This guide was originally published on The Creative Independent, a growing resource of emotional and practical guidance for creative people. See more of their guides here. Illustrations by Sunny Eckerle.

“Teacher burnout” refers to a state of chronic physical and emotional exhaustion brought on by prolonged periods of stress. Combined with low wages, inadequate funding, and disheartening educational policy, burnout has resulted in eight percent of teachers in America throwing in the towel over the past decade.

As a teacher myself, it’s been interesting to reflect on what keeps me coming back to the classroom, five years into this difficult yet ultimately rewarding job. What it comes down to, I think, is that teaching is not the only thing that keeps me going. In my opinion, relying solely on a day job or career to fulfill your ambitions and keep you mentally stimulated is risky business. Instead, I like to incorporate a smattering of fulfilling creative projects within my day-to-day life to help me keep my teaching job in perspective. And while it isn’t always easy to do it all, there are ways to balance things out.

Over the past few years, in addition to teaching full-time, I’ve managed to finish a master’s degree, start a record label, contribute to various publications, and release/perform music as Nassau. Through it all I’ve practiced, failed at, and re-tooled strategies for balancing full-time work with multiple creative side projects. In this guide you’ll find a handful of takeaways for staying sane, organized, and intentional while trying to do it all.

Be honest about your 9 to 5

Your day job matters a lot

It really does! The average person will spend over 90,000 hours, or about a third of their lives, at work. With another third of our hours spent sleeping, the time we actually have for “living” seems modest at best. If you’re holding down an unfulfilling 9-5 with the primary ambitions of supporting yourself and your creative work (versus building a career in that area), ideally this job should provide you with at least one of three things: more time, more resources, or a skill set that will help you be successful in your creative endeavors.

As you contemplate what type of day job might make sense for you, consider the feelings you’ll want to have after completing a shift, or after heading out from the office. Probably “drained, grumpy, and sick of everyone” are not feelings that are on your list. So think about it: What type of work or situations might you seek out that wouldn’t leave you in a bad mood after working? By spending some time brainstorming about the job that could be a nice complement to your personality and side projects, you’ll put yourself in a better position to find the right type of gig.

Before returning to teaching, I held an office job in NYC that left me deeply unfulfilled. My frustration and uncertainty about what to do about it translated to me generally being a grump around others. This disgruntled attitude also affected my relationship with friends, partners, and family. When it came time to write a song, article, or even do trivial tasks, I approached them with the same aversion I had to my job.

Have patience and enjoy the ride

Finding the right gig to nicely balance with your personality and creative work isn’t going to happen overnight. As you work towards finding the right role, pause and reflect on your thoughts and emotions whenever possible. In each type of positions, ask yourself: Were there new trends in your behavior? Did you notice an uptick in your creative work and productivity outside of your 9-5?

As you think about what type of day job might make sense for you, a simple exercise to try starts with taking inventory of your skills and passions. Write them down. Go for quantity here: What are you good at? What comes naturally? Anything goes. Then look for patterns or themes. You may even group your skills into categories including “things I love doing,” “things I get paid the most for doing,” “skills I want to improve,” or “skills I haven’t used in a long time, but would like to use again.” Identifying patterns will enable you to honor and recognize the expertise you already possess, and can help you find employment that complements not only you as a person, but your creative practice as well.

As you do the above exercise, you should also be honest with your intentions, and even name them. Would you like a job that makes you lots of money? Expands your network? Gets you working with your hands? Trust your brain and your body–you’ll thank yourself when you’ve landed the right job that’s actually helping you get what you want (not just what you think you should want), and are also able to have time and energy to produce creative work you’re proud of.

Get comfy with sacrifice and boundaries

Say “no” with confidence

If you choose to really focus on creative work while continuing to have a full-time day job, chances are you’ll be sacrificing time for friends, family, partners, and all the other ways you could be spending your days. Growing accustomed to missing out takes time, but learning to say “no” to things–even when you truly wish you could do those things–is an indispensable tool for maintaining focus and productivity with your art. While many people have an intuitive desire to please others, re-framing how, when, and why we say “no” can create fewer distractions, protect your time, and even shift your own perception of the importance and value of your work.

Looking back on the first few years I lived in Brooklyn, it is remarkable how little work I produced as I fell victim to saying “yes” to everything–to every show, every party, every coffee, every beer. It can be a hard pill to swallow, but overcommitting will ultimately hurt you, your relationships, and/or your work.

Here are a few ways to make saying “no” part of your creative practice:

• Teach people to understand that you may very well say “no” to their invitations. Instead of assuming that everyone expects you to say yes, flip the narrative. Experiment with making “no” a real option for you. Start small–say “no” to an invitation for drinks, or to a “quick phone call” that may actually completely interrupt your work flow. Once saying “no” becomes a real option, you’ll find yourself being able to do it with relative ease, and without feeling guilty.
• Change “I can’t” to “I don’t.” Having some personal ground rules and boundaries for yourself can go a long way. Where “I can’t” comes off as uncertain, “I don’t” implies confidence in your routine. For example, try saying “I don’t go out on Sunday nights, because I always use that time to write,” instead of “I can’t make it tonight, maybe next time!” Using “I don’t” will make it easier to stick to resolutions and increase the consistency of your creative routines.
• Get rid of the guilt. This might be the hardest thing to get used to (it certainly has been for me). Remember that saying “no” to friends and opportunities does not mean you’re doing something wrong; rather, it’s completely your right to decide how you spend your time. Examine your guilt, but don’t let it consume you. Most of the time you’ll find it’s not rooted in reality.
• Important reminder: Saying “yes” is also always an option! If you find that you’re denying yourself experiences that you deeply enjoy just for the sake of working, you may need to re-assess your strategy. Use “no” with purpose, and make saying “yes” something that you can really get excited about.

Time management and organization

Build good habits

Daily routines play a huge role in our creative successes (and failures). Chances are they’ll change repeatedly until you establish habits that are meaningful and attainable given the individual obstacles that tend to arise in your life each day. Personally, I’ve found creative routines to work most effectively when viewed as a place to start, rather than as a set of rules that can never be broken.

In general, the creative people I know come from two schools of thought: those who don’t work until inspiration strikes, and those who write, record, paint, or create even when inspiration is nowhere to be found. As someone who identifies with the latter, the following are habits that should support anyone looking to consistently flex their creative muscles. Honestly, the hardest part is just getting started–but once you start putting in the time, inspiration inevitably comes.

• Identify peak creative hours. Pick a window where distractions are minimal and your energy tends to be highest. Finding your ideal time block and sticking to it (without beating yourself up if you miss a day) is a great way to establish a creative routine. As an educator, I operate full-steam ahead from around 7am-2pm. After that, I find my energy waning. I’ve learned that other than occasional short bursts of energy after dinner, I tend to reserve my creative work for weekend mornings after I’ve exercised, meditated, and eaten a large meal.
• “Done” is better than “perfect.” Watching highly creative friends fail to finish a promising project always makes me sad. Regardless of whether or not you ever plan to publish the work, it’s important to make every effort to see your work through. Even if your only goal is to create the seeds for creative work, that counts–having a “stash” of ideas to pull from (as Big Boi advises) can be super helpful when you think you’ve hit a wall. And, on days where it feels like nothing is coming to you, it’s refreshing to scroll through your journal, notes, or sketchpad and know your creative well hasn’t run dry.
• Change your environment. The environment you make your work in impacts the quality and quantity of your work. If your creative space doesn’t support your goals and habits, it becomes increasingly difficult to make progress. A simple environment change you can make is to have whatever tools you need to create visible at all times. When you walk into your space, they should be staring you down. When I go downstairs in our apartment and all of my recording gear is set up, it’s rare that I don’t at least come up with one idea. If I come back from a show and leave my guitar and pedals packed away, it takes longer for me to get back in a groove of practicing and making demos. Pay attention to the barriers you create to getting started. Visiting other artists’ spaces to get ideas for how to re-arrange your desk, furniture, or equipment can also work wonders.
• Start small and build slowly. Whenever I would hear about guitarists I admire who practice for multiple hours a day uninterrupted, I’d get frustrated–I couldn’t imagine having that much extra time in a day. Then I realized I was going about it all wrong. I chose instead to start with a version of the habit that was easy: practicing for 10 minutes a day. The next day, I went up to 15 minutes, and kept going until I was at the hour mark. Building on a habit on a small scale helped me comprehend that I actually could find the time in my day to put in the work. By only increasing the habit by small increments, the progress felt meaningful and manageable. I was also completely focused on playing and not on any one particular outcome. Remember the long game. You can chip away at creative work and over time, it will add up.

Be realistic

*Read this section while listening to Cat Power’s “Nothin’ But Time (feat. Iggy Pop).”

You have more time than you think. Seriously. For someone who has never had a singular vision of what I should be doing with my life, accepting this was a big step towards putting goals in perspective and accepting that my curiosity for music, writing, and education could all be explored. Renowned rock climber, musician, poet, and writer Pat Ament describes just this in his 2017 Aquarium Drunkard interview:

“It’s like love. There is no end to the amount of love one can have. You can love multiple people at the same time, your mother and father, your friends, your girlfriend–but it’s the same with our pursuits. There is more than enough time in life to do more than one thing,” he says.

Ament also describes society’s need to categorize one another. “People are curious and like to define and understand a person. If one is good at a certain endeavor, people around him will reject any effort he makes to be good at another separate endeavor.” For those currently exploring a multitude of creative paths, keep on pressin’ on. You ain’t got nothin’ but time, and it ain’t got nothin’ on you.

To counter that, be realistic about your productivity. If your aim to increase your proficiency starts to make you feel crazy, you may slowly be entering the cult of busy. Are you actually having fun making your work, or has it become a box to check off a list? Try not to let your goals take ownership of your own well-being. A creative goal that served you a year ago may simply be out of sync with where you’re at now. Don’t forget to ask yourself “why” you’re doing what you’re doing.

Go easy on yourself

Do nothing, be mindful, and get moving

Sitting still is difficult for many people, and it always has been for me. I tend to punish myself for wasting any part of a day, and it’s rare that I’ll allow myself to just be. Even when physically sick, I retreat to the comfort of my to-do list. Vacations create a sense of urgency for me: I must see and do as much as possible when traveling to a new place. Sound familiar to anyone?

Only recently have I become more comfortable with letting my mind be still. Reading Roman Muradov’s illustrated book On Doing Nothing was a game changer for me. Through the lens of various artists, writers, and philosophers, Muradov argues that doing nothing is both easily achievable and essential to leading an enjoyable and creative life. While boredom can be debilitating at work, it certainly has its place in creativity. Our hyperactivity can often be a mirage, convincing us we’re being productive as we ascribe false status to our actions.

Downtime restores both drive and creativity, and provides a blank slate. It also gives your unconscious a chance to stimulate thought. Without time for reflection, we run the risk of psychological burnout. The following activities can yield surprisingly major results before, during, or after doing creative work:

• Take a walk, drive, bus, train, or subway ride without a destination in mind.
• Eat without doing anything else simultaneously–notice what sensations your body gets from the food you’re putting in your body. Chew slowly.
• Find a quiet place to sit alone and listen to natural sounds.
• Take three of the deepest breaths you’ve taken all day.

For years I filled every quiet moment with noise. Now, it’s the opposite. I look forward to moments of silence and tend to think/work best with ambient or instrumental music, especially when writing. If you’re looking to increase focus, an app I highly recommend looking into is called Environments. Released by archival record label The Numero Group, Environments is an ambient sound app based on extended field recordings made in the 1960s and ’70s by musicologist Irv Teibel. Sounds include country streams, gentle rain, and a wordless choir. Bandcamp also does a fantastic ambient music roundup each month. Their Music for Relaxation feature is a great place to start. In addition, Sydney’s Longform Editions curate an ongoing series of pieces of substantial length designed for immersive listening experiences.

If zoning out and slowing down aren’t quite doing the trick, never discount the power of getting your heart rate up. The benefits of regular exercise are endless, and often you just need to find the right type of sport or activity that fits your needs and personality. As a teacher, I interact with adults and children non-stop, and it gets to be exhausting. Because of that, I couldn’t imagine leaving my job and then participating in any sort of group sport where I had to interact with more people. Instead, running fits the bill perfectly. I enjoy it for its low cost, the minor barriers required to get started, and its solitude. Haruki Murakami’s book devoted to the sport outlines the clear connection between his work as a novelist and long-distance running.

If you’re a freelancer who works predominantly alone, you may be looking for some human interaction. TheWall Street Journal recently reported that team sports, followed by cycling (either stationary or on the road), are the best exercises to support mental health. Studies have shown that even walking for significant portions of time can improve cognitive efforts associated with creativity. Regardless of which exercise best suits you, try to build up a habit. Again, start small and build slowly.

Get support, let go, and move on

After relocating to Portland, Oregon from New York City, I was reminded how valuable having a trusted support system can be. Leaving New York meant leaving family, established friend groups, and creative communities behind. However, I was also reminded of the excitement and fear associated with being a new person in town, and the work you must do to nurture new relationships and build a community around yourself. It’s still a work in progress, but after a year living in Portland, I am relieved to have found people I can rely on for encouragement, feedback, and motivation. Wherever you are, even if you prefer to work alone, don’t underestimate the importance of being vulnerable, open, and honest with others. In the words of the Staple Singers, “reach out, touch a hand, make a friend if you can.”

In terms of letting go and moving on when something isn’t working out, I can’t say I do either of these well, but would be remiss not to address their value. When I launched Singles Club–a subscription-based record club and music journal–with my best friend in 2013, I believed in the project so much that I refused to accept that it wasn’t a sustainable model. It tied together many of my interests and skill sets, so when it came time to put the project on indefinite hiatus, I took it as a failure on my part. I told myself if I just promoted our releases harder, or secured investment/sponsorship opportunities, that it could have continued. Now, I know that’s probably not true. Moving on was challenging, but I am proud of the cultural artifact we left in the universe. It taught me to stop putting so much weight on specific projects, and that sometimes letting go is the best thing you can do to move forward and prevent burnout–both spiritually and creatively.

In summary…

Finding balance between full-time and creative work is a process. Most of the time, you’ll probably feel slightly off center. That’s more than okay. Be kind to yourself throughout your highest and lowest points. Admit when you’re having a hard time, and then shout it from the rooftops when you’ve had a breakthrough. Share, lift, and shine light on the work of others you admire. Protect your time and your vision, and keep your name clean. Be grateful. You are who you’re supposed to be.

When it comes to creative problem-solving, I’ve been my own worst enemy. There were times I would shoot for more attainable, less risky goals because I feared being in vulnerable situations. I focused too much on the outcome, rather than embraced the learning curve that I would experience in pursuit of that challenging goal.

The thing is, I was holding myself back by worrying too much about what would happen. Fear-induced blinders have a way of making us overlook things. This was something I didn’t realize until a university requested that I write a graduate-level curriculum on personal development.

I’d never written at the academic level before, and I was ready to go into full-on stress-mode. But rather than letting the anxiety paralyze me, I decided to focus on finding ways to tackle the task without worrying about how it would all turn out. This pivot away from anxiety and toward a solution opened up new problem-solving approaches that I believe everyone can learn from. Here are some ways I learned to strengthen that muscle.

1. I focused on improving my underdeveloped tendencies

In order to become a conscientious problem solver, you need to work on areas that don’t come naturally. From what I’ve observed with my clients, people don’t always take the time to hone skills that don’t come naturally to them. As a result, when problems arise, their counterproductive habits are quick to surface.

In my case, I noticed that I had a natural tendency to retreat from a situation where I was scared about not being able to do it well. Once I identified those triggers, I was able to push myself into uncharted territory–which forced me to grow.

When you address the problem upfront, you’ll become more and more comfortable operating with uncertainty–even in situations where you have little influence. Over time, you’ll discover that there are very few problems you can’t solve.

2. I challenged my assumptions with self-interrogation

You’ll likely face a problem in the next day or so. As tempting as it is to find evidence to support your first instinct, look at the issue from a new perspective by asking yourself a series of questions. When I was asked to write the university curriculum, I went through the following process–I questioned whether the experience would fit our company’s mission, would help me grow, or would have a positive impact. Upon answering “yes” to all three, I knew I had to move forward despite worrying that I might fail.

Today, instead of shutting down an opportunity that puts me in a vulnerable situation, I ask myself: “Does this give me an opportunity to grow? So what if I fail?” Then, I figure out the lessons I could take away from the situation (and trust me, there are always quite a few.)

Next, I flip to a more transactional mind-set and ask myself, “What is the cost of not doing this?” After all, I might lose a scary yet empowering opportunity, and who knows whether another will come along? When you ask yourself this question, you can identify the validity of your knee-jerk reactions. Rounding out the costs and benefits will provide a clear distinction between your fear and ability.

3. I asked for help and advice

It’s fine to want to go solo at times, but don’t make it an everyday practice. Our brains thrive when we’re part of a healthy community. Successful people make asking for advice a habit because they know that constructive criticism helps them do (and be) better.

People want to help, but they often don’t know that you need help. Make sure the person you are connecting with knows that, understands explicitly what you need help with, and has time to evaluate whether he or she can assist. When I asked for help to form my curriculum, people didn’t chide me for being a burden. In fact, they told me that I was wise in doing so. Not only did they share their insights, but also requested my guidance for their own conundrums.

In short, send that email, connect on LinkedIn, or offer a handshake to someone who inspires you or can impart some wisdom advice on a situation. You never know how far one connection can take you both.

Playing it safe might seem reasonable. But a perceived sense of security and warmth won’t make you a better problem solver or, for that matter, a stronger professional. Don’t let your fears hold you back from growing and learning as a person. That’s going to end in regret.

Kerry Goyette is the president of Aperio Consulting Group, a corporate consulting firm that utilizes workplace analytics and implements research-based strategies to build high-performance cultures.

The Department of Justice yesterday unsealed a 13-count indictment against eight people facing multiple charges for operating a digital advertising fraud operation known as “3ve,” that allegedly stole tens of millions of dollars from the the advertising industry.

“As alleged in court filings, the defendants in this case used sophisticated computer programming and infrastructure around the world to exploit the digital advertising industry through fraud,” United States Attorney Richard P. Donoghue said in a statement. “This case sends a powerful message that this Office, together with our law enforcement partners, will use all our available resources to target and dismantle these costly schemes and bring their perpetrators to justice, wherever they are.”

According to BuzzFeed News, the investigation stemmed from a coordinated partnership between Google and bot-detection firm White Ops, which then teamed with about 15 other tech companies, including Adobe, the Trade Desk, Amazon Advertising, and Oath, as well as security firms Malwarebytes, ESET, Proofpoint, Symantec, F-Secure, McAfee, and Trend Micro.

At its peak, 3ve involved about 1.7 million infected PCs, roughly 5,000 counterfeit publisher websites, and over 60,000 accounts with digital advertising companies to help fraudsters receive ad placements and get paid, all with a goal to siphon off as much money from the $250 billion digital ad industry.

This is a major development in the pursuit and prosecution of modern ad fraud, but also a drop in the bucket considering an estimated $19 billion will be stolen by ad fraud this year alone.

Testicular cancer ranks among the most curable forms of cancer, with a survival rate that can reach 99%. Early detection obviously plays a key role–but unfortunately, for many men, awkwardness trumps the obvious.

As far as uncomfortable medical exams go, having a doctor cup and mush your balls is one notch below checking for prostate cancer. Because the awkward factor can lead to men avoiding a potentially life-saving procedure, a New Zealand cancer organization teamed up with creative agency FCB to create the “Testimatic,” a discreet booth where patients can get their everything checked out without the dreaded eye contact.

Testicular cancer is actually the most common cancer in New Zealand men between the ages of 15 and 39. So Tony Clewett, executive creative director at FCB, saw an opportunity to raise awareness in a very attention-grabbing way. Men step into the Testimatic, drop trou, and a urologist or general practitioner reaches through a hole and performs the exams in 30 seconds or less.

“The aim was to come up with a concept that was quirky enough to work as a conversation starter with men, giving us the opportunity to explain the importance of men self-checking regularly,” said Clewett in a statement.

The Testimatic premiered at the New Zealand expo Big Boy Toys earlier this month, and more than 170 men got their testicles checked. The plan is to take the Testimatic on the road around New Zealand with the hope of educating men on how to examine themselves for testicular cancer.

“We see the Testimatic as a great way to get men thinking about a serious health concern,” Clewett says. “The message we’re trying to spread is that you don’t actually need to go to your doctor, you can check your own testicles and make it part of a monthly routine–for example, in the shower. If there’s anything you’re concerned about, don’t wait. Go and see your GP.”

Google’s cheap cellular service is getting more official with a name change and support for many more phones. Formerly Project Fi, the service is now called Google Fi, and starts at $20 per month for unlimited calls and unlimited texts, plus $1 per 0.1 GB of wireless data. A plan that uses 4 GB would therefore cost $60 per month, but Google only charges for the data you actually use, so you could spend a lot less if you mostly stick to Wi-Fi. To keep bills from getting out of control, the monthly cost maxes out at $80 per month for individuals, providing up to 15 GB at full speeds.

As for phone support, Google Fi now officially supports most iPhones and Android phones. You just have to pop in a SIM card from Google to use the service.

Still, phones that are optimized for Google Fi, including Google’s Pixel phones and a few handsets from LG and Motorola, will work better. Those phones can automatically switch between T-Mobile, Sprint, and US Cellular networks depending on which has the best signal, whereas The Verge reports that other phones appear to be sticking with T-Mobile only. Optimized phones can also use Google’s built-in VPN, and intelligently drop Wi-Fi for cellular when the connection is weak.

To get people on board, Google is offering either a travel gift card equal to the price of a new phone, or a $200 bill credit for folks who bring their existing phones, but both deals are only available today.

Helsinki is making the most of its new European Capital of Smart Tourism title–which it presumably won in a fierce Thunderdome-like competition–by pursuing new frontiers in digital tourism. The country is promoting its efforts at bringing in one million visitors to the Finnish capital. Visitors don’t need to brave the Finnish winter to do so, though. Instead Helsinki wants tourists to visit via virtual reality.

Virtual Helsinki is a virtual city experience that lets would-be tourists wander a digital twin of Helsinki that was built using 3D modeling. It was developed by the City of Helsinki with its partner VR-studio ZOAN. In the virtual city, VR tourists can tour the city’s famed Senate Square, see architect Alvar Aalto’s home, and visit the summer island of Lonna–all complete with a soundtrack and changing seasons. (Now if only they could create a VR version of the Holiday Bar.)

While many tourist destinations have been using VR 360-videos to lure tourists to their fair cities for some time, Virtual Helsinki aims to do something broader. VR-Helsinki allows visitors to move about freely in the computer simulation of Helsinki, creating additional experiences. And, in the future, VR-Helsinki will serve as a digital platform that will enable other service providers to run their businesses.

“Visitors can tour Helsinki as it was in the early 20th century, or purchase Finnish design products and have them delivered to their homes by post,” explains Miikka Rosendahl, CEO of ZOAN. The hope is that, in the near future, friends from around the world can plan a virtual trip to Helsinki together, virtually meeting in the virtual destination to have real fun.

Virtual Helsinki will be presented at the startup event Slush in December, and available to all VR-headset-wearing armchair tourists next year.

Security firm Malwarebytes has released its annual list of predictions for cybersecurity issues in the next year. Among the company’s predictions:

• Artificial intelligence will make malware harder to detect and combat. Remote servers will be able to monitor how and when rogue problems are spotted and thwarted and adjust the software on the fly to make it more resistant to defenses, predicts Malwarebytes CEO Marcin Kleczynski in a blog post announcing the predictions.
• Online checkout page “skimming,” where attackers harvest personal information and payment info from compromised shopping software, will likely rise in the new year. Companies like British Airways and Ticketmaster UK reported breaches involving payment data this year.
• On the plus side, rogue cryptocurrency mining malware will likely be less of a problem for everyday users, since it’s just not very profitable on consumer machines. Other platforms, like more powerful servers, may still be targeted, Malwarebytes predicts.
• Growing targets for malware will likely include internet routers and internet of things devices, both of which can be harnessed for sophisticated botnets and can be difficult to patch. Malwarebytes predicts Microsoft Edge, the software company’s replacement for its venerable Internet Explorer browser, will also see more attempts to find zero-day vulnerabilities as its market share grows.

First they came for the turkey, then for the Hy-vee meat products, Duncan Hines cake mix, ground beef, Ritz Crackers, Goldfish crackers, McDonald’s salads, Kellogg’s Honey Smacks, Swiss rolls, two different medications, and of course the on-again-off-again concerns about romaine lettuce.

According to People, the Center for Disease Control has investigated 22 outbreaks in 2018 so far, which is the highest number of investigations in the past 12 years. Annual product recalls by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which regulates meat producers, rose 83.4% from 2012 through 2017. Meanwhile, those issued by the FDA, which regulates everything else, jumped by 92.7%, according to CNBC.

Now the Food and Drug Administration is trying to give consumers a reason for all the recalls, without mentioning rule changes by the Trump administration–or climate change, of course. The culprit? Technology!

FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb told CNN that the numbers of investigations will grow as the FDA improves its methods of finding outbreaks under the auspices of the 2011 Food Safety Modernization Act. “I think food is more safe now than it’s ever been. We have much more resources and additional tools to do effective surveillance,” he said. The FDA is also better at warning the public about outbreaks, regularly updating its website, as well as on Facebook and Twitter.

Currently, the CDC has the ability to test samples from infected patients and use genetic testing to link the pathogens to specific food sources. However, as Gottlieb explained, the technology does not yet exist to track and trace an outbreak to a single distributer or grower–making it difficult to find the specific cause of the recent romaine lettuce and turkey recalls. Get on it, inventors!

We remain committed to identifying ways to decrease the incidence and impact of foodborne illness outbreaks, and #FDA will continue to provide updates on our investigation and changes to our advice on romaine lettuce as more information becomes available.

— Scott Gottlieb, M.D. (@SGottliebFDA) November 27, 2018

Type your commute into a new app, and it will tell you the fastest way to get there using essentially every local transportation option available–from the subway to a bike to Uber to a water taxi or a bus–and the carbon footprint, cost, and length of that trip versus driving in your own car.

“We’re trying to get people–in a clever, smart way–out of cars, plain and simple,” says Jonathan Whitworth, co-owner and chief strategy officer of Greenlines Technology, the company that created the app, called Cowlines. (The name, used in urban planning circles, refers to the fact that cows in an open field will choose the most efficient route to walk home.) “We want to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

Because Cowlines considers multiple modes at once, unlike an app like Google Maps, it can identify faster routes. “The combination gets you from A to B, in most cases, much quicker than what traditional Google Maps or another app will provide,” says Whitworth. “We’ve even seen in some of the tests that we’ve done that it’s sometimes up to 50% faster.”

The iOS app, which was piloted in Vancouver earlier this year, is now available in 62 cities in the U.S. and Canada, including New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle. It’s free to use. Greenline Technologies plans to sell aggregated, anonymized data to city planners who can use it to improve local transportation. Right now, cities might know how many people board a bus at a particular stop, but don’t know where those commuters came from or are going. “They’re starving for that information,” says Whitworth. If commuters are going from the bus to bike share, for example, the city might decide to add a bike lane in the area.

In some cities, such as Portland, Oregon, the app pulls data (primarily in real time) from as many as 50 different providers. But Whitworth says that the process of adding new cities is relatively fast. Ultimately, the company plans to make the app available globally. “We just want to follow the numbers,” he says. “When you see a city like Delhi that has the same population of Canada–around 30 million people–the numbers start becoming mind-bogglingly good about how by using our app you can get people to think about the decisions they’re making.”

Talk about spilling the tea! (I’m so sorry.) The Good Place star and fiery feminist advocate Jameela Jamil has had quite enough of celebrity women shilling for dubious products like Flat Tummy Tea, and she wants you (and those celebrities) to know it.

On Monday, Jamil tweeted her displeasure with 2014 Song of the Summer-maker Iggy Azalea over a recent sponsored post on Instagram, calling her a “double-agent for the patriarchy.”

Another double agent for the patriarchy bites the dust… When will these women who are covered in plastic surgery stop telling their followers to drink a laxative to look like them? It’s so embarrassing and it’s so encouraging of eating dirsordered behavior. BE BETTER ALLIES! https://t.co/9hjcapRdwL

— Jameela Jamil (@jameelajamil) November 26, 2018

Why is Jamil so upset? Everybody is entitled to earn money, after all, and if you have a large enough social media following, companies will just throw it at you. The actor elaborated on her reasons for being upset at famous women promoting shady diet products in a further series of tweets.

I was the teenager who starved herself for years, who spent all her money on these miracle cures and laxatives and tips from celebrities on how to maintain a weight that was lower than what my body wanted it to be. I was sick, I have had digestion and metabolism problems for life

— Jameela Jamil (@jameelajamil) November 26, 2018

20 years ago celebrities pushing false patriarchal ideals onto other women could be excused for not understanding the ramifications of this bad behavior, as there was less information and no social media and no mainstream Body positivity or mental health awareness. But NOW?

— Jameela Jamil (@jameelajamil) November 26, 2018

If you tell your fans to be thinner, you don’t love your fans. You don’t give a shit about them or their mental health or self worth.

— Jameela Jamil (@jameelajamil) November 26, 2018

Interesting choice to say these celebrities don’t “give a shit” about their fans, considering Jamil also expressed her wish that the Flat Tummy Tea make these same individuals shit their pants.

Anyway, after providing reasons for why these kinds of celebrity endorsements feel like such a betrayal to women, Jamil expanded her scope to include several others beyond Iggy Azalea: Khloe Kardashian, Amber Rose, and Cardi B.

Give us the discount codes to your nutritionists, personal chefs, personal trainers, airbrushers and plastic surgeons you bloody liars. pic.twitter.com/2wes19cJdb

— Jameela Jamil (@jameelajamil) November 26, 2018

Going after Cardi B, someone a lot of people actually like (sorry, Iggy Azalea) elevated Jamil’s feminist conquest into the realm of celebrity feud–with shots fired, and shots returned.

Regarding her response: she will never shit her pants, not because of bushes, but because she probably doesn’t ever take the products she promotes… during her promotional video she keeps looking at the name of the product on the cup… almost as if she’s never seen it… ???? https://t.co/um2u8zIDng

— Jameela Jamil (@jameelajamil) November 26, 2018

Jamil made it clear that she doesn’t wish harm on any of the people she’s calling out. She just wants them to be be more responsible.

I definitely don’t want any woman canceled! I’m hardly perfect! We can all just wake up one day and decide to be more responsible and do better for women! I used to be really ignorant and misguided in my feminism, pretty slut shamey and backwards… we can ALL Change + do more.❤️

— Jameela Jamil (@jameelajamil) November 27, 2018

The whole affair culminated (for now anyway) in what is known in video game terms as a “finishing move.” On Tuesday night, Jamil posted a video depicting what an honest version of an Instagram ad for Flat Tummy Tea might entail. It’s devastating and impossible to refute.

If celebs and influencers were actually honest with us about some of these diet/detox products… pic.twitter.com/OQsJobGOQN

— Jameela Jamil (@jameelajamil) November 28, 2018

This argument is over. It’s dead. And it probably didn’t go to the good place.

Yup, Amazon just can’t help making itself unpalatable to everybody, including parents-to-be.  The online retail behemoth is apparently sneaking ads into expectant parents’ baby registries. And the ads look so similar to actual products requested by parents that many of them have ended up buying the products that Amazon put on their list.

It works like this: The Wall Street Journal investigated the problem and found that Amazon charges $500,000 for registry ad placements, and sells three of them every quarter. Right now, the brands seem to be Playtex Diaper Genie, Huggies Snug & Dry diapers, and Aveeno bath products. The idea seems to be to suggest products to parents and the people buying them gifts. But thanks to the poor design of the registry, people can’t tell what is an ad, and this is leaving consumers feel like they have been duped into buying something they never wanted to buy.

This latest problem is only adding to a growing resentment toward Amazon that is bubbling on the internet. Over the last few weeks, people have been canceling their Amazon Prime memberships, and persuading other people to do so as well.

Dictionary.com’s choice for word of the year has become every bit as much of a bellwether as Time magazine’s person of the year. And this year–more so than in years past in my opinion–the editors at Dictionary.com nailed it with their choice of “misinformation.”

My first reaction, however, was: “Wait, why ‘misinformation’ and not ‘disinformation’?” which I’ve heard, read, and written about more often since November 7, 2016. Turns out there’s a very good reason.

Dictionary.com defines misinformation as “false information that is spread, regardless of whether there is intent to mislead.” Disinformation, on the other hand, is defined as “deliberately misleading or biased information; manipulated narrative or facts; propaganda.”

Note that the definition of “misinformation” still leaves open the possibility that the spreader has an intent to mislead. In other words, “disinformation” implies a definite intent to mislead, while “misinformation” makes no implication about intent.

It’s possible for a message to start out as disinformation and turn into misinformation. When it comes to the Russian troll who posts on Facebook about Black Lives Matter members hating on Hillary, that post is disinformation. But for the person who shares the message because it agrees with or affirms his existing world view (aka, confirmation bias), that’s misinformation.

The choice of misinformation as word of the year is brilliant for lots of reasons. Disinformation isn’t dangerous unless it’s propagated as misinformation.

The term also captures the tragic flaw in today’s dominant form of communication–social media. For much of its life Facebook was just a nice way to keep in touch with old friends and share baby pics with grandma. Twitter was once mainly about pithy quips and food pics. Now our social networks–especially Facebook–are vast and lightning-fast influence platforms that often deal in hate and half-truths. And there’s no built-in mechanism in social networks for shutting down misinformation, no immediate sanction for spreading it.

“One of the more unnerving things to realize is that there don’t seem to be any consequences,” said Ed Wasserman, dean of the graduate school of journalism at Berkeley. “There’s no reprisal; there’s no reputational harm. Falsity has now been woven in to the fabric of what political discourse looks like.”

Facebook online fundraisers raked in $125 million for charities on Giving Tuesday. That’s nearly three times more than the $45 million that the social network helped people raise on the same day last year.

For donors, part of the lure was a huge matching program provided by both Facebook and PayPal. The companies agreed to mirror up to $7 million in contributions on a dollar-per-dollar, first-come, first served basis. The fine print: It was capped at $250,000 per nonprofit and $20,000 per donor.

If the incentive sounds like a Black Friday door buster, it disappeared just as fast. The funds became available at 8 a.m. Eastern time, and were gone within “a matter of seconds,” according to a Facebook spokesperson. At 9:05 Eastern, the company issued an update (“Wow, that was fast!…”) confirming the deal was over.

The same sort of thing happened last year. As The NonProfit Times reports: “Facebook matched $2 million in gifts with the help of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which reached its limit by 8:30 a.m. on #GivingTuesday.”

Facebook made the service free for nonprofits, ensuring that 100% of all donations reached their target. For donors vying for part of that match, however, there’s no news yet about who received it. Facebook says it will share those notifications sometime after November 29.

“Our goal is to help people support causes they care about by making it easier to fundraise on Facebook,” says Naomi Gleit, VP of Social Good at Facebook in an email to Fast Company. “It’s incredibly inspiring and humbling to see the impact our community is having for causes big and small around the world.”

“This is a man’s world,” sang James Brown. He might have been describing criticism of the past two CES gadget conventions, in which not a single woman was tapped to deliver the main keynote addresses. The two-time all-dude lineup caught the eye of critics about this time last year, including Twitter CMO Leslie Berland; then-HP CMO and now Facebook global CMO Antonio Lucio; and especially diversity-inclusion organization Gender Avenger (GA).

The pressure may have paid off. For January 2019’s event, CES’s top leadership–which, incidentally, consists entirely of women–is on target to have a well-balanced speaker lineup, both for gender and ethnic heritage. The major corporate keynote lineup currently features two women and two men, one each of European and Asian heritage. And the current list of “featured speakers” highlighting smaller events has a slight majority of women, nearly half being women of color.

“As of this date, and if this gender balance holds steady, that main stage lineup could merit a Silver GA Stamp of Approval,” announced Gender Avenger today. That’s a big switch from earlier this month, when GA founder Gina Glantz slammed a CES plan to boost diversity by encouraging tag-team keynotes with multiple executives of the featured companies.

The outstanding question is whether this time is just a lucky break. There are plenty of impressive women in tech for the smaller addresses and panel discussions. But if CES follows its traditional approach, it will continue to turn over the big keynotes to major companies with big news to announce and big budgets to invest in the event. Not many women hold those leadership slots. For next January’s show, CES was able to turn to AMD CEO Lisa Su and IBM CEO Ginni Rometty. The latter is appearing for the second time in just four CESes. It will start looking awkward if she’s on the bill yet again next year.

Even the best reproductions of paintings face the same challenge as cheap copies: Their color accuracy sucks.

After all, the pigments that the original artist used–not to mention the infinite number of color combinations created on their palette–are impossible to produce using a traditional printer with only four inks: cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. The CMYK color space is so extremely limited compared to the full color spectrum of true paintings that even the best reproduction looks like crap next to the original. Even specialized art inkjet printers, which introduce additional inks, can’t approach the vibrancy of colors found in an oil painting by Monet or Velázquez.

But at MIT, scientists Changil Kim and Mike Foshey have developed a way around this, using a method called RePaint. Using 3D printing, 10 different inks, and artificial intelligence, their technique points to a world of inexpensive, super-accurate cloned paintings.

Instead of using those four CMYK inks and traditional printing techniques, RePaint uses a combination of 10 different transparent inks, placed by a 3D printer and governed by a complex AI system that decides how to layer and mix those inks to match a painting’s original colors.

Each layer is made of billions of little dots, which are laid down using a technique called halftoning. Traditionally, halftone printing uses CYMK dots of different sizes to create images that appear to have millions of colors. However, when you combine the 3D stacking of transparent colors with the halftoning method, the color gamut is much wider than CMYK, and the results are incredibly vibrant and accurate. The MIT team calls their new method “contoning,” and according to their tests, it’s “more than four times more accurate than state-of-the-art physical models at creating the exact color shades for different artworks.”

RePaint–which will be presented at the computer graphics conference ACM SIGGRAPH Asia next week–is accurate, but right now the AI and layering method is too time-consuming, limiting the reproductions to the size of a business card. The system also can’t reproduce some very special, ultra-saturated colors like cobalt blue, because the current 3D printing ink catalog is too limited.

However, the scientists are confident they will be able to fix these two problems in the future, when larger and faster 3D printers become available and new inks are developed. Foshey says that their technology will enable everyone to enjoy inexpensive and accurate art reproductions; in a press release, the team observes that RePaint could help museums by allowing curators to swap out originals for reproductions, protecting them from wear and tear, or producing color accurate prints, postcards, and replicas for sale.

“The value of fine art has rapidly increased in recent years, so there’s an increased tendency for it to be locked up in warehouses away from the public eye,” Foshey comments in a statement. “We’re building the technology to reverse this trend, and to create inexpensive and accurate reproductions that can be enjoyed by all.”

In other words: Brace yourself for even more Starry Night replicas.

Most venture capitalists hold their cards close to their chest. Not so with Bloomberg Beta, the media giant’s investment arm, which focuses on early-stage startups. The firm put its entire operating manual online–and not on some glossy website either, but on GitHub, the utilitarian platform for open-source software code.

In those files, you can find everything from the sizes of the checks Beta writes (it has $150 million to invest), to the criteria it uses to assess startups, to how it supports founders once a deal is done. And now, just this week, it’s taken the extraordinary step of publishing the exact documents it uses when closing a deal.

All of this is practically unheard of in an industry that jealously guards its privacy. At first, Beta, which launched in 2013 and is entirely backed by the Bloomberg parent company, was just looking for a way to stand out in a crowded field dominated by rockstar players. But the firm found that going open kimono has had material benefits.

For one, it’s cut down on the noise–the firm gets fewer pitches from startups that aren’t a fit, since the documents specify exactly what it invests in (companies focused on the future of work). Surprisingly, many VCs don’t even make that information public. The frankness has also attracted some founders specifically because of the values expressed in the documents. Among the nearly 100 companies now in Beta’s portfolio are big names like Codecademy, Homebrew, and Scout.fm.

Opacity in venture capital stems partly from the hush-hush attitudes of the financial industry. “These are private investment vehicles,” said Roy Bahat, the head of Bloomberg Beta and one of Fast Company’sMost Creative People. “They’re part of a class of investment that don’t talk about themselves that much.”

But the world is changing, and many businesses are shifting toward more transparency. “You can’t manufacture a brand anymore,” Bahat said. “If your brand is going to reveal who you really are, the fastest shortcut to that is to be as transparent as possible.”

For Beta, that means laying out shortcomings as well as aspirations. The firm values diversity and inclusion, but it hasn’t yet invested in as many underrepresented founders as it’d hoped. Its manual shares both its numbers (only 17% of its portfolio companies include a female founder), as well as its strategies for improving that performance (such as office hours solely for underrepresented founders and data-driven strategies to identify people likely to start a company).

Bahat is a natural innovator–Fast Company previously profiled his unorthodox hiring strategy at IGN. And he’s one of the most candid people you’ll ever meet (check out his LinkedIn profile). But the decision to put everything out in the open wasn’t initially comfortable for everyone at Beta. There are some distinct downsides. “The more transparent you are, the harder it is to use negotiating leverage,” Bahat said.

But Bahat said Beta is trading that for something more valuable: trust with founders, which comes from the fact, Bahat said, that “you’re willing to tell somebody the things that are supposed to be the secrets.”

Plus, just as going open source improves software, Bahat said that making Beta’s manual public–and putting it on GitHub where people can, and do, post comments–is making Beta better. “Starting a company is a trade,” Bahat said. “Tradecraft is all about getting a lot of little decisions right.”

Over time, though, going open kimono has simply become second nature. “It’s like any other muscle,” Bahat said. “It’s really hard at first, and unnatural. And then, the more you do it, the easier it gets.”

In today’s work environment, you need more from an employee than just strong technical skills. Sure, software engineers need to be familiar with the appropriate programming language, and data analysts need to know their way around a spreadsheet. But these things alone won’t make them effective. They need to know how to think outside the box.

But how do you cultivate creativity, and keep it growing among your new hires? After all, good ideas don’t just come out of thin air. Here are some practices that you might want to try.

1) Explain your thinking style

Not everyone will think the way you do–and when you work with people, you need to be clear about how everyone works. If you are a backward thinker, you begin at the end and work backward to the beginning. You define your goal clearly and you focus on that exact goal and move forward in well-defined steps.

If you are a forward thinker, on the other hand, you begin with a rough idea, and you move forward by reacting and correcting until you arrive with something concrete.

You’ll avoid frustration when you explain how you think. I once hired a talented young researcher. Every time she brought in her work, I responded by asking her to look at the problem another way. After her third presentation, she said to me, “I can’t work with you anymore. You don’t know what you want. I’m quitting.”

That was a wake-up call for me. From that point on, I make sure to explain my thinking style to everyone that I work with–and that meant going back and forth until we get there. When I do this, I create a platform for creative collaborations–by enabling others to work in a way that suits their thinking style, while making sure that they understand mine.

2) Make sure to challenge different creative muscles

In Lateral Thinking—a book about unleashing creativity–physician and psychologist Edward De Bono likened creativity to pouring hot wax into a block of wax. The first time you pour, you create a new hole–the second time you pour, your wax goes into the same hole, only deeper.

Sometimes it takes experimentation to elicit creativity, and that means pouring new holes into the wax. Don’t just ask your new hires to come up with three versions of a marketing plan. Ask for a strategic roadmap or ideas on making your website user-friendly. This gives your new hires a chance to exercise a different creative muscle, and they can learn what it takes for them to come up with a great idea.

3) Focus on what’s missing, not what’s wrong

When you watch yourself on video, you will most likely fixate on a particular flaw. You may obsess about how your smile seems crooked, how often you blink, how many “ahs” and “ers” you say in a minute. So what happens as a result of this kind of analysis? You pause, you clamp your jaws, you pop your eyes open, you have long, empty pauses. Focusing on flaws doesn’t work.

You have to look instead at what’s missing. If you speak with too many “ahs” and “ers” what’s missing is a connection between your speaking and your breathing, not that you’re stopping too much. You need to adopt the same kind of mind-set with your team’s creativity. Don’t focus on what they’re doing wrong. Instead, give them ideas on what they can do.

Whether you’re giving feedback or delivering a message, you have to approach it in a more–not less– perspective. As one of my clients explained, “When my boss asked us how we were going to cut costs, my colleagues presented their cost-cutting plans. I told him how I was going to sell more.” That client is one of his company’s top sales leaders.

4) Give feedback at a concept level

When you’re giving feedback to a new hire, you have to leave room for them to solve the problem. For example, suppose you walked into a room that had a fireplace at one end and two chairs against the back wall. When you say, “That’s ridiculous. Why don’t you move your chairs closer to the fire?” you’re jumping into solution mode.

Supposing instead you said, “I’d like you to consider how to optimize the experience of being in this room.” Now you’re challenging someone to think about what to do, and empowering them to come up with their own solutions. Your team might find the answers from the get-go, and you might need to tell them so. That’s okay, as long as you give them the space to be creators and problem solvers, not just doers.

5) Expect mistakes

Years ago, I was working with a leader from Toyota. He was talking about a discussion he’d had with a visitor from Ford, “I told him we have a system when employees notice a problem, they stop the line. We had 47 stops last month.” The Ford leader was impressed with the Andon process and adopted it right away. Then he came back a month later and proudly announced to my client, “We only had seven problems last month.”

My Toyota client explained that he’d missed the point. When you focus too much on avoiding mistakes, you’re actually blocking your creativity because you operate from the position of fear. You need to think of mistakes as a chance to fine-tune and improve the process. After all, creativity often comes from trial and error and you need to give your team the psychological space to do that.

Creativity doesn’t happen in a linear fashion. Often times, it requires trying different things before landing on something that works. Expect the same when it comes to your new hires. Be patient with the process, and you might just end up with something amazing.

When customers buy a Tesla vehicle in China they get a free perk–government surveillance. That’s according to a new report from the AP, which reveals that the Chinese government requires all electric vehicle manufacturers in the country–not just Tesla, but BMW, Ford, Volkswagen, GM, a total of 200–to report a shocking amount of data on vehicles to the government. Specifically, they must report 61 data points, including the exact location of the vehicle, to local government monitoring centers, where a click of a button reveals location and vehicle data, including make and model, mileage, and battery charge.

Per the AP, Chinese officials claim the data is used for analytics to improve public safety, plan infrastructure, industrial development, and to prevent fraud in subsidy programs. However, the data could be used as another means of government surveillance used to track the movements of citizens. While the carmakers say they are sending the data to comply with local laws, which apply only to alternative-energy vehicles, it’s usually done without car owners’ knowledge or consent.

Data also flows to a national monitoring center for new energy vehicles run by the Beijing Institute of Technology, which pulls information from more than 1.1 million vehicles across the country, according to the National Big Data Alliance of New Energy Vehicles, the AP reports.

China has been a booming customer for electric cars, and the government has set ambitious targets for electric vehicle sales in the country, striving for 20% of total sales by 2025. While it’s certainly good for the planet, in light of this report, it’s not hard to imagine a more nefarious reason for the government’s push.

We reached out to Tesla for comment and will update if we hear back.

Thanks to customers with apparently dirty habits, Starbucks has to start filtering pornography from the free public Wi-Fi in its U.S. stores, the company told the Verge.

Aside from the obvious question of who watches porn in a Starbucks (is it the same people who like their juniper lattes?), the other question is: Seriously, who the hell is watching porn in a Starbucks?!

While watching porn in a Starbucks has always been forbidden, the company didn’t have the technological means to enforce the ban until now. “We have identified a solution to prevent this content from being viewed within our stores and we will begin introducing it to our US locations in 2019,” the company told the Verge in an emailed statement.

The move comes after an anti-porn activist group called Enough is Enough targeted the company as part of its ongoing Porn Free WiFi campaign. Earlier this week, the group pointed out that Starbucks “cares more about providing paper straws to protect the environment than protecting kids and patrons on its public WiFi.” Starbucks had promised to begin filtering porn back in 2016 but didn’t execute the plan until now.

Scotty McLennan uses an iceberg metaphor when explaining the rationale for his Stanford Graduate School of Business course Global Business: Unspoken Rules of the Game.

When doing business around the world, learning and honoring the way people in other countries greet one another, or give gifts, or even gesture, drink, and speak is just the tip of a cultural iceberg. But understanding the values that lie beneath those behaviors—the attitudes, beliefs, ideologies, and philosophical or spiritual perspectives—can enable you to negotiate the iceberg rather than plow into it.

“We see things above the surface that look like business etiquette, but which underneath are really driven by some centuries-old cultural ethos. And under that there’s this fundamental philosophical and religious environment that something like Confucianism provides in China, or Protestantism provides in the United States, or Islam provides in the United Arab Emirates,” says McLennan, who teaches about the moral and spiritual aspects of business leadership. “To me it’s rather obvious, but it’s not understood by many people.”

McLennan received both his law degree and his master’s in theology from Harvard in 1975, the same year he was admitted to the Massachusetts Bar and ordained as a Unitarian Universalist minister. He was the dean for religious life at Stanford from 2001 to 2014 and the chaplain at Tufts University from 1984 until 2000. His books include Finding Your Religion: When the Faith You Grew Up with Has Lost Its Meaning and Jesus Was a Liberal: Reclaiming Christianity for All.

Worth noting: He also was Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau’s roommate while an undergraduate at Yale and is the model for the minister character, the Rev. Scot Sloan, in Trudeau’s Pulitzer Prize-winning comic strip.

Why is it important to understand underlying values and spiritual perspectives during global business interactions?

Scotty McLennan: As our students go out around the world—one day they’re in China, the next day they’re in Brazil, the next day they’re in the UAE—the question becomes: How do you penetrate those worlds? Obviously, they need to have local colleagues they can work with, but they also need to understand that there is, in fact, this cultural iceberg.

Can you cite a specific example of how that might play out in the real world?

SM: Mexican managers doing business in the U.S. often are quite surprised by a kind of coldness on the part of American managers. For Mexicans it’s very relationship-oriented, getting to know somebody personally, while for U.S. managers it’s much more, “Let’s get down to business.” And, “We need to keep our business and personal lives separate.” Americans have a more individualistic and competitive spirit, a Protestant ethic. Mexican managers have a Catholic ethic. Now these are both Christian subdivisions, but they have a very different orientation. To Mexicans, Americans seem to be clock-obsessed and schedule-oriented and sometimes just downright unfriendly. But if American business people go to Mexico and don’t take the time to establish strong personal relationships, they don’t do as well.

Can you cite an example from outside North America?

SM: Americans sometimes see the Chinese as nepotistic. They seem to be operating too closely with their relatives and families, giving advantages to their families. But from the Chinese perspective, it’s immoral not to prioritize your family members and people who are part of your circle. If you can understand the Confucian world and how it’s structured in relation to hierarchy and leadership, you get a much better understanding of how to do business in China, just as they try to understand the arms-length and rules-based approach of Americans.

Related: How a Middle East startup took on Uber–and won

Can you name a global company that’s navigating well around the icebergs?

SM: Say you’re Emirates airline in the UAE and you want to buy new airplanes. Do you use Islamic finance instruments, which are not interest bearing, or do you use traditional Western finance? There’s a whole world of Islamic finance that structures loans in a way that do not bear interest. They’re workarounds, but from an Islamic point of view they’re consistent with Koranic principles that do not allow usury and which regard traditional Western loans as usurious. So, when Emirates uses Islamic finance methodology, does that help them? I think it does. They still use Western interest to some extent, but I think by Emirates taking seriously and struggling with the financial and cultural realities of Islamic finance, that can make a positive difference in their business success.

Are most people aware how such underlying cultural values affect their behavior?

SM: Any entrepreneur, regardless of which country or culture they come from, has a worldview that has been learned by living in a culture, by being brought up by their parents, by going to schools and mosques and temples and churches, and by the way their business environment has been structured. A lot of that is often unknown to them and a surprise when they begin to work internationally and realize that other worldviews are quite different. Your own perspective and values are going to be operative whether you know it or not, so it really behooves you to know what those are.

How do you teach that kind of awareness?

SM: I often use a framework called the Potter Box, which is a model that Harvard ethicist Ralph Potter put together for making ethical decisions. It explains that any decision has four operative factors: facts, loyalties, values, and worldview. Those four quadrants are always operative, but the one we work with most easily is facts. We’re less conscious of all the stakeholders our decisions may affect. We’re also probably unaware of the ethical reasoning, which is always used in any decision making. And then behind all of it is a worldview that I describe as the bottom of that cultural iceberg. That worldview often dictates which mode of ethical reasoning you use and which loyalties you’re going to prioritize. It also skews your view of the facts. Values are very much at the core of what an entrepreneur does as he or she sets out to create a new product or service. But a lot of it can be missed. It’s unconscious and unspoken.

Related: The “American style” of business speaking

You’ve talked about basketball coach Phil Jackson as someone who brought a Zen Buddhist ethos into the world of sports. Are there examples from the world of business where you think a similar approach succeeded?

SM: Jeff Weiner, the CEO of LinkedIn, is a good example. He grew up Jewish, became increasingly agnostic, but then became quite enamored of the Dalai Lama in terms of how to live a joyful and fulfilled life. He has been able to develop an understanding of compassionate business, which he tries to apply in his life and train his employees to use. It’s quite different from what other managers do. His goal is to always keep in the forefront the importance of respect for other people, whether they be colleagues, employees, suppliers, or customers, and to use Buddhist notions of mindfulness. To be fully present in a situation, to understand what’s going on the room, you have to be present to yourself. And then he has a vision of compassion that he thinks LinkedIn can provide worldwide. That creates a different feel for that company.

How can students adapt to inevitable cultural changes?

SM: Literature can help people truly feel their way into another culture. Read good novels and short stories and plays by great authors from those cultures to help you see that culture lived out through families and political structures. The reality is that, at the basic value level, things don’t change that quickly. Even books from the 1950s or ’60s can be helpful.

In 2013 you tweeted a quote: “We can start a culture of peace and tolerance and I believe we need it more than ever before.” How do you feel about that message in 2018?

SM: I’m concerned now about the level of divisiveness we have in American society, but it’s also a worldwide phenomenon. We’re not doing a good job of finding common values anymore that we all hold and can be clear about. In the U.S., we say in the Pledge of Allegiance that we’re all one nation, indivisible, and care about liberty and justice for all, but it’s incredible to me how divisive we have become and how much we’ve destroyed the basic institutions that support those values. So, we need tolerance more than ever, so we can talk across differences to find the common values that are fundamental to who we are.

This article was originally published on Stanford Business and is republished here with permission.