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Some of the worst decisions you'll ever make will feel completely right in the moment.

That's the thing about intense emotions. They arrive with total conviction, handing you a clear instruction that feels like the obvious, correct, protective thing to do in the moment.

And that instruction is often what puts you deeper into the feeling you're trying to escape.

The most useful emotional skill is knowing when to trust that instinct and when it's working against you. Check the doc below to learn more.

#rajshamani #figuringout

Claude Fable 5 was shipped on June 9. Opus-5 on July 24. And you still pick the wrong one every time.

The 11 mistakes burning credits & 5 rules that fix it:

(both prompts are free here → how-to-ai.guide)

Stop doing these today:

1. Picking Fable because it's expensive.
The newer model is the cheaper one.

2. Thinking $10 buys more brain.
Opus 5 is $5. Fable 5 is $10. Opus scores higher on knowledge work.

3. Thinking $10 buys more memory.
Same 1M context on both models. You're paying double for identical memory.

4. Using Fable for emails.
Shooting a bird with a bazooka. It's your renewal quote, not the Manhattan Project.

5. Never touching the effort setting.
It's under the model name. It decides how long Claude thinks.

6. Switching models when the answer is bad.
Increase the effort setting. That's free. Switching costs double.

7. Maxing effort on Fable.
Effort multiplies tokens. Fable's tokens already cost 2x. That's double of double.

8. One long chat all day.
Claude re-reads the entire thread on every single turn. Turn 40 costs a fortune.

9. Not knowing your plan.
On Pro, Fable is included but with a limit. Be conservative the way you use Fable 5.

10. Not knowing Fable eats your week.
50% of your weekly limit, drained faster. Every Fable prompt steals an Opus prompt.

11. Prompting them the same way.
This is the real one. They demand different levels of instructions.

Now the 8 rules that fix it-

1. Opus 5 must be your default.
Emails, decks, spreadsheets, research, messy data, meeting notes. All of it.

2. Open Fable 5 three times a year.
Work you hand over for hours. Contracts and medical questions. A decision you get one shot at. That's the use case.

3. With Opus 5, have a conversation.
It's cheap. Ten messages cost nothing. Let it pull the context out of you.

4. Two turns on Fable, then switch.
Use it for the plan. Use Opus for the typing.

5. Give Fable a goal, never a task.
"Write this email" is a task. Opus does that for half the price. "Get me paid without losing the client" is a goal.

Opus 5 prompt:
"A client I've had two years went quiet after my renewal quote. I want to keep them. Ask me what you need to know before you suggest anything - use the AskUserQuestion tool."

Fable 5 prompt:
"Client of two years went quiet after my renewal quote. Thread attached. Goal: renewed at max 10% off, relationship intact. Work it end-to-end. Decide the approach, write the email, write the two follow-ups if they don't reply. Tell me how this backfires before you show me the draft."

Opus 5 gives you a draft. You edit it, you send it.
Fable 5 gives you a decision.

The hard part is writing that Fable brief. So I built a skill that writes it for you.

Type /fable-prompter, give it a lazy half-formed idea, and it hands back the finished brief.

Run it on Opus 5, never on Fable. The cheap model writes the expensive prompt.

It's free here → how-to-ai.guide
Subscribe, open the welcome email, click the Notion link, upload once to Claude.

Wild: Elon Musk just said AI traffic is about to overwhelm the human internet. Meanwhile, Cloudflare predicts bots could generate 1,000x more traffic than humans within 5 years 😳

That sounds ridiculous until you look at what is already happening.

In May, non-human traffic crossed 50% of HTML requests on Cloudflare’s network. The latest split is roughly 60.6% bots vs. 39.4% humans.

And it happened more than a year earlier than Cloudflare originally expected.

The reason: humans browse at human speed. Agents don’t 🤖

One shopping request might mean 10 pages for you.

For an AI agent, it can mean thousands of searches, API calls, comparisons, and checks running in parallel.

The numbers get wild pretty fast:

↳ Cloudflare says machine traffic could reach 1,000x human traffic within five years
↳ AI agents can generate roughly 450% more network traffic per task than humans
↳ Agentic AI could push enterprise network traffic ~9× by 2035
↳ Musk says 100,000 Starlink V3 satellites could theoretically deliver ~100 Pbps of capacity

But bandwidth may not be the biggest disruption.

The internet’s business model was built around human eyeballs: ads, pageviews, clicks and conversion funnels.

Agents don’t care about any of those. They care about access, APIs, permissions, price, and speed.

Humans built the internet. AI agents may soon become its biggest users.

P.S. also check out How to Build an Agentic OS with Claude Fable 5 🤖: https://lnkd.in/dZsST5qR

Looking backwards is the #1 mistake of 80% of the people who see this in their feed right now - pls pls pls put the system in place to allow you to forgive, learn and most of all move on from the past ❤️‼️

I missed Blackhat and Defcon for this. I've been semi-quiet for a couple, weeks spending much needed time with my wife.

We don't really vacation much, but it just so happened that two of them fell back to back. We enjoyed a week in the Florida Keys then came home, replenished our suitcases and jumped on a cruise to Mexico.

This past couple months have been crazy. When I founded my firm in July, things got busy quick.

I flew to Atlantic City to deliver a keynote.
I set up multiple partnerships.
I sat in a gazillion meetings.
Defined my services portfolio.

I felt my calendar already filling up for the rest of 3rd and 4th quarter. When you're in start-up mode, it's hard to walk away from your desk and turn off, but I had to.

Now I'm back. I'm tucked into my mancave and locked in.
I'm ready to build my Cybersecurity and AI company into something I'm proud of. I'm ready to build a business that will provide jobs for Entry, Mid, and Senior level professionals.

I'm ready to build something together. As always, I'll be talking about this journey as I learn from my failures and successes.

I hope everyone has a fantastic week.

Read this twice...

You're letting people who've never tried decide what you're allowed to attempt.

They don't get a vote. They never did.

You can just do things.

-DM

Earlier this year, Ipsos did something nobody in marketing had ever bothered to do.

They tested us.

1200 marketers. Across five countries. Real questions on the fundamentals of the discipline they practise every day. Positioning. Pricing. Brand versus performance. The stuff we all claim to know.

Most failed.

Not junior marketers. Not people from adjacent functions who wandered into marketing by accident. Marketers. With marketing job titles. Failing a test. On marketing.

When Ipsos separated out the marketers who had received formal marketing training, the results flipped. Trained marketers were 5x more likely to pass than untrained ones.

Think about what that means. The single biggest predictor of whether a marketer actually knows marketing isn't their years of experience, their IQ, their seniority, or how many conferences they've attended. It's whether anyone ever taught them the fundamentals properly.

We are the only serious business function that lets most of its practitioners skip the training. No CFO learned finance from LinkedIn posts. No lawyer picked up contract law from a podcast. But marketing? We wing it. And then we wonder why the seven marketers around the table have seven different definitions of positioning. Or why others don't take marketing seriously (clue: most marketers don't so why should we?).

This is what I built the MiniMBA in Marketing to fix. Ten weeks. The complete foundation — orientation, strategy, targeting, positioning, effectiveness, pricing, product. Taught properly.

And no plane tickets, no week out of the office, no second mortgage.

40,000 marketers in 40 countries have done it.

The next cohort starts in September. Dozens of marketers signed up today for it. If you're one of the untrained majority, this is your moment to stop winging it: www.minimba.com

And if you're in the already trained minority — congratulations. You're in the 5x club. Send this to someone who isn't.

Most of the big-brained experts I work with don’t struggle with content ideas...

Ideas come easy.

They struggle with the courage to say what they *really* think, and the conviction to repeat themselves once the novelty wears off.

Ideas are easy.
Commitment is rare.

Two of his best people asked to stop working together.
Their manager had misdiagnosed the problem.

One did her best thinking before the office filled up. The other did his best thinking out loud, in the corridor, at the coffee machine, in the middle of somebody else's meeting.

The manager tried the usual moves. Mediation. Shared objectives. A team lunch. None of it changed anything.

The working day had one shape and two people who refilled their energy in opposite directions were being asked to run at the same tempo, in the same room, on the same calendar, and to call the friction a relationship problem.

So he stopped treating it as a relationship problem.

He redesigned the week around how each of them recovered attention, not around how they got along. Protected focus blocks in the morning for the one who needed silence to think. Standing collaborative sessions in the afternoon for the one who thought by talking. Overlap only where the decision genuinely required both of them in the room.

The pairing did not become friendly. It became productive, which is a different and more useful thing.

Most of the introvert/extrovert advice online treats the difference as a communication style. That is the visible layer. Underneath sits a plainer fact: how energy and attention gets restored. Solitude for one, other people for the other. The workplace almost never designs for that. It designs for presence.

The design questions I would ask any leader sitting with a pair like this:

→ Where in the week does each of them actually recover attention, and does the calendar protect it or eat it?

→ Which decisions genuinely need both in the room, and which ones are only there out of habit?

→ What is the meeting rhythm rewarding, thinking or speaking, and is that the rhythm the work needs?

The pair is not the problem. The shape of the week is.

Up to you to decide whether the friction on your team is a personality mismatch, or a design choice nobody has revisited.

If you lead a team with quiet contributors on it, my free weekly note for The A+ Introvert covers how to redesign the working week around how attention actually gets refilled, including the daily energy audit I use with leaders:
https://lnkd.in/eSdKpkMs

LinkedIn is one of the most underused platforms in influencer marketing.

It also has the highest quality audience of any platform.

Decision makers, founders, operators, investors.

People who can actually buy.

That makes it the best channel for B2B,

And it works well for solid B2C brands too.

We have worked with more than 100 AI and tech partners in this area.

Which puts us among the top players globally by number of LinkedIn partnerships.

Here is what I see over and over:

A brand tries one post,
Picks the wrong partner,
Gets nothing,
And writes off the channel.

That is not a test.

That is flipping a coin and calling it data.

1. Testing is the whole game

Unless you already have content that is verified to perform,

You need a few rounds to find the angle, the format and the voice that works.

The winners then get repeated.

2. The partner matters more than the budget

Audience overlap and trust beat follower count every time.

Make sure this profile is trusted by other brands before considering.

3. Hard selling is the worst strategy

Trying to squeeze maximum value out of one post kills it.

Natural integration and ambassadorship win.

Some of our partners see 5x ROI and thousands of clicks from a single post,

And it comes from content people actually want to read.

4. Think in quarters, not posts

Repeated presence with the same trusted voice compounds.

We have brands we have worked with since I started posting on LinkedIn years ago.

5. Fix what happens after the click

Half of failed campaigns are a funnel problem, not a content problem.

6. Measure the right thing

Views and clicks are not always the goal.

Someone might see your content today and become a customer months later.

The real metric is long-term campaign performance.

The horizon is months, not days.

LinkedIn influencer marketing is not expensive or unpredictable.

It is just done badly most of the time.

The key is not to start blindly, but to know what to do.

This is the decisive factor between making it work and giving up.

P.S. Have you tried LinkedIn influencer marketing? What results have you seen so far?

♻️ Repost so LinkedIn marketing gets the attention it deserves and helps more businesses grow.

20 benefits of knowing personality types as a leader:

For your team

• Richer brainstorming sessions
• Smoother conflict resolution
• Personalized development
• Fewer misunderstandings
• Improved communication
• Creative problem-solving
• Stronger team cohesion
• Efficient work allocation
• Reduced stress levels
• Greater engagement

For you:

• Greater resilience
• More adaptability
• Stronger influence
• Enhanced empathy
• Deeper connections
• Heightened intuition
• Increased confidence
• Better self-awareness
• Clearer communication
• Sharper decision-making

Every great leader knows:

Understanding your team is the first step to success.

Why this matters?

It reveals how each team member:

➟ Thinks and processes information
➟ Interacts and communicates
➟ Responds to stress and conflict

Armed with this knowledge, you can:

➟ Tailor your leadership style
➟ Enhance team synergy
➟ Boost overall productivity

Save this sheet.
Share it with your team.
Use it as your daily reference.

P.S. Which personality model do you find most useful?

♻️ Find this valuable? Repost to share it.

P.S. 📌 Want a high-res PDF of my Personality Types cheat sheet?
Get it free: https://lnkd.in/ec9ibCvQ

11 habits that will transform your life in 3 months:

1. Get Morning Sunlight

This is essential to get your body in great health.

It’s proven to:

• Release cortisol, priming your brain for focus
• Improve overall mood and emotional regulation
• Set a circadian rhythm, which will help you fall asleep at night

2. Hide Your Phone

Our attention is constantly pulled in a million directions.

Notifications from our phones are the most powerful distraction.

Turn on airplane mode, set aside 4 hours, and focus on deep work.

Your output will dramatically increase.

3. Take a Cold Shower

There’s no better way to feel alert and awake than a cold shower.

Forcing yourself to get in makes the rest of your day easier.

You’ll also get:

• A boost in metabolism
• An increase in dopamine
• Enhanced muscle recovery

4. Make Your Bed

Start your day with a win.

Use this momentum for the rest of the day.

A 1-minute practice sets the tone for the next 12 hours.

One small action serves as the trigger for a great day.

5. Review Your Goals

Set process goals over end goals.

Reading 10 pages a day is less intimidating than reading a 1000-page novel.

Running for 10 minutes is less intimidating than running a marathon.

Once you commit to strong daily habits, the end goal will take care of itself.

6. Upgrade Your Sleep

Your sleep defines your productivity:

• No screen 1 hour before bed 
• Stop drinking caffeine after noon
• Cut out naps and late-night snacks

7. Upgrade Your Nutrition

You are what you eat.

If you eat like shit, you’ll feel like shit.

• Cut out sugars 
• Cut out processed foods
• Eat easily-digestible foods (0 bloating)

8. Walk Without Technology

Our brain needs time away from constant stimulation.

Our mind needs time to:

• Rest
• Recharge
• Recalibrate ideas

Letting your mind wander is key in the idea-generation process.

9. Have To-Do’s Ready For When You Wake Up

Plan out your morning the night before.

Having a plan:

• Reduces anxiety 
• Promotes great sleep
• Gets you productive immediately the next day

Prevents distractions from disturbing your deep work periods.

10. Walk After Meals

Walking after eating is essential to keep your performance high throughout the day.

It is proven to:

• Aid in digestion
• Boost your metabolism
• Keep energy levels high

Just a 10-minute walk after every meal will kickstart these benefits.

11. Send a Nice Text

Human connections are the most valuable in life.

Nice texts make someone’s day.

But they also:

• Make you feel good
• Give you a reason to reconnect
• Allows you to disconnect from work

__

Enjoy this? ♻️ Repost it to your network and follow Matt Gray for more.

Want to see the complete system I use to implement these 11 habits and transform my life in just 90 days?

Get the complete framework here: https://fos.now/fpdeCS

>> 98 AI courses. $0.

From Harvard, MIT, NVIDIA, Google and more.

Your AI curriculum is already online.

Most people still think getting good at AI means buying another $2,000 course.

It doesn’t.

I pulled together 98 free learning resources from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, Harvard, MIT, NVIDIA and leading university lectures.


📌 Get all 98 Links to the courses in my free newsletter: https://lnkd.in/eFNvmcYa


And this isn’t just “AI for beginners.”
The list covers prompt engineering, reasoning, RAG, Claude and ChatGPT workflows, AI agents, APIs, machine learning, deep learning, CUDA, transformers and responsible AI.

OpenAI Academy is actively expanding its practical learning library, Google still offers hands-on ML training, and NVIDIA says many of its self-paced courses are free.

Here 9️⃣ from Nvidia:

1️⃣ Agentic AI Explained: https://lnkd.in/eFBiM5aY

2️⃣ AI for All: From Basics to GenAI Practice: https://lnkd.in/eNjPi3gs

3️⃣ AI Infrastructure and Operations Fundamentals: https://lnkd.in/eNjPi3gs

4️⃣ Augment your LLM Using Retrieval Augmented Generation: https://lnkd.in/eCaBEsPS

5️⃣ Building A Brain in 10 Minutes: https://lnkd.in/etnQwFRA

6️⃣ Fundamentals of Accelerated Computing with CUDA C/C++: https://lnkd.in/eDdHXy9W

7️⃣ Generative AI Explained: https://lnkd.in/ewdNQN5h

8️⃣ Getting Started with AI on Jetson Nano: https://lnkd.in/eXt8nmZu

9️⃣ Introduction to Transformer-Based Natural Language Processing: https://lnkd.in/etP3ErYx

The bigger point is simple: access to high-quality AI education is no longer the bottleneck.
Execution is.

Pick one track.
Spend 30 minutes a day.
Build something with what you learn.

A year from now, that habit will matter far more than collecting another certificate.

Which AI skill would you learn first if the best material already cost you nothing?

---

♻️ Repost to share with your network
➕ Follow me https://lnkd.in/gjUQk7HF for cutting-edge AI insights

Join 600,000+ professionals using AI to stay ahead:
🔗 https://lnkd.in/eFNvmcYa


#AI #ArtificialIntelligence #GenerativeAI #FutureOfWork #Learning

Optimising your landing page for rankings is not enough.

What you need to know is whether it shows in AI answers:

That is the seismic shift I've been harping on about for the better part of a year.

When someone asks AI for a product or service recommendation...
Your site will either be cited & recommended, or completely ignored.

The good news is a lot of AEO is supplemented by SEO fundamentals.

But when it comes to GEO, it's a completely different ball game.
Even every AI model has a different playbook.

However, when it comes to your website,
There are non-negotiables you can't miss across the board.

Most sites I see are honestly painful to look at, knowing what I know...

So, these are the sections you fundamentally can't miss:

1. The H1
The question your buyer would type, answered in the same line.

2. The byline
A named author with photo, credentials and a bio link, so a real person stands behind the page.

3. The subheadline
One line naming the outcome they walk away with.

4. Question sub-headings
Every H2 and H3 as a real question, so AI can lift a clean answer from each.

5. The answer block
A 40 to 60 word answer to the main question, up top, above the fold.

6. The build
Raw HTML, copy as text, alt text on images, transcript under the video. Nothing hidden from crawlers.

7. The problem block
Name the problem in their words, then show what it's costing them.

8. The FAQ block
Real questions as headers, clean answers, marked up so AI pulls them straight in.

9. The solution block
How you solve it, led by the outcome, closing on one clear next step.

10. Schema in the head
Organisational schema for your brand, FAQ, Product and Article schema on the page.

11. The proof block
Named case studies with real, checkable numbers, plus any original data you own.

12. The comparison table
A table of features and pricing versus the alternatives, easy for AI to quote.

13. The pricing CTA
One action button in plain words, "start free" or "book a demo".

14. The last-updated stamp
A visible last-updated date and fresh schema, so AI keeps treating the page as live.

You can see that Search is just more advanced than it used to be.

Not to say it was ever *easy* necessarily...
But it is definitely harder and more complex now.

If your site isn't structured like this, it won't show up where it counts.

This is the shift we saw well ahead of time at Searchable.

📌 For free, you can use our AI SEO Agent to optimise your page: https://lnkd.in/gVwCJJDX

Have fun optimising !

♻️ Repost to help your network get ahead of the shift.
And follow Chris Donnelly for more AI SEO guidance.

Most people are waiting to start living.

Until the debt is gone.
Until the kids are older.
Until the business is better.
Until they finally feel settled.

But the life you're waiting for is already here.

People who love you.
The bills that are covered.
Your body that works today.
The meals that taste good right now.
An ordinary Tuesday with friends and family.

Don't just skip this stuff.

These things ARE life.

The big problem is that almost everything nowadays is designed to convince you that your real life is off somewhere in the future.

Once you achieve something or hit some silly milestone.

That you need more, newer, bigger, faster before you can actually "live."

You don't.

I've been writing about taking the opposite approach every Saturday for more than 4 years.

A short weekly essay on working less, earning enough, and living for right now.

200,000 lifestyle-first entrepreneurs and solopreneurs read it every weekend.

Subscribe today and get 3 bonus guides:

1. How I built a $15M solo business (without destroying my life).

2. Are you building the right thing? My ambition audit

3. How to free up 10 hours per week: 7 places you're losing time each week.

Join here: https://buff.ly/wCQIeh6

I received the wildest comment on one of my posts a couple months ago. Someone I’d never met, offered to take me on a trip of a lifetime to Hawaii. Spearfishing, normal people fishing, diving for lobster, lava caves, and like an entire list of things that have been only bucket list for years.

At first I was like, “Nah. This ain’t real.”

But within hours, I was on the phone with the More Than Just Business Solutions team and it felt like we’d been friends for ages.

My wife was beside me listening to the call, she said, “YOU ARE GOING! I will hold down the house.”

6 random people I’ve never met in an Airbnb 13 hours away from home. This is what life is about tbh, taking these online relationships to real life to experience this amazing place we call earth.

The trip is in a few short weeks, and I will be sharing more while there but this is just a reminder that insane things start happening when you stack days, share content and build true community around you.

Ok now the real fun. Holding my breath for 3 minutes, I’m almost half way there. Time to do some apnea walks at the beach today!

Big thanks to Stephen M. and Paul Kiriakos for this inane opportunity of a lifetime.

#yestheyarepayingforthistripandyesiwilltellyoutocheckouttheircompany #sponsored

How I use Claude Design to create LinkedIn carousels in minutes 👇

1. Upload your design system

This could be your brand guide, a PDF, PNG or even a carousel you’ve already designed.

Claude learns your colours, fonts and layouts.

2. Finalise your copy first

I always write the copy in a separate Claude chat before opening Claude Design.

💡 Hot tip: Don’t ask Claude to write and design at the same time, it will waste credits.

3. Give Claude Design a detailed brief

Tell it:
→ Number of slides
→ Copy for each slide
→ Visual style
→ Images or illustrations to include

The more specific you are, the better the result.

4. Generate the design

Get Claude to use your uploaded design system to create your carousel.

5. Polish it in Canva

Connect Claude to Canva, make a few final tweaks, and you’re done.

AI gets me 90% there.
The final 10% is still human taste.

The whole process takes minutes instead of hours.

Save this post for later, and let me know if you have any questions about Claude Design.

What's wrong with the first code snippet?

The second example is 43x faster to insert 10,000 records.

But what causes such a huge performance difference?

If you understand how EF works under the hood, the answer should be obvious. 👇

Every call to SaveChanges means one roundtrip to the database. In the first example, inserting each record means one call to the database. This quickly adds up...

Here's why it's important to use the right tool for the job: https://lnkd.in/dVHkF4Bg

Once an employee hands in their notice.

That's it.

It's too late.

Offering a raise last minute just screams, "We've been underpaying you.”

And that's a bad way to run a growing business.

Instead, give your team something to strive for, not a reason to run.

Pay based on their value, not just to avoid the hassle of hiring someone new.

Because business growth isn't just about getting more customers.
It's about building a team that can create more value as the business grows.

Give great people a reason to stay.
Give them a reason to get better.

That benefits you both.

One of the biggest misconceptions about commercial real estate brokerage is that success comes from charisma, connections, or negotiation skills. In my experience, that’s never been true. The people who build lasting careers in this business are usually the people willing to do the things others quickly grow tired of doing.

When I started in commercial real estate in 1984, there was no sophisticated training program waiting for me. On my first day, I got to the office before sunrise, sat outside a locked office door waiting for someone to arrive, and eventually got told, “Go sell buildings.” That was the onboarding process.

At the time, I thought there had to be more to it than that. Surely the successful brokers had some secret system or hidden advantage. Over time, I realized the opposite was true. Most highly successful brokers simply mastered very basic disciplines and repeated them consistently for years.

Early on, Paul J. M. and I became obsessive about consistency. We were usually the first people in the office and among the last to leave. We cold-called constantly, tracked every building owner in our territory, followed up repeatedly, and spent enormous amounts of time learning the market.

None of that work was glamorous. Most of it was repetitive. A lot of it was frustrating. But consistency compounds in ways people underestimate.

One of the biggest mistakes I see today is people expecting success to happen quickly. They want immediate momentum, immediate recognition, and immediate results. Commercial real estate rarely works that way. Most great opportunities are built through long periods of discipline before anything meaningful becomes visible externally.

I’ve always believed commercial real estate is a very simple business, but simple doesn’t mean easy. We are not curing cancer or solving the theory of relativity. We are helping people buy and sell buildings. The challenge comes from having the discipline to execute the fundamentals repeatedly over long periods of time.

Anybody can prospect hard for a week. Anybody can stay motivated for a month. Very few people can maintain consistency year after year, especially when results are delayed.

That consistency eventually creates expertise. Expertise creates confidence. Confidence builds trust. And trust is what drives this business. Clients are trusting you with major financial decisions, family assets, and often decades of accumulated wealth.

The people looking for shortcuts are usually disappointed by this business. There is no magical script. There is no secret trick. There is no substitute for consistency.

Exceptional careers are usually built by doing very ordinary things extraordinarily consistently. That was true when I started in 1984, and it’s still true today.

All you have to do is make organic social media content over and over and over again in as many different ways as possible across Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube shorts, LinkedIn, different thumbnails, different hooks, complete insane psycho discipline. You need to become a psycho at that. Do you know that if you went outside right now and made a video of eating a banana and drinking a rum and coke and posted it that people that have a high propensity of interest in bananas and rum and coke might be the first people that see that content?

The world we’re in now allows you to close the gap very quickly. Your third TikTok, if you make the right piece of content, can fundamentally change the course of your career. It’s about the intoxicating nature of the merit of a single post now, not what you’ve done to get to that single post.

Hard seasons can make progress feel invisible. That does not mean nothing is changing.

85-year-old grandmas use ChatGPT now.

That's how you know it's the tip of the iceberg:

ABOVE THE WATER - (where everyone lives)

1. ChatGPT → Not for thinking. For images.
Generate one, click it, and it drops into edit mode.
Just say what to change. Stay on "high."

JUST BELOW THE SURFACE

2. Claude → Start a Project. Upload your best past writing in files and write instructions.
Now it writes in your voice, not generic AI slop.

3. Grok → Add "check X right now" to your prompt.
Grok answers by searching the live feed with different agents at work.

4. Perplexity → Pretty good as a search engine.
Every answer has sources you can click.

5. Canva → Upload your Brand Kit once.
Easier to create designs in your colors and fonts. AI magic features are getting better with an upgrade.

6. Notion → Hit "Ask AI."
Search Notion, Slack, Drive, and Gmail from one box instead of five apps. Top tier as a workspace.

THE DEEP (almost nobody goes here):

7. Pangram → Paste AI draft before you send it.
It flags the lines that read as AI so you can make them human. The only AI detector I believe in.

8. Cursor → Describe the change in plain English.
It edits your whole project, not one line at a time.

9. Gamma → Outline in Claude first. Paste it in.
Full deck in 60 secs - your ideas, with interactive elements in slides (easier for eyes to look at data).

10. Suno → Paste your lyrics. Name the vibe.
It writes the whole song, vocals included. Doesn't feel AI at all. I made a song for my niece & nephew.

11. Midjourney → End every prompt with a style and a ratio ("editorial photo, 3:2").
The tool for designers who are good at designs.

12. Shortcut AI → "Audit Excel & fix the formulas."
It catches the broken & stale ones from massive spreadsheets - formula-driven, not hard-coded.

13. NotebookLM → Drop your dense reports in. Generate the "Brief." Generate a podcast of it and listen to the whole thing on your commute.

14. ElevenLabs → Record a clean minute of your voice. Now narrate any script by typing it.

15. Wispr Flow → Hold one key. Talk.
It ignores the "ums," formats it, drops it in any app - 4x faster than typing. Natively on your laptop.

16. Granola → notetaker that doesn't join the call.
It writes the full notes after. No bot ever joins the meeting. Transcripts are searchable with keywords.

17. Claude Code → End a session with "Write a CLAUDE .md of everything you learned."
Next time, it already knows your project.

Every tool below the surface beats the tip at a job.

Use enough of them to actually be efficient at work.

what I actually use AI for:

(non-work edition)

1. quarterly taxes (reviewing, asking technical qs)

2. trip planning (logistics, sightseeing, budgets, culture)

3. lab results (so handy with complex terminology / to arrive at dr prepared!)

4. contract reviewing (one set of eyes is never enough)

5. home troubleshooting (sometimes it’s an easy fix that I can do myself)

6. contractor quotes (industry norms, area-specific info)

7. wedding planning (IYKYK)

8. reading recc lists (based on what my goals are)

the mental energy that leaks out of small life logistics is real.

this allows me to put my mental energy where it will be better spent!

"Wir müssen jetzt handeln." So einfach, aber so deutlich lautet der Aufruf, den 16 Nobelpreisträger und führende Ökonomen und KI-Forscher jüngst unterschrieben haben - auch ich.

In der aktuellen Ausgabe meines Newsletters gehe ich darauf ein, wovor die führenden Köpfe in der globalen KI-Entwicklung explizit warnen, was ihre Forderungen sind und was jeder einzelne von uns beitragen kann, damit die KI-Transformation für uns Menschen zu einer besseren Arbeitswelt führt. Und nicht zum Desaster wird.

Beide Entwicklungsrichtungen sind derzeit möglich. Umso wichtiger ist, dass möglichst viele von uns verstehen, was gerade passiert und was unsere realistischen Handlungsoptionen sind. Let's get it right.

Happy Reading.

New data suggest the ass has fallen out of the creator economy. This weeks column for The Drum:https://lnkd.in/gKAZ6wbR

The creator of Claude Code says to delete your .md files every six months. Your skills too. Your hooks too.

His reasoning: the model has moved on.

All those instructions were written to patch weaknesses that do not exist any more, and Anthropic proved it on themselves. They cut more than 80% of Claude Code's own system prompt when Opus 5 shipped and it got better, not worse.

I am not deleting mine.

I built the middle option instead.

It reads Anthropic's current documentation for whatever model you are actually running, then audits your .md, your skills and your hooks against it and hands you an implementation plan.

Keep what still earns its place, cut what the model no longer needs.

Run it every time a new model drops.

Full audit prompts are here → https://lnkd.in/eeND5P4t

Real scale isn't headcount—it's ecosystem.

During my #sponsored interview with Peter Bayer, CEO of Visa Cash App RB F1 Team at the Hungarian Grand Prix, he shared a vision for collaboration that stretches far beyond the pit wall. 🏎️

With a team constantly on the road across 24 races, VCARB relies on tools like Slack (part of Salesforce) for seamless internal operations. But what struck me most was how they are looking to use that same digital backbone to bring young creators directly into their daily workflow.

Instead of keeping collaboration tools strictly internal, Peter is opening the front door to an entire community.

🚩 As Peter put it:
"We're running a test phase at the moment to involve those creators through Slack into our daily business operations. It's way more than access to behind the scenes—we actually make them part of the team."

The bigger takeaway: when you connect real-time messaging with AI workflows, you don't just streamline your work—you invite your audience to help build your brand.
How are you turning passive followers into active co-creators?

🔥 Watch the full interview to see how F1 is redefining community, leadership, and digital operations: https://lnkd.in/dnS-Ngei

#SalesforcePartner #Leadership #FutureOfWork #CommunityBuilding #DigitalTransformation #Innovation #AgenticAI #F1

Are we building autonomous agents faster than we are learning to manage them?

For a long time, I assumed the hardest part of AI would be building more capable systems.

If agents could reason better, plan better, and operate more independently, organizations would naturally become more productive. That seemed like a reasonable assumption because, for decades, technology was the constraint.

Lately, I've started questioning that.

Every week brings another breakthrough. Agents can coordinate tasks, call tools, remember previous interactions, and solve problems that felt impossible only a year ago. Watching that progress is exciting, but it has also made me notice something that I don't think we talk about enough.

We're accelerating the intelligence of our systems much faster than we're evolving the way we lead them.

To me, that's where the real gap is beginning to appear.

When organizations introduce autonomous agents, they often imagine they're deploying better software. I think they're actually introducing a new kind of teammate, one that forces leaders to rethink responsibility, authority, trust, and decision-making.

That's a much bigger change than adopting another tool.

In The Human-Agent Orchestrator, I argue that leadership is gradually shifting from supervision to orchestration. The role of a leader is becoming less about reviewing every action and more about designing how humans and agents work together without creating confusion or bottlenecks.

That sounds subtle, but I believe it's one of the biggest organizational shifts of the AI era.

The more capable agents become, the less practical constant supervision becomes. Eventually, the quality of the system depends less on watching every decision and more on designing the conditions under which good decisions consistently happen.

That's why I find myself asking different questions today than I did a few years ago.

→ Are we investing as much in leadership as we are in autonomy?
→ Are managers learning how to orchestrate, or simply supervise more digital workers?
→ And if agents continue improving at today's pace, are our organizations prepared for what leadership will actually become?

Perhaps the biggest challenge isn't building autonomous agents.

Perhaps it's becoming the kind of leaders they require.

What do you think? Are we building autonomous agents faster than we're learning how to manage them?

#HumanAgentOrchestrator #HybridManagement #AgenticAI #OrchestrationDesign #AIReadiness

Stone Island spent 6 months on tour with hardcore and metalcore bands 😤

THE CALM AND THE CHAOS follows a bunch of bands I love, High Vis, Angel Du$t, Knocked Loose and Haywire 617.

Photographer and director Isaac Lamb followed them across Europe and North America.

It's about the values that have held hardcore together for decades as two of the most enduring independent communities in culture.

Both built with zero permission from the mainstream.

Just people organising themselves around something they refuse to water down.

The bands wore their own current and vintage Stone Island… whatever was already hanging in the wardrobe.

Then collector Archie Maher opened the archive.

And the whole project was brought to life by Shelter Studio, co-founded by a mate of mine who really knows his stuff.

You can't buy your way into cultural associations like this.
You share values with a community long enough that they claim you.

Then when they do, you document it properly with the tastemakers who've been holding it up for twenty years.

This goes hard!

💚 ✌️

Here’s what winning the European Bench Press Championships taught me about B2B sales 😜

Sunday morning, Druskininkai, Lithuania. 8am weigh-in.

10am. Bar is loaded. Lifting has started.

But I could hear “no lift” from the stage. Again and again.

The bench pad was firmer than everyone was used to. Refs were quick with the red lights.

Opened with a 145kg bench press. It went up feeling like 500kg. No lift. Overturned by jury: good lift.

10-minute wait

Second lift 150kg. Felt better. Good lift - two white lights to one red.

But replay showed glutes losing contact with bench. 7mm in it. Refs overturned by jury: no lift.

10-minute wait

152.5kg is on the bar and lifting it means gold, for now. Others already failed it.

My turn.

In that moment, I couldn’t get any stronger. No technical cue would make a difference. It’s all about the mental game.

My self-talk is part realness, part inviting the unknown.

I go back to one question:

What do I know for sure?

I’m here to win
This is why I train
I have lifted this many times
My LinkedIn friends are counting on me

Sure Jodie, but that’s the same for everyone. We can’t all win. There’s more to this than logic and reason.

So then I surrender control to… I’m not sure who or what.

I’m not religious. But the place beyond me knows things I don’t.

So I talk to it.

I say I don’t need to know everything for sure. I trust that:

Everything is always working out for me.

What’s meant for me will find me.

This will unfold exactly as it’s meant to.

Then my friends’ words flashed through my mind:

Jupiter just entered Leo.
It’s the year of the fire horse.
The lions gate portal is open.

The power of the universe is within you.

Don’t know what that means. But sounds good. Count me in.

Commentator calls my name. 152.5kg.

I stomp out there on a mission to lift the weight I’d lifted 20+ times in the gym.

Good lift.

All 3 refs agree. 3-person jury can’t overturn.

Now we wait.

Denmark want gold too. Danish athlete now has to lift 155kg.

She stomps out there on a mission.

At the last second of the lift, she misses.

Cook - Great Britain, gold.

Tears. Cheers.

Relief I learned the words to the national anthem.

Excited to tell my LinkedIn friends about this 😆

Then the GB women’s team won gold too.

C’MAAAAANNNNN.

And if you’re still here for the B2B sales lesson, I got you.

And it’s this.

Trying to control everything will send you crazy and make you miserable.

Business and life are 10X more enjoyable and richer in every way when you learn to love the unknown.

Life is a game. Business is a game. Only one way to win:

PLAY

-

This CTA was accidental, I swear. But today my new book is out. The Game of Business and How to Play it.

Adapted from the 1925 book, The Game of Life and How to Play it.

https://lnkd.in/e6chhjGR

I see some stupid shit on LinkedIn

These are the 3 worst:

1 - AI comments

You look like an idiot, it destroys your reputation and it doesn’t do anything.


2 - Sending this message

“Hi [Name], I help businesses like yours 10x their revenue in 90 days. Let me know if you want to chat about how I can help you grow your business!”

$0 was made in the history of LinkedIn with this message.


3 - I don’t even know what to call this, but please stop.

ENTREPRENEUR 🚀 – BUILDER OF DREAMS 💡 – DISRUPTER OF INDUSTRIES 🌍 – 10X GROWTH EXPERT 📈 – CONNECTOR OF PEOPLE 🤝 – SPEAKER | MENTOR | VISIONARY 🔥

It’s the equivalent to the guy on Tinder holding a fish in every photo.

What else would you add?

I added a few more in the comments.


PS - Sorry for being brutal. I’ve preached this for 18 mths. Yet it still doesn’t get through. So I’m trying a different route.

I don't tolerate disrespect on my team...

i've sat across from people managing more money than i'll see in a lifetime, who assumed i couldn't possibly help them. i learned to love that assumption.

a lot of the executives i coach are decades into their careers. they manage $100M and up. they've forgotten more about finance than most people learn. and when they first meet me, there's often a flicker of a thought they're too polite to say:

"what could she possibly teach me?"

i used to find that intimidating. now i find it useful. here's what being underestimated taught me.

when someone underestimates you, they lower their guard.

they don't perform for you. they tell you the real problem, not the polished version, because they don't think you're a threat. and the real problem is the only thing you can actually solve. being underestimated gets you to the truth faster than being feared ever could.

it also forced me to be undeniable.

when no one assumes you're capable, "pretty good" doesn't cut it. you have to be so clearly useful that the assumption collapses on contact. i couldn't coast on a title or a reputation i didn't have yet. i had to be right, specifically and immediately, every single time. that pressure made me sharp in a way comfort never would have.

and here's the quiet thing underneath it all:

i never tried to convince anyone i belonged in the room.

i just did the work the room needed, until the question of whether i belonged stopped coming up. you don't win that argument by making it. you win it by making it irrelevant.

the executives who doubted me at first are some of my longest clients now.

not because i proved them wrong.

because i was too useful for the doubt to survive.

if you're the youngest, the newest, the most underestimated person in your room — good.

let them lower their guard. then be undeniable.

—

when's a time being underestimated actually worked in your favor? i think it's a hidden advantage almost no one talks about.

♻️ 𝘐𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘰𝘯𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘥, 𝘧𝘰𝘭𝘭𝘰𝘸 𝘮𝘦, Mariam Gogidze, 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘦 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘭𝘪𝘬𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴.

Most leaders eventually get a question they can't answer.

What you do in the next ten seconds decides whether the room trusts you more, or less.

You know the moment:

A pointed question in a board meeting, from an analyst, or from a direct report waiting for a decisive answer, and you don't actually have one.

The instinct is to fill the silence.

You kind of have an answer, but you're not sure.

But people remember how you handle the next ten seconds far more than whether you had the answer.

I've seen this in multiple boardrooms: People trust the leader who's straight about what they don't know.

First, take a pause before you speak. A few seconds of silence is seen as good consideration.

Then either:

✅ Ask a sharper question back.

"What's actually driving this?" or "What have we tried before?" turns you from someone expected to know everything into someone steering the conversation.

Or:

✅ Say what you don't know, and what you'll do about it.

"I don't have that number today, but I'll have it to you by Friday" builds more trust than a guess that turns out wrong.

People will remember your calm composure and your honesty, long after what you actually said.

And that is what builds your reputation.

📌 Save this for the next time a question catches you without an answer.
__

This is taken from my 'Board Presentation Skills' leadership development programme.

"Direct, relevant and to the point." - Senior MD, Top 5 Global Bank

Message me to see if it's a fit for your team.

A special moment in Kazimierz Dolny: the closing of the 20th anniversary edition of the BNP Paribas Dwa Brzegi - Festiwal Filmu i Sztuki 🎥🎞️.

Nine unforgettable days, well over 100 films and countless conversations, emotions and encounters. For the sixth time, BNP Paribas Bank Polska was the festival’s title sponsor, continuing the BNP Paribas Group’s century-long commitment to cinema 💯.

There is a reason why this partnership feels so natural to me. Cinema and business may seem like very different worlds, but at their best, they are driven by many of the same things:
💡 courage to turn ambitious ideas into reality,
🌍 diversity to challenge our perspective and help us see the world through different eyes,
🤝 collaboration because nothing truly meaningful is created alone.

These values also resonate strongly with the way we think about business. Progress requires the courage to embrace change and new technologies, openness to different perspectives and the ability to look beyond short-term results. It requires curiosity, creativity and, above all, people willing to build something together. And perhaps this is one of the reasons why culture matters so much.
I have never seen it as an afterthought to business. Culture develops curiosity and empathy. It challenges our assumptions, opens us to different experiences and reminds us that there is rarely only one way of looking at the world. These are not only cultural values. They are increasingly important qualities of responsible leadership.

Thank you, Grażyna Torbicka 🥰, the organisers, artists, volunteers, partners, local communities, the BNP Paribas Bank Polska team and, above all, the record-breaking festival audience for creating this unique experience 🙏🏼👏.

Twenty editions behind us and hopefully many more stories still to be told.

See you next year! 🎬

#SustainableFuture 🍀
#WeLoveCinema 💚
#BNPParibas 📈

"I hate my life" has become one of the most repeated sentences of an entire generation, and it almost never means what it says.

A sentence that once meant a crisis, said rarely, to a trusted person, with a marriage, a job, or a debt to blame, now slips out at 7 am while getting ready for work. It gets said over dinner, laughing. It gets typed under a meme and collects three thousand replies of "so real" from strangers who agree completely.

Ask a young person what exactly they hate, and there's a pause, then: "Nothing really. Just, like, all of it?" The old version of hating your life always had a target. This one points at just about everything.

It contradicts further when you walk through their week. The job, they like the work. The gym, they love working out. The cooking, the routine, the city: mostly things they chose and would choose again.

And if you offer them a way out entirely, a clean restart or their parents' life at 24, they refuse. After all the life-hating jokes, almost every one of them would pick this exact life again tomorrow.

A generation that loves the pieces of its life would not trade that life for any other, then why does reality seem so unbearable? Read more in my recent article: https://lnkd.in/d9gDEetA

#rajshamani #figuringout

A better December starts with what you choose to do in August.

5 new social impact funds + fellowships 🚀 🚀

1) Columbia University Human Rights Advocates Program: A residential capacity-building program at Columbia for grassroots human rights advocates.  https://lnkd.in/d2ThK2UK

2) Skoll Scholarship: A scholarship for social entrepreneurs to pursue an Oxford MBA. https://lnkd.in/d6i9mtfy 

3) Whitney Awards: Recognizes mid-career grassroots conservation leaders around the world. https://lnkd.in/dCYSQ_yZ

4) Global Institute Fellowship for Transforming Systems: A year-long, cohort-based fellowship for 20 education system leaders worldwide. https://lnkd.in/djP2fKju

5) AFSC Global Voices for Peace Small Seed Grants: Seed grants for community-led, Global South initiatives advancing peace, democracy, justice and nonviolence. https://lnkd.in/dXu6vfz2

☀️ For 60+ jobs, fellowships and more social impact opportunities like these every week, you can sign up at ethosatlas.com

A failure of ChatGPT Work & Claude Cowork is they assume that non-coders couldn't understand how to think about problems like a coder, so they hide all the technical choices and give you outputs alone.

But these choices matter, and are not that hard to understand. The models should instead explain choices like a good PM would (what should be delegated? what should be generalized? what tests to run?). You can kinda do this with a good prompt or skill, but it is something that Cowork and ChatGPT Work will need to get better at.

Die besten Mitarbeiter werden nicht angestellt – sie werden entwickelt.

Trotzdem sortieren die meisten Unternehmen Kandidaten nach Bullshit-Kriterien aus:

5 Jahre Erfahrung für einen Job, den es vor 3 Jahren noch gar nicht gab. Ein Abschluss, der nichts über die Fähigkeit aussagt, die eigentlich gebraucht wird.

Gerade jetzt ist das brandgefährlich. 🚨

Wir stecken mitten in einem Umbruch, wie's ihn selten gab.

KI verändert Prozesse in Wochen, nicht in Jahren.
Konkurrenz skaliert ihr Marketing über Nacht.
Ganze Geschäftsmodelle entstehen, die letztes Jahr noch nicht existiert haben.

In so einer Zeit ist die wichtigste Fähigkeit nicht mehr das, was jemand schon kann. 𝐄𝐬 𝐢𝐬𝐭 𝐝𝐢𝐞 𝐁𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐢𝐭𝐬𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐟𝐭, 𝐬𝐭ä𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐠 𝐝𝐚𝐳𝐮𝐳𝐮𝐥𝐞𝐫𝐧𝐞𝐧.

Und nirgends zeigt sich das deutlicher als bei KI.

Ein Kandidat ohne große KI-Erfahrung, aber mit echtem Hunger, sich reinzufuchsen? Kommt bei mir sofort in die engere Auswahl.

Ein Kandidat mit perfektem Lebenslauf, aber ohne diese Neugier? Wird in einem Jahr stillstehen, während der Rest der Branche weiterzieht.

KI ist gerade das Gold für Unternehmen. 𝐀𝐛𝐞𝐫 𝐆𝐨𝐥𝐝 𝐧ü𝐭𝐳𝐭 𝐧𝐢𝐜𝐡𝐭𝐬, 𝐰𝐞𝐧𝐧 𝐧𝐢𝐞𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐢𝐦 𝐓𝐞𝐚𝐦 𝐛𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐢𝐭 𝐢𝐬𝐭, 𝐝𝐚𝐧𝐚𝐜𝐡 𝐳𝐮 𝐠𝐫𝐚𝐛𝐞𝐧.

Deshalb: Hört auf, nach perfekten Lebensläufen zu suchen. Fangt an, nach Lernwillen zu fragen.

Fragt in Bewerbungsgesprächen nicht "Was hast du schon gemacht?", sondern "Was hast du dir zuletzt selbst beigebracht, ohne dass es jemand von dir verlangt hat?"

Die Antwort darauf verrät mehr über die nächsten 5 Jahre als jeder Lebenslauf.

Hast du schon mal jemanden eingestellt, der auf dem Papier nicht "perfekt" war und dich trotzdem überrascht hat? 👇

Contrary to newsfeed hype.
Getting in shape will not make you more money.
Believe me, tons of broke fit people.
100 bicep curls will not beat 100 cold emails.
If you wanna make more money, spend your time on things that make you more money.
- Alex ✊🏽

Now there's a whole movement trying to convince you that GTM Engineering and RevOps are two separate roles.

One builds the pipes. Another manages the process. Sounds organized. It's fragmented.

I think you want one person in charge of RevOps, talking to whoever the sales leader is, and those two are architecting things themselves. The RevOps person owns the system end to end. Infrastructure and process are the same thing when one person runs them.

Number one. The person who set up your lead routing doesn't know the rule for who gets which account, and the person who wrote the rule can't fix the pipe when it breaks. Two roles, zero accountability for the outcome.

Number two. Nobody going 10 to 50 million should be without a full time RevOps leader who owns territories, duplicate leads, response speed. All of it. Not just half.

Number three. Split the role and you split the system. Nobody owns the whole machine, and that's exactly where things fall apart.

Are you hiring two people to do one job, or do you have one person who owns the whole thing?

Wet n Wild 666.


No, this is not the name of a dirty/scary/weird movie.

It was lip liner.

And if you were a girl in the late 80s or early 90s, you may already know EXACTLY what I’m talking about.

My sister discovered it at CVS.

Wet n Wild.
Color 666.

A brownish/burgundy lip liner that cost 99 cents and somehow managed to make every girl I knew look 47% hotter.

We were poor.
There was no Sephora.
There were no makeup tutorials.

Nobody was "contouring."
I didn't know my undertones.
I didn't know I HAD undertones.

Nobody was selling me a $68 serum made from fermented Icelandic cloudberries harvested during a full moon.

We had CVS.
And $3.
And dreams.

You bought Wet n Wild 666, outlined your lips approximately three ZIP codes outside their natural border, slapped some shimmery pink gloss in the middle...

And suddenly?
SUPERMODEL.
Cindy Crawford could move over.
We were coming through.

I had completely forgotten about 666 until a few weeks ago when I ran into my childhood best friend.

We started reminiscing and she said, "I remember your mom used to keep your lip liner and eyeliner in the refrigerator so it was ready to be applied."

I nearly died laughing.

SHE DID.

There, nestled somewhere between the butter and a bottle of Wish-Bone Italian dressing, was our entire beauty department.

Cold eyeliner.
Cold lip liner.
Maybe $4 worth of inventory.

And we thought we looked FANTASTIC.

Now I walk into a makeup store and apparently I need primer, foundation, concealer, bronzer, highlighter, setting powder, setting spray, lip oil, brow gel, lash serum and six brushes whose individual purposes remain a mystery to me.

A teenage girl can have $600 worth of products sitting on her bathroom counter.

We had Wet n Wild 666.
For 99 cents.

I don't remember feeling poor when I put it on.
I remember feeling beautiful.

I remember standing in the mirror with my sister, getting ready to go somewhere, probably wearing something equally inexpensive, and thinking we looked like a million bucks.

Maybe that's the part I miss.
We didn't have much.
But it didn't take much to make us feel pretty.

Just 99 cents.
A little pink gloss.
And enough confidence to draw a completely new mouth on our faces. 😂

Anybody else remember Wet n Wild 666?

And PLEASE tell me what your broke-girl beauty product was.

#BrokeGirlBeauty
#99Cents
#Supermodels

This is home, truly. 🇸🇬
I grew up in Singapore.

And the older I get, the more I realise how
blessed I am to call this place home.
Because it wasn’t always this way.

My parents grew up in a very different Singapore.
There were times when there wasn’t enough food to eat.
When sleeping on wooden planks was normal.
When life was less about chasing your dreams, and more about getting by.

So I don’t take what I have today for granted.

I grew up in a Singapore where I had a safe space to learn, grow and thrive.

Where I could try different sports, explore the arts and slowly figure out who I wanted to be.

Where I could enjoy the hustle and bustle of the city, but still find little moments of peace in nature.

Where I could chase my passion for advertising, then take a leap and build a business of my own.

And where I got to watch my sister do the same.
From baking at home and tiny pop-ups,
to finally opening a café she can call her own.

Sometimes we get so caught up chasing the next milestone that we forget how lucky we are to even have the opportunity to dream.

Singapore gave me that opportunity.

To learn.
To try.
To fail.
To build.
To dream bigger.

And for that, I’ll always be grateful.

No matter where life takes me, this will always be home, truly. ❤️

Happy 61st birthday, Singapore. 🇸🇬

Covey published these in 1989.

They still come up in interview debriefs.

Not by name. Nobody sits in a hiring meeting and says “strong on habit five.”

(Credit to Jen Blandos for resurfacing Stephen Covey's 
7 Habits)

But listen to how Directors and VPs actually get evaluated and it's the same list wearing different clothes.

“She asked better questions than we did.”

“He had a 90-day plan before we asked for one.”

“They kept pushing for a version that worked for both teams.”

Same three habits. Different vocabulary.

Where I see things get uncomfortable for senior candidates:

At the senior level, you're not being scored on whether you have these habits. Most of you probably do.

You're being scored on whether you can demonstrate them in 45 minutes to five people who have never worked with you.

That's a completely different skill, and almost nobody practices it.

The people I work with who land the offer aren't better leaders than the ones who don't. They're just better at showing it when they’re in the interview.

If you're interviewing for a leadership role right now and you can't name which of these you'd actually prove in the loop, close that gap before your next final round.

What I wish I was told before I had success.

The “Hate Us ‘Cuz They Ain’t Us” Curve:

When you first start out, they tell you...

You’re lame.
You’re crazy.
That’ll never work.
Oh, she’s a one-hit wonder.
She probably has a rich dad.
Or slept her way there.

THEN, we hit the top of the curve. Your success is obvious. And things start to change...

They say…

Oh yeah, I know her.
Hey, long time no talk!
Love to meet up and pick your brain.
How did you do that?

And the grand finale...

They ask you for a job.

If success is your goal, expect people to talk a lot of crap for a long time. Let them.

Because one day, you’ll just get to point at the scoreboard.