Progress rarely moves in a straight line, but could it come in a round tube? Hyperloop One, a contender in the race to build the first tube system capable of propelling cylindrical pods to carry passengers as fast as 750 miles per hour, made the case for its technology today to an audience of roughly a hundred movers and shakers in Washington, D.C. After years of experimenting with the system in the Nevada desert, the company’s executives relied on old-fashioned airplane technology to make the trip to the nation’s capital to convince lawmakers that they represent the promise of the future.

“We’re just about to demonstrate the technology and we wanted people to start to think about what are we going to be doing after we demonstrate the technology,” CEO Rob Lloyd told Fast Company.

On Wednesday, Lloyd and cofounder and executive chairman Shervin Pishevar met with members of the the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation and the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. To make a pitch with bipartisan appeal, Lloyd cited the importance of American-made infrastructure, explaining that California-based Hyperloop One is preferable to high-speed rail (which requires investing in some foreign companies). “It is very refreshing to say, ‘Wait a minute, it would be great to have an industry that is American,'” he said.

It’s also an argument that might appeal to the White House. One of President Trump’s major promises was to create more jobs for average Americans. If the Hyperloop makes it way through all the inevitable regulatory hoops, the company will need a whole lot of workers to build its various systems of vacuum tubes.

The regulatory process is certain to be a challenge given Hyperloop’s ambitious timeline–Lloyd recently vowed to deliver a fully operational Hyperloop by 2020. He hopes to launch in three locations—including the U.S. Other contenders include the United Arab Emirates and Northern Europe. To that end, in November the company agreed to a government-funded feasibility study across Dubai and the United Arab Emirates. In addition, as part of its global challenge contest, thousands of teams from around the world competed to be a part of the world’s first full-scale test of the technology, with routes in both Poland and Finland among the semi-finalists selected. Finalists will be chosen in May.

Some see a lack of regulation around the Hyperloop as one of the main barriers to getting the technology adopted in the U.S. “We don’t have a process for something like this. That is the problem,” said former Secretary of the Department of Transportation Anthony Foxx at Hyperloop One’s Vision for American event.

Foxx has been a proponent of new technology like the Hyperloop, but has also acknowledged the difficulty of creating an entirely new legal framework for such a novel technology. “The Federal Railroad Administration’s current regulations would be like putting a square peg in a round hole for Hyperloop,” he said on Recode’s Decode podcast in February. “The technology, the science behind it, is very sound, but it’s another one of those examples of, the technology may be there before the government is.” He added that he wasn’t sure that the first Hyperloop would necessarily be in the U.S.

Lloyd thinks states could play a role in helping to get the U.S. Department of Transportation on board. “I do believe if some state signs up and says, ‘Hey, we’re ready to rock and roll on this and give these guys full support,’ I believe the federal DOT will find that very interesting.”

At the event in D.C., the company also announced that its test track in Nevada is ready for a full systems test, which it promises is coming in the next couple of months. Last year, Hyperloop One hosted a test of its propulsion system at its Nevada facility and promised a full-systems test by the end of 2016. But in an interview with The Verge, senior vice president of global operation Nick Earle, said they wanted to wait for the political situation to “settle down” before launching.

Last summer, Hyperloop One was also embroiled in a nasty lawsuit and countersuit between founding members of the company over harassment allegations among other issues. The suit was settled in November.

But the Apple CEO just lost those bragging rights, at least for the iPad.

For the first time, Microsoft’s Surface tablets beat Apple’s iPads to sit atop the J.D. Power satisfaction rankings, which were announced on Thursday. Surface users collectively gave their tablets an 855 score out of a possible 1,000. 

Surface users rated their tablets high for the variety of preloaded applications, internet connectivity, and the availability of manufacturer-supported accessories. Users liked the Surface’s selection of inputs and outputs, and for its internal storage. The Surface also earned top marks for design—the look and feel of the tablets. Users gave top marks for the Surface’s size, the quality of its materials, and the location of the physical buttons and controls.

“The Microsoft Surface platform has expanded what tablets can do, and it sets the bar for customer satisfaction,” said Jeff Conklin, J.D. Power’s VP of service industries. “These tablet devices are just as capable as many laptops, yet they can still function as standard tablets. This versatility is central to their appeal and success.”

Interestingly, given Microsoft’s stodgy reputation, the study found that Microsoft tablet owners are more likely to be early adopters of technology and more likely to be younger, compared to users of other tablets.

Not that Apple made a poor showing. Hardly. The iPad came in second with 849 points.

Apple lost the top spot to Samsung in 2013, but regained the title in 2014. It tied with Samsung for the top spot in 2015, and won outright in 2016. But Microsoft was already challenging its competitor last year, finishing just one point behind Apple.  

The iPad was launched in 2010, and sales climbed quickly until the tablet surpassed Mac sales in 2013. That turned out to be the iPad’s peak year. After that it began to decline quickly. Between the holiday shopping season of 2014 and the same quarter in 2016, the iPad lost 50% of its sales. It’s in that context that Apple recently announced a new budget-priced iPad.

“It’s pretty significant as it comes at a time when iPads seem to have lost some momentum at retail,” says analyst Michael Gartenberg. “There’s no doubt that with the Surface 4, Surface Book, and Surface Studio, Microsoft is capturing user mindshare from Apple, and mindshare often translates to market share.”  

“J.D. Power satisfaction results have always been a source of pride for Apple,” Gartenberg adds.

The J.D. Power results are ill-timed for another reason, too. Apple is going to extreme lengths to recapture the hearts and minds of the professional and creative communities that have supported Apple through good times and bad. Because Apple has been very slow to update its desktop computers and Macbook Pro line, many of those users have defected or are considering it. Many have become Surface users, or are considering it.

“Building products that deliver the power, versatility, and dependability that allow our customers to create their best work in any setting is fundamental to everything the team does,” a Microsoft spokesperson said about the Surface team in an email to Fast Company Thursday afternoon.

Apple hates talking about future products that aren’t ready to ship, but it did exactly that Monday by saying it’s currently working on a new Mac Pro as well as some souped-up iMacs that will show up later this year. It took that rare step to send a clear message to pro and creative users that Apple hasn’t forgotten them, and to hang on.

If there’s good news for Apple in the J.D. Power results, it’s that the tablet market is showing signs of health.

“This is actually very good news,” writes Shawn King at Jim Dalrymple’s The Loop blog. “It means there’s competition in the tablet space. Competition breeds better tablets for all of us.”

And the survey results show that consumers are more satisfied with tablets in general. The average overall satisfaction with tablets is 841 this year, an increase of 21 index points from last year.

Apple declined comment on the survey results.

So-called “soft skills,” by many accounts, are in high demand and short supply. But one of the reasons why things like communication, critical thinking, attention to detail, and the like seem so hard to find among job candidates is because hiring managers and recruiters aren’t all that good at testing for them. Unlike knowledge of JavaScript, you can’t always quickly determine whether somebody simply has it down or doesn’t. So as a workaround, I’ve started relying more and more on these three interview questions to reveal candidates’ soft skills.

1. “How Did You Prepare For This Interview?”

This “meta” question is a great way for me to gauge your attention to detail. Candidates usually come ready an anecdote to illustrate their focus on details when it comes to their work, but asking about interview prep forces them to stay on their toes. I can almost always tell whether you’ve Googled our company last-minute or have really done your homework.

But in my experience, the key to mastering this question is to not just answer it literally. Browsing our website, our social media profiles, and our Glassdoor reviews are a given. Instead, I’m looking to be impressed with something you unearthed in your research on us that you can weave back into the conversation. For example:

When I was browsing your site, I thought it was so smart to include sample score reports in the testing section. That’s the first thing I’d want to see if I was an employer considering purchasing your product.

(I run a company that creates pre-employment tests to help employers make more informed hiring choices.) This little anecdote tells me you took more than a cursory glance at our site. You’ve proven you have a knack for detail and the patience to dig a little deeper.

As a job candidate, even if you’re not asked the “How did you prepare?” question, you can still find ways to drop hints about your stellar interview prep into the conversation. Bring up something you found puzzling or interesting in your research, and use it to segue into a relevant personal story that makes you look good (and maybe even flatters the employer a little). Say you learned on The Muse that the company hosts hackathons every quarter. It’s totally appropriate to brag about your hackathon win at your university, and to ask about the coolest “hacks” the company’s employees have come up with over the years.

Related: Use This Formula To Dial Up The Soft Skills On Your Resume

2. “Could You Tell Me More About This Job You Held A Few Years Ago?”

Not the job you’re in right now but the one that’s two or three positions down your resume. I love this question for two reasons. For one, it gives you a chance to tell me a story about how you process information on the job and adapt accordingly. And because it taps into your past experience rather than something you’re doing every single day already, it pushes you to reflect on a job function you’ve moved on from. So not only does this shed light on your critical thinking skills, it also asks you to think critically about the experiences through which you developed them in the first place.

So if I ask, for example, about your university telefund job, don’t bore me with mundane details like your donation numbers. Show me how it trained you to be the problem-solver you are today. Maybe you found yourself discouraged by the percentage of alums who hung up on you after 10 seconds, so you volunteered to revise the standard call script. In just a week or two, donations started ticking upward. Every employer wants to know they’re hiring someone who can absorb information, understand the details that matter, and can make smart decisions on their own.

The second reason I love this question? It helps me test your attention to detail once again. Sometimes when I ask a candidate about a job listed toward the bottom half of their resume, I’m stunned to hear, “Oh, I forgot that was on there.” That’s a huge red flag. If you haven’t taken the time to familiarize yourself with the resume you’ve just handed me, how can I trust you with my company’s documents or codebase?

Before every interview, take time to read your own resume. Familiarize yourself with every stat, detail, and job you’ve included—but don’t stop there. Use your resume as a mnemonic device for triggering memories and stories you spin out on the fly. Make sure every job you’ve ever held has a corresponding story that showcases another soft skill (otherwise don’t include it).

3. “Does That Make Sense?”

I admit this is a tricky one—and that in a lot of professional settings, it’s just tossed off thoughtlessly and sounds condescending. But in a job interview, if I ask a candidate, “Does that make sense?” after I’ve just explained something important, I’m not just looking for affirmation that it does.

So just responding, “Yes, makes sense!” isn’t the way to earn high marks. The real purpose of this question is to probe your active listening skills. In other words, how well can you summarize what I’ve just said, and how attuned are you to understanding my needs as a hiring manager? Say you’re interviewing for a social media manager position with our company. A great way to demonstrate active listening is to first ask what social media success looks like to me. As soon as I’ve finished answering the question, it’s your time to shine.

At the very least, try to summarize my point of view in your own words. Then, if you want to go the extra mile, try segueing into a personal anecdote or philosophy that complements what I’ve just said. For example, if I mentioned that increasing follower counts isn’t a top priority, it’s a great opportunity for you to mention your personal conviction that certain vanity metrics aren’t the end-all-be-all of social. (Whereas if you start bragging about how you doubled your last company’s Instagram followers, I’ll know you weren’t listening.)

In today’s job-search climate, it’s crucial to master the subtle art of selling your soft skills to a potential employer. But it’s just as crucial for hiring managers to offer candidates a chance to do that. If you don’t know how look for soft skills, you’ll never find them.

Let’s face it—no one likes to be judged. But like it or not, that is exactly what a job interview is: a judgment zone. It’s also your chance to show that you’re the right person for the job, but if you’re not confident that you’ve got what it takes, the interviewer won’t be either.

If it’s any comfort, know that plenty of people are worried that their anxiety will sabotage their job interview performance. According to a 2013 study by Harris Interactive and Everest College, 92% of U.S. adults are anxious about job interviews, and 17% of people ranked fear of being nervous as their top concern.

Luckily, you can cross “nervous about being nervous” off your list with these stress-relief exercises that will help to calm your job interview anxiety.

1. Do A Mental Dress Rehearsal

Most career experts will advise you to practice answering interview questions, but there’s another kind of rehearsal that can prepare you in a different way—the rehearsal that’s all in your mind.

“Research shows that experiencing success increases our confidence, even if that experience is imagined,” says Harley Sears, an Arkansas-based consulting hypnotist. To get into a mental rehearsal, Sears recommends that you make yourself comfortable, close your eyes, take a few deep breaths, and allow your muscles to relax.

“See yourself as calm, focused, and prepared—confidently answering any questions throughout the successful interview. Allow yourself to feel strong, confident, and proud while visualizing your successful interview.”

2. Listen To A Motivational Playlist

Star in your own episode of “Carpool Karaoke” on your way to the interview, and you could sing your way into a Zen-like state for interview success.

“Movement and music can instantly get you in a place of confidence,” says Jennifer Davis, a New Jersey–based leadership coach. “Pick a favorite song that fills your heart with passion. Songs and movements that connect you with your best self will allow you to fully experience power in the moment, and then you can go in and crush it!”

3. Give Yourself A Pep Talk

Do you sometimes catch yourself talking to yourself? It’s okay. We all do it. Well, according to Patricia Thompson, president of Silver Lining Psychology, an Atlanta-based corporate psychology and management consulting firm, that’s exactly what you want to do before an interview to get in the right headspace.

Thompson actually suggests a trick to personalize your pep talk even more: “Use your own name. Research suggests that it helps you to distance yourself a bit from the situation, and instead of getting caught up in the anxiety of it, can help you to have a greater sense of perspective,” she says.

4. Watch Funny Videos

Finally, there’s a time when it is productive—and prescriptive—to watch cat videos. Thompson says there’s a benefit to watching a few funny videos before you head into your interview. “Having a good belly laugh relaxes you and puts you in a better mood. It has also been linked to reduce certain stress hormones in the body,” she says. Good laugh, good interview.

5. Exaggerate Your Fears

This might sound like the absolute opposite of a calming exercise, but as you’re preparing for your interview, ask yourself what the worst is that can happen, then amplify it.

“Most people try to stifle anxious thoughts with positivity, but voicing your worst fears is more effective,” says Jackie Viramontez, a Los Angeles–based life coach. “The exaggeration method allows you to laugh at yourself and regain a practical perspective.”

So think about what you fear most. Is it blanking on a question? Spilling your coffee? Play that scenario out, and you may just calm those jitters by having the experience in the safety of your own home.

This article originally appeared on Monster and is reprinted with permission.

More From Monster:

• 100 Companies Hiring In April
• How To Make A Great Impression Before You Meet Your Interviewer
• List Of Strengths And Weaknesses: What To Say In Your Interview

This week we learned what it takes to make your LinkedIn profile pop, what successful execs do to kick off and finish their workdays, and how learning to like other people can make you happier in life and work.

These are the stories you loved in Leadership for the week of April 1:

1. Want To Be Happier And More Successful? Learn To Like Other People

Most self-improvement advice comes down to tips for upgrading some part of ourselves—the focus is on us and what we need to do. However, research from the University of Georgia hints that there may be an overlooked approach to much the same outcomes: seeing the good in others. This week we explored why the best self-help advice may not have much to do with ourselves at all.

2. Career Experts Make Over These Mediocre LinkedIn Profiles 

It’s no longer enough to have a crisp resume—your LinkedIn presence also needs to be on point. But what exactly makes a compelling profile? Fast Company asked a few career experts to revamp some less-than-stellar LinkedIn profiles and offer a few tips for crafting profiles that drive recruiters to reach out about that next great opportunity.

3. How The Most Successful People Start And End Their Workdays 

What you do when you first wake up and before you go to bed can impact how productive you’ll be for the hours in between. While no hack and habit is universal, it never hurts to take inspiration from successful leaders and entrepreneurs. From 20-minute morning strolls to reading the New York Times on mobile (yes, you read that right), here’s how a few of them rise and shine, then power down.

4. How I Managed To Save Money On A $25,000 Salary In New York City 

Ask anybody who’s tried it—saving money in New York City is no easy thing to do. But one millennial not only figured out how to stretch an annual salary of less than $30,000 but also put a little money away in the process. Here’s how she made that happen in one of the most expensive cities in the world.

5. Why More Tech Companies Are Hiring People Without Degrees 

The typical stereotype of a Silicon Valley employee is often a computer science grad from Stanford or MIT. But in recent years, the tech industry has come to understand how this can create a homogenous workforce and has begun to recruit outside those networks. One pool of talent tech that companies are tapping more now includes those without college degrees but with technical skills. Here’s a look at why—and how they’re making it happen.

If you are about to take parental leave or just returning from leave, you may have realized that the way you work and what you need to be your best at work has changed. Whether you need to work from home or change your schedule or duties, starting conversations can be scary. Having these conversations, however, will not only improve your working life but can be the catalyst for lasting cultural change at your company.

Says Lindsey Pollak, millennial workplace expert at The Hartford insurance company: “If you as an individual can put your request in the context of cultural change—that it’s not just me wanting something, that this is the way the workplace is changing, that these policies are going to be important moving forward, I can be an example of why we are a good employer for millennials—all of that builds toward a broader story.”

Most importantly, do not enter into these conversations with the mind-set of asking for a special accommodation. “If you feel like you’re asking for a concession, the company’s going to feel that way too,” says talent executive Marcy Axelrad. “Often, these conversations are approached in a negative way, as a conflict, or as an accommodation, versus, here’s my business proposal of what’s going to work for both of us, and I’d love to take you through it. It’s positive.”

Here’s how to approach three potentially awkward post-leave conversations:

1. How to Ask For A Raise When You Return From Leave

The simple answer here is: Ask for it the exact same way you would any other time you deserved a change in compensation.

The more complicated answer is: Ask for it the exact same way you’d ask for it at any other deserving time . . . with the knowledge, in the back of your mind, that your employer may feel that he or she has already “accommodated” you this year.

Many women I spoke to felt a tremendous pressure to increase their earnings coming back to work. Some of the financial stress is practical (you have child care to pay for), and some of it is emotional (you want to feel that working is worth it). Go ahead and talk about all that stress and swirl—with your partner, your family, your friends. But at work, focus entirely on performance.

“Asking for a raise is all business,” says Deborah Grayson Riegel, principal of the Boda Group, a leadership and team development firm, and founder of Talk Support, a communication coaching company. “Go in knowing that the least valid reason to ask for a raise is because you need more money, so take the personal out of it.” And then dive right in. “Women undersell themselves, and I think organizations take advantage of that,” Riegel says. Here’s how to approach compensation like a pro:

Game the timing. You may feel mounting pressure with each paycheck, but “save your ask for when the time is right based on track record, and hopefully based on a previous conversation,” says Riegel. What is your company’s fiscal year? When are budgets most flush, and when is the pot dry? If you haven’t discussed a bump in compensation previously, you may need to lay the groundwork now, with documentable goals, and then pick up the conversation again at an agreed-upon date.

Anticipate their post-leave hesitation . . . but then don’t stoop to it. If you make a case entirely based on performance and deliverables, that frames the conversation and will make it more obviously wrong for your boss to lean on your leave as an excuse. But she or he may still go there. “If they say, ‘But you were just on leave,’ I would get curious and calmly ask what they mean by that,” instructs Riegel.

It’s not rude, it’s a dance that will progress the conversation in real terms. “Then if they talk about the cost of covering for you while you were out, you can say that what they’re describing is the company’s job to do—paying for a fill-in—not yours. It shouldn’t come out of your compensation. It should really be a line item in their budget. It shouldn’t be your burden that they have had to accommodate what they’ve legally had to do for you.” This should steer the conversation back to performance.

2. How to Ask To Go Part-Time When That’s Uncommon Where You Work

This advice comes from Karen, a senior brand manager at Energizer, who was very conflicted about going back to work after having the first of her three sons. Here’s exactly what she did:

Partway through her leave, Karen scheduled a call with her boss, but only after doing three things to prep:

1. She researched the company’s part-time policy. “It was very deep in the corporate website, hard to find, but allegedly, part-time is allowed,” she says.

2. Karen talked herself through the worst-case scenario. “I thought, Okay, if they tell me no, what will I do? I will go back full-time but continue to look for other flexible options. And if they assume that I’m on my way out in the meantime, well, at least we’re all on the same page.”

3. She thought hard about who her strongest relationship was within management. That was who she’d approach.

Finally, the ask: Toward the end of her leave, Karen emailed her boss asking her for a time to talk. On the phone she said: “I’m coming back, and I love the company, but I’m wondering if there are any options to go part-time? I’ve looked online and found our policy, but of course I wanted to talk to you personally.” Her boss wanted to run it up the ladder and scheduled another call where they worked out the financial details. Karen would work three days at a 60% salary, which felt like a real victory, given the existing culture. “My advice is, don’t expect them to give you the world if you’re not willing to give it back and haven’t already proven that,” she says. “I was a high performer; they knew that I was committed.”

3. How To Ask To Work From Home (At Least Some Of The Time)

First of all, be sure it’s really what you want. Working from home is a great option if you want to save yourself commuting time, or schedule a pediatrician appointment at lunchtime, or have some quiet time to concentrate on cranking out work without being pulled into meetings.

Working from home is not a great option if you envision using that time to save on child care and be with your baby. A newborn may nap enough to give you eight hours of work time. A six-month-old doesn’t. And if your productivity, deliverables, and availability slip because you’re at home with your kid, you’re not setting a great precedent for your own future requests—or anyone else’s.

Still want to ask to work from home? Jennifer Dorian, general manager of Turner Classic Movies, has both asked for and granted flexibility at various moments in her career. She says, “I would start the conversation like this: ‘Hey, I know we’ve worked together for a while, and I hope you have a high level of trust in my work ethic and my quality of work. I wanted to talk to you about using my energy in the best way possible and also adapting to some of the things I need to do at home. So here’s the schedule that I would propose, if you think it works for you. And I’m pretty sure I can get everything done because we’ll still have good communication, and I’ll still be available, and I’ll really be using this time at home to focus on my assignments.”

Be aware, also, Jennifer says, that your ideal vision of this flexibility may change over time, and you can be honest about that—same goes for your employer, of course. “I would be really honest about your needs. I wouldn’t play games, or ask for more than you want in the hope that they’ll negotiate down,” she says.

You’re asking for something that requires trust, so you should demonstrate that you’re being honest from that first conversation. If you sense hesitation on their part, reassure them that they aren’t committing forever. “You could always ask, ‘Can we just try this for three weeks, or a quarter, and then reevaluate?’” she suggests. By then you’ll have proven your dependability, and if your own needs have changed again, you’ll have another opportunity to open up the conversation.

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.

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

It’s no secret that successful people are readers. Reading helps you stay on top of new trends and learn techniques you can use in your career. Bill Gates and Warren Buffett each share their favorite books at the end of the year, and they’re filled with nonfiction titles.

But what about fiction–is it purely entertainment? Michel Morvan, founder and U.S. CEO of the tech company CoSMo, reads a couple chapters of a crime novel every night and says it’s not just for fun: “To run a business, you have to be deeply involved in all the minutiae, from strategy to product to hiring,” he says. “Diving into the story, identifying with the characters, and trying to solve the mystery has two effects on me. First, it is a very efficient way to disconnect from all the problems I face in the business. Second, it immediately unlocks my creativity. My mind has no limits while I’m reading, and it shouldn’t while I’m conducting business.”

Related: How Changing Your Reading Habits Can Transform Your Health

Indeed, research has found that reading fiction can help you improve skills that are just as important as the technical knowledge you might gain from nonfiction. Here are five things a novel delivers to your brain:

1. Enhanced Reasoning Skills

Reading fiction can give you insights that help you work beyond logic, says Michael Benveniste, an English professor from the University of Puget Sound. In situations that may be colored by emotion or past experience, it helps you cultivate qualitative reasoning, which is gained from descriptions.

“Fiction offers a space for speculating about the constitutive role that ‘fuzzy’ values like beliefs, norms, and experiences play in social contexts,” he says.

2. Understanding of Complex Problems

People who read fiction gain a broader understanding of others, according to a study from the University of Toronto. “These effects are due partly to the process of engagement in stories, which includes making inferences and becoming emotionally involved, and partly to the contents of fiction, which include complex characters and circumstances that we might not encounter in daily life,” writes Keith Oatley, professor emeritus of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto.

Oatley compares fiction to a computer simulator for your brain. “Just as computer simulations can help us get to grips with complex problems such as flying a plane or forecasting the weather, so novels, stories, and dramas can help us understand the complexities of social life,” he told The New York Times.

3. Empathy

Imagining a character’s situation can help you become more empathetic toward people in real life. That’s because when you read a story, you connect to personal experiences, according to research done by Raymond Mar, a psychologist at York University in Canada.

In a speech at the American Psychological Association’s annual convention, Mar said we often have thoughts and emotions that are consistent with the storyline. By reflecting on our past social interactions or imagining future interactions, we may gain insight into things that have happened in the past that relate to a character in a story.

“Experiences that we have in our life shape our understanding of the world…and imagined experiences through narrative fiction stories are also likely to shape or change us. But with a caveat–it’s not a magic bullet–it’s an opportunity for change and growth,” said Mar. “Even though fiction is fabricated, it can communicate truths about human psychology and relationships.”

4. Stress Relief

Reading a novel relieves stress better than listening to music, taking a walk or having a cup of tea, according to a study from the University of Sussex. Reading reduced stress levels by 68%, said cognitive neuropsychologist David Lewis. Just six minutes of reading lowered participants’ heart rate and eased tension in the muscles, he found. In fact, reading was able to get subjects’ stress levels lower than before they started.

“Losing yourself in a book is the ultimate relaxation,” Lewis said in an interview with the Telegraph. “It really doesn’t matter what book you read; by losing yourself in a thoroughly engrossing book you can escape from the worries and stresses of the everyday world and spend a while exploring the domain of the author’s imagination.

“This is more than merely a distraction but an active engaging of the imagination as the words on the printed page stimulate your creativity and cause you to enter what is essentially an altered state of consciousness.”

5. Strong Role Models

Novels often have engaging characters whose traits are described in detail. Juliette Wells, associate professor of English at Goucher College in Baltimore, Md., teaches 19th century fiction and says she pulls strength from Jane Austen novels.

“Many of these dynamics map usefully onto the world of work,” she says. “I’ve often found myself silently quoting Elizabeth Bennet of Pride and Prejudice, who declares, ‘my courage always rises at every attempt to intimidate me.’”

Showing up to work naked or suddenly speaking French in a meeting–dreams seem like senseless stories that fill our sleep. While they’re easy to ignore, they’re actually vital messages from our subconscious, says Kelly Sullivan Walden, author of I Had the Strangest Dream: The Dreamer’s Dictionary for the 21st Century.

Dreams close the gap between the subconscious and conscious mind. “The subconscious mind uses 88% of our mind’s power, while the logical, or conscious mind uses 12%,” says Sullivan Walden.

There are common dream themes that many of us share, and they have meaning if you take the time to decipher them. Here is some insight on what those dreams about work mean:

Forgetting Something Important

Having a dream that you forgot an important meeting or client call signifies that you’re worried about being tested, says Sullivan Walden. “This dream seems to show up with people who are overachievers, successful, or driven,” she says. “No slackers have this recurring dream.”

When you have a dream where you worry you won’t be able to figure something out, it usually means you will, says Sullivan Walden. “Subconsciously, you’re making sure that you’re prepared for the things that are testing you right now,” she says. “Our dream is telling us to show up prepared.”

If this type of dream is bothersome, Sullivan Walden suggests making a gratitude list about the things at work that are going well. “Your subconscious mind will get the message that you don’t have to worry,” she says. “It will make you feel like you’ve got this, and now you can dream about other things.”

Everyday Work Tasks

If you dream that you are working, it signifies that your job is important to you, says Sullivan Walden. “This is common with entrepreneurs, and the upside is that it helps you become better at your job,” she says. “You work through situations and get an edge on how to do better. The challenging side is you can feel like you never get a break.”

One way to shift away from having this dream is to make a list of the things you need to do the next day before you go to sleep. “This tells the subconscious mind that the conscious mind has it handled,” she says.

Also, look at these dreams for creative inspiration. “Pay attention to the bizarre,” says Sullivan Walden. “If a hippo comes into your office wearing roller skates or something else completely out of place, it could be a clue to how you may be more successful. Think about how it may help in some way.”

Flying In The Office

Flying dreams are about success, says Sullivan Walden. “You’re soaring above the earth and problems,” she says. “It’s about mastery.”

Don’t leave that dream lying down, she adds. “Meditate later on how wonderful it felt,” she says. “If you’re nervous about something later, remember how you were able to fly. It can make you feel like you’ve got super powers.”

Being Naked At Work

If you have a dream that you show up to work naked, Sullivan Walden says it symbolizes feeling revealed. “It can mean you felt you said too much or are worried about feedback you provided,” she says. “It can also mean you feel underprepared.”

Resolve these feelings by embracing it. “The more transparent you can be, the better it will be for you,” she says. “Dreams are always moving us toward integrating these feelings into our lives. Do the work so you feel more prepared and reassure yourself that everybody feels naked at one time.”

Dreams About Coworkers

If you dream about someone at work, you’re connecting to a trait that person has, says Sullivan Walden. “The rule of thumb with anything that happens in a dream is that everybody and everything is an aspect of you,” she says. “If you dream about your boss, for example, you’re connecting with the part of you that feels empowered. You’re owning your connection with authority figures.”

If you dream about a coworker, Sullivan Walden suggests asking yourself what quality they represent. “Are they a hard worker? Creative? Fun to be around?” she asks. “What two or three adjectives would you use to describe them? Then consider that you are connecting with that part of yourself. Your subconscious is saying that you want to become more of that.”

Remembering Your Dreams

We can have up to nine dreams each night, and while you don’t have to remember your dreams to benefit from them, you increase their value if you do, says Sullivan Walden. To remember your dream, don’t move around too much or immediately check your phone when you wake; this is when dreams often leave your memory. Before you get out of bed, Sullivan Walden suggests writing down your dream in a journal or recording it using an app, such as DreamsCloud.

“Don’t move a muscle until you have one scenario in mind,” she says. “Replay it several times before you get out of bed. Movement disconnects your dream and you’ll have a harder time if you wait until you get up.”

Another way to remember or decipher it is to share the dream with somebody else, suggests Sullivan Walden. “The meaning often becomes obvious when you hear it with your ears,” she says. “You can get a lot of information about what the dream is telling you. The most important thing is to honor it.”

Recurring Themes

If you notice recurring dreams, they may be trying to send you message. “We all have a playlist of people, places, and situations that frequent our dreams,” says Sullivan Walden. “Part of it is because human beings are habit makers.”

But there could be a deeper meaning. “Recurring dreams are like a cosmic highlighter pen that is pointing out, ‘This is important,’” says Sullivan Walden. “It’s unfinished business and you need to pay attention. It’s like the FedEx guy who leaves a notice at your door; when you finally pick it up, you can move forward or into a different direction.”

After Liberia’s second civil war ended in the mid-2000s, only 51 doctors were left to serve a population of more than 4 million people. Even now, the West African country faces a severe health care deficit: Half of all mothers give birth without a trained attendant, and about 30% of Liberians live more than a hour’s walk from a clinic. A lack of primary care, health professionals say, was a prime reason Ebola spread so viciously in 2014-2015, killing 4,800 people.

Last summer, the government announced a radical plan to fill in the coverage gaps. It wants to train 4,000 community health workers to work the countryside by 2020, and it’s enlisted an innovative nonprofit to do the on-the-ground work. Founded by Rajesh Panjabi, a Liberian-Indian-American social entrepreneur, Last Mile Health is expanding health access through the use of modern technology, and rethinking what it takes to deliver basic services in remote places.

If Liberia was to create a full, Western-style health system in all its remote villages, many of them deep in the rainforest, it would probably take years before it was able to offer adequate care. So, as well as credentialing doctors who can make thousands of diagnoses and treatments, Liberia is training workers who focus on the most common conditions, like pneumonia, diarrhea, and malaria, and the most vulnerable groups, like children and mothers.

Last Mile Health hires workers with the equivalent of a sixth to twelfth grade education, many of whom have never had jobs before, and puts them through a six-month training program. It teaches them about community mapping, family planning, how to identify triggers for disease outbreaks, basic first aid, and other skills. Then it arms the workers with backpacks full of diagnostic devices and basic drugs, like malaria pills and antibiotics, and sends them into the countryside.

“Currently, most diagnoses are made by doctors and nurses and physician assistants,” Panjabi says. “The puzzle we’re trying to solve is how many of these diagnoses can be made safely and effectively by community health workers. They’re integrated with a team of doctors, not separate from them. But they’re extending the reach of the system.”

There were three other Skoll winners this year. Babban Gona, founded by Kola Masha in Nigeria, trains young smallholder farmers, helping tamp down insecurity and extremism. Build Change, run by Elizabeth Hausler, retrofits houses and schools, so they’re less susceptible to collapsing during natural disasters. Polaris, started by Bradley Myles, takes a data-driven approach to preventing human trafficking.

Last Mile’s backpacks contain $1 blood tests that can diagnose malaria as simply as a pregnancy test. Health workers can gauge if children are malnourished by measuring the width of their upper arms, or diagnose pneumonia by counting their breaths-per-minute rates. They record every data point on a cell phone and record drug inventories of local stores, ensuring supplies are kept up-to-date. “There’s so much revolution in technology that it’s made it possible to take many tests that once were only available in hospitals,” Panjabi says.

Panjabi says installing solar panels and phone masts in rural communities could extend the services Last Mile is able to offer–for example, by powering more equipment, or improving communication between health workers and the nurses and doctors who oversee them.

“The more we’re able to connect solar and smartphone technology, the greater the capacity of the worker, the more health that can be had, and the more jobs we will create,” he says. “That’s the future if we can get more collision between the community health care revolution and the digital technology revolution, increasing access, lowering costs, and improving quality.”

Lauren Greenfield has photographed a man who wears 33 pounds of gold. She has photographed a two-year-old getting a pedicure, a home so large it has 32 bathrooms, and a banker who felt shortchanged by his $3.6 million bonus. She has photographed Kim Kardashian and Tiger Woods, JLo and Jay Z, and a Chinese billionaire with a replica of Mount Rushmore–at one-third scale–in his backyard. In fact, over the last 25 years, Greenfield, who is as much sociologist as photographer, has turned her camera on every imaginable expression of wealth and, as such, is uniquely qualified to comment on our increasingly off-the-rails obsession with affluence.

Greenfield’s prescient body of work, which includes the award-winning documentary The Queen of Versailles and her viral video #LikeAGirl, is being presented as Generation Wealth: a 504-page book and a provocative, sweeping exhibit at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles, opening on April 8.

I spoke with Greenfield about how her images tell the story of a growing addiction to consumerism, and what our obsession with wealth means for the future.

At the height of the economic boom, Greenfield was on assignment to cover the opening of a new Versace boutique in Beverly Hills. She was there to shoot Donatella Versace, but her eye was drawn to three women who, Greenfield remembers, “were all holding blingy Versace bags—and a lot of gold. They were so interesting looking, and I made a picture of their three purses. I started talking to one of the women, Jackie Siegel, who had flown in from Florida just for the party. This picture is so symbolic of the status markers: the rings, the bags, the breasts, the gold. It was 2007, and Jackie was spending $1 million a year on clothes, and Versace was shipping her containers of clothing. That night, she told me she was building the biggest house in America, and she invited me to Florida to see it.”

One of the trends Greenfield documents is the new twist on enviously peering over the hedge at the neighbor’s house. “People used to compare themselves to their neighbor down the road, who maybe had a slightly bigger car or closet,” she says. “But with the rise of reality TV and the affluent lifestyles dominating what we see on television–and with people watching so much of it–we’re actually more influenced by these shows than by our neighbors, and we spend more time with them. What we’re seeing is that people are no longer looking to buy a home in a neighborhood because their family or friends or church is there; instead, they’re looking to move into the biggest house they can afford. So what they have in common with their neighbors is mainly their ability to borrow.” It is, she says, a breakdown of traditional community through real estate, in which “people are more interested in keeping up with the Kardashians than with the Joneses.”

“The worldwide obsession with wealth is unsustainable on so many levels,” says Greenfield. “It’s morally unsustainable. It’s unsustainable for our communities, but it’s most urgent for the environment. The traffic in Beijing and Moscow is already incredible; the infrastructure can’t handle all of the cars.”

Although Greenfield didn’t set out to capture the environmental impact of our aspirations to own more and have bigger, her pictures clearly tell that story. From 1983 to 2013–roughly the time period that Generation Wealth covers–she notes that the average American home expanded from 1,725 square feet to 2,598 square feet. “Some of that added space accounts for larger and larger closets that we use to store more and more things. We’ve seen the storage industry blow up and the container industry blow up,” she says. “But the point for me is also about how, psychologically, our appetite for things became insatiable.”

Well, we know what ad won’t be here, eh? On the flip side of Pepsi’s creative catastrophe, Dove’s campaign for Real Beauty has been one of the most successful ongoing marketing campaigns over the last decade. And this week the brand unveiled Baby Dove, its first major category extension since launching the Dove+Men line in 2010. The new campaign backing the line of baby products keeps all things part of the brand-image family under the #RealMoms hashtag, and a consistent extension of Dove’s longstanding celebration of individuality. If the continued success of Real Beauty, and quality of the men’s advertising, is any indication, Baby Dove should keep this long-running campaign a success for the next generation. Onward!

Dove “Baby Dove #RealMoms”

What: Launch ad for Dove’s new line of baby products that’s a pint-sized extension of its Real Beauty campaign

Who: Dove, Razorfish

Why We Care: Not only does this represent the first new line extension for the brand in seven years, the ad thankfully carries on the brand’s tradition of taking a real look at motherhood, through a variety of people and approaches. No cliché ad moms here.

Sonos “The Big Lebowski on PLAYBASE”

What: Sonos gets totally mellow to introduce its take on the home theater sound bar speaker.

Who: Sonos, Anomaly

Why We Care: It’s not the first time Sonos has tapped into Hollywood to make a point about its speakers’ potential to enhance the viewing experience. The first time was a clip from I Love You, Man, but, as charming as Paul Rudd is, going with The Big Lebowski is, like, taking things up a notch, man.

Sheraton “We Dive In And Go Beyond”

What: A look at the heroic lengths to which Sheraton employees will go to make a guest happy.

Who: Sheraton Hotels, Venables Bell & Partners

Why We Care: The brand says the new “Go Beyond” campaign showcases actual Sheraton associates interacting with guests in small but meaningful ways that have great impact a traveler’s experience. What works here is the epic treatment of a mundane moment, as well as buddy’s face when that little girl aggressively chucks bunny in for another dip.

Lynx “Boys Don’t Cry”

What: The newest episode in the ongoing Men in Progress series for Lynx (that’s Axe to you and me) that compares real masculinity and what it means to be a man with the cultural conventions we’re regularly sold, largely by advertisers.

Who: Lynx, TML Unlimited

Why We Care: As short-doc branded series go, it looks like Lynx has learned a thing or two from its Unilever sibling Dove, interviewing real people about real feelings, to serve up a view of manhood counter to much of what we’ve been shown from marketers over the years. The series overall is strong, and this newest episode talking about whether or not it’s okay for men to cry is one of its best yet.

SoulCycle “Find It!”

What: New SoulCycle campaign uses real instructors giving impassioned pep talks that perfectly sum up the brand’s unique sweaty spirituality.

Who: SoulCycle, Laird+Partners

Why We Care: It may not be your thing. Maybe it whiffs a wee bit close to cult brand Kool-Aid. But as brand anthem ads go, can you imagine a better one for SoulCycle than this, actual instructors doing their best impression of Tony Robbins on two wheels? Part of what’s made it such a phenomenon is how SoulCycle’s staff have helped remake the traditional idea of an exercise class into part community, part self-help sweat session, and this illustrates that balance perfectly.

The Gale high-tech first-aid kit was born on a terrifying night in Mexico.

Its creator, Ram Fish, who once led the iPod group at Apple, was on vacation with his wife and three young daughters in a small town in Baja called Los Barriles. At 10 p.m. one night, one of his daughters, Tali, started having trouble breathing while she slept.

As she struggled to get her breath, her parents become more and more frightened. “We were saying ‘What do we do? Is there a local clinic? How do we diagnose it?” Fish remembers. Little villages in Baja are great for getting away from it all—but if someone gets sick, then health care is far away, too. Fish and his wife soon learned there was no clinic nearby.

“So we called Kaiser, and luckily there was somebody running it who spoke English,” Fish says. The nurse at Kaiser was able to provide some help identifying the cause of the young girl’s breathing problem. She was having a chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) episode, probably due to an infection. Most of the time, COPD episodes sound more dangerous than they really are, Fish told me. His daughter was wheezing loudly that night, but she was still getting enough oxygen.

“Everything ended up being fine, but it was a horrible night, looking at only the most primitive diagnostic tools,” he says. “You usually just leave them sleeping, but if it gets serious you need to give them steroids, and if that doesn’t work you need to intubate.” If the COPD attack had been more serious that night in Baja, Tali could have been in real trouble.

That got Fish thinking. “Everybody is focusing on doing things in the cloud, but the place where you really control the experience is the endpoint,” he says. He began to think that focusing on tools that people could keep on hand—especially for those who live far from a clinic—could improve patient outcomes. And it might make for a solid business, too.

A Clinic to Go

Fifteen months of hard work later, Fish had a startup called 19Labs, and a new product called the Gale “clinic-in-a-box.” (The name of the product derives from Florence Nightingale, the founder of modern nursing.)

Gale is a breadbox-size chest containing diagnostic tools in the bottom drawer and medications and supplies in the top drawer. On the top is a pop-up touch screen that displays various interactive treatment guides. The guides can walk a user through the process of assessing all kinds of health problems from snake bites to ankle sprains to heart trouble. “If you are a parent, or a secretary in a school, or have a senior,” Fish says, “without any health care education you can make an assessment.”

On the touch screen, a user first chooses from broad categories like “Stings and Bites” and “Concussions in Children.” The guides then help the user narrow down to a specific problem through a series of questions and answers. The text and images in the guides were developed by researchers at Stanford and licensed by 19Labs. A voice agent is always reachable to help users with questions about the treatment guides.

The touch screen is also used for placing video calls to physicians and other caregivers, including doctors from telehealth provider Amwell. The large button on the front of the Gale box can be preprogrammed to place a telemedicine call with a finger press. Alternatively, it can be set to immediately dial 911 or a health call center.

After using the guides, a user can call on a series of diagnostic, sensor-based instruments to get at the objective facts of the problem. The drawer on the bottom front of the Gale box holds some of the most important ones, including electrocardiogram patches, an AliveCor EKG and stroke detector, a blood sample tool, a digital thermometer, a fingertip oximeter (for measuring pulse), an otoscope (inner ear exams), and a spirometer (measures lung ventilation), among others.

“The amount of stuff that’s coming up in sensor technology is just amazing,” Fish says. Gale may one day integrate data from other, less clinical, sensors like sleep monitors or health and fitness wearables, Fish says.

When a Gale user calls into a call center or telehealth service, the data collected by the sensors can be transmitted to a caregiver. Fish is careful to point out that Gale doesn’t try to replace the human caregivers. Rather, the device seeks to assist in the assessment of a problem then help get the patient connected with the right health professionals when needed.

Gale incorporates a 4G cellular radio to stay connected from remote places, and sports a large battery to ensure that it’ll have power when medical help is needed. “You can imagine one in every school, every workplace, every office,” Fish says. “In the beginning it will be public places, and in a couple of years I think we’ll see more and more things like this at home.”

Fish isn’t ready to talk about how much Gale will cost yet, but says that the idea is to drive the price tag down by leveraging consumer electronics-like economies of scale and making money from ongoing services rather than just selling boxes. 19Labs, which now has 12 employees, hopes to finish pilot programs in South Dakota and Canada this year, then begin to make Gale more widely available to clinics. It plans to sell the Gale hardware for an initial cost that will include basic medical supplies and sensor instruments. A monthly fee will cover the device’s cellular connectivity and access to a cloud-based device management and health content platform.

Soaking Up SRI’s Mojo

19Labs is housed in a small office in a long, thin, two-story building located on the campus of SRI International in Menlo Park, California. SRI, originally known as the Stanford Research Institute, is the place where the very first internet packet was sent back in 1969. Hundreds of tech inventions have been created there over the years, such as the AI assistant that became Apple’s Siri. Numerous small tech companies, and a few high-profile venture capital firms have gathered themselves around the campus, as if to soak up some of that historic mojo.

When I walk in Fish is on a video conference call with a couple of his engineers, his medical director (and former astronaut) Dr. Scott Parazynski, and a developer from one of the country’s largest research hospitals. The hospital has developed a technology that could be integrated into Gale. Fish is rapidly and loudly throwing questions at the developer about everything from core technologies to business model to integration specifics to marketing tactics. The developer is keeping up pretty well.

The more you see the product, the more you can see the technology, design, and product marketing lessons Fish has brought not only from Apple but also another former employer, Samsung, where he worked on the Simband health wearable.

“From every company I worked at I took a few great ideas,” Fish says. He absorbed Apple’s obsession with quality and its desire to “surprise and delight” customers. At Samsung, he learned from the company’s culture of very hard work at high speed to deliver products before anybody else.

“The secret as a leader is to then apply these themes selectively, and balance the inherent conflict between those great ideas,” he says. “Companies tend to get religious—dogmatic around specific ideas—and at Apple, quality became one such dogmatic idea. Quality is critical, but perfection exists only in our dreams. Reality is never perfect. So aspire, but don’t get dogmatic about it, and know when to compromise.”

Part of a System

A common theme you’ll hear repeated by venture capitalists these days is the idea that products should be vertically integrated, providing as many layers of a given service as possible. VCs like companies that own hardware, software, and services. For instance, Apple controls the iPhone hardware, the operating system and many major apps, and services such as the App Store, iCloud, and Apple Music.

But that holistic approach can be difficult for startups, because it requires multiple internal groups focused on very different technologies, yet all working closely together on an integrated experience. Fish favors a different approach. “It’s smarter to play to your own strengths than to try to do something vertically,” he says. “And that’s a mistake that a lot of VCs in the Valley make when they tell startups ‘don’t give a damn, go transform the industry, take out the existing player, do everything from A to Z,’ rather than saying ‘No, build the things that you’re good at and then empower others.’”

Fish’s philosophy is to build a tech platform that can then pull in the best-in-class sensor products from companies like AliveCor. Rather than creating the medical supplies or sensor devices that come with Gale, 19Labs makes Gale into a platform for selling those products. If the Gale box finds its way into many clinics, schools, or homes, it could become a valuable distribution channel for partner companies.

Fish promoted this idea when he worked at Samsung, too. Samsung brought Fish in to lead the creation of the Simband. But rather than selling a one-size-fits all device including a few sensors that would fit the needs of most people, Fish (with Samsung executive Young Sohn) decided to make the Simband a prototype on which developers could create custom wearable devices with a specific set of sensors.

Since 19Labs hopes to sell Gale to health care providers—not consumers—this approach makes sense. Some health organizations may require specific or more specialized devices. A big part of 19Labs’ job is to make sure the hardware, software, and sensors all work together, and integrate with health providers’ systems.

While 19Labs is starting out by selling Gale to health clinics in far-flung places, Fish believes health care providers might eventually decide to buy the “clinic in a box” for homes, schools, and community centers.

By doing so, a provider might save money in the end, because patients would be able to utilize health services at the right times. “For the health care company, if they bring somebody too late to the hospital it can cost tens of thousands of dollars,” Fish says. “And if they keep them in the hospital it’s thousands of dollars a day more.”

Gale could help health care companies assess and deal with a problem before it becomes severe, and more difficult and costly to treat. It could also save money by enabling earlier hospital releases. “A mother might be able to bring her baby home sooner, if the family has the technology to monitor it,” Fish says.

While the character he played on TV was trying to break out from behind bars, Wentworth Miller was conducting an escape of his own: from being known as “just” an actor.

“I didn’t get around to writing, and I mean working up the nerve to even try it, until the third season of Prison Break,” the hyphenate says.

Up until then, Miller, who had bounced around in bit parts until finding his, um, breakout role, had done very little writing. His first stabs at it involved composing overenthusiastic email correspondence and the occasional poem. (One recipient of these emails eventually had to tell him she couldn’t keep up and that he had to rein it in.) Seemingly, just as sudden as the urge to write struck him, though, he quickly found himself selling scripts like 2013’s eerie family saga, Stoker, and last year’s housebound thriller, The Disappointments Room.

Now, having established himself, Miller is open to all possibilities, writing when he’s inspired and also taking acting parts. As the new season of the revived Prison Break lands this month, the double-threat offers some wisdom about how he set upon the uncharted waters of a screenwriting career and hasn’t looked back.

Re-Writing Someone Else’s Movie as Practice

We were on location, in Dallas, and I was looking for things to do on my days off, and I had a copy of a script for a Miramax movie I’d auditioned for a couple years back: A romantic comedy set in the world of competitive Scrabble. Really cute. But I had some ideas. Things I’d change. So I thought, “Why don’t I rewrite it? I can fill the hours, teach myself something about writing screenplays . . . It’ll be like taking a car apart and putting it back together.” That was the first thing I wrote. Or rewrote. I think, obviously, that some part of me was trying to express itself through writing. Had been for some time. That’s how it felt when I finally gave myself permission to write Stoker.

A Screenplay Requires a Big Idea and a Bigger Work Ethic

I didn’t do much outlining for Stoker and it was kind of a scary-slash-thrilling experience, writing by the seat of your pants, never knowing when or if the train was going to jump the tracks. It required a real leap of faith. On a daily basis. The whole thing just flowed out of me. Like it was waiting to manifest. I wrote eight to ten hours a day for four weeks and when it was finished, it felt like I did and didn’t write it, you know? Like I channeled it. Someone close to me, who has some really singular gifts, she always says, “I’m just the straw.” Like it passes through her from somewhere else. It was like that for me too. [After it was done,] I knew it was ready. Ready to be put out there to the world. And that’s what we sold to Fox Searchlight. That first draft.

Being a Pro Screenwriter Sometimes Works Like a Dream

[The sale of Stoker] happened really quickly. And organically. I was a working actor and I had representation and I had access, and that helped enormously. No question. I wrote the script, we found a producer and then we sold it within . . . I think it was six months? And it got made within a year or so. I don’t remember exactly. But everyone kept telling me, “It doesn’t usually happen like this.” And I believed them. But I didn’t have anything else to compare it to.

And Sometimes It Works . . . Less Like a Dream

I had no involvement with [Stoker] beyond that first draft. When they were looking for directors they brought me in to meet Chan-wook Park and he spent three hours pitching a very different version of the film. And somewhere in that meeting, I realized that yes, Fox was excited to produce my script but they were also excited to work with Park. And if he wanted to take the movie in a different direction they were going to support him. So I made what I thought was a very practical decision. Bottom line, I wanted the movie to get made. So I signed off on his involvement and absented myself from the process. I didn’t want to be that guy on set advocating for some version of the movie that was no longer relevant. And it was a hard call. Because it was my first script. And I was very attached to it. But in the end, it was like, “Here. Take the baby. I’ll see you at graduation.”

Once You Started Writing, It Can Be Hard to Stop

The next thing I wrote was Uncle Charlie, the prequel to Stoker. Actually, I started writing it while we were still in the middle of selling Stoker to Fox. And I finished it before we closed the deal. Then we had to call Fox and say, “Oh by the way, you’re actually negotiating for two pieces of material.” They didn’t end up buying the prequel but when they bought Stoker they bought the “creative.” The characters and the universe and so on. So they’re the only ones who can make Uncle Charlie. Which they won’t, I don’t think. It was never going to get made unless Stoker earned a gazillion dollars.

I’ve now written four original scripts total, and with the exception of The Disappointments Room, maybe, I didn’t write them with an eye to sell. I used to like to wait and write when I could feel it–the script and the story–itching beneath my skin. When I couldn’t not write. And I wrote for selfish reasons. Reasons that went far above and beyond professional ambitions and getting somewhere in this business . . . I wrote because it made me happy. Because I didn’t need other people’s participation or blessing or say so. Because it was therapeutic. Self-expression–through writing or whatever–can be life-saving. Transformative. And it was. I never worried about whether or not a script would sell. I just wrote it. Which I recognize is an extremely privileged position to take.

Putting Passion Over Business

I love writing but I don’t love the business of writing. Like the actual business around the writing. I’ve sat in those rooms, with those people, the ones in charge of hiring you for rewrites and remakes and adaptations. Hollywood’s “creative class.” And I didn’t speak their language. I didn’t want to learn either. Not my vibe, not my tribe. So the for-hire gigs… that’s not my focus anymore. These days when I write–if I have the time, if I have the motivation–it’s usually for personal reasons. Like an essay, I’ll post on social media. I enjoy being able to reach an audience directly and immediately without some kind of middleman. That’s where it’s at for me. For now.

When Donald Trump released a partial outline of his proposed 2018 budget, sectors across the U.S., from the arts and humanities to low-income community development, watched as critical funding streams were marched to the chopping block.

Habitat for Humanity, the largest nonprofit homebuilder in the world, was already planning its first-ever nationwide campaign to raise money for affordable housing before the budget proposal was released. But after the 2018 proposal–which would cut $6.2 billion (a 13.2% reduction) from the department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), as well as numerous local improvement and anti-poverty programs–was released, it lent an extra layer of urgency to the Home is the Key initiative, which launched April 3 and will run for the entire month, Jonathan Reckford, CEO of Habitat for Humanity, tells Fast Company. HUD oversees and administers public housing and rental-assistance programs that millions of low-income Americans rely on; it also provides technical assistance and housing development grants to organizations like Habitat.

“Home is the Key really comes from the view that housing is, in many ways, an invisible crisis in this country,” Reckford says. “We’re at the worst point of affordable housing in modern history, and now we’re talking about disinvesting at the federal level when we’re already way behind in our ability as a market to provide enough affordable housing.”

Through Home is the Key, Habitat hopes to catapult the need for affordable housing into the national conversation. According to HUD, families that spend more than 30% of their income on housing will have a difficult time affording other basic necessities; currently, one in four households in the U.S. fall into that category. “Just look at the stats: Virtually nowhere in the U.S. can someone making the minimum wage afford a one-bedroom apartment,” Reckford says. In major cities like San Francisco and New York, incomes have risen, but nowhere near high enough to compete with housing costs that have risen even faster. In five Bay Area counties, incomes have grown, on average, 30% over the past five years. In the same time frame, home prices have ballooned by 87%. While housing prices have remained relatively stable in more suburban and rural areas since the housing crisis of 2008, incomes for four out of five Americans have flatlined since 2007. “It’s a market failure that doesn’t work for anyone except the wealthy,” Reckford says.

In the face of potentially devastating cuts to affordable housing at the federal level, Habitat is hoping to act as a leader in equitable housing development. “Habitat’s always been about helping to build homes and improve the communities,” Reckford says. But as the organization has grown rapidly in recent years–it went from helping 125,000 people a decade ago to 3 million last year–it’s now trying to influence the housing market as a whole. “We were never designed to be the answer to the whole housing problem, but we want to be a demonstration: to show that we need to increase access to land for housing, to increase financing, and improve access to good-quality building materials, which also creates jobs,” Reckford says.

Though the Home is the Key campaign will close at the end of April, Reckford is currently in talks with more corporate partners, and is looking to build the campaign out into a more sustained platform. If the federal cuts to housing are approved, this cause will be one whose importance won’t wane over the next four years.

In 2000, I was working as an IT consultant in Sydney, Australia, and using some of my earnings to backpack around Southeast Asia. During a hike in the mountains in Northern Laos, I stumbled upon an Akha village and was invited to stay for a week. It was an amazing experience, and by the time I got home I was already determined to go deeper. For the next few months, I researched other opportunities to spent time in remote communities, and eventually I connected with FUNAI, Brazil’s governing body for indigenous peoples.

After many conversations with officials, I managed to secure permission to organize a solo trip to a remote area of the Upper Amazon Basin. Later that year I found myself on a flight to Manaus, the capital of the state of Amazonas, to meet with a local representative of the Tucano tribe. That contact helped me with organizing the logistics and materials for my upcoming trip, advising me to buy gifts for the community leaders such as fishing nets, metal pots, cigarettes and machetes.

With those supplies secured, we set off. And after five days of painful travel, some 50 miles upriver from São Gabriel da Cachoeira, I arrived at the Tucanos’ home and was warmly welcomed. I was 23 years old, and the next few weeks changed my life and career from that point forward.

Related: From Ulaanbaatar To Johannesburg—How My First Sales Job Traveling The World Changed My Career

The Mind And Body Adapt More Than You’d Think

Upon arriving, everything was a struggle. There was no glory or romance here, I soon found, only nature at its most raw.

All day, clouds of insects buzzed incessantly around my head and bit my skin. Since there was nowhere to escape, I had to learn to ignore them. Around noon, the heat was so unbearable that all human activity stops. Even in full shade, I’d sweat what felt like liters of water and would quickly dehydrate if I wasn’t careful. In the afternoon, the rain would often come in such intensity that everything was muted by its roar. Sheltering from it wasn’t always possible, so I’d often sit shivering, waiting for it to stop. I didn’t sleep much, thanks to the bug bites, the rain leaking through the thatched roof, and the hard roots and vines on the ground beneath me.

After a week of this, I was tired beyond belief, suffering from hunger pangs, and oscillating between unbelievably hot and horribly cold. But by the second week, something magical happened: I was so exhausted that I actually slept.

Day by day, the very things that had bothered me so much that I’d wondered how I could possibly endure them began to fade into the background. Before long, I stopped noticing them. It’s remarkable how adaptable the mind and body can be when you cut off alternatives. I’ve constantly used this lesson whenever I’ve faced subsequent challenges, including those of entrepreneurship. From downsizing to fundraising to scaling, the psychological hurdles have sometimes felt overwhelming. But whenever I’ve faced these obstacles, I remember the jungle.

All For One And One For All

When you’re a potential food source for the other inhabitants of your environment, you start to see things differently. I was only a guest for a few weeks, but for my Tucano hosts, the excruciatingly difficult task of finding food was a matter of survival. In order to protect their quality of life, the tribe needs to specialize in tasks and work together.

Meat is a rarity. It can take days for a hunting party to bring back game. The community’s staple food, manioc—a root vegetable known elsewhere as cassava—is difficult to prepare. It takes a long time to extract the product’s toxins with traditional methods in order to make it digestible.

Overcoming all these daily obstacles meant constantly working together. Everyone I met had their own form of specialized knowledge and contributed in some way to the overall health of the community. Despite the fact that illness, accident, and death were ever-present realities, the tribe seemed to function like a highly coordinated organization.

This lesson never left me. The value of bringing people together with specialized knowledge to exchange ideas and support one another is a bedrock of any team’s growth and success. Wherever I’ve lived and whatever I’ve done since in my career, I’ve always done my best to surround myself with as many experienced people as possible.

No Distractions Equals Deeper thinking

It goes without saying that there was no cell-phone signal in the jungle, no power outlets, and no Wi-Fi (all things that many modern-day digital nomads often can’t do without). I was completely cut off from the outside world and and, subsequently, any chance of distracting myself. This was before smartphones came on the scene, but as a 23 year old, I was still a pro at entertaining myself with digital media. It was just so convenient—and remains even more so today. But when distraction isn’t an option, you’re forced to face all your thoughts and emotions head-on.

At first, the only thing I could think about was how much I hated this horrible place. What had I gotten myself into? I had no way of stopping my relentless feelings of frustration and self-recrimination—at least within the first few days. Then, after dinner one night, they came to an end.

With nothing else to divide my attention, I began to reflect on more important things like family, community, love, and purpose. I was actually shocked that this stuff was coming from inside my own head; I’d never had such crystal-clear thoughts about those subjects before. I had never given myself a chance to reflect that deeply.

To be honest, this freaked me out a little at first, but with no choice but to come to grips with these new thoughts, I realized they made me feel stronger, more connected, and better grounded. Meditation is now a key component of my daily routine and helps me grapple with my most pressing problems.

Related: Sorry, Bali—Seven Underrated Hubs For Digital Nomads

Perspective Is Everything

But perhaps the biggest lesson my experience left me with had to do with perspective. My own life was dramatically different from the lives of my Amazonian hosts. No matter what high-pressure situations or low points I’ve experienced since—from sweating my way through VC pitches to wallowing in despair when my company wasn’t meeting expectations—I know it’s nothing like the realities of surviving in the Amazon.

The month I spent in the jungle taught me, sooner than most people in their twenties learn, to move past self-pity, and to realize the tremendous privilege it is to work in an office with people I respect on something we feel connected to. I am grateful to be part of a team of intelligent, motivated people who care about their jobs.

My visit with the Tucano people has served as a compass for my life and career ever since. Upon returning home, I joined the U.S. Peace Corps and volunteered in Romania for the next two years. I couldn’t have been more prepared. Being stripped of everything I took for granted helps me to remember that things can always get much more difficult. Just as the bee stings and embarrassment subsided, so did my perception of them as negative events. The most challenging experiences of those few weeks—by far the hardest I’d ever experienced up to that point—now serve as guideposts.

Sedarius Perrotta, CEO of Shelf, has managed and built technology teams all over the world, including the Philippines, Romania, Ukraine, Australia, Washington, D.C., and New York.

Slack is a group messaging platform that’s handy for trading notes with your colleagues over the course of your workday. But in my time working at Slack, I’ve figured out some ways to use it for much more than that. More than just a communication platform, Slack has now become my main tool for managing my time and getting tasks done in a pinch. Here’s how.

6:30 a.m.

My little human alarm clocks sound off: Izzy and Amelia barge into our room—they’re hungry. As my family eats breakfast, I open up Slack. I’ve been away for two weeks. I head to my Newsfeed view and spend the next five minutes catching up on the latest action. (Yes, I know—bad parenting.)

Red badges appear next to my @googlecalendar bot. I review my schedule. I congratulate myself for purposely blocking off 10 a.m.–lunchtime on my first day back in order to keep my morning light. My afternoon? Not so much.

Okay, time to get the girls ready.

7:15 a.m.

I notice an alert reminding me that it’s my direct report @ally’s birthday today. I’m in charge of the sweets.

I click through to @ally’s profile: as a company policy, everyone inputs their favorite, celebratory-sweet-thing. Ally would kill for chocolate lava cake. (Me too, Ally, me too.)

A badge appears next to my @postmates bot.

I head to the office.

8:30 a.m.

I grab my coffee and head to my desk, where I quickly find myself staring at a scattered pile of paper receipts intermixed with business cards. I’m sitting on a quarter’s worth of expenses. This will be fun.

I spread out the pile and snap a photo of the mess. After uploading the file to Slack, I share the image with the @google and @concur apps. The apps handle the rest–deduping, sorting, and filing both my expenses and contacts into digital copies in the right places.

#team-bd is on the top of my Priority view list. We’ve been busy. I open up the channel and digest the latest news from my friend, @snippets, a friendly bot that collects the latest projects my team is working on. In a couple of minutes, I have clear snapshot of the important things across my organization. Looks like my team member @benton is heading to Vegas for SAP’s big conference. (Always split 8s at the blackjack table, @benton!)

10 a.m.

I run through my important messages in the order they came in—it’s a mix of DMs and mentions in individual channels. I still need to review two contracts, approve two new-hire offer letters, and get back in touch with Box about extending the terms of our agreement. I also need time with @buster and @amir, so I shoot them both a meeting request.

(Hamberger and Ramen are the names of two of our conference rooms.) Okay, back to those tasks.

11:45 a.m.

Lunch. @dio is heading to Deli Board. @robby’s off to Sisig. Ugh, #teamsalad, our channel that keeps team members motivated to eat healthy, posted their daily lunchtime reminder to eat a salad. Fiiiine. I’ll go to Cafe Venue (again)—but I’m adding chicken parm to my salad order.

With a mouthful of chicken parm, I realize I’m going to be late to my 1:1. “Siri, message Ceci and let her know I’m going to be 5 minutes late using Slack”. Somehow Siri understands my mumbled language and the meeting is pushed back. Perfect, because @ally’s cake just arrived at the office.

2:15 p.m.

Cake was a bad choice. Why do I always think I deserve cake? I have a good one-hour chunk to crank through that task list. First, let’s get back to Box. Popping into our shared channel, I click the call button and get Sophia on Google Hangouts in her office conference room on the other end. I let her know we’re okay to extend our agreement by another two years. We agree on the next step of a technical conversation with her engineering team. Check that off the list.

I quickly update my Salesforce panel in Slack: “deal closed,” with an action item for a follow-up meeting. @slackbot recognizes my request in the Salesforce app, finds an open time (and open room) on my calendar, and pings Sofia in our shared channel with potential meeting times.

3 p.m.

Over coffee, Robby mentions a good book he’s reading. I DM myself so I don’t forget the title. While typing in “The Inner Game of Tennis,” I get a ping from @slackbot, alerting me of the reminder I’d set myself earlier to look at my task list (and those open contract reviews) this afternoon.

I scroll through #bd-dealreview (one of our business development channels), then locate and quickly expand the necessary Word doc. This looks good to go, but do I really need to download this doc, sign it, and then resend it to Benton? Hmm, no app pinned to this channel and @slackbot is recommending @docusign . . .

. . . So I guess @docusign it is. Let’s set up paid accounts for the entire business-development usergroup. After using my Slack identity to sign up, select my team, and elect for billing through Slack, I re-expand that Word doc and select the “Sign” Message Action. Done.

4:30 p.m.

Dang. I forgot to look into updating my life insurance contributions. Cake brain can make you forget. I’ll get to this tomorrow but @questionbot, a tool for aggregating company-wide knowledge and identify experts on a range of topics, can help me find the right person on the PeopleOps team to ping.

5 p.m.

The buzz in the office is easing. I’m meeting Sarah for a quick drink at Benjamin Coopers, and with a quick ping, @lyft is on the way.

Checking in on my Lyft, the app container shows my ride nearing our office on the map. Time to head out, so I unplug my laptop, put on my coat, and head to the elevators.

Today was a good day—maybe I’ll even reward myself with another slice of cake.

Jassim Latif is head of platform partnerships at Slack, a messaging platform that’s used by 5 million people every day, including teams at Capital One, IBM, and eBay.

Lawmakers in Texas just introduced a bill that would make a small change but potentially a big difference to the thousands of people awaiting organ transplants in the state. It also illustrates the subtle power of choice “defaults.”

The bill would tweak the text in driver’s license applications from “Would you like to join the organ donor registry?” to “Would you like to refuse to join the organ donor registry?” In other words, if passed, the legislation would make all applicants organ donors by default; they would have to explicitly opt out.

The language doesn’t take away individuals’ freedom to choose whether they’d like to be a donor, but the change would theoretically lead to more organ donors–and more lives saved–because social and behavioral sciences research shows most people accept whatever is listed as the default option. For example, a 2003 study found that the number of people who consented to be organ donors was about 80 percent higher in countries with opt-out policies–similar to the Texas proposal–than those with opt-in policies.

The power of defaults to guide people’s choices has made them an extremely popular way for policymakers and marketers alike to nudge people toward a particular decision. But it has also raised questions about how to ensure that defaults are used ethically and responsibly.

Influential By Default

Carefully chosen defaults can help people make choices that are better for themselves and for society.

Walt Disney World, for example, changed the default choices in its kids’ meals–swapping out soda for juice and french fries for fruits and vegetables–leading to the consumption of 21% fewer calories, 44% less fat, and 43% less sodium. And Vanguard reported that automatically enrolling new employees in a retirement plan more than doubled participation rates.

But defaults can also be used to help businesses profit from consumers, sometimes by prompting people to choose things that are not in their best interests. When banks began offering overdraft protection for checking account customers, they set the default to “opt out,” meaning clients had to go out of their way to decline the service if they preferred to have transactions be declined rather than pay a $35 fee for each overdraft.

This cost people a lot of money. Overdraft and nonsufficient funds fees accounted for about 75% of total checking account fees and averaged over $250 per year for consumers who had accounts that included overdraft protection by default.

So how can we protect people from potentially predatory situations like this while still making defaults available as a tool to help people make better decisions?

In some cases, policymakers can set rules for how defaults are used. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau responded to the overdraft protection problem, for example, by mandating that banks must get consumers’ explicit consent before signing them up for the service.

In others, mandates may be inappropriate or infeasible, leading some to suggest that companies be required to inform consumers how defaults are intended to influence them. This recommendation is based on the assumption that by making people more aware of their potential bias, they will be better able to resist its subtle influence and less likely to be manipulated.

Disclosure Affects Attitudes But Not Decisions

Our research, published in October, tests this assumption.

In a series of experiments, we presented people with choices framed as either opt-in or opt-out, varied whether or not we told people about the intent and potential influence of the default, and examined how that knowledge influenced their attitudes and decisions.

In one experiment, we had people decide what information (photographs, location, etc.) they would be willing to share on a new social media site and with whom they would share it, like “friends of friends” or advertisers. People were willing to share a third more information when they had to opt out of sharing than when they had to opt in. But more importantly, the amount they shared did not depend on whether they were explicitly told why the site had set the default the way it did, even when the site’s goal was to get them to share more info with more people.

In another experiment, we offered passersby on a college campus free hot chocolate. For some, the hot cocoa came with whipped cream by default, though people could choose to decline it. Others were offered cocoa without it. When whipped cream was the default, almost everyone accepted the more fattening option. When it wasn’t, less than 10% topped their cocoa with whipped cream.

Notably, the proportions were the same even for the half of them who were given explicit notice that the default had been set so that they were more likely to get a healthy drink (when they had to opt in) or an indulgent drink (when they had to opt out).

In other words, disclosure didn’t end up influencing people’s decisions. It did, however, affect how people felt about the default and the default setter.

Participants in these and other experiments judged the use of a default to be more ethical and fair when the intention behind it was disclosed ahead of time than when it was not. They also showed more interest in working with someone again in the future if that person was up front about how he or she was using defaults to influence their choices.

These effects were strongest when the default was designed to nudge people toward an option that was perceived to benefit society. But the benefits of transparency held even when the default was designed to nudge people toward an option that benefited the default setter, and even when the default setter’s motives were selfish.

This is encouraging news for those who might be hesitant to disclose the intent behind defaults. It shows that default setters can create transparency by disclosing the nature and intent behind defaults without making those defaults any less effective. Disclosure may even improve default setters’ reputations with consumers and lead to greater customer loyalty.

But this is discouraging for those who hoped that disclosure might be an effective means of consumer protection. Defaults still guide choices, even when they are preceded by disclosure of their effects and the reason that they were instituted.

So, aside from banning defaults, what can be done to make people less vulnerable to defaults designed to exploit them?

Debiasing Decision Making

To protect people from defaults whose influence is unwanted, it is important to understand why defaults are effective in the first place. One of the primary reasons why defaults are so influential is that they change the way we think about the options.

Research shows that making an option the default leads people to focus on reasons to accept the default and reject the alternative first and foremost. This gives the default the edge when the options are being weighed against each other. Since people are often unaware of how defaults are affecting their reasoning, disclosure does not help, because they do not know how to adjust their thinking to counter their influence.

Reducing the influence of defaults, therefore, requires an intervention that encourages people to shift their focus away from the default and toward its alternative.

We instructed some of the participants in our studies to think of reasons why they might prefer the default or its alternative and to write down what was important to them before they chose. Those who did this tended to weigh their options more evenly, as if there were no default. This more balanced consideration of both options made people less likely to stick with an option just because it was the default.

So disclosure alone is not enough to safeguard consumer welfare. In some cases, it may be prudent for policymakers to regulate defaults and enforce standards dictating when businesses must obtain consumers’ explicit consent. And in others, it may be necessary for consumer advocates to prompt consumers to weigh their options more evenly.

By making the effect of defaults more widely known and providing a more balanced alternative method for choosing, we hope that defaults will continue to be leveraged to improve people’s lives, now even more transparently so.

Mary Steffel is an assistant professor of marketing, Northeastern University; Elanor Williams is an assistant professor, Indiana University, Bloomington , and Ruth Pogacar is a PhD student in marketing, University of Cincinnati. 

This article was originally published onThe Conversation.

Tell me if this sounds familiar: You continually make it to the interview stage, and then—crickets. You have the skills to get in the door, but for some reason, you stall out when it comes to getting the offer. It’s super frustrating, and you can’t help but wonder why.

As someone who was responsible for recruiting and interviewing applicants for fellowship openings at organizations nationwide, I can tell you it’s true that being qualified isn’t always enough to edge out the competition.

So how do you become one of those people the hiring manager will fight for when it comes down to just two qualified people? The answer is simple: Build a real connection with your interviewer. Without a doubt, that was what made me pick one similarly qualified applicant over another. (I’m only human, after all.)

Doing this is easier than you think—in fact, all the applicants who “connected” with me during the process only had to do the following:

1. They Make It Clear Why They Fit The Organization

It’s fair to think of an interview like a test. After all, someone’s asking you questions and judging you based on your answers.

However, this mind-set will backfire. That’s because you ace a test by studying up and giving the right answers. But the “perfect” answers are almost never the best in an interview situation, because they make you sound like everyone else. If you say you want to work at a company because it’s number one in its field—and leave it there—odds are you’re giving the same answer as others.

The trick is to push yourself a step further and make sure you figure into your reply. For example, I interviewed a candidate, who in discussing her commitment to public interest work talked about efforts to raise awareness about sexual assault on her campus. While it wasn’t directly relevant to the role she was applying for, it showed that she volunteered on causes she cared about—and that’s the sort of civically engaged applicant we were looking for.

So work into your answers a few stories that show why you’re interested in the company. Often when you relay a story, you share more about how you think—and that helps the other person feel like he or she’s getting to know you. Plus, it feels like a more genuine way to talk about yourself.

2. They Show They’re Listening

You know that asking questions at the end of your interview is a great way to build a connection. However, posing them is not enough.

The crucial next step is to actually listen to the answer. I know, it sounds obvious. But you wouldn’t believe how many people asked me something, and then when I finished dove right into an unrelated next question without even taking a breath. This made me feel like they had no interest in what I had to say, and just wanted to score points.

Conversely, I was always impressed with the applicants who listened close enough to what I said to ask an unrehearsed follow-up question. Too nervous to think on your feet? It can be a simple as saying “Can you tell me more about [something the interviewer just said]?”

When you listen, it becomes a two-way exchange. That makes your interview feels more like a conversation, which boosts the likelihood of feeling connected.

3. They Write Thoughtful Thank-You Notes

Another way I knew a candidate was listening was if they referenced something I said in their follow-up.

Some people will tell you that all that matters about thank-you notes is that they’re sent. And it’s true that simply following this rule would put you leagues ahead of those who forget. However, I always appreciated one that went the extra mile and discussed something specific to the conversation.

Ask yourself: Did you learn anything new during the discussion? Was there a story they seemed especially interested in (by asking more)? Or something you feel you only touched on that you could’ve discussed further?

Let these answers guide your message. It’ll give you something meaningful to say between “Thank you for taking the time…” and “I look forward to hearing about next steps.” Plus, it’ll reinforce the connection you started to build.

Pro tip: In addition to sending an email within 24 hours, also send a handwritten one so the hiring manger will be reminded of you fondly a few days after the fact.

It’s not enough to just have the skills or passion. The candidates who rose to the top of my list also took the time to connect with me, to make it clear they saw me as a person, and not just an obstacle standing between them and the position. And because of that, it was easy to say to my team, “This person is the right one for the job!”

A version of this article originally appeared on The Daily Muse. It is adapted and reprinted with permission.

More from The Muse: 

• The 5 People You’re Competing Against in Your Job Search

• The Best Interview Questions to Ask in Every Round

• The Best Question to Ask if You Want to End the Interview on a Great Note

Imagine coming home after work each night to a cute 20-year-old woman who’s so excited to see you that she calls out, “Missed you, darling!” She’s always immaculately dressed, and the two of you never fight. If this sounds like a creepily retrograde, heteronormative male fantasy, well, it is. The designers at the Japanese software company Gatebox might just have had a certain target market (born of the country’s unique social circumstances) in mind when they developed their holographic virtual assistant, Azuma Hikari. But they might also have revealed their own unexamined gender biases in the process.

There’s nothing intrinsically bad about that; bias—the tendency to favor one thing over another—is just a name we give to some of the mental shortcuts our brains use to help us navigate complex environments that bombard us with far more information than we can consciously cope with. “The problem comes,” says Tiffany Jana, coauthor of Overcoming Bias: Building Relationships Across Differences, “when you allow unconscious biases—or blind spots—to influence your behavior and the way you treat others.” This is a reality that businesses know all too well as they struggle to craft more inclusive workplaces. And it’s one that millennials—the most diverse generation in the workforce right now (at least until gen-Z enters offices in greater numbers)—have grown up hearing about.

But one thing that gets lost in conversations about unconscious bias is that it can run it any number of directions. It’s not just about a majority group holding implicit, negative beliefs about a minority group. If millennials are going to successfully make the modern workforce a less biased place, the first step will be grappling with that complexity.

How? One good place to start has been around for nearly two decades. Launched at Harvard University in 1998, Project Implicit offers a series of “association tests” (IAT) designed to uncover participants’ unconscious biases about other demographic groups. So I asked four volunteers, aged 28–30, to go online, chose any of the 14 topics offered, and answer a series of questions Harvard researchers designed to probe “thoughts and feelings outside of conscious awareness and control”—then talk about the results.

Professional Stereotypes Can Get Personal

Eddie, a Cuban-American law student, picked a test dealing with body weight. His results showed a “strong preference” for thin over obese people, a bias shared by three-quarters of the IAT’s sample of web participants. Having recently (in real life) met a “rather rotund” real estate broker, Eddie now found himself wondering whether “being overweight and rather disheveled in appearance will translate into some kind of professional disorganization.” But he said he didn’t consider this assumption biased—it was just a way for him to “read people quickly and navigate the world effectively.”

Eddie’s choice of test was personally relevant in another way. About to start law school himself, Eddie confessed that he’s especially concerned these days with “maintaining a professional image” because “being overweight doesn’t fit the image of the law, which is a very conservative field,” and could be “a hindrance in, say, trying to sway a jury.”

It doesn’t matter whether or not Eddie is right about this—it’s a belief at least partly informed by his own career ambitions that influence his perception of others. But while Eddie’s results squared with IAT’s test sample, the other three millennials proved to be outliers, underscoring how “bias” isn’t as monolithic or one-directional as it’s commonly understood. It also appears to highly influenced by one’s family circumstances and upbringing.

“Overcompensating” For Attitudes About Skin Color

After taking a test focusing on skin tone, U.S.-born Priti, who’s from a Southeast Asian family, learned she has a “slight automatic preference for dark-skinned over light-skinned people,” according to the IAT, a result found in just 7% of the test’s web sample.

This didn’t surprise her, though. Priti is only too aware that Indian standards of beauty typically favor lighter skin. Because her dark-skinned mother was teased as a child in Mumbai and still talks about it, Priti was brought up to treat everyone the same. “It seems I’ve overcompensated to the other end of the scale,” she says.

But it wasn’t until we discussed her IAT results that Priti realized she actually finds it easier to visually recall and describe people of color than those with lighter complexions.

Your Gender Alone Doesn’t Determine Your Gender Biases

Both Heather, a white woman, and Matt, who’s African-American, took Harvard’s “gender career”–based IAT and wound up with different but similarly contrarian results. Heather, who works in data management for a research firm, was found to hold a “slight automatic association with male and family, and female with career,” typical of just 5% of IAT takers. While this is the reverse of the stereotype, Heather says it makes sense to her “because my father stayed home to be my primary caregiver while my mother worked.”

Matt, on the other hand, showed little or no automatic association between family and professional spheres by gender, a lack of gender bias that’s common to just 17% of IAT’s web sample. Matt was raised by a single mother and strongly influenced by his aunt, “both of whom were working professionals and incredibly entrepreneurial.”

Now a diversity educator, Matt considers his IAT results to reflect his belief that women are “very capable leaders” as well as his commitment to helping others understand the systemic, institutional nature of bias so they can begin to eliminate it for themselves.

Making Sense Of Bias In All Its Forms

Matt’s colleague at Wake Forest University, Shayla Herndon-Edmunds, has been using the IAT for six years in her role as director of diversity education. She asks students, faculty, and staff to take the test so that participants can process their results privately before joining group discussions—which she calls a “high-risk activity.” Herndon-Edmunds sees this awareness as a crucial first step, because you can’t work with others to break down biases if you haven’t first broken down your own.

Tiffany Jana agrees, adding that what my four volunteers did easily and quickly is crucial: Trying to make sense of their biases by tracing their roots through personal experience. Usually, she says, this takes time. Many people react to their IAT results dismissively, while others just feel anxious about less-than-positive beliefs they didn’t know they held.

But Jana says all this is normal. “Numerous studies show that levels of bias are consistent across generations when controlled for age. But to be fluent in talking about and owning biases openly, as these four volunteers have done, appears to be more common for millennials compared with older generations.” And given the extent to which biases still pervade the tech community especially, that has got to be a good thing.

Early in 2014, my year-old company faced a critical launch deadline. Feeling pressured and anxious, I started hiring in a hurry. To make a long story short, it didn’t go well.

I soon realized we’d wound up with some real misfits. A couple of them turned out to be openly contemptuous of the company’s norms and culture, as well as of my own directives as a leader. Others simply hadn’t yet developed the skills they needed to do their jobs well. I should’ve fired the troublemakers early on, but I was afraid of a nasty confrontation and embarrassed to admit my errors. Instead, I spent the next few months hoping things would get better. They didn’t.

But there was a silver lining to that painful experience: It made me realize I needed to step back and figure out a hiring strategy that was right for me as a leader, for my young company, and for our applicants. And it turns out the right strategy was a much slower one.

Point-Counterpoint:

• Why “Hire Slow, Fire Fast” Is A Better Strategy Than You Think
• Why “Hire Slow, Fire Fast” Is A Bunch Of BS

Five New Rules To Live By

My aim in opting for a “go-slow” approach to hiring was simple: improve my company’s chances of hiring only terrific people. I consulted with an outstanding executive coach, and together we thought hard about what we needed to do to make that happen. It was an intense—and, as it turns out, invaluable—period of introspection. Here’s what our hiring principles and processes look like now:

1. Make the job description painfully honest. We do everything we can to offer a crystal-clear description of what a job really entails, as well as what success is in that role. We even share which performance metrics we’ll be measuring. This takes time and a lot of forethought, especially for newly created roles. But it’s worth all the effort. We want our candidates to know exactly what they’re getting into.

2. Stop trying to “sell” the company to potential hires. “Employer branding” starts with the belief that you need to lure talent by talking about how great it is to work for you, but that can sometimes lead to misrepresenting what the company is really like. We’ve stopped doing that. Instead, we use a multistage interview process to try and listen more closely to what our candidates say their needs and interests are. Are they excited about the job, and about our industry? Are their skills and experiences appropriate to the position for which they’ve applied? Will they mesh with our company culture? To find out, we ask short, simple questions, and try hard not to lead interviewees (intentionally or not) to tell us what they think we want to hear.

Related:The Deceptively Simple Interview Question Every Interviewer Needs To Know

3. Focus on track records. We now look more closely than we used to at what applicants have actually achieved in the past, not their future trajectory or hopes for the next stage of their careers. It’s not that those other things don’t matter, it’s just that they’re less revealing than what they’ve already done. We also scrupulously check references, seeking confirmation of a candidate’s experience and skills and any other information on their strengths and weaknesses.

4. Ask candidates to take a personality assessment. This way we can understand how they work best and what motivates them, and also so we—and they—can honestly assess if the job is a good fit. This may sound like it’s a little over the top, but talent experts believe there’s a real need for more rigorous, psychologically grounded interviewing techniques. In our case, at least, this step has already proved to be an extremely valuable exercise on both sides of the table.

5. Remind candidates that they’re also interviewing you. Yes, this is something of a cliché by now, but it’s something candidates tend to forget in the thick of an interview. So remind them point-blank! Are they really interested in working in our industry? Are they comfortable working at a startup? Do their potential teammates seem like the kind of people they’d enjoy working with? At any rate, interviewing with us is a two-way street.

Risks And Rewards

It’s true that speed is often the name of the game in the startup world, but I’ve found that hiring slowly is actually the best way to get things moving fast. In the three years since we implemented this new approach, we’ve had zero turnover among our engineers and very little in the company as a whole—which means we’re significantly nimbler and more efficient. People are happier and more productive. Bad hires not only fail do to their own work but they tend to absorb other people’s time, too.

I realize that our slow-and-steady approach may mean that we miss out on some top talent. On the other hand, we’re also far more likely to bypass the headaches and setbacks that come with making bad hires. As I’ve learned the hard way, hasty hiring can put the brakes on the growth of your business. Taking the time to build a strong, positive, cohesive team is  the only way I’ve found to accelerate.

Baron Schwartz is the founder and CEO of VividCortex. He is one of the world’s leading experts on MySQL and has helped build and scale some of the largest web, social, gaming, and mobile properties. Follow him on Twitter at @xaprb.