The Performance Bargain Broke
For decades, performance promised stability. AI, layoffs, and shifting workplace incentives have rewritten the rules. It’s time to rethink success.
The First Dashboard You Had Was a Report Card
Before KPIs, dashboards, and LinkedIn, there was the report card. Here’s how school taught us to measure our worth long before we entered the workplace.
When the Scoreboard Becomes Identity
We built scoreboards to measure our lives. Somewhere in the last decade some of us started living for the scoreboard instead.
From Baby Oil to Glitter Sunscreen: Slathering on Identity
How did sunscreen evolve from a simple health product into a symbol of identity? From baby oil to glitter sunscreen, discover how sunscreen has evolved and what that reveals about marketing and consumers.
Performance Parenting and the Optimized Infant
Why are brands so eager to reach expecting parents first? Explore how marketing, status, and anxiety shape the modern market for the optimized infant.
The Market Didn’t Rediscover Polymaths. It Rediscovered Uncertainty.
The polymath trend isn’t a rediscovery of human range. It’s what happens when AI reprices specialization and the market needs a new ideal to sell back to workers.
You’re Sleeping Wrong (According to Sleep Product Marketers)
Sleep didn’t become a billion-dollar industry because we started sleeping worse. It happened because anxiety about sleep was remarkably easy to sell.
How LinkedIn Turned Us Into Performance Consumers
LinkedIn did not just change networking. It changed how workers understand identity, ambition, visibility, and professional value in an AI-driven performance economy.
My next book: Purpose Over Performance
A first look at my next book, Purpose Over Performance, and why one part of that conversation became The Graduation Gift, available now for preorder.
Smoking as a Signal
Why is smoking showing up everywhere again? Not because the habit has returned, but because the image has—reshaped by culture, identity, and the growing demand for control.