Ditch work

For the next 5 minutes, let’s elevate your career.

In today’s email:

Instagram is designed to hack our dopamine and oxytocin streams. It’s fiendishly addictive. I watch too many reels about wild animals. Fortunately, Instagram is also an excellent source of business and career information.

This morning, I watched Eric Schmidt - the former CEO of Google - talk about how fast AI was learning mathematics and physics. A different reel about the economist John Nash reminded me how human collaboration is a long-term, winning strategy.

We can cultivate Instagram’s algorithm to be positive and informative.

Cate Hall wrote in her recent Substack article, Are you stuck in movie logic?:

“Have you ever noticed just how much of the drama in movies is generated by an unspoken rule that the characters aren’t allowed to communicate well? Instead of naming the problem, they’re forced to skirt around it until the plot makes it impossible to ignore. It’s the cheapest way to build effective drama, but if you don’t fully dissolve yourself in the movie logic, the whole time you want to scream, “can’t anyone just talk about what’s happening directly?!”

Dysfunctional teams can be trapped in movie logic. They don’t have the conversations they need to have. We can break free of this. Simple language works: “I would like to discuss how we can make our relationship stronger” or “Something felt strange in that meeting, perhaps something important wasn’t said.” We can be direct and prompt a discussion that moves us forward.

Set “no-meetings” mornings. Block your calendar for deep work. This fosters creativity, productivity, and a state of flow.

Defend the time as if you’re with your most important client.

CareerCoacha has more than 40,000 readers. People joined because they care about being a high performer in their jobs. This care, or conscientiousness, predicts long-term career success better than any other personality trait.

With this in mind, we urge you to ditch work. Not forever. Just one afternoon. Go to a movie, to the beach, or to lunch and don’t return until tomorrow. Have leisure. If you don’t have flexibility in your job, schedule it for the weekend.

Emily Cummins (1987 — ) was born in Wakefield, UK. She graduated with first-class honours in Business Management from the University of Leeds. From age four, Cummins’ grandfather gave her a hammer and taught her how to make toys using scraps of material in his garden shed. Repurposing materials inspired her focus on sustainable design.

Cummins spent her gap year in Africa working with communities to develop her sustainable refrigerator invention. The fridge operates on evaporative cooling - no electricity, solar panels, chemicals, or moving parts needed. Sand, wool, or soil is packed between two cylinders and soaked with clean or dirty water. When the sun heats the outer shell, the water evaporates, drawing heat away from the inner container. This keeps contents as low as 6°C for several days. Cool enough to preserve food and medicines.

Cummins’ fridge has improved daily life and health for thousands. She was acknowledged as Barclays Woman of the Year Award and Cosmopolitan’s Ultimate Save-the-Planet Pioneer. Some of Cummins’ career wisdom:Build something 100 people love, not something 1 million people kind of like.