Episodes

This is the penultimate episode of Strange New Work, a special series from What Works that explores the future of work through the lens of speculative fiction. What's the most undervalued skill of the 21st-century economy? Mo...

I've got something short, sweet, and really special for you today. Sean, my husband, my go-to extrovert shield, and the co-founder of YellowHouse.Media has a new project that is pretty cool, if I do say so myself. It's a hotl...

This is the 6th installment of Strange New Work, a special series that uses speculative fiction to explore radically different work futures. Find the work you were born to do. Do what you were meant to do. Discover the work …

This is the 5th installment of Strange New Work, a special series that explores how speculative fiction can help us imagine radically different work futures. Think the future of housework looks like Rosey the Robot from The J...

This is the 4th installment in Strange New Work, a special series from What Works that explores how speculative fiction can help us imagine new ways of working. Social and professional norms aren't natural or innate. They're ...

This is the third installment in Strange New Work, a series that explores how speculative fiction can help us imagine the future of work. Today's work happens in tiny slivers of time. And we try to optimize each minute or …

This is the 11th edition of This is Not Advice, a "not advice" column for premium subscribers of What Works. In this episode and essay , I tackle the assumed quid pro quo that's at the heart of content marketing. …

This is the second episode in my new series, "Strange New Work." Artist and writer Morgan Harper Nichols is a world-builder. She says, " Worldbuilding, for me, [is] a form of expansive hope—a necessary imagination for being a...

The future of work doesn't have to be an extension of today's reality. This is the first installment in Strange New Work, a new series from What Works about imagining radically different ways of working and doing business. In...

Join Tara McMullin for a journey into the far future of work, and consider how we can create more humane, inclusive, and supportive work environment. The first episode of Strange New Work drops September 14! You can find Stra...

Today’s episode is a sneak peek of Work In Practice , my new 12-week training program for guides of all kinds. This program offers a toolkit for identifying the beliefs and stories that make a more sustainable relationship wi...

There are rules you know about—and rules you don't. Some rules are written down—and other rules are "just the way things are." And there are rules that make things clear to everyone—and rules that exclude through their lack o...

Play, learn, work, retire—those are the four stages of what Mauro Guillén calls the sequential mode of life . In his new book, The Perennials: The Megatrends Creating a Postgenerational Society , he proposes a new story for m...

This is the 8th edition of This is Not Advice , my "not-advice" column for premium subscribers of What Works . Today, I'm talking about our over-reliance on metrics and how easily we're seduced by reductive data . When does …

Making work for the public seems to come with a slew of fuzzy social expectations. What do we owe our readers, listeners, viewers, and followers? What more is expected beyond the post, episode, or video? How do you navigate t...

The media give us wildly exaggerated images of wealth and consumption. And even if we recognize that a tv show or an Instagram account is more fantasy than reality, those images impact what we believe we should be earning and...

At age 50, Manisha Thakor realized that she'd sacrificed her life at the altar of work. How did that happen? And what was she to do about it? Manisha's new book tackles how to unwind a toxic relationship with work …

This is an excerpt from the 7th edition of This is Not Advice —a not-advice column exclusively for premium subscribers. In this episode, I take a closer look at flexibility. When is it a feature? When is it a bug? …

This episode originally ran on May 25, 2022. It's been lightly remixed for today's release! “Rugged individualism” is the very language we speak in America. It shapes the way we approach work, family, and society. And rugged ...

So much of our modern discourse around productivity, empowerment, entrepreneurship, and personal growth includes messages about our bodies. These messages might not be explicit, but the messages are there—and our brains pick ...

This is an episode of "This is Not Advice," a bonus podcast I do for premium subscribers of What Works. Instead of just a teaser this week, I wanted to share the whole episode with you. If you'd like to …

This is an episode about Meta's new app, Threads. It's also about Substack and Substack's new-ish feature, Notes. But really, it's an episode about what we're looking for from the category we call "social media" and how we th...

"It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism," say Frederic Jameson and Slavoj Žižek. Capitalist liberal democracy is construed as the "end of history"—the culmination of millennia of civilizational...

Welcome to the 5th edition of This is Not Advice, a non-advice column for premium subscribers of What Works. If you’re already a premium subscriber, thank you! If you’re not, I still think you’re great—and you can read a soli...