What's on Your Mind?

Drake Maye vs. Sam Darnold. Two stingy defenses. A second-year head coach vs. a veteran coach in his second act. Super Bowl 60 is set and it’s a rematch: The New England Patriots vs. the Seattle Seahawks. The Patriots will seek their NFL-record seventh Super Bowl victory when they face the Seahawks on Feb. 8 at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, Calif. Led by Maye, coach Mike Vrabel and a stifling defense, the Patriots are back in the Super Bowl for the first time since Tom Brady and Bill Belichick won their sixth ring together seven years ago. The Patriots (17-3) beat the Denver Broncos 10-7 on Sunday in the AFC championship game to advance to their 12th Super Bowl. Dar…

Twenty years ago, as the top digital and innovation executive for Citi’s credit card business, I led the team that spent months building what looked like a brilliant partnership. We’d found a startup with a disruptive payments platform—one that became the forerunner of what has become a new payment type used by millions of consumers today. The deal: strategic investment in exchange for access to the startup’s codebase as a sandbox for innovation pilots. No more waiting in the legacy systems queue. Just rapid prototyping with leading-edge developers. We built the entire partnership in a silo of supporters, treating resistance as something to avoid until absolutely nece…

A new year often starts with a simple question: How can we do better? For businesses, it’s a question that applies to almost everything, from product innovation to climate impact—an area of increasing urgency for many. The goal of achieving net-zero is now a staple of most businesses’ annual plans, however the journey there is often challenging. It can be fraught with hidden trade-offs, making it difficult for ESG leaders to know whether they are truly backing the right solutions in pursuit of their climate goals. Take aviation, for example. As one of the world’s most difficult sectors to decarbonize, its 2.5% share of global CO2 emissions represents a major chall…

I’m always amazed at how easily we give our time to others without thinking, and then are mad later when it was wasted. What exactly did we think was going to happen? That everyone was going to be prepared, productive, and appreciative? Time has become the ultimate luxury—we never have enough of it, and are jealous of those that have it. For too many of us, endless meetings, back-to-back emails, and constant interruptions leave little room for focused, meaningful work. Additionally, in our effort to be nice or generous, we offer our time even when we’re running on empty. But what if I told you that much of this time theft could be prevented with a little more min…

Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning. The World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos brings together an incongruous mix of celebrities (this year included Matt Damon, David Beckham, and Katy Perry, who was accompanying ex-Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau), world leaders (President Donald The President), and nonprofit le…

As an operative researcher for luxury retail companies, I spent my career grabbing onto one corporate contract after the next, like a tree-swinging retainer monkey. But in a tariff-distressed industry, those contract “branches” grew further and further apart until I was left hanging. Then a colleague experiencing a similar work gap said, “Well, I guess we’re retired.” I’ve been called a lot of things in my life, but nothing prepared me for the word “retired.” I’m a freelancer, so no one is coming to my house with a gold watch as a reward for loyal service; I have no desire to move south; and I don’t play golf. My equally self-employed friend Roland had a suggestion: W…

Apple will turn its Siri assistant into a full-fledged chatbot by next year. The company is working on a personal AI device to compete with the one OpenAI is building with Jony Ive. And Apple is putting control over its AI strategy into new hands within the company. So say a flurry of new reports, all advancing the larger story that Apple is doing what it can to get itself back in the AI race. And it’s doing it in a way that may allow it, in classic Apple fashion, to lead from behind. That is, it may hang back and benefit from the hard lessons learned by others marketing a new technology, then arrive fashionably late with a more polished product. Apple and Goog…

A lot of people chase bigger paychecks and fancier titles, convinced that their next role will finally make them happy. I know I did. That’s why I spent years stuck in a job that, on paper, many would consider glamorous. But deep down inside, I knew it was toxic. I took on more and more responsibilities, kept a chaotic schedule, and bent over backwards to please my demanding boss. All because I thought that’s what it took to be successful. Then I would get home and push myself more, scrolling job boards, tweaking my résumé, and submitting applications. I was working around the clock, and rest wasn’t an option. All because I was convinced that a new role would chan…

When a stranger smiles at you, you smile back. That is why, when Sir Ian McKellen (The Lord of the Rings, X-Men, Amadeus) walked on the stage in front of me, looked me straight in the eye, and smiled at me, I smiled back. It was the polite thing to do. It was also completely unnecessary, because McKellen was not actually on the stage in front of me. He smiled at me through a pair of special glasses. The reason for this unusual social interaction is called An Ark, which bills itself as the first play to be created in mixed-reality. Using Magic Leap glasses, the play blends the physical world with the digital realm, creating an unusually intimate theater experience. Ope…

Remember how much fun it was to shop on the internet a decade ago? If you visited the Goop website, Gwyneth Paltrow might introduce you to her favorite $75 candle or $95 vibrator. If you were looking for a lasagne recipe, you could find a good one on Food52—along with recommendations for a baking dish hand-selected by former New York Times food editor Amanda Hesser. Watch-lovers flocked to Hodinkee to see what founder Benjamin Clymer thought of the cool new Longines or Omega timepiece (with a handy link to buy it, in case you really liked it). At their peak, around five years ago, all of these media companies landed millions of dollars in venture capital and had …

On my phone, there are already videos of the next moon landing. In one, an astronaut springs off the rung of a ladder, strung out from the lander, before slowly plopping to the surface. He is, alas, still getting accustomed to the weaker gravity. In another, the crew collects a sample—a classic lunar expedition activity—while another person lazily minds the rover. A third video shows an astronaut affixing the American flag to the ground, because this act of patriotism is even better the second time around. The blue oceans of Earth are visible, in the background, and a radio calls out: “Artemis crew is on the surface.” America is going back to the moon, and NASA i…

For decades, people with disabilities have relied on service dogs to help them perform daily tasks like opening doors, turning on lights, or alerting caregivers to emergencies. By some estimates, there are 500,000 service dogs in the U.S., but little attention has been paid to the fact that these dogs have been trained to interact with interfaces that are made for humans. A team of researchers from the United Kingdom wants to change that by designing accessible products for, and with dogs. The Open University’s Animal-Computer Interaction Laboratory in the UK was founded in 2011 to help promote the art and science of designing animal-centered systems. Led by Clara Man…

Henry Ford famously noted, “Whether you think you can do it or not, you are usually right.” His point was that beliefs, especially about our talents, performance, and even luck, can be self-fulfilling. Irrespective of whether they are right or wrong, they will become true by influencing objective success outcomes. Ford was hardly alone. Along the same lines, decades of psychological research show that beliefs matter, often profoundly so. Perhaps the most influential work comes from Albert Bandura’s theory of self-efficacy, defined as people’s beliefs in their capability to organize and execute the actions required to manage prospective situations. Across hundreds of s…

Think of your creativity like a high-performance garden: If you focus only on the visible harvest (outputs) and never allow the soil to lie fallow (liminal space) or the bees to roam freely (play), the ground eventually becomes depleted. Boredom is the signal that the soil needs replenishing, ensuring that your next season of work is a flourish rather than a struggle. In our current “busyness addiction,” we have come to glorify the hustle, over-indexing on output while neglecting the very well-being that fuels it. We treat leisure and rest like guilty pleasures rather than sacred pauses. Yet the truth of the Imagination Era is this: Our best work often happens when we…

In 2023, Ken Lux found himself in an FBI briefing on child trafficking. The CEO of Luxe Aviation was there as the past commander of the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office’s Air Squadron, a volunteer cadre of 50 general aviation pilots supporting police missions and community service. Lux recalls the FBI agent relaying the story of a since-jailed airline pilot who used his credentials to traffic children to clients in the Philippines with chilling negotiations. “I have a girl that’s 12 years old for your client,’” the pilot said. The client’s response: “No, we think we need an 8-year-old.” The group was horrified. “I have two daughters,” Lux says. “We said, ‘Wa…

It looks like OpenAI is taking the “new year, new you” approach when it comes to its business strategy. To kick off 2026, the company announced it would soon introduce ads into ChatGPT—which was a bit of a surprise, considering CEO Sam Altman had previously said ads would be a “last resort” as a business model. It’s hard to say how final a resort this is without looking at OpenAI’s balance sheet, but we do know the company is feeling the heat. After Google released Gemini 3 in the fall—which scored well on leaderboards, market share, and plaudits from the AI community—Altman declared a “code red” at OpenAI to ensure that ChatGPT is best in class. And as impressive as …

“If you’re a millennial and you’re going through your midlife crisis, this post is for you.” So begins a viral TikTok video posted last month by comedian Mike Mancusi. Many millennials are now in their forties, with the youngest about to turn 30, putting the generation at the beginning of the unofficial age bracket when midlife crises traditionally hit. But Mancusi argues that the millennial version is a singular experience. For past generations, a midlife crisis followed a familiar blueprint: graduate college, climb the career ladder, get married, have kids, then—somewhere between roughly 40 and 60—confront mortality and blow it all up for a red sports car o…

The “New Tab” page in Chrome is the digital equivalent of a blank stare. A white void. Nothing, and plenty of it. Why are we settling for this? Your browser’s start page is the most valuable real estate on your computer. It’s the first thing you see! Instead of looking at an empty space, you could be looking at a command center. Here are five Chrome extensions that turn that boring start screen into something actually useful. Momentum If you want your browser to feel less like a software application and more like a high-end wellness retreat, Momentum is the gold standard. Every day, it greets you with a stunning, high-res landscape photo and a simpl…

Apple’s iOS 26 has been available for nearly six months now, but it’s still one of the company’s least well-received software updates for the iPhone. Primarily, people have criticized the new Liquid Glass user interface design, which Apple now lets you tone down. But iOS 26 also changed the way many apps function on the iPhone, disrupting a user’s muscle memory and expectations, leading to many to pine for the way the iPhone functioned on iOS 18. Yet while you can’t revert to iOS 18 once you’ve upgraded to iOS 26, you can make some simple tweaks that will make your iOS 26 iPhone function as it did before. Here’s how. 1. Give Safari the layout it used to have,…

If you’re an old-school writer like me, usually the words alone are all you need. But once in a while, you need something extra. I’m referring to all the special symbols that don’t appear on your keyboard. Maybe you need to mark something as copyrighted with a ©, or you want to rave about the £8 order of fish and chips on your recent trip to London. Perhaps you’re a mathematician who’s working with π. ¿Y qué pasa si necesitas escribir una pregunta en español? Instead of having to dig deep into your virtual keyboard’s corners or memorize ASCII character codes, there’s a free website you can use to copy these symbols and more directly to your clipboard for easy anyw…

Spammers and malicious actors inundate us with a steady stream of text messages—often purporting to be from legitimate institutions or companies. Stanching this flow isn’t easy. Just as the unwanted emails we receive often tell us that we can simply unsubscribe via the “unsubscribe” link, these text messages explain that we can opt out of future communication simply by replying “STOP.” But that’s not always a safe way to deal with these unsolicited texts. Here’s why—and what you should do instead. The problem with replying “STOP” to unsolicited text messages We’ve all had it happen. We get a text message pitching us a product or asking for a political donation. At …

Below, J. Eric Oliver shares five key insights from his new book, How To Know Your Self: The Art & Science of Discovering Who You Really Are. Eric has been teaching at the University of Chicago for 20 years as a professor of political science. He has published six books and numerous scholarly articles on topics ranging from the “obesity epidemic” to the sources of conspiratorial thinking in American politics. He is also the host of the Knowing podcast. What’s the big idea? We suffer because we mistake the fluid process of being for a fixed identity. Flourishing begins when we learn to bring into alignment and balance the forces that shape the self. List…

Over the past couple of days, TikTok has been flooded with owl impressions—albeit ones in which the birds sound like various celebrities, have regional accents, or find themselves in hyper-specific situations. It’s a trend better seen with your own eyes than explained. “My impression of an owl if the owl was Jennifer Coolidge” is one such viral example. “If The President were an owl,” impersonated another. An “owl but it’s Keira Knightley,” another posted. Or “an owl but it’s Bella Swan,” said yet another. The hashtag #owlimpression currently has 13,000 videos of TikTokers “hoo-hoo-ing” in various likenesses. There are also definitive rankings of the best i…