Ellen Bennett just wants to have fun—all the while making “Proper Bad Ass Aprons.”

In just five short years, she’s turned determination to do something about drab, flimsy kitchen wear into a multimillion-dollar empire. Along the way, her handcrafted aprons have won fans like lifestyle doyenne Martha Stewart and top chefs Mario Batali, David Chang, April Bloomfield, Nobu Matsuhisa, and Alton Brown.

The 29-year-old entrepreneur is clearly having a good time storming the culinary world. So are the workers at her 17,000-square-foot Hedley & Bennett facility in downtown Los Angeles. For one thing, the cavernous space has a full-sized indoor tree house. And then there’s a slide, swing, and a zip line, just in case any of her employees need a change of pace as they go about their workday. And, oh yeah, the place is festooned with bright red, orange, blue, and green aprons.

“Everybody who stops by our headquarters gets a hug and an ice cream,” Bennett says.

But make no mistake, behind all her playful exuberance is a woman deadly serious about the movement behind her business: She’s obsessed with creating more dignified workwear. She wants line cooks, chefs, and waiters to have uniforms they are proud to wear, made from materials that don’t tear or come apart in a hot kitchen.

Bennett never set out to become a CEO: After attending culinary school, she started working as a line chef at Providence, a two Michelin-starred L.A. restaurant. As she sharpened knives and cut up carrots, she found herself distracted by her poorly made aprons and shirts. They were, to use Bennett’s words, “Total shit.”

Old-school kitchen uniforms tend to be made of a cheap poly-cotton blend that doesn’t breathe. Chef coats tend to be thick, rigid, and oversized, making it hard to move. Apron pockets rip off easily, straps are rarely adjustable, and when they are, they’re kept in place with plastic hardware that would melt in a hot kitchen.

“I kid you not: Two out of the three aprons I would wear every day at the restaurant had dangling pockets because they had ripped,” she says. “Everything at the restaurant—from the china to the way people stood—every single detail was on point. But the staff in the kitchen looked and felt terrible all day long, every day. There was a delta between how the staff looked and the actual food they were putting out.”

Bennett, who has always had an eye for design, began to do her own research into the kitchen-wear industry out of sheer curiosity. She found that mainstream restaurant suppliers generally import cheap products from overseas, and are focused on delivering volume and low cost, rather than quality. This is clear from a quick Google search: You can get a “professional-grade” apron for as low as $1.99 from any number of onlineuniformsuppliers.

Bennett believes that many of these manufacturers are far removed from restaurant kitchens and do not know what cooks really need. That’s the only way to explain how they could use plastic buttons that melt.

There were a couple of other luxury apron companies on the market, like Blunt Roll, which makes denim and leather aprons that double as knife rolls for between $170 and $350 per piece. And some restaurants, like Qui and Craftsman and Wolves, made their own aprons, which they also sold in-store. But no company was creating high-quality uniforms at scale.

In the end, Bennett’s business came about by accident. One day, the chef at Bäco Mercat mentioned that he was going to bring in a company to fit workers for new aprons. Bennett begged him to let her design and make the aprons herself.

“I had enough conviction in that moment that he gave me the opportunity,” Bennett recalls. “Suddenly, I had an order of 40 aprons.” She took $300 from her savings account and developed her very first collection. “I didn’t have sewers, but I had a very clear vision of what I wanted to create. And that’s how Hedley & Bennett was born,” she says.

The name of the company is derived from both sides of her family. Hedley refers to her English grandfather, a rocket scientist who would read the Encyclopedia Britannica on the weekends. Bennett comes from her fiery maternal side of the family, who are Mexican.

“When you merge the two different cultures, you get a mix of timelessness and a colorful, “take life by the lapels,” positive outlook on life,” Bennett explains.

From her very first batch for the Providence team, Bennett has used the best-quality materials she could get her hands on in L.A.’s garment district, including Japanese denim, American canvas, and linens from around the world, plus brass hardware. Besides being beautiful to look at and touch, they were also breathable.

“I took inspiration from my favorite clothing designers,” says Bennett. “I’d take a pocket from a Theory shirt or a collar from a Brooks Brothers blazer and incorporate them into these uniforms.”

After making that first set of aprons, Bennett approached chefs like Mario Batali and David Chang at events, said that she was an apron designer, and asked them what they wanted in kitchen workwear.

This “fake it till you make it” approach worked like a charm. In addition to getting their feedback, she was quickly able to make these celebrity chefs her customers. This process of collaboration on the design process also helped her buyers understand why her aprons would cost so much more than the standard-issue apron. Hedley & Bennett aprons run between $50 and $120, but prices go down for large-scale industry orders.

LAST 2 HOURS TO GET 2-DAY SHIPPING IN TIME FOR XMAS!! ⚡️ Plus we're offering 2-Day Shipping for only $10 so really there's no reason not to! Get a move on, elves! ???? ????: @lilyglass

A post shared by Proper Bad Ass Aprons (@hedleyandbennett) on Dec 21, 2016 at 9:26am PST

Soon after outfitting Providence, L.A.-based chefs Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo called, wanting her aprons for their flagship restaurant ANIMAL. Their main gripe was that standard apron straps were too short, so Bennett helped them craft aprons with extra-long straps. When Timothy Hollingsworth wanted a new work shirt for his restaurant Otium in downtown L.A., Bennett collaborated with him, testing samples in the kitchen and providing feedback for redesigns. He then outfitted his entire staff with them. Rick Bayless, one of Chicago’s most notable chefs who just won the James Beard Award for Outstanding Restaurant, was one of Bennett’s earliest customers, stocking all his restaurants with her gear.

This period was still what she describes as a “hustle.” Bennett kept her day job, but went up to one chef at a time, trying to convince him or her to buy her handmade aprons.

Within a year, Bennett had cut down her hours at Providence to two days a week so she could work on Hedley & Bennett, and was getting mentions in the New York Times Magazine. Three years later, Bennett is the CEO of her own company. She has 31 people on her payroll, including 12 who work entirely on manufacturing the aprons. She works with four other factories on the new products Hedley & Bennett now sells.

Bennett has helped restaurants around the world to seriously up their apron game. Hedley & Bennett creates uniforms for 4,000 restaurants and coffee shops all over the U.S., including Blue Bottle Coffee, Intelligentsia, and Lazy Bear.

If you’ve visited a fine dining establishment lately–maybe Ink, Momofuko, Trois Mec–or even a fast-casual joint like Sweetgreen or Shake Shack, chances are you’ve seen cooks and waiters wearing crisp, colorful aprons made of luxurious materials finished off with brass and nickel fixtures. These are likely Hedley & Bennett aprons.

But over the years, Hedley & Bennett has created aprons for larger corporate entities ranging from Delta Airlines to the Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts to the Ritz-Carlton. Companies like Google, Coca-Cola, American Express, the New York Times, Lexus, Aspen Food and Wine, and SpaceX have created aprons for special culinary events. Hedley & Bennett launched an exclusive apron designed in collaboration with Bon Appetit‘s creative director that comes with annual subscriptions. (It has navy and red double stitching, an angled chest pocket for sharpies and tools, and uses Cone Mill denim.)

But Bennett isn’t resting on her laurels. She’s still working to create the best, most beautiful aprons. Last week, for instance, the same night that the Met Gala was taking place, Bennett was tasked with outfitting the actor Jesse Tyler Ferguson to host the James Beard Awards. As he walked up the red carpet, he wore a red Hedley & Bennett apron, decorated with a garland of red tulle.

Bennett just invented the couture apron.

The Met Gala ain't got nothin on us! ???????????????? @jessetyler KILLING it as the host of the @beardfoundation awards while rocking his couture @hedleyandbennett apron ???????? // @sophiabush next time we'll make you a baby blue one! ???? #jbfa #jbfa2017

A post shared by Ellen Bennett (@ellenmariebennett) on May 1, 2017 at 6:24pm PDT

Facebook’s Head of People told Fast Company last week that her team of recruiters works hard to uncover candidates’ strengths. Most companies try to do much the same. They assess the qualities and skills they believe job performance depends on, and they design interviews to test whether candidates are likely to display those qualities once on the job.

This isn’t exactly a mistake, but it’s only part of the puzzle. Everyone has weaknesses and drawbacks that they’ll invariably bring with them, too. What hiring managers usually do is just try to decide whether a candidate’s strengths will outweigh those detriments.

But what they don’t often do is systematically determine which types of “personality flaws” they’d rather have on their teams. After all, some are a lot worse than others, and some can even be assets under the right circumstances.

What You Want Vs. What You’ll Get

There are millions of different jobs, and each company has its own culture, so what employers actually want in job candidates varies widely. But personality research suggests that all strong candidates tend to look rather similar, in the sense that there’s a limited number of attributes that make them strong: They’re generally more rewarding to deal with, more capable, and more willing to work hard than others are. Employers may use many different names for what they want—grit, adaptability, emotional intelligence, entrepreneurialism—but what they always need is ability, likability, and drive. You can ride those qualities to the bank any day of the week.

But while these three competencies predict future job performance and career success with remarkable accuracy, they don’t tell the full story about a candidate’s potential. In fact, no matter how attractive a candidate’s “bright side” may be, they’ll always have a “dark side,” too—a set of undesirable or counterproductive traits that hinder their ability to work well, mostly because of their disruptive effects on others.

Hiring managers tend to focus on attributes that predict positive career outcomes—like teamwork, engagement, performance, and leadership skills—and neglect the ones that predict derailment and failure: coasting, underperformance, antisocial behaviors, and the like. But whenever you hire somebody, they’re bringing a combination of these qualities with them through the door every single time. And your standard “What’s your biggest weakness?” job-interview question isn’t enough to help you assess the total package.

More often than not, questions like that are simply meant to evaluate candidates’ social skills and preparation; they’re basically an invitation to fake modesty or disguise additional strengths as weaknesses. Asked about her worst habit or character trait, an astute candidate will confess to being “a perfectionist,” “too altruistic,” or “too humble.” Then she’ll deliver a handy anecdote pretending that those qualities aren’t actually valuable in most workplaces—which astute interviewers know they often are.

Just think what would happen if a candidate answered by candidly listing their real faults, like being lazy, grumpy, selfish, or dim. At best, they might earn points (or even sympathy) for bold-faced honesty, but their chances of landing the job would fall to zero on the spot. Most people would wisely decline an invitation to hang themselves, but employers would assume no responsibility for those brazen or foolish enough to accept it. In practice, asking about weaknesses is just an easy way to eliminate some candidates without having to think too hard.

Yet none of this changes the fact that certain weaknesses are preferable to others. So if you want to assess the whole person and make sure you hire people with the best overall personality profiles, you can’t pretend they’re flawless. Instead, you need to look—intentionally—for the least problematic weaknesses a candidate might have. Here are three of them:

1. Conformism

We live in a world that celebrates “originals” and rule-breakers, but no organization (or society) could function if such individuals made up the majority. In fact, any collective system requires the bulk of its people to follow rules and norms, and employers know this.

While many companies say they need innovators and disruptors, what they truly require is people who will do what they’re told. As Susan Cain recently pointed out in the Times, this isn’t a bad thing; “followership” is a skill set we need just as badly as leadership. (“Perhaps the biggest disservice done by the outsize glorification of ‘leadership skills,'” she adds, “is to the practice of leadership itself . . . It attracts those who are motivated by the spotlight rather than by the ideas and people they serve.”) And yet you’ll find no job listing out there that includes terms like “obedient” or “dutiful,” except perhaps in the military.

Still, a great deal of psychological research suggests that rule-bound and conscientious individuals tend to perform better—even when they are leaders (presumably because they can still please their own bosses). As I show in my latest book, a large number of bosses would rather promote obedient and easygoing employees than talented but difficult ones. And in fact, many actually do.

Related:Why Your Leadership Skills Won’t Get You Hired (But These Four Other Things Might

2. Attention-Seeking

We might be fascinated by narcissists, but the common view is that great employees and leaders let their achievements speak for themselves. If two people are equally talented or productive, most of us would say that we’d rather work with the one who avoids self-promotion and seems humble and modest.

Yet meta-analytic studies show that attention-seeking individuals emerge more often as leaders, and they’re often perceived as more effective once they do, according to 360-degree feedback data. The danger, of course, is that many attention-seeking job candidates may also be narcissistic, so the best-case scenario is someone who enjoys performing and being the center of attention but isn’t actually self-obsessed or entitled.

In other words, it isn’t always a bad thing to hire an altruistic exhibitionist—a selfless clown.

3. (A Dose Of) Dishonesty

Make no mistake: Pathological dishonesty is harmful, particularly when coupled with low integrity. You don’t want to give a job to a lowdown liar.

But dishonesty isn’t a categorical evil in practice. Not only is it minimally problematic in small doses, but most of us know how it can even be useful, as the phrase “white lie” indicates. People who are brutally honest straight-talkers may even struggle more in their careers than those who are able to fake it—within reason—particularly if they seem authentic in the process.

That may not sit well with you, but there’s research to suggest, additionally, that dishonest people tend to be more creative (perhaps because because lying requires creativity and imagination). So if you’re hiring someone for a creative role, there’s a better chance you’ll be interviewing candidates who are adept at bending the truth. But most of them probably won’t be doing it maliciously. After all, the premise that we should “just be ourselves” is both naïve and foolish given what we know of human psychology.

Behaviorally, full authenticity describes acting without inhibitions or constraints, as we do when we’re partying with our friends—not a great formula for the workplace. The ideal employee is capable of exercising diplomacy and adhering to social etiquette, and this inevitably requires being at least somewhat dishonest: telling people that they’ve done well when they haven’t (especially if they’ve tried hard); telling your boss she had a great idea when in fact she didn’t; making a client feel like the most important person in the world when they’re actually really irritating.

So don’t stop looking for candidates’ strengths. If you are lucky enough to attract employees who are able, likable, and driven, make just make sure that they have the best possible flaws. Sometimes a dose of dishonesty, attention-seeking, and conformism may be the most tolerable defects you can ask for.

When Yeonmi Park watched a bootleg copy of Titanic as a child in North Korea, it fundamentally changed how she saw her country. “Titanic made me realize that I was controlled by the regime,” she said in a speech after escaping to South Korea. Another defector, Ji Seong-ho, had a similar realization after watching The Avengers. For Hyeonseo Lee, the turning point was South Korean soap operas.

As Trump warns that a “major, major conflict” with North Korea is possible and the U.S. ramps up its military presence in South Korea—on the eve of the likely election of a South Korean president who favors trade with North Korea—human rights activists are scaling up efforts to take out the regime via sitcoms and pop music on thumb drives that they get into the reclusive country in increasingly creative ways.

Activists in South Korea began smuggling old flash drives loaded with media from the outside world into North Korea in 2015. In 2016, they delivered 10,000 drives. Now, after a new donation of 100,000 new flash drives, the Flash Drives for Freedom campaign plans to infiltrate deeper into the country.

The drives are loaded with K-pop music, action movies, documentaries, travel photographs, a Korean copy of Wikipedia that can be read without internet access, and as much other content as can fit on the drive.

Once on the other side, the content is often copied and sold. Instead of using computers, North Koreans typically plug the drives into cheap portable media players from China that can run on batteries. “Every North Korean is one degree removed from someone with one,” says Halvorssen.

Though there is no way to directly measure the effectiveness of the content–all of which is illegal to view, in a country where a single TV channel plays only government propaganda–Halvorssen says there is no doubt that the principle works. “Every single defector we come in contact with, when asked what is the most powerful tool that can be used, has concurred,” he says. “I’ve never come across someone who says it shouldn’t be information.”

The strongest proof that it works: The North Korean government is trying desperately to stop it. “Enemy zero,” the first name on the government’s hit list, is the defector Park Sang-hak, who leads the activist group Fighters for a Free North Korea, which delivers flash drives and pro-democracy literature via balloon.

“All of our partners in South Korea have bodyguards presented by the South Korean government to protect them, because the number of times [North Korea] has sent assassins to kill them is significant,” Halvorssen says. After Human Rights Foundation publicized one balloon launch, the North Korean government issued a press release threatening to kill Americans. “I would say that ‘We want to kill you for this activity’ is the sort of thing that would indicate that the regime most definitely sees a threat.”

There is high demand for the drives, despite the risk. “There’s an entire market for the content,” he says. “That’s a very strong, important point. Number two, the possession of them is a capital crime, and yet people are willing to pay a week’s wages for them and risk being caught either selling them or with them.”

One recent survey found that around 90% of North Koreans now consume foreign media at least once a month. The majority also said that foreign media had more impact on their lives than the decisions of the North Korean government.

Public opinion may be close to the tipping point where the government can’t continue. “I have a very strong sense that a couple of million flash-sized packs of information would cause a paradigmatic shift inside North Korea,” says Halvorssen.

The activists are looking for more donations of drives. “They’re going to waste in so many people’s drawers,” he says. “They’re the equivalent of educational missiles.”

Ask CEOs about their priorities within their companies, and it typically won’t be too long before they mention some form of “improve innovation.” CEOs in IBM’s recent Global C-Suite Study stated that accelerating innovation was central to their goals.

But for all that time and resources spent, former Google product manager Dan Siroker, CEO of customer experience platform Optimizely, says that one cultural misstep could be preventing you from getting the best and most creative input from your team: HiPPO bias.

It’s not the deadly African mammal. Rather, HiPPO bias is the tendency to accept “highest paid person’s opinion” as the most valuable.

Siroker argues that automatically deferring to the most senior person in the room is an ineffective and outdated approach that must be replaced. “In most organizations, they have a command and control culture, where decisions get made at the top of the organization. Typically, whether they’re right or wrong, whether they’re using data or not, it ends up falling on usually the most senior person in the room,” he says.

While that may work in organizations that need to be hierarchical, such as the military, for the most part, it could be robbing you of important input from other members of the team. When you give everyone access to the data they need to provide informed opinions and feedback—and create an environment where such feedback is welcome—you invite all your team members to contribute the best they have to offer, he says.

How do you prevent HiPPO bias? There are a few ways to ensure it doesn’t become a dominant force in your company.

Embrace A Culture Of Transparency And Using Data To Make Decisions

Siroker tells new Optimizely employees two things: First, the company values “ownership” in its culture. That means that you shouldn’t be afraid to bring up new ideas and advocate for them. “I want everyone at Optimizely to own their successes and failures, and empower others to own theirs,” he says.

But that only works if there’s transparency, he says. He makes a commitment to new hires to be as transparent as possible, especially with data. When people have equal access to data, they can make better decisions and bring well-formed ideas to the table. If the only people who have access to the company’s data are the leaders, then they are cutting off one of the fundamental elements of fostering innovation in their teams, he says.

“It’s hard to imagine 10 years from now, any large successful company that isn’t embracing a culture of transparency and using data to make decisions,” he says.

Encourage “Experiments”

Siroker’s experience with speaking to leaders and presenting new ideas extends back to his days at Google when he was an associate product manager. “I was at the lowest rung in the organization, straight out of school. I had to go in and actually pitch the founders of Google on a controversial idea. This was, for me, as a kid straight out of school, not a very easy task,” he recalls.

He consulted a mentor who suggested he present the idea as an experiment. The pitch included a limited test for the idea, the data that would be collected, the potential risk, and how it could be mitigated. They gave him the green light. That experience stayed with him and showed him the potential for new ideas to come from anywhere.

Treat Ideas As Conversations

Sometimes the ideas don’t arrive fully formed, so it’s often best to treat them as conversation, says workplace communication expert Laura Crandall of Slate Communications. When you create an environment where ideas can stir collaboration, you can often refine them without making the originator feel like the idea was co-opted or changed unnecessarily, she says.

“You don’t have to pretend that you know—the wisdom is in the room, so just use it,” she says.

Accommodate Different Styles

In addition, Crandall says that people have different communication styles, so having different methods of collecting feedback can also be useful. Some people aren’t comfortable challenging an idea in front of a room full of people, for example. If you want their feedback, you might be better off having a one-on-one meeting with them later or inviting them to think about the idea and send an email or text message once they’ve had a chance to digest it.

With nearly 400 employees, that kind of individualization isn’t easy. But Optimizely has a weekly “all-hands” meeting where they share the highs and lows of the week. It’s a forum where anyone can ask a question on any topic. If an employee isn’t comfortable doing so, they can anonymously text their question. Siroker will read it and answer it in front of the group. The company also uses Slack for collaboration and feedback.

Purposefully Seek Out More Ideas

Finally, seek out ideas from people who may be reluctant to share, says Kate Zabriskie, founder and CEO of HR consultancy Business Training Works, Inc. Train managers to encourage employees to explore and present their ideas. Work on ways to track new input, and remind those who aren’t contributing that they’re welcome to do so, she says. If you find that you have “yes” people who placate instead of participate, leaders may need to work on how they communicate their anti-HiPPO feelings to ensure that they’re not inadvertently falling into this pattern.

You’d love to save money, but with that anemic paycheck of yours, it seems impossible. Chances are it isn’t, but it will continue to seem that way as long as you don’t know your cash flow. There’s zero way around this. You cannot understand your money and how to best manage it unless you have a detailed understanding of the inflow and outflow of your cash—but it doesn’t stop there. Let me break it down for you.

Size Up Your Cash Flow

You can start getting intimately familiar with your cash flow by writing out all existing expenses (even small ones like Hulu and Netflix, the salad you got for lunch, or the latest video game you bought). Take a piece of paper and write your net take-home pay—the total amount of money that hits your checking account each month—at the top of a piece of paper. Then list out each monthly expense you pay, both fixed and variable.

• Rent/mortgage
• Internet/cable
• Utilities (electric, water, gas, etc.)
• Cell phone
• Student loan payment
• Transportation cost (car payment, gas, monthly transit card)
• Health insurance
• Car insurance
• Renter’s insurance
• Groceries
• Entertainment (Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, happy hour budget, dating budget)
• Household goods (toilet paper and cleaning supplies)
• Beauty products (or stuff like beard oil, if that’s your thing)
• Pets (or kids if you #adulted real fast)
• Don’t forget write down any expenses you may pay annually as well.

You get the point. Subtract your outflow from your monthly take-home pay, and you’ve got yourself a basic understanding of your cash flow.

Get a positive number? Lucky you, because you actually don’t have every penny accounted for yet! This means there’s some money available to put into savings. But you need to pay yourself first so it doesn’t get spent. No more, “Sighhhhhh, I just never have anything left over at the end of the month to save” mentality.

Seeing that aggressive negative sign in front of your total? It’s time to move on to the next step.

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

Find Places To Slash Your Spending

They may be clichéd tactics, but things like cooking at home, cutting the cord on your cable, making your own coffee, and brown-bagging your lunch are easy places to start saving, and they really add up over time—as long as you don’t spend that money on something else. Other ways to save including canceling gym memberships, online subscriptions, and other paid installment services or luxuries you don’t use.

Walking/biking/carpooling or taking public transportation wherever possible also conserves cash, as does shopping around for better deals on something you want or need or going in on an expensive item that can be shared with a friend or roommate. Even bigger savings can come from looking into refinancing your debt to a lower interest rate (which could save you hundreds to thousands of dollars), selling to other people valuable items you never use that are in good condition, or calling to negotiate current rates with utility companies and service providers.

Just doing one of these smaller habits (like brown-bagging your lunch at least once or twice a week) can put an easy $15 minimum into your savings account each month. I know it sounds absolutely insane to only save $15 a month, but just start. Soon you’ll find that the habit motivates you to not only keep going, but increase your efforts.

Go On A Two-Week All-Cash Diet

Run your budget to see how much you can spend per week. Then hide your cards and take out cash. Hopefully the tactile experience of handing over an Andrew Jackson and sensing his judgmental stare glaring at you will make you think twice about whether or not you need to make this purchase.

Once the cash is gone, it’s gone. You might want to invest in some rice, beans, and hot sauce to keep in the cupboard before you get started. This can help you reset your spending habits and find where unexpected budget leaks are occurring. Stick with it for a month, and you may find an extra $30 to $50 to reroute toward savings.

Before you get frustrated about your ability to save, beware that it sometimes takes a while before these tips yield any real savings. You may be faced with difficult situations before you’re able to build any substantial emergency savings buffer. If this happens, you may have to make the call about which bill you can skip this month in lieu of paying something more important (like skipping out on your water bill in order to cover rent and a car payment). In these scenarios, it’s best to ask for permission first. Call the company, explain your situation, and see if you can perhaps get a grace period. Then be sure to catch up as quickly as possible.

This article is adapted from Broke Millennial: Stop Scraping by and Get Your Financial Life Together by Erin Lowry with the permission of TarcherPerigee, an imprint of Penguin Random House. Copyright © 2017 by Erin Lowry.

This story reflects the views of this author, but not necessarily the editorial position of Fast Company.

I get a lot of different reactions when I tell people how I quit my job to become a full-time writer and entrepreneur. But only one of them really rubs me the wrong way, and it’s pretty common: They’ll compliment me on my “hustle.”

Whenever this happens, I’m always forced to set the record straight: I never hustled. I took my time. I had a vision for how I wanted to live and work, and I pursued it passionately. Sure, I was tenacious. But no, I didn’t hustle.

It’s not just that the idea of “hustling” doesn’t accurately reflect my own professional life. It’s also a really flawed concept for anyone to plot a career path by. At base, “great hustle” is hardly a compliment.

Success Isn’t A Mad Dash

It isn’t just entrepreneurs who like to talk about hustle, a word the business world adopted from entertainers and athletes. But it’s been a popular term in startup circles for years. In a popular video from 2014, Gary Vaynerchuk calls it “the most important word ever.” His definition? “Putting all your effort into achieving the goal at hand, and for me that means making every minute count.”

Sounds reasonable enough, right? But in the same video, the entrepreneur and speaker stands outside on a darkened New York City street, the lights of a Christmas tree twinkling behind him, and boasts about the three meetings and round of emails he still has lined up for that evening. “While everybody’s drinking some goddamn eggnog,” he says, “I continue the hustle.”

I admire Vaynerchuk for his inspiring work ethic. But frankly, I’m tired of hearing the word “hustle” used in such a positive context. Working relentlessly for long hours isn’t the only sign that you have drive. After all, is it really a good idea to put all our energy into one thing all the time in the first place? Is it the only way to succeed? Probably not.

Here are a few of the ways Merriam-Webster defines the verb “hustle”:

• to crowd or push roughly: jostle, shove
• to urge forward precipitately
• to obtain by energetic activity
• to sell something to or obtain something from (someone) by energetic and especially underhanded activity: swindle

None of these sound like particularly smart strategies for either business or life. In fact, the main thing they have in common is that they don’t sound very strategic at all.

Success isn’t a mad dash to the finish line. It’s a series of slow, steady steps in the right direction. And if you don’t quit along the way, you eventually get there. But the way to long-term success takes a lot more than “energetic activity” every second of the day. It’s time to put this word to bed. Hustling may have its merits, but more often hurts than helps. Here are three reasons why.

1. Hustle Is Unhealthy

These days, it’s as popular to be busy as it is to lament our culture of “busyness.” For many of us, having tons to do is a badge of professional significance. But researchers have long documented its costs to our health. In fact, rushing from one thing to the next can make you physically ill. “Hurry sickness,” as one employer that studied the issue termed it, is “a behavior pattern characterized by continual rushing and anxiousness; an overwhelming and continual sense of urgency.” This sort of hyperactivity can increase stress, put pressure on your heart, and stifle your ability to lose weight and even sleep.

Related:How Busyness Affects Your Brain And Health

A friend of mine worked for a large nonprofit where it was rare to work less than 60 hours a week—his hours were closer to 75, and often he’d sleep only four hours a night. But this was the kind of “hustle” encouraged by the mission-driven organization’s leadership. After five years of constant busyness, my friend’s health, marriage, and quality of work declined. He ended up quitting to work somewhere else, and he’s a lot happier and healthier now. Hustle didn’t lead to success or boost his career—it almost wrecked it.

2. Hustle Is Inefficient

A recent study by Boston University’s Questrom School of Business professor Erin Reid found that managers couldn’t distinguish between work done by employees who worked 80 hours a week and those who just pretended to do so. Examining Reid’s findings in Harvard Business Review, Sarah Green Carmichael wrote that there was no “evidence that those employees actually accomplished less, or any sign that the overworking employees accomplished more.”

We tend to assume that longer hours lead to better work, but the opposite is often true. Whether for an individual or for a company, putting in more time doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll do better or even more work. I’ve found this to be true myself, having gradually cut my 50-hour workweek down to 40 hours, then 30, and then 25. Each time I reined it in, I found that the volume and quality of my output was about the same but that my working hours became more productive each time.

The cliché is often true: More isn’t always better.

3. Hustle Hurts The Work

When we hustle, we sometimes forget the importance of time off. We think every hour that we’re working—every moment we’re able to squeeze out another task—must be adding up, contributing to the results. But that’s not always the case.

Working endlessly on a project for 10 hours straight isn’t nearly as effective as working on the same project by using sporadic bursts of energy, taking brief but regular breaks. A 2010 study at the University of Illinois found that not taking breaks while pursuing a specific goal actually slows down how quickly it’s reached. On the other hand, in a separate study, people who took 15-minute breaks in their work had more stamina overall—they could stay focused longer, allowing them to do deeper and better work.

Working at high speed and at a continuous energy level just isn’t realistic, and it ultimately hurts our output when we try it. It’s much smarter to take your time and move with intention. After all, hustle is an impatient person’s game. And winning always takes patience. I’m not saying go after it only when you feel like it—that’s laziness. You do have to put in daily effort. But I’d much rather exchange “hustle” with “perseverance.” It’s a better word because it’s a much more accurate description of what it takes to succeed.

So hustle when you need to. When that deadline is looming, push hard, press the boundaries of what’s possible—rush things if you have to. But do that all the time, and you and your work will both suffer. A healthy lifestyle, an efficient approach toward work, and knowing how and when to focus are more important than putting in a ridiculous amount of time.

Those are the things I’d much rather be praised for. Wouldn’t you?

Jeff Goins is a Nashville–based writer and the author of Real Artists Don’t Starve: Timeless Strategies for Thriving in the New Creative Age. Follow him on Twitter at @JeffGoins.

WHAT: A twist on Hulu’s unfortunately timely Handmaid’s Tale miniseries.

WHO: The team at Saturday Night Live, and guest host Chris Pine.

WHY WE CARE: There’s pure evil, there’s those who were just following orders, and then there are some dudes with no idea anything’s wrong. A Handmaid’s Tale-themed sketch from SNL over the weekend goes after this last group–both the fictional version and its real-life equivalent. In the world of Margaret Atwood’s harrowing dystopian classic, women bear the brunt of responsibility and penalty for a plague of infertility. Mass subjugation follows; their money liquidated, their rights stripped away, and much worse. Well, much worse for some, anyway.

In SNL‘s take on the rapturously reviewed miniseries, currently airing on Hulu, a flock of lax-bros unaffected by the apocalyptic wrath in the Republic of Gilead hasn’t even noticed anything is . . . off. It’s what political theorist Hannah Arendt calls the banality of evil, the normalization (there’s that word again) of human wickedness. While it’s played for laughs here, the oblivious frat guys shouting “Girl squad!” at institutionalized handmaids, as though nothing’s changed, this same blitheness is reflected in every well-off white guy unconcerned with the plight of others in Trump’s America. Under his eye, indeed.

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is doubling down on its mission to make more of its archives accessible to the public by converting more than 200 art books into PDF and ePub formats that are free to download.

In collaboration with the Internet Archive, the Guggenheim Museum has been releasing a sizable library of content over the years, typically consisting of out-of-print or rare books. The museum’s latest release includes books featuring the art of Mark Rothko, Pablo Picasso, Roy Lichtenstein, Gustav Klimt, Wassily Kandinsky, and more.

Peruse the Guggenheim’s full (and free) catalog here.

You go into a negotiation knowing what you want, but if you walk away without getting it, your negotiating skills might need some work.

“Everybody wants to be a better negotiator–it’s a skill we all recognize is important,” says Corey Kupfer, author of Authentic Negotiating: Clarity, Detachment & Equilibrium the Three Keys to True Negotiating Success & How To Achieve Them. “Unfortunately, most are not happy with their level of skill.”

That’s because we tend to focus on the wrong things. “People study tactics and countertactics, and then countertactics to the countertactics,” says Kupfer, managing principal of Kupfer & Associates, a New York City-based law firm that helps entrepreneurs and corporations negotiate deals. “No matter how much practice you’ve had, that method of negotiating is not going to get you where you want to be. It’s manipulative instead of effective.”

Successful negotiation involves an open mind and a willingness to work together. Get what you want–or at least a close-enough version–by avoiding these six common pitfalls:

1. Lack Of Preparation

You may have studied up on the other person, but how much internal digging have you done?

“Where people really don’t do the level of work needed is on the internal prep: The deep, inner work where you get clear,” says Kupfer. “You have to make sure the true bottom line is in line with your internal truth through every point of the deal. How do you design a negotiation if you don’t know what works and doesn’t work for you?”

Instead of simply creating a list of wants, identify your motivation, suggests Kupfer. “Be able to answer why you want it,” he says. “If you don’t, you may agree to something and then find out later it’s not what you really wanted.”

2. Letting Your Ego Get In The Way

Your ego can show up a few different ways when you negotiate, says Kupfer. “It can be a macho know-it-all,” he says. “That’s an ego that doesn’t listen, and you run into trouble, because listening is an important skill in life and negotiation.”

You ego can show up as pride, where you become upset when someone says your company isn’t worth what you want, or when you don’t get the raise you ask for. And your ego can hurt you if you don’t own your own value.

Bypass your ego by staying detached to the outcome, says Kupfer. “Great negotiators want to get the deal done, but if it doesn’t meet their criteria they’re okay,” he says.

To detach, leave space and time to do whatever it takes to get you centered, says Kupfer. “It’s different for different people, but it could be meditation, running, bouncing thoughts off your mentor or close friend, or running spreadsheets,” he says. “Whatever gets you clear-headed.”

Having an ambivalent point of view helps you be a better negotiator, says Naomi Rothman, assistant professor of management at Lehigh University.

“Ambivalence makes individuals more receptive to others’ points of views, allowing negotiators to see if they have a shared perspective with their partner and enabling a collaborative tone in the negotiation,” Rothman says. “Expressing ambivalence in a negotiation also signals flexibility, and combined with creating a collaborative tone, can help negotiators achieve more integrative win-win negotiation outcomes, than expressing more aggressive states such as anger or even neutrality.”

3. Being Controlled By Fear

Being fearful during negotiations can negatively impact the outcome. “Some people are afraid of losing or succeeding,” says Kupfer. “They fear the unknown or looking bad. When you feel like you need this deal and you’re afraid of losing it, your fear will come across in what we say, in our tone and in our intonation.”

In order to control your fear, work to deal with what’s causing it and work on detachment. “Every master negotiator knows that the only thing worse than not getting a deal done is doing a bad deal,” says Kupfer. “You have to have underlying trust that if it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be. If not, you’ll do a deal later or with someone else.”

Control your fear by anticipating the “no,” adds Joel Klein, business coach and CEO of BizTank, a Shark Tank-style platform that helps connect entrepreneurs to capital.

“Don’t be afraid to communicate exactly what you want, and don’t be set back by a ‘no,'” he says. “Determination is something investors will admire, and even if investment isn’t offered the first time round, the determination and ambition that you express may attract investors to come back to you at a different time.”

4. Being Too Rigid

People can get hung up on details and structure, dismissing a deal that doesn’t fit within certain parameters. But if you come into a deal from a rigid place, you’re teeing yourself up for failure, says Kupfer.

“It’s easy to get locked into preconceived notions,” he says. “Or you can get rigid around timing, but that can backfire.”

If you push the pace of a deal too hard and don’t have patience, you might send a signal that you’re desperate or trying to hide something. Or if you go too slow, the other person could lose interest or find simpler solutions.

“Instead, be open to the flow of the deal,” says Kupfer. “Deals need to follow their organic rhythm, which could be very fast, very slow, or somewhere in between.”

5. Getting Emotional

Emotions can cause you to lose objectivity in negotiations, controlling or blinding you. You could become angry or frustrated, or you could enter the process being too attached to the outcome.

“Emotions can be signals telling you something,” says Kupfer. “Take a break or a step back. Ask yourself, ‘Why am I getting upset?'”

You may need to practice ways to detach from the deal, or decide if it’s the right time to be entering negotiations.

6. Losing Integrity

The easy part of negotiations is being honest and authentic, says Kupfer. “If you’re dishonest, that’s a problem,” he says. “Negotiations often start an ongoing business relationship, and they affect your reputation. If the deal starts out with a lack of integrity, the word will get out.”

Behaving aggressively and dominantly may help you achieve short-term, one-off wins, but it will hinder you in the long run, says Rothman.

“Negotiations are inherently interdependent; you need both parties to work together,” she says. “Behaving aggressively and dominantly signals inflexibility and is unlikely to inspire problem-solving approaches in negotiation partners. By contrast, behaving less dominantly has been shown to signal greater flexibility and can inspire greater problem solving that yields outcomes that make both parties better off.”

For more than a decade, Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign has been challenging our ideas of what beauty is, what it means, and why we think about it the way we do. Recently, the brand has extended its message into a new Real Moms campaign and product line, and hacking stock images to get a more realistic portrayal of strong, beautiful women in poster and outdoor advertising. Now, in the UK, the brand has found a way to embed its ideals into its product packaging.

Created by agency Ogilvy London, “Real Beauty Bottles” is a limited-edition run of six different body wash bottles to illustrate the power of body diversity–ranging from curvy to tall, petite to slim. In a statement Dove said, “Each bottle evokes the shapes, sizes, curves and edges that combine to make every woman their very own limited edition. They’re one of a kind–just like you. But sometimes we all need reminding of that. Recent research from the Dove Global Beauty and Confidence Report revealed that one in two women feels social media puts pressure on them to look a certain way. Thankfully, many women are fighting with us to spread beauty confidence.”

As a new graduate, everyone from your slightly older BFF to your favorite college professor has most likely lined up to give you their best advice for being the very best at your first job. But even with all their amazing and wise tidbits, a few things could still take you by surprise.

“New graduates need to be flexible and observant during their first few days on the job,” says Heather Huhman, Generation Y career expert and founder of Come Recommended. “Pay attention to how people interact in the office so you can begin to learn the rules in this new environment.”

Of course, you can also read this inside information so that nothing (hopefully) will take you by surprise as you navigate your new job.

1. Building Relationships Takes Work

You won’t walk into a new office and immediately find your new BFF. “Your first job isn’t going to be like college or your internship where there were others starting out at the same time as you,” Huhman says. “There may not be a group of other newbies who you can lean on for support.”

Related:How My Entry-Level Job Helped Me Become A Mid-20s Entrepreneur

The good news is that “if you take the time to try and get to know your coworkers and form connections, your transition will be a lot easier,” says Huhman.

That’s something Carrie Aulenbacher learned the hard way. Aulenbacher assumed her coworkers would appreciate her work ethic and they’d be buddies, but instead, some held it against her. “One of the employees pulled me aside and told me not to work so fast—it was making everyone else look slow,” she says. “I’d been told about office politics, but wasn’t aware of the degree to which things could manifest.”

2. Asking Questions Is Not A Sign Of Weakness

“I’ve seen a lot of new graduates who are scared to admit when they don’t know something,” says Huhman. “They fear looking incompetent.” But often the smartest move you can make in a new job is to ask a question. After all, there are only two options when faced with a situation that overwhelms or confuses you, as Huhman points out: “Pretend like you know what you’re doing and hope you don’t mess up—although, chances are you will,” she says, “or ask questions and get clarifications. The second option means admitting your limitations, but it provides you the chance to learn and avoid costly mistakes.”

3. The Learning Isn’t Over

You spent a lot of time and money on your education, so we’re not surprised if you think you’ve left college with all you’ll need to do well in your job. But if you’ve got that viewpoint, we’ve also got bad news: “You’ll be very disappointed,” Huhman warns. “Each company has their own way of doing things, so be prepared to adapt to new processes and ways of working through problems.”

When Caroline Stokes took her first job as a marketing assistant, “What took me by surprise was how much needed to be learned and the repetitive nature of it,” Stokes admitted. To top it off, no one seemed to step up to teach her those new skills; she had to learn on the job, as she went along. “It surprised me that I was put into a role with no support—I was just expected to find initiative then be able to read minds on what was needed next,” she says. “There was no real guidance . . . of what ‘good’ looked like.”

Related: How To Get Promoted After Less Than A Year On The Job 

4. Timing Is Out Of Your Control

Like it or not, “In every organization, there’s some degree of red tape,” says Huhman. And oftentimes, she says, “No matter how quickly you complete your tasks, there will be delays that are beyond your control.” The fact that your time—when you’re on the clock—is out of your control can be frustrating, “but understand that all you can do is try your hardest to meet your own deadlines.”

5. You Won’t Be Getting A “Report Card”

You’re used to being graded in college. But unless you specifically ask, your boss may not be as forthright with feedback as your professors were with your test scores. As Huhman explains, “Teachers and professors give us grades as a way to let us know what skills we’ve mastered and where we still need to improve. [But] don’t expect the same flow of feedback in your first job.” In fact, she says, “if you do find an employer who regularly sits down with you to discuss progress, count yourself lucky. It could take months, or even a year, before you receive input or recognition from your boss.”

In fact, no one may be grading—er, watching—you at all. That was Kalyn Duguay’s experience at her first job. “I was used to my roles as a part-time customer service rep and a student, in which you are constantly under the supervision of someone who is watching your every move,” she describes. “No one really tells you about the complete freedom and independence you have at your first job. It definitely was a surprise, and is something that can easily be taken advantage of.”

6. Professionalism Is Everything

According to Huhman, “Many new graduates have trouble adapting to professional communication etiquette.” In other words, you might be surprised to find that your boss doesn’t appreciate being called “ma’am,” or the emojis you seem to stick into every email. “They either craft emails that are overly formal or are filled with typos and slang,” says Huhman. What’s a new employee to do? “The key is to find an appropriate balance. You should always be respectful, but don’t be afraid to show your personality as well,” Huhman says.

This article originally appeared on Glassdoor and is adapted with permission.

Buried in the second verse of D12’s 2002 song “Fight Music” is the line: “I fucking hate you, I’ll take your drawers down and rape you.” In his 2012 song D2B, the rapper Problem takes a subtler but still pernicious approach, claiming: “In the bedroom there ain’t no rules.”

But there are, and they hinge around consent, communication, awareness, and comfort–concepts that many songs ignore in favor of promoting violence, abuse, and a toxic masculinity that too often bleeds into culture. In “Songs of Violence,” a campaign that ran for a month in April 2016 in Brazil, the newspaper Estadão teamed up the advertising agency FCB and the domestic violence hotline Disque Denúncia to draw attention to how often we hear these messages–and why unabsorbing or ignoring them should not be the response. Songs of Violence won the advertising award in the 2017 World Changing Idea awards (you can read more about all the finalists below).

Working with Shazam, FCB identified around 300 songs that contain the kind of violence against women described in Brazil’s anti-domestic violence statute Federal Law 11340, called the Lei Maria da Penha for the woman who became a leader of the country’s women’s rights movement after her ex-husband twice attempted to murder her. Once the songs were tagged according to lyrics and the section of the law they corresponded to, Disque Denúncia provided testimonials from real women who had experienced similar abuse. The women who shared their experiences all did so voluntarily, through a hotline set up by FCB and Disque Denúncia. “Just listening to the testimonials was nerve-wracking for us,” Fabio Simoes of FCB tells Fast Company. “We can only imagine what it was like for them–you could still feel the anguish and pain in their voices.”

During the month-long “Songs of Violence” campaign, when someone used Shazam to identify one of the 300 songs tagged by FCB, they would instead hear one such survivor testimonial. Each song was matched with its own testimonial; a banner would cover the phone screen with information about abuse and violence. The campaign reached over a million people, and just 6% chose to download the song after listening to the testimonial.

“Very often, the phrase ‘it’s a cultural thing’ is used as an excuse for bad behavior, especially when it comes to sexism in Brazil,” Simoes says. According to the World Health Organization, around one in three women will experience physical or sexual abuse. While it’s impossible to draw an evidence-based link between violence in music and in the world, our popular culture’s normalization of rape, abuse, and disregard for a woman’s boundaries and comfort has seeped into how we process and respond to such incidences. It’s not too much of a stretch to leap from how we nod along to lyrics like Problem’s and D12’s to how a confirmed rapist can walk away from a trial with a paltry six-month jail sentence.

“Songs of Violence,” Simoes says, sparked the beginning of an important debate for Brazil. “Violence against women is not entertainment–it’s a crime,” he says. While a month-long campaign can’t bring about a complete culture shift, it’s a start: This year, for the first time, organizers of street parties during Carnival–Brazil’s rowdiest holiday–mobilized to outlaw a handful of songs integral to traditional Carnival performances. Objecting to sexist and homophobic lyrics, one organizer, Debora Thome, told The Chicago Tribune that “Carnival in Brazil reflects a lot of what we see in our day-to-day life.” So does music; “Songs of Violence” is a reminder that change can start with what we listen to.

Here’s more about the finalists in the advertising category:

“Wander Wisely”

Campbell Ewald for Travelocity

In 2015, Pauline Lewis flew halfway across the globe to Ethiopia, where she spent her trip helping an organization for women and orphans build up a library and a computer lab. Voluntourism is a growing phenomenon: 63% of Americans would ideally combine vacation with giving back. What’s stopping a lot of them: cost. The videos Campbell Ewald created for Travelocity highlight the agency’s Travel For Good program, which offers grants to people from the U.S. to pursue social good projects around the world. Following Pauline and the other 2015 grand prize winner, the videos compel people to find a passion project and apply for a grant to see it through.

“Women Not Objects”

Badger & Winters

It takes just a drive on a highway or a flip through a magazine to see that the advertising industry makes big bucks exploiting women. When the message to stop doing so comes from within the advertising industry itself, people listen. As one of the few female-led advertising agencies, Badger & Winters launched #WomenNotObjects in January 2016 to call on advertisers to stop objectifying women in their work. The videos, which show what happened when the team at Badger & Winters Googled “objectification of women,” racked up over 45 million views and commitments from a range of competitors and media organizations to hold a mirror up to themselves and reconsider how they portray women for the sake of profit.

“Great Immigrants”

Atlantic Media Strategies and Carnegie Corporation

Especially under the watch of Donald Trump’s presidency, immigration has become a politicized, often dehumanized, topic. Through its Great Immigrants campaign, Carnegie sheds a light on the lives of immigrants and how they contribute to and shape American culture. In a series of videos created in partnership with Atlantic Media Strategies and reaching 3.4 million people, Carnegie tells the story of immigrants like Diane von Furstenburg and Jose Andres to inspire immigrants to apply for citizenship, and encourage Americans to empathize and engage with immigration on a personal level.

Future Fab

Ideo.org

In five regions across Kenya, Ideo.org partnered with the pro-contraceptive organization Marie Stopes International to educate teens, communities, and health care providers about contraception and safe sex. Deploying everything from posters and T-shirts to a fashion show and a magazine, Future Fab sent the message–in bright, bold lettering–that safe sex is the cool choice. Since the program launched in 2016, over 1,000 kids have participated in the programming and learned how a proactive approach to sexual health can set them up for a successful future.

The Fair Food Program

Pinkwater & Putman for the Coalition of Immokalee Workers

In 2011, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a human-rights organization based in Florida, launched the Fair Food Program (FFP) to ensure that all workers on participating farms received fair wages under humane working conditions. The FFP involved farmworkers, Florida tomato growers, and thirteen retail buyers, including Whole Foods, WalMart, and Chipotle. By partnering with Pinkwater & Putnam, the FFP ensured that their work would be recognized and shared by developing a label and branding campaign that would let consumers know when they were buying a Fair Food product, and spread FFPs message through media and talk show placements.

Detroit Matters

Havas Chicago for Craftsman

Across American cities, divestment has left behind abandoned parks and community centers in need of repairs, but lacking the funding to see them through. Last year, the construction tool company Craftsman partnered with a local gardening group, the Detroit Mower Gang, to revitalize 31 parks during a 12-hour marathon event. Havas Chicago caught it all on film and turned it into a documentary that is the first in a planned Craftsman Fixes America series. The film reached over 1 million people and drew countless suggestions for the next place Craftsman can help fix, and brought 60 volunteers to the Detroit Mower Group.

“Green Laces”

Anomaly for Dick’s Sporting Goods

In 2014, the Fifth Ward Saints, a football team in an impoverished part of Houston, had their equipment stolen and lacked the resources to replace it. Dicks Sporting Goods stepped in to replace the equipment and donate extra funding, and through its Green Laces campaign, developed with Anomaly, the company is continuing to raise money for underfunded youth sports by donating $2 of every purchase made during the holiday season to a program in need.

“Love Has No Labels”

R/GA

Behind an x-ray screen installed on Valentine’s Day 2015 in Santa Monica, two skeletons dance toward each other, then embrace. A crowd gathered around cheers, and cheers louder when the skeletons emerge from behind the screen to reveal themselves as two women. “Love Has No Labels” asks everyone to look their biases in the face by challenging our assumptions and recognizing that everyone–regardless of race, sexuality, age, and disability–is capable and deserving of love. The video of the Santa Monica installation reached over 160 million views and became the second-most viewed and shared PSA in history.

“Unfairy Tales”

180LA for Unicef

With over 10 million people displaced and in need of aid, the Syrian refugee crisis should be inspiring an outpouring of humanitarian assistance. But refugees often run into crossed arms and closed borders. A series of videos created by 180LA for Unicef, “Unfairy Tales” animate the experience of fleeing Syria as a child. Despite the format, the videos are dark and thought-provoking, and tell the stories of real-life Syrian refugees; the creators hope they will inspire empathy and an offer a new lens on an often-misunderstood crisis.

“Inject Hope”

Landor for Hamilton County Heroin Coalition

The opioid crisis in the U.S. is often discussed in terms of statistics: 33,000 people killed in 2015; life expectancy declining in rural areas. When the Hamilton County Heroin Coalition in Ohio approached the agency Landor to develop an awareness strategy, they expected something straightforward, but Landor’s “Inject Hope” campaign brought the crisis home in an unexpected way. Instead of depicting addiction as something that happens far away (despite the fact that nearly half the area residents know someone affected by heroin use), Landor humanized the epidemic by portraying ordinary people–friends, relatives, coworkers–who were also addicts in need of help. Since the campaign launched last year, six more counties have gotten involved in spreading awareness.

“Walk With Yeshi”

AKQA

On Facebook Messenger “Walk With Yeshi” allows users to follow a young Ethiopian girl as she takes a 2.5-hour-long journey to collect drinking water. Through the app, Yeshi shares her life as users hear the sounds of her footsteps, the music from her village, and hear descriptions of what she sees along her path. They also hear the difficulties of the long journey under the sun. The campaign by AKQA is an exercise in radical empathy, and through it, Lokai and Charity: Water were able to build 33 wells in Ethiopia.

Wheels4Water

Rule29 Creative

Two creative and bike enthusiasts founded Wheels4Water with the idea that they could transform their passion for cycling into a way to help fight the worldwide water crisis. Each year, Wheels4Water works with their development partner, Lifewater International, to determine a community anywhere in the world in need of safe water and sanitation resources. They then plan an epic cycling trip to raise money and awareness: In 2014, Wheels4Water led a group from Boston to Chicago; in 2015, they rode the California coast. So far, they’ve raised over $235,000 and helped around 6,000 people gain access to safe water.

Suspended for What?

DoSomething.org

Students who are suspended are three times more likely to drop out of school, which triples the likelihood they’ll end up behind bars. And often, they’re suspended for reasons that are better addressed through counseling and a restorative justice approach. Through its Suspended for What? campaign, DoSomething.org engaged a range of partners, including the NAACP and ACLU, to advocate for disciplinary reform in high schools around the country. Students shared their experiences with suspension and raised their voices to encourage their schools to adopt fairer policies. The pilot campaign resulted in at least five schools reforming their disciplinary protocol, and this year, DoSomething.org hopes to scale up and reach all 508 school districts where at least 25% of the school body has been suspended at least once.

When civil war began in Yemen in 2015, so did the growth of solar power. The crisis took out the already unreliable electric grid and made fuel for generators both scarce and expensive. Solar panels, though also expensive, became a better deal. As people started to turn to solar power, one Yemeni man decided to build an app to help people learn how to install them–which helped solar grow even faster.

“Due to the war and the crisis that is going on in Yemen, the power grid that was supplied by the government is totally disconnected, hence, solar power systems became the main power supply for most homes and businesses,” says Anwar Al-Haddad, who built the app, called PV Solar. Al-Haddad estimates that in 2016, solar grew from roughly 5% of the electricity supply in cities like the capital of Sanaa to more than 50%.

He didn’t know how to build an app (“I do not like coding, no matter how hard I try to learn it,” he says), but discovered Thunkable, a drag-and-drop platform that anyone can use to make an app without experience. The resulting app helps people calculate the size of the solar panel system they need. If someone places their phone on the panel, the app can use the phone’s gyroscope to calculate the tilt of the panel and help the user adjust it to get the maximum sunlight. An Arabic version of the app also includes articles and advice about how to install, maintain, and use the panels.

For Thunkable, a Y Combinator-alum, the story is an example of the power of creating opportunities for people to solve local problems. “In Silicon Valley, we try and solve many of the world’s problems with technology, but there are so many problems that we are not even aware of,” says Arun Saigal, the company’s cofounder and CEO. “With Thunkable, we are enabling people with the most intimate knowledge of their own major local problems to solve these problems.”

“Under normal circumstances, it would have taken years, even decades, to convince the citizens of Sanaa that switching to solar was not just better for the environment, but saves money as well,” one Yemen citizen wrote in 2016. “But the ongoing conflict seems to have helped push the switch through in a matter of months.” The app, arguably, helped that happen even faster.

It’s a sunny morning in Boyle Heights, a working-class neighborhood in East Los Angeles. Marty Bailey, 55, is about to start his day as the head of manufacturing at the eco-chic label Reformation. The brand’s 33,500-square-foot headquarters houses the first fully sustainable sewing factory in the United States. When visitors stop by, they tend to notice the Curtis Kuling graffiti scrawled on the walls, the hip vintage furniture that populates the design studio, and employees tending to their plots in the community garden outside. But for Bailey, the most exciting thing about the factory is its totally reimagined manufacturing process.

Reformation is a fast fashion brand, constantly changing its product mix to keep up with the latest trends. But founder Yael Aflalo has upended each step of her supply chain to make it leaner, more nimble, and more environmentally friendly. A team of data scientists keeps track of best-selling outfits and conveys this information to Bailey, who is tasked with producing garments based on real-time demand. This ensures that the brand is delivering products that customers love, while eliminating wasted inventory. “Today, we’re making 300 maxi dresses,” Bailey says. “Yesterday, we were making T-shirts. From a logistical and supply-chain perspective, that’s a very complicated thing to do. It’s a challenge, in the best possible way.”

This approach to manufacturing bears little resemblance to the Fruit of the Loom factory where Bailey first launched his career three decades ago. In 1984, Bailey had just graduated from Campbellsville University in Kentucky, got married, and had a baby girl on the way. He needed a job quick, so he took a position at “the Factory” (as the locals called it) on the western edge of Campbellsville. At the time, it was among the largest apparel-making operations in the world, with 700,000 square feet devoted to bleaching and dying fabric, cutting and sewing, and quality control.

During each shift, Bailey remembers tens of thousands of professional sewers being shuttled in by school bus from seven counties, churning out more than 4 million identical plain white T-shirts and tightie-whities a week, filling the cavernous floor with the rhythmic buzzing and whirring of sewing machines. One sewer, June Judd, who spent 18 years at the factory, remembers sewing the fly onto 15,000 men’s briefs every single day. Sewers earned double the minimum wage—between $10 and $12 an hour—often making around $50,000 a year with overtime, or $75,888 a year with overtime, adjusted for inflation.

The shift is clear: These days, instead of massive conglomerates making generic products, a wave of tech-savvy startups are choosing to manufacture in America. Their reasons for going local often have little to do with patriotism. They’re primarily searching for better ways to create high-quality, state-of-the-art products and deliver them to customers faster than competitors making merchandise overseas.

The Hollowing Out Of American Factories

This uptick in Made in America startups could well signal a new era of manufacturing in the United States. But it’s important to remember that these are just a small fraction of the 4.5 million jobs that disappeared since NAFTA went into effect in 1994.

Bailey first noticed jobs leaving the country in the mid-’90s. All around him, he watched as factories began to downsize. There were many reasons for this shift—American consumers demanding cheaper products, American employers resisting rising labor costs and unions, free trade agreements making it easier to manufacture abroad—but the end result was always the same: American workers were out of work. Week by week, hundreds of Bailey’s coworkers at Fruit of the Loom were handed pink slips. Then, in 1998, after running for 50 years, the factory shut down operations altogether. “These were folks I knew,” Bailey says. “These jobs had paid for people’s houses, cars, and kids’ college. Workers took pride in being skilled sewing operators.”

As a rising star at Fruit of the Loom, Bailey was posted to Central America to set up new facilities that would make the very same T-shirts and underwear his friends in Campbellsville once made. “I went from managing factories in the southern United States and Texas to opening facilities in Honduras, El Salvador, and Mexico,” he recalls. “I went from working with highly skilled American sewers to training people in Central America who had never seen an industrial sewing machine before.”

Manufacturing jobs have been leaving the country for decades now, but recently, offshoring has been creeping back into the headlines. It came up repeatedly during the 2016 election, with candidates on both sides of the political divide decrying the hollowing out of American factories. Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders devoted a significant part of their platforms to promising to bring these jobs back, tossing around plans to pull out of free trade agreements and impose import taxes. Yet few politicians, if any, have talked about what it would actually look like to usher in a new era of manufacturing in the United States.

The startups that have committed to U.S.-based manufacturing understand this. They were laying the groundwork for a new phase in American manufacturing long before Trump started campaigning on his America First platform—and they didn’t model their factories on those of the past. They’ve been coming up with new, innovative approaches to production that address current demands and challenges.

American Apparel is one of them. After years of setting up factories overseas, Bailey returned to the U.S. in 2002 to run the company’s brand new factory in Los Angeles. Fifteen years ago, the notion of making T-shirts in America was so novel that journalists and cable news crews were constantly buzzing about American Apparel, trying to make sense of how founder and CEO Dov Charney was able to wholesale a T-shirt for $3 while still paying American workers a fair wage. But by setting up a vertically integrated supply chain—controlling everything from the factory to the distribution—Charney had found a business model that worked, paving the way for a whole flock of fashion startups to consider making products locally, rather than instinctively looking to Asia and Central and South America.  

Earlier this year, American Apparel filed for bankruptcy and was sold, but by then, Los Angeles had been transformed into a thriving hub of garment manufacturing, employing nearly 50,000 workers to cut and sew apparel. And Southern California isn’t the only place that’s created new jobs in this sector. American Giant has built a robust cotton manufacturing supply chain in the Carolinas, Mizzen+Main is bringing dress-shirt making to Texas, State Optical is training eyeglass craftspeople in Chicago, Winkbeds is working with traditional mattress makers in Wisconsin to make the most high-tech beds on the market, and Maiden Home is able to deliver customized furniture in three weeks by manufacturing in North Carolina.

New Ecosystems

Some of the most well-known American companies today—Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Amazon—have relatively small workforces. When Facebook reached a market capitalization of $200 billion in 2014, it only had 9,199 employees; when General Electric hit the same mark in 1997, it had 239,000. Technology companies are able to create wealth but not necessarily jobs. This isn’t the case when it comes to making furniture, clothes, watches, and eyeglasses. As a new breed of entrepreneurs is discovering, to make products in America, you need skilled workers—and a lot of them.

In 2014, Scott Shapiro launched State Optical, one of a handful of eyewear brands operating entirely in the U.S. He opened a 10,000-square-foot factory in Vernon Hills, a northern suburb of Chicago, and invested thousands of dollars in building a team of craftspeople. Before launching, the company had a six-month-long apprenticeship program. Shapiro’s cofounders, Marc Franchi and Jason Stanley, who previously handmade small batches of eyeglasses for their brand Frieze Frames, taught 50 new employees the fundamentals of the craft. These new workers had previously been mechanics, jewelers, retail associates, and electricians. “There just weren’t people left in the U.S. who knew how to make eyeglasses anymore,” Shapiro explains. “Starting this business meant reintroducing these skills into the workforce.”

State Optical’s factory is well-lit and the white walls are stark, except for the enormous American flags that add bright pops of red and blue. Making eyewear is precise work: Employees sit quietly at tables, buffing the frames with tiny tools for a high-gloss finish, tightening tiny screws to just the right level of tension, or inspecting each pair’s rounded edge. 

Vitaly Vaysberg, who was born and raised in Chicago, can be found behind one of the 50 new state-of-the-art machines Shapiro imported from Japan and China. He began his career at his family’s metalworking factory, but after his father retired, he began looking for other manufacturing work and spotted an ad for a job at State Optical. He became employee No. 4. These days, he works at a computer that helps him insert hinges into glasses with fine precision. “I fell in love with manufacturing because you’re basically taking a big, unformed slab of material and turning it into something that someone can use,” he says. “But metal is totally different from plastic. When you make a mistake working with metal, you can always fix it by welding a small piece of metal back into the structure. With plastic, you only have one shot, so you have to get it right the first time.”

All of this, Shapiro says, affects quality. But as he studied the market, he realized that some Americans were looking for better craftsmanship and attention to detail in their eyewear. “We’re seeing a lot of cynicism in the marketplace today from young people who are asking why eyeglasses cost what they do and where are they made,” Shapiro says. “I had heard consumers asking for glasses that were made in the U.S., so I knew there was a market.”

At State Optical, each pair of glasses requires more than two weeks to make, and requires 75 separate steps, such as drilling 21 tiny holes that make up State Optical’s logo onto the end pieces. He believes that attention to detail sets his company apart. Perfectly cut and buffed plastic sits more comfortably on the nose, well-made screws will stay tight, and together, all these little touches make a product that will last a long time.

Of course, quality comes at a price. Given State Optical’s initial investment in the factory infrastructure and worker training—plus paying employees an average of $15 an hour, with benefits and paid vacation—it made sense for Shapiro to price products at the higher end of the market. The glasses cost between $310 and $410, on par with brands like Chanel or Prada, and are currently sold in more than 500 high-end optical stores around the country. But over time, Shapiro hopes that it will be possible to produce in greater volume and more competitive prices.

As the company grows, Shapiro continues to bring on new workers, and he believes that eventually, he’ll help create a new workforce of skilled artisans who will be able to kickstart an American-made eyewear industry.

Weiss apprenticed at two Swiss companies, Audemars Piguet and Vacheron Constantin, but rather than spending his career in Europe, he set a goal of returning the prestige of watchmaking to the United States. In the mid-1800s, the United States had been a leader in mechanical watchmaking, with brands like Waltham and Elgin developing engineering methods that were adopted by the Swiss and the British. But when the quartz battery-powered watch was invented in 1969, handcrafted mechanical watches were replaced by mass-produced watches, and production was shipped off to Asia. “I really believed there was a market for luxury watches that were made here,” Weiss says.

He was right. Over the last four years, the Weiss Watch Company has grown steadily and sells 2,500 timepieces a year. They cost between $950 and $6,950, a similar price point to Movado and Tag Heuer. Most Americans can’t afford that steep an investment, but Weiss has tapped into a market of luxury consumers who are particularly intrigued by the watches’ American provenance. As he’s ramped up production, he’s moved into a proper studio in L.A. and begun the work of training others. He has already taught former pastry chef Lisa Odland to become a watch technician (she now works alongside him), and he will continue to hire more people as his business expands. Improbably, Weiss has a helped resuscitate a dead industry in the United States.

Made To Measure

While U.S. eyewear and watch manufacturing have been almost entirely offshored for the past several decades, the furniture sector has fared slightly better. Across the country, clusters of woodworkers and craftspeople have doggedly continued to make tables and armchairs, selling them at local main street stores or trade shows.

Woodworking has deep roots in this country. In the late 1800s, the United States was a global hub of furniture manufacturing: Companies in North Carolina, Michigan, and Wisconsin developed new ways to streamline the mass production of wooden dressers and sofa sets. The industry thrived for more than 150 years, until production largely moved to China in the 1990s, partly because the Chinese government subsidized manufacturing to ensure that Chinese-made furniture was the cheapest in the world. This policy defied WTO anti-competitive agreements. In the last decade alone, America has lost 300,000 furniture jobs.

But in the last two years, tech entrepreneurs have been searching out independent furniture workshops around the country and partnering with them to sell their products online. They’ve discovered that manufacturing furniture locally comes with unique advantages: You can create customized products, then ship them to the customer in a matter of days. This holds significant weight in an era when consumers are more eager for customized products than ever before.

Selling products directly to customers online allows Kapur to cut out retail markups (which are particularly hefty in the furniture industry) and price her sofas at between $1,000 and $2,000, in line with brands like Pottery Barn and West Elm that mass manufacture the majority of their projects in China. “Making products in the U.S. happened to be the right decision based on my business model,” Kapur says. “My goal is to deliver high quality, customization, and most importantly, very quick turnaround times.”

Kapur, who grew up in Saratoga, California, right in the heart of Silicon Valley, has brought the mind-set of a tech entrepreneur to her business. When she began partnering with the small North Carolina factories, she noticed that their supply chains were fragmented and inefficient: They each sourced cushions and fabrics from a range of suppliers, paying far too much in the process. Kapur now buys raw materials in bulk on behalf of all three of the factories she works with, aggregating their buying power so that the factory owners can tap into lower prices whenever they need to purchase materials.

Kapur built her supply chain to ensure her sofas and armchairs would be reasonably priced. For Edgar Blazona, perfecting the process of creating high-quality American-made furniture at good prices took a few years. In 2011, Blazona borrowed $5,000 from his father-in-law to set up a small store in Berkeley called True Modern. Back then, there weren’t many options for buying locally made sofas in California; there was a far more robust furniture-making industry on the East Coast. But in the Bay Area—where granola-eating hippies buy their vegetables from nearby farms and slather artisanal jam on homemade bread—Blazona thought there could be a market for American-made sofas. He was right—but as he discovered, even people obsessed with locally made goods are still price-conscious. “We’ve become addicted to these low price points,” Blazona says. “For us, we were trying to figure out how to create a great product at a reasonable price point. Not the cheapest—not competing with China—just reasonable.”

He’s been tinkering with his business model for several years, but his newest business—a company called Benchmade Modern—has allowed him to scale. These days, he sells sofas online, allowing customers to pick the color, fabric, and size and have it delivered to their door in as few as seven days. Prices are similar to Crate and Barrel (as is the company’s aesthetic), costing between $1,000 and $4,000, depending on the model.

To make this possible, Blazona set up a factory in Los Angeles where sections of furniture are assembled to create a customer’s desired shape and size, then upholstered in the fabric of choice. Everything has been streamlined so that when an order comes in, workers are able to put all the pieces together almost immediately. There’s even a tracking device on the finished product so that the customer can watch it travel across the country to their living room. “I don’t want to get all Donald Trump about it,” Blazona says. “For us, it’s simply about asking: How do we use our people to build the things that we love? We’re betting we can do this at enough scale to bring the cost [of our merchandise] down.”

Both Benchmade and Maiden Home rely on technology to make the manufacturing and selling process as efficient as possible. But at Winkbeds, technology is essential to the mattresses themselves. Two years ago, founder Dan Alder left a career in corporate law because he wanted to create a tangible product that people would use every day. He’d had unpleasant experiences with buying beds. “It’s such an opaque industry,” he says. “No bed salesman can tell you why one bed is double the price of another. When I learned more about the industry, I learned that the very same bed is often marketed under different brands at different prices.”

Adler believed the industry could do better. To him, this meant not only creating a high-quality product, but also innovating to give the customer a better sleeping experience. And one thing that continues to wake people up at night is suddenly feeling too hot or to cold. He began to imagine: What if a bed could be temperature-regulated to the sleeper’s ideal level of coolness? Better yet, what if you could adjust the temperature on both sides of the mattress, so that couples with different preferences sleep comfortably?

As he set out to create his futuristic bed, it was critical that he work with a bedmaker based in the U.S. He found a family-owned factory in Wisconsin whose founder was excited about about developing this new bed. It’s easy for Adler to travel to the Midwest from his New York headquarters, so he makes regular trips to the facility to build prototypes and discuss how to incorporate new technologies. Moreover, communication is not a barrier, as it might be if he was working with a factory in China or Japan.

Earlier this year, Winkbeds launched coolControl, a patented system that conducts fresh air from the bedroom to create the desired temperature on each side of the bed using a remote control or an app. All beds are made to order and are delivered for free within seven to 14 days. A mattress costs $1,299 for a queen size bed, which is similar to the cost of Sealy or Serta. “It’s very clear to me that my entire business hinges on local manufacturing,” Adler says.

New Value Propositions

Since 1988, Todd Whitley has come into work at everyday at 7 a.m. on the dot at the Eagle Sportswear factory in Middlesex, North Carolina. As the cutting manager, he supervises a team of five people who cut clothing patterns on fabric, which are then sent up to another floor in the building where 200 sewers turn the pieces into completed garments.

His work hadn’t changed much over the course of his three-decade-long career, but four years ago, the San Francisco-based apparel startup American Giant took over the facility, adding small but important improvements to the workflow. The company outfitted Whitley’s department with a high-tech digital pattern maker, which spits out designs in a matter of minutes, allowing the team to focus on the cutting process. “In the past, it would take hours, sometimes an entire day, for one person to draw out patterns,” Whitley says. “Now, it all happens by machine.”

Up on the sewing floor, American Giant has introduced a technique called “group sew.” Previously, each sewer on a team would be responsible for finishing off a particular part of the garment: the hem, the sleeve, the collar, etc. With the new method, a group of five or six sewers learn how to do all of these tasks. They pick garments from a pile and sew whatever part is required. “It ends up being much faster, and there are fewer defects when they work as a team this way,” American Giant’s founder, Bayard Winthrop, explains. “We offer incentives for teams that are able to go through garments faster, and the sewers have been pretty excited about it.”

The fact that the Eagle factory is still here at all is a miracle, given how many textile plants in North Carolina have shuttered since the 1990s. “I kept hearing that factories in this area were closing down,” he says. “It was really scary. But I really credit the Morrells [the factory’s owners] for keeping this place going and not letting employees go during the hard times.”

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A post shared by American Giant (@americangiant) on Feb 11, 2017 at 9:33am PST

Winthrop founded American Giant in 2011 as a brand for high-quality basics. Slate called one sweatshirt “the greatest hoodie ever made,” which earned the company a loyal following among the Silicon Valley set. Winthrop launched American Giant because he was nostalgic for the American brands of his youth—Levi’s, Wrangler, and Fruit of the Loom—that were proudly made in the U.S. and were crafted to last a lifetime. He was committed to making all his products locally, and equally committed to making them at prices that middle-class consumers could afford.

The problem is, Americans are addicted to cheap products—especially when it comes to their wardrobe. The price of garments has gone down over the last few decades. In 1998, a pair of Levi’s 501 jeans cost $50 and a Ralph Lauren Polo shirt went for $62.50 (or $74.72 and $93.41 adjusted for inflation). Twenty years later, the suggested retail prices for the jeans is $59.50 and $85 for the shirt.

Last year, an Associated Press-GfK poll of 1,076 Americans found that the vast majority would choose lower prices over paying a premium for items that are made in the U.S. When presented with the option of buying a $50 pair of jeans made in another country or an $85 pair made in the U.S.—both made with the same fabric and design—67% said they would buy the less expensive version. This was true across the socioeconomic spectrum: People in households earning more than $100,000 annually were just as likely to go for the cheaper pants.

American Giant is trying to change the perception that goods made in the U.S. are out of reach to the average consumer. Offering hoodies that start at $69 and T-shirts at $24.50, Winthrop believes he’s on his way. He stays up at night thinking about how he can make his supply chain as cost-effective as possible. For him, it comes down to streamlining operations, making them as efficient as possible to drive down costs while still paying American workers healthy salaries. Part of this involves acquiring factories such as the Eagle plant, so that the company can update the machinery and use smarter techniques. But Winthrop is also working on larger scale efficiencies, such as bringing the factories, mills, and cotton suppliers closer together to further streamline operations.

All of this has an impact on the bottom line, enabling Winthrop to bring prices closer to mid-range brands like Gap or Banana Republic. But American Giant is trying to make the case that its products are good value for money because they are made with better materials and craftsmanship than brands making products in China (like Gap and Banana Republic). The company also prides itself on a rigorous R&D process, where each product goes through many rounds of prototyping to make sure that it is an improvement on what already exists on the market. While a $89 sweatshirt is three or four times what you might pay at Walmart, Winthrop argues that it will last longer.

“We’re in the business of trying to change consumer behavior,” he says. “We’re not trying to bring prices down to Made in China prices, but when you consider the quality we’re offering, we think we have a very strong value proposition for the consumer. I think consumers are getting tired of buying low-end, poorly-made fast fashion: They’re disillusioned from seeing one thing after another fall apart on them.”

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A post shared by Mizzen+Main (@mizzenandmain) on Jan 30, 2017 at 9:01am PST

Not Trump’s Way

Young entrepreneurs making products in America tend to focus on how innovative their products are, but every so often, you’ll meet one that is overtly patriotic.

In 2012, Kevin Lavelle launched Mizzen+Main, a menswear brand that incorporates high-tech fabrics into shirts so that they wick moisture and don’t wrinkle. The technology, it turns out, was the easy part. It was the manufacturing that proved much more challenging than he imagined.

Lavelle, 31, was dead-set on producing the shirts not just in America, but in his home state of Texas. He dug through phone books and web databases, calling thousands of factories. Some had been closed for a long time, while others specialized in a single product like firemen’s jackets or chef’s aprons. (Meanwhile, he passed over pages of websites that allow you to fax over a simple form with prototype and fabric information to China, and receive a shipment of shirts in six to 12 months.) Eventually, the legwork paid off: Lavelle found a facility outside Houston that has been making his shirts since day one and has expanded as his business has exploded.

“I care an enormous amount about my town, my city, and this country,” Lavelle says. “As a business leader, given that I had the choice, I thought it was important to offer people in my community jobs. If we don’t employ our own people, I won’t have a market to sell my shirts to.”

But even for entrepreneurs who proudly support job creation, Trump’s protectionist rhetoric does not sit well. For months, there has been talk of a proposed border adjustment tax, which the New York Times describes as the “centerpiece of the Republican tax overhaul.” The 20% tax would be levied on products imported to the United States in an effort to boost domestic manufacturing and make American products more competitive with those made overseas.

To Lavelle, who built his business entirely on his own terms, these new regulations feel a little like coercion. “Despite the fact that as an American-made business we would have a comparative advantage, I do not think the Border Adjustment Tax would benefit our economy or consumers over the long term or short term,” he says via email. “Plenty of things just cannot be made in the U.S. anymore and require an international supply chain; we cannot find some fabrics in the U.S., not because of cost but rather technical capabilities from both a machine and human capital side of the equation. We strongly support keeping every job in the United States [where] possible, but that should be a choice and not a mandated policy or punishment.”

The man.

A post shared by Buck Mason (@buckmason) on Mar 28, 2017 at 3:49pm PDT

In the weeks after the election, Erik Schnakenberg and Sasha Koehn, cofounders of menswear brand Buck Mason, spent hours discussing the future of their industry with other business owners in Los Angeles. Even though they manufacture their products in New York City’s Garment District and would not be immediately affected by Trump’s proposed border taxes, it still worries them. “It seems shortsighted to me,” Schnakenberg says. “I would much rather that the government support companies manufacturing locally with incentives, rather than punish overseas production. It means that if we ever decide that we want to scale, manufacturing in another country would not be an option for us. It would limit our options.”

Theirs is a common sentiment. American Giant’s Winthrop believes that these regulations might increase local production, but it won’t ensure that the products made here are innovative or well-made. “An inexpensive way for the federal government to maintain and increase American manufacturing is by introducing tax breaks, benefits, and incentives to companies that manufacture in the U.S.,” he says. “But the focus needs to be on fostering competitiveness.”

State Optical’s Scott Shapiro agrees. “Coercing business to manufacture in the U.S. won’t necessarily do anything to ensure that they make good products,” he says. “It won’t help make factories high-tech or ensure that we’re making well-crafted products.”

Because the Fruit of the Loom factory was closed to send jobs overseas, workers qualified for a year to 18 months of unemployment, rather than the typical six months. Many staffers who hadn’t completed high school used this time to get their GED. Most had never touched a keyboard before, but a number of them took courses in the basics of computing. Others became nurses or admissions clerks in hospitals. More than 1,000 workers took advantage of state benefits to get associate’s degrees at Campbellsville University. “If Fruit of the Loom moved back into the factory, I doubt they would be lining up for their old jobs.”

And it’s extremely unlikely the company ever would move back. In 1999, Amazon moved into the old Fruit of the Loom textile plant and turned the space into a distribution center. The retail giant has been there ever since, transforming Campbellsville from a hub of the industrial economy into a hub of the information economy. Bailey believes that manufacturing can come back to the U.S., but it must happen organically, with entrepreneurs who choose to build out new supply chains and smart new products of their own volition. This is the only way to create truly innovative businesses in the United States.

“There’s no going back,” Bailey says, sitting in his Reformation office in Los Angeles. He nods, then resumes thumbing through swatches of the most advanced sustainable fabrics on the market. Later, he’ll look over samples of material the world has never seen before: recycled fibers woven with tercel and viscose that are dramatically less polluting than most synthetics. Eventually, workers in a downtown Los Angeles factory will transform those fabrics into body-conscious mini-dresses for the trendiest twentysomethings. And maybe, someday, the Reformation business model—local, ethical, green—won’t be so exceptional in the landscape of modern American manufacturing.

San Jose, this is not.

It’s a Friday afternoon, and Andrew Hull, the founder and president of marketing consulting firm Elixiter, is still hard at work in his Bozeman, Montana, office. But soon—insanely soon—he’ll be setting up camp with a troop of local Boy Scouts. When he finally ducks out of the office at 4 p.m., he, the scouts, and four other chaperones are at a trailhead within the hour, ready to backpack three miles. Camp is set before nightfall.

“You can get anywhere in Bozeman in 15 minutes,” says Hull, whose 40-employee company’s clients include Fitbit and Aetna. “Where Elixiter is, we have access to trailheads within 15 minutes. Skiing is 25 minutes.”

Bozeman (pop. 43,405) has long been a magnet for outdoor enthusiasts; count Hull, an avid cyclist, among those ranks. But the small city has also earned another reputation as a boomtown for entrepreneurs, many in high technology. Thanks in part to its natural amenities, the presence of a university, and an embrace of the digital economy, Bozeman is turning into a startup hub in the middle of nowhere.

The place is incomprehensibly scenic, even by Montana standards, situated in a spot where four mountain ranges decide enough is enough and relax into a fertile valley. Yellowstone National Park is a 90-minute drive. A River Runs Through It was filmed on the nearby Gallatin River, so trout fishing is a given.

Like many places in the state, the local economies were driven for years by tourism and agriculture. But unlike many, this city in the southwestern corner of Montana started to diversify its economy in the 1980s when photonics companies started to build lasers, and manufacturing and outdoor-gear firms also settled in. A conservationist might bump into a think-tank economist at one of the local breweries. Montana State University (MSU) provides both thousands of jobs and an annual batch of new employees.

The real major transformation in the town’s economy began in 1997, when Greg Gianforte founded RightNow Technologies, a customer relationship management firm. Gianforte had previously started a company in New Jersey, and after selling that one to McAfee, he set his sights toward Bozeman to raise a family. “We had this idea that the internet removed geography as a constraint,” Gianforte says. “When we started, that was a theory; it wasn’t a fact.”

RightNow eventually grew to 1,100 employees, and Oracle bought it for $1.5 billion. Some 500 RightNow employees worked in Bozeman, and the Oracle acquisition seeded a new class of entrepreneurs. Gianforte founded a startup incubator and entered politics; the Republican is following an unsuccessful 2016 run for governor with a bid for the House of Representatives seat vacated by Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke. Sixteen other RightNow alumni have since started companies in Montana, many in Bozeman.

In the five years since the Oracle deal closed, this wave of founders is reshaping the state economy. According to a University of Montana survey, the state’s high-tech sector in 2016 paid 14,500 employees a median wage of around $60,000. Both are sums a single West Coast company could top, but those are significant totals in a state with barely more than 1 million people where the median household income is about $50,000.

“One problem we’ve had is that, historically, graduates from Montana colleges have been told to leave the state,” says Christina Quick Henderson, executive director of the Montana High Tech Business Alliance. “With the growth of the industry, that’s no longer true.” Among the 25 least-populated states, Montana has topped the Kauffman Foundation’s rankings of startup activity for four years running. Indeed, the 138 members of Quick Henderson’s trade organization added more than 900 jobs in 2016, and nearly 1,000 are expected to be added to payrolls in 2017.

Odds are that those employees will remain in those jobs, too. Montana employers enjoy preposterously high retention rates compared with their counterparts in larger metros. “They don’t want to leave,” says Hull. “We have a 75% lifetime retention rate. That’s pretty crazy in the tech and marketing industry.”

One reason for the high retention rates is that work-life balance, the subject of many a Silicon Valley manifesto, is manifest in Bozeman. Single-minded careerism isn’t really a thing in Bozeman—folks come to work and participate in the area’s copious outdoor activities. That notion is baked into company cultures. “When we do our team-building activities, if we can incorporate river rafting or hiking or doing something outside, that’s one of our big goals,” says Daren Nordhagen, president of Foundant Technologies.

Keeping employees in Bozeman may be easy, but finding them is a challenge. Instead of competing with other companies amid a large talent pool, Montana firms for years had to fill the pool themselves. Gianforte’s bait of choice was home-state pride. Twice a year, RightNow would send postcards to MSU computer science grads who had left the state, and the company erected billboards on highways leading to Big Sky ski resort and Yellowstone. He says 80% of his employees in Bozeman were born in Montana, and the rest were “hunting and fishing fools” who wanted the Montana lifestyle and a good wage.

Subsequent entrepreneurs have followed suit, though they aren’t having to work quite as hard as RightNow did to lure folks to Bozeman. MSU is churning out more graduates—it is now the largest college in the state—and Bozeman’s growth has made it more palatable for many incoming residents. The downtown is densifying and adding amenities. Some remain astonished that the town is now home to a wine bar.

“Most of [our employees] had already made the choice to live in Bozeman,” Nordhagen says. “There are people that move here because they want the outdoor lifestyle, or they want to get out of the big city and have a more rural area to raise their families, yet still have access to decent jobs, decent restaurants, and an airport. There are tons of people who are moving to Montana, and then figuring out the rest once they get here.”

That’s not to say workforce development isn’t a critical element of business. MSU is not MIT, and the Bozeman metro area holds 100,000 people, not 1 million. Thus, extensive employee training programs are in order. Elixiter, for its part, runs one akin to a vocational apprenticeship. All new employees undergo three months of classroom-style training—homework included—taught by fellow employees, followed by three more months of shadowing a coworker.

The pace of training fits with the overall growth model of most Bozeman companies. This is a population of founders comfortable with 20% growth and the addition of just a handful of staffers each year. (Not that there aren’t fast growers—five Bozeman firms, including Elixiter and Foundant, made the Inc. 5000 list in 2016.) One reason for this is a lack of venture capital. Aside from Next Frontier Capital, a local VC firm with a $21.5 million fund, substantial funding is virtually nonexistent in Montana. Most company founders bootstrap, so growth is curtailed by the available resources.

Entrepreneurs in town feel the fiscal reality suits the rancher-and-miner culture of the state and helps yield resilient companies. “There’s this attitude of, ‘We’re going to figure this out.’ If you grow up on a farm or ranch, if something breaks, you have to fix it. There’s nobody else to do it for you,” says Hull. “So, there’s this spirit of ingenuity, of figuring things out, and that translates well to the tech world.”

A reliance on hiring and training locals has its drawbacks. An obvious one is a lack of diversity. Hiring from the state workforce essentially means hiring white—87% of Montanans are Caucasian—and few founders are actively broadening their recruiting pipelines. Multiple executives labeled their applicants a “self-selecting” group, meaning folks turned off by the Montana lifestyle don’t bother applying. There are perks to this approach. A lifelong New Yorker would find Bozeman severely lacking in cultural amenities, while someone already living in Bozeman likely values fly fishing more than access to, say, international eateries. The latter person is more likely to fit in with these companies. It’s also more likely that person is white.

It’s not just racial diversity that’s affected. Montana lacks statewide nondiscrimination policies based on sexual orientation or gender. When Bozeman passed its own nondiscrimination policy in 2014, a major opponent was the town’s tech figurehead—Gianforte. Buzzfeed reported in 2016 that Gianforte lobbied against an LGBT nondiscrimination ordinance, and his family trust has given $1.1 million to groups that fight against reproductive rights and LGBT equality.

The lack of diversity could affect the bottom line as companies’ ambitions shift. “Some companies want to hire dozens of people a year, and that means you have to recruit people from the outside,” says Kauffman’s Motoyama. “In IT-related jobs, you may need to find people from India, people from China. You don’t find those kinds of software engineers in Montana.” The job-hoppers some Montana entrepreneurs dread often are some of the most talented employees, are diverse, and sometimes come from far-off places.

Matt Fulton would like some of those folks to find their way to Montana. During a five-year stint with Palo Alto-based Medallia, Fulton worked remotely from Bozeman for an 18-month period. After briefly returning to Palo Alto, he and wife Abby Schlatter moved back to Bozeman and started a company called commonFont in 2013. Fulton enjoys the familiar Bozeman perk: His employees love the town, and they want to stick around. But if he interviews a candidate whose primary motivation is to live in or move to Bozeman, rather than work at commonFont, he won’t extend an offer.

“That’s one of the things that I like least about Bozeman. I wish there was more moving around, more competition for top talent,” Fulton says. “Retention is high because there’s not enough choice, and not enough competition. . . . If there was more of a culture of people looking around and evaluating other opportunities, I think that would be helpful and healthy. It would help us attract and retain a higher caliber of workforce.”

If that lack of competition is simply a volume problem, then it could be solved by a continued surge in startup activity. Marty Ostermiller was RightNow’s director of finance until he left town in 2012, after the Oracle acquisition; he now works in Salt Lake City. “That’s the peril in Bozeman—your options are limited, and they were especially limited then,” he says. “But I think that’s part of why Bozeman became an entrepreneurial place. People wanted to stay there, and it wasn’t completely obvious where to work.”

Founders who have stuck around share a considerable collective accomplishment: Few Western towns as small as Bozeman provide so many middle-class jobs for locals. Professionals from Idaho or Wyoming or New Mexico often face dichotomous choices: Either flee your home state for better-paying jobs in a coastal metro, or stick around and weather the boom-bust cycles of extraction-based economies and commodity agriculture. Someone entering the Bozeman job market today won’t face such polarizing choices.

Chris Mehl is a Bozeman city commissioner and works for Headwaters Economics, which researches the economies of the rural West. His firm has documented a trend in Western urbanization that exacerbates the economic gap between small cities—think Bozeman and Bend, Oregon—and the truly rural places surrounding them. A major determinant is infrastructure. If a town has access to transportation and high-speed internet, then it is easier for new companies to locate there. Remote employees, of which there are many in Bozeman, typically command high wages and can settle in any burg with internet access. “Why rural communities aren’t demanding broadband, I don’t know,” Mehl says.

Bozeman’s growth has its downfalls. A robust startup scene, well-paid remote workers, and scenic beauty are a recipe for swelling housing costs. According to Zillow, the median list price of a house in Bozeman is north of $420,000 compared with $250,000 in Billings, the state’s largest city. But if wages and job numbers continue to flourish, it’s a problem numerous Western towns envy.

Residents of smaller Montana towns are heeding the Bozeman example. Travis Cottom convinced his Memphis-based employer to open an office in his hometown of Dillon, population 4,000. In Kalispell, advanced manufacturing and the production of grid-scale batteries are replacing jobs lost in the timber industry. San Francisco-based Social Finance has an office of developers in Helena, with plans to grow it to 100 employees.

“We had one motivation: The understanding that agriculture provides less and less job opportunity every year as technology improves,” says Tom Spika, a former farmer who started Spika Manufacturing in Lewistown. “We envisioned small companies starting up with something they can sell outside the community that would actually provide jobs you could raise a family on.”

Philadelphia-raised Gianforte stoked Bozeman’s entrepreneurial scene, but it’s the Montana locals he hired who might sustain it. “It was a founding principle of Elixiter to create high-paying jobs in Montana,” Hull says. In doing so, Hull and his fellow founders won’t just boost Bozeman’s economic profile, they’ll also serve as role models for struggling communities around the West.

In the United Arab Emirates, where the population more than tripled between 2000 and 2015, groundwater could run out in less than 15 years. Desalination plants, which strip salt from seawater, might be the solution in the future, but today they’re both expensive and energy-intensive. One Abu Dhabi company hopes to bring the country water from another source: melting icebergs.

“An iceberg can hold 20 billion gallons of water, which is enough for a million people’s drinking water for five years,” Abdulla Alshehi, founder of National Advisor Bureau Limited, the Masdar-based company pursuing a plan to haul icebergs to the Middle East from Antarctica, tells Fast Company. (Because icebergs are made from snow, they contain freshwater and not saltwater.) “So it’s a huge quantity we’re talking about. Unfortunately, due to what’s happening from global warming, many icebergs are disintegrating in Antarctica. Once they disintegrate, they float in the ocean and they melt, wasting billions of gallons of the water resources of the Earth.”

Within months, a Delaware-sized chunk of ice may split from an ice shelf in Antarctica, where a crack has grown to 110 miles long. Though that particular chunk of ice is already floating in the water and won’t cause sea level rise, it holds back land-based glaciers that will push sea levels higher when they melt. The idea of using icebergs as a water source–equal parts visionary and crazy–isn’t new, but the push is more urgent now because of climate change. Alshehi sees the project as a way to mitigate sea level rise while making use of the purest water in the world. He suggests–perhaps equally fantastically–that the melting iceberg could also help offset the briny water that desalination plants dump along the coast, and that the presence of the iceberg could help cool the area.

Alshehi is not the first to consider hauling icebergs to places that need drinking water. As early as the mid-1800s, small icebergs were towed from Antarctica to Chile for use in breweries, and another entrepreneur suggested towing icebergs to India. By the mid-1900s, oceanographer John Isaacs proposed iceberg towing as a less energy-intensive alternative to desalination. In the 1970s, researchers from the RAND Corporation analyzed how it could work, envisioning a train of icebergs wrapped in plastic to keep them from melting (they also proposed using a floating nuclear power station to feed power to propellers on each iceberg). In 1977, a Saudi Arabian prince funded an international conference to explore the idea. More recently, French engineer Georges Mougin revived the idea–but trials that were supposed to begin in 2012 or 2013 have yet to occur.

To date, no one has succeeded. But towing does happen regularly on a smaller scale. When 100,000-ton icebergs drift toward offshore oil platforms in Canada, the industry tows them away. “If you ask someone from C-Core, they’ll tell you that they’re iceberg cowboys,” says Aleksey Marchenko, a professor in ice mechanics at the University Center in Svalbard, an Arctic university, referring to a Candian research and development company that moves icebergs both for the fossil fuel industry and for companies like Iceberg Vodka.

Those icebergs are towed using a combination of nets, synthetic line, and steel wire connected to ships. “I’m not sure this same technology could be applied to larger icebergs,” Marchenko says. It’s not clear what size iceberg Alshehi plans to transport, but Marchenko says that “There’s no sense in towing a small iceberg for freshwater.” The oil and gas industry also only tows icebergs relatively short distances.

One challenge is determining the best route to take. Currents and wind can change direction, making it difficult to move an unwieldy and massive chunk of ice.

If a ship guides an iceberg relatively quickly–half a meter per second–it would take a month to cover 1,000 kilometers (currents and storms could slow it down). The trip from Antartica to the coast of Fujairah, over 10,000 kilometers, could take a year or more. Along the way, the iceberg risks melting or breaking, while the ships that tow it operate at huge expense.

Alshehi is still in the process of finding investors for the trip, which he hopes to begin in 2018. If the project moves forward, the company would choose an iceberg using satellite images, wrap it in insulating material to lessen melting, and tie it up and connect it with ships and barges. Once the iceberg is 25 kilometers offshore of the UAE, the company plans to crush the ice, fill up floating tankers, and bring it to land.

Though the process hasn’t happened before, Alshehi is optimistic. “We will be the first, inshallah,” he says.

As Amanda and Chance Richie were getting ready to spend a seven-figure sum on a flailing but historic fast-food chain based in Flint, Michigan, news reports around the world were highlighting the horrifying spectacle of an entire U.S. city’s water supply poisoned by both lead and government mismanagement. The couple thought they knew what they were getting into, but after they closed on Halo Burger in January 2016, they quickly realized that reading about Flint’s water disaster couldn’t begin to prepare them for the reality of a community in crisis.

Listening in as kitchen workers talked about their sick children and struggles to deal with a lack of usable water, the Richies started to get a sense of the challenge ahead of them. “It’s not that we weren’t aware of what was happening, but it’s different when you become part of a community that’s in so much trouble,” says Amanda, 41, as she and her husband sit in a booth one morning at Halo’s flagship location in downtown Flint. “This was scary. We realized we had taken on a responsibility that was more than serving hamburgers.”

This is tricky territory for any business to navigate: how to be a good corporate citizen without coming off as self-serving or exploitative. But given the severity of Flint’s situation and the extent to which it touched everyone in the community, finding that balance was going to be even more difficult. The Richies wanted to help because it was the right thing to do. But they also knew they’d need to do it in an effective and authentic way, or else it could seriously damage their new business. As Amanda puts it, “The water crisis was either going to be an opportunity or the death of the Halo Burger brand.”

Halo Burger is almost as old as fast food itself. Launched in Flint in 1923—just two years after White Castle, America’s first hamburger chain—the restaurant was originally called Kewpee Hotel Hamburgs. By World War II, there were more than 400 Kewpees across the Midwest, but the business slowly unraveled after its founder died in 1945. William V. Thomas, a counter clerk-turned-franchisee, took over the original Flint location in 1942, and by the 1960s he was the last Kewpee operator paying the franchise fees. Thomas and his son, Terry, renamed the business Halo Burger in 1967, expanding to a peak of 13 locations around Flint by the 1990s. Despite the name change, the Thomases kept the Kewpee Burger on the menu, tweaking it to “QP” to avoid trademark conflicts. “We just said that was for ‘quarter pounder,'” chuckles Terry Thomas, now 76 and living part-time in Cocoa Beach, Florida (William died in 1973). Halo still boasts other Kewpee originals, including a hamburger smothered in olives and a vanilla ice cream float made with classic Detroit ginger ale Vernors.

Terry sold Halo, then down to nine locations, in 2010 to Dortch Enterprises, “and I regretted it ever since,” he says. Dortch, which owns dozens of Subways shops in Michigan, hoped to turn Halo into a national brand that would compete with growing fast-casual burger chains such as Five Guys and Smashburger. The company added six locations in the Detroit suburbs and in Lansing, Michigan, but ultimately that ambitious vision didn’t pan out, and in the spring of 2015, Dortch put Halo on the market.

Around the same time, Chance Richie—a self-made multimillionaire who founded and then sold a business that developed an environmentally conscious process for recycling fracking wastewater—was looking for a new challenge. At first, he and his wife (who also runs a Michigan-based specialty chemical company she inherited from her father) contacted Sonic about opening franchises in southeast Michigan. Sonic executives suggested they buy the Halo restaurants and convert them into Sonics, but the Richies had a better idea. They and their five children already liked Halo’s food, having stopped in many times on the way to their vacation home in northern Michigan, and they became enamored of the possibility of reviving such a historic local brand.

In October 2015, they began to negotiate with Dortch. The water crisis was just starting to break. Weeks earlier, a local pediatrician and a scientist at Virginia Tech had proven that Flint’s water supply was tainted by toxic, illegally high levels of lead—something locals had been insisting for months, despite efforts by the city and state government to dismiss their concerns. Thousands of residents of this poor, mostly black city of 100,000 faced the prospect that their children’s physical and mental health had been seriously harmed.

Many entrepreneurs would have run away from a community confronted with a crippling long-term health crisis, but the Richies instead accelerated the purchase. Though they won’t reveal what they paid, they say they didn’t ask for a price reduction. In January 2016, they closed the deal on Halo’s 15 outlets. They were now the proud new owners of a distressed brand in a traumatized city.

The Richies quickly started to implement their turnaround plan, which involved improving ingredient quality, lowering prices, and raising pay for employees. They closed five underperforming restaurants and plowed $2.5 million into store renovations, upgraded computer systems, and compensation. The couple also started supporting the local community by tapping in-state vendors for their beef, buns, pickles, cookies, and packaging. “We’re going to simplify operations to lower our food costs, reduce waste, and improve food quality and speed of service,” says Chance, a muscular 45-year-old who favors tight-fitted T-shirts and skinny jeans.

But given the water disaster, which by that point was a big national story, the Richies knew those steps weren’t enough. They soon convinced Coca-Cola—which supplies soda to the chain—to offer free cases of bottled water for the public to take home at all of Halo’s Flint locations. They collected $48,000 through counter jars and store fundraisers for food trucks that delivered fresh produce to low-income areas, an effort to improve nutrition in ways known to help avoid or alleviate lead absorption in the blood. And they began to offer health insurance to employees working at least 20 hours a week because improved access to medical care seemed necessary to cope with the problems caused by lead exposure. “We firmly believed that Flint was very resilient,” says Chance. “If you put something into [the community], you’re going to get it back in return. Does the RoI work out? By dollars and cents, no. But from a brand-perception [perspective] and what we want to do with the overall company, it absolutely makes sense.”

Flint seems to have responded to their efforts. Revenue rose 14% in 2016 and is up more than 10% year-over-year so far in 2017, the owners say. That suggests a significant uptick in customer traffic, especially considering that they closed one-third of the locations, increased starting pay from $7.90 to $9 an hour, put 37 of about 250 employees on a health plan, and saw a 4.4% drop in the average check. “Did we see people be really positive towards us because we invested right away? Yeah, absolutely,” Amanda says. “We got a ton of great press, we got a ton of customers coming in thanking us for being part of the community. We had people reach out to Chance and me. But that’s not why we did it.” University of Michigan business professor Rajeev Batra describes this kind of approach to community outreach as “enlightened opportunism. It can be cynical if it’s inauthentic, or it can be sincere,” he says. “People can tell the difference.”

It's a beautiful day to eat Halo Burger☀️

A post shared by Halo Burger (@halo_burger) on Aug 23, 2016 at 8:43am PDT

Today, the Flint crisis has quieted down somewhat as the city, using tens of millions of dollars from the state and federal government, is replacing lead pipes, and water-treatment changes have improved its quality. That has allowed the Richies to focus more on expanding Halo Burger. They plan to open five new sites by next year, with a goal of hitting 60 across the state by 2022. They’ve also revved up a new marketing campaign centered on Detroit Pistons star Andre Drummond, and they are currently negotiating to lease space at the new Little Caesars Arena in downtown Detroit when the Pistons move there this fall.

But no matter how big Halo might grow, the Richies intend to keep the business’s home community at the center of its identity. “We plan to be clear to everyone that this started in Flint, that this is a Flint business,” Chance says. “It’s something we’re proud of and the people of Flint are proud of. We can represent something good coming out of a place where people only hear the bad. We rode out the storm together.”

Over the last couple of years, General Electric has been making a lot of noise in branded content, particularly with its podcasts, produced under the umbrella of GE Theater. Stories like The Message and LifeAfter were narrative fiction aimed at getting audiences excited about innovation and technology in general. But the brand’s latest content project, “In the Wild,” is a nine-part web series set in the real world, a closer look at exactly what the company does, what it produces, and where we all interact with its innovations.

Hosted by Alie Ward and Adam Savage, the “wild” in the series name refers to the labs, the testing facilities, the airports, and ship ports where the company’s work sees action. It’s an evolution of the brand’s Instagram feed, and other content around its industrial innovation like last year’s “Unimpossible Missions,” and the old GE Adventure blog. Nerdery at its finest.

GE’s chief creative officer Andy Goldberg says one of the goals was to entertain and excite, while giving us all a more well-rounded view of what exactly they mean when they talk about innovation. “We wanted to put out a series that educates audiences on what GE actually does, and wow people with our technology ‘out in the real world,’ not just one or two industries, but in the eight-plus industries where we are constantly innovating,” says Goldberg.

If you’re reading this article, you probably already know that email messes with our productivity and focus. How many times have you been deep into a project only to be distracted by a barrage of messages that flooding your inbox? Before you know it, you’re spending the rest of your day in reactive mode dealing with everyone else’s requests.

Many of us are, in fact, addicted to email. As Fast Company previously reported, checking email can release the pleasure hormone dopamine, the same hormone that gets discharged during sex, gambling, and drug consumption. There is also the FOMO factor: The off chance that there’s something important there.  And let’s not forget just checking email to procrastinate.

Related:How The Most Productive CEOs Keep Emails In Check 

But what if you scrapped the idea of getting your email addiction under control, and instead focused your energy on replicating that addiction when you’re doing truly important tasks.

Why We’re Addicted To Email

Jocelyn K. Glei, author of Unsubscribe–How To Kill Email Anxiety, Avoid Distractions,  And Get Real Work Done, wrote in her book that it’s our addiction with progress that powers our addiction to email. We see the number of our email notifications going down, and we feel like we’re accomplishing something.

Glei says it’s part of the brain’s “completion bias,” in which we get a shot of pleasurable dopamine as soon as we complete a task like answering an email, making us feel compelled to keep doing it.

The problem is that answering our emails is almost never the best use of our time. According to Glei, answering emails “can lead us to become addicted to busywork at the expense of carving out time to do our best work.” In most instances, you’re responding to other people’s agendas, at the expense of your own.

Step 1: Change The Way You Think About Email

Step one of transferring your email addiction to real, meaningful work addiction is to stop letting your inbox dictate what you should focus on each day.

Email should be something that helps our work, rather than a tool that controls us, says Glei. This a view that PubMatic CEO Rajeev Goel shares. He previously told Fast Company that we should think about email as “facilitating work” rather than being our work. This shift allows us to put it in lower priority and will make us less likely to click on every email that comes our way right away.

Related:Why You Should Hire The Person Who’s Slow To Reply To Your Emails 

Step 2: Make Your Progress Visible

Glei came to the realization that one of the most powerful ways to shift her perspective is to create metrics so you can see yourself making headway. In her book, she suggests you “post a calendar by your desk to track your daily creative output, such as the number of words you wrote, bugs you fixed, or sales call you made…or print out your drafts, sketches, and prototypes as they accrue and keep them in an ever-growing stack on your desk as a testament to your progress.”

Glei tracks her progress by writing down how many words she’s written every single day, as well as tasks she’s completed on the calendar behind her desk. “That way, I can see my progress, and my momentum in a very granular way, for my most important work. The key is to make progress visible for the projects you’re deeply invested in. So you’re not only seeing progress when you whittle down your unread message count or sift through your Slack notifications.

Progress is one of our most powerful motivators at work, so you have to find ways to “see” it in the projects that matter most.”

Glei admits that she’s not always immune from the pull of inbox zero. But whenever she finds herself in that situation, she puts her urge in perspective. She asks herself “Do I want to let other people’s emails dictate my mood, my focus, and my to-do list? Or do I want to remain in control of what I accomplish with my day?”

“I don’t want my tombstone to say: “Here lies Jocelyn K. Glei, she checked all her emails.” It sounds a bit underwhelming doesn’t it?”

From an early age, Credit Karma founder and CEO Kenneth Lin understood the value of money. He immigrated to the U.S. from China at age 4, landing in Las Vegas with his parents at a time when the booming desert town was defined by the rough glitz of craps tables and shrimp cocktails. His dad worked late hours, six days a week; his mom held multiple jobs and cooked for local bakeries.

“They were always starting something,” says Lin, 41. “I saw that growing up and I think in many ways it really influenced me.”

Lin took a steady job after graduating from Boston University—the first one in his family to complete college—but kept experimenting with business ideas on the side. First, in the early days of the World Wide Web, he bought computer parts at wholesale prices and built a website to sell them online. Later, he opened an internet cafe in Harvard Square.

“I like doing my own thing,” he says. “I like the challenge of thinking it through.”

But not until Credit Karma did he decide to tackle a challenge with a sense of mission rooted in his own childhood. Lin founded the company in 2007, with the goal of creating a customer-friendly alternative to trickster credit score services. He has since raised $386 million, vaulting Credit Karma into the ranks of Silicon Valley’s startup unicorns, and figured out how to turn a profit while helping nearly 70 million Americans discover financial services products that meet their needs. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the company has become his most successful venture, by far.

“There are a lot of families struggling to make ends meet,” he says. “To the extent that we can help save $50 or $100—a month, a week, a year—that’s valuable. And we can make a business out of it, which is great. It’s hard to do both.”

For users, the product is simple: Create a Credit Karma account, and you can monitor your credit score for free. Based on your credit history, the company then generates targeted offers for financial services including credit cards, student loans, and auto loans. If you opt in to one of those offers, Credit Karma gets paid by a referral fee by the bank or lender—a new credit card customer, for example, could be worth as much as $700. In 2015, the company made around $350 million.

Now Lin is embarking on mortgage refinancing recommendations, Credit Karma’s second major launch in less than six months (a free tax service launched in January, in time for April 15 filing).

“We want to help consumers surface when they should refinance and have certainty around the money they are going to save,” he says. “Our goal is to make a refinance as simple as possible.”

The company is operating the service in 26 states, with plans to expand nationwide in the coming months. By Lin’s reckoning, 20% of U.S. mortgage debt is represented on the Credit Karma platform, and roughly one-third of homeowners would benefit from refinancing—a major opportunity. Down the road, Credit Karma plans to explore recommendations for related products, like home equity loans.

“The secret sauce of Credit Karma is relevance,” he says. “What we found is that the more specific you could get, the more apt people were to listen to your advice.” Mortgages will embody that precisely honed approach to targeting: “You’re not going to receive an email just because you have a mortgage. You’re going to receive an email if we have a high degree of confidence that you’ll benefit from refinancing.”

Layering in tax return data for users who file via Credit Karma will make the company’s degree of confidence in its mortgage suggestions even more robust.

Privacy, Trust, And Data

Credit Karma and other companies that rely on targeted advertising have their detractors—namely, privacy advocates. The company offers a classic internet-era bargain: trading personal data for a better deal or experience. A Credit Karma skeptic sounded the alarm on Reddit: “If you aren’t paying for a service, you are the product.” Online tax preparation service providers like Credit Karma are “thirsty for data,” the Wall Street Journalwarned last month.

For Lin, this perception is a source of frustration. “People think we’re sellers of data. That’s wrong,” he told attendees at a conference in late March. “We protect the rights and privacy of our base.” The credit card industry as a whole still relies on direct mail campaigns that leverage data purchased from Credit Karma competitors. But on Credit Karma’s own site, banks and lenders doesn’t know that you’ve seen an offer for their product unless you decide to click through.

Long-term, Lin believes that Credit Karma’s success is tied to its ability to present itself as a trusted, independent advisor. “The consumer comes first,” he says. “I think that’s part of the discipline of doing this for 10 years. I don’t have to say, ‘we don’t do predatory loan products’ if the consumer is the thing that we orient ourselves around. At a lot of points of time we could have sold out or compromised the user base, but we didn’t do that. And it’s turned out to be a great investment, in addition to being just the right thing to do.”

Still, it’s a tricky balance; Credit Karma has no official definition of “predatory.” The company sometimes recommends LendUp, for example, a company that provides small-scale, short-term loans with APRs that can start as high as 400% (unlike a traditional payday lender, LendUp offers better rates over a time to borrowers who pay on time and in full).

“There’s a lot of dimensions,” Lin says. “We talk about this sometimes—what about payday lending, what about some of these other lending instruments where the typical consumer would say, well that’s bad. But what if you have really poor credit? You quickly realize, there is a group of people that are served by this.” He compares the socioeconomic norms of San Francisco, where Credit Karma is based, with the realities of his Vegas upbringing and the realities that many of his users face (based on Google search data, the company is most popular in Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, and West Virginia). “It’s sort of Ivory Tower if you’re saying, ‘Don’t do this.'”

In that way and others, Credit Karma has evolved to reflect Lin’s values and perspective. He is frugal, for one. Back in 2012, before the company had raised its game-changing $30 million Series B, the team looked into running a TV ad spot as a way to attract users. When an ad agency estimated the total cost of creative, production, media buy, and analytics at around $500,000—roughly the same amount the company had left in the bank—Lin decided to take a more homespun approach. The company spent around $25 on props, recruited employees to be hand actors, and rented a budget recording studio to tape the voiceover. In the spot, a hand writes on a calendar, while a voice asks: “Did you forget to cancel your free credit score?” When it aired, registrations came pouring in. “We spent peanuts to acquire those users,” Lin says.

From Lean Times To IPO Rumors

He also embodies the work ethic he learned from his parents. As Credit Karma navigated the 2008 financial crisis, just a year after launching, Lin spent his days creating pivot tables to manage the company’s recommendations and his evenings emailing personal finance bloggers by the dozen. Three times, as the recession dragged on, Credit Karma nearly ran out of money, but on each occasion Lin was able to scramble and pull together a check or two (once from his own savings). He hired slowly, preferring to wear many hats rather than cycle through a startup boom and bust. Even today, chief revenue officer and founding team member Nichole Mustard says she has seen him pause and break down boxes at the office, to keep things tidy. “It’s still the right thing to do,” she says.

In a company’s early days, that form of leading by example can make the difference between success and failure. Now Credit Karma is at a different inflection point: It needs to find strong mid-level leaders and publish org charts and processes. Like many serial entrepreneurs, Lin does not take as naturally to this later, adolescent stage. “I think it some point I don’t love the full operations,” he says. “I like the thought component of [building a business]—I don’t like the bureaucracy.”

Given Credit Karma’s scale and profitability (it has been in the black for the last two years), IPO rumors have started to percolate. “It’s something we evaluate all the time,” Lin says. “It’s great to see Snap and everyone go out and have a great experience, because it creates optionality. But it’s never really been our end game.” His reservations center around “the ability to maintain the mission” and the ability to think long-term. “If we were a public company I don’t know if we would have been able to do tax. There would have been so much pressure to growth the business from a top-line perspective.”

Instead, for the time being, Lin is focused on his users—who skew young and will soon start growing into more and more financial products. Credit cards and lending products predominate now, but one day it might be brokerage accounts and life insurance offerings. “You’re going to see it go through the whole life cycle of everything financial services-related. We want to have a platform that’s smart, that helps you make the right life decisions around your finances.”

Down the road he envisions deeper integrations with bank partners, with the goal of making the platform’s “smartness” work better for users. It will be a lengthy process: “We have to understand how every bank and every product makes that decision; they have to share that with us. Then we have to know what the user preferences are. Then ideally there’s an integration where you don’t even have to apply,” he says. “Ideally that bank will say, great, approved. Here is a token that you can directly link into your Apple Pay wallet, you can start using [the funds] right now.”

Incumbents’ potential willingness to cooperate in such a scenario says a lot about the market opportunity that Credit Karma has been able to exploit. Faith in banks and other financial institutions remains low, even post-crisis. But within the Credit Karma brand halo, with its quirky voice and user-aligned business model, a specific bank product may look more compelling. 

“We think finance shouldn’t be as serious,” Lin says. “But there’s a balance: You can’t be too irreverent or flip, because it’s people’s money.” At the end of the day, “We’re here to give people the tools to make the right decisions.”