The Work Revolution

Today I want to talk a bit about something REALLY important — happy hour.

If you’re watching this episode on video, you can see it’s happy hour day for me, and I’m dressed for the occasion. 

There isn’t a clear consensus on where the term “happy hour” originated in history. It could have come from the U.S. Navy, could’ve been a reaction to Prohibition, or could’ve even been Shakespeare who coined this term!

We’re not...

Today I have something a little different here on my face — it’s a pair of blue light filtering glasses.

I don’t actually need to wear these to see you — I also have contact lenses in — but I noticed a few weeks ago how fatigued my eyes were feeling with all the additional screen time I’m putting in these days.

So I picked up a pair of these! 

I’m not sure yet how much they will help, but I thought it would be an exp...

Today I want to talk about something called the “American Dream” — this notion where anyone can succeed in life, despite their background.

Well, in some sort of grand ironic twist, I guess, America is now terrible at helping its own citizens achieve the American Dream.

A person’s ability to move towards the American Dream is closely related to something called “social mobility” —  which is essentially how quickly and ef...

Today I want to talk about two ideas that are constantly confused — management and leadership — and more importantly, I want to talk about WHY this is such a big problem.

Just a couple days ago I saw a headline from the Harvard Business Review, of all places, conflating these two terms as if they were the same thing.

But if they were the same thing, we wouldn’t have two different words.

Now, I can’t be overly harsh on thi...

Today I want to talk about something that’s frankly always been important, but I think many of us, myself included, have maybe been able to ignore it… until recently

That topic: self-care

Have you done a good job of self-care in the last few years?

I know I haven’t, but now I am very much in the process of waking up to what this phrase actually means

You’ve maybe heard the metaphor of self-care being like when you’re o...

If you watched the last episode, you might be noticing something a little different today.

Or, more accurately, you might be seeing just a few thousand tiny changes on top of my head.

Since we last saw each other, I got a haircut.

But right now, this typically mundane activity was actually quite an ordeal.

In case you should stumble upon this video months or years after the fact, right now, many locations in the U...

It seems to me we are in a time that is crying out for cooperation.

A virus like the one that just shut the entire world down 

— and let’s pause for a moment and think about how monumentally significant that truly is 

shut
the
entire
world
down

well, we don’t know exactly how this pandemic started, but it appears to be due to an animal virus being passed to a human

That’s probably old...

In my last video, I talked about systems and how we’ve actually codified into them privilege for some and inaccessibility for others.

So today, I want to talk a bit more about the topic of systems. 

For whatever reason, I seem to be hard-wired to see systems — it’s apparently how my brain works. 

The Helios team has even been joking that we should probably start some kind of drinking game for every time I say th...

Today I want to talk a bit about racial justice.

Now, it probably goes without saying that I don’t have a firsthand perspective on this topic — I mean look at me, I practically need sunscreen for the ring light I use to film these things — so I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

In fact, my lack of firsthand perspective is exactly the reality that I want to speak to first, because I know a heck of a lot of people who are in t...

Today I want to talk about what this time could teach us about our work

Obviously the variation in what each of us do for work is enormous, but for many of us I suspect this time is illuminating some important things

For example…

If you didn’t like your job before you might now realize that you actually hate it

It’s possible you had enough things “around” your work that made it bearable before — colleagues you en...

Hello my friends.

The other day a friend of mine shared something I found to be incredibly profound.

We were talking about resilience — which is, I suspect, something many of us would like more of right now — and he said…

We often talk about resilience as bouncing back, right?

Well, at its best, resilience actually doesn’t bounce BACK

It bounces FORWARD

I love this

As you know, right now there’s a lot of conve...

The other day on LinkedIn I had a friend ask how we got into this mess.

Of course there’s a lot of mess right now — he was referring to what’s been happening in healthcare where the front line experts are being increasingly governed by numbers-obsessed corporate entities.

How did that happen, where even our most educated specialists like surgeons are being micromanaged??

Historically its not terribly complicated…

Today I wanted to zoom out and offer some thoughts on what’s possibly happening right now at a high level.

Many of you might be familiar with a broadway musical called Hamilton. It’s about a time roughly 250 years ago that those of us here in the U.S. call the American Revolution.

Maybe you’ve seen the show or listened to the music — and if you haven’t you should!

Over the past few years since I saw the show, I’ve often w...

Today I want to talk about something that’s on many people’s minds right now…

The future.

We’re kind of obsessed with “what comes next” — right now the conversation is mostly in relation to the COVID pandemic — but this is always a question we humans have, isn’t it?

What comes next?

Well today I want to talk a little about this question, because the future actually isn’t what we think it is.

I think is important to ...

In the wake of recent events, it’s become clearer than ever that the way we work needs a revolution.

Let me explain.

Work, and the way we’ve been doing it, is the single most dominant organizing story in our lives.

It largely determines where we live, the people we interact with most, our primary social status, how much (or little) freedom we experience, and in some countries — like the U.S. — even whether we have healthc...