This week’s Perspectives is an interview with Carrie Olsen, a voice actress, voiceover business coach, and online course creator. Carrie left a corporate career in instructional design to pursue voiceover full-time, and now helps others explore creative careers through her coaching practice and courses.

You can check out Carrie’s 3-step guide to building something that’s yours here:

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This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Anna Burgess Yang: Tell me about the work that you do.

Carrie Olsen: My primary work is voiceover. Anywhere that you hear a voice but don’t see a face, that’s voiceover. That could be anything from animation to TV and radio commercials, the self-checkout line telling you “Are you ready to pay?”, the voice on the bus saying “Next stop, Broadway Street.” Audiobooks, podcasts, promos. I do a lot of promos for TV shows and live announcing. When you’re listening to the Oscars or the MTV Movie and TV Awards — which I’ve live announced — that’s voiceover work.

Through coaching other people on how to get into voiceover, I found that some people are truly passionate about voiceover. But others are like, “I just want something that’s creative, that’s out of the ordinary. Tell me about this. Is this something that might fit that mold?”

Over the years, I’ve started tailoring my coaching more toward a creative outlet. If you don’t know what your thing is, we’ll figure out what that is. And if you do know what it is, it’s usually psychological barriers that are keeping people from pushing forward. We’ll work through those things.

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ABY: You were at a corporate job and discovered voiceover through a podcast you were listening to. What was it that made you think, “Yes, I could do that”?

CO: I was listening to a podcast, and a voiceover coach was on it. Basically describing a day in the life. I had just had my first daughter, so I was looking for something where I could be at home with her more. And it was checking all the boxes. She would say, “I get up in the morning, do my workout, check my emails, go record a little bit, then go back to the booth.” And I was like, she’s doing that from home, and she’s making a living, and she’s supporting her kids. That sounds like something I could do.

It’s kind of the impetus we all have. When you see someone doing a fun job, you’re like, “Oh, that looks fun and easy. I’m sure I could do that.” That was me being naive going into it. But then, after I had my first coaching session with her and started learning what it takes to build a voiceover business, I got more excited. It was combining my creative side with my entrepreneurial side and building a business from scratch.

ABY: You went from a corporate job with clear structure and a clear title, and now you’re in a field that a lot of people don’t even know exists. How did that change how you thought about yourself professionally?

CO: I’ve always thought about my corporate job as feeling like I was wearing a mask. There are some people who are really good at corporate, and they’re bringing their full selves. But for me, it was being in a stuffy office and having to wear clothes I didn’t choose and sitting in inefficient meetings.

The job I had right before I got into voiceover, as far as corporate jobs go, was fantastic. I liked the work, I liked my coworkers, but it wasn’t ideal. I was still away from my daughter, and it wasn’t what I would have chosen.

When I started my own business, how I thought about myself became less defined. I was creating what I was doing. Everything was my call. When people ask what I do, I always have to explain it. It’s not like saying “teacher.” People are like, “What is that? What do you do?”

I’m a quiet person. I’m introverted. But voiceover became this space where I had to be bigger and louder. I was still getting to explore those other sides of me that you would never get to at a corporate job or in a boardroom. It was really neat to get to explore that creative side.

ABY: Did that exploration change your sense of identity, or did it reveal who you already were?

CO: I think it was the latter. It was always there. But there were parts that I didn’t even know were there, or you’d have to probe really hard for me to admit it. It seems silly for an adult to be like, “I want to be an actor someday.” Responsible people don’t say that. Realistic people don’t say that. So it was this thing that was buried really far underneath, and voiceover opened that up.

ABY: You’ve built a business with multiple income streams: voiceover work, coaching, and an online course. Was that intentional, or did it evolve over time?

CO: That definitely evolved. Getting started in voiceover, I didn’t know what to expect. When I started booking work, it was this leap of faith that my husband and I took. I was booking work on weekends, working after work with a newborn at home. We had this moment where we said, “What would happen if you put full-time hours to this work?” We did that, and it worked out. I matched what I made at my corporate job in my first year of voiceover work.

My corporate job was instructional design. I was a content design specialist for the e-learning department of a construction company. I really love adult learning theory. When people started asking me, “How did you build a voiceover business in a year?”, my natural answer was, “Let me build a course about it.”

It started off as a blog post, and people were reading it. I started building my email list, I thought, “Now I have this asset. What do I do with an email list?” So I started doing webinars to send people to my course. It all just stacked on. I didn’t have a master plan from the very beginning. I just kept seeing what was offered next and saying yes.

ABY: What’s the hardest part about running a creative business?

CO: There’s no steady paycheck. You have to learn how to budget on an irregular income. I’m okay with that. My husband is happier when things are expected and normal. Balancing our two different preferences for how money comes in has been a challenge the whole time I’ve been a solopreneur.

But I think in general, it’s getting over the hump of saying, “I can do this. It’s okay for me to do this. It’s actually good for me to explore something that is fulfilling.” I think that’s a part that responsible people have a hard time with, because we feel like we need to take care of everyone else. And a lot of times that means putting our own desires on the back burner, indefinitely. That barrier is hard to overcome.

ABY: What would you tell somebody in a corporate job who has a creative passion and wants to turn it into a real career? How do they get past that barrier?

CO: You don’t have to quit your job right away. There’s a way to do it responsibly. That’s a barrier for some people, but it’s also kind of the easy barrier that’s hiding other barriers. It’s the easy one to say: “I want to be responsible. I can’t risk losing my job.”

I have a three-step guide that talks about this. The first step is to see the lie: the stories you’ve been telling yourself about the reasons why you can’t write a book or start painting or whatever. Those stories aren’t true. Things like, “I’d be abandoning my family,” or “I’d be doing something irresponsible,” or maybe it’s something your parents instilled in you.

It’s important to recognize that your inner critic is trying to keep you safe. But you’re actually going to be okay. You don’t have to quit your job right away, and you don’t have to jump in with both feet. You can practice putting yourself out there in small ways. That helps you build the muscle so you get more used to what it feels like.

Thinking about a career change? Download my guide: 5 Types of Career Pivots.

Have a work story you’d like to share? Please reach out using this form. I can retell your story while protecting your identity, share a guest post, or conduct an interview.

This week’s Perspectives is an interview with Sarthak Dhawan, co-founder of Turbo AI, a notetaker and study tools app for students. In 2025, Sarthak and his other co-founder, Rudy Arora, dropped out of college to focus on Turbo AI full-time.

I’ve written a lot about AI and its impact on work, so it was interesting to hear Sarthak’s perspective as an “industry insider” working for an AI company.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

ABY: Tell me a little bit about your background and how you ended up starting Turbo AI.

Sarthak Dhawan: I started coding in elementary school because my brother got me into it. I got a lot of joy from building things and seeing people use them. It slowly evolved into creating random projects. I met my co-founder, Rudy, in middle school.

When I was going into 9th grade, my school had this portal that students would use to check their grades. But it was really slow and didn’t work half the time. I said to myself, “This seems like an opportunity for me to go ahead and build a nice, pretty mobile app for students to check their grades.” I did that, and it ended up going pretty viral, just by word of mouth. I remember going to my school, seeing people use my app, and they were liking it!

I got into Duke University, and Rudy went to Northwestern. We started Turbo AI with $300 we had saved up from an internship, and used that to create the LLC.

About eight months ago, we chose to drop out of college because the business was doing so well. We have over 8 million signups and are earning more than a million dollars per month.

ABY: What was it like, making the decision to drop out of college and focus on this full-time, rather than finish your degree?

SD: The first time I mentioned dropping out to my parents, they had a terrible reaction. Like, “What are you thinking? Duke is a good school. We’re paying so much in tuition. You worked so hard to get to this point. Why not just finish and do the startup stuff later?” At the time, I thought, “You know what? That makes sense.”

It was only when we were making a sizeable amount of money, growing the team, and needed more employees that I couldn’t justify the amount of time I was spending on school. It wasn’t like I said, “Hey, I think this is going to be big. Let’s drop out.” It was more like, “This is already big.” It was a natural progression. And when it came to that point, my parents realized that their kid was going to be ok.

ABY: What was the transition like from “this is my side hustle” to “this is my full-time job”?

SD: Mentally, there was never really a transition, if I’m being honest. I wake up every day because I find this work enjoyable, and I want to grow the company.

One of the biggest reasons I didn’t want to leave school was actually the social environment. Duke is awesome. When we formed the company, we decided to make the social part a priority.

ABY: When you think about creating a work environment for your team, what’s important to you?

SD: When I think about hiring and building a culture, I think the most important thing is having autonomy in what you do. No one wants to be told, “Do this task,” and be micromanaged the whole time. That makes it painful.

We’re very small for the scale we’re at. When we’re hiring someone, we want them to own that sector of the business, whether it’s an engineer or a marketing person — so they feel like they’re making decisions and having an impact. I think that’s what people derive value from.

With the actual logistics of things, we’re very flexible. If you want to work some days remotely or choose your own hours, it’s fine. I’ve never really understood why that matters. I’m of the perspective that if the work gets done and it’s high quality, I don’t care what you do.

ABY: What do you see in your users’ adoption of AI — mostly students — in how they approach trying new things or how they include AI in their work?

SD: We’ve had a rapid shift in the past few years where people’s attention spans are smaller and smaller, because of social media. That shortened attention span is affecting people in all areas of their lives.

So we’re seeing a problem in the usage of our application where students’ attention spans are so short that even if you take a 100-page PDF and put it into our tool to make four pages, they’re not willing to sit down and read those four pages. Four pages are still too much.

AI is catalyzing this even further because instead of reading a 10-page article, you can ask for a summary and read a few words. It’ll give you exactly what you want.

The awesome part about consuming information before AI was that you were forced to consume a lot of information and synthesize it yourself. And the process of consuming information you don’t necessarily need is really valuable. In this world of AI, you’re not consuming any extraneous information. It’s sort of like tunnel vision that’s been exacerbated by social media being exacerbated even more by AI. What we’re trying to do with Turbo AI is make learning more fun, more enjoyable, and more interactive.

ABY: How do you think about AI’s impact on the workforce as a whole?

SD: When I look at AI from two years ago, when it wasn’t nearly as good, compared to my productivity now, it’s maybe 100 to 1,000X. I think it’s very complementary. We’re not at the stage where AI can autonomously do things. You need a human utilizing these tools.

Historically, when the Industrial Revolution came around, jobs were lost, but many new jobs were created. There was a lot of technology early on replacing jobs that people didn’t necessarily want to do.

The problem we’re seeing now is that AI excels in areas that are highly intellectual. For example, right now we’re seeing that AI is amazing at coding, math, and physics. When jobs at the higher end of desirability start to get taken away, I don’t know what sort of macroeconomic shifts that would cause. It’s a little bit concerning to me, but hard to say.

ABY: What would you say to someone who is uncertain about the job market right now?

SD: Knowledge across the board has never been more democratized. Fifty years ago, if you wanted to understand certain concepts or improve your job prospects, you might have to go to a prestigious college. But now, AI levels the playing field in terms of how fast, how easily, and how cheaply you can upskill yourself.

So the bottleneck is just, are you willing to put in the time to learn something? But that’s a solvable problem, and very realistic.

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This week’s Perspectives is an interview with . Hannah is the founder of Sunlight Tax, and she specializes in friendly, informative tax education for creatives, artists, and people who feel overwhelmed by the business world. Her mission is to empower creative people to set themselves up for long-term success and take control of the financial side of their careers through her program, Money Bootcamp. She also hosts the Sunlight Tax podcast.

As someone who has worked in banking/finance for most of my career, I found Hannah to have a very down-to-earth and refreshing take on taxes. You can connect with Hannah on Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and LinkedIn.

Anna Burgess Yang: Tell me about your background.

Hannah Cole: I’m a total weirdo. I’m a professional artist. And that was what I knew I wanted to be when I grew up. I got my MFA, and I was actually a professor of painting at Boston University for a while. But at a few different points in my career, I had some really miserable experiences with accountants and with taxes. Terrible.

And like a lot of creative people, because of those awful experiences, I got a bit of an allergy to money. It was as though the world was saying, “Oh, you’re creative, then this isn’t for you.” Which is stupid. And inaccurate. But I passively absorbed that message.

Eventually, I got angry enough that I went back to school for accounting. I decided to specialize in taxes, in part just because I wanted to help my friends who were artists and creative people. Because it’s just so hard to even just be treated with respect when you are in that world.

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ABY: What motivated you to focus on education instead of tax services?

HC: I started out doing tax prep for creative people. But I realized a couple of things. One, tax prep is a commodity business. You will be ground to dust by H&R Block and TurboTax. Anyone doing this work might use tax prep as a loss leader and bring you in for financial advisor services or monthly accounting. So that was a business decision.

The other thing is that there is so much financial illiteracy in the U.S. The Tax Foundation just did a survey and found that tax illiteracy costs the average U.S. taxpayer $1,000 per year just because they don’t understand how tax brackets work.

Also, people don’t even realize the bad smell of random tax advice that’s coming from someone without a license, and not someone you should be listening to.

ABY: What type of education do you focus on?

HC: I went to Yale, and I wanted a grounding in a broad liberal arts education. One of the things I was interested in was linguistics and cross-cultural communication. I’ve come to realize that this is my skill and my gift to the world. I translate the language of culture and accounting to the world of creative, dynamic freelance people who are out there taking risks and doing cool work. But they’re flying by the seat of their pants on the tax and accounting side.

One thing I feel strongly about is treating people I’m talking to with respect. The work they’re doing is amazing. I just don’t assume that they’ve learned any tax information. We should be taught in high school. But nobody has a baseline. I teach the basics to everyone. I do over 50 tax workshops per year for big organizations.

ABY: What do you think are some of the big misconceptions self-employed people have about taxes?

HC: Most people don’t realize that self-employment tax is going to be more than half of their tax bill, and most of their taxes are paying into Medicare and Social Security. When you work for an employer, your boss is paying into those systems on your behalf. So when you’re self-employed, that number gets doubled, and you don’t even know what it is.

People are radically underestimating how big their tax bill will be, and then they don’t know how the quarterly tax system works. Some people are really diligent and try to do a good job. Maybe they’re even setting aside money in a separate bank account. And that person doesn’t realize that they’re going to get penalized because they don’t pay every quarter as the law requires.

ABY: What is a challenging part of this type of education that you’re doing?

HC: Honestly, it’s just my reach and the fact that I’m just one person. I’m pushing against a culture that is anti-tax and anti-tax education. When I teach people, I teach the civics behind why we pay into Medicare and Social Security. It’s essentially insurance and works like life insurance.

I find that after my workshops, people think the system is much fairer. There’s unbelievably bad press out there, and usually when people have the information, they feel better about the system and paying into it and what it provides for them.

ABY: Do you think self-employed people struggle with the “paperwork” part of their finances?

HC: Yes, I think so. And it doesn’t have to be complicated. But when you only have random bits and pieces of info, it’s hard. For example, a lot of people try to do their bookkeeping off of receipts. It’s incredibly common, and it’s a nightmare.

Having a separate business bank account is a better baseline for your bookkeeping. Just that little shift makes the paperwork so simple. But I think people lack information about even getting to that point.

ABY: What types of formats do you think do really well in financial education?

HC: One thing is timing. People only get their eyes opened when they’re experiencing acute pain. And that’s an awful way to learn. That’s nothow I want people to learn, but that’s when people pay attention.

I try to have a mantra in my own business: “Never waste your pain.” If something is awful, take a minute. Do what you need to do to clean up the mess. But also, let’s stop the pain so we don’t continue to have it recur. Because taxes are there every single year. How do you want next year to look?

ABY: And you have a book, Taxes for Humans! What prompted you to write it?

HC: I’ve always loved writing. But what prompted me is that someone reached out after one of my workshops. I had an email in my inbox from a literary agent. I talk about how civics can feel really good and build a community that we want. Putting systems in place empowers people to do the amazing work they’re doing. The agent said, “I think you have a real vision, and this would make a good book.”

ABY: On top of everything you do with Sunlight Tax, you’re also an artist. How do you balance those two things?

HC: I think balance is a bit of a myth. There’s no way I could do tax workshops, talk to clients, and then go into the studio. I’d just be thinking about tax stuff. So I work seasonally. I’m 100% in when I’m teaching taxes. And then after tax season is over, in July and August, that’s my studio time. After April 15th, I can turn things onto a low simmer, and I can just walk away and be in my studio. I love that.

Last year, I lost my studio and all of my life’s work. Twenty years of art in Hurricane Helene. Things happen, and there’s no guarantee. It’s not like a hurricane is supposed to come five hours off the coast up a mountain. No one was prepared for it.

I was applying for FEMA aid and made a little help page – sunlighttax.com. I figured – not wasting my pain — let’s make a little tutorial about this for everyone else.

Want to build a life-first business? These reflections will help you determine your priorities.

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Have a work story you’d like to share? Please reach out using this form. I can retell your story while protecting your identity, share a guest post, or conduct an interview.

This issue of Perspectives is an interview with Maggie Blackburn. Maggie is an experience designer, career strategist, and coach living in Brooklyn, NY. After reaching a point where she felt lost, stuck, and misaligned with her life, she left the corporate ladder behind to pursue her own path. Now she designs retreats for companies and communities and coaches multi-passionate professionals to create careers that honor their multiple interests—not just one.

You can check out Maggie’s website, newsletter, LinkedIn, and Instagram.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Anna Burgess Yang: Give me a little bit of background about your career. How did you get started?

Maggie Blackburn: I started my career in consulting. I had interned at Deloitte and then got a full-time offer after college. The first few years were pretty good. I was traveling and was excited about the work. But I got an itch to try something else. I was interested in marketing in college, so that’s what led me to work at Slack.

I was at Slack for about three years. When I first started, I really loved the product and the team. But during COVID, everyone started using Slack due to the increase in remote work. It was really stressful, and I burned out. There was also the Salesforce acquisition of Slack at the time. So that prompted me to think about what I wanted to do next and look for something else.

ABY: Was Slack fully remote at the time?

MB: Slack was fully remote in 2020, during the pandemic. Before that, I was going into the office in San Francisco. It was just a different time, pre-pandemic. My mindset was to climb the corporate ladder and get promoted. And I think after the pandemic, with working so much, I was asking myself, “What am I working for?”

ABY: What happened after you left Slack?

MB: I had this feeling that I needed to make a change, but I wasn’t there yet. The pain wasn’t enough. I thought I would try something else and learn new skills at another company within my product marketing role. But then, within the first few months at my new company, it felt like the job wasn’t what I had signed up for. I got a new manager, the product area I was going to work on changed, and leadership changed. So there were a lot of things going on. But in my head, I thought, “I can’t quit.”

ABY: What was your relationship like with your manager?

MB: My new manager started as a peer and then became my manager. So she was a newer manager. We didn’t really establish any personal rapport; our relationship was very professional and business-oriented.

A new VP of Product Marketing was hired, and a new role opened up on the team. He mentioned it during an all-hands meeting. After, he messaged me and asked me if I was interested in the role. I let him know that I would need to talk to my manager. I mentioned it to my manager, and she told me that they would need to post the role publicly for fairness. Shortly after that, I was told that the company wasn’t going to hire for the role after all.

However, I was told that the company still needed someone to work on the projects that the role was going to work on. So I was assigned to the work. I messaged the VP and let him know that I would be happy to work on it, but I would like something added to my current title to reflect it. After that, I met 1:1 with my manager. That’s when things started to unfold in a way I wasn’t expecting.

ABY: What happened?

MB: She pointed out that the company had recently had layoffs. She said that I was being ungrateful, asking for things. I wasn’t asking for more money — just a title.

The conversation felt like an attack. I was crying, and she was yelling at me. After that conversation, I didn’t hear anything from her. No apology, no follow-up. I asked for another conversation, and we talked again, but the trust couldn’t be rebuilt.

That conversation was what propelled me to do the work I’m doing now, as a self-employed person. But, at the time, it felt like rock bottom.

ABY: How much longer after this incident did you stay at the company?

MB: Two more years. I got a new manager. But there were so many changes at the company during such a short time. There was always a feeling that I needed to play politics or “play the game.” I felt stuck. I thought about trying to build something on my own and leaving corporate, but I was very scared of leaving the paycheck and financial stability.

ABY: How did you finally decide to make the leap?

MB: My first breaking point was that conversation with my manager, which propelled me to figure out what else I wanted to do. During that time, I was experimenting with marketing for small businesses or pivoting into events. A role actually opened on the events team at the company. I applied, but the manager wanted someone with more experience. That’s the second thing that propelled me. I realized that if I couldn’t pivot internally, it was time to actually leave and figure things out. Even though I didn’t have a steady inflow of clients.

ABY: What did you end up pivoting into?

MB: I pivoted into corporate retreats and different types of events. My very first project was with Julia Kaplan, founder at Recess, whom I’d met a few years prior. She asked me if I wanted to help her with a new project. She also ended up referring me to my career coach. It was very fruitful and full circle. And the event was really fun — we went to San Diego for a corporate retreat.

From there, it’s been finding new clients and word of mouth. A lot of it has been from LinkedIn. Even just by posting that I was leaving my job, I got another client.

ABY: What do you love most about running your own business?

MB: Definitely the freedom and creativity. I can launch a program if I want, or design my website, or play with social media, or work wherever I want. This past summer, I spent five weeks in London. No one’s telling you what to do. There’s not really a box that you have to fit in. Even if you are a creative in a corporate company, there are standards, and brand guidelines, and 1,800 approvals before your work gets out.

And being able to connect with other solopreneurs has been really surprising. People think it’s going to be really lonely when you go out on your own because you don’t have coworkers anymore. But I think you can build community.

ABY: What have you gained from working with a coach?

MB: I worked with a lifestyle coach named Alona Shaked, and now I’m working with Jenni Gritters, who is a business coach. With Alona, we did a lot of work around mindset. As I mentioned, I felt very stuck. I had no idea what I wanted to do next and had a lot of fear. The work was around challenging some of those thoughts. We looked at past examples of when things were hard, but turned out ok. It was a lot of visioning work.

I felt really misaligned and unclear about what I wanted to do. That part wasn’t necessarily the company’s fault. That was just me asking myself hard questions and working with the coach to identify what was important to me. Now I feel like I’m living toward my values.

At first, I didn’t even realize that having my own business and working for myself was an option. Then, for a while, I thought, “I’ll just do the exact same thing I’m doing in corporate, but work for myself.” But you can actually think bigger. It’ll take time to get there, but you can have a really beautiful outcome when you work for yourself and push through the discomfort.

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This week’s guest essay is from my friend , COO and co-founder of Fresh Starts Registry and modern-day etiquette expert. She’s the author of Simple Scripts to Support Your People: What to Say When You Don’t Know What to Say.

You can also check out Jenny’s Substack: .

Let’s start here, to quote the inimitable Prentis Hemphill: “Boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously.”

When we set boundaries, we are trying to stay in community with someone, in some capacity — not to box them out, necessarily. We are trying to maintain a love for the other while also honoring and respecting our own needs and self-love. Setting boundaries might feel awkward, even mean sometimes, but I want to remind you that when you set them with clarity and warm firmness, they are actually a wonderful way of teaching people how to love you.

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Here are some scenarios and scripts for how to set boundaries when you are going through a medical crisis.

Some advice on delivery:

• We’re going to assume the people who we are setting boundaries with love us and want the best for us, that their motivations are good, even if a little complicated or self-involved at times (we all know those people).

• We are going to try and deliver our boundary scripts without an edge of anger; in fact, neutrality is best. I sort of cringe even writing this because you’re the one going through a medical crisis – why should you have to be anything other than your most authentic self at any moment? But we’re aiming for the most effective delivery here. You can always caveat your delivery with, “I’m not in a good place” or “I’m in a fair amount of pain, so please ignore my tone.” Sometimes when communicating a boundary, we do need to put a little shine on it — and that shine is often in the delivery.

• We are not going to overexplain, we are going to say what we need and then we are going to let that be a full statement. If the other party does not respond we are going to allow the boundary to marinate in the silence. We are not going to reverse course or give them more information than they need.

Remember: Clear is kind. Be clear. Speak from your experience and what you need —not about any previous behavior they have shown. Clear is kind. Succinct is sweet.

If someone reaches out and you just don’t have the energy or mental space to reply:

“You are so sweet to check in on me. I don’t have the energy to catch you up right now, but I will do my best once I have some energy to spend.”

Not every message needs an immediate response; sometimes we want to process new information or even just rest and not be constantly staring at our phone, recapping the potential traumas of our own bodies.

Tip: Write out (dictate or voice to text, or even voice memo!) the most recent updates you’d want to share with a certain group of people, so you don’t find yourself needing to constantly type and retype what has been happening. Save it in your Notes app for a quick copy/paste when someone checks in, and you’d be happy to give them the information, you just don’t want to type it out again.

If someone offers [good or bad] advice and you aren’t looking for input:

“I know you’re worried about me and want me to get and be better, so offering up ideas and solutions seems like a great idea. I am working with my medical team to find the best solutions for me. What I need right now is to feel what I am feeling, to express what I am thinking, and a lot of rest. If you aren’t able to hear me chatter about all of this without offering solutions, let me know. I know it can be hard not to want to fix it! But what I need right now is a listening ear, if you can’t be that, that’s okay, and I won’t discuss it with you.”

Unsolicited advice from non-medical professionals (or worse, an adjacent field!) can feel intrusive, frustrating, toxically positive, all of the above. Let yourself say no to that. We can only tell people what we need. If they cannot deliver what we need, we do not need to punish ourselves by continuing to enter into that cycle with them. Talk about it with someone else who is able to hold the space.

If someone thinks what you need is visitors —and you really don’t:

“You are so sweet to want to come and spend time with me, I am nowhere near the space of being able to have people over or near me, really. But I will let you know when I am ready to see people again.”

It is okay to protect your space, your peace, and oftentimes your fragile immune system! If they come back suggesting they’d like to drop off food or make an excuse to come over, be ready:

Script: “That’s really kind – please just leave it at the front door.” You are allowed to hold your boundary.

If they want to keep talking about your health — but you just want to talk about The Ultimatum:

“I know that talking about my health is the elephant in the room, but I would love to talk about almost anything else. Join me in my healthy distraction. Have you watched the newest season of The Ultimatum? I would like to tell you all about every insane twist.”

You contain multitudes, and sometimes those multitudes are the healthiest way to move forward. We all deserve distraction, we all deserve time free from health ruminations. Let your people know what you need, even if that is a thesis-level breakdown of The Ultimatum.

If you need to put your phone in another room and sleep for 16 hours:

“I am letting you know I am plugging my phone in in the living room and creating perfect sleep conditions in the bedroom. I will check in with you when I am awake. I just need to log off for a while.”

You need rest, you deserve rest. Let someone know where you are, how you are, and why you’re going radio silent, and then, enjoy the silence.

If someone is asking for play-by-play updates — but doesn’t need them:

“I can see you’re worried about me, and I appreciate that. I am going to be keeping the day-to-day details of this private right now. I appreciate you respecting that. I will share headlines with you, but the nitty gritty feels very vulnerable and I’ll be keeping those to myself.”

Your medical history is yours, you do not have to be broadcasting these to the family group chat. You are allowed to share as much or as little with whomever you want.

Remember you are allowed to set boundaries and protect your peace all of the time, but especially during a trying moment. You are worthy of placing boundaries and having them honored.

If you love this newsletter and look forward to reading it every week, please consider forwarding it to a friend or becoming a subscriber.

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Most issues of this publication are free because I love sharing ideas and connecting with others about the future of work. If you want to support me as a writer, you can buy me a coffee.

Have a work story you’d like to share? Please reach out using this form. I can retell your story while protecting your identity, share a guest post, or conduct an interview.

This is a guest essay from my dear friend Erica Mukherjee. Erica and I have known each other for (does math) more than twenty-five years — since high school.

Erica is a historian of mud and empire and a Clinical Assistant Professor of History at NYU Shanghai. She is writing a book on the watery landscapes of imperial India and is committed to public history, developing walking tours, historical fairy tales, and botanically-inspired workshops.

You can follow Erica on Threads and send her a DM if you’re interested in collaborating on a public environmental history project.

It is summer and I am at the beach. As I write these words—longhand and in a slightly damp notebook—I can hear the waves breaking on the shore, feel the heat of the sun on my skin, and see a gull starting at me with an intensity bordering on hostility, as if it knows I will not be sharing the pretzels I have tucked at the bottom of my bag. The beach is my summer office, and the gulls, cormorants, and pigeons are my summer coworkers.

For over a decade, I have been lucky enough to live a few minutes’ walk from one of New York City’s beaches (yes, NYC has beaches and yes, we swim there). I am also an academic — an assistant professor of environmental history to be more precise — and while I am not in the classroom over the summer there are still papers to write, books to read, and lessons to plan. My work becomes more solitary and flexible, but it is definitely still work.

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Making a habit of working at the beach has helped me understand my work-life relationship. It has also made me mindful of my work process, both in terms of the types of work I do on any given day and the materials and mindset I need to accomplish that work.

Discovering worklife

Like most academics, I am not good at erecting boundaries between my work and my life. And for years, I was given to understand that that was a problem. Achieving a balance between “work” as a distinct activity and “life” as a distinct activity seems to be a preoccupying goal of 21^st century labor. A quick online search shows that everyone from Forbes to the National Library of Medicine has something to say about how that can and should be achieved. Even my own university is so dedicated to the concept that it hosts an Office of Work Life.

I have just never been able to do it. Sometimes, through poor planning or my inability to say no (I’m working on it!), I find myself working long hours during the academic year. But these are discrete instances. Rather, there is no functional boundary between my work and my life because I read books about the history of herbariums for fun and go on walks to look for invasive species.

And when I go on vacation, I bring my work with me. Not my department’s annual budget request or the book review that needs proofreading, but a particular way of understanding the world that has me photographing gingko trees on the streets of Shanghai, marveling at Helsinki’s storm water management infrastructure, and dragging my oh-so-patient travel companions to every natural history museum on three continents. In 2024, I developed a public lecture based on a particularly muddy hike I had taken in the north of England, and those vacation photos formed the bulk of my slide deck.

If “work” and “life” are supposed to be separate entities, “beach” is yet another category that is supposed to be outside of the humdrum routine of one’s regular life. Folks don beachwear and pack their beach bags with beach towels, beach umbrellas, and beach reads in order to have a beach vacation. All these specialized activities and equipment support the idea that real life stops as soon as one’s flipflops touch the sand. And if there is supposed to be a barrier between work and life, the distance between work and beach must be irreconcilable.

Or so I thought.

For several summers, I tried to work at home and then take an appropriately light book out to the beach. But it was no fun being hunched over my desk when I knew the ocean was but a few steps away. And then, when I was at the beach, I would often be beset by vague feelings of guilt that I should be working on my latest research project. I don’t like that guilt, and carefully dividing my work time, life time, and beach time was doing nothing to assuage it.

Because of my love of a dramatic narrative, I’d like to say I woke up one morning, threw off the shackles of artificial division, and reveled in the messiness of worklife. In actuality, the process was much more gradual. I started taking those fun books about herbaria or rewilding or 19^th century literary representations of whales to the beach with me. In my mind, I called them inappropriate beach reads, and I removed them from the story when someone asked me what I was doing over the summer. It became undeniable, however, that bringing my actual work books out to the sand meant that I could stay outside longer, get more reading done, and, importantly, quiet that nagging guilt.

That’s when I stopped trying to balance work and life as separate entities and instead squished them into a jumbled worklife. Since I’m always thinking about history and the environment, there is no point in fighting it to achieve some artificial balance. And because my job colors how I approach the world, I have thus made myself open to moments of inspiration and serendipity that I would have missed otherwise. The messiness works for me.

How to work on the beach

While my beach-based worklife has become more involved since those first days when I substituted a work book for a beach read, I have not been able to transfer my whole office to the sand. Nor do I want to. Even as working at the beach has helped me to create the entangled mentality and practices I call worklife, it has also helped me mindfully break apart the work I do on any given day into the categories “beach” and “not-beach.” This seemingly simplistic division has nevertheless allowed me to think more carefully about the types of work I do and how best to do it.

It all comes back to the environment (I told you it was never too far from my mind). The beach is a harsh environment, inimical to permanent settlement by most life forms, particularly humans. A beach day requires a lot of supplies to keep the average human comfortable—drinking water, food, artificial shade, a comfortable place to sit—these are not naturally occurring.

Regardless of what I plan to accomplish at the beach, I always bring my reusable water bottle, a snack, an umbrella, and a blanket. I also slather on sunscreen and wear a lightweight coverup, flipflops, and sunglasses. Leaving the house is a process, but this is the minimum amount of material support I need to be comfortable in a place with glaring sun and no fresh water.

Since I’m going to be working, I also need to pack the necessary tools for the tasks I’ve set out for myself on any given day and ensure that they are also protected from the harsh beach environment, most immediately the sand, but also the omnipresent salt spray.

My phone — safely encased — comes with me, but I would never take my laptop onto the sand. Paper books, notebooks, and printouts are fine, and I use a clipboard to make sure loose papers don’t blow away. I also use small metal Book Darts (bookdarts.com is not an affiliate link, just an amazing small business worth checking out) to mark my page rather than sticky notes or lightweight bookmarks that are also in danger of scattering from a gust. Every piece of paper I bring to the beach becomes at least a little wet, either from the spray or from my dripping person post-swim, so I only use pens whose ink doesn’t run. And even though I have my phone with me, the sun’s glare means that I can only use it for short periods of time before I strain my eyes.

Given these environmental and material constraints, my “beach” work most often involves reading, taking notes, brainstorming, writing first drafts, and editing pre-printed material. All of this work is slow and deliberate. It lends itself to the pace of a hand moving a pen and welcomes pauses to stare at the waves or follow the flight of a bird. This kind of work cannot be rushed as it involves developing and nurturing ideas. Whether one chooses to call it daydreaming or thinking deeply, beach work takes time.

My “not beach” work—which is chiefly answering emails, administrative tasks, polishing drafts, and proofreading—is typically more urgent and intricate. I cannot afford to be distracted by a puppy attacking a piece of seaweed that clearly had it coming when I need to estimate my department’s annual budget, nor can I daydream half the afternoon away when a colleague is expecting my reply. All of this work is also tied to my laptop, a temperamental tool that stays indoors.

Some days I work exclusively in one category or the other. Other days, I will only do the bare minimum “not beach” work needed to stay on top of my deadlines, or I will feel ambitious and decide to check multiple tasks off my to-do list before I shift to the slower rhythms of “beach” work. External factors like deadlines or the weather might influence how I choose to organize my workday, but I also allow my mood to dictate what I plan to do.

Since worklife is messy and, at times, chaotic, I try not to judge myself for the choices I make on any given day. This ensures I am doing something to support my worklife goals rather than let guilt gnaw at me for not working the “right way.”

If you love this newsletter and look forward to reading it every week, please consider forwarding it to a friend or becoming a paying subscriber.

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Most issues of this publication are free because I love sharing ideas and connecting with others about the future of work. If you want to support me as a writer, you can buy me a coffee.

Have a work story you’d like to share? Please reach out using this form. I can retell your story while protecting your identity, share a guest post, or conduct an interview.

This guest post was written by Nola Simon, a hybrid/remote work and leadership strategist. I’ve known Nola for several years: I interviewed her and was a guest on her podcast. She always has insightful perspectives on the future of work.

You can learn more about Nola on her website.

Asynchronous practices — and the systems behind them — are how organizations and individuals can thrive as technology evolves. Here’s why the future of work is rooted in flexibility and care.

What is asynchronous work?

We intuitively understand asynchronous work when it’s not described that way. Emails, voicemails, faxes, letters are all examples of asynchronous communication. If you’ve read a book or listened to a recording of music, that’s asynchronous. A play in a theatre is synchronous; streaming the Disney recording of Hamilton, that’s asynchronous. Live concerts are synchronous; the documentary about the tour is asynchronous.

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Even school is designed with a combination of the two — classes taught in person by a teacher at the school or live on Zoom with a full cohort of students are synchronous. Homework is asynchronous by design. The idea is to develop independent study, diligence, dedication, time management, and autonomy.

So much of what is written about asynchronous work and hybrid/remote work pertains to productivity and coordination of presence. It’s really missing the point of flexibility. If you can’t see your people, you must trust them to do the work. This is the basis of the very first org chart ever created.

In 1855, David McCallum, the general superintendent of the New York and Erie Railroad, designed a dynamic, trust-based system conceived as a way of dealing with an overflow of information and delegating decision-making. A tale as old as time. A big part of this was defining roles and responsibilities so people understood what was expected of them. Documentation, in other words.

Rachel Botsman, an expert in trust, showcased an in-depth study of this artifact at the London Biennale in June 2025. What you notice first is that the head of the organization is at the bottom of the chart. Leadership is at the root and the chart itself appears to be a willow tree, known for flexibility and which grew all along the railway, meaning it was familiar to everyone it referenced.

“…who do we have to thank for the pyramid? IBM. We went from this beautiful living system to linear, static, rigid lines... It amazes me that this is over a hundred years old.”
– Rachel Botsman

I happen to read org charts for fun, but mostly what I’m looking for isn’t on the printed chart. It’s the messiness, the invisible network that works behind the scenes. It’s the nepotism, friendships, and unseen influence that never gets documented. The stories that bring the chart to life.

Trust and documentation as infrastructure

The interesting thing about documenting roles, responsibilities, general knowledge, standard operating procedures, assumptions, constraints, and decision-making is that they become institutional knowledge. A culture of attribution develops and becomes policy; that very attribution creates visibility and credibility. If there is insufficient documentation, organizations suffer when turnover happens. But this documentation also facilitates flexibility, asynchronous work, which in turn sets the stage for AI adoption.

The cost of proximity bias

Imagine if the shift to asynchronous means that meetings that could have been emails disappear because they are expensive and unproductive. Imagine if proximity bias has a cost assigned per person, and that cost is deducted from department budgets.

Imagine if metrics track who books the most meetings and therefore wastes the most time and money, transcripts surface who speaks the most and listens the least.

Imagine if we had all started this back in 2020 instead of devoting so much time and money to return to office mandates? What we resist, persists.

Transparency is not trust because trust is a confident relationship with the unknown but what if leadership focuses on how we become confident? How do we shift to trusting each other? Trust is reciprocal and should be celebrated. What if leadership became about telling the story of trust? What if team engagement focuses on demonstrating examples of AI experimentation at all levels of the organization? There are companies already successfully implementing these approaches – think Dropbox, Gitlab, Shopify, Atlassian.

“To understand the disruption happening, it’s helpful think of trust like energy: It doesn’t get destroyed; it changes form. Local trust flowed sideways, directly from person to person. Institutional trust flowed upwards to leaders, experts, referees, and regulators. Distributed trust changed the flow back sideways but in ways and on a scale never possible before. Now, with the rapid advancement of AI, autosapient trust will flow through an AI agent.”
– Rachel Botsman

Rethinking leadership and hiring

If you document well, the skills you are hiring for change. No longer are you hiring for people who run great meetings, present, negotiate, and collaborate well in real time. You are looking for people who are autonomous and have agency and who can discern when meetings fuel the work.

When you are hiring people who have a high degree of self-trust and initiative, the role of management and leadership changes, too. The role shifts from monitoring compliance and task completion to removing barriers that stall momentum. Leadership becomes care: assessing overwork to prevent burnout, proactively creating opportunities to connect and nurture a sense of belonging. Gathering will still matter but mattering means more than just physical presence.

"If you want anything to matter to someone, they first have to believe that they matter to you. Nothing matters to someone who doesn't first believe that they matter. It's very difficult for anything to matter to someone who doesn't first believe that they matter.”
- Zach Mercurio

The fastest way to improve productivity is to subtract useless tasks. Automation can help with that significantly. The key is to develop the skills and instinct to verify and trust more quickly than we have until now.

I once campaigned for 10 years to eliminate a process that absorbed the time of 300 staff with very little reward. Automation eliminated this within a week. Corporations must invest in career development at all levels, upskilling and providing valuable resources that are challenging to access outside of corporate. Empathy, critical thinking, and discernment become scarce but increasingly valuable. Think curation rather than gathering more content and information. Perks will no longer be the nice to have but the differentiator in whether the best of the best work for you or for themselves.

If it’s true that AI will reduce corporate headcount, how do we retain the very best when gig work and freelancing become attractive and viable options? Trust doesn’t disappear; it just changes shape. Do the people with the skills you need trust you more than they trust themselves to be able to provide for the lives they want to live? The need to earn money won’t likely disappear, and companies that run on AI presumably still want customers who have disposable income to be able to purchase the products and services they provide.

Systems, automation, and AI aren’t just for corporate

Automation and subtraction are not just a productivity tactic corporations can use —it can be a matter of survival for the small business and the self-employed.

In her essay I’m Self-Employed. And I Have a Brain Tumor, Anna Burgess Yang describes preparing her business for her absence as she faced brain surgery. She carefully planned systems so others could help, pre-scheduled content, and set clear expectations for clients. This essay is part of the system Anna designed to facilitate her recovery process. I’m honoured that she trusts me to help.

Over the years, Anna and I have only met on Zoom twice to conduct two interviews, one which became a podcast and the other a long form Substack. Most of our interaction happens asynchronously online on various platforms like LinkedIn, Threads, and Medium. Trust without presence is entirely possible.

This protocol wasn’t something Anna built overnight. And obviously, she wasn’t planning for a brain tumour when she designed it for her business. She had already invested in systems, automation, and AI to support her ongoing work. The fact that it already exists means that with some tweaks, she can focus on her health and her family without worrying about every operational detail.

Her approach shows that subtracting busywork and designing for asynchronous support isn’t just efficient—it’s proactive self-care. It enables resilience when life demands our full attention, making work sustainable and adaptable even in crisis.

Anna’s story is a profound reminder: The way we choose to work and the tools we choose to use enable systems and systems enable the work. Even when we can’t be present.

Asynchronous work isn’t just a shift in schedule — it’s a shift in how we lead, how we trust, and how we build systems that sustain us in uncertainty.

I’ll be writing more about my Brain Tumor Journey in my personal blog. If you’d like to support my recovery, I have a GoFundMe or you can buy me a coffee.

You can also subscribe to support this publication as I continue to write during my Brain Tumor Recovery.

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This guest post is written by my friend Nick Moore. Nick is a technical writer who started freelancing full-time around the same time I did. We bounce ideas off each other all the time, and I value his perspective and his writing skills.

You can learn more about Nick on his website.

“Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life,” is one of the most popular pieces of career advice I encountered as a young adult. According to an article by Quote Investigator, its origins are murky, and people often attribute it to Confuscious, Ben Franklin, and Mark Twain.

This murkiness feels fitting, though, because this aphorism is the water in which we swim and the water in which I grew up. As far as I’m concerned, the quote might as well have come from my parents, who repeated it to me often when I was a teenager who was always worrying two steps ahead.

My relationship to work has changed dramatically across my decade in the workforce, and this quote has resurfaced numerous times over that span.

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Sometimes, it felt like a beacon: “If I only go to grad school, then I’ll be able to get into the industry that allows work to not feel like work.” Other times, it felt like a warning light: “You’re working hard, you’re burning out, and you’re not having fun. You’ve chosen the wrong line of work.”

Two years ago, I was laid off from a full-time content marketing position at a tech startup, and I chose to become a freelance writer.

That decision ended up culminating a thought I’d had simmering for years: The framework underlying this aphorism relies on a false binary. You don’t have to choose between work that provides passion (and maybe a paycheck) or work that subjects you to drudgery (and pays to make the pain go down easier). There’s a third way.

The case for passion

The false binary goes like this: You’re either doing a job you love and work that makes you feel passionate about doing it, or you’re weathering drudgery for the sake of a big paycheck. For young millennials like me, the false binary came pre-solved: Drudgery sucks, so find work that doesn’t feel like work — at any cost.

Generationally, we paid that cost. The student debt our generation has taken on is enormous, and the burden seems never-ending. At the time, it all seemed worth it because we were taking on debt to live a life free from work.

We found out too late, though, that the price was steeper and more nefarious than we (or our parents) anticipated. As Anne Helen Peterson writes (in an essay on burnout that went super-viral in 2019),

“When we talk about millennial student debt, we’re not just talking about the payments that keep millennials from participating in American ‘institutions’ like home ownership or purchasing diamonds. It’s also about the psychological toll of realizing that something you’d been told, and came to believe yourself, would be ‘worth it’ — worth the loans, worth the labor, worth all that self-optimization — isn’t.”

For me, this debt, this betrayal, came due not when the banks demanded my first student loan payment but when I realized passion would neither pay the bills nor free me from drudgery.

Work, it turns out, is work, and even great jobs include a lot of unfun labor surrounding the good stuff. To this day, I occasionally meet people who’ve fulfilled the dream, people who really have one of those one-in-a-million jobs, or people who happen to fit perfectly into a field that really suits them.

For most people, however, I think this is a mirage that’s more likely to hurt you than save you. Mirages only work when they look beautiful, and when we have to start from the desert, looking for an escape.

In her book Work Won't Love You Back, Sarah Jaffe writes, “Without a society, with the lines between the family and the workplace blurring, with little time for a personal life anyway, we are even more likely to try to make work more pleasurable, even to seek in it a replacement for the love we lack elsewhere.”

The idea of work as a site of passion and love exists because and in relation to the fact that third spaces have been destroyed, communities have been broken apart, and free time has been consumed by anxiety, screens, and, cyclically, work.

When companies become “family,” as so many bosses would have us believe, love is turned against us. As Jaffe writes, “If we fail to love our work, it becomes another form of individual shame. Love, after all, is supposed to be an unlimited resource that lives within us: If the workplace is a family, shouldn’t we naturally love it?”

I fell out of love with this form of love fairly early. I thought I would work in the book publishing industry, but I didn’t have the familial wealth to suffer a move to New York City and an unknown number of “dues paid” via unpaid internships. A class I nearly didn’t take covered content marketing, and I thought there might be something for me there. Something less than passion, perhaps, but something that made the looming student loans survivable.

Still, I graduated with nearly six-figure debt, and though I started work earning more than the big fat zero an internship would have offered me, I still worried about the other path in the binary: Maybe I should have accepted drudgery from the start instead of taking the long route.

The case for drudgery

The other side of the false binary goes like this: Work sucks, so you might as well get paid as much as you can (in money, status, etc.) while you do it. The prototypical career options for this path are always doctor and lawyer. Midway through my college experience, another position rose up: Software engineer.

My first office job post-school was at a tech media company, where I frequently interviewed engineers, IT professionals, and other technical experts. The complexity of their work was dizzying, and my job was to explain work I didn’t understand to people who knew more about it than I did. The fact that everyone I wrote about made more money than I did made sense. I had some envy but no resentment.

In the following years, I worked for tech companies but never as a tech worker. Like a crab on the ocean floor, I fed on the detritus of dollars sinking down to me, the frothing waves of VC dollars flowing in and out of startups that surged, crashed, and fell apart.

All the while, my envy deepened. I met tech workers who loved their jobs, self-described code monkeys who relished the bananas piled their way, but I met many who took the work on as highly paid drudgery.

At first, my passion-work instincts were disgusted. Who could do something they hated? Just for money? It seemed like a poison pill. But then I saw the paychecks, cold brew on tap, work-from-home Fridays, and flexible, relaxed environments. I saw people getting paid like doctors and lawyers without having any lives on the line. And the poison pill looked pretty delicious.

I lacked the instincts to learn coding well, however, and I lacked the gumption to flip my life over in a way that would have allowed me the space and effort to switch tracks and choose the other prong. Instead, I stayed nearby but outside, and watched.

This position meant I saw the rise, but I also saw the fall. According to Gergely Orosz, “2023 was, indeed, historic as the first year since Y2K when the number of software engineering jobs shrank. Growth has resumed this year, but it’s at least possible that a long-term flattening of the growth curve is emerging.”

With the end of ZIRP, we may be seeing the end of the software engineer as a safe, easy bet to invest your time in, even if you find the work tedious. And it’s only gotten worse. Now, with the rise of AI-based coding tools, the gold rush seems over.

The problem, really, is that you don’t get to pick a point on that graph. As a worker, you’re gambling on your industry and hoping for the best – that you’re a developer in 2010 and not a developer in 2023 (or whatever might come next).

Of course, the tech industry will remain, as will engineering jobs (this essay is not the place for AGI predictions), but the rush, specifically, is over.

Engineering is returning to the kind of state most industries are in: The work sucks, but they pay you to do it, and hey, if you don’t mind the work, it might not feel quite as bad to do all week.

If I had kids, even teenagers on the cusp of entering college, I don’t think I would urge them to choose engineering. I wouldn’t steer them away, but unlike many parents of the students in my cohort, I wouldn’t tell them this line of work, or any other one, will be a golden ticket.

For me, this rise and fall of the tech gold rush shows there’s no dependable path to wealth, no easy-to-call tradeoff that pays you handsomely for a little drudgery. If anything, the “safe” path has come to feel risky. I worry about the people who invested years of work in a field they loathe, only to find that the money has dried up and they have skills they no longer care to possess.

The case for satisfaction

I love writing. The first ambition I ever had was when I set a blue-colored pencil to a page and wrote a Captain Underpants rip-off, and decided, when I was eight, that I had what it took to become a published author.

College showed me that novelist, as a career path, was perhaps a little too much passion and not enough paycheck. I went to grad school to work in publishing, intending to work with writers but not as one, but the scales were still too imbalanced against paycheck (especially given the debt I took on to find this out).

When I graduated, I started working in content marketing. First, I worked in tech media; then, I worked for a content marketing agency; then I worked as a full-time content marketer for a tech startup; then, as many were, I was laid off. When that happened, I faced a dilemma I had only been half-facing throughout my career: Did I really want to twist my passion into work?

I love writing, but I didn’t love what I was writing about. I merely liked it. But was that enough? Was I burning writing hours writing blog posts that I should have been saving for off-hours side work?

Freelancing allowed me to complete the answer I had been drafting: Work can provide satisfaction, a level of pleasure that isn’t passion or love but is much better than drudgery and tedium. And if I only ask for satisfaction, then I can do work that pays better than work meant to fill my soul.

Nowadays, I spend almost every day researching, writing, and occasionally interviewing (to support further research and writing). I’m rarely excited to start the workday, but once I’m focused, I routinely find myself delaying the end of the day because I’m in the groove and I’m “stuck in.”

I think of this feeling as the kind of satisfaction you can get from solving a puzzle. When you do a puzzle, you know what the result of the work will be (it’s right on the box!), but you do it anyway because the tactile sensation of clicking pieces together and the intellectual sensation of testing, thinking, and progressing is satisfying.

Nowadays, that’s all I expect of work, and because I’ve made my expectations realistic, work has the chance to surpass my expectations occasionally. Work still feels like work, but I don’t demand that it feel like anything else, which gives it the chance to give me the more mundane satisfaction of solving a mundane problem.

The false binary doesn’t just hide a third path. It distorts the way you think about work by magnifying the role work must play in your life.

Zoom in that far, and the choice makes sense; you'd better work for happiness or money, or you’re getting nothing at all. Zoom out, though, and there are many more things to consider – chief among them, the question the binary begs: What role will work have in your life?

If I were advising a teenager now, I would ask the same kinds of questions that sociology professor Erin A. Cech asks his students:

Now I encourage students, and anyone else at the crossroads of important career decisions, to marshal a more holistic set of considerations in their decision-making. I start with the question, What do you want your relationship to paid work to be? What do you need from your work in addition to a paycheck? Predictable hours? Enjoyable colleagues? Benefits? A respectful boss?

Your workplace is not your family, but work is a part of life. Putting work in the context of your life gives you more variables to think about, more dials to twist, more options to consider. You’re not stuck in the false binary of passion or drudgery.

You must work, yes, but you can figure out ways to find satisfaction in the day-to-day, maximize money and flexibility along the way, and fill the rest of your time with life rather than squeezing your life into work.

Putting work in its place

Work is greedy, and if you let it, work can consume you. As Petersen writes, “When all hours can be theoretically converted to more work, the hours when you're not working feel like a lost opportunity, or just an abject failure.”

Accepting that work is about passion through labor or profit through drudgery requires making work a central focal point in your life. Once that happens, as Petersen writes, every non-working hour becomes a betrayal of the chance to feel passionate or to earn profit.

In reality, the “third way” I’ve proposed here isn’t a third option in a list of three, but a different framework entirely. It’s not the only one, but it’s mine, and I think it’s a good way to jostle people out of the false binary many of us inherited.

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This week’s Perspectives is an interview with Monique, a former elementary school educator living in the Midwest. Monique resigned this year after a 25-year teaching career to do something completely different with her life.

Monique shared her story with me via an interview. I opted to retell her story as a first-person narrative, and the interview was edited for length and clarity. Details have been changed for Monique’s privacy.

The majority of my life, I wanted to be a teacher. As a kid, I would set up my stuffed animals around a desk and chalkboard in the basement. I didn't have any siblings, but growing up I babysat and had opportunities to work with younger grades in sports groups. People kept telling me how good I was with other people and explaining things. I loved watching people learn and having a hand in that.

I got to the point where I was choosing where to go to college and what to study. I ended up in elementary education. And even when I was given the opportunity to be in another country doing something else, with everything paid for, I told my family that I needed to teach.

I was in education for 25 years. In the beginning, it was exactly what I hoped it would be. There was a lot of freedom to be creative and to meet students where they were at and find their interests. I happened to be at a place with a very involved, supportive parent population. Kids came in and were excited about learning. There was normal "kid stuff" but they treated each other with kindness. Not everything was prescribed for me, nor did the kids have as many assessments or use as much technology as they do now.

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Over the past 25 years, best practices and instruction have changed a lot — like what we know about the brain and how people learn. One thing that's different now is that we know kids' brains are wired differently than they were at the time due to the way we live our lives now. Whether that's due to trauma, or the COVID experience, or because of technology, we know that kids are learning differently. And I feel like we, in the education profession, have not changed.

I read somewhere that we are preparing kids for a workforce that existed decades ago instead of the one that's going to exist when they enter the workforce. I think that's exactly right. Obviously, we'll have to wait and see. But school is definitely not set up in a way that's promoting the things I think we need to promote for kids.

One of the things that was a big push at the beginning of my career was that you could use any instructional strategy. Your depth of content knowledge wasn't as significantly important to your instruction as your pedagogical knowledge. "If you know how to teach, you can teach anything" was kind of the way we looked at it. Elementary teachers didn't master any specific content in our undergrad work, because we didn't have to.

But content knowledge matters when you're teaching a six-year-old. Because if you start to say things to kids that don't make sense, kids have to unlearn what they were previously taught. So content knowledge became far more important.

We also understand that kids learn in different ways. Teaching a person to swim is probably the best analogy. Let's say you have 25 kids in front of you in a pool. Some of them have never been in the water, and some of them have been swimming their entire lives. As a teacher, you're expected to know which kids need your hand under their bellies to keep them above water and which should be doing laps and flips turns.

If you're able to differentiate by content, by interest, by readiness level — and, in some subjects, it's easier than others — amazing. You provide the kids with what they need when they need it. The thought that you could do that in every content area, every single day, for every single student, is virtually impossible. There's support staff, interventionists, and special ed teachers, but the struggle is to make sure everyone's on the same page. Assuming I even have enough people, which is usually not true, how do I make sure all of us are expecting the same things in the way a child needs it?

Every year, I would say, "I don't know what I want to be when I grow up." That thought got really serious within the last five years. COVID happened, and the timing was a coincidence, except that I think COVID caused a lot of people to reprioritize their lives. I am probably different as a result of that.

When other job opportunities would open up within the school district, I was always willing to throw my name into the hat. I was at six or seven schools throughout my career, at every grade level. I did two out-of-classroom positions. I would consider leadership positions. With each of these moves, I was trying to figure out where I was supposed to "fit."

I think the way I was treated by children was a significant breaking point. It's going to sound really selfish — and I don't mean it to — but in the beginning, kids were excited to come to school. Even if they didn't like school, they were connected to each other and the staff. They knew they were there because they were going to learn something, and it was going to help them enjoy their lives. Even if all they looked forward to was recess and lunch.

I feel like what's happened over the course of recent history is the amount of trauma that kids have experienced. The way the world works right now is causing them to have a very different outlook on how you treat other people, how you demonstrate an interest in things, and what you do when those things are not true. So, for example, if I'm not connected to someone, what's the base level for how I treat them? If I'm not interested in a subject, what's the appropriate way to demonstrate that?

When I started thinking about equivalents, initially, I wanted a financially equivalent job. I thought I could work with a park district, a day care, a YMCA, or a library. Then I started to think about the skills I have that are not specific to education, like organizing data, organizing events, and getting people connected to each other. I looked at roles that had an organizational management type of label. But none of those doors ever seemed to open.

At this point, I'm more open to more things than I was before because, clearly, the thing I thought I was supposed to do did not work. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. You have to do something different. I'm a little more open to what's coming to me versus going out and seeking what I think I'm supposed to have.

I'm working at a couple of gyms. Trying to do something with music. And I have a job working outdoors — a job that I had no idea would be fun. My work days are broken up a lot more. There's a lot more physical labor. There's a lot less money. But I'm far more satisfied with the work. And feel more valued, which seems bizarre.

When the school year starts in the fall, I think I'll miss the friendships. It's not going to be setting up my classroom. It's not going to be pulling all the data and making sure I know who needs what before they even walk in the door. It's not sitting in meetings. But I've lost touch with people who are my best friends in the world for the past two and a half decades. And it's not because I don't want to see them. When you're a teacher, you're going to see everyone again in three months when the summer is over. I think that will be hard. But the "Sunday Scaries"? They don't exist anymore.

I think teachers work really hard. I know everybody's job is hard, and hard looks different in a lot of ways. But if you haven't been a teacher or lived with a teacher, you don't understand the incredibly invasive permeation into your entire life. You don't even realize it yourself until you walk away. It's constantly on your mind because you care. You wouldn't have gotten into this profession if you didn't.

Teachers are told that teaching is a work of the heart. A calling. Which is a very sweet way to say, "You're not going to get compensated" or "You're not going to be appreciated." We're told to think that's ok because you're doing it out of the goodness of your heart. And everyone has a breaking point if you're doing something on that basis.

Most issues of this publication are free because I love sharing ideas and connecting with others about the future of work. If you want to support me as a writer, you can buy me a coffee.

If you love this newsletter and look forward to reading it every week, please consider forwarding it to a friend or becoming a subscriber.

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This guest post is written by my friend , CEO and co-founder of . Olivia is an amazing human who supports people going through major life changes

In addition to her Substack, you can also check out the Fresh Starts Registry website, which provides resources for people going through divorce. Olivia also co-hosts A Fresh Story podcast (I’ve been a guest!).

When my younger son was a toddler and my older son was just in preschool, I broke my foot — and not just a small fracture. I wasn’t allowed to place any pressure on it for three months.

I had two little boys, a house full of stairs, and not a lot of help at home from my spouse. I felt like I was underwater, barely managing. Everything hurt. Everything felt impossible. I remember sitting on the bottom step one day with tears pouring down my face because I couldn’t figure out how to get the laundry basket down to the basement without crawling. I was in pain, yes—but it was the logistics that nearly broke me.

My sister, who lived an hour away, drove out as often as she could to help. She would baby-wear my toddler while cooking meals, cleaning up, and doing laundry. My parents stepped in to make sure my older son got to preschool and speech therapy every single day. These weren’t grand, dramatic acts. These were small, consistent moments of support—and they saved me. They kept me from going under. They were the difference between spiraling into depression and knowing I was held.

When someone you love is going through a medical crisis — whether it’s a broken bone, surgery, a new diagnosis, cancer treatment, or just ongoing health challenges — there are things you can do. And many of them don’t cost anything at all.

Here are 10 ways to show up for someone who’s in it — five if you’re nearby, five if you’re far — and all grounded in care, not perfection.

If you’re nearby, help hold the roof up

1. Text: “I’m at the store—what can I grab for you?”

Don’t say “Let me know if you need anything.” That puts the emotional labor back on them. Instead, offer specifics: “I’m at CVS—need Pedialyte, tissues, or dry shampoo?” Even if they say no, they’ll feel your care. And if they say yes, you’ve made their life a little bit easier.

2. Drop something on the porch and walk away.

One friend left a jar of soup and a pack of gum on my steps with a note: “Don’t answer the door. Just love you.” It doesn’t need to be Pinterest-perfect. It just needs to say: I see you.

3. Take one caregiving task off their plate.

Walk the dog. Feed the fish. Entertain the toddler for twenty minutes. When someone is in crisis, even the tiny things — like remembering to refill the dog’s water bowl or keep a child occupied so they can rest — can feel enormous. Offer to help with one of the living, breathing beings in their care. It may seem small to you, but it’s one less spinning plate for them to manage.

4. Take over one task. Just do it.

Empty the dishwasher. Fold the laundry. Mop the kitchen. No fanfare, no big conversation. One day, my sister just swept the floors and loaded the dishwasher while I sat crying on the couch. She didn’t ask. She just did it.

5. Be physically present — even if you’re just sitting nearby.

I’ve had friends sit next to me and knit while I lay in bed half-asleep. The comfort of someone simply being there, without small talk or pressure, is a quiet kind of medicine.

If you’re far away: Love travels

1. Be their Google.

Look up pharmacies that deliver. Research specialists. Find parking garages near the doctor’s office. Help them make sense of their insurance paperwork. Send a text like, “Do you want me to look that up for you so you don’t get the terrifying results?” That small filter can offer a huge sense of relief.

2. Send a short voice note or video message.

Texts are nice, but hearing a familiar voice saying “I love you, I’m here” can make all the difference. Don’t expect a response. Don’t ask any questions. Just let them feel your presence from a distance.

3. Mail a little care envelope.

When a friend of mine was going through chemo, I sent her a note, some tea bags, a silly sticker, and a lip balm. It cost less than $5. It sat on her nightstand for weeks and made her smile when she reached for it in the middle of hard nights.

4. Organize the helpers.

Even from afar, you can coordinate a care calendar, a meal train, or a support group chat. I once had a friend in another state set up a spreadsheet for my local friends so I wasn’t overwhelmed by random offers. That’s what love looks like too — quiet coordination.

5. Send a meal. Even better: schedule it.

This one isn’t free, but if you have a few extra dollars, sending a meal — via DoorDash, Uber Eats, or even Instacart — can be a lifeline. The best part? They don’t have to cook, answer the door, or talk to anyone. One friend sent me a rotisserie chicken and pre-cut fruit. I cried into the pineapple.

Just show up

What I’ve learned is that love shows up in unglamorous, everyday ways: through food, through folding towels, through the gentle message that says, “You don’t owe me anything—I just want you to know you’re not alone.” You don’t need to fix everything. You just need to offer a little light, a little steadiness. That’s what gets people through.

Most issues of this publication are free because I love sharing ideas and connecting with others about the future of work. If you want to support me as a writer, you can buy me a coffee.

If you love this newsletter and look forward to reading it every week, please consider forwarding it to a friend or becoming a subscriber.

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Have a work story you’d like to share? Please reach out using this form. I can retell your story while protecting your identity, share a guest post, or conduct an interview.

This week's Perspectives is an interview with Brionna Ned, a lawyer and founder of The Lawless Lawyer. I reached out to Brionna last year for some legal work after a fellow freelancer raved about working with her. Brionna runs the lowercase legal community, designed to help freelancers gain more confidence in their legal knowledge. You can connect with Brionna on LinkedIn, Threads, and Instagram. You can also subscribe to her newsletter.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Anna Burgess Yang: How did your legal career begin? What type of work were you doing?

Brionna Ned: I started my career in law before I went to law school. I was in the process of getting a master's degree in sociology at Stanford. Didn't know what I wanted to do. Came across a lot of New York Times articles about the Napster and Limewire litigation. I was totally obsessed with it.

One of the premier intellectual property professors was at Stanford Law. And my roommate's mom was a professor at the law school, so she introduced me to him. He explained to me how these types of lawsuits worked, and his older sister was part of the litigation, and I talked to her about it.

I went from having no idea what I wanted to do with life to knowing that I wanted to go to law school. I worked as a paralegal during the last economic recession at a securities litigation firm. The firm handled cases of customers suing their brokers for losing all of their investment funds during the recession. I did that for two years.

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After law school, I wanted to do entertainment law. The intersection of music and technology was really fascinating to me. I worked at a very fancy law firm, Munger, Tolles & Olson (that's currently in the news!) I worked on a ton of intellectual property and entertainment litigation.

Then I transitioned to in-house counsel a few years into my career. I worked at an electric vehicle company and did intellectual property and international compliance work. That's where I really developed my in-house and legal operations skills that I still use today, just in a different context.

ABY: Why did you leave that type of work?

BN: One of the things about Munger, Tolles & Olson was that I got early experience as a junior associate, and that was important to me. I only spent two years there, but I had done a couple of oral arguments, which was unheard of at a junior level. I had taken and defended almost 30 depositions. I had written and won major briefs. People kept saying, "Just wait until you do (all those things I just listed) and you'll be hooked." I did those things, and didn't find them all that exciting.

I had my eyes set on being in-house because I wanted to see the whole picture. You only get a little piece of the puzzle when you're outside counsel. At the time I wasn't diagnosed, but I have ADHD and my brain works better with the full picture.

But when I became in-house counsel, my values and the values of the leadership team were not aligned. Because there were only three lawyers, I was in constant conversation with the CEO. It was not working. So once I settled the litigation, I felt like I had accomplished what they hired me to do. I felt complete and didn't want to deal with the CEO anymore. So I quit and took a break.

ABY: How did you end up starting your own business?

BN: I felt a calling to really do my own thing, completely on my own terms. I was still doing fractional counsel work with some small businesses. That has been the consistent throughline in my entrepreneurship journey. Even when I was in-house counsel, I had entrepreneur friends call me in a panic over a contract.

Like a friend signed a book contract with a developmental editor for self-publishing, and they weren't getting what they had expected. I looked at the contract, and it was something that I would never recommend signing. Or people would call because they were having trouble getting payment. Or they were late with a deliverable and didn't want to get sued.

I would look at the contracts and think — not to be insensitive — but the issues are not that deep. There were pretty simple fixes. I think my brain started to pattern map that cognitive dissonance. People would think there's a crisis when there wasn't. All of these issues were a step before hiring a lawyer, because there is a fundamental knowledge gap. That was a real light bulb for me. The genesis of The Lawless Lawyer is asking, "What are we missing?"

What I've been saying lately is, "You don't know what you're doing when it comes to the law in your business, and that's fine. That can be fixed with the right information."

ABY: What type of information do you think is really important for solopreneurs?

BN: I started by doing contract work, like drafting contracts and reviewing contracts for folks. The reason I made the shift to The Lawless Lawyer was that I wasn't fulfilling my goal to provide the right information. Drafting and reviewing contracts was great, but I wasn't equipping people with the information I think they need and deserve to have.

In my sessions with people last fall, I started asking questions like, "Do you know what legal risk is? What's your understanding of legal risk?" I was met with blank faces. People had no idea what I was talking about. That was when I had my second light bulb moment.

Legal risk is just the potential for financial damage or reputational loss for failing to follow the laws that apply to your business. That's all it is. Understanding what it is and how to identify it helps you create a list of priorities of how you're going to manage your legal.

In my opinion, people fall into a trap of looking for information online, where the main conversation is, "You've got to protect yourself. And in order to protect yourself, you need to do these 10 things that cost thousands of dollars." The everyday person doesn't have that kind of money. And that generic list is based on what's needed for a much larger corporation. We're not trying to protect $100 million in assets.

That's why I think it's important to Matrix-unplug from the default level of protection. Protections for these big companies are the right strategy, because they have so many assets. But if you don't have a ton of assets, you have to be savvier and more strategic. And strategic is just knowing your "why." Why you do something, from a legal perspective, is because you know what your legal risks are and you've prioritized them in your business.

ABY: Talk to me about your pivot from one-on-one work to lowercase legal.

BN: I have a community called lowercase legal. It's a one-time fee community, and it's a place for people to ask their legal questions. I noticed that people want a place where they can safely ask questions, get answers, and not feel ashamed. It's my favorite thing, because it's just a Slack community with channels for different legal categories. People can post a question, and I will record a video or a short audio giving them some things to think about and help them analyze the situation so they can move forward.

For example, I had a freelancer who was working with a client and the client had found a crappy contract template online. The client was saying, "We can't change the contract." That's when I start to think, legal does not exist for that company. Because I know, as a former in-house counsel, that a core job function is reviewing contracts. So anytime you hear, "We can't change the contract," assume that legal does not exist and that your client doesn't understand their own contract. You can explain to them why you need changes, and see what happens. Inside the community, we were able to troubleshoot what was going on and create an action plan.

I have a program called the Starter Package, where I'm helping people map out the legal landscape of their business, so they know what types of legal issues apply. People have very different experiences. I have a person who has no idea what to do for their business from a legal perspective. And I have a person who is really expanding and starting to think really critically about their intellectual property strategy. It has been really fun and fulfilling for me.

The goal of what I'm doing is bigger than me and who I'm working with. It's something I fundamentally believe. Every business owner needs to have this information. You've got to start questioning the advice that's out there. Most of the advice is for a company that IPOs and sells stock, and the vast majority of us are not doing that. We've got to adjust our legal strategy to match where we're at.

Most issues of this publication are free because I love sharing ideas and connecting with others about the future of work. If you want to support me as a writer, you can buy me a coffee.

If you love this newsletter and look forward to reading it every week, please consider forwarding it to a friend or becoming a subscriber.

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Have a work story you’d like to share? Please reach out using this form. I can retell your story while protecting your identity, share a guest post, or conduct an interview.

This week's Perspectives is an interview with Meredith Kucherov. Meredith is a senior content strategist and writer, currently working as a freelancer. Meredith and I met at a marketing agency a few years ago and have been friends since. We've even met in person!

Meredith has always talked very openly about mental health and burnout, which is why I asked if she would be willing to share her work experiences with me.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Anna Burgess Yang: Tell me when you first started experiencing burnout, and did you recognize it was burnout at the time?

Meredith Kucherov: I didn't realize that I was experiencing burnout until I was past the point of no return. I was a team lead, and had been promoted a few times. I thought I was on top of the world. Things were hard, but I thought they were going to get better, because that's what management kept promising. I thought I was going to be part of that. The thing that was most important to me was to support my team and set them up for success.

And then I realized that I couldn't do that; it was outside of my control. I'd been overcompensating for very unsustainable practices at the company through my own force of will, and tried to shield my employees from that. It was emotionally draining. People told me to just look out for myself, and that it was all about hitting the numbers — and that doesn't align with my values. I had a choice of screwing people over and feeling complicit in that, or taking myself out of the equation.

ABY: At what point did you realize that it was starting to take a toll on you?

MK: I had some of the classic signs of burnout, like being short-tempered and emotionally volatile. Every little thing felt like a huge thing. I was working all the time and wasn't taking care of myself. This was in 2021, so it was still Covid era. I thought maybe I was just dealing with the trauma of the time.

But it really kind of hit me all at once. I was visiting my parents, still in "I'm on top of the world" mode. I was working from their place, and they were telling me, "Meredith, you seem worn down. I can see this is taking a toll on you." And I thought, "No, I've totally got this." About a month later, it hit me like a ton of bricks.

I decided to take leave under the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) to figure out what was going on with me, and to reflect on what was going on. I encourage anyone to take FMLA, if you can afford to. It's unpaid, but your job is secure for any kind of issue, including depression or burnout.

ABY: What did you decide to do after that?

MK: I decided to look for another role. This was during The Great Resignation, so the job market was popping. I landed an in-house role at a startup. I was still recovering from burnout, but this was a much healthier environment where I was able to do good work while maintaining some balance. Unfortunately, after about a year, I was hit with a layoff, which definitely feels like a tech rite of passage at this point.

While I was job hunting again, I started focusing on fitness and committed to making the changes in my life that I could control. I did a lot of work during that time on my mental health with my therapist and my psychiatrist. By the time I started working again, I wasn't burned out anymore.

ABY: You then had another job later that also impacted your mental health. What was that like?

MK: The problems in the first situation were very institutional. At this later job, it was my manager. We started out having a good relationship, and at some point, I don't know exactly why, things changed for her.

Nine months into this job, I worked on a very big project. It was eight weeks of round-the-clock working, trying to compensate for other people's shortcomings and working within a very hierarchical organization. I hit the burnout fuse after that insanity. I took three weeks off and used all of my sick days. But I was still really trying to make things work. I got a lot of positive feedback from people at the organization.

But a few months later, things really soured with my boss. I think she was under a lot of pressure, and I was the scapegoat. She'd tell me to address something, and then tell me to deprioritize the project. Then later ask me, "Why haven't you done this already?" I expressed that I did not understand what the expectations for me were, because I felt like I had been doing what I was told to do. But it felt like everything I did was not what she wanted.

ABY: How did you eventually decide that you couldn't take it anymore?

MK: HR got involved in the dynamic between my boss and me. There was a meeting with me, my boss, and HR. I was asking, "What is this going to be about?" and the response was "We're just touching base, nothing to worry about." And then they hit me with, "You're not meeting the expectations of your role." It caught me off guard, especially because I had only ever received positive feedback before. I asked them to explain where I needed to improve, but I never got a real answer.

While going through this, I decided to pursue getting a disability accommodation. I have anxiety and major depressive disorder (MDD). I've been in treatment since my 20s, and I'm very open about it. People who have worked with me have felt like my openness was helpful and contributed to a positive culture.

But at this company, I definitely experienced the other side of that coin, where it can bite you in the ass. I felt like disclosing negatively impacted how people perceived me — before any of the issues with my boss surfaced. They assumed I was overly emotional or saw any emotional expression as a weakness. When I started pursuing an accommodation, that's when I felt like HR went from trying to help me as much as they could to just doing the minimum of what they're required to do by law.

HR suggested that I take short-term disability, and I decided to do that so I could reset. A big plus for short-term disability, as compared to FMLA, is that it’s paid. There is a bit more paperwork involved, and you need a letter from your doctor, but it was manageable.

While on leave, I tried to get accommodations put in place. Simple things, like having my boss tell me in writing if she wants to talk about something versus dropping a meeting on my calendar with no context. But when I got back from leave, I felt like they weren’t trying to make things work. It felt like they were either going to fire me or were trying to get me to quit. So I quit. It’s the first time I’ve ever voluntarily left a job without something else lined up. I was fortunate enough, because of my spouse's income, to have the flexibility to do that, but I know that's not an option for many people, especially in the current job market.

ABY: What impact did that experience have on you?

MK: That whole experience shook my confidence. Some people at the company called me a rock star, though my boss obviously did not in those last few months. It made me second-guess myself, the quality of my work, and my judgment. I've seen that show up in the freelance work I'm taking on as well. And I’ve had to rebuild that confidence. On one of my first freelance assignments, I was in knots about getting it right. I was afraid I wasn’t good enough. But it was actually a big success, and it got me more work and more clients. So I try to remind myself of that when the doubt creeps back in.

I've learned that I can't always be transparent about my mental health and my disability, because it could backfire or be held against me. When freelancing, I can't say, "Hey, I've been burned in this particular way before, and here's how we can work together around that.” It's all just business. Right now, having those boundaries is a positive thing — especially because I am more in control of my work and the people I choose to work with.

ABY: What would you say to other people who are working a job and struggling with mental health?

MK: Try to identify safe people, whether that's a peer or your manager. But maybe be a bit more circumspect than I was.

And I would say that if you're dealing with something or you're burned out and you want to take leave, like FMLA or short-term disability, use those benefits (if they're available to you). Get disability accommodations if you need them.

HR will help you and give you resources, but they can't fix a bad boss. Or a bad situation. Or a bad dynamic. And sometimes asking for some of those things or disclosing too much can backfire, where people then underestimate you. There's bias, and some companies are better than others at reckoning with that. But that doesn’t mean that HR is the bad guy. More often than not, I think people in HR want to do what’s best for people, but there’s a lot that’s beyond their control.

I think that your health is more important than a job. And I feel torn about saying this, especially in this economy. No job is worth your mental health, but people also have to live. Don't stay in a job that's actively harming you. Whether you start actively looking for another job, or get out and find part-time work doing retail or something completely different. Try to find the little things to get you through it. And take care of yourself first.

Most issues of this publication are free because I love sharing ideas and connecting with others about the future of work. If you want to support me as a writer, you can buy me a coffee.

If you love this newsletter and look forward to reading it every week, please consider forwarding it to a friend or becoming a subscriber.

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Have a work story you’d like to share? Please reach out using this form. I can retell your story while protecting your identity, share a guest post, or conduct an interview.

This week’s Perspectives is an interview with Katherine Pomfret. Katherine quit corporate life a year ago and now runs The Society of Alternative Entrepreneurs. She also works as a waitress in the U.K.

Katherine wrote about why she was quitting corporate life in a LinkedIn post that went viral. Her story caught my attention and I’ve been following her journey ever since. Katherine and I chatted about her life now, and why she’s so passionate about alternative entrepreneurialism.

Anna Burgess Yang: I want to set the stage a bit. Tell me what you are doing for work now, after you quit your job last year.

Katherine Pomfret: I live in a caravan now, with a cat. I rent a little piece of land that my van is on. I do not have a toilet or a shower in my van. I do now have gas. For a while, I didn't have electricity, gas, or water.

For income, I do three things. My passion project is my jewelry making. I make silver jewelry in my caravan. I have some income from The Society of Alternative Entrepreneurs. And I work as a waitress, more than full time. Up to 50 hours a week on minimum wage. I love waitressing. I love making people's days that little bit better. You can put the food down with care. You can present a burger in a million different ways. There is an art to it. And how you do it will affect someone's whole mood, and how they react to every other human being for the rest of the afternoon.

We encourage multiple income streams in alternative entrepreneurialism. Why? Because no job can possibly allow you to give all talents that you have to the world. And no job can adequately fulfill all your needs. So it makes sense to do different things.

It's also in the way the world is going. In the volatile and unpredictable nature of the global political climate, it makes sense to have options. And not to put all your eggs in one basket, which, of course, the corporate world has encouraged us to do. Because they want all of us. They're greedy. They do not want us to have an ounce of energy left after they've squeezed us dry. So they encourage that mindset. But multiple income streams are also really good if you have passions that you want to follow.

ABY: Tell me about quitting your corporate job.

KP: People love the phrase "the great leap." It wasn't. I quit seven jobs in three years. I kept thinking the boss was wrong, or the company culture was wrong, or the setup with the investors was wrong. Or mostly, I thought I was wrong. I thought, all the time, "What is wrong with me?" I quit a job in March 2023, and then I did my usual, applying for jobs. I always got jobs really easily, probably because I was so good at faking it.

I was going through this recruitment process for a job that was going to be even more money, bigger team, blah blah. And they treated me appallingly during the interview process. They asked me, "So, we've told you your budget. But what are you going to do if three months into the year, we cut your budget by 70%?" And I said, "Who would do that? Who is going to set a budget and then three months later cut it by 70%?" And they replied, "We've done it before." And I thought, "You're asking me how I will save you from your own idiocy. You want me to say how I would have accounted for this when I did the campaign, and that I would have tricks up my sleeve, and would be able to manage by outsourcing to freelancers. Why would I want to work for you? I don't."

That's when I thought, "I'm done with the whole game. I'm quitting marketing." So I posted that on LinkedIn. And the reason I did that was because I didn't want to change my mind. I wanted to make myself impossible to hire. I wanted to not just think outside of the box, but to jump out of the box and throw it into the sea.

ABY: And what happened as a result of that LinkedIn post?

KP: About 20 minutes later I thought, "Oh shit, maybe I shouldn't have done that." I went back, and it had 400 likes and was full of comments. What changed for me then was, all this time, I thought there was something wrong with me. And the response to that post made me realize, "Oh my God, everyone feels like this, but none of us dared say it.” And the DMs were something else. Aside from what was publicly posted, dozens of DMs an hour, for about 10 days, from people all over the world. So many people had their take on it, and their story, and their perspective. That's a once-in-a-lifetime experience to connect with so many people, so strongly, all at once.

That post was at a really low point in my life, and the responses from people really saved me. It changed the narrative from one of complete failure to one of realizing my identity and being proud of my insight and perceptiveness and refusal to compromise ethically.

And that's why I formed The Society of Alternative Entrepreneurs. I had zero ambition to do it. And I'm still personally quite conflicted about it. But I did it because I needed the people in my DMs to be able to speak to each other. Because I realized that I am not the smartest person in the room. I'm just the one who, by fluke of the algorithm, had this post shown to so many people. I could see patterns, and similarities, and affinities. And I needed people to be able to talk about these things — outside of LinkedIn — and have a space that was private where they could express their opinions, explore alternatives, and connect with each other.

ABY: What do you do in The Society of Alternative Entrepreneurs?

KP: We move more slowly. What we've done in the past year is really try to understand: what are the areas people need to work on? I do not buy this narrative of "the great leap" or courage, or inspiration, or the Big Idea. I think this is actually about things like building self-awareness, living according to your values, understanding your passions, unlocking creativity, developing resilience, and redefining self-care. I think when we start doing all of these things, then the way forward becomes a lot clearer. It becomes almost impossible and distateful to do anything else.

Also, redefining our relationship with money. The reason that we focus on money is that it's a shortcut. You might read studies that say there is a link between money and happiness, but what that means is that poverty and hardship cause severe stress. We ran a little course last August called Freedom to Dare about redefining relationships with money. We looked at things like your family story of money. Because quite often, people in these kinds of corporate jobs have grown up in middle-class families, you know, really quite wealthy in global terms. And so we looked at that. We do things like no-spend days and joy diaries.

None of these things are quick. We're all at different stages. The ones who have "done it," by which I mean they have quit their corporate job and are supporting themselves full time as what we call an alternative entrepreneur, has taken them two to three years. Part of what we do is try to help people by putting markers in so they can realize the progress that they're making.

Everyone focuses on the Quit Day. Everyone loves the quit day story, the quit day fantasy. And it's just another day on a really long path because guess what? The new thing you start doing will not be a success forever. You will not need to stop learning. But try always to keep moving upward, and don't worry about the destination. Enjoy the journey.

ABY: What would you say to someone who feels burned out but doesn't know what they want to do next?

KP: The first thing you need is strategies to cope with toxic workplaces. Because what's going to happen is you're going to get stuck so burnt out, ground down, lose yourself that you're not going to be able to function or make any progress. Don't quit. Don't do what I do. Find resources for surviving toxic workplaces and healing from trauma, because a lot of people have PTSD or are otherwise traumatized from experiences that they've had in the corporate world. So that's number one.

And then my second thing would be to find your tribe and be involved in a community. That doesn't need to be a formal thing, but it does need to be something meaningful where you have at least weekly conversations with people who will support you. Who have similar aspirations and ideas to yours. Because you can't do this alone.

The point that I want people to understand is that you need to fully appreciate your gifts and talents, understand your values, and commit to living your values. You've got to get yourself into that space, and you'll have to go deep inside. The answer isn't "out there." It's inside you.

When people ask themselves, "What do I want to do?" Try to think, "What are my talents?" Not the skills. We talk about talents as distinct from skills. A talent is something innate. We tend to undervalue them because they come to us so effortlessly. We don't even realize that we're particularly good at it or that other people struggle with it. Skills are things we acquire: we are taught them, they are certificated, etc. Your talents are gifts, and so you owe it to the world to share them.

Most issues of this publication are free because I love sharing ideas and connecting with others about the future of work. If you want to support me as a writer, you can buy me a coffee.

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This week's Perspectives is an interview with Kelly Colón, founder of Eledex Coaching & Consulting, a company dedicated to advancing neurodiversity advocacy by empowering individuals and organizations to embrace authentic inclusion. Kelly and I crossed paths a few years ago when she sent me a DM on LinkedIn, saying she was at a crossroads in her career and wanted to make a change. A few months later, she made the leap and started her own business. Kelly provides executive function coaching for students and neuroaffirming support for adults.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Anna Burgess Yang: Tell me about your work history, up until the point when you decided to start your own business.

Kelly Colón: My world, since I was a teenager, was centered around real estate. My dad had a real estate title examination business, and so I worked with him and then did some commercial property management early in my career. I never completed my formal college education. I ended up getting my broker's license, and I was selling residential real estate. I did a lot of home staging, working with builders to stage model homes, things like that. I was sort of dabbling in interior design.

When my son was two, I thought I should go back to school and get an interior design degree. I had zero confidence, because I'm neurodivergent and because I was terrible at school. But I got an associate's degree in interior design. And then I realized that I actually hate interior design! I ended up feeling really frustrated and beating myself up about it.

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I ended up going to dinner with a friend and her husband, who had been going to the Wentworth Institute of Technology in the construction management degree program. We were talking about what I wanted to do next. I didn't want to do real estate sales forever — the income wasn't consistent, and I had small kids. But I enjoyed the home inspection process, and when I was doing property management, working with tenants. So my friend's husband suggested that I apply to Wentworth's Facilities and Construction program. And I said, "There's no way I could get into that; they're never going to let me in." He said, "Just apply." So I applied, kind of on a dare. If you know me and really want me to do something, double dog dare me that I can't. That's usually a surefire way for me to apply.

I applied, and I got a full ride. Which, to this day, I don't understand how that happened. That shifted my career. I was working for public and private entities, overseeing construction and design projects.

ABY: How did you end up leaving the industry?

KC: During the pandemic, I got laid off. And I thought, "I don't know if I want to do this anymore." The companies were very rigid. I would be in a conference room for seven, eight hours per day running these program management meetings, completely hyper-dysregulated. I was working with companies to design new buildings, new facilities, and I thought, "I could never work here." I had an epiphany at that point. I'd given the last 15 years of my life to this facilities construction industry, and I don't want to continue building spaces I can't even function in.

So, on a whim, I met with a woman who was working for a furniture manufacturer. She mentored me through the pandemic. And she had an open spot on her team, and asked me to come work for her. After three months of saying no, she wore me down. I worked with her for about two years. During all of this, I was also teaching higher ed, mostly adjunct, mostly at night.

ABY: What made you realize that you wanted to go out on your own, versus working for another employer?

KC: Desperation, frustration, anger, rage. I wish there were a better answer, but that's the real one. In addition to my professional background and my teaching, I was also an advocate for families who were going through the IEP (Individualized Education Program) evaluation process for their kids. I never talked about it. People didn't know that I was neurodivergent. I was pulled into meetings where they wanted me to give presentations on trauma, informed design, neuroinclusion, and neurodiversity.

My team was great, but I was surrounded by people who weren't neurodivergent. They were making recommendations that I knew — even though I'm not a clinician — would absolutely harm and traumatize individuals. They're a vendor, I get it. They were pushing a solution, like "put this rocker in your office and it's going to magically re-regulate." And I was like, "You don't even know what that word means. You're saying the words, but you don't understand the language."

ABY: Did you end up talking about it with your team?

KC: I did a podcast for the furniture industry, and I was on a call with three of the company's competitors. We all had a different lane that we were talking about. Mine was obviously trauma, neurodiversity, and neuroinclusion. I thought I did a great job.

My phone and email blew up with people who were really grateful for the content I was sharing and the humanizing way I explained it. I was feeling very proud of myself. About an hour later, I got the dreaded call that leadership was less than thrilled. Because I didn't talk about furniture in any form or fashion. The collective was telling me that there's a desperate need for what I was saying, and there was pushback from the people in charge. It was the straw that broke the camel's back. A few weeks later, I had a meeting with my manager, and I resigned.

ABY: Did you have a plan for what to do next?

KC: I did not have a clue what I was going to do. If you had asked me back then, I would have guessed that I'd do workplace design or workplace strategy. I never would have thought I would publicly go out and talk about neurodivergence when I'd spent 40 years hiding.

But in the response to the panel discussion, I thought, "Ok, there's something here." I hired a business coach. And it took me about six months, but I finally said, "You know what? I'm not going to hide anymore." I had no idea if I could make money and support my family. But I knew that the world was broken, and we have an entire community of humans who are wildly unsupported. And we have another cohort of humans who want to support them, but don't know how. And maybe I can be a bridge to that.

ABY: You post a lot on LinkedIn about being neurodivergent. How does it feel to put yourself out there, and what type of response have you gotten?

KC: I would like to say that it feels great, but I don't know if that would be an honest and transparent response. Early on, it was traumatizing and terrorizing. Once it's out there, you can't dial it back. There was going to be a whole host of people who had known me for 15 or 20 years who might be blindsided by the stuff I was posting. I've lost friends and professional contacts who are opposed to any sort of discussion around inclusion, supporting neurodivergent individuals, or modifying their workplaces to support people. It was hard. It was terrifying.

But hiding who I am impacted my ability to show up transparently. Once I let that go, the response was very much like it was after I was on that panel. People were sending me private DMs and emails, saying that they hadn't seen anybody talk about these things in a way that didn't feel clinical — like a task or a box they had to check off. Over the last year, I've gained a lot more confidence. The people I'm trying to reach and the people I'm advocating for matter more than my fear.

But I will say this much: since January, I've had several people reach out to me with very judgmental, very negative feedback. Unsupportive at best and cruel at worst. Because the work I work I do lands in the diversity, equity, and inclusion space, which is under attack right now. I've had people tell me I'm crazy. I had someone tell me directly that I needed to shut my mouth and put my pen down. And, as I said before, the fastest way to get me to do something is to tell me I can't.

ABY: You advocate for neuro-inclusive policies and practices in the workplace. For people who still believe that's important, what does that look like?

KC: In a nirvana sense, it means that regardless of your cognitive differences, you can show up in a way that feels supportive. It sounds cliche, but it allows people to show up in a way that is authentically them and unique to them. You get a sense of trust and belonging, these things human beings need to thrive. And if that doesn't happen, it has a negative impact on people's mental health and well-being. When there is masking, which is hiding certain pieces of yourself, you have a higher rate of suicide. There's a lot more negative stuff that happens when we're unable to show up the way that we need to.

Community and belonging are critical. You have to be able to show up in a way that is unapologetically you, but also that the community you're showing up in has the policies, procedures, programs, and environment that allow you to show up.

ABY: What are the things that you think are most important to change, things that aren't happening right now to support neurodivergent people?

KC: This is my opinion, party of one, but I think there are a lot of individuals who want to do this work. But as human beings, we want a fast return, an easy ROI, and a step-by-step how-to guide. The problem is, that's not step one. That's where we're getting it wrong.

It's about building literacy. If you're learning a foreign language, it takes time. We need to build a neuro-affirming language. It means our hiring processes are inclusive, and we're really considering cognitive needs and invisible disabilities that we otherwise wouldn't even know if we didn't have the language around it.

ABY: It sounds like some foundational work is missing?

KC: Yeah, it's kind of like building a house on a fractured foundation. It's a massive investment, because we're not talking about one-and-done. Neuroscience continues to change. That's a hard thing for leaders to understand. You can build a foundation, but that foundation has to be trained and re-trained.

If you go into an organization, how many do ethics training every year? I mean, some people just click through the stuff and don't actually listen, but still. They have learning management systems and a process. So my thing is, before you start to modify a workplace, you have to pause and put together workshops and trainings, and build your internal functional literacy around these topics.

ABY: How do you think this type of work will continue to evolve?

KC: The current political climate in the U.S. is scary for marginalized groups. But it reminds me that this work is even more important now than it was when I made the decision to leave two years ago. We have an entire community of people who have started to be courageous enough to admit, "Hey, I am XYZ. I need ABC support." My fear is that if we don't continue to foster this, they're going stop talking, stop advocating, and we're going to see a large cohort of these people unsupported. And I'm worried about the mental health implications of that on the backside.

I will say this much: there are still people who are asking for this work. My executive function coaching has exploded. There is clearly an understanding that this need is not being addressed. There is still a desire for people to continue to do this work, which is good.

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This week's Perspectives is an interview with freelance content writer Hsing Tseng. Hsing and I met a few years ago when we both worked at the same content marketing agnecy. We’ve been on a similar freelance path since leaving corporate life. Hsing has had several "get the f*ck out" (GTFO) moments in her career, so I asked if she'd be willing to share her experiences.

In addition to her client work, Hsing also writes the blog command + create. Hsing and I have also collaborated on a few resources for fellow freelancers: a client proposal and contract template and a free checklist you can use. You can check them out here.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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Anna Burgess Yang: Tell me about the first time you knew you had to GTFO of your job.

HT: I was working part-time as a digital content producer, which meant I was updating content for two sister news stations. Working in a newsroom is very high-volume, covering breaking news events. There's a certain skillset in being that kind of news reporter.

The company made me work full-time hours for a week while other people took time off. I worked overtime, and at the end of the week, I thought I should have a full-time role. I was already doing the work and there was a full-time position open. My supervisor — a really good mentor to me — actually said, "If they don't hire you, you should GTFO. There's no reason you shouldn't be promoted to the full-time role."

I had to beg to even be given an interview. The role was given to someone who was completely unqualified and had never done the type of work the job required. It was ridiculous. I had done the work, worked more than full-time, and demonstrated my commitment to the company.

I got the f*ck out so hard. I went to Korea.

ABY: What prompted you to move to Korea? Were you trying to get into a different field, or how did you end up making that decision?

HT: I went to Korea to teach English. I had never studied abroad while I was in college (for financial reasons). And I had recently learned about programs where you're paid to teach abroad. And I thought that would be awesome. I was a double major in Asian Studies and Journalism Studies. I'd always wanted to live in Korea, or Japan, or Thailand for a while. When I didn't get the job, I saw it as a sign that I needed to go.

It was one of the best experiences of my life. I spent over two years there teaching English, traveling, and immersing myself in another culture.

ABY: What was your second GTFO experience?

HT: When I returned to the U.S., eventually, I was headhunted and hired as a writer at a tech company. I didn't know anything about SaaS or business intelligence (the category I was writing in). But within eight months, I'd proven myself to be extremely competent. I was promoted to a content editor position and given my own team.

The way teams were strucuted, each team had an editor and a team of writers. The editor was responsible for the batch of work, and each writer was responsible for a quota. Eventually, the writers' quota was raised, which put a lot of stress on them. Also, when I started, the writers were all in-house. But eventually, the company outsourced all of the writing. And the work wasn't up to par with my standards. So I spent a lot of time rewriting and coaching and helping the writers become better.

I was very invested, which meant my team's production was lower than other teams. Other editors didn't care and would just push content through as long as it had no glaring errors. Because I took my job seriously, it penalized me and everyone under me. When I raised concerns, they were dismissed.

ABY: When did you know you needed to GTFO?

HT: Two people wrote Glassdoor reviews bashing the company. Everything written was true. But very soon after that, two writers were laid off — the two writers who had been the most vocal about the quota system. It felt very suspicious. And here's the kicker: for them to get severance, there was a non-disparagement clause that they couldn’t say anything bad about the company. And leadership told them that in order for them to get severance, the Glassdoor reviews had to come down. And the writers who were laid off were not the people who wrote the Glassdoor reviews.

In our group chat, the writers begged the people who wrote the reviews to take them down. It was a moral dilemma, because it was right to leave them up. But our friends couldn't get severance if they weren't taken down. The actual writers of the reviews took them down to help our friends out.

The company threatened to subpoena the reviews from Glassdoor to find out who wrote them. It was a pretty serious situation, where people felt like they would get fired for speaking their minds. I started to look for a new job after that.

ABY: What about your next job?

HT: I went to a content marketing agency. And the head of operations implemented a revolving three-month quota. If you did not maintain an average quota, you could not take any paid time off. My average was too low. There were a lot of reasons writers couldn't meet quotas — not all of which were the writers' fault. For example, my main client wasn't approving ideas, so there wasn't enough for me to write to meet the quota. I tried to pick up extra work from other clients, but it was often snatched up because all writers were trying to meet the same quota.

Then, three people on the editing team were unceremoniously laid off. It was a huge detriment to employee morale, especially the main copy editor. And then writers were responsible for their own copyediting and told that was just part of our job now.

I was trying my best. I was really burned out but suffered through it because I couldn't take PTO. It all came to a head in November of that year after months of trying to fight through my burnout.

ABY: What happened?

HT: I was put on a Performance Improvement Plan (PIP). I talked to my manager, and he said it wasn't his decision. We weren't being evaluated qualitatively; we were being evaluated quantitatively. And because no one could take PTO, everyone was burning to crisps.

The PIP said I had to deliver three articles for a high-stakes client. I worked above and beyond for my PIP month. I broke my back to meet deadlines, working nights and weekends. I even worked through Thanksgiving weekend. It exacerbated my already severe burnout.

I worked with a few other people, and we delivered 20 articles in 30 days for this client. And when we hit all of the goals, the recognition we got was "Great teamwork." Nothing about how we had handled a poorly scoped, unsustainable project. We were given a pat on the back as if that's what we were expected to do.

The burnout was killing me. I finished the PIP and turned in my resignation letter the same day.

ABY: Did the company react at all when you quit?

HT: The CEO and the head of operations wanted to meet with me. In the meeting, they were incredibly dismissive and talked down to me. They said I deserved to be PIP'd and that all of the problems I pointed out weren't true. They were trying to gaslight me into saying that everything was fine and that it was a "me" problem. It definitely wasn't. It was systemic. People had been leaving in droves for months. I knew it was time for me as well.

ABY: After three GTFO situations, now you're a freelancer. What led you to that decision?

HT: I had been interviewing for months, but nothing had panned out. It was a tough job market. I looked at the patterns and wondered if I was the problem. Not in a negative way. But maybe I am not suited for the rat race. Maybe I am not meant to work for a company, to work for KPIs, and to be quantified.

I took a good two-and-a-half months to recover from burnout before I did anything. Then I was like, "You know what? I'm going to start freelancing and figure it out." I pulled myself up by my britches, and it's been great. There is no boss like yourself. Being responsible for my own things. And people love my work.

I wasn't the problem. It was the environment.

ABY: In any situation, how do people know it's time to GTFO?

HT: When your values no longer align with the company you're working for. When you're not being valued, when your opinion is not being heard, and when there's no accountability. How much are you willing to sacrifice of your own well-being and your own values to keep working at a company?

I've seen so many people get burned out or get tossed out (laid off). The values I thought these companies had when I joined proved not to be the case. When your eyes open, you can't unsee things.

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This week’s Perspectives is a conversation with Jenni Gritters, a business coach and strategist for self-employed creatives and solopreneurs. She also runs a boutique content agency.

Jenni and I met when she invited me to host a workshop for SUSTAIN, her group coaching program. She also publishes . You can learn more at jennigritters.com

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Anna Burgess Yang: Tell me a little bit about your background and your career.

Jenni Gritters: I got a master's in journalism. I walked out of school with a little bit of debt and realized that the landscape for jobs was not great. I had a lot of small jobs, which is pretty common for someone in media. And then I had a couple of full-time jobs.

My first job was at a viral media company funded by venture capital. We had to grow really, really fast. I was in charge of generating millions of page views per month with a team of five people. I was there for about a year and a half, and I burned out so hard. Twelve-hour days, during an election cycle... I fried myself. I was so exhausted that I left with nothing else planned.

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I ended up freelancing for a few months. I liked freelancing, but my husband was in graduate school at the time, and we couldn't make it work financially. So I took another full-time job, stayed for a year and a half, and got laid off.

I had a couple of interviews for communications and journalism jobs. It was the same shit, different toilet. I thought to myself, "I don't think I can do this again." I decided that I really wanted to try working for myself. This was in 2018. I wrote a business plan to run my own writing company. And it worked — I'm here.

ABY: What did your business look like when you first started versus what does it look like today?

JG: I've launched four businesses between 2018 and now, a couple of which are iterations of the first one. When I first started, I was a traditional freelancer and would take work from anyone who would give it to me. I branded myself as a health and fitness writer. I was a yoga teacher, and my master's degree was in science journalism. But the work was very discrepant: small projects, big projects, a lot of little pieces.

That worked great for a few years. Then I had kids and didn't have as much time to work. I had a baby within the first two months of the pandemic. We didn't have childcare; I had him at home with me, and I had to run a business. So it forced a lot of changes. I had to refine things. I had to raise my rates and be really clear about who I worked with.

Then I added coaching. I started a podcast business that a lot of people know me for (and left after a few years). So there are iterations and evolutions. Now, I run a $30k/month business. I've learned a lot, and there's a lot more complexity to my business now, to be really honest, which is both good and bad.

ABY: What has been the biggest change for you since you started your own business?

JG: I think it's my health. I really do. I know that's an interesting answer, but when I was spending 12 hours on a computer, I had really bad neck and back tension. I was clenching my jaw. I just didn't feel good, and my nervous system was super dysregulated. I was always in survival mode.

I work 25 hours per week now. We moved to the woods. I walk around in the trees. I coach people with voicemail apps while I'm hiking. It's very idyllic. I feel well, I take naps, and I eat better. I think it's because of the intentionality that I'm able to have. Someone else isn't choosing or dictating my schedule. I am, and I can flex it up or down, depending on the season.

ABY: And your husband also works for the business, right?

JG: He did for a while; he doesn't anymore. He was basically watching me improve my life, while he was working a traditional job as a nurse at a cath lab in the basement of a hospital. He was on call nights and weekends. And once we had a second kid, it became extra challenging. We started asking a lot of questions about doing things differently.

That was two years ago. He took a leave of absence. I said, "I will see if I can scale up my business and double my revenue." It worked. He helped with a lot of the infrastructure pieces. As I grew my coaching business, he was setting up tools, like a CRM. He's very systems-oriented. He sort of grew out of the role because we don't need as much infrastructure stuff. So he has his own website design agency now.

It's been an adventure working with your partner. It's so complex, but it was really good for us. It gave us more wiggle room, schedule-wise, which I think will resonate with a lot of parents. When he was working as a nurse, he was gone 60 hours per week. I was the primary parent, but also trying to grow my business. When he left, suddenly, we were in charge of our schedule. It was a big shift and really good when we had a newborn.

ABY: What do you like about coaching people?

JG: It's my favorite thing. I think what I loved about journalism was the teaching. I like writing and talking to people, but I chafed at a lot of the journalistic norms. I was never going to be the one reporting on tragedies and big things happening in the world. I don't feel like I found my place, career-wise, until I started coaching.

People started asking me, "Do you coach?" I tried it, and then got a full certification. I love how honest it is. I think we walk around the world having surface-level conversations, and all day, I talk about real things. I like looking at people's businesses or work situations and figuring out how we can change them so they can get their needs met. That feels like important work to me.

I ask questions like, "What are your values? What do you care about right now? What are your priorities? And how do we structure work based on those things?" It's very life-first. It feels a little rebellious, too. I get a lot of people who question the way things are and ask if they can be different. And I get to say, "Yes, they can."

ABY: The landscape of employment has changed a lot over the past 2+. Both for self-employed people and people who are working full-time for an employer. What do you see, or what are you hearing from people?

JG: I think it's a giant permission slip to do things differently. People who are adapting and trying new things are doing fine. Those who keep doing things the way they used to do them are having a hard time.

In the self-employment space, marketing works differently now. People do not want to be cold-pitched. There's a lot more relationality, and that's hard for people who've previously had a lot of success sending cold-pitch emails. It just doesn't work anymore.

People are applying for full-time jobs after being laid off and not getting hired. I feel more stable working for myself. So I'm having a lot of conversations, asking, "Is this actually true? Is a job [with an employer] more stable? What would it look like to set something else up that's more stable?"

My business is thriving because a lot of people are asking questions about work and how to create something that works for them. I think it's a post-pandemic thing. And also the economy and inflation. And we're all tired of being only online. There are some nuances that have changed the way we want to interact with each other.

ABY: What do you say to someone who is thinking about leaving a full-time job? Do you encourage it, or do you help them try to think through their options?

JG: If you're a person who finds yourself in that little twisty thing of, "Can I do it in a way that works for me?" The answer is yes. But you probably need a community, or a coach, or a friend, or someone to work through that. Because a lot of the blueprints out there are really a) not built for parents, b) not built for women, and c) not built for anybody who has chronic illness. Those are a huge subset of my clients. I help people build unique business models because they come in and have unique needs. I have clients who work six months out of the year and then travel six months. I work with clients who only have ten hours a week to work. Whatever it is, we can probably figure it out.

People who love the freedom of time and creative challenges will thrive working for themselves. People who really would prefer to be directed, who want to put their energy somewhere other than work, maybe that's not the right fit. We start there. At this point, about 80% of the people I have that conversation with want to at least try working for themselves. If you're itchy and craving and feeling a little rebellious, people usually choose to leave their jobs, and then we figure it out. I call it the offboarding plan. It's like a little off-ramp from your job. How will you do it in a way that feels safe to you? Will you turn your employer into your first client and shrink them down to part-time? There are ways I think that it can be a smooth exit.

I have people come to me who aren't sure if they have the skillset to be self-employed. They don't think they have the hustle. My whole business is predicated on the idea that you can build a sustainable business without the hustle. I know a lot of what people see is a hustle version that's maybe more sparkly and shiny and popular, but you don't have to do it that way.

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This issue of Perspectives is a guest post from author of . Katie and I have known each other for several years, and — as a systems-minded person myself — I love this essay about tools that make Katie’s life easier. You can also follow Katie on LinkedIn.

As things so often do, it started in therapy. I was airing some distress about the tornado of tasks spiraling in my head when my therapist asked, very reasonably: “Have you thought about making a checklist?” 

My immediate response: “Ew, no.” 

You see, I am not a “checklist person.” I’m not the kind of person who has systems and then systems for those systems, who sees the planner sale at Barnes & Noble and thinks “jackpot.” The kind of person who geeks out over their productivity stack. 

I resisted productivity tools for the same reason I cringed any time I saw the words “template” or “framework.” They reminded me a little too much of performative productivity culture—of thought leaders posting on LinkedIn about how they just love to nerd out over their Gantt charts. I didn’t want to be one of those people—I felt bad for those people. I’d gained class consciousness as a worker, you see. I wouldn’t be caught dead posting about how happy I was to be wielding the tools of my oppressors. 

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In the romcom of my life, productivity tools were the good-looking football player who also got good grades, and I was the angsty chaotic goth girl who had discovered Karl Marx. They represented everything I wasn’t: disciplined, efficient, predictable. And yet, no matter how hard I tried to avoid them, somehow we kept getting paired up as lab partners. 

Then, my mental health started disappearing before my eyes. And let’s just say I started to see productivity a little differently. 

The meet cute: Diary of an ex over-achiever

I haven’t always felt this way about productivity tools. In high school, I swore by my school-issued planner. In undergrad, I maintained my whiteboard of assignments and deadlines with the devotion of a Swiftie awaiting the release of RepTV. I was a classic overscheduled, over-competitive “gifted” kid. I lived for a good checklist. I loved to-dos and deadlines.

But then came my twenties, and a lot of stuff happened that destabilized my relationship with productivity tools and the concept of productivity more broadly. 

First, I spent a few years at an agency where we were desperately laying processes just a few steps ahead of the freight train of demand about to bear down on us. Productivity tools became associated with trauma and imminent doom, this feeling that the whole rickety construct we had assembled could come collapsing down on us at any moment. Then I spent another year at a different agency, where I had a rather fraught introduction to the concept of the billable hour. Productivity tools became The Man, constantly surveilling and assessing my value to The Firm.

And so on and so forth through multiple jobs: I worked in contexts where tools didn’t work; where they did work, but they told on you; and where they would work, if it weren’t for the fact that it was a full-time job just to maintain them. I started to feel a particular way about productivity tools, and that way was that I did not like them. In fact, I felt… kind of betrayed by them. Productivity tools really started to feel like a bad boyfriend: hypercontrolling, paranoid, and jealous of my autonomy. 

The breakup: It’s not me, it’s you

So, I broke up with productivity tools. I told them I needed space. No more Gantt charts. No more inbox zero. And for a while, that felt liberating. It felt like I was taking a more conscious, intentional stance toward life than all the capitalist robots. I wasn’t going to let some apps define my value as a human being. 

But over time, and for a number of interrelated reasons, that sense of liberation started to unravel—as did my sense of well-being more broadly. 

The reality was that, while I had rejected productivity tools, the tasks themselves hadn’t gone anywhere. They still piled up—emails, deadlines, meetings, personal errands. Instead of being written down or managed by a system, they lived in my head, jostling for space and attention and energy. Psychologists have a name for this—they call it “mental load.” And I was carrying mine around all by myself. 

The fallout: The self-defeating, self-perpetuating cycle of doom 

I’m not saying the lack of productivity tools in my life literally broke my mental health. That was its own journey. But the two things—my productivity tool usage and my mental health—do track each other pretty closely. 

You see, there’s a pattern in my life that goes like this:  

1. I build up a mental load from having all these deadlines and priorities jostling around just in my head.

2. Over time, that load gets incredibly heavy. Things start falling through cracks. Deadlines get missed, emails go unreturned. I start feeling like utter and complete garbage

3. Depression! I feel worthless. My inability to hit deadlines and deliver quality work confirms all my worst assumptions about myself as a human. 

4. It’s a cycle! A vicious, self-perpetuating cycle. Return to step 1, rinse, repeat. 

This is the sad montage scene of the movie: me, letting sad mail pile up in my mailboxes, digital and analog; me, letting sad dishes pile up in my sink; me, letting guilt and misery pile up on me. And all because I was stuck on this idea that productivity tools weren’t for me. 

Then, one day, after I spent an entire afternoon unraveling because I forgot to close the loop on an email, I realized: chaos wasn’t the romantic rebellion I’d imagined. There wasn’t anything noble or artistic about missed deadlines or chronic anxiety. 

No, it’s not a solution to my whole entire “deal,” so to speak—there are about twenty other shame spirals happening in my head at any given moment. But here was a single, concrete mound to chip away at here on the side of Depression Mountain: What if I had judged productivity tools too harshly? What if, instead of seeing them as symbols of conformity and oppression, I learned to see them as tools of individual liberation? 

The reunion: The power of second chances.  

And so, I decided to do the mature thing: I decided to give productivity tools another shot. But this time, I decided I’d be in control. This wouldn’t be some toxic relationship where they called all the shots. This time, I would set boundaries. As much as productivity tools tell me what they need from me, I would turn around and tell them what I need from them. 

That’s been the project of the past several months: welcoming productivity tools back into my life. No, I will not be creating Notion pages to review the status of my relationship any time soon; but I can see but I can see how giving certain areas of my life a bit more structure has made that mental load a little less heavy. I have the beginnings of my own little personal “productivity stack” and it looks like this: 

For life: 

• Finch for tracking basic day-to-day activities like taking my meds and brushing my teeth. This might sound simple, but for someone like me, getting these small tasks out of my brain and into a cute, gamified app feels like a small victory every day. 

• Peloton for fitness and activity tracking. I’m not out here trying to hit PRs every week, but staying accountable for moving my body has been huge. Plus, if I can check off that 30-minute “Walk+Run”, I get a tiny rush of satisfaction that feels way better than doomscrolling.

• Sunnyside for tracking alcohol consumption.  It’s not just about cutting back but about building awareness. It’s helped me keep that temptation at a manageable level—without feeling like I’m depriving myself.

• Empower for financial tracking, because I’ve realized financial health is a critical part of my mental health. Checking my balance used to be anxiety-inducing, but now it’s like having “financial proprioception”—I always know where I stand relative to my money. 

For work, there’s:

• Asana for project management. I’m still wrapping my head around the fact that I willingly re-entered a relationship with a task management app, but Asana feels like an ally rather than a dictator. It helps me manage deadlines without the looming sense of dread I used to feel. 

• ChatGPT for…a little bit of everything, honestly. I use it as part career coach, part editor, part administrative assistant. It’s great at helping me to step outside myself and observe my own thought processes and move past cognitive blocks. 

And for everything:

• Google Calendar. I used to look at my calendar like it was the enemy, but now I’ve learned the key is to embrace the blank spaces. Turns out, a little white space is just as important as the color-coded blocks. (This shoutout also goes to Reclaim.ai, which kept those downtimes after calls sacred and helped me avoid the dreaded double-book.)

Relationship status: It’s complicated

So here we are, the final act of our love story. Me and productivity tools—who would’ve thought those two crazy kids would wind up together? 

Of course, my relationship with productivity tools isn’t perfect. There are still days when I miss deadlines or can’t get it together to take a shower. And I want to emphasize that all of this is happening against a backdrop of mental health care provided by experts—a privilege not everyone is fortunate enough to have access to. 

But the truth is, I need productivity tools. Not in the clingy, can’t-live-without-them kind of way, but in the “they make my life better” way. I used to think I was winning some kind of prize by not using them, but there’s no Pulitzer for panic attacks. Using tools to track the mundane doesn’t make me less capable; it makes me a person who gets things done. 

 I’ll probably never have a flawless relationship with productivity tools—there will always be missed deadlines, chaotic days, and times when my kitchen sink is far from empty. But now, I see them for what they are: tools. Not oppressive systems, but resources that I can shape and control. It may be a bit much to say productivity tools “gave me my life back,” but they’ve certainly helped me take back a piece of my mind—and for that, I’m grateful. 

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The benefits of government service are well known: serving the nation, job security, and a guaranteed pension. For some, these are enough to build a fulfilling career. But for me, these perks began to feel less like advantages and more like chains.

Time-in-grade promotions start to feel less meaningful, and the weight of mediocre management becomes harder to bear. What I eventually realized is that advancing in the federal government often requires more patience than talent—a willingness to stay rather than a drive to excel.

Still, the decision to leave was daunting. The benefits that once seemed so appealing now served as a cautionary tale against venturing out. The thought of starting over in a new field felt overwhelming, and I struggled with an inner voice telling me it would never work. I also lacked support from my soon-to-be former colleagues.

This, I learned, was the beginning of imposter syndrome—a self-protection mechanism designed to keep me from facing potential pain. It whispered that the transition would be too hard, that it would never work, and that I was better off staying where I was. But I knew deep down that this wasn’t true. I could either accept the status quo or push back and push through.

The first step: confronting self-doubt

Taking the first step was the hardest part. Figuring out which direction to head in felt like navigating a dark, uncharted ocean. That foreboding feeling, however, was not a monster lurking in the depths, but rather my own unrealized potential.

I recognized that the fear I was experiencing was simply my mind’s way of protecting me from the unknown. But I also knew that if I didn’t face it, I would never discover what I was truly capable of.

I chose to confront this fear by committing to start my transition. I took consistent action by reaching out to those who had blazed the trail before me, and learned from their experiences. Ultimately, a strong network was more impactful than any resume.

The middle of the journey: persistence and networking

As I began my job search, the process felt endless. It was a routine of introductory calls and refining my pitch to quickly convince recruiters and hiring managers of my competitiveness. I got a lot of no’s. Rejection came in many forms. From ghosting to proforma no-thank-you’s, I received them all.

While persistence was crucial, I realized it alone wouldn’t be enough. I had to pair grit and determination with strategic networking. I needed to connect with people who could open doors for me and help articulate the unique value of my experience. This was particularly challenging because, coming from a government background, I wasn’t naturally embedded in the private sector’s networks.

Building this network was a process of both intention and patience. I started by reaching out to former colleagues and acquaintances who had successfully made similar career changes. These trailblazers were invaluable. They showed me what was possible and which steps to take. I also learned what mistakes to avoid. Each conversation helped refine my narrative and better position my approach.

But it wasn’t just about making connections—it was about cultivating them. I invested time in maintaining these relationships, whether through follow-up meetings or simply checking in. This ongoing engagement helped me stay top-of-mind for opportunities and ensured my network was not just a list of contacts, but a group of allies who were invested in my success.

A significant outcome of these efforts was improved articulation of my unique experience. Initially, I struggled to translate my government background into terms that resonated with private-sector recruiters and hiring managers.

Through conversations with my network, I learned how to reframe my skills in ways that highlighted their relevance. They helped me see that my experience in government—whether it was managing large-scale projects or navigating complex regulatory environments—was not relevant, valuable and transferable.

Ultimately, the combination of persistence and a well-cultivated network propelled me forward. Each new connection was a step closer to landing the role I wanted, and each conversation strengthened my ability to articulate my value. Persistence is crucial, but having the right people in your corner makes all the difference.

Beyond the first role: continuous growth and giving back

After securing my first role in the private sector, I knew the journey wasn’t over. I continued to ask myself important questions: How well were my skills translating? What feedback was I receiving? Was I on a path that would lead to greater responsibility and compensation?

One of the most rewarding aspects of this transition has been helping others who are earlier in their process. By relating my experiences, I not only realized how far I had come but also gained more awareness of my own progress. This “protégé effect” has kept me motivated and focused on my goals.

The end is just another beginning

Every chapter in this journey, like all others, will eventually end—including the chapter on my career itself. As I move forward, I keep asking myself: What am I working towards? More money, a higher title or something else entirely? These answers guide my steps.

If you’re considering a similar career transition, remember the biggest barrier is inertia. You must start now. And once you do, the next challenge is learning how to measure your progress. I’m here to share what I’ve learned and help you turn an impossible job search into a reality.

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Allison and I connected here on Substack and I resonated with the opening line of her the “About” page: The way we work is broken. (Plus her cover images are very cool.)

Anne-Marie Slaughter’s 2012 Atlantic story "Why Women Still Can't Have It All" set off a national debate that’s still raging today. Her thesis:

“[M]illions of women feel that they are to blame if they cannot manage to rise up the ladder as fast as men and also have a family and an active home life (and be thin and beautiful to boot).”

More than a decade later, a balanced life is still effectively impossible for caregivers of all kinds who have professional ambitions outside their caretaking responsibilities.

Moreover, even if you don’t have small children or elderly or disabled relatives for whom you’re responsible, or if you do but you have the infrastructure with which to manage those obligations without encroaching on the exertion of maximum effort toward your career, maybe you don’t want to exert that maximum effort.

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Maybe you’re in a life phase where it feels best to prioritize self-care, exclusive of any deeper existential meaning your vocation may provide, or you feel called to pursue a lifelong dream like traveling or volunteering. Maybe your life is relatively, reasonably balanced most of the time, and your job is just fine, not great but fine—and that’s fine with you for the time being.

What if we approached our careers the way many exercisers approach fitness: through interval training? Methods like HIIT (high-intensity interval training), SIT (sprint interval training), and Tabata all involve several rounds that alternate between high-intensity movements with short periods of lower-intensity movements.

During the lower-intensity time periods, there’s no guilt about lowering your heart rate or sweating less, there’s no pressure to get back to high-intensity mode as quickly as possible. The low-intensity phases are as critical as their high-intensity counterparts; they’re two halves of a whole workout. 

Based on what’s going on in your life (because that’s all work is, one part of life), your career may be full throttle or you may be in a chapter where personal obligations or priorities are relegating work to the bottom of the list. And all of those variations, “having it all” be damned, are totally fine. 

Thinking about your approach to work through the lens of interval training—of course respecting the need to earn whatever income your personal circumstances require—does a few things:

• It alleviates the pressure to win, win, win; to strive, strive strive

• It’s kind to yourself, circumventing—or helping heal from—burnout

• It injects realism into the professional picture; it recognizes that the “all” in “having it all” can be more big-picture and long-term—the “all” still counts if it’s over the course of a lifetime

As I’ve gotten older, especially as a mom of two young kids but even before they were born, I’ve found my professional energy varies much more than it used to. In my twenties and early thirties amidst the addictive, voracious hustle of 2010s New York City, I could work from 8 AM through midnight without motivation waning.

I was literally hungry for professional advancement; my ambition was a tangible thing like when you can feel humidity in the air. It’s almost impossible to believe now, but there was a time I’d voluntarily go into the office on the weekends to “catch up” on work. 

A combination of COVID, getting older (read: more wizened and jaded), becoming a parent, and transitioning to mostly remote work has led to me being a) more tired and b) more aware of my energy rhythms.

I’ve found that leaning into this idea of an interval training approach to work, even as a structure for a work week—stacking meetings in the afternoons and later in the week in recognition of when I have the most creative brain power for solo-focused work, helps me stay attuned to my natural motivation and therefore not only produce more effectively but feel better doing it. And that means I’m leading my teams most compellingly, which is my primary obligation at work. 

Most of us have to work to live, even if we love what we do, or love the people we work with. or both. We might as well feel our healthiest, and therefore model a healthy approach as leaders, doing it. 

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This issue of Perspectives is an interview with Christine Gritmon (she/her), a strategic consultant and personal branding coach. I met Christine at a conference a few years ago and we've been "internet friends" ever since. Christine's personal brand is SO memorable with her bright red clothing and accessories! I found myself always noticing her whenever she was in the room. You can check out her website: gritmon.com.

Last year, Christine moved her family from New York in the U.S. to St. Albans in the U.K. I wanted to chat with Christine about what that move was like and the impact on her career and life.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Anna Burgess Yang: Tell me about this huge move. What was it like and what prompted it?

Christine Gritmon: When I was in my early 20s, I was thinking that I should go have an adventure. My mother's from Ireland, which made me eligible for Irish citizenship. I decided I was going to move to Ireland for a year. I got my Irish passport all set up and everything.

And then two things happened. One, I just didn't pull all of my stuff together, because there's a lot of stuff involved when you're moving across an ocean. And two, I fell in love (not with my current husband!). So I was like, ok, not going to move. But I always knew that interest might rise again.

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ABY: Give me a brief rundown of your career and how you got to where you are now.

CG: I started in the corporate beauty industry, back in the early 2000s, mostly in marketing-related functions. It really played into the sort of "brand geekery" that I've always had. I'm fascinated by cool brands and I was working with cool brands like Estee Lauder and Avon and Shiseido. I was working with creative people and helping manage creative projects. And I was like, "What am I doing? I am a creative person. I don't want to just be helping creative people make things happen. I want to be a creative person."

So I became a creative freelancer. I studied graphic design at Parsons and I put myself out there as a freelance graphic designer and writer. Even though I had always written, I never considered myself a writer. I discovered quickly that writing was a skill. I cold-pitched some publications, and someone finally said, "Sure, we'll toss you an assignment and see how you do." That part wound up really blowing up, which led to the next career change. I went in-house at the publication. I learned so much, not only about journalism, but about communication in general and effective communication.

While I was there, it was a very fortuitous time, because the newsroom was just starting to make use of digital tools. Social media had been around for several years, but companies were still figuring out how to use it as a business tool. This was in about 2015, so it wasn't super early, but it was a time when if you were willing to hop in and try things out, you could do it. So I quickly made a name for myself in the newsroom as someone who "got" social media and was interested in seeing what it could do.

ABY: How did you end up moving into personal branding?

CG: I wound up getting promoted to engagement editor for events and branding. Basically my whole job was increasing the two-way communication and connecting with our community on a bigger level. After a while, people and business groups started asking me to give talks about social media. And my first thought was, "I don't know anything about social media." And then I realized, "Oh. They know even less." If you're good at something, you tend to assume that it's easy. Eventually, I wound up leaving that job to start Christine Gritmon Inc. in 2016.

I started by focusing on social media for small local businesses, and specifically restaurants, because I had great context in the local restaurant industry. That kind of reached an apex in 2020, because it was really sink or swim with digital in 2020. Either you got online to float your business through while it was closed, or you didn't and you resolved yourself to not having a business at the end of the pandemic.

So 2020 was amazing for my business. 2021 was horrifyingly terrible for my business, because the opposite happened. Businesses started to open back up, and they were terrified about how they were spending their money. And if it was a choice between a marketing strategy or plexiglass shields, they're going to spend it on plexiglass shields.

Somewhere in there, I realized that I did my best among an audience of my peers. And I realized that I'd always gotten compliments on my personal branding. So I said, "That's what I'm going to do." They say you should be known for something, that you should be niche. So I decided to make a name for myself and personal branding, specifically. I did a new show called Let's Talk about Brand and a Twitter chat, and just went for it.

ABY: When did you start thinking about moving to the U.K. with your family?

CG: In the midst of all this, the background of the "real world," there were changes taking place in the United States. Things were happening that my family was uncomfortable with. My husband brought up that I'd mentioned moving abroad and we started looking into that. And it wasn't just politics: it was also an incredible opportunity to see the world. My kids are 12 and almost 10 years old.

Then in 2022, I actually took a full-time position. I had an amazing job with a fully global, fully remote company. And I really got to use my skills. I was the head content editor for a community of social media professionals. So I got to leverage my incredible network, and I also got to maintain my own brand stuff. I didn't have to focus on Christine Gritmon Inc. making money in 2022, but I was still moving my brand forward. And in 2023, I entered the year strong. I was excited about new stuff with my full-time job, and I was also ready to hit the ground running and move to the U.K. that summer.

And then I got laid off at the end of January 2023. We decided not to change our plans about moving, but it did complicate things. We were applying for visas for my husband and children, and as the sponsor of the visa, I was required to have a certain level of income. And in addition to that, we had our house in New York. We ended up selling it, because moving across an ocean is expensive.

I started suffering from depression. I didn't realize it until I took a break from all of this to attend a conference in the U.K., where I have a lot of friends. They asked how things were going, and I answered very honestly. As I heard myself answering, I was like, "Oh, honey. You're not ok."

ABY: I was listening to a podcast on NPR and it cited a stat that 40% of Americans have been laid off at some point in their careers, and that it's really jarring for most people. Can you talk about that experience?

CG: I try extra hard to make the best of things. And I did have some warning, so it wasn't completely out of nowhere. I was hired for a specific project that wasn't tied to the company's revenue. Which means, essentially, that it was a cost center, rather than a profit center, for this company. It was a project that the CEO believed in and was committed to, and I got to be part of the launch team for the project, and it was really great.

At the end of 2022, we were hit with a kind of one-two punch. One was that the CEO told the whole company that the numbers weren't great. The second blow was that my boss got a life-changing dream job offer and left. So we were immediately faced with, "Do we replace him? Or do we pull the plug?"

It's good that I stayed on good terms with the people. I didn't burn bridges, and I wasn't a jerk about it. But at the same time, I feel like it's one thing to be that way on the surface. I could have been a little angry. I could have allowed myself to be a little more upset and hurt and shocked. But I was really trying too hard to be okay with it.

ABY: So you're in the middle of all of this, and you moved?

CG: We moved, later than we had hoped to. We had hoped to move mid-summer. What wound up happening was that I moved at the beginning of September. We thought we could rent a place from afar via virtual tours or find a realtor who could help us out. But everyone was incredibly unhelpful until I was physically there, in person. So I came out in September and spent the month going from guest room to guest room at friends' houses. I was really adamant that I not spend more than a few days in any once place. I said I'd rather impose on a greater number of people for shorter amounts of time.

And I kept going to events. There were conferences in the U.K. that I was attending. It was just exhausting, and I was away from my family for longer than I'd ever been. But at the end of September, literally while I was at a marketing meetup, I got approved for a rental that I'd been interested in. At the time, we were in contract to sell our house, but hadn't closed yet, which meant we didn't have any money and were still paying our mortgage. So I moved into this house. I got a mattress delivered and I bought an IKEA couch. That was all I could do.

My family came from New York and joined me here. We bought a few more IKEA beds. But we were living very bare bones because our house hadn't closed yet and all of our stuff was still in a shipping container on the Atlantic Ocean. It was really hard, plus the kids weren't in school for a few weeks. We were just sitting around in this empty house, kind of shell-shocked.

In mid-November, the final pieces started falling into place. While I was speaking at an event, our shipping container of stuff arrived. My husband texted me during the day, showing me all the boxes and how full this empty house had become. The next day, our house sale closed.

ABY: And meanwhile, you've been applying for jobs?

CG: I had all my bold plans for my own business at the start of 2023, but getting laid off kind of throws you for a loop, in ways that aren't always immediately evident. I was thinking, "Everything was working, and everything was falling into place. Now, all of a sudden, nothing is falling into place, and nothing is working." It was a combination of my head not being in the right place and a symptom of larger economic issues that led to me getting laid off in the first place. Because now I've been in the job market for a year and a half, and it is so tough out there.

I've always had extremely good luck and have gotten the majority of the jobs that I've applied for in the past. I used to be very meticulous about the right job and try extra hard on the application and cover letter, and it paid off. But now, for example, one job had such a huge glut of applicants that the hiring manager literally wrote a blog post about it. It's hard. It sucks. And especially now. I feel like we turned our family's lives around and did all of this, and now, because of me, we can't do things like hop off to Portugal for the weekend for giggles.

ABY: I interview a lot of people who have gone through change. What has the identity flux been like, for you?

CG: I thought that once I got here, I'd bounce back. Especially since I had such a great, supportive network that was eager to help me. I could get my business going in the U.K. and adjust to a new market.

But that's not really what it is. I hadn't realized how exhausted I was. So I didn't hit the ground running. I kind of flailed a bit, and now I'm realizing it's because I needed a break. My life had been on hold for a year dealing with all of this.

Now, my priorities are shifting, and I need to figure out what that means for what I'm doing professionally. Here's what I mean by that: for the past decade, I've been increasingly front-and-center in my business. I'm the brand, and my brand is out there with the red. It's been genuine and legitimate, but it takes a lot of energy, and I'm empty.

I'm entering a new chapter in my life now, partially just because of time and the ages of my children, partially because of the move, partially because of all sorts of things. I think I'd rather just do the work, where I can show up and be smart, tell people what to do, and leave. I don't want to be the execution person anymore. And it's not that I don't want to be a personal brand — it's just that I need to pull back a little.

It's time to stop that break now, because the reason I turned my life around was so that I could have these adventures. I need to no longer be a body at rest, continuing to be at rest. It's time to get the inertia going in the other direction, to get some momentum going as I move forward into this chapter of my life and decide what it looks like.

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