What Works

So a couple of weeks ago, I downloaded Final Cut Pro and committed to learning how to use it. Despite logging hundreds, if not thousands, of hours in other video editing software, this is a big challenge. I took some time to reflect on how I make sense of learning a new skill like this—because learning new skills is an essential component of navigating the 21st-century economy.

Footnotes:

• Read the essay version of this episode here.
• The Adult Learner by Malcolm Knowles
• "Apple Creator Studio is launching to take on Adobe" on The Verge

Registration for Making Sense, an 8-week workshop series on turning "Wait, what?!" moments into compelling content, is open for registration. Program starts March 24. Learn more: whatworks.fyi/makingsense

You’re going along, minding your own business, and then it hits you: “Wait, what?!” Your expectation or assumption bumps against the facts. Things aren’t the way you thought they were. It’s not always a life-altering surprise. It might be something tiny—just enough of a shock to make you rethink what you thought you knew.

Today, how we resolve those “Wait, what?!” moments.

I’m kicking off my 8-week workshop series, Making Sense, on March 24. This program walks you through the sensemaking process and takes you step by step through applying it to a media-making project. By the end of the 8 weeks, you’ll have made significant progress on your project and have an effective process you can use over and over again to create more compelling content.

Registration for Making Sense is now open. To learn more and enroll go to: whatworks.fyi/making-sense

It's no secret that one of my, let's say, special interests is higher education. The reasons for this are at least threefold. First, I have a kid heading off to college next year. Second, I have past regrets and future fantasies about the academy. And third, the world of work and the realm of education overlap in myriad ways.

Work and education have always had a close relationship. Access to education influences access to different types of work. New forms of work influence how we organize and deliver education.

I've been talking about doing an episode or a series on the intersection of higher ed and work for... years now. Today, finally, I have an initial installment in what I hope is an ongoing, if nonsequential, look at how these two pillars of modern life influence each other.

Joining me to share both her professional insight and her personal journey is Dr. Lauren Lassabe Shepherd, a historian of education and the host of the American Campus Podcast.

Footnotes:

• Read an edited transcript of this conversation.
• Learn more about Lauren Lassabe Shepherd.
• Resistance from the Right by Lauren Lassabe Shepherd
• The Old is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born by Nancy Fraser
• "Adjunct professors deserve professional development" by Anna Conway and Thomas Tobin at Insight Higher Ed
• "An Army of Temps: AFT Adjunct Faculty Quality of Work/Life Report" 
• "The Secret Lives of Adjunct Professors" by Gila Berryman at Elle
• Justice Lewis Power Jr. and the Powell Memo on Wikipedia
• More about futurist Bryan Alexander
• More about Indigenous studies scholar Sandy Grande

Check out the American Campus Podcast:

• Mentioned in the Episode:
  • "The peak and decline of US higher ed with Bryan Alexander"
  • "How to get a job at Harvard in 1860 with prabhdeep kehal"
• A few personal favorites:
  • "Christianity, manhood, and college football with Hunter M. Hampton"
  • "The college bookstore racket with Katya Schwenk"
  • "The history of federal student loans with Elizabeth Tandy Shermer"

• (00:00) - Rethinking Higher Ed for the 21st-Century Economy with Lauren Lassabe Shepherd

A brief meditation on grief at the loss of one's future self and how often that loss passes unacknowledged.

Footnotes:

• Read the essay version of this episode.
• “10:00 am” (Season 1, Episode 4) The Pitt on HBO
• “Ho’oponopono” on Wikipedia
• Unlearning with Hannah Arendt by Marie Luise Knott
• The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt

More from Tara:

• Blank Slate is a guide to rethinking your business for sustainability.
• Making Sense is an 8-workshop on creating compelling media through sensemaking. New cohort starts March 24. Registration opens on February 12. Learn more!

How often do you revisit old work? Do you have systems for circling back to what you've created in the past to see how you could improve upon it or take it in a new direction?

In this episode, I consider the practice of circling back through Mckenzie Wark's theory of "hacking." And I explain why my latest project, Blank Slate, is a hack and how it came to be.

Footnotes:

• Read the essay version of this episode.
• Learn more about rethinking your small business status quo with Blank Slate.
• "Broken Links" by Tara McMullin on What Works
• Capital Is Dead: Is This Something Worse? by Mckenzie Wark
• How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell
• "Make Something Heavy." by Anu Atluru
• Casey Newton on The Vergecast (31:50) explaining his creative system

I've had all the various parts of this episode swirling in my head for months—from The Paperclip Maximizer to The Great Feminization to Meta's Masculine Energy to mind-body dualism to the AI industry's role in what I propose is The Great Re-Masculinization. 

It is absolutely about both the present and the future of work, and whether we accept the inevitability of regressing to an imagined past or forge into a more dynamic, multi-dimensional workplace that values the contribution of all sorts of intelligence.

Footnotes:

• Read the essay version of this episode
• "The Great Feminization" by Helen Andrews in Compact Magazine
• "Did Liberal Feminism Ruin the Workplace?" on Interesting Times with Ross Douthat (gift link)
• "Why does Mark Zuckerberg want more masculine energy in the corporate world? Patriarchy is still in charge" by Ashley Morgan on The Conversation
• Artificial Knowing by Alison Adam
• Mark Zuckerberg's comments on free expression
• "GPT-5 has lost what makes GPT-4 so special... Its ability to feel emotional nuance with users" post by alan1cooldude
• "Did Women Ruin Everything?" on In Bed With The Right

• (00:00) - Rage Bait Strikes Again

Have a big decision on your mind? Trying to choose between a bunch of good options?

Today, I'm talking about decision-making… not so much how to choose, but the context of our choices. No decision gets made in a vacuum. Choices are always framed by circumstances, relationships, emotions, fears, and desires.

The good news is that deepening our self-knowledge can be a great way to illuminate the context of our choices and point us in a productive direction. So I'm sharing an exercise from my new guide, Blank Slate, to unlock some of that self-knowledge as you head into the new year.

Blank Slate officially launches on January 15, but you can pre-order today at an early bird price! Learn more here.

Footnotes:

• Read the essay version of this episode.
• Clues By Sam
• "Delightful Misdirection (Or, How to Rethink Your Options)" at What Works
• "Honeydew" at What Works

• (00:00) - Puzzles

Here we are at the tail end of 2025. I just "opened" my Spotify Unwrapped... And after 3 years of burnout recovery, I’m finally ready to figure out what getting my shit together in the shadow of everything I’ve learned about myself and my needs in the last five years is going to look like.

It’s tempting to assume that getting one’s shit together is a forward-looking pursuit. You know, “Here are all the things I’m going to do.” But, in my opinion, an important part of getting one’s shit together is taking stock of said shit. And so this episode is a step in that direction. I enlisted my husband, Sean, to do a bit of a year-end review. 

This review is in no way comprehensive. It’s a wee bit stilted. And if it sounds a little forced, it is—because getting your shit together takes doing some things that you’re out of practice with.

This episode is simply an exercise in remembering. It’s that first awkward practice that you just have to get through at the beginning of a new season. 

Getting my shit together is very much a work in progress, not a grand announcement of some new project or direction for my work. Maybe that will come. Maybe it won’t. My main objective is to feel like I’m steering the ship again.

Heads up: this will be my final new episode of 2025. I'll be back on January 8 with fresh ideas, stories, and ways to rethink work.

This episode contains repeated uses of the word "shit," so if that's something you'd prefer not to hear. Skip this one!

Footnotes:

• YellowHouse.Media (the podcast & video production agency that Sean and I run)
• Waxwing Books
• Remnant Population by Elizabeth Moon
• I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman
• The Wall by Marlen Haushofer
• "No Good Art Comes From Greed" by Kelsey McKinney on Defector
• Alchemised by SenLinYu

• (00:00) - 2025 Review

How do you get people to care about what you care about?

It's a marketing question. A movement-building question. A question at the heart of the attention economy. And in one form or another, it's the question I've probably received more than any other over the last 15+ years. After all, there is no silver-bullet social media plan, no door-knocking strategy, no magical meeting agenda that produces results if the message at its heart doesn’t resonate with those receiving it.

This episode is in four chapters. In the first chapter, I assure you that getting attention is actually (relatively) easy—even if few of us are willing to do what it takes. In the second chapter, I explain why paying attention is really difficult, with the help of my favorite French philosopher. In the third chapter, I've got a story about getting my teenage daughter to watch a movie explaining esoteric financial products. And in the final chapter, I'll share a little idea I've been referring to as the Swimming Pool Theory of Communication.

If you care about getting others to care about what you care about (and I know you do), this one is for you.

Footnotes:

• Reasons my husky got mad at me this week
• Things that annoyed Waffles this week
• The Subversive Simone Weil by Robert Zaretsky
• The Big Short (book by Michael Lewis, film directed by Adam McKay)
• "Encoding/Decoding" by Stuart Hall

• (00:00) - Introduction

If you’ve ever chosen an ambitious, unconventional, or deeply meaningful aim only to see your plan devolve into something far more run-of-the-mill, this one is for you.

Footnotes:

• Read the essay version of this episode.
• "AI Can't Even Turn On the Lights" on The Vergecast
• About OpenAI
• "Applying Systems Archetypes" via The Systems Thinker
• Sam Altman saying we've "surpassed" the definition of AGI from 5 years ago
• More from Tara on AI:
  • "What is a search engine? Or, Anne Leckie versus the 'Well, Actually' Bros"
  • "Always Be Optimizing"
  • "Black Box Thinking"