How influencers, well, influence the way we see the world, our work, our families, and ourselves? And how does the spectacle we immerse ourselves in daily contribute to our perfectionism, anxiety, or fear? In the fifth installment of Self-Help, LLC, I talk about all that and more with Sara Petersen. This is an edited version of an episode that originally ran in October 2022.

There’s an influencer for every thing these days. Camping equipment? Sure. Nutritional supplements? You bet. Miniatures? You know it. College admissions? But of course. In this episode, though, we’re going to focus on one of the original influencer niches: MOMS.

The rise of the influencer ushered in a new outlet for self-help. Now, not only are there motivational books and talks, there’s a product endorsement to help you live your best life. Influencers give us, perhaps, the direct line between personal growth and consumer capitalism. I talk with the author of Momfluenced, Sara Petersen, about all of that and more.

Footnotes:

• Subscribe to Sara Petersen’s newsletter
• Grab your copy of Momfluenced
• “Life After Lifestyle” by Toby Shorin
• “The Rhetoric of the Image” by Roland Barthes
• The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord
• Episode 393 with Kelly Diels
• Episode 395 with Steph Barron Hall
• “The Influencer Industry: Constructing and Commodifying Authenticity on Social Media” by Emily Dean Hund

New!
Join me for an 8-week seminar called Making Sense starting in September! I'll guide you through how to use the process of sensemaking to make media that helps your audience better understand the world.

If you're bored by your current content strategy, tired of coming up with new how-tos or advice posts, and want a fresh and impactful way to approach how you write, podcast, speak, or communicate in any way, this seminar is for you. You'll work week-by-week through on-demand learning, office hours, workshops, and small assignments so that by the end, you have the draft of an essay, script for a video, outline of a podcast series, or slide deck for a presentation.

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This is the 4th part of my series Self-Help, LLC, which I'm replaying over the summer! Enjoy!

If your Instagram feed or Explore page looks anything like mine, then you likely see a preponderance of posts about personality types, conditions, or other self-knowledge. We’re hooked on learning about ourselves! And perhaps even more hooked on sharing what we’ve learned—which means that the Instagram algorithm (as well as TikTok’s and Pinterest’s algorithms) has learned to love this kind of content, too.

In this episode, I explore discovering ourselves versus making ourselves, why self-knowledge is big business on Instagram, and how creating viral personality content can wreak havoc on the creator’s psyche. To dig into this with me, I invited @ninetypesco creator, Steph Barron Hall, onto the show.

Footnotes:

• Find Steph Barron Hall on Instagram (@ninetypesco)
• Learn more about working with Steph
• How to be Authentic by Skye Cleary
• Learn more about the Enneagram and find your type
• The Nine Types of Rest
• Self-Help, INC by Micki McGee
• “Double consciousness”
• “Looking glass self”

Essay versions of each episode are posted at whatworks.fyi every Thursday. 

This is an updated version of the 3rd installment in my series Self-Help, LLC, from 2022. Enjoy!

Our quest for self-improvement requires us to decide who (or what) to trust with our time, energy, and money. What book do you decide to read next? Which coach do you hire? What accounts do you follow? Our consumer choices seem endless—so finding someone or something to put your trust in might feel like an Olympic feat.

On the flip side, as business owners or independent workers whether explicitly or implicitly in the business of self-help, our goal is to cultivate trust. Why would someone trust us with their business, their marriage, or their hopes and dreams for the future?

In this episode, I sit down with sociologist Patrick Sheehan to talk about his study of career coaches and the role they play with job seekers. We examine the roles that both credentialed and experience-based experts play in society and why uncertainty and instability might inspire us—for better or worse—to put our trust in prophets rather than priests.

Footnotes:

• “We’ve stopped trusting institutions and started trusting strangers” by Rachel Botsman (TED Talk)
• “The Change Rules of Trust in the Digital Age” by Rachel Botsman (HBR)
• “Where did all the coaches come from?” by Patrick Sheehan (Work In Progress Sociology)
• “The new economy as multi-level marketing scheme: career coaches and unemployment in the age of uncertainty” by Patrick Sheehan (Work in Progress Sociology)
• “Gun Culture and Wellness Culture Come From the Same Place” by Alan Levinovitz (Huffington Post)

As always, find an essay version of this episode at whatworks.fyi

I’m continuing my rebroadcast of a series I did a couple of years ago called Self-Help, LLC, and asked the question, "Are we all in the self-help business now?"

Today’s episode is all about the aesthetics of self-help and what my guest Kelly Diels has dubbed the female lifestyle empowerment brand. If you’ve ever fussed with your hair or outfit before taking a selfie or sought out the perfect Instagram-worthy spot on vacation, this episode is for you. And if you haven’t? Well, hopefully, this episode will put your mind at ease: you don’t need to do any of that to be successful.

It’s not only self-help or entrepreneurship products that are sold as tools for “empowerment” today. It’s just about everything: makeup, clothing, workout equipment, vitamins, office supplies… Whole brands are built around the promise that a purchase won’t just solve your problem, it’ll make you a better, more fulfilled person. But empowerment isn’t for sale—only the status quo.

In this episode, I talk with writer and coach Kelly Diels about empowerment marketing and what she calls the “female lifestyle empowerment brand.” You’ll also hear from independent beauty writer Jessica DeFino about how empowerment is leveraged by the beauty industry (more from her later in the series!).

Footnotes:

• Learn more about Kelly Diels
• Learn more about Jessica DeFino
• Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino
• Thick by Tressie McMillan Cottom
• How to be Authentic: Simone de Beauvoir and the Quest for Fulfillment by Skye Cleary
• Helen Gurley Brown as quoted in Self-Help, INC by Micki McGee
• “The Rhetoric of the Image” by Roland Barthes

Read the updated essay version of this episode at whatworks.fyi

Love What Works? Want to support the work of asking big questions about how we work today? Become a premium subscriber and get exclusive content and live quarterly workshops for just $7 per month. Go to whatworks.fyi/subscribe

This is Part 1 of a series from 2022 called Self-Help, LLC. This summer, I’ll be republishing this series as I work on new essays and episodes. There’s a good chance this series is new to you, and if its previous reception is any indication, I think you’ll love it! If you listened to it the first time through, I’d love to know how it hits differently today.

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It’s hard to escape the language and politics of self-help today. Whether you’re browsing your LinkedIn, Instagram, or even TikTok feed, there’s a very good chance that the first post you see offers up some idea for living a better life or growing a more successful business. Shoulds and supposed-tos are cultural currency. We gain social capital by sharing advice or “giving value.” And that’s left me wondering: are we all in the self-help business now?

Today’s episode kicks off an 8-part series called Self-Help, LLC which will explore that question from a number of different angles. In this episode, I’m taking a close look at a particular construction of personal growth and entrepreneurship culture: winners and losers.

Footnotes:

• Dr. Rick for Progressive
• Why does the insurance industry have so many mascots? on Planet Money
• Self-Help, INC by Micki McGee
• More about Marshall McLuhan (”The medium is the message”)
• Nixon’s universal health care plan proposal
• Reaganism & Thatcherism
• The Old is Dying & the New Cannot be Born by Nancy Fraser

Find the essay version of this episode at whatworks.fyi and support my work critiquing and theorizing the 21st-century economy by becoming a premium subscriber for just $7 per month!

For justice-minded people, navigating the world of work in the 21st-century economy can feel... impossible. A real no-win scenario. There's a constant tension between what's good for the communities we inhabit and what's good (and necessary) for us as individuals. But it's in this tension that we find a "margin of maneuverability"—a source of hope, possibility, and creativity.

That's the theme of a new book called The Myth of Making It by Samhita Mukhopadhyay, a feminist writer and editor, and the former executive editor of Teen Vogue. I sat down with Samhita to talk about the book and explore our margins of maneuverability.

Footnotes:

• Grab your copy of The Myth of Making It by Samhita Mukhopadhyay
• Find out more about Samhita
• Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and more on the Kobayashi Maru in Star Trek lore
• The Politics of Affect by Brian Massumi
• "At 20, Teen Vogue knows its readers contain multitudes" by Annie Aguiar for Poynter

Related episodes:

• 466: Making Room for Others with Leonie Smith
• 455: The Case for Uncertainty (and How to Navigate It)
• 457: How to Define Hard-to-Define Work Stress
• 450: The Will to Share Power with Tania Luna

Join me for Summer Seminar x What Works! It's an 8-week guided learning and reflection experience that provides a structure for examining your relationship with rest. Learn more and register here!

Our podcast feeds and streaming services are full of real stories of real people. And not all of those stories feel... true. I mean, even if the facts are accurate, the way something is edited, packaged, and marketed can dramatically alter a story's impact.

Artist and audio producer Jess Shane wanted to create a project that would expose some of the problematic elements of this booming (and highly profitable) industry. The result is a podcast series for Radiotopia Presents called Shocking, Heartbreaking, Transformative. Listening to it made me deeply uncomfortable, so I knew I needed to have her on What Works to discuss it!

In this episode, you'll get the behind-the-scenes on this project. And you'll learn what happens when attention becomes a fetish.

Footnotes:

• Listen to Shocking, Heartbreaking, Transformative from Radiotopia Presents
• Find out more about Jess Shane
• Curated Stories: The Uses and Misuses of Storytelling by Sujatha Fernandes
• The Crisis of Narration by Byung-Chul Han

• (00:00) - Edited for maximum shock value

Okay, this isn't really an episode about speculative investing. Well, it is. But I'm not talking about crypto or meme stocks. I'm talking about the challenges of living and working as a speculative investment.

Today's episode is a brief reflection on self-speculation, the "anticipatory, speculative self," and why the second person is so ubiquitous on social media.

Footnotes:

• "Verified: Self-presentation, identity management, and selfhood in the age of big data" by Alison Hearn in Self-(Re)presentation Now
• "The Truth About Influence" by Alison Hearn in Re-thinking Mediations of Post-Truth Politics and Trust
• Psychopolitics by Byung-Chul Han
• "What 'You' and 'We' Say About Me" by Ariana Orvell

As always, find an essay version of today's episode at whatworks.fyi

What would happen if you archived all of your Instagram content, announced that you had taken a job at a fictional wellness company, and then got fired for disclosing your experience with company-mandated colonic hydrotherapy? Well, Leigh Stein did exactly that.

Leigh wears many hats—novelist, poet, cultural critic, book coach, publishing expert. And when she realized that she wasn't wearing the hat she wanted to wear on Instagram, she decided to have some fun with a satirical performance art project.

Listen for the whole story and a provocation to embrace your own social media use as a project of identity performance!

Footnotes:

• Leigh Stein's books and cultural criticism
• Leigh Stein on Instagram, TikTok, and Substack
• Gender Trouble by Judith Butler
• Judith Butler on Why Is This Happening with Chris Hayes
• Sarah Urist Green on performance art for The Art Assignment
• Performance by RoseLee Goldberg
• "From Work to Text" by Roland Barthes
• RuPaul explaining drag on The Preachers

Also in this series:

• Organizing Indie Labor with Chiarra Lohr of the Indie Sellers Guild
• Figuring Out the Creator Economy with Charlie Gilkey & Kate Tyson
• Building Solidarity in the Creator Economy with Charlie Gilkey & Kate Tyson
• Rethinking Creativity: An Interlude

Find an essay version of this episode at whatworks.fyi

***

I'm teaching a new workshop on May 15 & 16, 2024! It's called World-Building for Business Owners, and it's based on a process I've been honing for more than a decade. I'll help you apply creative, even playful thinking to your business strategy—and help you create an internally consistent business that causes fewer headaches, meets your needs more efficiently, plays to your strengths, and creates satisfying work.

Click here for all the details or go to explorewhatworks.com/world

• (00:00) - Digital performance art?

Good luck going anywhere today without running into a message about creativity.

I was going to say, "anywhere online," but really, it's just about anywhere. We get creative in the kitchen. Creative in our workouts. Creative in bed. And of course, creative at work. Creativity is somewhat of a "cult object," as Samuel Franklin put it in his cultural history of creativity.

Today, I want to get uncomfortably close to that cult object and ask, "What is our fascination with creativity hiding?" So join me as I venture onto the third rail of the 21st-century economy.

Footnotes:

• The Cult of Creativity: A Surprisingly Recent History by Samuel W. Franklin
• "The Surprising Origins of Our Obsession with Creativity" by Samuel W. Franklin in Behavioral Scientist
• "The Origins of Creativity" by Louis Menard (book review) in The New Yorker
• Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher

Also in this series:

• Organizing Indie Labor with Chiarra Lohr of the Indie Sellers Guild
• Figuring Out the Creator Economy with Charlie Gilkey & Kate Tyson
• Building Solidarity in the Creator Economy with Charlie Gilkey & Kate Tyson

Find an essay version of this episode at whatworks.fyi

***

I'm teaching a new workshop on May 15 & 16, 2024! It's called World-Building for Business Owners, and it's based on a process I've been honing for more than a decade. I'll help you apply creative, even playful thinking to your business strategy—and help you create an internally consistent business that causes fewer headaches, meets your needs more efficiently, plays to your strengths, and creates satisfying work.

Click here for all the details or go to explorewhatworks.com/world

***

If you enjoy What Works, please consider supporting this work by becoming a premium subscriber for just $7 per month.

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