Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

When I worked a corporate job, I was often in charge of purchasing decisions. At one company, my team had inherited a lot of homegrown solutions. I saw the limitations of these products and was quick to replace them if the budget allowed. In corporate settings, “build vs. buy” is a well-known decision framework. Companies weigh the cost of developing something in-house against purchasing an outside solution. It’s often simple math: how much time and resources does it take to maintain this internally versus what does it cost to buy or outsource? Solopreneurs face the same decision constantly. However, the stakes are a lot higher when it’s your own time and own mo…

Some consider self-employment a soul-crushing grind—a pit of despair one falls into after being laid off, or after graduating into a job market where entry-level jobs have evaporated. Chasing clients, following up on payment requests, and working into the night, all for little pay . . . it’s a stopgap until you find a full-time job. Who on earth would choose it? But freelancing doesn’t have to feel like gig work. And in fact, plenty of people, especially Gen Zers, do deliberately choose it. If you’re skeptical about freelancing or struggling to earn enough to pay your bills, it might be time for a mindset audit: Instead of thinking like a paycheck-chasing hustler, thi…

Being a middle manager often feels like living in two worlds at once. On one side, executives cascade big goals and sweeping strategies. On the other, teams look to you for clarity, advocacy, and daily guidance. You’re constantly reconciling top-down demands with bottom-up realities, often with too little time and too few resources to satisfy either side. The paradox of the role is stark: Middle managers carry enormous responsibility for execution but don’t always have the authority to make critical decisions. You’re expected to deliver results on budgets you don’t control, within structures you didn’t design, and through policies you didn’t write. This tension is one…

As a young child, interior designer Jeremiah Brent and his mother visited open houses and model homes in his hometown of Modesto, California, as a form of daydreaming. Brent walked through the houses, imagining the people who might live there, building a fantasy around what these homes could be. Since then, Brent has turned his childhood design obsession into a sprawling career: He runs a 50-person design firm, moonlights on Queer Eye, and recently brokered his first bedding deal with Target. Having come up in the industry through a series of audacious bets on himself, Brent has developed a sense of humor and pragmatism around his relationship with creativity and his…

It’s the last week of Black History Month (BHM) and it’s clear Americans are over performative values. Trite BHM-inspired merchandise sits on retailer shelves untouched while media is abuzz covering the artistry, activism, and symbolism of Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show. The signal is clear: consumers are looking to brands for real solutions to real problems, not products that commodify culture. Most companies build everything from advertising to AI for the “average user,” but in doing so, they react to rather than lead markets. Strategic leaders look to growth audiences—underserved groups who are the fastest-growing demographics—as lead users. They are the “can…

We live in a world, especially in Western cultures, that relentlessly promotes positive thinking and celebrates self-belief to the point of sidelining reality—that inconvenient thing that does not disappear simply because we ignore it. Self-help advice and pop-psychology slogans urge us to stop worrying about what others think, to believe in ourselves no matter what, and to focus on our strengths. They rarely stress the value of acknowledging our flaws and limitations, even when this requires revising, if not abandoning, our childhood ambitions. It may sound harsh, but science shows clear benefits to confronting our shortcomings, aligning our self-assessments wi…

Meetings in corporate America are broken—and only breaking down more. Globally, people sit in three times as many meetings as they did before the pandemic, 60% of meetings are ad hoc, rather than scheduled, and 71% of people regularly multitask through them. When poorly-run meetings become the norm, people begin to see them as a time with little value. But meetings are an opportunity to shape organizational culture, and not enough leaders are taking advantage of it. Most high-performing teams build strong relationships, show care for the whole person, have open and honest communications, listen to each other, clarify processes, and collaborate. These are all beha…

This week, Apple’s newest laptop, the MacBook Neo, went on sale. Reviews of the device have been almost universally positive, with many praising the laptop’s starting cost of just $599—a price point few expected Apple would ever reach for a notebook computer. Apple is clearly positioning the affordable machine as a productivity device for use in two main areas: education and the workplace. Indeed, imagery on the MacBook Neo’s product page features many of the most essential productivity apps used by students and workers, including Microsoft Word and Excel, Slack, Canva, Box, Keynote, and more. Yet if you’ve picked up a Neo for use in work or school, you should kno…

At a recent retreat I was attending, I found myself in one of those “hallway moments.” Walking out of a lecture, I was engaged in conversation with a fellow attendee. Soon it became clear we had differing opinions about the topic. As I felt myself getting tense, formulating my response in my mind, I caught a glimpse of myself in a wall of mirrors as we walked by a pilates studio on the property. I didn’t like what I saw—it was not my best self. I did not look calm, cool and collected; instead, I looked tense and ready to charge. The exact opposite vibe that was the goal of this retreat. That quick glimpse of myself helped me to check myself, adjust my face, slow down my t…

There’s a tremendous, ageless opportunity hiding in plain sight, but marketers need to look through a different lens to see it. Right now, there are some 35 million U.S. empty nester women, as I calculate it, and a growing percentage of them are single. They aren’t retreating into rest and relaxation; they are stepping out to exult in activities they finally have the time, money, and motivation to pursue. Historically, marketers have largely overlooked this demographic. Or, if they address this market, it’s only for margin and share growth. That’s the wrong framework. The real opportunity isn’t just about capturing their spending power, it’s about recognizing a profo…

Novo Nordisk just launched a new subscription program for Wegovy customers. In an announcement Tuesday, the Danish GLP-1 maker said the new program will help “reduce cost uncertainty” so that people can maintain access to their obesity drugs. Wegovy contains semaglutide, a glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonist used for chronic weight management. Novo Nordisk also promised savings of up to $600 per year for the pill form of the drug and up to $1,200 per year for the injections with a 12-month subscription. Eligible patients can choose the self-pay options that work best for them. A three-month plan will cost users $329 per month. A six-month plan is $299 per m…

When Kitty got her fourth layoff call, she took it via Bluetooth in her car. She knew the script by then: the sudden 15-minute meeting invite, the HR rep that pops into the call, the platitudes that precede the devastation of being unemployed — again. “My boss says, ‘Hi Kitty,’ and I said, ‘You’re laying me off. Just go.’” Something happens after the second, or third, or even fourth layoff. Shock gets replaced by trauma-informed familiarity. Grief turns into exhaustion, shame calcifies. The way a person understands work changes, imbuing the next job with cynicism that’s hard to shake. A layoff victim’s relationship with work changes. Sometimes forever. But in…

For all the advances in data science, artificial intelligence, and behavioral assessments, one hiring ritual remains stubbornly unchanged: the job interview, where candidates are still subjected to awkward brainteasers about golf balls in airplanes, forced to disclose their “biggest weaknesses” to amateur psychologists, asked whether they would keep working after winning the lottery, or made to present to silent panels who seem less interested in evidence of competence than in observing how gracefully applicants endure a mildly humiliating social experiment. Despite decades of research showing that traditional interviews are only moderately reliable predictors of perf…

Engineering is one of the most male-dominated workforces in America. As of 2023, only 16% of engineers in the U.S. were women. Marketing, meanwhile, is an industry led by women: Though it has a more even split, the field still employs more women than men, with 60% of marketing roles in the U.S. held by women. But a phenomenon in new job listings has some experts wondering if marketing is undergoing a reinvention—one designed to make it a more enticing field for men. The discourse began when brand consultant Miranda Shanahan pointed out a trend she’s noticed on LinkedIn. “I’m convinced marketing jobs are being rebranded so that boys can do it too,” Shanahan said in…

Airbnb is becoming Airb-n-bigger. In an attempt to become what is something of an all-encompassing trip platform, Airbnb announced several new features and offerings on Wednesday, including a redesigned homepage, new service categories (such as airport pickups, grocery-delivery options, luggage-storage, and car rentals, along with new experiences), and even the ability to book rooms at boutique or independent hotels. That’s right: the company that built a name for itself offering alternatives to hotels is now folding some of them into its platform. Airbnb inflates The new features are wide-ranging, and users can even take advantage of social elements, like…

The current AI boom reminds me of the dot-com era, which I watched unfold from venture capital in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Lots of hype. Eye-watering investments. Genuine transformative potential. Most conversations about AI today focus on the obvious value, productivity, and efficiency gains. That’s real, but it’s the shallow end. The deeper potential is something else entirely: ending the linear take-make-waste economy and with it, our reliance on fossil fuels. For half a century, the global economy has run on a simple, destructive model. Extract finite resources from the Earth. Manufacture mostly disposable products. Throw away. Repeat. Petroleum into pa…

Jensen Huang has some pointed words for leaders who blame company layoffs on artificial intelligence. “I think the narrative that connects AI to job loss, for many of the CEOs that are doing it, is just too lazy,” the Nvidia cofounder and CEO said in an interview with Channel NewsAsia. “AI has just arrived. How is it possible they’re already losing jobs? How is it possible that AI became productive and useful only six months ago, and they were somehow laying people off two years ago because of AI? “It doesn’t make any sense,” Huang added. “It was just a way for them to sound smart, and I really hate that.” While Huang didn’t name-drop any specific CEOs or comp…