Self-help is everywhere. But for a long time, I tried to avoid it. "I just focus on business," I'd say. What I didn't realize back then was how much the structure, grammar, and discourse of personal growth permeate every layer of a business—and the entrepreneur behind it.

Self-help sells. It's an $11 billion industry that's predicted to go to $14 billion in the next 3 years.

And that's only counting products and services that are sold under the banner of "self-help." Even bigger than the explicit "live your best life" market is the valence of messaging, media, and cultural ventures that orbit it. In fact, there is a very good chance that, in one way or another, you and your work are part of the greater self-help ecosystem. 

You don't have to be a life coach, motivational speaker, momfluencer, or day planner designer to produce products and services that tap into the desire for a better, easier, or more fulfilling life. You might be a copywriter that leverages personal growth messaging in the copy you write. You might be a non-profit director that leverages donors' desire to "make a difference" to raise funds. You might be a management consultant that helps companies build better workplace cultures so employees feel a greater sense of purpose.

Or, like your humble podcast host, you might one day make the startling discovery that: yes, you wrote a self-help book after more than a decade of declaring that you help people build better businesses, not better lives.

I've gotten really curious about the business and politics of self-help. What makes self-help-inspired messaging so effective? Why are we constantly on the lookout for better ways to live and work? What compels us to follow aspirational Instagram accounts? Are we all in the self-help business? 

Next up on What Works, I have an 8-part series called Self-Help, LLC. It's a look at how the gospel of self-improvement shapes our lives, our work, and the businesses we're building 

I talk with writer Sara Petersen about Momfluencing, sociologist Patrick Sheehan about the coaching industry and backlash to credentialed experts, and brand strategist India Jackson about how our bodies are shaped by self-help. I also talk with Nine Types Co founder Steph Barron Hall about the draw of self-knowledge on Instagram, coach and writer Kelly Diels about the female lifestyle empowerment brand, and coach and author Jadah Sellner about the politics of hustle culture. 

My intention is that this series gives you a fresh perspective on what you create, what you consume, and how the underlying values of self-help culture influence them both. We'll dig into the business models behind explicitly self-help ventures and examine how less explicit personal growth businesses build on self-help's logic.

The first episode in this series—Winners and Losers—drops September 6. Make sure you hit "follow" in your favorite podcast player and share the show with a friend who loves to think critically about the world we live in.

The economy seems like a monolithic entity we measure, manage, and adapt to. But really, economics (as a field) and the economy (as a system) is really just an agglomeration of human decisions. What’s in? What’s out? What’s up? What’s down? And most importantly: Why? In this episode, I talk with Stacey Vanek Smith, a co-host of NPR’s The Indicator from Planet Money and this summer’s guide for Planet Money Summer School. We talk about how someone with no economics background can get so obsessed, how the economy is a profoundly human system, and, of course, inflation.

Footnotes:

• Planet Money Summer School
• “GDP & What Counts” (Summer School 2)
• “Why is the Fed so boring?”
• The Indicator from Planet Money
• More about Stacey Vanek Smith

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Pre-order What Works: A Comprehensive Framework to Change the Way We Approach Goal-Setting at explorewhatworks.com/book 

What’s a Big-G Goal? Well, those are the kind of milestone targets we set. At that time, my Big G Goals were about how many new members I could enroll or what kind of stages I could speak on. At another time in my life, writing a book was a Big G Goal of mine. And before that, completing a Ph.D. was my Big G Goal. They’re the kind of goals that make you feel validated for about 24 hours after you achieve them—or make you feel like a failure if you don’t.

Well, "a failure" was exactly what I felt like. So I went back to the drawing board. I wiped the slate so clean that I started to question whether Big-G Goals were helping me make my life better or whether they were simply squeezing me into stories someone else was telling.

My new book, What Works: A Comprehensive Framework to Change the Way We Approach Goal-Setting, arrives on November 1. But you can pre-order wherever you buy books: explorewhatworks.com/book

My guess is that, as a listener of this podcast, you’re interested in approaching life and work in new ways. You think critically about the shoulds and supposed-tos you grew up with. You notice how it always seems to be “up to you” to fix yourself, rather than questioning whether you’re broken at all.

You question conventional ideas of success and achievement. You notice when conventional wisdom starts to infringe on your values.

This book is for you.

I can guarantee you that it’s different than any other book on goal-setting—because it’s not really about goal-setting at all. It’s not a thinly veiled pep talk. It’s not about turning structural problems into your personal to-do list.

What Works will change the way you think about goal-setting—but it will also change the story you live in. Life and work don’t have to be structured around the next achievement or milestone.

What Works will help you take on the big questions that bubble under the surface of most advice on success and productivity—the philosophical, cultural, and political discourses that unconsciously shape how we think.

But in the end, What Works will also offer you a practical framework you can use to discover what works for you.

Pre-Order What Works today!

How do you prepare your small business for economic ups and downs? Is a recession inevitable? And what even is a recession? In this episode, unpack why the economy cycles through periods of boom and bust. I also demonstrate how a similar cycle is at play in the online business space. And I offer some strategies for making sustainable business decisions—no matter what happens with the economy.

Footnotes:

• Gates of the Arctic National Park
• Caribou population cycles
• Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Sea by Bathsheba Demuth
• Beargrass
• Mast fruiting
• Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer
• “Are recessions normal?” on Make Me Smart
• Economic cycles on Investopedia
• Spotted lanternfly and tree of heaven
• Timothy Snyder on the Ezra Klein Show
• “The best of all possible worlds” from Candide
• A history of recessions in the 20th and 21st centuries
• Rana Foroohar on the Ezra Klein Show

Article versions of episodes are posted at explorewhatworks.com every Thursday. To get those articles delivered straight to you, free of charge, go to explorewhatworks.com/weekly

Have a question about an episode of What Works? Is there something you've noticed online, in the news, or in your business that you're curious about? Go to zipmessage.com/whatworks! Leave me a message, and I'll try to respond in a future episode!

Personal brand development is now a mainstay of college career preparation. Young social media influencers are well-versed on the language of personal branding. It seems cultivating your personal brand is a prerequisite for navigating the 21st-century economy. Public image has a long history, of course. But how has our relationship with ourselves changed since we started to put so much effort into emphasizing the most marketable parts of our identities? This episode tackles the history of personal branding, the labor of self-branding, and why so much value is being created in the “social factory.”

Footnotes:

• “Sentimental ‘Greenbacks’ of Civilization”: Cartes de Visite and the Pre-History of Self-Branding by Alison Hearn (The Routledge Companion to Advertising and Promotional Culture)
• “Cartes de Visite,” Art Gallery of New South Wales (YouTube)
• The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act by Isaac Butler
• “Meat, Mask, Burden: Probing the Contours of the Branded Self” by Alison Hearn (Journal of Consumer Culture)
• The Anti-Capitalist Chronicles by David Harvey
• EP.385: Who do you work for? on What Works
• Connect with Tyler McCall on Twitter
• “On the internet, we’re always famous” by Chris Hayes (The New Yorker)
• “The Problem with Personal Brands and the Labor of Authenticity” by Tara McMullin

Essay versions of each episode are available every Thursday at explorewhatworks.com. To get them delivered straight to your inbox, sign up free at explorewhatworks.com/weekly

“You could make money with that!” That’s probably the first thing you hear when someone discovers you’re an excellent baker, or designer, or potter. Even if your hobby is collecting super hero figurines, someone has probably suggesting “monetizing” that interest. There is all sorts of historical, economic, and sociological context for this. But in this episode, I talk with someone who typifies not getting paid for what you love to do: my husband, Sean McMullin. You’ll hear how Sean’s extended family in Utah and Montana, as well as his time living in an Iñupiat village in rural Alaska, shaped how he thinks about work he doesn’t get paid for.

Footnotes:

• More about the Iñupiat people 
• “I grew up in a church led by a prophet” by Meg Conley
• YellowHouse.Media
• Sean McMullin on Instagram

 
 Essay versions of each episode are published every Thursday at explorewhatworks.com. Get the delivered straight to you by signing up at explorewhatworks.com/weekly
 
 

“Positive thinking” comes in many forms: New Thought, the prosperity gospel, manifestation teaching, self-help guides, and more. It’s hard to argue with thinking positive thoughts! But when positive thoughts become a substitute for curiosity and inquiry about real challenges, positive thinking can lead us away from real solutions. In this episode, I explore my own encounters with the world of positive thinking and how facing reality has actually given me more hope.
 
 Footnotes:

• More about Mary Baker Eddy
• More about Ernest Holmes and The Science of Mind
• More about Norman Vincent Peale* The Power of Positive Thinking
• Mary Kay Ash on YouTube
• Confidence Culture by Shani Orgad and Rosalind Gill
• Rhonda Byrne on YouTube
• “Farm-To-Table: Reciprocity in Every Seam” (Christy Dawn ad)
• “Manifestation, eugenics, and flower oil” by Meg Conley
• Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell
• At The Existentialist Cafe by Sarah Bakewell
• Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit

 
 Essay versions of each episode are available at explorewhatworks.com each Thursday. Get them delivered straight to you by signing up at explorewhatworks.com/weekly

Who doesn’t love to get paid? So we’re going to talk about how that actually happens. Not the dollars and cents of getting paid, but the form and structure. In the previous two episodes, we examined our relationships to work—both paid and unpaid. And it got me thinking about how we actually account for the ways paid work, well, pays—and especially how that impacts business owners and independent workers. I’m talking the difference between wages and profit, how surplus labor creates profit, and specifically how I structure my own pay in order to have a better perspective on my work.

Footnotes:

• Surplus Labor in Radical Economics
• Karl Marx via The School of Life
• “The ‘Cult’ of Passive Income” via Tiffany Ferguson

It seems like every business owner or freelancer I know wants to quit social media. But very few people are actually doing it. It seems easier to imagine the end of your business than the end of social media, to paraphrase Mark Fisher. There’s something about our relationship to social platforms that makes them feel inescapable. And, perhaps without even noticing, it’s started to see like we’re working for them more than working for ourselves. In this episode, I unpack our relationship to platforms and who profits from our labor. And it starts in an unusual place: the recent Etsy strike.
 
Footnotes:

• “Etsy sellers will go on strike in April and ask customers to boycott” on The Verge
• “Why Etsy sellers are going on strike” on Yahoo Finance
• “16,000 shops join Etsy strike” via KERO
• Rob Kalin speaking to the World Economic Forum
• Mark Zuckerberg testifying before the House Energy & Commerce Committee
• “How Facebook (Meta), Twitter, social media make money from you” via Investopedia
• Tyler McCall on Instagram and Twitter

I grew up expecting to love what I did for a living. I was encouraged to choose a career that I was passionate about. But when I did, I bumped up against the stark reality that work I loved didn’t pay the bills. At least not in any straightforward way. In this episode, I explore the context of “doing what you love” and how it shapes the way we build our businesses or careers today.

Footnotes:

• Analysis of wages during the 90s (BLS)
• Eupsychian Management by Abraham Maslow
• Target Commercial: “Come in for workout gear, leave feeling empowered.”
• Dan Olsen on The Ezra Klein Show
• The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord
• “The Passion Paradigm: Professional Adherence to and Consequences of the Ideology of ‘Do What You Love’” by Lindsay DePalma
• “Down with Love: Feminist Critique and the New Ideologies of Work” by Kathi Weeks
• Work Won’t Love You Back by Sarah Jaffe
• More about Lou Blaser and Midlife Cues
• “To My Brothers and Sisters In The Failure Business” by Seymour Krim
• Works Progress Administration