It’s sweltering out there in the middle of the summer. It’s hard enough finding workwear that doesn’t leave you drenched during your commute to the office, but finding shoes that don’t make your feet sweat and blister can be a huge challenge. Many women would love to wear their Birkenstocks every single day, but unfortunately, they aren’t appropriate in most offices. So, we’ve done some legwork to find and test work-appropriate sandals that are polished but also very comfortable to walk in.

Work to Weekend: Sperry Dawn Echo

The Sperry Dawn Echo ($89.95) features a 3.5 inch cork wedge. The heel lends the shoe a slightly more formal look than your flip flops, but they are incredibly comfortable to walk in. I spent an entire day in them running errands and my feet didn’t feel any worse for the wear. They pair perfectly with sun dresses and cropped pants, but they work well with shorts too, if you decide to wear them for the weekend. All in all a good investment if you’re looking for one sandal to get you through the summer.

If You Need To Be Formal: Cole Haan Grace Grand

If you’re in the opposite camp and need to wear formal workwear to the office, Cole Haan’s Grace Grand Sandal ($270) is engineered to get you through the day without your feet feeling a pinch. I use the word “engineer” literally here, because these shoes were developed by scientists in Cole Haan’s innovation lab to take the pressure out of the heel and ensure that the toe box is not pinched. Even though these shoes feature a 3.5 inch heel, they also include a layer of energy foam and padding under the achilles tendon, distributing weight across the foot. I wore these shoes for an event where I was forced to stand for most of the evening and they lived up to their promise of comfort.

Elegant But Walkable: M.Gemi Spirale

If you’re looking for a simple, elegant pair of leather shoes, M.Gemi has several that fit the bill. The brand makes all of its shoes in Italian workshops, so the brand tends to have a European flair. I tried the Spirale ($248), which is one of M.Gemi’s most popular shoes this summer, with a strap that seems to wrap around your leg, creating a lengthening effect. It also features a 3.5 inch heel. The shoe is made entirely of vachetta leather. I will note that it took me about two days to break into these shoes, since the leather is quite hard, but then the leather seemed to mold to my foot. These shoes look very sophisticated and work well with formal work outfits. They are also great for summer parties.

In Case You Need A Closed-Toe Shoe: Margaux Espadrille

Some workplaces simply don’t allow open toed shoes in the summer. In this case, your best bet is to go with an espadrille that is made from breathable cotton and linen, to give your feet plenty of space to breathe. New York based startup Margaux creates an elegant espadrille ($225) that is comfortable and work appropriate. The brand created these shoes in collaboration with Mark D. Sikes, a designer known for striped shirts. The stripes on these shoes, which appear either on the laces or the base, give them a chic look. I wore them with cropped pants and also with a sun dress. The innersole comes embedded with a thin layer of padding and the sole is made of rubber. This is a perfect alternative to flats–and your feet will be far less sweaty.

Best in Class: Dansko Dawson

The most comfortable shoes I tried, by far, were those created by Dansko. The brand started as a comfort footwear company known for its clogs, so walkability and orthopedic health are very important to the shoe designers. But in recent years, the brand has been working to incorporate its technology into a wider range of shoe designs that include shoes that can be worn to work. My pick would be the Dawson Vintage Pull Up ($150), which comes in a 3.25 inch block heel. I wore them with a pantsuit to an interview one day and with a maxi dress the next, and the shoes managed to make both outfits look more put together.

Every part of the sandal is designed for comfort. The leather is incredibly soft, requiring no break-in time. The outsole contains shock-absorbing material and the footbed has cushioning that provides plenty of arch support. All of this is optimized to make them incredibly easy to walk in.

This week, we learned how to become likable in mere minutes, which “work uniforms” make mornings easier, and why certain LinkedIn messages earn higher responses than others.

These are the stories you loved in Leadership for the week of July 14:

1. Do These 5 Emotionally Intelligent Things Within 5 Minutes Of Meeting Someone

When it comes to making a good first impression, it may be more important to appear likable than smart. After all, nobody’s likely to remember you positively if they didn’t find you pleasant to be around. From finding common talking points to reiterating your new acquaintance’s name, these are a few emotionally intelligent things to do in the first moments after meeting someone new.

2. These Six Women’s “Work Uniforms” Will Make Your Mornings Easier

In an ideal world, nobody would be judged by their appearance. But the truth is that in the workplace, how we present ourselves still unfairly carries over to how competent we appear to others–especially for women. Figuring out how to dress each morning can be a waste of mental energy, though, which is why having a “work uniform” to default to can be very helpful. Fast Company‘s Liz Segran spent some time testing different options to suit every industry. Here’s what she found.

3. These Are The LinkedIn InMails That Get The Highest Response Rates

Writing an effective LinkedIn InMail message isn’t that different from writing a good email: Make your message too broad, and the recipient might ignore you, but sound too pushy and it’ll result in the same thing. This week a product marketing manager at LinkedIn dug into the numbers to find out which types of messages earn the highest responses. The one difference with email? It really doesn’t matter when you send it.

4. We Need A Massive Remote-Worker Hiring Spree In The American Heartland

Stephane Kasriel, CEO of the freelancing platform Upwork, says one possible solution to the divisions in American society has to do with hiring. The same way companies set diversity targets, he argues in an OpEd this week, they should also set geographically based hiring goals. This would help bring jobs to qualified workers outside of urban business centers on the coasts. But it would only work on one condition: “Just don’t ask them to move.”

5. These Are The Job Skills Of The Future That Robots Can’t Master

For all the talk of a skills gap in STEM fields, research shows that things like communication and problem-solving are still hard to come by–particularly for companies looking to fill executive positions. So when you’re thinking about what training might benefit you, it might be better to focus on those “soft skills” rather than software. As technology executive Paul Roehrig puts it, “It sounds counterintuitive, but to beat the bot, you need to be more human.”

With trials already underway in Kenya, Finland, and Oakland, and several others planned elsewhere, basic income is starting to get a thorough testing. The idea of direct cash transfers to meet basic human needs has been getting a lot of attention in the media, from Silicon Valley leaders, and among academics and think tanks. It can’t be long before a city or state in the United States experiments with basic income for itself (Oakland’s pilot is run by Y Combinator, a startup incubator).

Several are apparently discussing the possibility behind closed doors, but Hawaii has come the closest. In May, its legislature passed continuing resolution HCR 89, setting up a commission to study the concept. It has a remit to examine how automation, and innovation in general, will affect Hawaii’s future job market and to analyze how other states and cities around the world are facing up to the challenge of delivering economic security. “For the first time, a state has declared that everyone deserves basic financial security,” says Chris Lee, the state representative (a Democrat) who sponsored the measure. “In the wealthiest nation on the planet, we have the resources to ensure that no-one gets left behind.”

A lot of people might question that last statement. But as he looks at Hawaii’s economic future, Lee is greatly concerned. Several of the state’s manufacturing industries, including pineapples and sugar, are in trouble, he says. Many residents are reliant on service jobs (like tourism) that often don’t pay well and lack security. Automation–like computerized cashier desks–is taking retail jobs. The state has a high homeless rate, and a very high cost of living (utility bills are 35% higher in Honolulu than in Austin, Texas, for example). And welfare, traditionally a safety net, looks less and less able to take up the slack. Hawaii’s welfare benefits (TANF) are now effectively below 1996 levels, according to the Center for Budget And Policy Priorities.

Moreover, says Lee, Hawaii is more isolated than other states. Sitting in the Pacific, it’s less able to feed off its neighbors, taking in new industries or benefiting from economic spillover effects. It lacks big anchor industries like tech or gambling. “We definitely feel more exposed and a greater sense of urgency to look at new ideas,” he tells Fast Company. (Alaska, another non-contiguous state, has had a sort of basic income since the early-1980s, paying out as much as $2,000 annually to residents from its oil revenues.)

Lee wants Hawaii to consider paying a basic income guarantee because he believes work is no longer able to provide for everyone and because there may be ways to improve the potency and efficiency of today’s public assistance budget. He’s not sure how Hawaii might pay for a basic income–which perhaps is the most important question of all. But he says it could mean everything from expanding the state’s recently passed Earned Income Tax Credit to a regular monthly payment, perhaps amounting to $1,500.

Paying out a basic income to cover people’s needs, including food, housing, and childcare, may be less costly than traditional benefits, he argues. “We know it’s going to be significantly more expensive to taxpayers and businesses if we do nothing if wages have stagnated and unemployment increases, than to create a basic income mechanism. It’s not only a new safety net, but it could also encourage entrepreneurship and give people the capacity to start new businesses and make investments in themselves that they wouldn’t ordinarily do,” he says. Lee says he would consider cutting existing assistance programs to pay for a basic income in Hawaii.

Lee wants to learn from basic income trials elsewhere, so Hawaii doesn’t need to embark on its own significant experiment. But he admits the lessons from, say, the Kenyan trial–involving dozens of poor villages in rural areas–may not be too instructive for a U.S. context. Several trials in Canada and the U.S. in the 60s and 70s, and more recent ones in the developing world, however, have served to knock back one myth about basic income, he believes. Cash transfers don’t stop people from working. Most people keep showing up for jobs.

Since HCR 89 passed, Lee has heard from interested legislators in California, Minnesota, Japan, Taiwan, Switzerland, and elsewhere, showing how interest in basic income is growing in many places. Hawaii’s resolution was supported by both unions and the Chamber of Commerce in the state, demonstrating how basic income can break down some normal ideological boundaries. Lee hopes Republicans–who number only five representatives in Hawaii out of 51 members–will support the idea in time.

“I expect it to be a topic of discussion on both sides of the aisle [as we head into the next election in 2020],” he says. “After the housing bubble, the recession, and the 2016 election, we cannot ignore a mechanism that ensures opportunity for all in the face of a dying American Dream.”

As Game Of Thrones returned last Sunday, fans thrilled at the sight of Khaleesi finally claiming a castle in Westeros; they repulsed at the sight of Ed Sheeran inexplicably hanging out with Arya Stark; and they boggled in amazement at the makeover that Euron Greyjoy received as he sailed into King’s Landing to seek the hand of Cersei Lannister.

The woman who makes the decisions on how to outfit the heroes, rogues, villains and undead monsters of Game Of Thrones is Michele Clapton, who’s worked on each of the show’s seven seasons and who’s also one on of Fast Company‘s Most Creative People. After the premiere on Sunday, Clapton found a few minutes away from the set to answer five questions about the creative process of working on the show and Euron’s Yeezy-like new look.

Michele Clapton: It’s relatively easy, as the costumes are related to each character’s journey. So they’re a reaction to their situation, state of mind, or direction–whatever really is happening to them, or whatever they are trying to make happen.

Fast Company: There’s been a lot of talk online this week about Euron Greyjoy’s look in King’s Landing, where he’s got kind of a John Varvatos rock star thing going on. How do you make those kinds of decisions?

Michele Clapton: I actually didn’t know the reaction until I got this question. I hadn’t looked online! But I get an idea, I talk with the actor and the writers, and it develops from there. People will make what they will of it, but we wanted swagger. I loved the slashed star shapes that we made. It’s supposed to represent the type of guy that obviously has issues. The slashes, although seemingly mindless, are repetitive and exacting. He is also everything that Jaime Lannister isn’t. It’s a mind game–he’s like this to get under Jamie’s skin… I think it works.

Fast Company: Are you empowered to make more creative decisions from time to time because the show has had such a distinct aesthetic for so long?

Michele Clapton: Maybe. I have always tried to be bold, but I also make the costumes relate to the character and their storyline and direction. Sometimes it takes a while for people to see where we are going. It takes time for a character to reach the look that fans crave. Dany in her house colors, for example–it’s a journey.

Michele Goldberg: It’s hard to think of an instance because the costumes are developed and discussed long before they make it to the set, but there are one or two that get through. I hated the Sand Snakes nipples on their armor. I really thought that we had eliminated the problem, but when lit they really showed. I was mortified.

Fast Company: Are there characters who are more fun to design for?

Michele Goldberg: Ah! Too hard to say. I love Cersei. She wears her heart on her sleeve. But really, all the characters are interesting to design for. They are so well written, we identify with them or recognize them. I just try to design costumes that help tell their story. That’s my job.

WHAT: The trailer for Netflix’s upcoming film, Bright, which puts fantasy world elements in a modern L.A. cop movie.

WHO: Director David Ayer and stars Will Smith and Joel Edgerton.

WHY WE CARE: Netflix has been putting out original movies for years now, but the company’s investment in major filmmaking is only starting to take hold. The last couple months have seen high-profile fare like War Machine, starring Brad Pitt, and Okja, a factory farming morality tale disguised as an adventure movie directed by Snowpiercer‘s Bong Joon Ho. The Irishman, Martin Scorsese’s return to the gangster milieu, is currently filming–with De Niro, Pacino, and Joe Pesci as leads–and will be on the streaming service next year, something that may have once been seen as unthinkable. Among these top-tier projects, though, is Bright, the high-budget fantasy cop movie Netflix won a fierce bidding war. Although we got a glimpse of the Will Smith vehicle during the Super Bowl, the first full trailer officially dropped today and offers a better idea of what those other studios were fighting to acquire.

Bright finds Will Smith back in quippy Bad Boys/Men In Black mode, though humbled a bit by his comparatively advanced age. He plays an L.A. cop who is partnered with an orc played by a completely unrecognizable Joel Edgerton. The plot concerns the appearance of a magic wand that may have devastating consequences for this weird world if it falls into the wrong hands. Most interestingly, though, the trailer reveals that all the fantasy elements in the film exist to turn it into a racial allegory. Hammering that point home, Edgerton’s orc is referred to as a “diversity hire,” while Will Smith jokes before attacking a tiny Tinker Bell-like creature, “Fairy lives don’t matter today.” While it’s kind of tough to buy into the idea that Fantasy Earth also had the Black Lives Matter movement, rendering this reference a wink to the audience, all in all, it’s interesting that a film about mythical creature cops would have more on its mind.

Bright is out on Netflix December 22.

You’re ready to make a career move–maybe you’re looking for a new job, launching a side business, or eyeing a promotion. In all of these instances, boosting your personal brand can help you achieve your goal.

That’s because a strong personal brand is a carefully designed message that’s compelling and attracts the right people. It helps you stand out for who you are and what you do best.

You’re probably nodding along, because you already know all of this. You don’t need to be convinced how valuable personal branding is: What’s holding you back is the time commitment.

Related:Six Hidden Risks To Personal Branding 

That’s why you have a LinkedIn Profile, even though you haven’t updated it since you set it up. After all, who can devote hours each week on top of working or job searching? Well, believe it or not, 30 minutes is all you need to take your efforts to the next level. Here’s how to spend them:

Minutes 1-10: Evaluate What Makes You Stand Out

The first thing you want to do is perform a self-assessment. This step is often overlooked, but it’ll be super helpful as you find your voice in a sea of professionals with similar experience.

This evaluation helps you have a clear vision of your USP, or “unique selling proposition,” which is just a fancy term for the value you offer to your target audience.

Here are some questions to get you started:

• What are you passionate about? You want to think about what excites you, and what things you truly enjoy doing.
• What are your core beliefs? This is important because it’s like a mission statement. It’ll help you relay your personal approach to getting things done.
• What are your top four strengths? This will help you share what you do better than anyone else, to set you apart from the competition.
• Are you a good leader or a good doer–or both? This is good to know because it’s a way to identify and highlight the kind of roles that complement your strengths.
• What do others say about you? Ask around! You may have strengths you’re unaware of, or talents you need to put more emphasis on so people know they exist.

To be clear, I don’t expect you to answer these questions with witty tag lines. This exercise is to help you target your branding efforts. So, answer the question(s) that inspire you by jotting down notes, and honestly writing what comes to mind.

Minutes 10-20: Compare That To What You Already Have

Now that you’ve done some reflection on what you want to say, it’s time to see how it stacks up against what’s already out there.

If someone were to read your LinkedIn profile, tweets, or personal website, would they see messaging that points them toward the answers you came up with?

You might be thinking: Wait, I only have 10 minutes, that’s not enough time to read my whole website or review my LinkedIn line by line. But here’s the thing: People who click into one of your social profiles or visit your website are probably going to spend a fraction of that time looking at it.

Related:This Is What Recruiters Look For On Your LinkedIn Profile 

So you want to look for things that shout what you do. On LinkedIn, that means moving beyond filling out the basics and adding links to media, writing posts, and getting endorsements for skills. On your website, that might mean building a portfolio. On Twitter, it’s about not just following influencers, but composing tweets, too.

This step is about comparing what you want to highlight to what you have and asking yourself: What’s missing? What can I add?

Minutes 20-30: Create A Schedule

Truth talk: Personal branding isn’t a “set it and forget it” kind of thing. Once you’ve figured out what you want your message to be and how you can share it more effectively, you’re going to need to start posting–consistently.

A helpful way to be consistent is to set a schedule that you can use as a guide. It shouldn’t feel like a chore, but if you’re anything like me, if you don’t schedule it, it could get back-burnered. All I ask is that you give it 10 minutes a day!

Here’s an example of a schedule you can start with:

• Monday: Make (or update) a list of people you’d like to engage with more (a former manager) or simply connect with (an industry influencer).
• Tuesday: Reach out to someone from that list. If it’s someone you’re reconnecting with, try one of these ideas. If it’s a stranger, you can test out this Twitter trick, or, if you’re brave, just send a cold LinkedIn invite using these templates.
• Wednesday: Spend time looking for industry-related articles in publications popular in your field and share one. Or, alternatively, comment on someone else’s post (or at a minimum, share it).
• Thursday: Make (or update) your list of improvements you’d like to make to your online presence. Break it down into baby steps. For example, you wouldn’t write, “Build personal site.” You’d write, “Look into site designers” and “write copy for personal site bio.”
• Friday: Spend today looking at yesterday’s list and knocking just one thing off.

Of course, you can tailor your plan to whatever works best for you. Honestly, if you just do the five things above even once a month, you’ll see traction. Regardless of the schedule you choose, feel free to switch it up, and see what gets the best response. You won’t see results overnight, but, that’s okay.

My final piece of advice is to avoid being misled by the term “personal branding.” What I mean is: The most successful brands aren’t just about you. Take the time to know your target audience, and listening to what’s on their minds as well. Genuinely connect and build relationships! As best-selling author Dale Carnegie said, “To be interesting, be interested.”

This article originally appeared on The Daily Muse and is reprinted with permission. 

More From The Muse:

• 4 Personal Branding Strategies You Can Steal From Big, Successful Companies 
• I’m An Introvert Who Hated Working On My Personal Brand–Until I Did it My Way 
• 4 Personal Branding Lies You Should Stop Telling Yourself (For Your Reputation’s Sake) 

Nineteen million Americans are interested in buying life insurance, but have gotten stuck somewhere in the process. Clunky forms, fine-print PDFs, inconvenient medical exams, seemingly high costs—the list of headaches is long and frustrating. Perhaps as a result, the individual life insurance market has been roughly flat in the U.S. for over a decade, with total premiums landing around $120 billion each year, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence. Since the 1980s, sales of individual life insurance policies have plunged over 40%.

A batch of young companies wants to take a bite out of that market, and potentially grow it. With backing from some of the insurance giants, they are reinventing life insurance in the same way that robo-advisors have reinvented wealth management, by replacing human agents with an online experience. And as millennials start families, they see an opportunity to capture a new generation of consumers and form lucrative, lifelong financial relationships.

Most of these new players are focused on term life insurance, which is cheaper (and simpler) than whole life insurance, doesn’t accumulate cash value, and lasts for a fixed term (10, 20, or 30 years, for example). Term life typically requires an in-person medical exam, conducted by a third-party partner—but even that piece of the application process is starting to move online. Here are four of the startups taking the lead.

Ladder

For Ladder cofounder and CEO Jamie Hale, the need for life insurance hits close to home. “My dad died when I was 11,” says Hale, who spent over a decade working as an investor in San Francisco. “He got a simple life plan, and out of that act of love he helped take care of my mom, keep us in our home, and get us through college.”

Hale launched Ladder in California this past January, offering term life policies of up to 30 years that pay out between $100,000 and $8 million. Ladder is able to generate quotes for different terms within seconds, and approve some customers in less than six minutes. The company is also encouraging customers to reduce their coverage over time, as children grow older and mortgages are paid down. “It can save consumers literally thousands of dollars over the lifetime of owning a policy,” Hale says of the adjustment options built into the product. “It’s your choice as the consumer.”

Fabric

Brooklyn-based Fabric, cofounded by former Simple chief operating officer Adam Erlebacher, launched in March with two product tiers. Fabric Instant, which costs as little as $6, is an attempt to resurrect a little-known product called accidental death insurance. Fabric Premium, the “upgrade” option, is a more standard 20-year term life offering.

“The really amazing thing about [accidental death insurance] is that you don’t need a health exam, you don’t need to do very much underwriting at all for it,” Erlebacher says. “If you connect to the right external data sources that are now available, you can verify someone’s identity and mitigate fraud, and get someone insured in two minutes.” (There are downsides, however: Proving a death was “accidental” is more complicated than it may at first seem.)

Over time, Erlebacher hopes to see customers migrate via smartphone to Fabric Premium, which has been designed with first-time parents in mind. Indeed, young parents are the company’s primary target, with blog posts like “The Guide To Budgeting For Baby.”

Tomorrow

For Tomorrow, which launched this week, life insurance is just one piece of a larger story. Cofounder and CEO Dave Hanley wants to help Americans set up wills and trusts, for free, and then recommend term life insurance policies that fit their needs. Offerings from nine different carriers are available within the Tomorrow app. “We see them as things that were always meant to be together,” Hanley says of the decision to combine insurance with end-of-life legal products.

Within Tomorrow’s app, it takes just minutes to identify key assets and photograph personal valuables. Family members or friends named as guardians are invited to agree to the role via Tomorrow-generated text or email. When the process is complete, Tomorrow generates a will that can be exported, signed, and notarized.

Haven Life

Haven Life is the outlier in this realm. The company is a startup division within MassMutual, wholly owned by the incumbent insurer (MassMutual is also an investor in PolicyGenius, a website that provides insurance quotes). “I think the relationship is one of our key strategic advantages,” says Haven founder and CEO Yaron Ben-Zvi. He argues that Haven has more freedom to experiment with its application and underwriting processes because it works so closely with its corporate parent. “In this world, if I’m going to change a question in an application, that changes my underwriting process, which changes changes the risk profile and profitability of the product that I just sold. All of those things have to work in concert.”

Haven, like Ladder and SoFi, offers instant-approval term life insurance for qualified applicants. Instead of reviewing a blood test and in-person evaluation, the company can search prescription databases and driving records, among other data sources, to evaluate health. Even with that innovation in efficiency, the product is not an easy pitch.

“Life insurance is the double whammy of difficult topics in your life,” Ben-Zvi says. “Financials are hard to talk about, mortality is hard to talk about. We put both of those things together.”

Pretty much nobody sets out to be an entrepreneur because they’re excited about becoming someone else’s manager. Usually, you start your own company because you’re passionate about an idea you have–and maybe also partly because you’re tired of having a boss yourself.

But as my company grew, I soon found myself the head of a company with dozens of people reporting to me. And eventually I realized that some of the habits I’d adopted for managing other people in the early days had just stopped working. Once I’d kicked them, though, things started running a lot more smoothly. These are three that I’m really glad I gave up.

Habit # 1. Being The Textbook Leader I Thought I Should Be

Some leaders think they need to distance themselves from their teams in order to qualify as leaders. And the logic behind that notion isn’t totally ridiculous–the idea that good leaders should be unbiased in every aspect of their decision-making.

I used to take that road myself, but I realized I was coming off to some as unapproachable or intense. Whatever impartiality I might’ve gained by keeping folks at arm’s length I was paying for in other ways. Not only did this kind of attitude just not feel like me, it wasn’t working. I was caught between being the leader someone told me to be and the human being I really am. I was fighting with myself, and it showed.

Related:How Leaders Can Balance Logic And Emotions To Make Better Decisions 

So I shifted gears. I started sharing ideas and expressing my passions more openly. It felt more natural, and it showed in my attitude. I saw immediate effects. Ideas started flowing more freely when I was open about my enthusiasm–which, after all, is why I got into the startup game in the first place.

Habit #2: Comparing My Success To Other People’s

There are some crazy smart, hardworking people out there in the world. Their success takes many forms. In my first few years as CEO, whenever I compared myself with someone around my own age who’d made it big, thoughts like, “I’m a year older than them, what am I doing wrong?” would run through my head. As if that wasn’t bad enough, I communicated these anxieties to my team.

That, unsurprisingly, wasn’t the best leadership habit. It strained some relationships and demotivated others. I started out as a scrappy teenager flipping phones in New Delhi, but I had somehow lost sight of the fact that we don’t all start out at the same point in life–or wind up in the same places, either.

After all, success is the culmination of progress, and what constitutes progress for one person depends on their life experiences and priorities. It follows that the same is true of “success,” a word whose definition is intensely personal. So while it’s important to draw inspiration and learn from others’ wins, I’ve since learned not to let it distract me. And my team is grateful I’ve stopped playing the comparison game, and holding them accountable to my own misplaced ideas about success.

Habit #3: Asking “110%” Of People

We’ve all had a boss who’s barked miniature pep talks like, “I want 110% from everyone!” Such a simple statement, right? But after trying similar tactics unsuccessfully, I realized my team probably hears them this way: “I want everyone to spend lots of time away from friends and family, abandon your hobbies, deprive yourself of sleep, and get some results! Pronto!”

Related:Three Counterproductive Myths About Corporate Culture 

When you put it like that, that’s not a fair ask–in fact, it can create some serious issues in a growing company’s work culture. I’ve since learned that asking 110% of people all the time, even metaphorically, is just plain nuts. Yes, there are crunch times in any startup, but people need work-life balance as well. In the long haul, it’s more productive. After all, just telling everybody to put in effort doesn’t tell them why they should–it doesn’t deliver much in the way of actual motivation. Once I’d put myself in my employees’ shoes, I realized I was doing it all wrong.

It was up to me to answer that “why” question, I realized, and then take the steps to make sure my company still offered good work-life balance for my team. In fact, I learned that if I could do that well, then I wouldn’t have to demand 110%–because when the need arises, people would be wiling to give their all–without being asked to.

Ajay Yadav is the founder and CEO of Roomi.

There’s new evidence that a Trump presidency may present a serious threat to future philanthropic funding: A recent survey by Schwab Charitable, the country’s 4th largest nonprofit behind Fidelity, United Way and Feeding America (according the research by the Chronicle of Philanthropy) reports 45% of its current donors and financial advisors are likely to reduce their annual giving if Trump’s proposed tax reforms—which reduce charitable deductions on taxable income–take effect in 2018. In total, as many as 60% of Schwab’s givers would either decrease donations or aren’t sure how they’d proceed.

The hit to charities could be enormous: Schwab Charitable is a public charity that manages Donor Advised Funds, a philanthropic vehicle that lest people get to tax benefits of giving to charity and then decide where to give their money after the fact. The money going in may not go back out within the same year, but it eventually does: In fiscal year 2017, for instance, Schwab’s contributors distributed $1.57 billion to over 65,000 charities through hundreds of thousands of grants.

That’s a 34% increase from the previous year, in part because the strong economy and continually rising stock market have driven an uptick in people contributing to DAFs. In addition to cash contributions, public stock, private company shares, IPO profits, and gains from real estate, private equity and hedge fund holdings can all be liquidated and added without taking a capital gain hit.

At the end of June, Schwab reported that it has $11 billion in DAF assets under management. Since its formation in 1999, the group’s account holders have distributed a total of $8 billion in grants to approximately 113,000 charities. By avoiding capital gains taxes on non-cash assets, the Schwab estimates donors are able to ultimately invest around 20% more than if they’d converted those original stakes to cash, paid taxes, and contributed to a charity directly. Last year, such contributions accounted for about two-thirds what Schwab received from investors.

As Fast Company has reported, the proposed Trump changes may shortchange giving because, like it or not, people—especially those with high net worth—generally use charitable contributions as a way to reduce how they’re taxed on their take-home pay. Trump’s plan combines tax brackets (form seven to just three) in a way that lowers the deduction rate for this kind of practice (instead of taking, say, $400 off your taxable income for every $1,000 given, you’ll likely get $330).

Lowering deductions might not make a huge difference to folks giving annual contributions of a few hundred bucks to some cause they care about, but it could substantially impact those who provide the bulk of the nonprofit sector’s funding: high net worth givers, who often make donations in numbers with a lot more zeros to offset what they owe the government, a practice increasingly done through DAFs.

“Changes to the charitable deduction [standards] would have the greatest impact on giving,” says Kim Laughton, the president of Schwab Charitable in an email, who notes that, according to the group’s recent survey there’s obvious interest in preserving the current tax plan.

Other groups, like Philanthropy Roundtable and Alliance for Charitable Reform, have been meeting with top Republican congressional leaders about the idea of creating a universal charitable deduction for givers who don’t itemize their tax returns, which might encourage more giving from everyday folks to offset losses at the top levels.

For DAF users, the idea of investing in a charitable fund but waiting to distribute might be a hedge against another emerging behavior: Since the election, many donors are acting increasingly partisan, supporting causes that are politically in line with how they voted. Holding money in a longer term philanthropic plan might allow for more reasoned or even more strategic investment than just giving in response to politics, so long as the money still moves back to nonprofits in a timely manner.

But nonprofits without proper funding obviously can’t do their jobs effectively. The irony is that these groups generally work on a shoestring, so funding gaps might cost their employees jobs, leaving fewer people to do more urgent work.

Like a hall-of-fame athlete hanging up his jersey, Sean Spicer–the Michael Jordan of scream-lying–has just resigned as White House Press Secretary. No more will Americans be assured (lately off-camera) that the president’s incendiary garbled tweets “speak for themselves.” Do you know who hasn’t retired, though? Melissa McCarthy.

Lorne Michaels, who is almost definitely reading this: please get her on the phone right now.

In a world gone utterly mad, there is only one rational thing to do at this moment: convene an emergency episode of Saturday Night Live and bring back Melissa McCarthy’s Spicey this very weekend. Everyone is enjoying a necessary break from Alec Baldwin’s Trump, and Anthony Atamanuik is killing it on The President Show, but no political impression is currently as in-demand as that aggressive, podium-riding rascal. Yes, the show is bringing Weekend Update to prime time next month, but that will be too late. Who knows if Earth will even exist in a month? This has to happen now.

So much has gone down since the SNL season finale aired a thousand years ago on May 20, there’s plenty of material to build an episode around. For instance, I would watch an entire 90 minutes just on the time when devout catholic Sean Spicer was not allowed to meet the pope–but Trump’s golf-caddy-turned-social-media-guy Dan Scavino was, only for a source from the White House to later drily quip about Spicer, “Wow. That’s all he wanted.” There’s also the time CNN brought in a sketch artist to draw Spicer, when media outlets were still settling into the new normal of not being allowed to film a briefing. Let’s face it; the possibilities are endless. Can SNL even afford not to explore them?

Sure, the show is coming off of its highest-rated season ever, riding a surge in public appetite for political satire, but things did not exactly end in a great place. SNL closed out its run this year certain that Trump was all but defeated—with much of the cast dressed as various members of the administration, crooning “Hallelujah.” Coming off the tumultuous week following Comey’s firing, things must have seemed optimistic. That instinct has since proven premature, however. The number of scandal cycles Trump has done a clumsy Electric Slide through in the interim is easily double-digits. If SNL wants to get a finger back on the pulse, it needs to start now, and it needs to start with Spicey.

More importantly, though: we need Spicey. To reiterate the point above, this summer has been a Dante’s Inferno of living nightmares—a crazy-making parody of Veep-meets-1984, but real. We’ve all been through a lot these past couple months. That kid from Room now looks like Merle Haggard. Just keeping up with the news yesterday about Trump’s legal team shakeups and attempts to discredit a special prosecutor felt like walking into a cockpit, midair, and finding no pilot. We could all use a break—preferably in the form of a surprise SNL with Melissa McCarthy resuming the sketch role of a lifetime one last time.

Do the right thing, SNL. The giant ball of wadded-up gum is in your court.

It’s always hard to find the right thing to say when someone shares frightening health news. The announcement of Senator John McCain’s brain cancer diagnosis this week showed that even the world’s greatest speakers and thinkers can get it wrong.

I’m sure that Barack Obama meant nothing but the best when he tweeted:

John McCain is an American hero & one of the bravest fighters I’ve ever known. Cancer doesn’t know what it’s up against. Give it hell, John.

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) July 20, 2017

Obama wasn’t alone: Joe Biden wrote, “You will win this fight, John,” while Hillary Clinton wrote, “John McCain is as tough as they come.”

But positioning cancer as a battle to be won, rather than as an illness, sets up a logical implication that those who die didn’t try hard enough–and that’s a real disservice to people who lose their lives to this terrible disease.

It also has real political implications. Democrats expressing their support for McCain in this way demonstrated implicit support for right-wing narratives of “personal responsibility” that are driving the GOP’s efforts to take health care away from millions of Americans.

Before summer’s out, we’ll repeal/replace Obamacare w/ system based on personal responsibility, free-market competition & state-based reform pic.twitter.com/JzCyxX9kJb

— Mike Pence (@mike_pence) June 24, 2017

For me, as for so many other Americans, this rhetoric cuts deep.

My father died of lung cancer three years ago, at the age of 69. He was unlucky enough to develop the disease, despite being a lifelong nonsmoker. Dad’s physical and moral strength isn’t even debatable–but his lung cancer, like McCain’s brain tumor, had a poor prognosis from the time of diagnosis. Like many cancer patients, my dad was eager to explore options for his treatment. He endured chemo for many months. He participated as a subject in drug trials that may have helped to extend his life. He worked for a medical school, which meant that he had good health insurance and exceptional access to innovative and talented practitioners.

But recovering from his cancer was, sadly, never an option, no matter how many times people said to him: You can beat this! It’s a statement that is meant to sound encouraging, but is really a way for the speaker to distance themselves from the patient. “You can beat this,” means, “This is a problem that you can take care of yourself.” In other words, defeating your cancer is your personal responsibility.

Paul Ryan spearheaded the concept of personal responsibility in the context of health care in 2009, when he wrote in his Patient’s Choice Act that a “large percentage of heart disease, stroke, and type 2 diabetes, as well as many cancers, could be prevented if Americans would stop smoking, start eating better, and start exercising.” Health policy should be built, he argued then (and now) to reward people who look after their health—to disincentivize illness, as if people are eager to pursue bad health.

Politicians like Mike Pence celebrate a future in which “personal responsibility” drives access to health care for all Americans. While working hard to save money for America’s richest white men, Trumpcare overlooks all of the factors beyond “personal responsibility” that lead to ill health—systemic inequality, poverty, and perhaps most of all, just terrible bad luck. John McCain’s age alone made him four times as likely to develop cancer than men who are 20 years younger than he is. Would his age be regarded as irresponsible?

If Democrats believe that people should have equal access to health care regardless of extenuating circumstances, they must stop talking about cancer in a way that yokes survival to strength and virtue, and death to weakness or moral failing. Under the current health care system, people who are wealthy are likely to have better treatment outcomes because they can pay for better treatment. We would never tell someone who was recently diagnosed with a terminal illness, “I know you can beat this, because you’re really rich!” though it’s more accurate than telling them they’ll defeat a disease by being tough.

So, what should you say when someone is diagnosed with cancer? Tell them that you’re sorry. Tell them that you love them. Tell them that you’ll drive them to their appointments, help them fundraise for their treatment, or help look after their children or pets. Tell them that you’ll keep fighting tooth and nail to make our elected representatives preserve Americans’ health insurance.

But don’t speak to them as if you’re on their side in a wrestling match with the Grim Reaper. That’s plain sick.

Jean Hannah Edelstein is a freelance journalist who lives in Brooklyn and is writing a book about cancer and genetics.

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

When earthquakes strike, or thousands of refugees mass at the border, some countries take unexpected events in their stride, while others fall to pieces. Disasters reveal underlying resiliency: the patchwork of government, business, and civil systems that either hang together in a crisis, or cause people to flail about ineffectually.

Professional services firm KPMG’s 2017 Change Readiness Index measures this resiliency using a mix of primary interviews and a lot of secondary data, and it contains good news for the U.S.–a seeming rarity in national rankings. Despite our current political turmoil and social problems, the U.S. has jumped from 20th place in the ranking in 2015 (the last time it was conducted) to 12th place now. In the eyes of KPMG’s number-crunchers at least, we’re better placed these days to ride out catastrophes, compared to the rest of the world.

The ranking covers enterprise, government and “people & civil society” bringing together data across 170 indicators for 136 countries. That includes things like infrastructure, rule of law, and a country’s ability to deliver “inclusive growth” (that is, wealth without inequality). The U.S. scores best for enterprise resiliency (ninth place) and less well for government resiliency (23rd place). On the latter, we’re marked down for irresponsible public budgeting and forecasting, says Tim Stiles, one of the authors of the report.

The Index–a “fact-based report card on national resiliency and readiness”–scores Switzerland, Sweden, United Arab Emirates, Singapore and Denmark in the top five places. “What’s interesting about the top-five is that they’re generally smaller countries with smaller populations. And it’s not necessary to be a resource-rich country to do well,” Stiles says in an interview.

Stiles says the index was first conceived following the 2010 Haiti earthquake, which showed how the unprepared the country was to deal with the aftermath of the disaster. The aim is to highlight weaknesses in national resiliency and opportunities where governments and the international development community can intervene.

Stiles compares the experience of Haiti in 2010 with Chile, which experienced an 8.8-magnitude earthquake soon after. More than 90% of Chile’s population lost power and thousands of homes were destroyed by a tsunami. But, within three months, the country’s stock market and consumer confidence was back to pre-disaster levels, and economic growth seemed unaffected, he says. Haiti, by contrast, had a loss of more than 5% of GDP in 2010. “Haiti struggled to rebound from the earthquake, hampered by weak government structures, poorly coordinated humanitarian response and loss of key personnel,” he says. Haiti now stands at 123rd in the index, compared to Chile’s 24th place ranking.

Though the top performers are all rich countries, several lower and middle-income nations punch above their weight. Rwanda, officially a “low income” country, is in 46th place ahead of high-income economies like Greece (54th) and plenty of upper middle- and lower-middle-income countries, including Turkey and Mexico.

Rwanda’s score is mostly explained by its government resiliency pillar, where its 21st among the 136 nations surveyed. “Rwanda’s progress is impressive in light of the Rwandan Civil War and genocide in the 1990s, and has been aided by political stability and the pace of economic development in recent decades,” the report says. In 2015, it was only in 69th place but is now praised for its security, fiscal and budgeting, regulation, and enterprise sustainability. Natural disasters have a disproportionate effect on the world’s poorest, mostly because poorer people are more likely to work in weather-affected industries (like agriculture) and to live in vulnerable housing. The World Bank says 26 million people fall into poverty as a result of earthquakes, floods and other extreme events every year, and that the economic cost rises to at least $500 billion.

You packed your favorite journal and a couple of pens. You planned some time on the beach, or left an afternoon empty to find a table at an outdoor cafe where you can grab an ice-cold drink and just think. This vacation, you’ve told yourself, you’re finally going to be able to take a break and get some clarity.

But clarity about what, exactly?

It’s true that vacationing can hold some unexpected career benefits, in addition to letting you recharge your batteries and do some self-reflection about your working life, your personal life, and your overall goals. But musing on these big-ticket themes isn’t something many of us have a lot of practice doing. When you finally get a chance to do it, you might find your thoughts a little unfocused. That’s fine—mind-wandering is sort of the point here. But in case you need a little more structure, these are four questions to let your mind wander over.

Related:This Is How Emotionally Intelligent People Vacation

1. Stresses And Worries Aside, Am I Happy At Work?

One question worth asking is whether you’re happy with your job on a day-to-day or week-by-week basis. You may find some workdays pretty stressful, and that’s normal, but do you generally find your job fulfilling to do?

Vacation is a great time to really step back and consider that, because it’s one of those rare occasions when you can step back to monitor your own reaction to being away from work. A change of pace is always nice, but at the end of your vacation, are you excited to get back to the projects you’ve been working on? If you totally dread the end of vacation, it might be time to start looking for something else.

When you’re away from the office, you can also think about which aspects of your job are most rewarding. By identifying the tasks that excite you, you can lay the groundwork to pursue opportunities that let you do them more often.

Related:This Card Game Can Help Make Your Work More Meaningful

2. Where Am I Headed?

One of the most aggravating questions hiring managers like to ask on job interviews is, “Where do you see yourself in five years?” Lots of people find that hard to answer, in part because a lot of the time they don’t honestly know.

That’s understandable. It can also be difficult to do long-range planning when you’re buried in the daily grind, when your goals are changing, when your industry is evolving at a breakneck pace, or all of the above. Taking some time off lets you think about whether your career is headed in a direction you’re generally happy with. To get a handle on a big-ticket question like this, try to think specifically about the skills you feel you still need to acquire to succeed.

In other words, you may not be able to see the future, but you can still think like a futurist when it comes to your own career planning. Are there people who might be good mentors (including of the unofficial kind) to help you fill in those skill gaps? Maybe it’s time for some more education. Going back to school for another degree may be daunting, but you can always start by taking a couple of professional development courses. Or maybe you just need to do a little more networking to brush up on the latest goings-on in your field.

Many companies have some form of educational benefits that lots of employees don’t know much about, let alone actually use. Maybe this vacation is the time to figure out which opportunities you can ask your HR team about once you’re back in the office. In fact, even companies that don’t offer a standing set of training resources may be willing to cover some of the cost of professional development you pursue on your own.

This is one of those items that way too few employees actually negotiate for, beyond compensation. Use a few spare hours this vacation to come up with some training options you’d like your company to help you go after.

3. Who Don’t I Know?

You have more colleagues than just the ones who work for the same company as you. There’s a whole community out there of professionals who do much the same kind of work, but most of us don’t spend enough time getting to know them. After all, networking is a tedious chore and often completely fruitless.

And sure, sometimes that’s true. But there are a few things you can do to expand your connections in ways that don’t feel like networking. One of them is pretty old-school: Join a professional society. They’re often a great source for the latest developments in your field, sparing you the need to scroll LinkedIn for industry news. And they often have local meetings where you can meet people dealing with the same issues you are, rather than blindly scouring a random mixer for them.

There are also “networking” opportunities that might be lurking in your average workday—chances to connect with valuable people you haven’t had a chance (or a non-awkward pretext) for to strike up a conversation with yet.

You’re on vacation, though, so all this will have to wait, right? Technically, yes. But one of the reasons so many people procrastinate on (or just downright avoid) networking is because they haven’t given much thought to who’s missing from their contact lists, let alone what the best strategy might be for filling those gaps. Your vacation is a great chance to consider that. Based on where you are in your career and where you’d like to be before long (see above), think about the ideal connections you’ll need to make. Here’s a handy guide for figuring out who’s most important to you at the moment and where can you find them.

4. What’s Missing?

Work is great, but there’s more to life than the things you do to make your company money. In high school and college, you might’ve spent a lot more time doing things you were passionate about—or things that helped you discover what you’re passionate about. After hitting the workforce, most of us start to shed extracurriculars. If you look back, you may see a graveyard of discarded instruments, sports, clubs, and volunteer work stretching out in your wake.

It’s great to draw a sense of purpose and fulfillment from your full-time job, but those outside activities can also be powerful sources of energy. What’s more, they can be the steam valves that give you much-needed emotional release when the pressure at work builds up. Vacation is a good time to re-engage with old hobbies and pursuits you’ve left behind. Pull that old French horn out of the closet. Brush off your tennis racquet. Find a local dog shelter that needs another pair of hands. (Puppies are always a great cure for whatever ails you.)

Don’t feel guilty about carving out a little more time away from your work to pick up these side gigs and activities. Not only will they give you a chance to develop your other interests, they’ll also give you people to hang out with who aren’t all focused on the same set of work issues that you are.

And hey, you never know; over winter vacation about 16 years ago, I started taking saxophone lessons. Not only has it been great fun, I’m now in a band!

San Diego Comic-Con is in full effect now, which means that the release of trailers, teasers, promos, and activations for your favorite vaguely superheroic/science-fiction/fantastical movies and TV shows has gone from “faucet” to “firehose.” Trying to keep up with all of them is a challenge, so rather than click link after link seeking every extended 19-second clip of footage, we’ve compiled the releases of every new series or movie here for your convenience. We’re still anticipating some heavy-hitters–perhaps Avengers: Infinity War, Justice League, Aquaman, or Marvel’s Punisher–and there’ve been surprises both in what’s been released (Stargate?) and what didn’t make an appearance (Deadpool 2, any new X-Men footage). But scroll on down to see what’s come out so far.

WHAT: The first teaser for the Superman prequel Krypton

WHO: Man of Steel screenwriter David Goyer developed the series for SyFy.

WHY WE CARE: The most interesting parts of Man of Steel were definitely Russell Crowe’s adventures in the doomed planet of Krypton before he launched his lil’ baby in a rocket to Earth, where he’d grow up to learn from foster dad Kevin Costner that saving people is bad, yet somehow decide to become Superman anyway. Getting a chance to revisit that without any of the Superman baggage sounds like a win-win to us.

WHAT: The new trailer for Marvel’s Inhumans

WHO: Game of Thrones villain Iwan Rheon is the most recognizable face as the similarly sociopathic Maximus, brother of Inhuman king Black Bolt, on the ABC series.

WHY WE CARE: Marvel’s TV push is out of control right now–between Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Iron Fist, Luke Cage, and the forthcoming Defenders, Runaways, New Warriors, and Punisher (and honestly, we probably missed one or two), it’s possible to basically make all of your TV-viewing set in the same connected universe. And that doesn’t even count Legion, Gifted, or the other non-Marvel Studios productions hitting airwaves! But how many of those co-star a giant teleporting dog? Point: Inhumans.

WHAT: A teaser image for DC Comics’ Doomsday Clock

WHO: Writer Geoff Johns and artist Gary Frank bring the title to life.

WHY WE CARE: DC made clear during its Rebirth event that it would be utilizing Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen characters, which it owns the legal (if not exactly the moral) rights to. The genre-defining ’80s series asked the question “Who Watches The Watchmen,” and now we have an answer: It’s the Justice League! That’s not exactly in the spirit of Moore and Gibbons’ work, but we’ll be damned if we’re not intrigued nonetheless.

What is a Jaeger? It's you, times a thousand. Now accepting pilot applications at https://t.co/wmtSHdTiHq. #PacificRimUprisingpic.twitter.com/NUaOoRQf8t

— Pacific Rim (@PacificRim) July 20, 2017

WHAT: An ARG-style recruitment ad for Pacific Rim: Uprising

WHO: John Boyega stars in the 60-second spot.

WHY WE CARE: The fact that there’s a sequel to the middling box office film Pacific Rim at all is rather unlikely, and a testament to the fact that enthusiasm can sometimes result in a limited fanbase getting what they want. And Boyega, coming in fresh off of Star Wars, probably helps a bit. Pacific Rim is a blast, though, and the unexpected chance to revisit that universe is one we will seize with both hands.

WHAT: The full trailer for Netflix’s Bright

WHO: Will Smith and Joel Edgerton star in David Ayer’s $100 million real world-meets-fantasy epic Bright, written by Max Landis.

WHY WE CARE: There’s maybe a 10% chance this thing is good. It’s clearly a heavy-handed racial allegory (in the first clip of the trailer, Smith tells a bunch of gang members–helpfully identified by him as such–that “fairy lives don’t matter” before he smooshes a pixie with a broom) about the challenges of interacting amidst racial differences. To put it mildly, Max Landis is one of the last people who should be penning racial allegories. Also, every movie he’s written since 2012’s Chronicle has lost money and been critically panned, so there’s probably a reason why Bright is on Netflix instead of in theaters. Nonetheless, it’s a fascinating premise–fantasy creatures in contemporary Los Angeles!–and Will Smith is still extremely likable, so maybe this somehow works out?

WHAT: The first teaser for Stargate: Origins

WHO: The series will premiere on the streaming service Stargate Command.

WHY WE CARE: Well, to put it bluntly, we don’t. Stargate is a niche thing with a really passionate fanbase that loves it so much that they’ve literally launched its own streaming channel, complete with a major flagship production, just for those fans. That might be the future of properties like Stargate–it’s just shy of Kickstarter, with investors banking on the idea that there are enough Stargate fanatics out there who will pay for an all-Stargate, all-the-time service with original content that they can make it work. If so, that’ll be good news for fans of any canceled niche property, and that’s why we’re keeping an eye on this one.

WHAT: The new teaser for Netflix’s Defenders

WHO: Stan Lee narrates this look at the Marvel series that pairs Luke Cage, Daredevil, Jessica Jones, and Iron Fist.

WHY WE CARE: Stan Lee is 94-years-old, and hearing him talk about heroism is still thrilling. Combine that with a glimpse at Defenders‘ last lead character–surprise, it’s The Punisher–and there’s a lot to like here.

WHAT: The Westworld activation at SDCC

WHO: New York agency Campfire created the experience for HBO.

WHY WE CARE: Westworld was divisive, but a series built around the idea of entering an immersive, first-person world deserves a big-deal SDCC activation, and it sounds like they delivered. The experience is built around actors playing the sort of characters a person would likely find in Westworld, and the props and costumes they offered to visitors was an ARG-style chance to enter Westworld itself, rather than a chance to get a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the show. That’s the sort of creativity we’d like to see at more of these kind of activations, even if there are few properties that lend themselves to it as fully as Westworld does.

In general, it’s smart to say what you mean. In the workplace, people tend to use overwrought business jargon to compensate for not knowing their stuff. But there’s a less-apparent risk to doing just the reverse. If you sound like a walking Instagram comment, you might start to alienate yourself in your own office and lose your coworkers’ trust—even if they use those same kinds of words expressions when they’re texting their roommates.

Some terms and phrases are best left to casual exchanges with friends and family. Here are a few you probably shouldn’t let creep into your office vocabulary.

1. “No Problem”

I know—what could possibly be wrong with this one? It’s so innocuous, right? You’re asked to photocopy a document or put together a meeting agenda. Easy enough. “No problem,” you reply.

The expression comes up in all kinds of business environments, and the tone is often chipper and upbeat, so you don’t give a second thought to using it periodically. Few people who hear “no problem” take it literally, but at a level just beneath consciousness awareness, it telegraphs an underhanded resentment. The speaker implies the possibility that somebody has created an issue that they’re willing to let slide.

It’s not the (nearly absurd) risk of a literal misinterpretation that you should guard against, though. It’s the likelihood that you’ll default to “no problem” when presented with tasks you consider menial—giving directions, taking minutes, photocopying, wrapping a package, or stepping out of someone’s way in an elevator—and unconsciously show your annoyance with them (including nonverbally).

Related: Four Words And Phrases To Avoid When You’re Trying To Sound Confident

Chances are you won’t say “no problem” when your supervisor asks you to prepare an important report or assigns you some other significant task. When a work duty carries more weight, you’re more likely to ask smart questions about what it’ll take to do it right, convey your enthusiasm, and declare that you’re up to the task. But shouldn’t you try to be seen as the person who approaches all your work  that way? Scrap “no problem”—it isn’t helping you show your best side. (And after all, it’s a double negative.)

2. “Whatever”

Like “no problem,” this word usually has a flippant tone to it, but that’s not the main downside to using it. “Whatever” is often used to dismiss another person’s idea. If I say, “Sure, whatever!” after somebody has offered a suggestion, I might think I’m just saying I don’t mind one way or the other—kind of like, “doesn’t matter to me, go for it!” But it won’t always come across that supportively.

Instead, it might signal that I disagree but will go along with it anyway—maybe because I don’t have the power or the initiative to convince my colleagues otherwise, or maybe just because I’ve got a martyr complex. “Whatever” denotes resentful resignation, even if it doesn’t sound that way to your own ears. Much the same is true of other tepid notes of assent, like “yeah,” “yup,” “sure,” and “fine.” Use these words with your friends, but not in professional settings where the stakes are fundamentally different.

3. “It Is What It Is”

Clichés like this make you sound like a lazy thinker. We default unthinkingly to empty expressions when we’re trying to give the impression we have something to say but really don’t, and also when we want to sound as though we’re comfortable with something but might not be. “Business is business,” “it is what it is,” and phrases like them aren’t just meaningless and repetitious—they sound like you don’t really care or that your brain just isn’t in gear. Good luck getting promoted that way.

4. “Pissed Off”

This expression is heard around the office more commonly than you might think, and even when the speaker is referring to how somebody else is feeling, it still reflects badly on them. Saying “I’m pissed off that I didn’t get that vacation time” makes you sound angry and uncooperative—that much is obvious. But if you say “she was really pissed off after that meeting,” referring to your boss, you’re subtly expressing a criticism of her (even if you think she had ever right to be furious!). Likewise, if you remark, “I think I pissed off Doug yesterday,” you’re basically confessing that you can’t get along with others (even if you think Doug was in the wrong!).

From just about every angle, this expression don’t work in your favor. Yes, people in your office—including you—are going to get upset from time to time. That much is natural. But how you speak about those breakdowns in collaboration should be more, well, collaborative. That goes for email, too, by the way.

Related:Six Ways To Write Emails That Don’t Make People Silently Resent You

5. “Can’t”

To be fair, you can’t get away with never saying “can’t”—it’s just too common and useful a contraction—and I’m not suggesting you try. But it is smart to be on you guard for the contexts where you use it.

For example, you might innocently say at a meeting, “I can’t get that report to you until next Monday.” And fine, maybe you really can’t because it just isn’t feasible. But phrasing it like this makes you sound ineffective—like the person who disappoints. Why not flip it around and say what you can do instead? “I’ll have that report to you next Monday.” There—suddenly you’re somebody who delivers, and is helpfully realistic about timelines to boot.

Try to avoid “don’t” in similar situations. Rather than saying, “I don’t know what the solution is,” go with, “Let’s go over what some possible solutions might look like—I could really use some input.” Then you’ll sound bright and collegial.

6. “Hope”

Here’s another perfectly innocuous word that can sound defeatist and passive (or even passive aggressive) around the office if you aren’t careful. In some contexts, it can make you sound less than confident. For example, if you say, “I hope we’ll meet our sales target,” you’re really planting the opposite idea—the possibility that you may not. Obviously, that possibility is real and may even be one that you want to impress upon your team in order so they know what the stakes are. But then why not just say, “I really want us to meet our sales target, and I know we can get there”?

Similarly, “I hope our team can agree on a plan” sounds like you don’t exactly see how you’ll manage to. Instead, just say, “We expect to hammer out a plan” or “we’re committed to coming up with something everybody agrees on.” Even if you might not actually be confident that’ll happen, you should probably refrain from showing it.

No matter what, people invariably draw impressions of us based on the words we say. And by the very nature of language, those infinite shades of interpretation are impossible to control. But it’s still possible to avoid the expressions that may impart resentment, resignation, or a lack of commitment that you might not even actually feel. Avoid these six words and phrases and you’ll start to sound just a little more collegial and confident. In the workplace especially, a little often goes a long way.

Liuzhou, an industrial city in southern China, looks like a typical modern Chinese metropolis, filled with concrete high-rises and often shrouded in smog. But the city’s newest district, in planning now, will be different: Every building, from schools to office and apartment towers, will be covered in trees and plants.

Called “Forest City,” the area–roughly half the size of Central Park–will be home to 30,000 people, 40,000 trees, and nearly 1 million plants. It’s similar to a design first realized in Milan–where the project’s architect, Stefano Boeri, completed two tree-covered skyscrapers in 2014–but at a much larger scale.

In any project, Boeri’s team begins by planning landscaping on the ground. But by adding a dense network of trees and shrubs to balconies, it’s possible to multiply the benefits of greenery in an urban neighborhood. In Milan, the two towers house as many trees as might be found on five to seven acres of actual forest, on roughly a tenth of the land. In Nanjing, China, where the architecture firm is working on another two towers, the buildings will have as many trees as nearly 10 acres of forest.

“[It’s] like a graft,” says Boeri. “You are nesting, in the center of a super dense and polluted environment, an ecosystem which has an amazing biodiversity, and which can really contribute in terms of absorption of CO2, production of oxygen, and absorption of the fine dust of pollution.”

The architecture firm began working on the concept with another Chinese municipality a few years ago, as the Chinese government began to seek new approaches to development (that city, while still interested, hasn’t yet chosen to implement the idea, while Liuzhou is preparing to begin construction). Each year, millions of people in rural China move to cities seeking better jobs; in the past, government planners have often responded by adding suburban sprawl.

“They extend the periphery of the metropolis, and this addition of low-priced, low-quality settlements produces every year this crazy extension of a mediocre and polluted urban environment,” Boeri says. “I think what now is evident to the government is that this kind of answer to urbanization is now in doubt because it has so many disadvantages in terms of quality of life, air pollution, the cost in terms of commuting… I think they are in search of possible alternatives.”

The design also helps fight climate change close to a source of pollution. Cities are responsible for around three-quarters of the world’s carbon emissions. “Forests are absorbing 35-40% of that CO2,” says Boeri. “So the idea to move forests inside the city…it’s a way to meet the enemy in its field.”

“We are trying to always combine the presence of green with the presence of technological devices such as renewable energy,” he says. “All of this, in the end, works together. The leaves are also contributing to reduce the temperature of the surfaces on the sides of the building. In Milan in the summertime, the costs of energy consumption are drastically reduced by the presence of the leaves that are shading the facade.”

Incorporating thousands of trees on buildings poses new design challenges. “We had, from the beginning, to deal with problems that normally you don’t have when you build a traditional building,” he says. In the first buildings in Milan, the architects worked with botanists to ensure that the trees would survive, and with the engineering firm Arup to calculate how heavy the soil should be (not too heavy for balconies to support, but heavy enough to keep trees stable on windy days) and developed a new way to stabilize roots in planters. As they have tweaked this system, they test trees in a wind tunnel in Florida to ensure that the design is safe. The overall system, they say, is working. In Milan, the apartments are occupied (at least one is also an Airbnb), and a team of gardeners regularly rappel down the skyscrapers to take care of the trees.

Though China has a history of planning some “eco cities” that were never actually built–and construction of Forest City has yet to begin–Boeri is confident that the project will continue to move forward. After completing the concept design, the team is now designing buildings for the first of three phases of construction. The architects haven’t published the cost, but the Milan skyscrapers cost only 5% more than traditional skyscrapers. Construction is likely to begin in 2020.

As Boeri’s team plans similar buildings in Paris, Utrecht, and other cities, he’s hoping that the Liuzhou development inspires others to incorporate more greenery into facades. “I think that in two or three years, there will be many other architects that will start to replicate and to improve what we have done,” he says. “We didn’t copyright anything, because we want to be copied, in a way. We hope that there will be other architects that will be better than us.”

A few years ago, when I started working on newsletters, most people thought email was dead. Social media, it seemed, was THE way to reach people.

But today, thanks in large part to the unknowable ways of algorithms–which have made it nearly impossible to definitively figure out how to reach your followers on social media platforms–the reliability of email as a form of communication has put the newsletter back in the spotlight. Today, newsletters are flooding inboxes. The question isn’t whether or not you should start an email newsletter; it’s how can you create a newsletter people will actually want to open?

What Day Or Time Of Day Is Best To Send A Newsletter?

This is probably the most asked (yet least important) question about starting a newsletter. There is no universal day or time to send an email. Rigorous testing of Fast Company‘s Daily newsletter proved that whether we sent it at 6 a.m., noon, or 4 p.m., our open rate stayed the same. Emails have a long shelf life, and users will go back and click on an email that interests them hours, days, and even weeks after you send it.

So, When Should You Send It?

Even if your open rate remains the same no matter what time you send your newsletter, your campaign’s highest open rate will be in the hour following your send time. So you should be mindful and thoughtful about the time you choose. Consider four things here: your workflow, your audience, your competition, and your goal.

Workflow

When does it make sense in your workflow to send the newsletter? Pick a day/time that fits into your schedule, and make sure it’s a time that you can replicate each day or week. Consistency in send time is important in order to become a part of your readers’ routines (and you want to be part of their routine).

Depending on the type of newsletter you’re sending, preparing a newsletter can be incredibly time consuming, and hitting a strict deadline can be stressful. Leave yourself enough time to create, get feedback on, and test your newsletter–more on that in a minute.

Audience

Make sure you consider your users when choosing your send time. Try to imagine what they’re doing at the time they receive your email, and ask yourself: do they want your email then? At 9 a.m. on Mondays, I imagine Fast Company‘s East Coast readers heading in to work, maybe still commuting, maybe standing in line for coffee, maybe already at their desks while our West Coast users are just waking up–and most of those activities give those readers just enough time to skim through the Fast Company Daily.

Competition

The easiest way to stand out is to be the only new email in a user’s inbox. Scope out your competitors and pick a send time that doesn’t overlap with theirs.

Goal

Finally, consider what you want your user to do with your newsletter. If you’re asking them to click through to take a survey or read your 1,200-word exposé, don’t send your newsletter during their morning commute, when users are likely preoccupied and short on time. That kind of content might make more sense on the weekend.

What Else?

Design

Your newsletter design should be mobile-first, simple, and skimmable. Here are some tips from my experiences over the years:

• Bear in mind the screen size of your readers’ phones when you’re developing your newsletter’s layout and creating content. Choose bullet points and short sentences instead of paragraphs, and use headers to break up text.
• Keep your paragraphs short and use lots of headers to break up the material.
• Do use photos–but remember that they won’t always load quickly, or at all, in certain browsers and email clients. So it’s best to start your newsletter with text, and place photos lower in the email, so they have time to load before your users scroll that far down..
• Unlike the web, email does not support fancy fonts and complex design because of all the different inboxes, devices, screen sizes, and mail platforms out there. So make sure you test your design in as many inbox types as you can. Many email newsletter management tools feature a render option, which should enable you to see what your newsletter will look like across a wide range of inboxes.

Subject Line

Your subject line is what will make a user either open or ignore your email, so it’s important to get it right. Your subject line can be anything: a question, an answer, a single word, and even a full a sentence–as long as it’s intriguing enough to make your readers want to click on it.

Make sure to test your subject lines, at least when you’re starting out on your newsletter adventure. Many newsletter platforms like Mailchimp have an A/B testing feature that allows you to easily pit one subject line against another by testing your options on a small sample of your subscribers before sending the winning subject line out to the rest of your list.

At Fast Company, we test a series of subject lines on Twitter before we send out our morning newsletter. We send out a bunch of early morning tweets with our possible subject lines (and the links to the stories that each line goes with) and we choose the winner based on which tweet garners the highest engagement rate. That’s how we choose the subject line you receive from us in your inbox every morning!

Content

Good content, with the right voice and format, is obviously the most important part of a newsletter. Perfecting that, with lots of feedback from outsiders, is really your first step.

Once you have good content, and subscribers, you’ll still need to work hard to keep subscribers hooked. Users will naturally lose interest in a newsletter within the first few months. You need something extra to keep them coming back–-something unique that sets your newsletter apart from the rest. It could be a unique format like the number-centric Significant Digits newsletter, the pop-culture-heavy references in TheSkimm, inside-baseball stories from a niche provider like Nieman Lab’s journalism news digest, or exclusive offers and giveaways–for example, I always open the Creative Market newsletter to get the free design template and font downloads for that week.

Testing

I discussed earlier how we test subject lines for the Fast Company Daily newsletter each day, which is an ongoing method we’ve found to be successful at maximizing email engagement on a daily basis. But there are a lot of other tests–ongoing and occasional–that are important to ensure your newsletter is a success.

What should you test?

Start with your questions or uncertainties about your newsletter, and the problems you think it has. Then ask your subscribers about those things through surveys and observe their behavior on a macro level with A/B testing.

When we set out to redesign the Fast Company Daily, we had our ideas about what needed to be fixed (for starters, it featured bright blue links and wasn’t responsive to different screen sizes). But we knew that before we changed anything, we would first need our users’ input. We started by sending a survey to our most loyal subscribers (the subscribers who open our newsletter the most–this is data we can easily pull from our newsletter service provider, MailChimp), since they were the ones who would be most affected by any changes and, we thought, would be the most willing to give feedback.

We focused the survey on what we ourselves thought were issues with the newsletter, and on aspects of the newsletter that we thought were already pretty good but could be more perfect, like story selection. In the end, we found that the most important questions we asked were:

“What do you do when you open the Fast Company newsletter?”

This told us, at the most basic level, what the use of our newsletter was–which was important when we considered what our goals were for the redesign. Ultimately we needed to make it easier for our subscribers to skim through the headlines (which is what most users said they did with our newsletter), and try to increase our click through rate (which was our objective).

“What do you like or dislike about the Fast Company Daily?”

While it took a while to read through and identify themes across all the answers to this open-ended question, it was definitely worth it. The answers to the question helped us see problems we didn’t even know existed–like duplicated stories across our newsletters, or lack of labels for our video links.

These long-form answers helped us get to know our users better, so in the future when we consider changes, we have a base understanding of who they are, how they think, and what’s important to them.

Don’t Blindly Trust Your Audience (Or Your Own Instincts)–Test Everything! 

After we learned what our subscribers said they do with our newsletter, we had to put their feedback (and our own assumptions) to the test and see what they actually did. So, we divided our subscriber base into three sections, and sent each group a different newsletter.

Group A was the control, and received our traditional newsletter. Group B received what appeared to be the traditional newsletter, but with an element or two that differed from the original in order to conduct A/B testing. And group C received something completely different: an email dominated by text, not interspersed with images.

The “A” and “B” newsletters helped us answer some quick questions.We sent A at 7 a.m. and B at noon or 4 p.m. to see whether there was a better time to send the newsletter (there wasn’t). We sent A with one subject line style for a week, and B with another style, to see whether there was a specific subject line formula that worked best (there wasn’t). We put 6 stories in A and 10 stories in B to see whether more stories in our newsletters resulted in a higher click through (it didn’t).

Meanwhile, newsletter C helped us test a newsletter type we thought we should be sending, a newsletter that didn’t just contain a list of links and images but instead was dominated by text written by a reporter or editor. For the record, most of our users hated that newsletter–since, as we learned in our our initial user survey and the ongoing survey we linked to every day in newsletter C, all our users really wanted to do with our newsletter was skim through headlines to find what interested them. Paragraphs of text weren’t conducive to skimming.

All that testing led us to our current newsletter format, which is informed by all the lessons from newsletter tests A and B, and designed based on the daily feedback we received from subscribers of newsletter test C.

How Do You Know You’re Succeeding?

No matter what type of newsletter you’re creating, you should be looking to measure success in two key ways: loyalty (the consistency of your users’ engagement) and growth (growing and maintaining your subscriber list). Whether the end goal of your newsletter is to drive traffic, develop brand awareness, drive sales, or world peace, being successful at achieving any goal first depends on the loyalty of your users and the size of your audience.

Driving loyalty

Make sure to engage with your users. Email as a medium is a multi-directional communication device, so make sure to use it that way–not just as a one-way delivery system for your content.

A good way to promote engagement with your users is to solicit responses. That can be as simple as encouraging them to email you back with comments or feedback.

Polls are a very easy way to get your users engaged with the least amount of effort on their part. When we sent detailed surveys to our most loyal subscribers, we had a 30% response rate from them and received some very valuable and lengthy responses from our subscribers. But to find out what the rest of our subscribers wanted–subscribers who might not be as committed to us as a brand and therefore might not be willing to put in as much effort as our loyalest readers–we added polls to the bottom of each newsletter with simple questions like “Did you read the editor’s note at the top of the newsletter?”

We experienced a higher response rate with 1-question polls because users didn’t have to leave the newsletter to submit feedback. The barrier to participation was low.

You can also get users to engage with your newsletter just by asking questions–for example, Muckrack and other newsletters have daily trivia questions. It’s a good idea to encourage engagement that extends outside of the email–try to get users to engage with you on other platforms, and even at real-life events. TheSkimm has built probably the most loyal subscriber base with their skimm’bassadors program–they offer incentives to users who promote the newsletter, incentives like branded Skimm products, access to early product testing, invitations to events, and a shoutout in theSkimm on their birthdays.

Make sure to test different engagement strategies and see what clicks (no pun intended) with your audience. If they feel like you hear their voice and that they truly are part of your newsletter community, it’ll be easier for them to feel connected, and they will be more loyal as a result.

Growth
Being proactive about growing your newsletter list is as important as sending your newsletter. But how do you grow your following?

• Use Your Network: From day one you should reach out to everyone you know to sign up for your newsletter, and get them to get their contacts to sign up, too.
• Socialize: You should also use social networks to actively promote your newsletter. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn–get posting! You can also use Twitter cards (through Twitter’s ad interface) to promote your newsletter and solicit 1-click signups.
• Partner Up: Look for other people or businesses that run newsletters with a similar target audience and reach out to them to promote your newsletter. If your audience is large enough, you can reciprocate by promoting their business in your own newsletter.
• Keep it simple! Make it as easy as possible for users to sign up for your newsletter. Don’t clutter your signup pages on your website with multiple fields or lots of text. You want to minimize the barrier to entry.If you have a website, make sure to create a clean, simple sign up box and feature it in a prominent place. Newsletter pop-ups may be annoying for the user, but they are an effective way to get signups–so try to minimize irritation by designing these boxes in an attractive and easy-to-navigate manner.

Never stop promoting your newsletter, even if you feel like you’ve hit your goal subscriber number. Remember that users can lose interest in your work, so to achieve growth you need to gain active users at a faster rate than you lose them.

Final Thoughts: Always Think About Your User!

One big advantage of an email newsletter is that a user has to be pretty fed up with a newsletter to go through the steps required to unsubscribe. But considering how many newsletters are flooding inboxes these days and how detrimental non-essential emails can be to maintaining a healthy inbox, purging one’s inbox is become more and more important.

I recently realized it was time to set aside some time and cull my newsletter subscriptions in an attempt to take back control of my inbox. I was ruthless, and cut 95% of my subscriptions. I cut anything that came daily that I didn’t read daily, and kept only newsletters that gave me something I couldn’t get anywhere else. You don’t want me to cut your newsletter out of my diet, do you? No. So make sure you’re always thinking about how you can make your newsletter essential to your user. When your reader evaluates her subscription diet, no matter how consistently you send your newsletter, no matter how much you have tested it, the only thing that will really matter is how good the content is. More on that in another installment.

If you aren’t already a subscriber, sign up for the Fast Company Daily below!

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First, the good news: There’s a spate of new technologies to help companies measure and predict their employees’ talents, and it’s only a matter of time before artificial intelligence becomes a normal part of the hiring process. But now for the bad news: Those innovations have to surmount one pretty big obstacle first—human intuition.

The fact is that people just aren’t very good at knowing how talented they are at one thing relative to another, let alone at making objective (or even objective-ish) assessments about the strengths and weaknesses of others. Don’t despair, though. There are a few low-tech ways to size up your skill-set more accurately long before the robots roll in and do it for you.

1. Stop Looking For “Talent” In The First Place

One of the reasons talent is hard to observe is that it’s just an abstract concept, a story we invent to make sense of people’s accomplishments. When you know somebody, you might infer how talented they are based on their achievement and how well they’ve performed in school or at work, for instance, but even that is just an intuitive guess. Since all you have to base your judgment on are outcomes, it’s impossible to know which ones were caused by luck, hard work, or even just an ability to deceive people into getting what they want. You can’t possibly estimate how much any of these factors might have contributed to their success.

But it doesn’t stop there. Our own biases distort the objectivity of our judgments–on top of the shaky measures we rely on in order to make them. For instance, when we compete with a colleague for a promotion, we’ll naturally underestimate their abilities and overestimate the likely role of luck or nepotism in the contest, just so we can feel better about our own chances (or egos, if we lose out). This tendency, which psychologists term “motivated reasoning,” distorts our view of reality to such a degree that we unconsciously sacrifice a truth that makes us look bad in order to embrace a lie that makes us look good.

So whether you’re applying to a job or sitting on the other side of the table as a hiring manager poring over resumes, things may feel pretty hopeless. Even professional talent spotters rely too much on their intuition, causing organizations to be pretty clueless about their employees’ talents and potential. That’s one major reason why what 20-odd years ago was heralded as a “war for talent” has devolved into a war on talent; instead of attracting, harnessing, and unlocking human potential, organizations are alienating the majority of their employees, including their top performers.

One of the simplest ways out of this rut is a shift in mind-set: Just stop actively looking for “talent”–you’ll always be led astray–and seek out some other types of information instead, like these . .

2. Get Negative Feedback

Constructive criticism could probably do a lot more good inside organizations if only more people were comfortable taking it. Simple as it sounds, you can actually get a better handle on your comparative strengths and weaknesses by asking others to tell you what they think you’re doing wrong (or not just very well).

Make no mistake: Their feedback will be imperfect, too, for the same reasons your own self-assessments are, but that’s why it’s important not to ask just anybody. Seek out people with expertise, experience, and authority in the specific area where you’re looking for feedback. (You wouldn’t ask a high school music teacher to give you tips on your jump-shot, would you?) And make sure the people you’re asking aren’t your best friends in the office. The people closest to you are bad sources of feedback because they like you; even if they think they’re being fair, they’ll subconsciously skew their criticism to avoid upsetting you.

By the same token, you can crowdsource information about other people’s abilities, creating an informal version of a 360-degree feedback that’s actually pretty reliable. Our evolutionary ancestors lived in small groups where everybody had a reputation. Even in an age of virtual work and remote teams, you can still get a fairly accurate read on someone’s reputation for strengths in one area and weaknesses in another just by asking multiple sources to report on them–in other words, by tapping the power of collective intelligence.

3. Look For Four Key Traits

Talent is obviously context-dependent. Serena Williams can crush Warren Buffett at tennis, while he’d probably be better than her at managing your money. But leaving aside technical expertise and skills like these, there are some fairly universal qualities that determine systematic individual differences in career-related talent.

Here’s a little thought experiment to work backward from. The perfect human would likely include the following psychological traits:

1. High general intelligence, which translates into the ability to learn complex things rather quickly
2. High curiosity, which would fuel her appetite for ongoing, deep learning
3. High emotional intelligence, which would make her more likable and rewarding to deal with
4. High ambition, which would allow her to remain dissatisfied with her achievements, constantly striving to improve

Research shows that, with the right instructions and a little practice, most people are generally quite good at assessing these traits in others, even after relatively short interactions with them. This means you can also ask others to assess them in you (which goes back to point #2, on gathering negative feedback).

4. Distrust Self-Claims

One of the easiest ways to misjudge others’ talents is to take them at their own word. From an evolutionary perspective, self-deception is actually adaptive because being unaware of your limitations can help you fool others into thinking that you’re better than you actually are.

Unfortunately, this is how so many incompetent people succeed through sheer overconfidence, and it’s why competent people who aren’t totally full of themselves end up flying under the radar. So as a general rule, simply ignoring what people say about their own strengths and weaknesses can make you a better judge of them. Most people who say they’re great at something are unlikely to be better at it than those who “confess” to being bad at it. As the famous Dunning-Kruger effect shows, experts and fools don’t differ much in their self-estimated competence–it’s just that narcissists have proved extraordinarily good at marketing talents they don’t actually possess.

Like in any domain of competence, your talent-judging ability will only improve if you acknowledge your limitations, are passionately curious, and willing to put your models and theories to the test–even at the risk of harsh criticism. Only by trying to disprove your preconceptions can you know whether those beliefs are right. But do that, and judging strengths and weaknesses might even become a bonafide strength of yours.

If I see someone crying, I cry–without fail. It isn’t purposeful, it’s just how my brain reacts. My husband, by his own admission, is like the Tin Man, just without the quest for greater emotional expression.

This difference between us, which can lead to frustration from me and eye rolls from him, is a common refrain among men and women. It is just one in a long litany of supposed differences between (straight) men and women. Also included, women are nurturing, talkative, and spatially inept, whereas men are assertive, logical, and mechanical, and on and on.

Hundreds of years ago, people blamed these differences on women’s reproductive organs (somehow blood in a uterus was supposed to make it difficult to reason). Now with advances in neuroscience, the answers seem more sophisticated: Men and women are different because we have different brains. This is propagated by clickbait articles and news segments that show the brightly lit images of brain scans explaining away our frustrating gender differences with “scientific evidence.” Pink brains and blue brains are easy to sell in a world where we have been told for generations that men are from Mars and women are from Venus.

Most Brains Are Both “Male” And “Female”

The problem with blaming differences between women and men on pink brains and blue brains is that it isn’t really true. But the idea sticks around because there are just enough kernels of truth to obfuscate the real picture.

Indeed, there are some differences in the brains of men and women. Men’s brains are about 10% bigger than women’s brains, which happens to be about the same as our height and weight difference. But women compensate for that smaller size by having more wrinkled brains that also have more gray matter relative to white matter than men, basically allowing more important stuff to get packed into a smaller area.

And indeed, there are some important sex differences in mental health, neuropsychiatric disorders, and learning disorders that are clearly neurobiological.

But most of the differences that stubbornly float around popular culture have been clearly refuted in the scientific literature. A classic example is the idea that the female brain has a larger corpus callosum (the section of the brain that connects the two hemispheres) and less lateralized brains than males. The corpus callosum notion has been a popular idea since a study was published in 1982 that got picked up by Time and Newsweek.

These statements have been extrapolated and translated into the popular belief that women multitask better (and why women are supposedly better at simultaneously calling the doctor’s office, cleaning the kitchen, and helping with homework). The problem is that these statements have been heavily refuted by multiple independent meta-analyses (which are just large meta-studies that analyze all available studies together), with one of the meta-analytic researchers calling it a “myth.” These studies are more scientifically valid and reliable, but not nearly as sexy, so they don’t get covered.

The most convincing scientific evidence about gender in the brain is much more complicated than a news soundbite allows, but it makes a lot more sense than the idea that we have different brains.

Neuroscientist Daphna Joel and her team examined the brains of 1,400 individuals (quite different than the typical neuro-imaging study that includes about 10 men and 10 women). They repeatedly find that some individual, small sections of the brain indeed show patterns that are more typical of males or more typical of females (although millions of sections show no difference at all).

However, when they look at all the sections together instead of just a small snapshot, they find only about 3% of people have a brain that is fully “male” or fully “female.” In other words, it is extremely rare to find a consistently pink brain or blue brain. The other 97% of people have brains that are a mosaic of pink and blue. Almost all of us have features common in men and features common in women.

Even neuroscientists can’t tell if an individual brain belongs to a man or woman.

The mosaic idea actually seems to be common sense. We know that we are all individuals made up of unique experiences. Those experiences shape the structures and connections within our highly complex brains.

Even our number of neurons differs widely. The average brain holds about 86 billion neurons, but individuals differ from that number by an average of 8 billion. Even identical twins have different brain structures and connections because of their own experiences. We are all our own idiosyncratic mosaic–in our behaviors, skills, and brains.

What’s Really Behind Gender Differences

Why does the myth of pink brains and blue brains stick so firmly in our collective consciousness? One reason is because men and women often do have different interests and ways of acting. My husband and I are sincerely different. This is primarily because we come from different cultures, mine (the culture of being raised as a girl) encouraged emotional expression, and his told him that “boys don’t cry.”

Anyone that has traveled knows the importance of cultural influence, yet we don’t chalk up those cultural differences to neuroscience. Rather, as humans, we effectively adapted our behavior to our social norms and pressures.

The other reason the myth is so stubborn is that we like to remember examples that are consistent with our gender narrative. We remember information better when it supports our theory that men and women are different. We overlook all the men who cry, who easily multitask at work, and who can’t do math. It helps us keep a simplified and consistent picture in our brains.

Research by behavioral psychologists has shown in studies with 1 million-plus people that our individual differences are much larger than any group-level gender difference, and that no individual fits the male or female stereotype perfectly.

The end result is that our gender is a pretty uninformative part of who we are. It doesn’t determine our brain structure, it doesn’t determine what tasks and jobs we are good at, and it doesn’t determine much about who we are. Humans, and our brains, are much more complicated than that.

Christia Spears Brown, PhD, is a developmental and social psychologist at the University of Kentucky who studies the maintenance and impact of gender stereotypes. She is the author of Parenting Beyond Pink and Blue: How to Raise Kids Free of Gender Stereotypes. 

What if filing your insurance claims was as easy as snapping a photo?

That’s precisely what Better, a new app for for filing out-of-network health insurance claims, professes to do. Launched in June, the startup promises just a few simple steps: Visit a doctor, pay the bill, take a photo of the gibberish that is your bill, then let Better handle the entire claim process—from start to finish.

In exchange, the debt relief app takes 10% of the money you get paid back. If it turns out the claim is not covered by your insurance or the amount is applied to your deductible, the service is free of charge.

In general, if you visit a doctor who does not accept your insurance, you have to pay out of pocket and then get a paper with a code on it that is then meant to be sent to the insurance company in hopes of recouping your money.

“But it’s such a complicated process, most people don’t get through it,” Better cofounder and CEO Rachael Norman tells Fast Company.

Instead, the bill is often shoved into a kitchen drawer because consumers don’t have the patience to oversee it. Or, if it is submitted, it’s often denied or returned due to incorrect or insufficient information.

“Consumers are missing out on the full benefits on their insurance policy,” stresses Norman. She’s frustrated by what she sees as millions of dollars left on the table because of insurance companies’ failings, a complicated system by design. “Patients deserve to have someone on their side and should not be left without support in a system this complex,” wrote Norman on the Better company website.

Medical billing has quickly become a national crisis: One out of four American households struggle with medical debt, which is now the leading cause of personal bankruptcy, according to a survey by the Kauffman Family Foundation in conjunction with The New York Times. Meanwhile, Harvard Business Review estimates the nation spends $1 trillion dollars on health care administration each year.

“Your doctor’s office has trained professionals who do this day in, day out—working to make sure they get the money they’re owed from the insurance companies,” explains Norman. “They work really hard to do that. It’s not an easy system… and it’s something an individual, especially one with health issues, has trouble navigating on their own.”

Norman looked for a business—or really just any individual—who could help her decipher her own medical bills, which began piling up in her home.

“There was nothing out there,” she says, “so I built it.”

The Broken Medical System

Norman had always been interested in the medical field. She was pre-med at Stanford University and spent two summers doing HIV research at the National Institutes of Health. She even spent a year as a medical volunteer in Niger, Africa, assisting U.S. surgeons brought over by an NGO to offer free surgeries to impoverished communities. Ironically, the experience was precisely what led her to discontinue her studies.

“I saw just how broken the medical system is,” reflects Norman. The chief complaint among the doctors she worked with was that too many aspects of the system got in the way of providing the care they wanted for their patients. “I heard over and over again from doctors that they wouldn’t choose to do [this career] over again a second time.”

Related: How This Technology Is Making Doctors Hate Their Jobs

Instead, Norman decided to pursue a career in tech, with which, she holds, “you’re able to solve problems much more quickly.” She moved to San Francisco to work at Bitcoin startup 21 Inc., where she learned product development, engineering management, and the fundamentals of running a business.

In early 2016, Norman experienced an ‘aha’ moment that led her to want to strike out on her own–and revisit her interest in medicine. After spending countless hours on the phone attempting to resolve coding errors for out-of-network doctor appointment bills, she realized she had lost several thousand dollars over the years by simply giving up on the process. “I didn’t have the time,” she says, “it was such a headache.”

Then, a close friend got stuck with a $2 million medical bill following  injuries from a house fire. The added burden of paying an unruly amount on top of managing one’s health inspired Norman to take action.

“It’s so stressful and horrible for people,” she says. “I wanted to find a way to help with this issue and do so in a way that could become a sustainable business and make an impact in this space.”

Norman threw herself into researching everything she could about the insurance billing system. While poking around the industry, she didn’t see anyone else providing a receipt submission service, “which was a really big motivator,” she says. Other medical bill apps exist, but most focus on bill negotiation or solving the issues that arise after claims are submitted. Norman wanted to build a system focused on the initial process, on what your insurance company hasn’t even handled yet.

Most of her days were filled with calling insurance companies, reaching out to lawyers, and immersing herself in the mind-boggling insurance code systems. For example, Norman learned that several big health insurance companies, such as Blue Shield, separate customers into two tiers. If you work for a major employer like Google or Facebook, you will be given preferential treatment, which includes a special corporate concierge service that handles calls and billing more efficiently. But if you work for a less prestigious company, you are routed to a different call center in which the agents are less than helpful.

At the latter, reports Norman, 20% of her calls were dropped. In addition, the insurance company repeatedly lost documents and files, asking her to re-send them via fax or mail. “Then their OCR (optical character recognition systems) for reading these claims are terrible,” Norman states.

“There’s So Much Work To Be Done”

In 2016, Norman met John Stockdale, a former engineer at Facebook who now serves as Better cofounder and CTO. Together they brought on a team of contractors, engineers, and angel investors, including Tim Trefren (cofounder of Mixpanel), Sean Plaice (cofounder of Postmates), and Brent Goldman (engineering manager at Uber). The company incorporated in March 2016.

They then built the product that would become Better and began testing it with a small circle. During an eight month-long beta mode, which started last summer, Better processed over $1.5 million worth of claims.

Now, a little after a year, Better is fully live, with seven full-time staff members. In lieu of Norman manually making calls, the product’s technology automatically sorts out all the insurance codes, thereby helping the company scale to a larger audience.

The company already has ambitious plans. For its first year, Better plans on dedicating 100% of its revenue to forgive $16 million of medical debt across America. (Medical debt often sells for pennies on the dollar, so this amounts to a little under $100,000.) The goal is to topple HBO’s Last Week Tonight host John Oliver, who forgave $15 million—the largest TV giveaway in history—as part of a public takedown of the debt-purchasing industry last June.

“He beat Oprah,” offers Norman of the TV giveaway, “and now we are going to beat him.”

While Better would not release specific numbers, the company reports it has already garnered “a lot of support” from health care providers, specifically solo practitioners such as therapists, dentists, and chiropractors. “They know [insurance claims are] something their patients struggle with,” says Norman.

Natalie Friedman is one such therapist who recommends Better to clients at her Los Angeles-based practice.

“Nine times out of 10, new clients come to me and our first conversation is not about their reason for seeking therapy but answering insurance questions,” writes Friedman. She says it ends up being a “fraught conversation” over insurance policies they do not understand. “People who are seeking therapy have already struggled to take the step to contact me (or any therapist), and then there’s this other hurdle to get over.”

A reportedly increasing amount of health care providers are opting out of insurance panels entirely because they find the extra billing work too exhausting. That then puts the entirety of the administrative burden on the consumer.

“The patient very commonly comes last,” sighs Norman. In coming years, she hopes to expand her business to new categories within the insurance claims sector. This includes bill negotiation, appeals, and access to resources. Because, as she sees it, the system will not dramatically change anytime soon.

“No matter what happens with health care [in politics], insurance companies will remain the same, and this particular problem is going to be there,” Norman predicts. Regardless which policy you choose, she says, you’re still buying “a black box” of ambiguous, confusing documents that even a lawyer would find taxing.

“[Health care] is a $3.3 trillion dollar industry—it moves very, very slowly,” she explains. “There are many thousand of players and anything that’s done to simplify it takes a very long time.” Beside, as Norman says, the complication serves in insurance companies favor: it minimizes the amount that they pay out in claims. “I don’t see the incentives aligning for it to get much easier for individuals anytime soon.”

Not that Norman is any way discouraged. If anything, she finds it motivating. The entrepreneur firmly believes technology is our best hope to change the health care system in the United States.

“There’s so much work to be done with exactly what we’re doing—getting people money back,” says Norman. “It’s such a huge problem. We’re going to stay focused on that.”