According to research done by outdoor retailer REI, 72% of women say they feel liberated or free when they are outdoors, but only 32% describe themselves as “outdoorsy.” One of the most cited reasons for this is the primarily male-dominated news, social media, and marketing around the outdoor industry. In response this week, REI is launching a new initiative called “Force of Nature,” a commitment to making women the prime focus of the company’s nonprofit investments, gear development, and marketing for the rest of 2017.

“REI can help inspire and enable more women to make the outdoors a part of their lives,” says CEO Jerry Stritzke. “Through ‘Force of Nature,’ women will be front and center in our brand and storytelling spaces, but our commitment goes way beyond a ‘brand’ discussion.”

The initiative includes putting more than $1 million of the company’s community investments directly into nonprofits that get women and girls into the outdoors. It also extends into product development, and while REI has been developing female-specific gear since 2000, the brand acknowledges there’s more work to be done. The brand’s senior vice-president of merchandising Susan Viscon is working to fill the remaining gaps with partners like Arcteryx, Osprey, Outdoor Research, and others. In marketing, for the rest of 2017 REI is putting women first in all its content, including a partnership with Outside magazine to publish its first-ever all women’s issue on April 11. And since the company’s survey reported that 43% of women said finding someone to go outdoors with is a barrier, REI will be launching 1,000 national events and classes for women, starting May 6.

Stritzke says the idea for Force of Nature came from within the company. “More than two years ago, a group of women at REI were thinking about gender equity in the outdoors because we’ve been in this space for decades,” he says. “They asked a simple question: ‘Why are the stories we typically see in the outdoors so male dominated?’ From that seed came the idea for using the power of our brand and storytelling to help change that ‘face’ of the outdoors.”

The company’s research included a survey or more than 2,000 women, but Stritzke says they began by talking to the women already passionate about the outdoors. “We started by listening to the women who are already making the outdoors the center of their life,” he says. “They had some powerful things in common—namely greater confidence and fulfillment across their personal and professional lives. We conducted a national survey and heard the same things. That made our path very clear.”

As a company, REI certainly aims to walk the walk of gender balance, with one-third of its board and 44% of corporate officers being women, including the CIO, CFO, and board chair. Stritzke says that goes all the way back to the co-op’s 107-year-old cofounder Mary Anderson.

“REI was founded by a both a man and a woman. It’s in our DNA,” says Stritzke. “We believe that access to the outdoors is a right that should be available for all—men and women. Force of Nature aims to ensure that women are just as encouraged and equipped to embrace life outside as men. That’s about more than business or sales. That’s about impacting the quality of people’s lives, and as a co-op, that kind of impact is our greater measure of success.”

If last year’s award-winning juggernaut #OptOutside is any indication, Force of Nature will be something to watch over the next nine months and, according to Stritzke, beyond. Even though the new initiative is pegged as a 2017-specific campaign, the CEO says it won’t end in December.

“This year we are swinging the pendulum to focus on women, but this effort has been in the works years internally, and this is just the start of the external push,” says Stritzke. “For example, our merchandising team, led by [Viscon], has been working for more than a decade to address how we create better gear for women that helps them perform at their absolute best.  We’ve made a ton of progress and plan to keep working. So yes, you’ll see more of this type of work from us in the future.”

Ryan Murphy is a man possessed.

The showrunner and producer has become one of the foremost storytellers in television because every project he creates is deeply rooted in his own personal passions, sometimes to the point of near tunnel vision fanaticism to materialize concepts onscreen exactly how he sees them in his head, come hell or high cost–to wit, episode five of Feud.

In the first installment of Murphy’s newest anthology, Feud depicts the storied rivalry of Hollywood legends Joan Crawford and Bette Davis just before, during, and after co-starring in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Although his creative praxis is to operate from a point of direct interests, Feud hits on an even more emotional level than average for Murphy.

Back when he was a syndicated columnist for Knight Ridder, Murphy spent four hours getting to know Bette Davis not long before she passed away, an interview which planted the early seeds of what would become Feud.

“The first thing she said to me was, ‘do you want to hold my Oscar?’ So that scene [in episode five] where [Davis] gives that whole speech about how she holds [her Oscar] in bed when she watches TV, she actually told me that and I always wanted to use that reportage somewhere,” Murphy says. “I thought it was very moving and lovely.”

What was even more moving for Murphy, albeit unexpected, was what Feud evolved into.

“I learned that you can make a show for one reason but to be open to the idea that it can become about something else. The first half of it is about feminism and how women are not treated well in the industry, but the last half of the show, starting with episode five, is a meditation on loneliness and what it’s like to be dismissed or not treated well because you’re old–you become invisible,” Murphy says. “It reminded me a lot of how my grandparents felt when they got old. Suddenly the world slows down, people aren’t calling you on the phone, there’s no career, and your children are gone.”

As Murphy mentions, episode five of Feud is most definitely the flashpoint of the season. Not only does it shift the tone for the remaining episodes, it’s what Murphy claims as his “Holy Grail” in the scope, level of production, and least of all budget.

It’s 1963 and Bette Davis has received a best-actress Oscar nomination for her role in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Her co-star and rival Joan Crawford? Zilch. For Davis, she’s on the precipice of becoming the first female actress with three Oscars. For Crawford, it’s yet another affront in a life that seems like nothing but disappointments. In the lead up to Hollywood’s biggest night, Crawford and her friend and entertainment columnist Hedda Hopper embark on a vicious campaign to persuade the voting members of the Academy to bypass Davis. What’s more, Crawford practically strong-arms the other actresses nominated in the same category to allow her to accept their award should one of them win.

“I grew up with this book that I was obsessed with called Inside Oscar by Mason Wiley and Damien Bona. The Crawford vs. Davis Academy Awards chapter was always my favorite because when I first read it, I remember saying, ‘none of this happened, right?’ But it was all true,” Murphy says. “I was a huge fan of that story because it was so dramatic and had so much conflict. Once [Feud] was picked up, I wanted to direct [this episode] because I feel like all I really knew about it was what a bitch Joan Crawford was for doing that. But if somebody goes to that length, there must be so much pain involved.”

Out of Feud’s eight episodes, Murphy directs three with number five easily being his crown jewel.

“It was was one of the most important episodes because it was the height of the feud. You saw how far Joan Crawford would be willing to go to get back at Bette Davis for the slights that she thought she had committed,” Murphy says. “The thing that I was amazed by was that her act of revenge actually hurt herself as well because she was a profit participant in the movie. If Bette Davis had won the Oscar, Joan Crawford would have made more money, because when you win an Oscar your movie makes more money at the box office. But she didn’t care.”

Encapsulating the emotional weight of Davis and Crawford’s rift while trying to stay as faithful to that particular Hollywood era became an intense labor of love for Murphy. “I was a kid who grew up in Indiana with cornfields and churches, so the Academy Awards was the one night in the year that I could have this entrée into a dream which was Hollywood for me. It was important to me and I wanted to treat it reverently,” he says. “It really was a love letter to Hollywood.”

Below, Murphy breaks down the meticulous and obsessives lengths he went through in order to pull off the stunning achievement that is episode five of Feud.

Fabricating Authenticity And Burning Oscars

“We scouted in Santa Monica and found the real auditorium where the Oscars were held. I was so excited that they were going to let us shoot there and then you walk in and it’s plastic stadium seating now–it’s not what it was. We had to spend a lot of money, exterior and interior, recreating [the 1963 Oscars] because for me it became my Holy Grail. If we’re going to do this, we were going to do it right. We had a whole research team dedicated to bringing me photographs of every possible thing that we could find from that night in terms of the green room and the food and the color of the carnations.

The first thing we did was recreate the stage. It was a very weird set that year because it had kind of a cake-tiered display where all the Oscars were. We made all of those Oscars, and they’re different than the Oscars today–they weighed differently. Afterwards we burned them all out of respect to the Academy and we got rid of the molds. Outside of the civic center, we recreated the red carpet and all of those bleachers and scaffolding. All that early 60s ironwork had long been torn down, so we recreated that physically and digitally.”

Suffering For Art: Joan Crawford’s Back-Breaking Gown

“We recreated all of the dresses of the women including the dress that Jessica Lange wore that pulled her back out three times because it was literally 45 to 50 pounds. Jessica kept begging me to hurry up and get [the shot] because it hurt to wear it. But Joan Crawford wore it so we were like, ‘you know what Jessica, you can suck it up. If Joan could do it, so can you.’ So she laughed it off.”

The Fourth Time’s A Charm: Inside That Two-Minute Steadicam Shot

“I had always written in the script a steadicam shot: what it’s like to win and go backstage from that moment all the way into the pressroom. I found out that [Lawrence of Arabia director] David Lean was a little confused about where to go [after his Best Director win] but Crawford, who was like the mayor of Oscar world, knew her way around that auditorium in a way that I think only stagehands did. So we wrote that in the script.

I wrote all that scene based on the original architecture of the place, and then we showed up to scout it and almost all of it had been ripped down, removed, or enlarged. I was devastated but I wasn’t going to give up the ghost. So with our brilliant production designer Judy Becker, we rebuilt the back stage that was actually there that night. What you see, only 20 percent of that was real and the rest of it we built: the dressing rooms, pressroom, green room, hallways–we built everything. After it was built, we dedicated an entire day for that steadicam shot which was very difficult because it had anywhere from 100 to 150 extras. I would pretend to be Joan Crawford and the camera would follow behind me and we would walk it over and over and over again so that the extras knew when to be cued and where to turn. Sometimes they would have to hug a wall–there would be only a half an inch of space between them and the steadicam operator because hallways and rooms back then were much smaller than they are now.

On the fourth take, it was perfect and we only did one more [for safety]. What you see in [episode five] is the fourth take.

Jessica, Susan, and Catherine [Zeta-Jones] thought I was insane. They keep saying, ‘why are you so obsessed with the shot?’ And then when we ran it and they loved it because it really was a technical feat for them as actors and they had a lot of fun doing it–even though the dress was murder on poor Jessica Lange’s back!”

The Art of Crafting Suspense Around What’s Already Known

“Bette Davis was desperate to win, and more than desperate to win was convinced she had won. So the moment of her not winning and just having the wind knocked out of her was devastating. She actually spoke to me about how she had never gone through anything more painful than that and that her whole dream in life was to have three [Oscars]. It wasn’t just about the awards–she thought it was going to lead to better work. She told me that it actually did feel like a gut punch.

I was interested in giving viewers the experience of what it’s like to be waiting in the wings and to win, and what it’s like to lose. So that scene where [Davis] loses and leans forward and almost passes out, I started from an emotional place because I myself have been nominated for awards and won–and I’ve been nominated for awards and lost. I know that feeling of, they’re reading your name and the camera is on you and you can’t react because if you do you look like an asshole, so you’re in this sense of suspended animation. For the 10 seconds it takes to get through it, the reality is so bizarre.”

It was really an emotional show. I just love the actresses in it and the actors–we had fun doing it and we cared so much about those two women. And I think that comes across.”

Before the internet, people interested in body modification—not just tattoo and piercing enthusiasts, but those drawn to more unusual practices like ear pointing, tongue splitting, suspension, scarification, and the voluntary amputation of limbs and organs—had a difficult time meeting others who shared their interests.

The internet, of course, changed everything: You can chat and connect with anyone from your computer. And in 1994—more than a decade before Facebook launched—body modification enthusiasts started their own social media platform: the Body Modification E-zine, or BME.

First operating as a bulletin board service (an early form of online message boards), BME eventually added features and functions that were forerunners before now-familiar online tools: blogging, wikis, online dating, and podcasts.

But as sites like Facebook and Myspace emerged, BME found itself competing for attention with these new “global communities.” The story of the website shows how online communities can form and fall apart—and how Facebook’s monolithic presence makes enduring internet communities for people on the margins of society that much more precarious.

A commitment to authenticity

BME, along with the long-standing punk scene in New Brunswick, New Jersey and Brooklyn’s booming drag culture, are the three communities I studied in my forthcoming book Digital Countercultures and the Struggle for Community. All three constitute what I call “countercultural communities”—groups that define themselves as being, in some way, opposed to the mainstream. As someone who studies digital culture, I’ve been able to see how outsiders can help us understand the biases that are built into everyday tools and devices, which are (usually) designed by straight, white men.

So what can we learn from a site like BME?

First, it’s important to note some key factors shaping how BME managed membership and participation. In contrast to sites that require people to use their “authentic” names to create a profile, BME allowed users to pick a pseudonym. The only requirement was an authentic interest in body modification. As a condition of membership, users had to submit photos or firsthand accounts of their modifications. These images and accounts were then vetted by BME members.

While tattoos and piercings might seem fairly common today, this was less true when BME was getting its start in the mid-1990s. And it’s still common for people who have undergone some of the more extreme body modification procedures, like tongue splitting and subdermal implants, to be ostracized.

BME’s rules for participation were meant to protect those who felt stigmatized. It also required members to take their role in the community seriously. Accounts could be suspended if users didn’t post regularly, meaning that people couldn’t simply sign up and lurk.

But a number of challenges arose. Body modification became increasinglycommon, threatening BME’s outsider status. Then mainstream social network sites started to take off, and immediately started competing for users with smaller, niche sites like BME.

Trying to keep pace

After Myspace and Facebook launched, BME struggled to retain members who were attracted to the larger audiences and more sophisticated features of the newer, better-funded sites.

In 2011, BME planned an overhaul: For the first time, they’d be utilizing designers from outside the modified community. After a series of delays and budget issues, the new version of the site launched. But there were bugs, and some users didn’t like the new aesthetic, which seemed to mirror contemporary mainstream websites.

Meanwhile, content that was mundane on BME, like tongue splitting and ear pointing, could be extremely provocative on mainstream sites. BME users that gravitated to these new social media networks could rack up thousands, rather than dozens, of views. And as opposed to the outdated, sometimes buggy software on BME, platforms like Facebook offered slicker design and more sophisticated features, like photo tagging and geotagging.

Over time, these challenges to the BME community became increasingly problematic. Members deleted accounts or stopped posting. By 2015, the main community forum—which used to have hundreds of posts a day—went without a single comment for over six months.

BME predicted many of the web’s functions and features, but it failed to anticipate its own demise.

The WalMart of the internet?

How does the story of BME help us understand our relationship to technology?

When I asked BME’s owner, Rachel Larratt, about mainstream social media sites, she described them as generic and bland.

As a small-business owner, Larratt recognizes that Facebook can help businesses like hers thrive. She just disagrees with Facebook’s contention that it’s one big “global community.”

“It’s all marketing,” she told me. “They are trying to foster that idea [of being a community]. It’s just staged, really, like a big-box store trying to pretend like they are a local small-business owner.”

In building a massive user base, the major social media sites resort to the lowest common denominator for terms like “community” and “user guidelines.” Facebook’s user guidelines apply to all of its users, even though its user base covers an incredibly diverse group of people, perspectives, and values.

These policies can be tweaked and updated with minimal notice to users, which is also true of its design. Users have limited ability to communicate with Facebook’s administrators when there’s a problem, as we’ve seen when drag queens demanded changes to the “real name” policy, when nursing mothers rejected censorship of breastfeeding photos, and when LGBT activists insisted that photos of same-gender couples kissing shouldn’t be blocked for being “obscene.” In all of these cases, Facebook attempted to enforce a blanket set of policies on groups that have a very different set of ethics and values.

I’ve found that the people who lose from this approach are those on the margins, whose identities and experiences are least likely to be anticipated by designers without significant experiences of marginalization.

A generic, rootless place

Online life can be thought of as a place, albeit one that’s more conceptual than physical.

Yet in Facebook—with its massive user base—Larratt sees a kind of placelessness, much as the generic predictability of Walmart contrasts with the authentic idiosyncrasies of a locally owned grocery store. The blandness of Facebook’s interface and the lack of options to customize or personalize its design contribute to this feeling.

Today, many think the internet is best accessed through a mobile device, which is sometimes labeled as a “mobile first” approach to design. Mobile first assumes that people will access the internet from a smartphone rather than a laptop, a design ethic that emphasizes apps and instant, seamless access, in contrast to a model of stationary and sustained attention. In other words, it’s designing for someone who wants to check the news on a lunch break or scan through Reddit threads on the commute home from work.

For those who value feeling as if going online is a physical meeting point, easy and fleeting connectivity can be perceived as a bad thing, trading convenience for commitment. BME’s community was built up through sustained and regular participation. It’s the difference between grabbing a Dunkin’ Donuts coffee on the way to work and being a regular at a neighborhood bar. Becoming part of a community involves hanging out, messing around, and committing to local rules for participation.

To be clear, I’m not making an anti-progress push against mobile devices. And I also don’t want to suggest that countercultural communities are best served by outdated technologies. But it’s worth considering whether mobility is always a good thing—and what assumptions go into the push for uninterrupted access.

Technology, and more specifically digital technology, often takes the blame for fears of social isolation. Hype about video-game and internet addiction, along with stereotypes linking an interest in technology to poor social skills, makes the internet an easy scapegoat.

Yet researchers have found that internet access and social media use are linked to more diverse social networks. My research shows that the internet can be a powerful tool of connection and community support, especially for people who have non-mainstream interests or identities.

BME was meant to provide common ground for people with uncommon interests, and for many years it did just that, becoming an online meeting spot as well as the authoritative source for body modification information. But BME’s model lost out to mainstream platforms that prioritized bigger online audiences and more sophisticated design over niche interests and user-driven guidelines for membership and participation.

So as we continue to design platforms for an ever-growing population of users, it’s important to consider who’s going to be on the other end of the keyboard. Otherwise only a certain kind of community will flourish, while others will struggle to survive.

Jessa Lingel, Assistant Professor of Communication, University of Pennsylvania

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

It may have arrived on April Fools Day, but this was no prank. Instead, it was what a fanbase ever-increasing in size and rapaciousness has been craving for 18 months: the return of Rick and Morty.

Since the last episode of the show’s second season aired on Adult Swim in October 2015, Rick and Morty has experienced a rare word-of-mouth boom. Testimony about the hilarious, multi-layered sci-fi cartoon leapt off of Reddit and into sports bars and office kitchens around the country. While it was popular during its first two seasons’s run, something galvanized in the show’s absence, like the popularity of the Pixies after the band first broke up. So, when the show returned unannounced, like a mid-summer visit from Santa Claus, the Internet had a meltdown. Adult Swim’s 24-hour loop of the third season premiere, unaccompanied by news of when further episodes would arrive, quickly vaulted to the top of the trending topics on Twitter. Here’s a quick rundown for newcomers on why you should care.

What’s The Big Deal About Rick and Morty?

Community creator, podcaster, and all-around mad comedy genius, Dan Harmon, invented the show with Justin Roiland, an animator and voice actor who proved an unlikely foil. The pair used the ridiculous central relationship of Back to the Future as a launchpad for a show that sends a megalomaniac, chaotic good scientist and his gawky grandson on random adventures every week. If that sounds simple, it’s not. The show is bursting at the seams with mind-bending pretzel logic, fantastical world-building, jokes that come at a 30 Rock pace, and a hostile relationship with the third wall. Rick and Morty premiered in late 2013, and its first two seasons spanned 21 episodes with what appears to be endless repeat-viewing potential.

What’s the Big Deal About the Third Season Premiere?

After the second season ended in October 2015, there has been precious little information about when a third would arrive. Marginal side character Mister Poopybutthole addressed the issue directly in a tag at the end of the season 2 finale, saying the third season would come in “like a year and a half,” which would be right about now. However, the actual release date always has been, and remains, a mystery. Fans were expecting it at some point in late 2016, and they were ultimately disappointed. Dan Harmon has regularly addressed their rabid concern on his podcast, Harmontown, and revealed the cause for the delay in a statement on Twitter, saying: “[T]he truth is not dramatic. It’s quite boring. We love our show. It’s a weird show that we struggle to not overthink OR underthink. As for now, they’re drawing it.”

Adult Swim didn’t help calm fans down, instead releasing this elaborate “rickroll” back in February, which teased a clip from the third season but instead offered words from the show’s first two seasons edited to form the lyrics to “Never Gonna Give You Up.” When the third season premiere did drop, late on April 1, fans were convinced it was just another burn—and they were in ecstasies when it turned out not to be.

What’s The Big Deal About The Episode Itself?

After such a lengthy delay, fans rightly worried that the show’s writers might have crumbled beneath the weight of expectations, in the wake of its expanding popularity. “The Rickshank Rickdemption,” however, should disappoint no one. Although Rick and Morty has often played with the notion of continuity, the third season premiere picks up precisely where its predecessor left off—an impossible corner the writers had written it into—and finds a satisfying way out. Not only that, but there’s also contextually appropriate callbacks to past events, like the bodies buried in the backyard, the Citadel of Ricks, and the Cronenberg Universe. (The tag at the end of the episode telegraphs the return of Tammy and Birdperson, now revived, RoboCop-style, as Phoenixperson.) It may not be the best place to start for newcomers—it’s actually a terrible place to start—but it’s assurance that the journey will be worth it. By the time any Morty-come-lately’s get there, they should feel as satisfied as Rick finding McDonald’s Mulan tie-in limited time Szechuan McNugget dipping sauce—which is actually a real thing.

Look for the rest of season 3 to premiere… sometime this summer.

For Intel, it was an important announcement: Moore’s law is not dead.

Before a gaggle of tech writers and analysts, company officials last week displayed charts and illustrations showing how transistor density on an integrated circuit continues to double every two years—consistent with a prediction made more than five decades ago by Intel cofounder Gordon Moore.

The intended message: Intel hasn’t lost its zeal for big leaps in computing, even as it changes the way it introduces new chips, and branches beyond the PC processor into other areas like computer vision and the internet of things.

“Number one, too many people have been writing about the end of Moore’s law, and we have to correct that misimpression,” Mark Bohr, Intel’s technology and manufacturing group senior fellow and director of process architecture and integration, says in an interview. “And number two, Intel has developed some pretty compelling technologies … that not only prove that Moore’s law is still alive, but that it’s going to continue to provide the best benefits of density, cost performance, and power.”

But while Moore’s law soldiers on, it’s no longer associated with the types of performance gains Intel was making 10 to 20 years ago. The practical benefits of Moore’s law are not what they used to be.

Slower steps, bigger leaps

For each new generation of microprocessor, Intel used to adhere to a two-step cycle, called the “tick-tock.” The “tick” is where Moore’s law takes effect, using a new manufacturing process to shrink the size of each transistor and pack more of them onto a chip. The subsequent “tock” introduces a new microarchitecture, which yields further performance improvements by optimizing how the chip carries out instructions. Intel would typically go through this cycle once every two years.

But in recent years, shrinking the size of transistors has become more challenging, and in 2016, Intel made a major change. The latest 14 nm process added a third “optimization” step after the architectural change, with modest performance improvements and new features such as 4K HDR video support. And in January, Intel said it would add a fourth optimization step, stretching the cycle out even further. The move to a 10 nm process won’t happen until the second half of 2017, three years after the last “tick,” and Intel expects the new four-step process to repeat itself.

This “hyper scaling” allows computing power to continue to increase while needing fewer changes in the manufacturing process. If you divide the number of transistors in Intel’s current tick by the surface area of two common logic cells, the rate of improvement still equals out to more than double every two years, keeping Moore’s law on track.

“Yes, they’ve taken longer, but we’ve taken bigger steps,” Bohr said during his three-hour presentation.

Why didn’t anyone draw this seemingly obvious conclusion sooner? Intel says its competitors in the semiconductor fabrication business have been muddying the waters, either using metrics that can’t be quantified, or moving to new manufacturing processes despite smaller gains in transistor size. With the metric Intel is now using, the company estimates that competitors are about three years behind in transistor density. And while chip makers do have a tendency to favor metrics that look flattering, Bohr says its methodology has been proposed by others in the industry before, and it can be verified by third parties.

“If company A doesn’t want to report their density using that metric, other companies, including a company that does reverse-engineering reports, can easily do the necessary measurements and report on that number,” Bohr says.

Gartner analyst Sam Wang agrees that Intel is being fair in its methodology, though he’s not sure whether the rest of the industry will follow along. He says it’s up to the media and analysts to popularize the measurement Intel is pushing.

“If all foundries agree to adopt this method, that would be a great comparison,” he says.

Moore’s Law in the real world

Despite the continued advancement of Moore’s law, the reality is that Intel’s processors aren’t making the performance leaps that they used to, and that was true even before the end of the tick-tock cycle. This chart from Elsevier is illustrative, showing that around 2003, processor performance gains dropped from 52% per year to 22% per year. Intel’s current 7th-generation Core i7 processor is a 15% improvement over the previous generation, and the upcoming 8th-generation Core i7 is expected to be similar.

But while the 1990s and early aughts were a period of rapid growth in processing power due to innovations in process technology and microarchitecture, Moore’s law in itself does not weigh in on any particular performance improvement.

“Just to go back to the original papers by Gordon Moore, his prediction was that transistor density would double every two years. He didn’t make any statement about performance,” Bohr says.

Still, aren’t more powerful processors the point of this whole exercise? Not exactly. The real benefit of Moore’s law is to drive down the cost per transistor at a consistent rate. This does allow Intel to improve performance by adding more transistors as a way of improving performance, but it also just decreases the cost to produce new products. While Intel doesn’t disclose its exact cost per transistor, the company points out that cost declines are the same now as they were under the tick-tock cycle. And yes, there’s a graph to prove it.

For present-day Intel, the main benefits of Moore’s law are probably more attractive than the incidental performance gains of 20 years ago. Amid up-and-down PC sales, Intel has been moving into other businesses, such as wearables and other small-scale connected products, and wants to take on Nvidia in AI for self-driving cars. Last year, the company also made a deal with ARM–whose architecture underpins most smartphone and tablet processors–to produce new chips on Intel’s upcoming 10 nm manufacturing process.

Adherence to Moore’s law, then, is no longer just about keeping Intel-powered PCs on the cutting edge.

“Following Moore’s law in terms of delivering better transistor density, lower transistor costs, and improved transistor performance and power, those benefits really apply to all product lines,” Bohr says, “whether we’re talking about a server part, a client part, or a low-power mobile part.”

Inside Google’s Code Next lab in Oakland on a typical Tuesday afternoon, a 13-year-old might be opening up an old gadget–maybe a calculator–and trying to put the pieces back together in a way that hasn’t been done before. On a Saturday, students might be programming a robot or 3D-printing a chess set.

The lab–a 1,500-square foot space across from Oakland’s Fruitvale BART station–is particularly designed to reach black and Latino students, in 8th to 10th grades, about half of whom don’t have access to computer science classes in school. It’s one part of a larger strategy to help solve tech’s diversity problem. Only about 7% of tech workers are black and 8% are Latino (the overall population is 12% black and 16% Latino). Even when tech companies have pushed for more diversity, the numbers have mostly stayed the same. At Google, employees were 2% black and 3% Latino in 2016–the same stats as 2014, despite two years of effort.

One obvious problem was a lack of access to technology in the neighborhoods where many minority students live. “We drew on our own experiences of having to leave the community to access resources and opportunities,” says April Alvarez, the Oakland-based experience manager for the program. “We really wanted to change that and to situate ourselves in the community.”

“We knew that space would be critical to inspiring these students,” says Danish Kurani, founder of Kurani. “You’re not just throwing them in any traditional classroom or any banal learning space but it’s really something special, something inspiring, that could help build that interest in computer science, build confidence in the students, and really also help them see why it’s relevant to their lives and why it’s a worthwhile endeavor or career path.”

Rather than focusing strictly on coding and parking students in front of laptops, the lab was deliberately filled with tools for making physical objects. “We did a listening tour when we first started designing the program, and we heard that kids didn’t have access and exposure to technology,” says Alvarez. “There was almost sometimes some fear and some demystifying that we had to do around interactions that kids have with technology. We know that a curriculum that focuses on computational making gets kids really excited and engaged. That was the first step.”

Code Next works with local partner organizations to recruit students, who can attend the program for free. The program prioritizes students who show a passion for something in their lives, though they don’t need to have a background in tech. “We look for kids who are just passionate about something–dance, singing, any kind of extracurricular where they just sort of put themselves into it,” says King. “We felt like then that thing that they love could be seen or rendered through technology.”

“We wanted to almost passively teach students that things are made–the environment around them was constructed and built and designed, and you yourselves are capable of doing that,” says Kurani.

One area of the lab is designed to represent the future. It’s intentionally left blank, so students can display their own work on physical platforms or a touchscreen with a digital portfolio. “It’s really sending the message that look, you guys are the future of this industry,” he says. “You guys are the future of computer science and technology. So we’re allowing you to project: What do you think the future should be for these industries? How do you think computer science and tech should evolve going forward? What problems should it address and work towards solving?”

Students are also building networks. In New York, where Google currently operates the program out of its own offices (a separate lab will soon be built in Harlem), students from all over the city are meeting, making friends, and starting to hang out outside of workshops. “That’s the basis of social capital,” King says. “That’s when 10 years down the line, you call that person.”

Teachers and other organizations are beginning to visit both the Oakland and New York programs to learn from the successes it’s had since it launched in 2016: 97% of students have said that the lab provides a better space for hands-on learning than their school, and 80% said it has given them the confidence to pursue a tech career. Google hopes to share the curriculum and approach widely, so it can be replicated elsewhere.

Schools may eventually begin to look more like the lab. “I think it’s one thing to just have a singular “maker space” or a lab for making at a school,” says Kurani. “But I think the real push will be when schools realize that all of their spaces need to start accommodating all the different types of learners they have. It can’t just be that 95% of our school is one way, and 5% of our campus or environment is supporting this type of learning.”

King agrees. “User experience and education need to get married,” he says. “Every day, in school, there should be a double bottom line of, ‘Have they learned what we wanted them to learn?’ and, ‘Do they want to come back tomorrow?’ If we don’t do those two, then we kind of missed the point.”

No one knows the challenges of the battlefield better than the soldiers who face them every day. As part of a Navy SEAL team in Afghanistan, Brandon Tseng got to know all too well the gut-wrenching existential uncertainty involved in kicking down doors in a war zone: Would there be an IED on the other side? A suicide bomber? An enemy combatant with a gun or grenade? An ally who might look the same at first glance? Or just an innocent little girl, caught up in a conflict that to her means only terror, grief, and despair?

A month after coming home, Tseng, 30, teamed up with his older brother Ryan, a serial entrepreneur, in the spring of 2015 to start a company called Shield AI. Their first product, due to be deployed by SEAL teams overseas later this year, will be “an autonomous quadrotor [drone] designed to collect intel inside buildings and structures, which are incredibly dangerous environments to operate in,” Tseng says. The idea is to “get eyes and ears ahead of special operators before they go in,” and thus reduce both military and civilian casualties. Shield’s ambitious goal? To get American and civilian casualties in ground combat to zero by 2030.

The Tsengs raised almost $600,000 in angel investment within a few months of launching their company, but their real break came when they hooked up with an organization known as DIUx–the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit-Experimental, which is charged with matching innovative private-sector technologies to problems that need solving at the Department of Defense. DIUx helped Shield make contacts and generate interest from a number of branches of the armed forces. That interest helped the company raise about $2 million from venture firms in May 2016, and in August Shield was awarded a $1 million contract to provide five prototype drones, reportedly to the Naval Special Warfare Command, which oversees the Navy’s eight SEAL teams (among other units). The company currently has contracts with the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security, and today announced a $10.5 million Series A financing led by top-shelf venture firm Andreessen Horowitz.

Going from napkin sketch to battlefield deployment in two and a half years is the equivalent of  traveling at light speed for the notoriously sluggish Department of Defense. By comparison, it took the Army more than five years just to choose a new handgun to replace the Beretta M9, and it will probably wait another year or more before the pistols actually are used in battle.

Coming up with ways to solve the problems of the battlefield has traditionally been the task of Defense Department mandarins armed with long lists of rigid requirements and towering stacks of government acquisition regulations. But with America’s adversaries piecing together cutting-edge off-the-shelf technology in ways that often challenge current military capabilities, rapid deployment of new technology like Shield’s has become a crucial part of the Pentagon’s mission.

That new focus on innovation has led the Department of Defense to launch or support a raft of new programs recently, designed to update its technology both in the back office and on the battlefield. Some of these, like DIUx, are now attracting the attention of Silicon Valley and other entrepreneurs, drawn by a desire to serve — and to be part of a defense budget of around $600 billion.

But as this new breed of patriot entrepreneurs like the Tsengs gets geared up to do what’s arguably the most important work of their civilian careers–supporting a life-or-death mission that affects the security of the country–the fragile innovation infrastructure the Pentagon has managed to build is in danger of collapsing under the weight of a capricious new administration and an institutionalized bureaucracy that has helped cause the armed forces to come close to falling behind in the first place. Silicon Valley would like to help us win the next war. But will the Pentagon let it?

Tangled In Red Tape

Startups can afford to build stuff first and ask questions later–quite literally. The best young technology companies learn where they’re going and how to get there by getting a product into the marketplace and then paying close attention to how users react. Failure is only another teachable moment on the long road to overnight success.

But for military planners, failure means that people die. To prevent such failures, and ensure the DoD acts as a good steward of the American taxpayer’s money, a deep well of regulations governs how and when the Pentagon can acquire new military gear. Which can present a problem.

“The acquisition process will often acquire something that’s no longer cutting edge.”

Tim Greeff runs the National Security Technology Accelerator (aka NSTXL), a non-profit consortium supported by $100 million in Pentagon contract authorizations. Similar to DIUx, NSTXL connects private-sector companies with military customers that need particular problems solved. DIUx and NSTXL provide ways to get new tech to the warfighter more rapidly than is possible through the Pentagon’s traditional acquisition process. “Especially now, with the rapid pace of technology, the acquisition process will [often] acquire something that’s no longer cutting edge” by the time it’s delivered, Greeff says.

And young companies often face nearly insurmountable hurdles to doing business with the DoD. The Byzantine process of submitting a bid or becoming a government contractor — especially one with the security clearances needed to work with intelligence agencies or special ops forces — can be prohibitive. The tangle of red tape on both ends of the process means that many innovative solutions are never even considered. But organizations like DIUx and NSTXL (as well as a public-private partnership called MD5 — confusingly sometimes also known as the National Security Technology Accelerator) are now helping cut through the red tape, and letting founders like Zeuss, Inc.’s Brandon White serve their country in ways that might otherwise be out of reach.

As a kid, White wanted to be Chuck Norris. But as a committed high school athlete, he had already had three ACL surgeries by the time he got to college, and he was told that Special Forces was not in the cards. So White bowed out. “I’m really not built to be anything but Chuck Norris,” White told himself at the time. “I’ll probably drive everybody crazy.”

Instead, he became an entrepreneur. But the desire to serve his country never left him. “Traditionally, the thought is, if I don’t put on a uniform or I don’t take a government job, I’m not serving,” White says. But White found a different way to serve: working with DIUx to provide intelligence- and information-management software to the U.S. Special Operations Command, or SOCOM, which oversees joint special ops missions across the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines. Chuck Norris doesn’t need boolean search to find some terrorist ass to kick; Zeuss brings him the right information, when and where he needs it.

Behind The Curve

In the traditional Pentagon procurement process, startups like Zeuss and Shield would probably never even make it to the prototyping stage. Without a handler like DIUx or NSTXL, “going the DoD or IC [intelligence community] route can be suicidal,” White says, which is why most Silicon Valley boards advise companies to steer well clear. “They can’t circumvent laws,” says White, “but DIUx helped walk us through.”

“Our culture will inherently punch them in the face.”

The companies that have navigated the DoD’s maze of regulations in the past have profited handsomely–and have become exactly what President Eisenhower warned of some 55 years ago: an entrenched military-industrial complex that seems to work harder at defending its own interests than at creating new technologies in the national service. According to White, the Pentagon’s new innovation programs send a clear message: “They’ve effectively told all of those big contractors, you guys haven’t been keeping up. You put us behind the curve.”

The question for many entrepreneurs is whether the DoD can leverage Silicon Valley innovation without dragging its new partners into a similar relationship. “The government’s challenge will be, how do they intermix here without putting the very complex that has inhibited innovation on us?” White says. “The inclination will be for them to enact their system on our culture. But our culture will inherently punch them in the face.”

The Valley Of Death

It’s possible the Pentagon needs a good punch in the face–or at least a wake-up call. For much of the second half of the twentieth century, the government outspent the private sector on R&D by as much as two to one. But by the turn of the century the tables had turned, and private companies were spending almost three times as much as government on R&D–putting the cutting edge solidly in commercial hands. The rapidly falling cost of new technologies also means that adversaries, from foreign governments to non-state actors like ISIS, have easy access to that cutting edge, often without the regulatory constraints that can hamstring the U.S. government.

It’s this reality that the Pentagon is now attempting to come to grips with. And while there are attempts afoot to overhaul the acquisitions process from the top down, it’s bottom-up initiatives like DIUx and NSTXL that are already having an effect.

But the real test of a more entrepreneurial defense establishment has yet to come. DIUx provides a way for the armed services to rapidly prototype new technologies, but moving those technologies into bigger procurement contracts may prove more difficult. DIUx has so far moved more than $45 million to the more than two dozen companies it has worked with, which make products that range from air-support drones to wargaming platforms, cybersecurity services, data analysis, and more. It hopes to bring the first of those companies out of the prototype phase and into procurement this spring.

“Beltway insiders call that the Valley of Death, going from prototype to production,” says Raj Shah, a former fighter pilot who is the managing partner at DIUx. The “superpower” DIUx plans to use to get its companies through that valley is a provision in the 2016 defense budget bill that lets DIUx prototyping stand in for a more traditional acquisition process. This means that customers within the DoD don’t have to “recompete” the sourcing for solutions developed by DIUx companies, but can move straight to the kind of big procurement contracts that can make a company’s fortune.

While the prototype-to-production approach might sound like nothing more than common sense, it is in many ways new to the Pentagon, which is used to doing business through long lists of detailed requirements–requirements that may not actually capture a solution to the problem at hand. “We don’t ask for a set of requirements, but rather an understanding of what is their core problem and can we use nontraditional technology or orthogonal approaches to help solve it. That’s the key differentiator to how we work versus a traditional acquisition process,” Shah says.

The approach smacks of Silicon Valley’s lean startup principles, in which a deep understanding of the problem is a prerequisite to coming up with effective solutions. But getting Pentagon acquisitions officers to think in those terms is not easy.

“We as a government suck at writing problems,” says former Army Colonel Pete Newell. “We’re not focused on generating the problems, we focus on the solutions, and that’s how we’re blowing this.”

Sharp End Of The Stick

These days, Newell can be found in the offices of BMNT Partners, a Palo Alto consultancy with a role similar to DIUx or BMNT: connecting government customers with innovative private-sector problem solvers. He brings a singular set of experiences to the job: his last role in the Army was as director of the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force, an office tasked with doing real-time military R&D and problem-solving from forward bases in places like Afghanistan and elsewhere. BMNT’s offices are decorated here and there with miniature models of some of the drones and robot minesweepers that Newell has had a hand in developing in the past. If anyone knows how to identify and describe the problems of the battlefield, it’s Newell.

Along with lean startup guru Steve Blank, Newell is working to update the process of doing military innovation and problem-solving both in government and among entrepreneurs. Together, Blank and Newell have developed a university course known as “Hacking for Defense,” which launched at Stanford in the spring of 2016; the course is now being offered at about two dozen universities around the country and has been adopted as the basis for commercializing innovations coming out of the National Science Foundation.

Based partly on Blank’s lean startup methodology but strongly influenced by Newell’s experience with the Rapid Equipping Force, H4D, as it’s known, gives small teams of engineering and design students the chance to work on actual problems faced by agencies within the Department of Defense, the intelligence community, and (through sister course Hacking For Diplomacy) the State Department. “I want my students to engage in some type of national service,” says Blank, who spent four years in the Air Force during the Vietnam War, including almost two years in southeast Asia. “Right now, the only way to do that is Teach for America or AmeriCorps, or maybe Code for America. But there’s no way to engage with the sharp end of the stick, whether it’s State or Defense, or the intel community.”

“We’re not talking about building battleships this way. But every component bolted inside that battleship for sure could be built this way.”

H4D gives students an up-close look at the business of national security. Course organizers work directly with government agencies to source problems that are actively in need of a solution. In turn, those agencies take advantage of the real solutions that emerge: something like half the 275 people who have come through the courses in the last year have continued to work with government in one form or another, according to Blank. The response on both ends has been overwhelming, he says, and the program is expanding rapidly. A Hacking For Energy course is underway, and planning has begun for both Hacking For Development, which will work with NGOs, and Hacking For Urban Resilience.

Newell and Blank are also seeking to popularize the methodology by training military and government planners in lean techniques through a nonprofit organization known as Hacking For Defense, Inc. DIUx, for its part, also hopes to influence on-the-ground acquisition strategy. To this end, it has published a guide to how other branches of the DoD and government can take advantage of the “commercial solutions offering” it uses to streamline acquisitions. Already, other organizations, such as the Defense Information Systems Agency, for one, are looking at how they can leverage similar mechanisms.

Entrepreneurial problem-solving isn’t the magic wand that will make all the Pentagon’s acquisition challenges disappear, of course. “You should not buy an aircraft carrier with us,” says Shah. But even aircraft carriers can benefit.

“We’re not talking about building battleships this way,” Newell says. “But every component bolted inside that battleship for sure could be built this way.”

“The DoD serves a very important mission, protecting the United States and her citizens. There are a lot of people that are interested in working on that problem,” says Brandon Tseng. “But in the past there were barriers. You’d have to work in a large defense contractor, and people weren’t sure what problems the DoD was dealing with. With DIUx, they’ve opened that opportunity up to many young startups.”

“We serve this mission because of my personal experiences, and the team’s sincere desire to help this deserving and often overlooked community of service members who put themselves in harm’s way, and civilians without the choice who find themselves in these situations. A lot of technology companies ignore these people. I think we can do a better job.”

Mark Wallace‘s work has appeared in The New York Times magazine, the weekend Financial Times, and the Philadelphia Independent, among many others. He lives in San Francisco.

In 2006, a few months after giving birth to her son, Max, Paige Bellenbaum was walking down Avenue B in Manhattan. A bus drove past, and out of nowhere, Bellenbaum was overwhelmed with the impulse to throw herself and her baby under it. She didn’t; she stared at herself in the bus’s window as it drove past, then immediately got in a taxi and took herself to the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Center, where she was diagnosed with severe postpartum depression.

By trade, Bellenbaum was a social worker, but she couldn’t see in herself the same markers of mental illness she’d been trained to identify. Postpartum depression affects as many as 15% of women in America, but it’s rarely discussed: The U.S.’s stingy parental-leave policies compound a cultural expectation that new motherhood should be joyous and breezy, when rather, it’s often overwhelming and isolating.

Bellenbaum is now the program director of The Motherhood Center of New York, a first-of-its-kind clinic that opened to patients on March 14. Staffed by physicians and social workers, the center will treat new and expecting mothers in a range of services and specialize in the treatment of perinatal mood and anxiety disorders (PMADs). An intensive weekday program will be available to women experiencing the most severe symptoms; mothers seeking aid on a weekly basis will have access to outpatient services that include therapy, support groups, and couples’ therapy.

It’s perhaps telling that the idea for The Motherhood Center originated not in the U.S.–the only developed country in the world lacking a paid parental-leave policy–but in Australia, where new mothers are supported financially for 18 weeks after the birth of their child. (it’s no Estonia, where new mothers receive 87 weeks of paid leave, but it’s still better than nothing.)

In early 2014, The Motherhood Center’s founder Billy Ingram left his job as the CFO of Frontier Healthcare, a New York-based medical group, with the idea of founding his own startup. Ingram, who is Australian, learned from two friends of a program run through the Masada Private Hospital in Melbourne: A week-long, in-patient treatment course for mothers and babies up to 24 months old, in which nurses would get the infants on more regular sleep cycles while mother receive counseling, and are transitioned into caring for the baby in a supported environment. It was a very popular program and reimbursed by insurance; Ingram tells Fast Company that he decided to try to establish something similar in America.

“I thought that perhaps, something like this already existed,” he says. “But what I found was not only does this not exist, but the level of care and awareness that existed in Australia and most of Europe doesn’t really exist here in the treatment options. The screenings are haphazard and spotty and the awareness of the specific nature and incidence of PMADs is very poor in America.”

In New York, Ingram began to meet with various nonprofits, including Postpartum Support International and the Postpartum Resource Center of New York. Through those meetings, he met Catherine Birndorf, a well-known reproductive psychiatrist in New York, who was supportive of the idea, and now serves as the center’s medical director. The two started consulting about the project, and Birndorf suggested to Ingram that he look into the Women & Infants Hospital in Rhode Island, affiliated with Brown University’s medical system and established in 2000 as the first specific perinatal partial hospitalization program in the U.S. (Partial hospitalization programs fall in between inpatient and outpatient programs and generally involve five to six hours of on-site care, five days a week.) Prior to meeting with the hospital’s director, Margaret Howard, Ingram had been considering developing an overnight, in-patient facility for mothers in New York, but after his visit to Rhode Island, decided that the partial-hospitalization model offered more flexibility in terms of licensing and services offered.

However, the Motherhood Center of New York differs from Rhode Island’s model in two crucial ways: it offers an on-site nursery where licensed childcare workers take care of infants while mothers attend sessions, and the center will operate completely independently of any medical institution. Driving that decision, Birndorf tells Fast Company, is the desire to make the center accessible to as many women as possible.

Hospitals in the city are often proprietary and prefer to keep patients in their own systems; by operating independently, the Motherhood Center will transcend those organizational lines. “We’re interested in collaboration and open doors,” Birndorf says. The center is also negotiating with insurance companies; for now, it’s accepting patients on an out-of-network basis as it undergoes the process of getting into various networks (including Medicaid), and for patients without out-of-network benefits, the center staff will negotiate single-case agreements for reimbursements–something Ingram says is likely to be successful because the center offers services unavailable elsewhere nearby.

Anyone seeking an appointment at The Motherhood Center can call the center and arrange for a consultation; no formal referral is necessary, though Birndorf says that she, Ingram, and Bellenbaum, through their combined networks of contacts in the OB/GYN and pediatric fields, have been actively working to get the word out about the center’s services, aiming to supplement the health care treatment the women are already receiving through a more targeted and holistic approach to mental health care.

The Motherhood Center is also working on establishing a connected 501(c)(3) nonprofit arm, which, Birndorf says, will be able to raise money to offset the cost of offering services at free or reduced rates for low-income or uninsured women, who are often immigrants or unemployed. “We’re committed to getting funding so we can continue to offset costs for people who can’t pay,” Birndorf says.

The accessibility of The Motherhood Center to all folds in neatly with a greater state- and city-wide push for more awareness around maternal depression. Motivated by her own experience with PMADs, Bellenbaum reached out to New York State Senator Liz Kruger, who, along with Assembly Member Richard Gottfried, drafted a bill in 2014 recommending education and screening for maternal depression. When New York City’s First Lady, Chirlane McCray, introduced the comprehensive mental health plan, ThriveNYC, in November 2015, universal depression screenings for all new and expectant mothers was one of the top-line goals. Bellenbaum was one of the keynote speakers at the rollout event for ThriveNYC; Ingram and Birndorf were in the audience and afterward went up and asked her if she wanted to get involved with the Motherhood Center (Birndorf, as it turns out, had treated Bellenbaum for her depression back in 2006). Bellenbaum came on board as program director in early 2016.

Though the center is still very new, Birndorf says that interest in its services has been high. “We’ve been flooded with phone calls,” she says. Even though the Trump administration is reportedly considering introducing the U.S.’s first paid-leave policy, time off is not enough: Women who are suffering from PMADs require specialized, dedicated treatment. And with insurance coverage likely being cut off for millions of Americans, organizations like the Motherhood Center, which have as their mission serving people based on need, not their ability to pay, will remain crucial. The conversation around maternal depression, Birndorf says, needs to continue to grow. “That’s why when you have celebrities like Brooke Shields writing a book about it in 2005, or Hayden Panettiere and Drew Barrymore and Chrissy Tiegen speaking out about it, it’s like: keep talking–someone’s got to keep this on the map,” Birndorf says. “And we’re not going away: we’re a brick and mortar place where people can have these conversations.”

If you’ve ever tried adopting one, you know that no productivity hack, habit, or routine is universal. What works for one person doesn’t always work for another. But that means it’s usually worthwhile to hear a lot of different ways other people organize their workdays, since it means more options for you to try on for size. And since the way you kick off your day and the way you wind it down can have a huge impact on how productive you are during the hours in between, Fast Company asked some top business leaders and execs to share their morning and nighttime routines. Here are our favorites.

Wake Up And Walk (Or Spin) It Out

“Most days, I try to walk to work,” says Andy Katz-Mayfield,  cofounder and CEO of shaving company Harry’s. During his 20-minute morning strolls, Katz-Mayfield says he steers clear of checking emails and tries not to use his phone altogether. “It’s one of the few uninterrupted, quiet moments I have all day, and I find it usually gets me in a clear, relaxed head space.”

Leila Janah,  founder and CEO of Samasource, an organization that helps people in the U.S. and abroad find digital work, also walks to work every day. Her morning soundtrack switches from Cuban salsa music to NPR’s Fresh Air as soon as she steps out the door. While she’s getting ready in the morning, Janah says “the salsa is an antidepressant.” Then, once she’s on her way, “Terry Gross’s guests are an inspiration. Both help me stay positive throughout the day.”

Unsurprisingly, SoulCycle CEO Melanie Whelan takes it a step further, stopping off for a spinning class en route to the office. “Working out in the morning is the best thing you can do to start your day,” she says. “It may be tough to wake up and get out of bed, but once you’re up and in class, you’ll feel so accomplished. The rest of your day becomes super productive because you got your workout in.”

Kids First, Email Second

Many people start firing off emails on their phones before they’ve even gotten out of bed. Daniella Yacobovsky, cofounder and CMO of the jewelry startup BaubleBar, isn’t one of them, but she does give her inbox a quick peek to see what’s awaiting her. “I’ve never been the kind of person who can just shoot out of bed in the morning and hit the ground running, so I like to ease into my day by browsing emails and the news in bed.”

Whelan does the same but keeps her browsing time to just 15 minutes. “By skimming through everything first thing, I can truly be present for my kids’ morning routine and drop-off—not trying to do two things at once,” she says, adding that she always tries to drop her kids off at school if she’s in town. “Presence is such an underrated wellness habit.”

Many of the leaders and execs I spoke to said they spend more of their mornings interacting with their kids than they do tackling email—both out of necessity and and by design. Katz-Mayfield checks Twitter first thing in the morning, but not for long because his daughter typically “tries to eat my phone,” he says.

For Christina Agapakis, creative director at the biotech startup Ginkgo Bioworks, mornings are now dedicated to her son, who’s nearly two years old. It’s “hard to catch up on email first thing when my son is my alarm clock,” she points out, noting that he’s just started sleeping through the night. “As far as my morning routine, that’s mostly spent trying to get the aforementioned toddler to eat breakfast and put on pants.”

Parenting has forced Agapakis to keep her home and work life more separate, she’s found. “There’s a lot that can be said about the politics of ‘productivity’ in the office and in the home, but having to take care of someone else 24 hours a day has made me realize that it’s more useful to think about efficiency, about recognizing and aggressively setting priorities, and about caring—caring for people and about what you do, at home and at work,” she explains. “I now spend less time working but get more done during those hours at work.”

Powering Down Before Hitting The Hay

Evening rituals can matter at least as much as morning ones, with some of the most productive people claiming that the secret to a smooth-running workday lies in what you do the night before—including what you do (and don’t do) with your smartphone. Google “phone before bed,” and you’ll be directed to countless articles claiming that you shouldn’t go to bed with your smartphone in hand (the first result: “Reading On A Screen Before Bed Might Be Killing You”) because our devices’ screens emit a blue light that some research suggests can disrupt sleep cycles. Some, like Bryan Johnson, take this to heart—as befits the founder and CEO of Kernel, a startup working to enhance human cognition.

“I turn off devices by 9 p.m. so that I can decompress for bed and sleep between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m., more or less,” Johnson says. “I also take three milligrams of melatonin on work nights and try not to eat any carbohydrates after 6 p.m.”

Ben Lamm, the CEO and cofounder of Conversable, which helps companies communicate with customers via chatbots, winds down with an elaborate routine that goes beyond just unplugging. “Every night, after I put down my computers and other screens, I take a steam shower at 120 degrees to raise my body temperature,” he says. “After, I’ll do various yoga stretching, and spend some time reading to get my mind off of the day.” Lamm also says that “the setting of my room is important—dim lighting, blackout shades, and a sound machine with waves.” He isn’t alone. Dave Asprey, who’s best known for creating Bulletproof Coffee, has crafted a “sleeping cave” of his own, also replete with blackout curtains and other tweaks for uninterrupted shut-eye.

Whelan uses ginger tea and a sprayable mist packed with essential oils to help put her to sleep each night, right after spending some time with a good book. “I read before bed every evening,” she says. “It’s the only way to put some space between the workday and a productive night’s sleep.” She says she alternates between fiction and nonfiction; on her nightstand right now is Kristin Hannah’s 2015 novel The Nightingale (“I can’t put it down!”).

If heavy curtains and a cup of tea don’t cut it for you, you’re not alone. Katz-Mayfield closes out his evening with “a glass or two of wine to take the edge off,” and then reads the New York Times—on his iPhone. “I know everyone tells you not to bring your phone to bed,” he says. “But let’s be honest, everyone brings their phone to bed.”

The research notwithstanding, he adds, “I usually fall asleep pretty quickly—which is not a commentary on the New York Times.”

“I need a cheap logo for my new business,” read one message I spotted last week in a Facebook group for entrepreneurs. I chuckled to myself and went back to work. I’ve seen hundreds of posts like this from startup founders trying to bootstrap their companies and looking to take care of design issues on the cheap. This used to be me.

The biggest lesson I’ve learned, both from working in the marketing world early in my career and by starting my own marketing company, is that design is one of the best investments you can make to get your new business off the ground. It’s also one of the most underappreciated—overlooked in many cases until it’s too late.

Building Credibility—Early And On A Budget

When you’re building a new brand, your credibility is nonexistent. No one has heard of you, which means you have to build trust from the ground up. Although I didn’t have much funding to get my marketing agency started, I knew that my website and business card would be early touchpoints with customers. Since they were just about all I had, both had to convey professionalism and pique interest very early on. Investing in design was an investment in trust and credibility.

Many founders quickly find that out. “In an industry like ours, design was the best way to break through the noise and get the attention of the market,” says Donald DeSantis, cofounder and SVP design at VTS, a real estate leasing platform. “Design is the tip of the spear for customer satisfaction and, ultimately, retention.”

In your new venture’s early days, put whatever funds you can into building a clean, polished website and logo to establish a credible presence. A Google search is often the first thing a potential client or customer will do in order to learn more about your company, so you’ll need to make a lasting (and positive) impression. But new customers aren’t the only people you’ll impress with great design; a strong presence also attracts talent. “Great design attracts strong talent and can help turn your customers into evangelists,” adds DeSantis. “This is crucial in the early days of a startup.”

Related:How To Build Credibility For Your Startup Nobody’s Heard Of Yet

Getting The Right Kind Of Attention

While I was doing the initial business development for my company, I knew our collateral had to stand out from the thousands of other agencies in the marketplace. So I invested all of our early revenue back into design, building polished-looking proposals, invoices, and presentations. This helped us stand out and land our earliest clients.

Your potential customers are inundated with marketing messages every hour of the day. Just scroll through Facebook and you’ll get bombarded with information on companies all hoping to sell you something. Clean, crisp, and visually appealing graphics can help you break through all this noise, says Jason Wachob, founder of the health and wellness site mindbodygreen. “In the age of platforms,” he points out, “you must make an indelible impression by way of a strong design aesthetic and point of view. Otherwise your brand will get lost in the clutter.”

Marcelo Calbucci, chief product officer at Doctor Link, even suggested, on Medium, that web-based startups’ first-ever hire should be a designer—not a developer. Without a well-designed user experience from the get-go, he says, no one’s coming back. Ellevest CEO Sallie Krawcheck agrees. She was dubious when her cofounder suggested hiring a chief design officer for the startup’s founding team but says it’s one of the best pre-launch choices they made. 

This often applies for companies dealing with physical goods and services, too, though. As Hong Quang built his electric bike startup Karmic Bikes, he quickly realized that design was everything right out of the gate. In fact, he says looking back, it “was the only reason we could even compete. If we didn’t invest in design early on, we wouldn’t even exist as a company today.”

Telling Your Story

Think about beloved brands like Apple or Nike. Their customers don’t just want a smartphone or a pair of running shoes; they want products that not only deliver some kind of value themselves but also reflect consumers’ own identities and values in some way.

“’Chris Sacca summarized it perfectly when he said ‘ideas are cheap, execution is everything’,” says Michael Young, a graphic designer and animator, referring to the tech VC. “When you’re a startup and you’re competing against hundreds of other potential companies with the same idea, execution is crucial.”

In other words, the idea behind your business may not be enough to make it succeed, but the way you convey it might. “If you can tell a story and connect to your users through an illustration or animation rather than a block of text,” Young explains, “it’s going to be a more memorable experience. As the digital landscape has only gotten more cluttered, I’ve noticed an increase in clients asking for an approach where they can tell their story in a visual way.”

It isn’t easy deciding how to invest your limited resources when you’re building a company from the ground up. Design may seem more like a “nice to have” than something essential—but it probably won’t in retrospect, when you’re doing a postmortem on what went wrong. You’ve got to get design right in order to get your startup off the ground.

Everyone has their own unique preferences, habits, and strategies for getting work done. These range from small things—like you can’t concentrate without ambient noise—to bigger ones—like you’d rather sit in a two-hour presentation about a topic than read a 50-page report about it. The better you know your personal work style, the more you can tailor your approach and environment.

But it’s not so simple as soon as you introduce other people into the equation. Your team members have their own preferences, habits, and strategies—and those idiosyncrasies will occasionally clash with yours. Maybe your boss sends you emails filled with half-baked ideas. She loves getting her thoughts down so you can run with them; however, you find it much easier to sit with her one on one and learn more about what she’s envisioning and which ideas you should prioritize. Or maybe you prefer to get everything in writing and skip real-time conversations altogether.

If you ignore these differences, you’ll sabotage your productivity. But if you insist on your way or the highway, you’ll sabotage your professional relationships. Luckily, there’s a third option: finding a happy medium between your colleagues’ work styles and your own.

Forget The Golden Rule

Most of us know the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do to you.

While the sentiment is right, this principle can steer you wrong at work. After all, it takes for granted that everyone has the same preferences and goals as you—which isn’t the case.

Dave Kerpen, author of The Art of People: 11 Simple People Skills That Will Get You Everything You Want, explains we should instead follow the Platinum Rule: Do unto others as they would want done to them. In practice, this means continually questioning your assumptions about how your coworkers want to work with you. Before you make a decision involving someone else, ask yourself, “Am I doing it this way or making this choice based on their work style or mine?”

For instance, maybe you always schedule meetings in the first half of the day because you like uninterrupted work time in the afternoons. But if your report doesn’t feel truly awake until 11 a.m., an early-morning check-in might not be productive.

Being aware of potential work style conflicts will help you avoid them. That’s not to say you should let others’ styles override your own all the time. To reach a happy equilibrium, know when you should compromise and when you shouldn’t.

Identify Your Deal-Breakers

Before you can figure out where you’re willing to adapt, you need to identify your “deal-breakers.” In other words, what are the work habits or practices critical to your productivity and happiness?

For example, a sales manager I know refuses to use Slack. He’s discovered it’s too difficult to get his everyday work done while fielding constant messages from his sales reps, the product team, customer success associates, marketers, etc. If you want to get in touch with this manager, you need to email him.

While this might be an extreme example, it gives you an idea of what your line in the sand might be. On the flip side, you could have a coworker who vastly prefers communicating over Slack. She thinks it’s far more efficient to answer a quick message than read and respond to an email.

To hone in your dealbreakers, ask yourself:

• How do I like to send and receive information?
• Which productivity tools do I use frequently?
• Have I replaced or changed any work habits because they weren’t efficient?
• Looking at the last few times I was frustrated with a team member, can I find any trends?
• When do I feel the most and least focused?

Identify Your Non-Deal-Breakers

Once you’ve pinpointed the elements of your work style you’re relatively unwilling to modify or cut out, think about what you’re less tied to.

To give you an idea, maybe you’re equally happy starting a project with a loose outline and timeframe as an extremely detailed, structured action plan. Or perhaps you don’t mind whether your coworkers want to collaborate in a shared Google doc or hold an in-person brainstorming team and whiteboard your thoughts.

Having this personal knowledge is incredibly powerful. Now, you can essentially negotiate with your team members to find a work style that suits everyone.

Develop Compromises With Your Coworkers

Consider letting your coworkers know you’d like to talk about their work preferences and how you both can be as productive as possible.

Here’s a sample email template you can use for new team members:

Hi [coworker’s name],

I’m excited to work with you on [X project, Y goal, the Z team]! 🙂 Do you want to chat for 20 minutes or so about our individual work styles and how we can help each other succeed?

Thanks,
[Your name]

Here’s an email template for team members you’re already working with:

Hey [coworker’s name],

Working with you on [X project, Y goal, the Z team] has been great so far. I’d love to learn more about your individual work style and preferences and if there’s anything you’d like to modify about how we work together.

Do you have 20 minutes to chat?

Thanks,
[Your name]

If they agree, let them know you’ve outlined your productivity “must-haves” and would love to know theirs, too. (You can send them this article for reference in advance.)

Kick off the meeting by reiterating the purpose (to lay some collaboration guidelines that you’ll both be satisfied with), then ask them to describe their general work style.

Here are some questions that may be useful:

• How do you like to run meetings (with a set agenda, over a chat platform, etc.)?
• Which method of communication do you like best (phone, email, video conference, text, chat, in-person conversations, etc.)?
• How often do you like to check in (once a day, once a week, once a month, when a significant milestone is reached, etc.)?
• If I have questions, should I email them to you, come by your desk, send you a message over chat, ping you on our project management platform, or call you?
• Are there certain times of day you block aside for specific activities? Do you have any preferences about when I schedule meetings?

Note where you overlap. For instance, if you both prefer weekly status updates, say, “That’s great, I’m also a fan of checking in once per week.” When you differ, delve into their rationale. Figuring out why they like doing something a certain way will make it easier to find a compromise. To give you an idea, maybe you find weekly check-ins excessive. You might ask, “What are the benefits of checking in once per week versus every two weeks or month?” or, “In your experience, does a weekly check-in help you catch errors before they’re a big deal?”

Once they give you some context, you may decide there’s a good reason for their preference. Here’s a handy response: “I usually do it [other way], but I’m happy to adapt because your way makes a lot of sense.”

Being flexible in this area will make your coworker more likely to compromise in a different area. However, if you’re still not bought in, instead say something along the lines of, “I understand why you prefer that. I tend to prefer [other way]. Can we meet in the middle—maybe by doing [middle version] . . . ?”

By the end of the meeting, you should have created a collaboration strategy that suits both your styles.

Identify Your Boss’s Work Style

Depending on your relationship and company culture, a slightly less casual approach might be necessary with your boss. Use this template to request a meeting:

Hi [boss’s name],

I’ve really enjoyed working with and learning from you these past [X months]. I realized we’ve never had a formal discussion about work style. To ensure I’m doing the best job in this role as possible, I’d like to talk about your preferences for communication, meetings, and so on. Do you have 30 minutes this [week, month]?

Thanks,
[Your name]

During the meeting, consider covering:

• Their preferred method of teaching you, answering questions, and helping solve problems
• Their preferred meeting format, time, length, and style
• How they make decisions
• Their expectations for work quality and speed (Is “done better than perfect” or should you spend additional time making sure your work is error-free?)

The initial email and the agenda focus on your manager’s work style because in many offices you’re expected to conform to your manager’s work style. However, a good boss will take your preferences into account. If they’re in the second camp, this meeting gives them an opportunity to learn about your work style. Once they’ve responded to your questions, they’ll naturally ask questions like, “And what do you prefer?”, “How do you normally work best?”, and, “What can I do to make you successful?”

Bonus: Identify Learning Styles

If you’re working extremely closely with someone (like a direct team member or manager), consider identifying their learning style as well. The way people absorb information is closely tied to the way they work; plus, you can use this to avoid misinterpretation and miscommunication.

According to Howard Gardner, a professor of education at Harvard University, there are seven (or more) basic types of intelligence. His Multiple Intelligences Theory states, “The mind is better described as consisting of eight or nine relatively separate faculties.”

While every person has every type of intelligence, they’re usually stronger in one or two and weaker in the others. Unsurprisingly, it’s easiest for them to learn in a way that reflects their primary intelligence.

Here are the seven types of learning styles:

1. Visual-spatial: Can understand the relationship between images and meanings and objects and space.
2. Interpersonal: Can recognize, understand, and influence other people’s emotions, wants, and desires.
3. Linguistic: Can use words (both written and verbal) to express their ideas and learn new concepts.
4. Intrapersonal: Can understand one’s own emotions, wants, and desires and control them as needed.
5. Kinesthetic: Can use their body to convey information and ideas.
6. Logical-mathematical: Can solve abstract problems, analyze complex information, recognize patterns, and develop calculations.
7. Musical: Can appreciate, create, and reproduce music.

It’s usually easiest to identify your coworker’s primary intelligence by asking them. Shoot them an email with a link to this test and pay attention to the words he or she uses.

For instance, if you say, “Could I please get your feedback on my lead-gen ideas?”:

• A kinesthetic person might say, “Hit me!”
• A visual person might say, “Let’s see what you’ve got.”
• A logical-mathematical person might say, “I’d be happy to review them.”

Of course, a single answer can’t tell you what their primary intelligence is—but if you keep track over time, you should notice a trend.

It’s also helpful to observe how they naturally communicate.

• Do they default to drawing on a whiteboard or sending you screenshots and screencasts? They’re probably a visual thinker.
• Do they use their hands and physical objects to explain their ideas? They’re probably a kinesthetic thinker.
• Do they send you detailed emails, write reports, and give presentations? They’re probably a linguistic thinker.
• Do they spontaneously come up with jingles or raps during conversations? They’re probably a musical thinker.
• Are they reflective, calm, and the go-to person in a crisis? They’re probably an intrapersonal thinker.
• Are they charismatic, universally well-liked, and a natural leader? They’re probably an interpersonal thinker.
• Are they one of the first to spot a pattern or discrepancy in the data? They’re probably a logical-mathematical thinker.

Once you’ve figured out which category your colleague fits into, tailor your communication method appropriately. Let’s say your boss is a linguistic thinker. Instead of sending her your monthly report in a Powerpoint deck, like you usually do, consider sending a straightforward text document.

Whether you’re a freelancer, an individual contributor, or a leader, other people must interact and collaborate with you to get their own job done. Your partnership will be far more successful (not to mention, enjoyable) if you’re working in a way that suits you both. These strategies will help you build and reinforce mutually productive professional relationships with anyone.

A version of this story originally appeared on Zapier. It is adapted and reprinted with permission.

Human resources departments are easy targets. A month ago, Susan Fowler wrote an extensive blog post that immediately went viral about the ongoing sexual harassment she experienced at Uber. She pointed a finger at Uber’s HR team, which she says failed to take her complaints seriously. Over the last few weeks, former Thinx employees have described founder and former CEO Miki Agrawal’s behavior on the record as aggressive, vindictive, and sexually inappropriate, alongside other workplace problems, including terrible pay and poor health care benefits. Many argued that if the startup had had an HR manager in place, some or all of these problems might have gone away.

Related:Thinx’s Stance On Period Leave Could Have Been A Harbinger Of Bigger HR Issues

This Is What Caused Uber’s Broken Company Culture 

But this isn’t necessarily true. I spoke with nine experts, ranging from HR professionals to professors to industry analysts, all of whom argued that without strong leadership invested in a healthy workplace, HR is hamstrung. “If HR doesn’t have the support of top management, you can’t create or maintain a positive work culture,” says MaryAnne Hyland, professor of HR management at Adelphi University.

Why The Current HR Structure Is So Broken

Jason Nazar, Comparably’s CEO and a serial entrepreneur, concurs. “Culture always starts at the top,” he says. “HR is meant to be both a megaphone of the values of leadership and the safeguards for when people do things that are inappropriate, wrong, or not in the best interest of the company.”

Several pointed out that the very nature of human resources within a company is tenuous: The department is meant to advocate on behalf of employees, but it is still subordinate to the company’s leadership. If the leaders of the company are themselves misbehaving or not taking employees who bring up problems seriously, HR departments are probably not going to be empowered to set the company on the right course.

In Fowler’s description of her experience at Uber, it appears that senior management was aware of sexual harassment yet turned a blind eye. Trained HR professionals should know the proper procedure for dealing with an employee complaint: Talking to the other party, investigating what happened, then changing the work arrangement and, if appropriate, disciplining the harasser. But at Uber, the HR team didn’t have the leverage to do their jobs well, since the leaders at the company were effectively colluding with the man accused of sexual harassment. This makes it close to impossible for an HR manager to effectively fight for the rights of an employee.

This is unfortunately a relatively common occurrence. “I know people who have quit their jobs as senior HR managers because they see things going on at the company and don’t have the support of senior management to address the issue,” Hyland says. “They did not feel comfortable staying in the position where they could not do what they knew was the right thing to do.”

But, of course, not all HR professionals are in the privileged position of just being able to leave. Many stay at their jobs, even though their hands are tied. This is generally when employees experience the all-too-familiar sense of frustration of going into the HR manager’s office in the hopes that someone would listen and help, only to realize that nothing is going to change.

This is one reason that problems are so pervasive in the workplace, even at companies with robust HR departments. According to Comparably, a startup that collects data from employees about compensation and culture at companies, 7% of men and 26% of women claim to have been sexually harassed at work, out of a sample of more than 10,000 respondents.

When it comes to racism in the workplace, the situation is just as bleak. Over half of all African-Americans had experienced racist behavior at work, as did one-third of Native Americans and Latinos and a quarter of Asians. In total, out of 5,000 respondents, 21% of men and 29% of women had experienced some form of racism at the office.

When startups finally hit their stride and start growing quickly, leaders are often so focused on maintaining this upward trajectory that they don’t pay attention to how happy their employees are. This was the case at both Uber and Thinx. “Companies that have toxic work environments tend to have gotten so caught up in their amazing growth that they forget to put that emphasis on empowering their people to do great work,” says Carlos Bradley, director of culture and training at boxed meal kit company Sun Basket and former Apple employee. “We see time and again that this kind of explodes in their face.”

How to Begin to Fix HR

But it doesn’t need to be like this. There are mechanisms companies can implement to make HR a more powerful and effective force.

Nazar says that most companies begin to hire someone for the role of HR when the employee base swells to between 50 and 75 people. Nazar, who is a serial entrepreneur, acknowledges that it might not make sense to bring on an HR manager early on, but it is up to the company’s founder to make HR a priority. From day one, someone must be tasked with thinking about employee welfare, whether it is the CEO or another top manager, like the COO.

Related:How Asana Built The Best Company Culture In Tech

The Future Of HR and Why Startups Shouldn’t Reject It

Even if the company is minuscule and relies on external tools to deal with HR issues like payroll and benefits management, someone needs to be the point person staff members go to with problems or complaints. “No matter what size you are, culture matters,” he says. “If you’re the founder, if you’re employee No. 1, you’ve got to think, what’s the culture going to be like for the very next person? As soon as you become a company of two, you need be talking about what your company culture is.”

Nazar says that once a company has taken outside investment and has plans to grow quickly, hiring HR becomes a necessity. At that point, even when a company has basic issues in check and is welcoming to people of all genders, sexualities, and races, more tricky cultural issues come up. These include nuanced issues such as how you get employees to stay positive and optimistic in the face of adversity, or how you balance having fun as a team and also achieving your goals. “These are the more challenging aspects of culture,” he says.

Kristen Kenny, VP of people and talent at CarGurus, points out that culture changes constantly as new people come on board. This is why it’s important for a designated HR person to devote time on a regular basis to figure out what employees need, and how this might be changing. Through biannual employee surveys, Kenny discovered that employees needed a forum to discuss issues with top management, so she launched quarterly town hall meetings. Employees wanted to know what was happening beyond their teams, so she created company newsletters. To create bonding experiences between teams, she started “dining clubs” where different groups could get to know one another.

For HR to be effective, it is important to define what it can and cannot do. Ultimately HR is not responsible for creating a positive culture: That is the job of leadership. HR can help perpetuate this culture and rid the company of people who do not embrace company values. Installing an HR manager at a company rife with problems is not going to accomplish much–and blaming HR for leadership’s failures makes it less likely that the underlying issues will be addressed. “It starts at the top,” Bradley says. “The things that are important to the top leadership at a company become important everywhere else in the company. Of course leadership needs to think about growth and customer acquisition, but great leaders always go back to talking about ‘our people.'”

In a moment of crisis, the board, CEO, and management of a company need to get to the root of the problem. Who at the top is enabling bad behavior? What can be done to prevent this person from causing ongoing harm? Does there need to be a change in leadership? If so, as in the case of both Thinx and Uber, which are finding new CEOs, what can be done to ensure that the new chief is given real autonomy and prioritizes employee happiness?

But once the management has established the kind of culture they want at a company, HR professionals become extremely valuable because they can help turn this vision into a reality. And having a strong set of values empowers the HR team to actually bring about change, whether that’s creating new policies or firing bad apples. “At a company where HR is supported by management, we are able to look at every person that comes to us with a problem and say, ‘You are our most important resource,'” Bradley says. “We’re going to take care of you, do proper, thorough investigations, and make the right call.”

In the end, smart leaders don’t see HR as a luxury or as an unfortunate necessity. They realize that it has an impact on a the bottom line and is crucial to the success of the business. “The companies that are well-recognized for being effective workplaces treat their employees well and turn that into a winning recipe for the business,” Hyland says.

Mothers who continue to work have been found to have more ambitious daughters and kinder sons, according to research out of Harvard Business School.  But facing the prospect of returning to work after an often-too-short maternity leave can make the drumbeat of “I have to quit” loud in your ears.

I surveyed 732 working moms, and they reported that it took an average of almost six months after delivery to start feeling normal again emotionally. The vast majority were back at work months before that point, though. Your fuse is short, your nighttime sleep is shorter; it’s only natural that the desire to quit can become a fixation and a distraction.

Here are the five things I’ve found in my research that silence the drumbeat and get you through, sanity and career intact.

1. Remember That The Discomfort Is Temporary

Know that this transitional time is temporary, and it will hurt less. Every learning curve has an apex. “We all accept to varying degrees that there will be a learning curve with new motherhood,” says psychotherapist Sarah Best. “Taking care of a baby is a new kind of job. But there’s this assumption that returning to work is going to be the same as always, the same role, the same job, that it should feel easy. But the fact is, you’ve never been a working mom before. It’s a totally new scenario.” When you find yourself being self-critical, Best advises, “Remind yourself: Oh, yeah, this is only day four. I may be a pro at my job, but I’m an absolute beginner at being a working mom.”

Occasionally, Best will have a patient who, after three months back at work, truly feels like she needs to make a major change. But much, much more often, the women who tell her at week two that they need to quit come back a month or two later with a different story entirely: “They say,” notes Best, “‘I’m so glad I’m back at the office; I don’t think I would have been able to stay home!’”

2. Think About What You Get Out Of Work . . .

Simple but true: Women’s perception of their work as rewarding is the single biggest predictor of whether they’ll resume their employment, according to research published in 2013 in the Maternal and Child Health Journal.  More than their occupation level. More than their education. More than their husband’s paycheck! Carolyn Pirak, LCSW, founding director of the Bringing Baby Home program at The Gottman Institute, advises new moms to “Think, why did you choose to work in the first place? Did you choose to work only for money, or because you love the work and the people? You did at some point choose to work where you work.

So, now that you have a baby, are you getting just money from your job . . . or are you getting esteem and confidence, too?”

I’ll add: Are you getting experience that will keep you moving upward so you can make cultural, institutional change for new parents from within?

Speaking of moving upward, a lot of what you get out of not quitting is that several years from now, you won’t be an at-home mom who quit. Blunt, but there it is.

Liisa Hunter, who works in marketing solutions on a global sales team for Facebook, says she found this idea really motivating and true when she returned after the birth of her first son. “I remember a colleague saying to me—and this was so poignant—that this is the most difficult time in your life right now as a mom,” Liisa says. “She said, ‘But you need to understand that in five years, your son will go to kindergarten, and in that time, you’ll either have moved up in your career from here to here’—I still remember her gesturing with her hands—’or you will be calling me, trying to get back into the workforce.'”

It’s ironic that such a chaotic time could give you a sense of calm, but that’s a sentiment I heard repeatedly in my interviews. “The moment I went back to doing my work again, I just felt more like myself. I felt like more of an adult,” says Hannah, an interior designer who has her own small firm. “I loved being at home with my baby, but I realized that I’d felt really adrift.” Work gives you destination, goals, purpose.

3. . . . And Realize What Work Gets Out Of You!

Everyone works harder and more happily when they feel valued. So make a list—yes, really, a bulleted list—of all the things your boss and colleagues and the greater industry get out of having you, ass flattened in that chair, doing your job.

These three months, this whole lifetime, really, is riddled with compromises. No one’s saying you won’t have to compromise to stick with your career. But research out of Australia has shown that if you are able to see the value you bring to your work—if you feel valued by your managers and coworkers—you’ll feel more confident in those compromises. So make the list. Go on.

4. Consider Phasing Back In For Better Focus

Focus is an enormous issue when you first go back; phasing back in really helps, according to numerous studies and many of the mothers I spoke with. Unsurprisingly, women who experience those distracting “daily re-entry regrets” most likely intend to leave their jobs. Also unsurprising—but so important—is the fact that women with shorter leaves have more of those regrets. If you can extend your leave, even only part-time, you increase your chances of staying at work long term.

Marcy Axelrad, a lawyer and human resources expert in Boston, worked two days a week when she first came back to work, then three days, “and that’s when I realized, yeah, my baby’s fine,” she says. “I’ve got a great, great caregiver at home and he’s happy. So then I came back full-time.” Now the global senior director of talent operations at the online furniture retailer Wayfair, Axelrad is the brains behind the company’s family-friendly policies. She’s seen it time and time again: “That flexibility is one of the reasons why our working moms come back after their leave. And most do eventually come back full-time.”

Do not underestimate your rights to do a phase-in and the positive impact it can have on workplace culture. Many companies have an established written policy. And even those that don’t might have had a precedent set by other new moms. The Family and Medical Leave Act allows you to take your 12 weeks over the course of the year (if your company is cool with this kind of intermittent leave). Do your research! When we ask for something for ourselves, we’re really asking for all the moms who follow us, too. So if you can, please do.

5. Enjoy A Bit Of Success (It Sustains You)

If you are in the “I have to quit” doldrums, this is the time to do the easiest thing on your list first. Hell, write things on your to-do list that you’ve already done just so you can scratch through them. Success is extremely motivating. So whatever it takes for you to feel like you’re doing a good job—clocking in at 8:58 a.m. instead of 9 a.m., or meeting with that college sophomore who wants to hear about your career path, or introducing your boss to an impressive new contact (really, just a five-minute email)—do it. You’ll be happier coming to work tomorrow. Because you are coming back tomorrow!

This excerpt from The Fifth Trimester: The Working Mom’s Guide to Style, Sanity, and Big Success After Baby is reprinted with permission. 

Lauren Smith Brody is the founder of The Fifth Trimester movement, which helps businesses and new parents work together to create a more family-friendly workplace culture. A longtime leader in the women’s magazine industry, Lauren was most recently the executive editor of Glamour magazine. Raised in Ohio, Texas, and Georgia, she now lives in New York City with her husband and two young sons.

Today is Equal Pay Day, a day that symbolizes how far into the year women must work to earn what men earned in the previous year. Women’s salaries are estimated to be about $10,800 less per year than men’s. Despite recent efforts to achieve parity, such as companies signing the White House’s Equal Pay Pledge and its #hackthepaygap initiative aimed at improving diversity and gender pay gaps for freelancers, it’s going to take years to get there. The current rate of change puts it at 2059, according to a report from the U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee.

New analysis on salaries and jobs from LinkedIn’s proprietary data find one reason may be because women make up less than 30% of roles in the highest-paid sectors. Other research from Smartasset, a provider of online finance tools, finds that in tech, the average female-to-male earnings ratio is 84.8%, down from 2016 when it was 86.7%. Nationwide, that report found that a little over a quarter (26%) of computer and mathematical jobs are filled by women.

Meanwhile, more women are turning to gig work to make up for the shortfall. Hyperwallet, a payment platform, surveyed 2,000 U.S.-based female gig workers and found that the majority (86%) believe gig work is the best way to earn equal pay. In contrast, only 41% of those surveyed thought they’d achieve pay parity with a traditional career path.

Hyperwallet found that many of the respondents come from a variety of industries including retail, health care, accounting, and sales, and 63% say that gig work is their primary source of income.

The majority take on professional freelance work (on platforms such as Upwork and 99designs), direct selling (through companies like Mary Kay and Rodan + Fields), and service platforms (including TaskRabbit and Care.com) in order to have more flexible hours. As many as 70% report that they are the primary caregiver in their home. Fifty-nine percent said they have spouses with full-time careers. As such, it’s tough to see how gig work could close the wage gap if women are still doing the majority of caregiving in the home (unpaid), and the gig salaries of 62% of the workers surveyed for Hyperwallet’s report were less than $10,000 per year (and fewer than 8% earn more than $30K annually).

New research from Accenture indicates that there are ways to equalize pay that may be more reliable than taking gig work. The report reveals that if more people began using digital technologies to learn and work (such as online classes, social media, AI platforms, etc.) thereby increasing the number of jobs to support those fields, it could help as many as 9 million women find work that would increase their income by 25% by 2030. Likewise, if women acquired stronger digital skills, it could improve their chances of earning more and getting into senior roles. 

In the U.S., Accenture’s analysts claim these changes could close the pay gap by 2039.

Regardless of the means to get there, a report from the U.S. Treasury found that advancing women’s equality could add between a $2.1 trillion and $4.3 trillion addition to the country’s GDP in the next decade. If every state and city made progress toward gender parity, they could add at least 5% to their own economies. Half of U.S. states can add more than 10% to their economies. Knowing this, it’s clear that pay parity is not just a women’s issue–it affects everyone.

A year ago, the Georges Pompidou highway next to the right bank of Paris’s Seine River was filled with traffic. Now it’s permanently car-free. Later this month, a new park will open on the site, covering part of the road with playgrounds and grass. Cafes and a free bike workshop will open by the summer.

It’s one part of the city’s transformation of transportation away from cars, led by a mayor who has called personal car ownership “archaic.”

“Unparalleled challenges like air pollution require unprecedented action,” Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo tells Fast Company. “These policies are based on the urgency of both the health crisis and the climate crisis we are facing.”

A new electric “tram-bus” will soon replace two lanes of traffic on another major road in Paris. As of January 2017, the most polluting, oldest diesel cars are banned from city streets during the day; all diesel cars will be banned by 2025. The city is running trials of a driverless electric shuttle in a dedicated lane between two train stations and will soon test electric taxi boats. A new bike path will be built in the middle of the Champs-Élysées, part of a plan to double bike lanes from roughly 430 miles in 2015 to 870 miles by 2020, including “express” bike lanes separated from traffic. Major intersections are being redesigned to favor pedestrians, not cars. The city hosted a car-free day in 2015 and 2016. New devices will track emissions from cars in real time. The ultimate goal: fixing the city’s pollution problem.

“More than half the world’s population lives in cities, a figure that will rise to 70% by 2050,” says Hidalgo. “Cities are already responsible for 70% of carbon emissions. Cities are where the future happens first. All of which means that mayors have an obligation to drive innovation and action. Mayors are on the front lines, especially when it comes to the greatest threat that our cities face–climate change.”

While national governments tend to move more slowly on climate policy, cities are pioneering climate solutions in transportation–often through urban design or procurement policies, but also by putting pressure directly on manufacturers. In December 2016, Hidalgo, along with other mayors in C40, a global network of cities committed to addressing climate change, launched a petition calling on vehicle manufacturers to move more quickly to adopt electric, hydrogen, and hybrid cars.

Hidalgo, who was elected as chair of C40 in 2016, has also launched the organization’s Women4Climate initiative, which aims to showcase women climate leaders, explore how women are disproportionately affected by climate change, and empower young leaders to “carry the fight forward.” In March, Hidalgo hosted a conference for the initiative in New York City, one of several gatherings that brings together mayors to connect and collaborate on an urban agenda to limit global temperature rise 1.5 degrees Celsius.

“The transition to a clean energy mobility system is underway largely due to the leadership of cities around the world, from Paris to Bogotá, from Tokyo to Mexico City,” says Hidalgo.”Unlike federal governments or private companies, city leaders hold jurisdiction over public transit options, and can drive large-scale deployment by electrifying municipal vehicle fleets, adding bicycle lanes, limiting the number of cars through incentives or taxes, and implementing policies to encourage a clean transport revolution.”

Bertrand Delanoë, who was mayor of Paris from 2002 to 2014, introduced the city’s massive, pioneering bike-share program in 2007. Autolib, the city’s electric car sharing service, launched in 2011. Delanoë closed the left bank of the Seine to cars in 2013, and began the process to lower speed limits throughout the city. These policies helped cut traffic 30% over the last 15 years. Hidalgo, elected as the city’s first female mayor in 2014, is continuing that work–and arguably moving even more aggressively.

When she announced that the Pompidou highway would be closed to cars, some commuters complained that they’d spend more time driving to work, and increase traffic (and pollution) elsewhere. One local newspaper studied traffic patterns and concluded that traffic was increasing on other roads. But the city believes that any negative effects are temporary, and that the amount of total traffic will be reduced as people shift to alternate transportation.

Hidalgo says that she hasn’t tried to sell Parisians on the changes. “Marketing is not my way to do politics,” she says. “Instead of wasting time and energy trying to convince through an elaborate marketing campaign, I deliver real solutions that speak for themselves and benefit the people of Paris. And as a mayor of Paris, I am proud to deliver all my commitments to my people.”

When people experience each change, she thinks that they will be swayed. “Once every month we close the Champs-Élysées to traffic,” she says. “When you walk through the crowds of Parisians and tourists enjoying this iconic space, it removes any doubt that you might have that pedestrianization will benefit all, resulting in a cleaner, safer, and more beautiful Paris.”

Hidalgo seems to be right: Voters want a change in transportation. Hidalgo is helped by the fact that inside city limits, where her electorate lives, most people can easily take the metro, walk, or otherwise get around without cars. (Suburban commuters are more likely to be affected; the government is also working to expand suburban transit options, including new metro lines). A member of the Socialist Party, Hidalgo campaigned in support of the environment, making promises about launching Paris’s electric car sharing program and other alternative transportation. Polls show the majority of Parisians support her.

“The mayor was elected to make positive change with mobility, and these kinds of policies to reduce space for cars in favor of other modes of transport,” says Lorelei Limousin, transport and climate policy officer for the French branch of the nonprofit Climate Action Network. “So it’s important to say that it’s quite coherent with the votes of the people in Paris. And when you see the polls about the pedestrianization of the riverbanks, the majority of people are in favor of it.”

The changes, though radical, are still in the early stages. The planned network of new bike lanes, for example, has mostly not yet been built.

“The mayor of Paris launched a plan for cycling, which is quite ambitious, but only a little has been realized,” says Limousin. “It needs a lot more.” Once that’s developed, Limousin says, it will have cascading effects on the whole transportation system, helping some people move from the city’s overcrowded subway to bikes, freeing up more room on public transit for people who are still driving.

A new report commissioned by the city looks at how much more the transportation system–along with everything else–would have to change for Paris to reach a goal of carbon neutrality by 2050. The number of cars in the city would be cut in half, thanks in part to car sharing. By 2038, the report envisions, the city would be car-free every weekend. Because commuting is a major source of emissions, more companies would allow working from home or a neighborhood coworking office. Every vehicle left on roads would be non-polluting.

“I doubt we will ever see a car-free city, but we must see cities free from polluting vehicles,” says Hidalgo. “That is why we are working every day to create a green city ready for the future.”

With fears about the job-killing effects of automation growing every day, once unthinkable ideas are starting to get an airing. A universal basic income (UBI)–where the government gives everyone enough money to live on–has lots of supporters, especially in Silicon Valley. And now some prominent individuals are calling for a tax on robots. The thinking: If you make robots more expensive, there will be more public funds to help retrain workers (or pay for that basic income)–and the higher cost might keep some companies from buying robots and quickly tanking the employment rate.

Bill Gates recently called for a robot tax in an interview with Quartz, arguing that it could slow the shift to a more robot-centric future, allowing society to catch breath. Moreover, he said, it could raise revenues to pay humans for more human types of work, like looking after children or the elderly.

Gates’s position was shocking because you don’t often hear tech executives, even ex ones, arguing with unfettered tech progress, and because, as Quartz pointed out, Microsoft is a big developer of artificial intelligence. But the CEO turned mega-philanthropist may have made the idea more acceptable for others to consider and debate. And now Jane Kim, one of 11 city supervisors in San Francisco, has begun to explore more seriously what it would look like for a city to actually implement such a tax.

Kim, who represents areas like Union Square, the Tenderloin, and Civic Center, is setting up a working group to consider how an automation tax might work. She hopes it will include representatives from the tech community, academia, and unions, and that it can work through some of the practical questions. These include how much revenue the city stands to lose from lost payroll taxes due to automation, and what industries might be most affected. “It’s not only going to be manufacturing and truck drivers. It’s also going to be restaurants, hotel workers, and health care, which form a strong base of employment in the city,” she says. The tax would be paid by companies adopting robots over workers, not by robot-makers.

Kim sees revenue raised from the tax going toward education. She notes that an increasing number of jobs require a college degree, meaning that the tax could have a role in making college more affordable (the city is already taxing high-end real estate to pay for free tuition). Like Gates, she also favors exploring ways to slow the automation wave, allowing government and business to put in policies that help people transition. “It may be that government needs to play a role in regulating automation over time, so we can absorb job displacement at a rate that’s more sustainable for our country,” she says.

These concerns were enough to derail a robot tax proposal put forward by some European lawmakers this year. But, a report from the European Parliament did suggest other radical ideas, including requiring companies to report robot adoption, and the concept of “electronic personhood” where robots would have some of the rights and responsibilities of human beings.

Kim doesn’t claim that taxing automation is a silver bullet, only that it’s worth pursuing along with other measures, including a basic income guarantee. She supports UBI, but points out that many proposals are un-funded, unlike the robot tax, which both has a social effect (more jobs, less automation) and generates money for other things.

Most of all, Kim–possibly the first public official in America to publicly support a robot tax–is keen to experiment. “We are the center of the tech world here in San Francisco. There is a broad concern about automation and job displacement in the future,” she says. “We want to be the first to put ideas out there, so they can be explored. Then we want others to follow.”

This is it. This is the sign. #RESIST has officially gone mainstream. Maybe it was the People’s Climate March back in 2014, or the Women’s March in January, but you know dissent is catching on when a brand like Pepsi latches its marketing talons into it. Case in point, this new global ad starring Kendall Jenner as a model-turned-protester, marching in the streets to the tune of Skip Marley’s “Lion.”

Yeah, if ya took all my rights away
Yeah, if ya tellin’ me how to pray
Yeah, if ya won’t let us demonstrate
Yeah, you’re wrong
Yeah, if ya thinking I don’t belong
Yeah, if ya hiding behind a gun
Yeah, if ya hoping we’re gonna run
Ya wrong

Pretty edgy for a sugar water ad, non? Or is it? Created by Creators League Studio, PepsiCo’s in-house creative team, the ad features a protest of some kind–for love? Peace? Equality?–but remains ambiguous enough to tap into everyone’s own confirmation bias. Though, the diversity of the crowd suggests it’s not exactly calling for a quicker construction timeline for The Wall.  Perhaps the most interesting moment comes when we see a line of (surprisingly unarmed) police set to block the protesters, and Jenner pulls a flower power move, with a can of Pepsi subbing in for a carnation.

At a time of handwringing over whether brands should be taking a stand on social and policy issues, and how they might do it, Pepsi has sidestepped the issue completely by creating an ad that tries to tap into all the emotion of dissent, with none of the conviction. What is the message here? What are they actually standing up for? Maybe the brand is telling us by its choice of soundtrack. But more realistically, it’s half-stepping, and at a time like this, that lack of clarity reeks of all style, no substance.

It was an exposé made for the era of social media—and it’s still having an impact.

A year ago this week, reporters at the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and more than 100 news organizations around the world released their first stories linked to the Panama Papers—a leaked trove of more than 11 million records from Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca. The documents and thousands of published stories showed how politicians and other prominent figures around the world were linked to secretive offshore corporations and accounts, spurring investigations, protests, and political resignations from Iceland to India. The law firm’s founders were arrested in February on money laundering charges.

“I think we’re looking at five years of continued prosecutions and political adjustment based on this information,” says Lawrence J. Trautman, a law and business professor at Western Carolina University who has written about the leak.

That impact was the result of work by almost 400 reporters around the world, who analyzed the leaked data for more than a year before the first stories were published—as well as a team of engineers who built the infrastructure that made it possible for them to sift through the almost 3 terabytes of information.

“This really is a testament to collaborative journalism in the truest sense of the word—I don’t think anything has existed like this, remotely like this, the kind of range of partners, BBC and Guardian, the smaller players in Ecuador,” said Kevin G. Hall, chief economics correspondent and senior investigator for the McClatchy newspaper chain, in a recent panel discussion on the Panama Papers at the Brookings Institution.

And to let those people collaborate, the ICIJ team effectively deployed its own internal social network, allowing the journalists to securely discuss their work and findings even though they were seldom, if ever, in the same room.

“Technology helped us bridge the gap that you normally have when people collaborate across borders,” says Mar Cabra, head of ICIJ’s data and research unit.

Even just turning the raw data into something reporters could work with was a major technical underpinning, made easier by ICIJ’s experience working with previous smaller troves of leaked offshore finance data, she says.

“Those 11.5 million documents were in dozens of different formats,” she says. “There were a lot of PDFs that had to be made machine-readable.”

Dozens of cloud-based servers churned through those PDFs, using software that ICIJ has since made open source to extract text and index it for reporters to search and analyze.

“We became, somehow, a software development company, because we were updating the software all the time,” Cabra says. “We had one developer that was working only on the document search platform, and I told him, ‘You’re gonna work for a few months on making this data available.'”

The team also used the graph database Neo4J, designed to store and speedily analyze relationship networks like the connections between the offshore companies and their owners and directors, and the companion visualization tool Linkurious to enable reporters to browse through the links between companies in an intuitive way. The software essentially built the kinds of whiteboard social network diagrams that are a staple of Homeland and Hollywood dramas, but on an unprecedentedly massive scale.

“They were able to find even more names than the ones that they had explored just by sifting through the documents,” Cabra says. “That because more stories—that became new leads to pursue.”

ICIJ ultimately also opened up large portions of the database to the public, letting readers use the same visualization tools to look for figures of interest to them in the records. And millions of people have visited the group’s website in order to do so, Cabra says.

“Human eyes are not made to understand rows and rows and rows of data [and] names, interconnected,” she says. “Visualizations help us make sense of that.”

The group, which recently spun off from the Center for Public Integrity, a D.C.-based investigative journalism nonprofit and is in the midst of a crowdfunding campaign, is still looking to add additional features to its software, like potential integrations with outside databases like Wikipedia.

ICIJ is also working with the makers of Neo4J to further streamline its databases, which could make it easier to link data from the Panama Papers and its other datasets—or to easily integrate information from future leaks. The group may also add something like a Google News-style alert system to highlight news stories involving previously unknown people linked to companies in the database, as Cabra says news organizations continue to discover new stories in the leaked data and collaborate to share what they find.

“I think that technology was key to make this project happen, but humans were key too,” she says. “Technology can be awesome—it can be groundbreaking, but if humans don’t collaborate, none of these would have happened.”

In 1987, Donald Trump published The Art of the Deal, a 402-page book outlining his worldview and strategies for making what he was known for at the time: deals.

Looking back now, of course, we know that Trump might not be as good at deals (or business) as he touted in the book. Since its publication, he’s launched and shuttered a number of companies across a variety of industries, including Trump Mortgage, Trump Airlines, Trump Vodka, Trump magazine, Trump Steaks, luxury travel search engine GoTrump.com, and Trump University. His Atlantic City casinos filed for bankruptcy and closed up shop.

The Art of the Deal, which was co-authored by journalist Tony Schwartz (who now maintains he wrote the majority of the book, a claim Trump has disputed), was a hit. It skyrocketed to the No. 1 spot on the New York Times best seller list and stayed there for 48 weeks. During his presidential campaign, Trump called the book one of his proudest accomplishments, and also his second-favorite book behind the Bible.

Today, you can purchase The Art of the Deal in hardcover, paperback, audiobook, and e-book form. The e-book version on Amazon’s Kindle offers an interesting feature: the option to highlight individual passages and view the most-highlighted excerpts, based on other readers’ activity.

We looked at the most-highlighted sections of Trump’s second-favorite book, plumbing them for insights into his presidency. Here they are, in order of popularity:

“The worst thing you can possibly do in a deal is seem desperate to make it. That makes the other guy smell blood, and then you’re dead. The best thing you can do is deal from strength, and leverage is the biggest strength you can have. Leverage is having something the other guy wants. Or better yet, needs. Or best of all, simply can’t do without.”

Is this why Trump appears unfazed by the failure of the GOP’s long-awaited health care bill?

“That experience taught me a few things. One is to listen to your gut, no matter how good something sounds on paper. The second is that you’re generally better off sticking with what you know. And the third is that sometimes your best investments are the ones you don’t make.”

With an approval rating hovering in the mid-30s, some might argue that Trump should have followed this advice when choosing to run president.

“My leverage came from confirming an impression they were already predisposed to believe.”

“Good publicity is preferable to bad, but from a bottom-line perspective, bad publicity is sometimes better than no publicity at all. Controversy, in short, sells.”

He certainly held fast to that belief during the campaign. And it likely helped him.

“The final key to the way I promote is bravado. I play to people’s fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That’s why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration—and a very effective form of promotion.”

He hasn’t given up on this habit. He still claims everything he does is the “biggest” or “best” ever.

“You can’t be scared. You do your thing, you hold your ground, you stand up tall, and whatever happens, happens.”

A prelude to his recent “I never lose” comment, in reference to the failed health care bill.

“I believe in spending what you have to. But I also believe in not spending more than you should.”

Perhaps this will help him balance the country’s budget.

“One of the keys to thinking big is total focus. I think of it almost as a controlled neurosis, which is a quality I’ve noticed in many highly successful entrepreneurs. They’re obsessive, they’re driven, they’re single-minded and sometimes they’re almost maniacal, but it’s all channeled into their work. Where other people are paralyzed by neurosis, the people I’m talking about are actually helped by it.”

It remains to be seen if megalomania can produce results in Washington.

“It’s not how many hours you put in, it’s what you get done while you’re working.”

So far, productivity in the Trump Administration has been…mixed.

“Money was never a big motivation for me, except as a way to keep score. The real excitement is playing the game.”

A justification for all those golf trips?

With New York almost fully excavated from the winter, I got my bike out this morning and rode to the office for the first time this year. The air just the right level of cool, and as I headed toward the Brooklyn Bridge on-ramp, a group of fellow cyclists, mostly men, coalesced around me. We did the head-nod thing, and swore en masse at the potholes around an uncompleted construction site. But on the bridge, frustration disappeared. From that vantage, the city looked beautiful, and the wind felt freeing. I arrived at the office early, a little sweaty, and in an unreasonably good mood for having not yet had a second cup of coffee.

As a female bike commuter, I’ve faced more than a few raised eyebrows. There’s the fact that for every three men who cycle, only one woman does. And there’s also the fact that in America, as in many parts of the world, cycling is still seen as a rather niche form of transit, preferred by Lycra enthusiasts or, in New York City, those with a death wish. I fall into neither category. I love to ride, and I’ve learned what Peter Walker, political correspondent and contributor to The Guardian’s bike blog, writes in his new book: Biking is not as unsafe as it seems, and it’s often the fastest and most enjoyable way to get around.

But Walker also takes it a step further. His book, out April 4, is called How Cycling Can Save the World, and while he admits the title is a bit grandiose, he also tells Fast Company that it’s not far from the truth. From eradicating health concerns linked to inactivity, to mitigating climate change, to boosting local economies and building community, biking, Walker says, is an integral part of the solution. It just has some image and infrastructure issues to overcome.

Walker has been an urban cyclist the past 25 years, ever since he took a job as a bicycle courier in London in the early 1990s. In the three years he worked as a courier, he transformed from a slight, asthmatic college graduate to an athlete; “It was always assumed that I was the fittest person in my peer group,” Walker writes in the book. He was probably clocking 300 miles a week, and while he didn’t fit the speed-racing, “spandex warrior” image that springs to mind for some people when they think “cyclist,” he experienced firsthand that his lifestyle was far from the norm. When he joined The Guardian 10 years ago, he noticed that while the paper covered cycling as a sport, casual biking rarely made the pages (that disparity inspired him to start the bike blog seven years ago). “Ride a bike in many cities, and it can feel like you’re the unelected local representative of some mistrusted, barely understood cult,” Walker writes.

These days, Walker is more of what he calls an “everyday cyclist”: he bikes with his son to school, and around the neighborhood on errands. That type of casual cycling–when hopping on a bike is just a part of your daily life, not an event–is the kind of use that Walker sees as truly transformative. “Even a relatively sedate daily bike commute can have a near-miraculous health impact at just about any age,” Walker writes. Every year in America, around 800 Americans die on bikes; in the same period of time, at least 200,000 die prematurely from illnesses linked to lack of physical activity, like cardiovascular disease and cancer. The most comprehensive study on the benefits of cycling, Walker says, tracked 30,000 Danes over the course of 15 years; the researchers found that just biking to work decreased risk of mortality within that time frame by approximately 40%.

Local businesses would also thrive: Contrary to the assumptions of many store owners, who often drastically overestimate how many of their customers arrive by car, Walker cites studies that cyclists are more frequent and reliable customers, and the presence of bike lanes on streets contributes to revenue boosts: In 2013, the New  York City Department of Transportation commissioned a study of the impact of the protected bike lane installed on 9^th Avenue in Manhattan three years earlier. They found that business revenues rose 49% on that street, as opposed to 26% on non-bike-lane streets nearby.

The key, Walker says, will be for politicians to confront these statistics on the benefits of cycling, and turn them into infrastructure that supports it. Painted divides or “sharrows” won’t cut it; these non-structural bike lanes may actually lessen cyclists’ safety by luring them into a false sense of security. What will is a connected network of fully segregated bike lanes, shielded from cars by a curb and sometimes, a fence. When New York introduced its first fully fledged bike lanes in 2006, the share of cycle trips skyrocketed by 250% over the next eight years. Supporting cycling at the political level, Walker says, is likely to face pushback from powerful lobbies like the auto and oil industries, but the incontrovertible health and climate benefits, he says, could and should win out.

But the real change will come from the culture, Walker writes:

“If cycling is indeed going to save the world, it won’t be the Lycra-clad road warriors who’ll be doing it. The big changes–and they can be huge–happen when a nation doesn’t see cycling as a hobby, a sport, a mission, let alone a way of life. They happen when it becomes nothing more than a convenient, quick, cheap way of getting about, with the unintended bonus being the fact that you get some exercise in the process.”