First, some good news: Job flexibility is more widespread than you think. Now for the bad news: Most employers don’t shout their flex-time offerings from the rooftops, so many employees don’t take advantage of them. But because your company’s policies might not be clearly spelled out, you may be able to build some more flexibility into your schedule on your own, then ask permission—or forgiveness—later.

Flextime’s Many (Hidden) Forms

Whether you admit it or not, work-life balance is probably pretty important to you. Employers know it’s important, too. Just take a look at the careers websites of major employers. You’ll often see photos of smiling employees, mission statements, and descriptions of what the company’s workplace culture is like.

But what’s typically missing is actual detail about the policies that make that culture what it is. No prospective hire can just hop on over to an employer’s website and find out whether they’d be able to leave at 4:30 p.m. two days a week to go to yoga class, or even at a consistent hour that lets them pick their kid up before daycare closes.

That doesn’t mean those options don’t exist. According to HR professionals surveyed by the Society for Human Resources Management, 56% of employers offered some type of flexible working arrangement in 2016. But when we crowdsource information about work-life balance and job flexibility on Fairygodboss, the employer review platform for women that I cofounded, employees more commonly say that their companies have flexible work cultures or that they’ve struck informal arrangements with their managers.

After all, job flexibility takes many forms. There are part-time jobs, remote roles, and formally compressed workweeks (where you put in 40 hours between Monday and Thursday), not to mention all those times you might just ask your boss, “Hey, could I work from home tomorrow?”

Related: These Work-Life Balance Strategies Help In Even The Most Demanding Jobs

And indeed, if you want a more flexible schedule, you certainly can ask for it. But many people worry about the stigma of doing so. Some even argue that employers should offer flexibility to everyone in order to preempt that fear. Instead, you might be able to take matters into your own hands. Here are a few questions to ask yourself before determining whether that’s the right move.

What’s The Worst That Can Happen?

There’s an old adage that it’s better to seek forgiveness than to ask permission. This is something I often hear women in our community suggest to each other when it comes to taking an afternoon off or leaving the office early. On Fairygodboss, one user recently advised other women thinking of working at Vistaprint, the custom printing company, to take that approach:

My two pieces of advice:

1. Don’t apologize for having responsibilities outside of work. Get your work done, be flexible (sometimes work at night or a few hours on a weekend to get your work done), but don’t apologize when you have to leave at 5 to pick up your kid.

2. Don’t overexplain! “I need to leave because my kids are xyz . . . ” Just do it, your work will show your dedication and you will be recognized for it.

Related:The Fastest-Growing Job Categories For Flexible Work May Surprise You 

Of course, this isn’t always a realistic option for many rank-and-file employees, especially those who work on an hourly shift basis. Plus, this advice might be better for ducking out early occasionally than for working part-time or at home on a weekly basis.

But even then, you may have more leeway than you think. If what you’re looking for day-to-day is simply the flexibility to leave early to run an errand, then it may actually be overkill to have a conversation with your boss beforehand. Try walking out the door early or coming in later, and see what happens first. Then chat about it later if you need to.

Is Your Boss The Ultimate Decision Maker?

When it comes to flex time, your boss may or may not have the final say. Sometimes there’s a departmental or company-wide policy that you can take advantage of without your manager having to make a judgment call. But the difference between an official and unofficial policy here is really important—even if you have an understanding manager who grants your request to work from home on Fridays.

I’ve heard of many scenarios where someone is happy to be granted a “nudge-nudge, wink-wink” type of flexibility that isn’t officially sanctioned. While that works fine for a while, those agreements tend to be vulnerable if your boss leaves or gets promoted. In fact, many women tell us at Fairygodboss that they start looking for a new job when their managers change and they suddenly lose their flexibility.

Will Merely Asking Hurt You?

Sometimes just inquiring about flexibility can be a risk, whether or not you actually get it. If you’re worried that might be the case—unfair as it may be—how can you get the information you need without the negative consequences?

You may reach a point where you need quite a lot of flexibility and fear your current employer might not be able to offer it to you. In these cases, your first stop should always be the HR department, where you can ask somebody about the general policies in place. It’s also smart to talk to other colleagues on-on-one whom you’ve seen work flexibly. This way you may be able to protect yourself from any fallout if your boss turns down your request and questions your commitment to your work.

No matter what, keep in mind that flexible work can take many forms. While it’s still a sensitive topic in some workplaces, you might have more leeway to tailor how—and determine whom—you ask, depending on what arrangement you want. Or possibly just skip the conversation altogether.

Georgene Huang is CEO and cofounder of Fairygodboss, a leading career community featuring anonymous job reviews for women, by women. She’s obsessed with understanding how to improve the workplace for women.

Not long ago, one of my team members showed up to our one-on-one check-in with an admirably thorough list. It included what they were working on, the areas where they felt blocked, and a few questions that they had for me. We had a productive chat and both left feeling energized, but I later realized something was missing.

There was one very important question they didn’t ask me: “Which items on my list of tasks and projects are the most important?”

Not Sure What To Focus On? Just Ask Your Manager

Most talented people at work cover more surface area than their managers are aware of. And that’s often because they pick the right things to prioritize in the first place. But that doesn’t mean they always do it alone. A few years into my career, I realized that figuring out what to focus on at work wasn’t a complicated process —I just needed to ask.

Still, most employees tend to think of prioritizing their workloads as a solo affair. That’s one reason why time management is so often a major burden. But you work on a team, so why not run your individual to-do list past the person who heads up that team? Give it a try; chances are your manager won’t see it as an imposition.

Related:Five Things I’ve Learned As A New Manager At Google

Once I clued into this, I continued to bring a list of everything I was working on to my one-on-one meetings with my manager, but I also added a question into the mix every week: If I have five things on my to-do list but can only do three of them well in the time I’ve got, which three should they be? These simple requests for my manager’s input helped me make sure we both agreed on what I should focus on, and over time, I got a lot better at focusing on the right things.

I like to think of these as “forced alignment” conversations. The whole point is for managers and employees to get on the same page about what’s most important to the growth of the business and what individual team members are doing to advance it.

But these conversations do something else that’s equally important—they establish sustainable boundaries for employees. Even good managers are often tempted to pile tasks on their best team members. After all, there’s always more work that needs to be done than people to do it, and it’s natural to look to high-capacity, ambitious people to lead the most important tasks. But this can quickly get out of hand.

It can be difficult for people to say no to work—especially for top performers and people early in their careers. After all, they want all the opportunities they can get! The reality, though, is that even the most talented employees have limited resources. What’s more, not everything is equally important. The most effective managers know this. That’s why they’re willing to help their team members decide what their priorities should be.

Making Prioritizing A Team Sport

Of course, this is a two-way street. If you ask your manager, “Could you help me decide which items on my list are the most important?” they can respond in one of two ways: They can either prioritize your to-dos just like you’ve asked, or they can tell you that they think tackling the whole list is a reasonable expectation.

Related: How To Write To-Do Lists That Make You Happier At Work

Either way, this gives you the information you need to prioritize what’s most important, and it allows for a more open discussion about time management. You can agree on a longer timeline for one of your to-do list items, for instance, without leaving doubt in your manager’s mind that you question its value. This is a crucial trap to avoid; you never want your manager to interpret a missed deadline as a sign of apathy, and this simple conversation can help you sidestep that risk.

But more often than not, it cuts the other way. Whenever my direct reports come to me with to-do lists that I think are unreasonably long, I generally start a forced alignment conversation in order to help them narrow down, even if they don’t ask for that. As an employee, it’s your job to look out for your own priorities and boundaries. But it’s the job of managers to look out for their team members’ priorities, too—especially if your employees aren’t always confident in pushing back.

So next time you feel like your to-do list is overwhelming, try running it past your manager and asking what you should prioritize. And don’t just do it once—make it a regular part of your one-on-one meetings. These conversations aren’t investments just in your own career growth, but in the growth of your whole organization. Good businesses prioritize, but only because they have good employees who know how to do the same.

Kieran Snyder is the CEO and cofounder of Textio, an augmented writing platform that finds patterns in job posts and outcomes data.

This week, Domino’s announced that it has now integrated IFTTT into its Pizza Tracker tech, to connect your pizza order to your smart home. So now it can turn on the porch lights when your pizza is out for delivery, or make sure your smart TV has the right game on or fired up Netflix as the pizza arrives. Trivial? Yes. Unnecessary? Of course. Cool? Pretty much.

The pizza chain has long established its tech bonafides, with the Pizza Tracker back in 2008, to now through its Anyware platform, giving us the ability to order pizza through everything from Google Home and Facebook Messenger, to Ford Sync or a pizza emoji.

Kelly McCormick, creative director at Domino’s agency Crispin Porter+Bogusky (CP+B), says that while the brand is always looking for ways to bring new ideas to life, it also wanted to re-examine existing tools, to see how they could be better. That’s when they landed on the Pizza Tracker, which has been giving people the ability to track their pizza order online from preparation to delivery.

“How could we build on it, open it up, make it even more useful?” says McCormick. “That led us to IFTTT, which allows customers to extend the Tracker’s capabilities to real-world objects and environments.”

While it is a bit gimmicky, the IFTTT tool is still something that people can have fun with, which is a consistent value in much of Domino’s innovations across its Anyware platform. How do they evaluate ideas in terms of what people want, what will surprise them, and what’s a realistic project to take on?

“Many times, those three things may, in fact, be at odds,” says McCormick. “What people think they want might actually not surprise them. Sometimes, we believe in making something that people never knew they might want. It’s definitely on an idea-by-idea basis, but we have to weigh desire, cultural trends, timeliness, utility, etc. In terms of what’s realistic, we really, truly believe our collective team defines “realistic” differently from most other brands. We make sure everything we put out there creates a great or better experience for the Domino’s fan when it comes to ordering, getting and enjoying Domino’s pizza.”

McCormick’s fellow CP+B creative director D’Arcy O’Neill says the brand’s focus on innovation is primarily about their experience before getting the pizza in their hands.

“That means reinventing ordering, waiting and delivery,” says O’Neill. “With IFTTT we’re working on creating more of an experience around the pizza, and also invite our customers in a bit closer to help create and define that experience.”

You did it–you graduated, secured your first job, and are heading into the next chapter of your life. As you embark into the working world, you probably feel nervous and excited about your first day at work. It’s normal to feel that way–but as you ease into your new routine, you might find that some of the things you did while a student, or at your part-time job or internship, aren’t exactly welcomed in your brand new, shiny office.

Is it okay to wear jeans to work? Is your “Work Mode” Spotify playlist appropriate for the office? Is chewing gum at work a cool or rude thing to do?

Related:Four Workplace Stereotypes Millennials (Like Me) Thoroughly Resent

If you’re worried about how to behave at work as the new employee, we spoke with Business etiquette expert and founder of the Protocol School of Palm Beach Jacqueline Whitmore to determine the top five office rules every new graduate needs to know.

1. Music Is Okay, If It’s Not Distracting

Many people love to listen to music while they work. For some, it can make them more creative or help them focus; but for others, music can be distracting or deter them from productivity.

“If you’re in a main space where everyone works, I would say no. But if you’re in a private office, I would say yes,” explains Jacqueline. “If you can wear headphones without it making you less productive you can do so, but it also depends on your position and level of focus. If your job is to be aware of what’s going on around you, such as an office manager or assistant position, then you shouldn’t be listening to music at work.”

2. Avoid Personal, Political And Religious Conversations

Want to know what you shouldn’t talk about at work with your coworkers? Gossip about coworkers, sex, politics, and money are the four topics Jacqueline says you absolutely should avoid discussing at work.

“If you’re talking about the budget for your department, that’s different,” she says. “But if you’re asking questions about how much someone’s car cost or what they bought over the weekend, that’s not appropriate.”

3. If You’re Going To Snack, Do So Quietly

Chewing gum is not inappropriate at work–unless you’re doing it loudly, with your mouth open and are popping bubbles in your coworkers’ faces. If you’re quietly chewing a piece of gum after lunch or like a minty-fresh pick up in the afternoon, you’re not going to get fired for doing so. But, it’s the loud chewing (or sticking of gum under the desk at work) that’s going to get you called into the principal–er, boss’s–office.

“The break room is for eating, so it’s having snacks at your desk that is taboo,” notes Jacqueline. “Avoid anything that is too crunchy and noisy or has a potent smell to it. Any kind of messy eating at your desk is just not a good image. However, everyone does eat at their desk, so I would just make sure the food isn’t overly pungent and be quiet. And of course–don’t take calls with food in your mouth.”

4. Two Drinks Max At Work-Related Social Events

Every now and then, your office might throw a party or host a “happy hour” at the end of the day. While it can be fun to relax with your coworkers over a beer in the office, you want to make sure you avoid drinking too much, especially as a new member of the team.

While Jacqueline notes it can depend on your tolerance level, she says two drinks is the maximum you want to have at a work function to avoid getting intoxicated or impaired in front of your coworkers.

5. Be Respectful And Kind

What’s the number one rule for behaving at work? “Treat others the way you want to be treated,” says Jacqueline.

It’s something your parents might have told you over and over again as a kid, but it still holds true because it’s the best way to be a decent person, especially inside an office. If you wouldn’t want someone yelling at you in front of your coworkers, don’t do the same to them. If you wouldn’t want people to be gossiping about your divorce or weight gain, don’t talk that way about others.

At the end of the day, you have come back and face your coworkers again tomorrow–so treat them with respect, be kind, and before you make rude comments or jokes at the expense of a co-worker, think about how it would make you feel.

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

Nowadays, students looking to go to college complete almost the entire application process online: finding schools, sending in application forms and essays, and applying for financial aid, all with the click of a mouse or tap of a screen.

For many students, that’s made the process substantially easier. No more thumbing through encyclopedia-size college guides to figure out where to apply, and no more runs to the post office to meet mailing deadlines. By fall 2014, colleges and universities received 94% of their applications online, up from 68% in 2007 and 49% in 2005, according to the National Association for College Admission Counseling (the NACAC).

But between getting into college and figuring out how to pay for it, a strictly online application process can become an additional challenge for teens who have limited financial means and minimal access to the internet. Students whose application fees are waived due to family incomes often end up only applying to a single college. Meanwhile, the average American teen applies to between four and six, according to Annie Reznik, executive director of the Coalition for Access, Affordability, and Success, a group of more than 90 colleges including Harvard, Princeton, Penn State, and the University of Arizona working to improve application success.

“This digital divide is essentially one more barrier that low-income students face,” says David Hawkins, NACAC’s executive director for educational content and policy.

That’s pushed colleges and education nonprofits to find ways to help students use the computer access they do have more efficiently and take advantage of the digital tools at their disposal, particularly smartphones.

Bridging The Digital Divide

A decade ago, research by Kristan Venegas, now professor of clinical education at the University of Southern California, found students without home internet struggling to piece together access to computers at school, friends’ houses, and internet cafes. In more recent research, she’s found that similar issues continue to affect students today, with many schools still not providing computer lab space devoted to college applications.

“The main themes are that there’s an increased reliance on using internet interfaces in order to apply for college, but there hasn’t been a significant change in terms of access to using printer-and-internet-enabled computers for college-going in schools,” she says.

Some things have improved, like more educational institutions now provide students with email addresses—one less thing they need to set up before beginning to apply. But they still need to be resourceful just to find a place to fill out their applications. That can mean applying to fewer schools or only to safe, local choices where friends are applying and the process is more familiar, Venegas says.

“Libraries have computers, but there’s a 30-minute limit,” she says. “Imagine having to fill out your college application in a 30-minute window.”

Once students are admitted to school, those without home internet may still struggle to meet deadlines to file additional forms for financial aid, housing, or course selection.

Many students do have smartphones, but depending on their data plans, they might still need to find public Wi-Fi to get online, Venegas says. And not all college and scholarships sites are optimized for viewing on smaller devices. Writing essays on a 5-inch screen can be effectively impossible.

But cellphones can also provide avenues for educational organizations to connect with prospective students. The College Board sends paper mailings to students, advising them on pulling together documents like tax returns and filling out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, a form necessary to apply for most need-based financial aid. Applicants can also text with human College Board advisers who can answer questions and help with the process.

“Some students might just ask, ‘What’s the deadline for the school that I’m applying to?” says Cassandra Larson, executive director of the College Board’s Access to Opportunity Department. “Some of them might get into quite deep questions about how to complete sections of the FAFSA based on their situation: ‘I live with one parent and not the other; whose tax information do I use?’”

The financial aid process, with its unfamiliar jargon and complex, high-stakes forms, can be a vexing issue for many students. Cecilia Rios-Aguilar, the director of the University of California, Los Angeles’ Higher Education Research Institute, is involved in a study of how access to a Facebook-based community app affects student performance at a group of community colleges. People who used the app had significantly higher GPAs, she says, but the researchers found that one of the most important uses of the app was finding guidance while applying for aid.

“We just analyzed the exchanges and we noticed that students needed a lot of procedural help and knowledge in how to navigate the financial aid process,” she says.

Making The Application Process More Centralized

The College Board is also experimenting with texts offering information about applying for aid and notifications for upcoming deadlines. The group also provides apps and mobile-friendly websites to aid in the college search, along with a mailed “starter list” of colleges students might want to take a look at.

“It’s based on where students like them from a similar zip code and test score successfully graduate from college,” says Larson. “One of the things that can be challenging on a smartphone is there is thousands of schools to choose from.”

The Common Application, a group of almost 700 colleges that accept a shared application form, also provides its own smartphone app called onTrack, which lets students track application deadlines and see what materials they still need to submit to participating colleges. The group is also adding integration with Google Drive, which is intended to help students upload application materials easily even if they don’t always work on the same computer.

“We know that many school districts have adopted Google Docs and Google Drive to enable their students and teachers to create, collaborate, and access shared documents from any internet connected device,” a spokesperson told Fast Company via email. “We also recognize that some students do not always have personal computers at home but use Google Drive on school or library computers to store their documents. We want to meet students where they are.”

The Coalition for Access, Affordability and Success, which offers its own shared application that’s accepted by its group of more than 90 schools, also includes what it calls a digital “locker,” which students can use to gather documents for applications. Reznik says the application is mobile-friendly enough for smartphones to handle applications, but many students will naturally do tasks like writing essays on computers in school or elsewhere, and the locker lets them save their work for later use.

The program also makes it easy for students to find out if they qualify for fee waivers by answering a few yes-or-no questions. When the University of Florida instituted the Coalition’s application, the number of waiver-eligible applicants grew substantially, Reznik says.

“They felt like they were serving the students of Florida better than ever before,” she says.

On the afternoon of April 30, in front of a crowd of over 100 people at the Dairy Arts Center in Boulder, Colorado, Mike Butler, the public safety chief of the nearby town of Longmont stood up and went to the microphone.

This is what he said:

Do you know who I am? Do you? Do you know who I am? Well, think before you say anything because of course, you don’t know who I am. You don’t know me. And yet all kinds of people, when they find out I was born in Mexico, they act like I’m a criminal. I am not a criminal. I am not a criminal!

I am not here to steal money or take anyone’s life for no reason. I am here to help, help anyone who needs my help. That is why I was born. Whether that be in Mexico or the U.S., I was born to help. That is simply who I am. There are so many people dying of hunger, living on the streets with no help, and yet people think I’m here so I can have a lot of kids and get food stamps without paying any taxes or so I can get a check from the government and spend it all on myself.

Butler was speaking from a monologue by Hugo Juarez, an undocumented immigrant who came to the U.S. from Mexico when he was 12 years old. Juarez wrote the monologue for Do You Know Who I Am? a production run through the Boulder-based Motus Theater and made up of a series of true stories written and performed by local undocumented immigrants. Kirsten Wilson, the artistic director of Motus Theater, tells Fast Company that she first approached local immigrants-rights groups to work with a handful to narrativize and perform their experiences in 2013. For the past three years, she says, Motus has toured Do You Know Who I Am? and reached 4,000 people in a state where the population of undocumented immigrants hovers around 164,000–the 14th highest in the U.S.

So for the post-election iteration of Do You Know Who I Am? Motus Theater went straight to the heart of the issue and enlisted local law enforcement to read out the immigrants’ monologues. Wilson began by approaching Stan Garnett, the district attorney for Boulder County, who had long been active in supporting immigrant safety and who agreed to help reach out to other law enforcement leaders, as did Boulder County Sheriff Joe Pelle. Two police chiefs initially refused, Wilson says, but changed their mind after talking with Wilson, Garnett, and Pelle. The law enforcement officials involved, Wilson says, saw the performance as a way to “get a message out to the immigrant community that they are not working with [Immigration and Customs Enforcement].”

The six original undocumented performers of Do You Know Who I Am? Wilson says, “are part of a group who have changed the conversation around immigration nationally by being willing to come forward and tell their story.” They had never before heard their experiences shared by someone else, but “they thought that this was a really important time to–if we’re using police lingo–call for backup,” Wilson says.

In reading out the stories of the undocumented immigrants, the law enforcement officials, Wilson says, are not speaking for them. Instead, Victor Galvan, one of the original performers and an organizer with the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition, says that speaking someone else’s narrative serves to highlight the similarities across two people’s seemingly vastly different experiences. “The reason why our monologues are so relatable is because they touch on things that are ingrained in us as people,” Galvan says. “We talk about letting down our parents, losing grandparents. We talk about work and school and the everyday things that make us human.”

Yet the experience of inhabiting the perspective of an undocumented person drove home the reality of living in our current hostile climate, even to already sympathetic officers. When Pelle was contacted several months ago about participating in the Motus production, he took on the story of Juan Juarez, a young man who came to Colorado when he was 14. Despite having gone through school in Colorado, “due to the current political climate and immigration priorities, he’s afraid,” Pelle tells Fast Company. Reading Juarez’s story, Pelle says he was struck by how, despite what he describes as decades of work to foster trust within the local Latino community, through working on pro-immigrants-rights policy to organizing toy drives, the heightened tensions around immigration were undermining those efforts. “People want nothing to do with cops, they have no reason to trust us,” Pelle says.

“The police chiefs are now the holder of these stories, in a way,” Wilson says. “And that comes with a responsibility for them.”

While the production of Do You Know Who I Am? pulled from the Boulder community, Galvan says it’s an exercise that can and should take root in communities across the U.S.–and could perhaps reach and influence officers not as open-minded as those who originally volunteered to participate in the production. “On an individual basis, this is the work that needs to happen if we want to see America move toward a more inclusive and accepting narrative,” Galvan says. “Sharing stories, actually talking to police officers one-on-one, that’s what will really change hearts and minds.”

In his first week as the CEO of PwC, one of the largest professional services firms that provides audit, tax, and advisory services to Fortune 500 companies worldwide, Tim Ryan found himself in Dallas as tensions mounted between the African-American community and the police.

That Friday morning in early July, Ryan says he struggled to focus, “I found myself overseeing a 46,000-member workforce devastated from a series of shootings in Baton Rouge, St. Paul, and Dallas.” Wondering if his colleagues were feeling the same way, Ryan decided to send a note out to the entire firm that morning “expressing my grief and sadness while still knowing that wasn’t enough.”

Ryan was struck by the overwhelming response that he received. This, along with other conversations that Ryan decided to set up, in townhalls and safe spaces at PwC revealed, “the depth and immediacy of how this situation was affecting them—and how much they wanted to connect with others to process what was unfolding. I knew I was taking a risk by hosting these conversations, given I had only been in the job for a few days. [But I also] knew that we needed to address what was going on. I couldn’t expect our employees to show up at work thinking it was business as usual.”

These were the gaps in empathy and understanding that Ryan wanted to help bridge. And, since July, a key challenge for him as CEO has been to keep up that conversation. The firm has implemented a new training plan to deal with unconscious bias in which employees can work at their own pace and are able to track their own progress—an approach that research shows is more effective than mandatory training.

Now Ryan is also looking to impact the wider corporate culture through the “huge convening power of PwC” as he put it, based on the fact that as a professional services firm they work with almost every Fortune 500 company.

He also plans to bring his CEO peers to talk about diversity and inclusion “so they can all learn best practices from each other,” as part of an initiative set to launch this summer. “Diversity is not just an issue for CEOs who have a lot of resources, financial and human capital. Rather, the challenge is to help the tens of thousands of businesses who don’t have the same resources like we do to invest in diversity.” The company also plans to make its new training plan available to other companies and the public free of charge.

Early Exposure

Despite growing up young in a blue-collar neighborhood of Boston, Ryan recalls thinking, “everything was fair, everything was equal” until he was age 7 or 8 when forced integration of the school system was implemented. Ryan says, “It was very informative in my early childhood. I can remember trying to understand what was happening. And my parents explained to me that our education system wasn’t equally distributed.”

Through his high school and college years, Ryan worked in a high-end grocery store where his mother and relatives also worked. He recalls an incident where he and another coworker were making fun of a special-needs coworker who was stocking produce slower than them. When the store manager asked them why they were making fun of their coworker because “he is giving me his 100%. Are you giving me yours?” That was one of his first lessons in managing fairly and, he says, it has stayed with him.

The reality that life isn’t fair really took root for Ryan 20 years later when he started his career at PwC as an associate in the firm’s Boston office, and began working for banking clients during the 1991 banking crises that hit New England especially hard. “For a short period of time,” he says, “the job that I had was actually to collect keys from people who couldn’t keep their houses.”

That experience became a crucial turning point for Ryan. It helped him understand the human side of their work, that the numbers on their spreadsheets had consequences that affected the lives of real people.

It might have also made Ryan step up as a leader during the 2008 financial crises. In early 2008, Ryan urged AIG, who was a client at the time, to declare a “material weakness in its financial results related to the company’s credit default swaps.” In September 2008, it was revealed that credit default swaps created underlying risks at AIG, which led to the near-collapse and failure of the insurer.

Investing in Communities

While Ryan sees the firm’s purpose as being front and center in their work with clients, he also sees the need to invest in the community. The firm just finished a five-year program where they contributed $190 million, and 3 million hours aimed at financial literacy; 80% of their team participated in the campaign. “They were in classrooms all across the country,” he says, “teaching students and educators about financial literacy.”

Now they are expanding the effort with the launch of a new $320 million campaign aimed at helping students in underserved communities gain crucial technology skills to succeed in college and work. As part of the program, PwC employees will mentor students to help them choose the right college or career for them—an effort the firm hopes will build more diversity in many professions including financial services.

“As the first person in my family to attend college, this is something that I’m personally really passionate about. I know I wouldn’t be where I am today without some important mentors in my life,” Ryan says.

Trust-Based Leadership

Ryan is still “getting used to the fact that people view you differently [as CEO]. I understand why they do, but I don’t want to be treated that way.”  In turn, he has had to learn to really trust his team and not solve all the important problems for key clients himself.  “I’m a big believer in what I call trust-based leadership,” a term he coined to describe his belief that “the more empowerment I can put in other people’s hands the better.”

It’s an approach that resonates with the millennials who now make up the majority of PwC’s workforce, “The average age of our 50,000 employees is only 28.” Ryan sees this next generation of the workforce as one that “demands to be empowered and understands that PwC has to stand for more than making a buck.”

It’s a passion that Ryan shares with his millennial staff, “Sitting at PwC, the fact that we have the brand and the convening power is a great place to try and change the world.”

Listening to Ryan, it struck me as a radical mission coming from the leader of an accounting firm. As if reading my mind, Ryan says, “I will have to consider it a personal epic failure if all I do is grow PwC by 20%.”

This article is part of a series of articles by Aaron Hurst exploring how leaders find purpose and meaning in their jobs. Last fall, Hurst’s company, Imperative, released a global survey of the role of purpose at work, in partnership with LinkedIn Talent Solutions, which found that those who are intrinsically motivated to find purpose in their jobs consistently outperform their colleagues and experience greater levels of job satisfaction and well-being, regardless of country, gender, or ethnicity. They are also 50% more likely to be leaders. This series will profile those leaders, and how they connect with what’s meaningful to them in their role and the organizations they lead.

In the mountains near Pikeville, Kentucky, two coal mines may soon become the state’s largest solar farm.

“In this part of the country, we’ve gone through a downturn,” says Ryan Johns, development executive for Berkley Energy Group, which owns the strip mines. “So we looked at other ways that we could use our properties to keep producing energy.”

After a conversation with former state auditor Adam Edelen, who heads a consulting practice for entrepreneurs, Johns began to consider investing in renewable energy. “He asked, ‘Would you be open to doing renewables?’ and I said, ‘If it’ll help us make money and put people back to work, we’re for that.'”

EDF Renewable Energy, a company that develops wind and solar projects, is currently leading engineering studies to plan the potential solar farm. It would be the first built on a strip mine, which could make construction more challenging than usual.

“We know we know the first couple inches are gravel, and we expect the next couple of feet are going to be small rock,” says Doug Copeland, who works on project development for EDF. “The geotechnical investigation is really the key to all of this, and preparing for a construction process that will be a little bit different from building in the California desert or on a piece of farmland.”

On one site, all of the available coal has already been extracted. On the other, the coal will likely be mined out within 12 to 18 months. As the jobs on that site disappear, other coal mining jobs are scarce. Mining employment in Kentucky has dropped from more than 14,000 jobs in 2008 to 3,833 in 2016. The solar development would provide both new construction work and ongoing jobs. (BitSource, another innovative company in Pikeville, trains former coal miners to code).

Some of those jobs could begin as soon as the current coal mining stops. “On this active mine that’s there now, there’s going to be guys who are staying employed on that reclamation work, in essence preparing for the solar project,” says Copeland.

The engineers are working to make the project as large as possible–potentially 100 megawatts, or 10 times larger than the current largest solar farm in Kentucky. “It’s on us to make sure that we design a project that has the maximum output for the lowest cost so that we can continue to make solar competitive in this region,” says Copeland. “We do believe it will.”

The plans for the new solar farm still aren’t final, as feasibility studies continue and the permitting process still has to be completed. But it’s something that could potentially also happen on other former strip mines. “When you really look at this project–and this is something that has never really been tried before–if and when we are successful with this, we believe that we will be is that then this will extend to other areas and to other areas in our region,” says Johns. “It can definitely be a game changer for our area.”

In 2011, one Kentucky-based solar developer calculated that if all surface coal mines in the state were covered with solar panels, it could supply 10% of the energy needs of the entire country. The new project would tie into a regional grid that serves mid-Atlantic states. At 100 megawatts, it could power approximately 16,400 homes.

For Berkley Energy Group, which traditionally considered itself a coal company, solar makes sense as part of the future of the business.

“Our CEO started realizing several years ago that we needed to diversify more and to look at things we started seeing a decline coming in coal,” says Johns. “We look at ourselves as more an ‘all of the above’ approach to energy. We are not just a coal company…We’ve had a major change in our area with coal and you know you can either not believe what’s going on and just kind of put your head in the sand or you can sit back and complain about it, or you can try to do something about it. We’re trying to be as forward-thinking as we can.”

“I was constantly checking my smartphone, that Bermuda Triangle of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram,” says Joshua Fields Millburn, cofounder of website The Minimalists.

Seven years ago, he, like many of us, was a slave to his devices. He spent hours slumped over a laptop at work and at home, checked his email constantly on his phone, and kept his TV on, the modern-day equivalent of a fireplace lit throughout the winter. “The biggest distractions we face today are often the glowing screens in front of us,” he says. He points out that even some new toasters have Wi-Fi.

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So Millburn decided to simplify his life, both physically and digitally. He pared down the mental clutter caused by time spent on tech. By leaving his phone in airplane mode, for example, and only checking it during set intervals, he could identify needless distractions and appreciate the device’s most useful aspects, like communication with loved ones. Quitting cold turkey and going full-on analog was never the goal; digital minimalism was. “Minimalism,” he says, “is about being more deliberate with the tools that we have.”

In 2010, he and his friend Ryan Nicodemus founded The Minimalists site to share Millburn’s digital-downsizing experience and offer tips on how others can reach an orderly state of semi-zen. The site now has nearly 5 million monthly readers, and a podcast with over 3 million downloads monthly.

Advocating for less screen time and more smelling of the proverbial roses isn’t a new concept. But a growing number of bloggers, academics, and entrepreneurs who brand themselves digital minimalists are trying to turn that familiar message into an actual movement. Millburn’s website is devoted to minimalism in all areas of life (including curbing physical clutter at home, à la Marie Kondo’s best-seller The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up), but he says readers are especially interested in tips on managing their digital lives. The site’s most popular podcast episode dealt with reducing tech dependency without cutting oneself off from the digital dopamine machine altogether.

According to the American Psychological Association (APA) findings, 65% of Americans agree that periodically “unplugging” or taking a “digital detox” is important for their mental health. But only 28% of them report actually doing so. A recent Nielsen study found that in 2016, the average American spent 10 hours and 39 minutes a day consuming media on screens. That’s one hour more than in 2015. And a survey for the APA revealed that Americans who constantly checked their phones reported the highest levels of stress. “What these individuals don’t consider is that while technology helps them in many ways, being constantly connected can have a negative impact on both their physical and mental health,” APA associate executive director Lynn Bufka said in a press release.

None of this comes as a surprise. We’ve been reading articles for at least a decade about the need to unplug, and what happens when we don’t. The question now is whether the practical approach of gadget moderation is realistic and appealing enough to catch on en masse. Minimalism has permeated so much of our culture—from fashion to home decor and food. People get a certain satisfaction out of picking the few things that are so perfect they outweigh the need for more. Can we do the same with our approach to tech?

Fear Of Burning Out

Calvin Newport, author of Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, is a digital minimalist attempting to reposition FOMO.

The associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University doesn’t use Twitter or Instagram. He doesn’t even have a Facebook account. He never knows about the latest cat video or what your aunt thinks of the Trump administration or which celebrity is in the doghouse for uttering an insensitive comment. “I like missing out,” Newport says. “Less can be more.”

Newport witnessed how social media has “taken over the lives” of those he knows, and he has no regrets about having never been tagged in a photo. He believes that phones and their algorithms are engineered to be “addictive,” inducing chronic check-ins. Instead of fears of missing out, he’d like to see people consider the risks of burning out. FOBO, if you will.

“People feel like they’re losing their autonomy,” he says, citing how daily social media usage amounts to 118 minutes per day per American. “They feel strung out . . . [Checking social media] is feeling somewhat compulsory.”

Digital minimalism is a response to such behavior. It’s a guiding principle meant to help people question which digital communication tools—and behaviors surrounding the tools—add real value to their existence.

“It is motivated by the belief that intentionally and aggressively clearing away low-value digital noise, and optimizing your use of the tools that really matter, can significantly improve your life,” he explains on his blog. In November, he wrote a New York Times piece about the drawbacks of social media. It became Instapaper’s most read column for a week.

In his writing, Newton encourages people to be more deliberate in choosing tech for their daily life. He acknowledges that certain apps, such as Waze or Postmates, serve an identifiable purpose, like getting from one’s house to brunch. Others are more murky. To achieve app clarity, Newport suggests making a list of what you most value, be it relationships or your job, and then move backwards and see which tools help you nurture or achieve those things. Does Snapchat significantly enhance your well-being? Will Candy Crush help you get a promotion?

Newport says he has received hundreds of emails from individuals who say they are attempting to adopt digital minimalism. One reported he cut back from using four computer monitors at once to just one 15-inch laptop screen.

“A lot of people feel very trapped and fed up with having to be on their phones and feel obligated, whereas others feel they have very important uses and get a lot of value out of it,” Newport says. “It’s not about one thing being definitively bad and one thing being definitively good, but these technologies, if you’re not intentional, can take over your life.”

Craig Link, editor of the site Digital Minimalism, experienced firsthand how easily screens can usurp one’s freedom. The British blogger admits he was addicted to his smartphone, TV, and video games. His sedentary lifestyle affected all areas of his life, until a combination of poor health, failing relationships, and disrupted sleep convinced him to make a change.

A self-described “tech enthusiast,” Link launched his website a year ago in an effort to help address the boundary issues he and many others experience with tech. He suggests picking the lowest storage option on a phone contract (it forces you to be mindful of which apps, random photographs, or songs you store) and only subscribing to one or two social media platforms. “Choose something that suits your taste,” he says.

By abiding to such principles, Link says he was able to rebuild his life. Gone are the distractions, the mental fatigue, and general dissatisfaction. “A simple life is not a deprived life, but a life that includes only what is important to you and that which makes you happy,” he says on his site.

Millburn saw a similar impact when he reduced his usage. During peak tech-dependency periods, he recalls being stressed from the moment he woke up. More than 200 work and personal emails would be waiting in his inbox, but only 20% of them were actually important.

“I was letting everyone else dictate my hours,” says Millburn, who now only checks email during set times. “I was able to regain control of my schedule . . . and regain control of my life.” Do that for a long enough time, he says, and you’ll find relief from internal clutter; with less stimulation, you can become more aware of your overall happiness.

Millburn isn’t the the first to come to this conclusion, but his blog’s message of tempering versus throwing out tech has struck a chord with his readers. The moderation he encourages is infused with an empowering, practical message that some people thought was missing from the doomsday studies and articles they read all too often of how tech is impairing our social skills, body alignment, and rewiring our brains.

Minimize At Home And On The Job

Shannon Vaughn has a different approach to spreading the minimalist gospel: She sells bath salts. In 2014, the former Georgetown medical student founded Pursoma, a beauty company that markets its mineral bath kits as a way to combat tech toxicity. A bath, Vaughn says, is the ultimate off switch for today’s overconnected citizen. It’s one hour of screen-free time. (Assuming, of course, that you don’t take your phone into the bathroom.)

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Plenty of companies sell bath salts, but only Vaughn’s brand goes so far as to position its product as an antidote to device-induced stress. These are salts marketed as a way to “revive the body from tech overuse,” according to Pursoma’s website, which also states, “Our systems are intensely weakened from the radiation emitted by laptops, cell phone and fluorescent light exposure.”

Pursoma products contain montmorilonite medicinal clay, a nutrient-packed ingredient that some studies have shown effectively remove body toxins and electronic-based radiation, and lessen joint pain. It was tested by NASA for its ability to replenish calcium depletion in astronauts. Sea salt, meanwhile, is an ingredient recommended to stimulate circulation and relieve muscle cramps.

Pursoma’s bath products are currently available in 200 stores nationwide, including Anthropologie and Goop, and retail for $14-$36.

Vaughn got the idea for the company in medical school, when she suffered debilitating headaches from staring at her phone all day. She wanted to know why, so she went . . . to the Apple Store. Vaughn says that when she explained her symptoms to employees, they told her, “‘We all take melatonin because we can’t sleep at night because we’re on these devices all day.'” It was then that she realized just how big a physiological toll devices take.

“We certainly are not advocating that you should cut out all your digital devices,” Vaughn says. “I don’t think that works, and I don’t think it’s practical. But it’s good to take time out. Like, say, ‘Every day this week, no one’s going to have their phone at their table,’ or, ‘I’m not going to wake up with my phone; I’ll set an alarm clock.'”

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Pursoma’s sales have doubled in the last year, driven primarily by female consumers in their 30s and 40s. One of the brand’s most successful marketing coups was a social media campaign that advocated getting off social media. The #SafeSocial campaign asked fans to photograph non-tech activities, upload the photos, and then turn off their phones. A prize of free salts was awarded to whoever had the best “disconnected” photo. The winner was notified via social media.

At first, Vaughn resisting marketing on social channels, but eventually decided it was the only way to reach the document-everything millennials. She recognizes the irony of it all, but hopes, with #SafeSocial, she can help the pendulum swing the other way: What if we made signing off the cool thing to do?

Instilling such behavior in the youngest users of digital media is difficult. Calvin Newport observes a stark generational split between twentysomething millennials and people over 35. While older generations easily recall a time before social media, before the internet was centralized by a handful of time-suck platforms, the youngest millennials never knew a Facebook-less worldwide web. “They see [social media] as the internet,” Newport says.

Celebrity millennials including Justin Bieber, Demi Lovato, and Kendall Jenner have undergone temporary detoxes from social media, but so far, no one in their star-studded peer group has taken up the minimalism cause to potentially influence their millions of impressionable tween and teenage fans. There have been reports of teens cutting back, and this past March, Teen Voguetalked up the trend, referring to detoxing as “going ’90s.” But according to a recent survey by the nonprofit Common Sense Media, kids between ages 8 to 18 average nine hours and 22 minutes of daily screen time—of which seven hours are for recreational use.

Michael Robb, Common Sense Media’s director of research, says digital consumption shows no indication of going down. There is shift in what they’re consuming—a migration from television to smartphones—but according to recent surveys, minimalism has not caught on within any age group. “It seems pretty clear that parents are using as much media as their kids are,” Robb says.

Likewise, Orianna Fielding, author of Unplugged: The Essential Digital Detox Plan, doesn’t see any significant shift in American behavior in the last five years, but is working hard to bring about incremental changes. Fielding is the founder of The Digital Detox Company, a consulting firm that helps people learn balanced work-life tech habits. Founded in 2014, the group crafts bespoke digital health programs that, as she describes, “integrate mindfulness, psychology, neuroscience, and creativity practices to create an in-house culture of digital wellness” at a variety of companies, from tech startups to creative agencies. She might, for instance, ask executives to imagine that each email sent within the company costs 1¢, in the hope that they cut down on the tsunami of unnecessary messages.

“We’re in favor of micromoments, where you put yourself on airplane mode and give yourself an hour to recharge,” Fielding says. Her goal is to teach people who “panic when not connected to their devices” that the world will keep spinning whether or not they are within arm’s reach of a glowing rectangle. “When you talk about minimalism, it’s much more approachable because you know it’s a reduction, not an annihilation,” she says. “It feels less radical. Its a way of simplifying your digital life so that you have space to be creative and productive.”

Does she foresee a cultural shift in attitudes toward device-dependence? “There is a very underground movement,” she says. She believes in time, whether you call it digital minimalism, “going ’90s,” or just taking a bath, the idea of cutting back will become more appealing to all age groups.

As to how we go about changing our habits, Fielding recommends starting small:

Leave your mobile device in another room when you take a shower. Try to have a tech-free meal with a friend. Try meeting someone without knowing everything they’ve done in the last 24 hours. If you go out for a walk, you don’t have to photograph the tree: Just feel it, experience it, look at it. Try to factor in a few micromoments that aren’t digital in your day and you may just find that the cumulative effects of those bring you more than it takes away. That’s what it’s about.

It might sound scary, but digital minimalists attest that there is life beyond the apps. As Newport says, “As someone who has never used these services, I can tell you: You don’t have to use them. Your life will still go on.”

Anthony Romero was the first one into the office in lower Manhattan on Wednesday, November 9, 2016. He had spent the prior night at an election party hosted by George Soros, one of the ACLU’s biggest donors—an event that, according to Romero, was “like being at a wedding that turned into a funeral.”

Like many Americans, Romero had woken up to a political reality he had not expected. But unlike most of the country, the executive director of the ACLU had a clear vision of what came next. It was, after all, a scenario for which he had been preparing for months.

First thing that morning, Romero sat at his desk, which looks out across the New York harbor with a sweeping view of the Statue of Liberty, and wrote a letter to then president-elect Donald Trump. In it, he laid out several of Trump’s campaign promises—deportation forces to remove undocumented immigrants, a entry ban for Muslims, and restrictions on a woman’s right to abortion, among them—and succinctly explained how they violate the Constitution.

The ACLU had already planned an all-staff meeting for that morning, to be held near the nonprofit’s offices in the amphitheater of the National Museum of the American Indian.All of the ACLU’s roughly 300 New York City-based employees were invited, including 110 legal staffers, along with people working in development, advocacy, and communications. The 900-some employees from the organization’s 53 state affiliate offices (including three in California) were invited to call in.

Romero, who has led the ACLU for 16 years, acknowledged his employees’ disappointment and let them express it.But he didn’t let them linger on it. “This is what we are here for,” he reminded them. “We will get tested, and we will sometimes lose, but we will always be in the fight for the right reasons.” 

After the meeting, he handed his letter to ACLU communications director Michele Moore, who had started earlier in the year with the directive to help make the 97-year-old nonprofit relevant again. Romero didn’t want the letter edited or toned down. He told Moore to just run with it. Two days later, Romero’s early-morning missive appeared as a full-page ad in the New York Times.

In the nearly six months since election night, the ACLU has fulfilled Romero’s promise, mounting some of the most prominent legal challenges to the Trump administration and becoming a de facto leader of what’s become known as “the resistance.” The organization and its affiliates have launched more than a dozen legal actions and Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests against the Trump administration. They’ve scored victories against both of the administration’s executive orders limiting the ability of people from some predominantly Muslim countries to enter the country (aka the travel bans), and recently joined with the County of Santa Clara in its successful suit to oppose the defunding of sanctuary cities. And they’ve ratcheted up the pressure in smaller ways, such as publishing a slew of documents relating President Trump’s business interests, obtained by a FOIA request. At the same time, the nonprofit has continued to pursue other civil-rights cases at state and national levels, which include battles for trans bathroom rights and various challenges to restrictions on reproductive freedom.

The ACLU was founded by a group of activists in the 1920s, when protesters were routinely thrown in jail for actions as benign as distributing anti-war literature. It was a time when states openly allowed violence and discrimination against African-Americans, when women had only just won the right to vote, and when LGBT people enjoyed absolutely no constitutional protections. 

The landscape of American freedom looks vastly different now, thanks in part to the ACLU’s work on cases like Brown v. Board of Education to help end school segregation; Loving v. Virginia, which established lawful interracial marriage; and Roe v. Wade, confirming a woman’s constitutional right to abortion. More recently, the ACLU has taken on government surveillance and torture, and helped secure the right of gay couples to legally marry with the landmark 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges Supreme Court victory.

But the ACLU’s influence and profile today may be unmatched in its history, as the nonprofit mobilizes Americans to aid its efforts like never before. In his 16 years as executive director, Romero has doubled the organization’s size and budget. But that progress has skyrocketed since election day. Over the past six months, the number of card-carrying ACLU members has quadrupled from around 400,000 to 1.6 million, and more than $83 million in donations has flooded in—much of it from individuals donating online. That’s more than one-third of the ACLU’s annual budget. (The nonprofit has seen so much financial support that Romero has even urged donors not to forget other organizations in need.) The organization that this time last year was trying to figure out how to stay relevant is now the pet cause for celebrities and Silicon Valley luminaries, including Y Combinator president Sam Altman, who recently pledged the support of his high-profile startup accelerator. 

The ACLU has responded by hiring and expanding and improving its operations, including creating its first-ever grassroots organizing arm. “Government has turned its back on the people, and the ACLU is leading the charge in saying, ‘We are here to listen, and we are here to be a part of a strategic plan,’” says Mark Rosenbaum, who spent 40 years at the ACLU’s Southern California chapter before becoming director of the Opportunity Under Law division of the pro bono law firmPublic Counsel. “They are developing strategies and policies that are responsive to the real needs that are being voiced.”

This is all possible because the ACLU—under Anthony Romero—was ready for the president whom it calls “a one-man constitutional crisis.”

America’s Insurance Policy

More than six months before the media and much of the American public was blindsided by the election results, the ACLU was preparing for a Trump presidency. In May 2016, as Bernie Sanders conceded the Democratic primary and Trump secured enough delegates to claim the Republican primary, Romero directed his staff to begin compiling detailed reports on what, exactly, a Clinton and Trump presidency would mean for civil liberties and constitutional rights.

The ACLU is organized into 14 different project groups, each focused on a major issue, such as voting rights, criminal justice, surveillance, and immigration. Within each group, there are subgroups for specific topics, like detention or refugees. At any given time, the ACLU may be working on roughly 66 different subjects. For the candidate dossiers, Romero asked each project group to consider the politician through the lens of its issue.

For the Clinton report, the task was relatively simple. The teams had decades of Clinton policy statements to draw from, and they looked at what the appointment of a moderate Supreme Court nominee might mean for issues such as the death penalty and stop and frisk.

Building a detailed report on Trump was much more daunting—and unpopular. Romero concedes that some of the staff, already burdened with the pressure to wrap up pending litigation against the Obama administration, likely viewed it as “Anthony’s vanity project.” But he pushed forward. “Everyone was talking about Clinton, Clinton, Clinton. We had a Clinton plan and we were thinking about the transition, but we had to have a Trump plan because if he was to be elected, the challenges would have been too great to just [address] on the fly,” Romero explains when I meet him at his offices in early March.

To pull together the report, the ACLU hired an outside research firm and culled through all of Trump’s statements. “Then I said to the litigators, ‘Give me the best constitutional legal statutory analysis you would muster to fight these policies,’” Romero recalls.

The ACLU published “The Trump Memos” on July 13, 2016. (Since Clinton didn’t pose nearly as serious of a constitutional threat, the ACLU didn’t publish its memo on her until October.) The 27-page document took all of candidate Trump’s campaign rhetoric on six big issues (immigration, actions against Muslims, torture, libel, mass surveillance, and abortion) literally and seriously, drawing out his often vague or incoherent statements to their possible policy positions. Then it built a clear defense against each. “We had to take him at his word,” explains Moore. “So if he was talking about mass deportation forces, [we thought,] what does that mean in terms of [the] right to due process?” The ACLU had no way of knowing if or when the president would try to fulfill his campaign promises, but it created the backbone for its legal arguments just in case.

Today, the document reads like a detailed playbook for Trump’s first 100 days, and likely beyond. For example, the July memo explained that Trump’s own inflammatory campaign trail rhetoric against Muslims could be used to undermine any attempt at a country-based travel ban: “To the extent that Trump’s proposed ban has shifted from an explicit religion-based ban to a pretextual country-based ban, it remains unmistakably clear from the history of this proposal and the continuing focus on Muslims in public statements from the Trump campaign that the target continues to be adherents of a particular faith. The Constitution does not tolerate such discrimination.” This is the very argument that would help win over the Ninth Circuit judges more than six months later.

Why did Romero prepare for an outcome that everyone thought was unlikely? He says it’s just in his nature. “I have plan A, plan B, and plan C, and then I have to come up with plan D on the spot,” he explains. “We were the only nonprofit that put out a report on Trump. Our job was to be ready for the worst-case scenario.”

Being at the vanguard isn’t new for Romero. He has often filled the role of first: He is the first Latino and openly gay man to lead the ACLU, and was the first person in his family to graduate from high school. Born to immigrant parents from Puerto Rico, he spent his early childhood in public housing in the Bronx. He understood, at an young age, the hurdles that immigrants face: During Romero’s childhood, his father filed a grievance against the hotel he worked for when he was denied a promotion because of his limited English. Romero went on to Princeton, where he studied public and international affairs, and then Stanford law school.

After law school, he applied for a fellowship at the ACLU, but was turned down. He wound up at the Rockefeller Foundation, where he established himself as a civil-rights advocate. From there he took a position in the Civil Rights and Social Justice division of the Ford Foundation, where he became one of the youngest directors in the foundation’s history. It was there that he honed the fundraising skills that have been such a boon to the ACLU.

Romero became executive director of the ACLU one week before the September 11, 2001, terrorism attacks. “I hadn’t even unpacked my boxes yet, or gotten business cards,” he recalls. “It really required me to put my arms around the place and provide the leadership that the organization needed and that the country required.”  

While Romero anticipated that the attacks might lead to increased nationalism and an erosion of civil liberties (similar to what happened in the aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attack), he decided to begin by addressing the country’s mood. His first press release, issued on September 20, took a decidedly patriotic tone, pledging that the ACLU would “work with our national leaders in their fight to bring those responsible for this tragedy to justice.” 

Not all of his colleagues agreed with this approach. “Some people [within the ACLU] thought I was too nationalistic,” Romero says. “[But] you have to meet the client where they are. And our client, the American people, were grieving and stunned and afraid. [I said to the staff], we have to make sure that the public is ready to hear us. As soon as the Bush administration began to enact the Patriot Act ordetain and deport immigrants, that’s when we were really at full throttle.”

Today, Romeroviews the ACLU as the U.S.’s insurance policy. Under his leadership, it has become an institution that prepares silently in the background and pushes forward as the need arises. Since Romero took the helm, his lawyers have battled cases both big (the end of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell in 2010; marriage equality in 2015) and lesser-known, and have challenged presidents, whether it was over George W. Bush’s mass surveillance efforts or the Obama administration’s deportations and use of drones in battle. And although the public might not have been interested in “The Trump Memos” last summer (“I think two people read it,” Romero jokes), the ACLU did its due diligence, just in case.  

Winning In The Streets And In The Courtroom

On January 27, 2017, after less than a week in office, Trump signed the executive order that colloquially became known as the Muslim Ban. The order, which barred entry for people from seven Muslim-majority countries, regardless of their immigration status, was issued just before 5 p.m. on a Friday. It was timed, in other words, to surprise.

The immigration lawyers at the ACLU didn’t know that the order would come down that evening, but they did have advanced warning: According to Romero, someone within the White House had leaked a photocopied draft to the ACLU a few days earlier, and the organization had begun to map out its case. “We had figured out all the legal theories already,” Romero says. “We just needed to plug in clients.”

Two hours after the order was signed, Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU’s national Immigrants’ Rights Project, and his colleagues were on the phone with partner organizations, including the National Immigration Law Center and the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP). A couple hours later, lawyers with IRAP told Gelernt that two men from Iraq who had worked for the U.S. government were being detained at JFK airport; they would become the main plaintiffs in the case against the government. Gelernt and the others worked in shifts through the night and filed a habeas corpus lawsuit on behalf of their clients—and anyone else caught by the ban—in federal court just before 6 a.m. on Saturday, less than 12 hours after the order was issued.

As planes landed throughout the country, stories of people being detained began to proliferate. Gelernt had hoped for a fast response to their filing, but as the morning wore on, it became clear that they wouldn’t get a hearing that day. So Gelernt and his team quickly changed course: They needed someone to issue a temporary, emergency national stay on the executive order. Again they scrambled, working through the afternoon to file papers by 5 p.m. that Saturday. A half hour later, they reached a New York federal court judge, who told Gelernt to get lawyers from both sides to the Brooklyn courtroom in two hours.

By this time, crowds were halting traffic at airports, and the chaos surrounding the executive order had become the biggest national story. Gelernt quickly showered and headed down to Brooklyn. As he, Romero, the government lawyers, and a few activists filed into the courtroom, a small crowd started to gather outside.

The hearing began with a tense sense of urgency. Gelernt was handed a piece of paper from another lawyer: One of his clients was being put on a plane back to Syria in 25 minutes. According to Gelernt, the judge asked the Justice Department attorneys two questions: Would the individuals who are being deported and detained be a threat to national security if they were allowed to stay?And if we send these people back, are they going to be in harm’s way? The answers, apparently, were insufficient. The judge issued a nationwide injunction to block the deportation of people stranded by the executive order. The room erupted in cheers—something that never happens in federal court, says Gelernt.

Moments later, Romero and Gelernt exited the courthouse. “In my mind, [I thought] there were going to be maybe 40 people out there,” Gelernt says. The crowd that had gathered was estimated at 1,000 people. Reporters swarmed the lawyers. Phones went up to record; people were shushed. A shaky video of Romero and Gelernt explaining the court order was quickly posted on the ACLU’s Facebook page, where it now has more than 19 million views. The crowd started to chant “ACLU, thank you!” and high-fiving the lawyers.

Donations to the ACLU had started pouring in the day after the election, and thousands of people had carried ACLU-branded signs at the Women’s March on January 21. But it was outside that Brooklyn courthouse that the nonprofit solidified its position as a leader of the resistance. Over the course of that final weekend in January, the ACLU took in an unprecedented $24 million in online donations from roughly 350,000 people. Silicon Valley heavy hitters also got involved: Lyft pledged $1 million over four years and many other companies, including Instacart, Slack, and Google, pledged to match employee donations.  

Related: How The Tech Industry Is Helping The ACLU Fill Its War Chest

“[The ACLU has] always been fighting the fight, but they have often been invisible,” says Ilyse Hogue, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, which often aligns with the ACLU’s reproductive rights team. “What’s new is that their legal work provides not just an opportunity to make sure that rights are maintained, but [it has become] a symbol of hope in very difficult times.”

The dramatic success of those 24 hours isn’t how the ACLU wins most of its cases, but it is indicative of how the organization works: a mix of careful planning, remarkable speed, and increasing agility. Its power and reach come not only from a strong core of specialized lawyers, but also a robust network of partner organizations and affiliate offices that allows the nonprofit to have meticulously planned cases that can be amended on the fly.

It’s where Romero’s plan A, B, C, and improvised plan D come into play. “[Anthony] thrives on these moments and gets energized by them,” says Gelernt. “He is very good at providing a broad-strokes narrative for the organization, but then letting the lawyers do their work and not micromanaging.”

A key part of this effort is the ACLU’s increasing reliance on its affiliates. Many of the organization’s legal battles are started and even won on a state level, which is why Romero has invested so heavily in building out these state offices. An important recent case for transgender rights, for example, began in Virginia with Gavin Grimm, a local high school student who wasn’t allowed to use the boy’s bathroom. (In March, the Supreme Court kicked that case back down to a lower court, where it has yet to be heard.) 

This distribution of work ensures that the ACLU can function with relative ease, even at times when it should be highly stressful. I met with Romero just hours after the second immigration ban was announced, on March 6, but he wasn’t rushed, even when casually speaking of his grueling schedule.

The reason for his calm? The ACLU didn’t have to scramble to file new lawsuits or find clients when the order came down; it already had 15 legal actions in process in several states. The case that would overturn the second version of the immigration ban just nine days later—a suit filed in Maryland—was one that the ACLU had set in motion back in January.

Romero sees this strategy as particularly important, given the multi-pronged challenges he is facing. “We can have one precious,perfect little case with the best clients, filed in the right jurisdiction, [but] I don’t think that would be the right strategy for us. I think the right strategy for us is to file as many of these lawsuits as we possibly can.”

Despite the ACLU’s growth and its attack-from-all-angles strategy, the nonprofit is still astonishingly outnumbered. The government has more than 19,000 lawyers to the ACLU’s 300. And no amount of online donations is going to boost the organization’s ranks to make it a fair fight—which is why the ACLU is now betting heavily on the court of public opinion.

Keeping Up Momentum

There’s no doubt the ACLU is having a moment. Romero’s job is to keep it going. At this year’s TED conference in Vancouver, he gave a rousing 15-minute speech on the importance of civic involvement, and received a standing ovation. He’s a confident public speaker, used to selling the importance of the ACLU’s mission, but his talk last week took the fiery tone of a leader whose organization depends on sustained public outrage. Referencing Silicon Valley’s obsession with disruption, Romero told the audience, “We have to disrupt our lives so that we can disrupt the amoral accretion of power by those who would betray our values. ‘We’ in ‘We the people’ must raise justice up, and must bring peace to our nation.”

Romero’s speech reflects a new emphasis on mobilizing members. It has become increasingly clear over the past six months that those hundreds of thousands of people who have recently joined the ACLU want to do more than just give money. “We’ve got [members] who really want to be put to work,” Romero says. “We have a responsibility to help them figure out how to make a difference.”

To mobilize public interest, Romero enlisted Faiz Shakir, a founding member and former editor-in-chief of the political news website ThinkProgress.org, who most recently served as a senior adviser to former Senator Harry Reid. Shakir assumed the role of national political director for the ACLU on inauguration day, and immediately set to work developing a grassroots-organizing arm. “I said to [Romero], ‘People are voting with their pocketbooks and email addresses,’” Shakir recalls. “[They’re saying,] tag, you’re it. You’re the leader of the resistance.”

Related: How The ACLU Is Evolving To Fight Trump In Streets–Not Just The Courtroom

In March, Shakir helped launch People Power, an online destination that offers citizens (whether or not they are ACLU members) resources for political engagement and advice on how to self-organize protests and rallies. Buoyed by the success of the Women’s March and other protests (including those at the airports during the travel ban), the ACLU hopes that its supporters will take further action to support its causes. People Power debuted with a live-streamed “town hall,” which offered the 200,000 people who had gathered at house parties around the country a basic understanding of their rights while protesting and initial ideas for action.

In Shakir’s vision, the ACLU’s grassroots citizen activists will create town halls, lobby lawmakers, and organize protests, supplementing what he refers to as the “grass-top activities” of the ACLU affiliates: working with legislators, governors, business leaders, and other influential people. The ACLU is so invested in this new experiment that it is dedicating a planned $13 million over the next year to build People Power.  

Public Council’s Rosenbaum credits Romero’s leadership for allowing the ACLU to seize this moment in history. “For a long time [the ACLU] won major cases that raised important issues,” he says. “That’s valuable, but it’s not the same thing as having a core vision and mission and executing and expanding it, and Anthony has done that. [Today] the ACLU is outsmarting and outmobilizing the government, whether it’s in the courts, legislative branches, or with grassroots organizing.”

Still, in this heated political climate, adopting high-profile stances and encouraging the public to take up causes in the organization’s name carry a certain amount of risk. The ACLU’s Washington, D.C.-based foundation, which is eligible to accept tax-deductible donations from individuals, corporations, and other charities, is prohibited from engaging too much in politics by its 501(c)3 status. The foundation funds the ACLU’s legal work, which supports the Constitution above all political parties or candidates. The nonprofit’s lobbying and organizing efforts, however, are paid for by the ACLU’s social-welfare entity, which relies on membership dollars that are not eligible for charitable-contribution deductions. The ACLU is careful to keep its two entities separate, but critics in the past have questioned its tax-exempt status. 

The infusion of cash across the political spectrum has given the organization the opportunity to hire and expand beyond its People Power efforts. Two days before the president took the oath of office, Romero announced his seven-point plan for the next four years, which includes an increased focus on immigrant, reproductive, and LGBT rights.

To accomplish this, he says the ACLU will need an additional $100 million above the organization’s $220 million annual budget. The largest chunk of money, more than $40 million, will be used to create 100 new staff positions in affiliate offices, earmarked especially for states with large populations that often bring forward cases impacting national policy, such as Texas, Florida, and Ohio. The New York City-based national office will expand, adding around 90 staff positions via an infusion of $21 million.

The 97-year-old organization is also overhauling its digital tools and investing in its communications efforts, both of which have become priorities as public interest surges. “Our tech needs are woefully underresourced and underdeveloped,” Romero admits. “We have this massive flood of new [members], and I can’t even tell you the basic demographics. What was working fine for a membership of 400,000 people is not working for 1.6 million.” 

Silicon Valley is lending a hand: The ACLU recently joined Y Combinator’s accelerator program, and now has the support of many of the engineers and business leaders associated with the incubator. (Romero says they are still identifying what projects to have them work on.) “We need leaders like [Romero] now more than ever,” says Altman, “and we wanted to play a small part in supporting his work.”

Romero is realistic that this time of rapid growth is likely to breed its share of failures. “We are definitely reengineering the place as we’re flying it,” he says, sounding remarkably like a startup founder. “Some things are going to work great, and some things aren’t.” That acceptance of the inevitability of failure helps him take the long view of the ACLU’s success.

He likens the ACLU to long-distance runners who have trained assiduously for this administration. “You’re building muscle for the marathon that you need to run,” he says. “We were building muscle in the Obama years that we’re putting to use now. We’re always laying the groundwork for that next moment, that next flashpoint, the next inflection point that really does test you.” And these days, that next inflection point may be right around the corner, ready to land on Romero’s desk at 5 p.m. on a Friday evening.

Correction: An earlier version of this article stated that the ACLU’s membership had tripled since the election. It has quadrupled. 

Zaydoon Munir emigrated to the U.S. from Baghdad, Iraq, so he knows the difference between an authoritarian regime and a free country. But, despite loving our free-market economic system, he criticizes one major aspect of it: credit scoring.

Credit scoring is a system orchestrated by three national credit bureaus (Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion) that track our payment histories–whether we pay our utility or credit cards bills on time (as well as our taxes, car loans, and so on) and, if not, how badly we’re late. They mostly use the FICO system (developed by the company Fair Isaac in 1989), and their numbers are highly determinative, in some cases life-changing. Whether we’re in the 500s, 600s, or 700s makes the difference between buying a house and renting for the rest of our lives, or, perhaps, going to college or not. And it certainly dictates if we can buy a $50,000 BMW 20 minutes after walking into a showroom, and what interest we’ll pay.

“It doesn’t feel like a 21st-century model,” he says. “I was born and raised in Baghdad. It looks like a system that Saddam would have designed where everyone is required by government to submit their files and you have no say in it.”

Munir’s New York startup, RevolutionCredit, has a tagline of “Be More Than a Score”–which has an anti-Orwellian ring to it. His big idea is to use behavioral science to predict how someone might behave in their personal finances, augmenting the past-facing number kept by the credit bureaus, all other indicators be damned. “Most of the credit scoring models that exist today, in the U.S. or outside, are mainly transaction-data-based,” he says. “This means they are mostly backward-looking and negative selection. The RevolutionCredit model is both forward-looking and positive-selection based.”

RevolutionCredit’s method might appear a little flimsy or unsophisticated at first. It develops “credit clinics”–online puzzles and quizzes that appear before, during, and after transactions, for instance when you’re applying for increased credit with a card company. The clinics are online modules that gather data about us and also educate at the same time. For example, one teaches budgeting, asking users to distinguish between fixed and variable expenses. From how you answer, the module gathers about 200 data points, which can begin to determine a person’s financial “aptitude,” “intent,” and “commitment,” Munir says. Depending on how you answer a quiz question about whether a rental payment is a fixed or variable expense, or how you try to square a theoretical budget, or whether you choose to do the quiz at all, may dictate whether you’re approved a credit increase, or denied it.

Munir, who previously worked at Experian, has an origin story for RevolutionCredit–the sort of folksy tale journalists appreciate even if we know they’re not always completely authentic, or even true. Most ideas aren’t born as lightbulb moments; they’re the slow accretion of thoughts over months of experiences. Munir’s story though involves a burrito from his favorite Mexican restaurant in Laguna Beach, California. He was driving along one day eating it with one hand, while talking into a cell phone with the other. His knees were guiding the steering wheel. Suddenly he sees a police car in the rear mirror and soon he’s stopped for dangerous driving. He’s forced to put the burrito aside, so it’s lying greasily on the side seat as the officer approaches.

Later, Munir had the choice of taking a traffic course as a way of cleaning up his driving record. And it was then that he imagined financial education as a way to purge someone’s financial record–only the financial education would be at the time of the transaction, not some time after the fact when it was less relevant. After two years or so of looking at how to systematize the idea into online modules, he hit upon something workable in September, 2013. Since then, RevolutionCredit has signed up 18 customers, a mix of marketplace (peer-to-peer) lenders, and credit card companies; recently one electric utility has started using the modules as well. (Unfortunately, Munir won’t reveal any company names–for confidentiality reasons he says. But there seems no reason to doubt RevolutionCredit’s success.)

The most common applications are collections. If you’re late on a bill, you might get a text or email asking you to carry out a survey and be rewarded for it–say, with a longer grace period for paying the bill. By working with customers this way, the company increases the rate of collections by up to 37% compared to standard collection processes. “People who do RevolutionCredit have a 30% lower delinquency rate than their peer group. They write off [debt at a] 20% lower rate than their peer group,” Munir says. “We are identifying people who want to help themselves. Today [most of the time] there’s no other option. You’re just stuck with the credit score.”

Though it’s still relatively early for the company, RevolutionCredit is a potentially big idea because it shifts creditworthiness away from a simple numbers game. It becomes an activity that people participate in, not just something an elusive company keeps a record about. Munir sees potential to expand into less developed markets where financial exclusion is an even more serious issue, and where the backward-looking data is less sophisticated than it is in this country. Behavioral science, however sophisticated, will never replace scoring completely. But it can offer greater perspective and help fill in some gaps in traditional data, he says.

“In 2011, when I was first shopping my business around, I got turned down because people said it’s the era of big data. They said: FICO will be replaced with a better score with more data,” Munir says, still smiling. “I said, ‘No, you may get better, but you’re not transforming anything.’ And I was right. Let’s be honest, FICO or VantageScore are big data models already. To build an accurate and fair credit scoring model, one should balance data from the past and the future.”

In the Dutch city of Utrecht, local policy favors bicycles over cars. On “bicycle streets,” bikes have priority, and cars are “guests.” For many commuters, it’s possible to ride to work or school via separated bike lanes and bike-only bridges and tunnels. The central train station is home to the world’s largest indoor bike parking lot (by 2020, it will have spaces for 33,000 bikes) with its own internal bike lanes and digital signs guiding people to open parking spots.

All of this has worked to convince people to ride instead of drive, and roughly 60% of trips to the city center happen on a bike. But the city wants people to ride even more often, and is now testing a new type of bike infrastructure: electronic kiosks designed to help cyclists speed up their commutes by coaching them to catch a series of green lights without having to come to a stop.

When the posts detect you riding by, it calculates your speed and whether you’ll make the next light. If you’re too slow, it flashes a cartoon rabbit. If you’re too fast, it flashes a tortoise. A thumbs-up indicates that you’re traveling at exactly the right speed. When there’s too much traffic and you’ll have to stop no matter what, the sign shows a cow, meant to symbolize a herd of cattle blocking traffic in the countryside.

“In the Netherlands, the biggest frustration for cyclists is the traffic lights,” says Jan-Paul De Beer, head of Springlab, a Utrecht-based design firm that invented the kiosks, called Flo, which the city is now testing. “If you cycle through the city, after every minute you have to stop again. It’s not ideal. That, for us, was the inspiration to do something about it.” The company focuses on how to get people more active, and funded the development of the new technology itself.

As cities like Utrecht grow, bike traffic is getting worse. “Cycling is getting more popular, so you see also more people in the biking lanes,” he says. “More people waiting in line, more frustration. It’s like everybody sitting in cars in a traffic jam.” By regulating speed, Flo keeps bikes moving. The kiosks also communicate with traffic signals to turn them green, when possible, as a bike approaches.

“If you make it, it feels like victory–yes, I made the green light,” says De Beer. “It’s really kind of a game experience.”

The first Flo kiosk is installed at one of the most dangerous intersections in the city, where dozens of serious accidents can happen each year. The city is hoping that the technology can help reduce the number of cyclists that try to squeak through the red light there. If tests are successful, the posts could be rolled out throughout the city. The cities of Eindhoven and Antwerp will install prototypes in the coming weeks.

“We just launched in the Netherlands, but it’s also available for international use,” De Beer says. “We want to help cyclists all over the world.”

In Western history, the concept of the password can be traced as far back as the so-called “shibboleth incident” in the 12th chapter of the biblical Book of Judges. In the chaos of battle between the tribes of Gilead and Ephraim, Gileadite soldiers used the word “shibboleth” to detect their enemies, knowing that the Ephraimites pronounced it slightly differently in their dialect. The stakes were life and death, we’re told, in a confrontation between Gileadites and a possible Ephraimite fugitive:

“Then said they unto him, ‘Say now Shibboleth’; and he said ‘Sibboleth’; for he could not frame to pronounce it right; then they laid hold on him, and slew him at the fords of the Jordan.”

The literary history of the password also includes the classic tale “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” invented in the 18th century by the French Orientalist Antoine Galland. Used in the tale to open a magically sealed cave, the invocation “Open, Sesame!” enjoys broad currency as a catchphrase today, not only in other literary, cinematic, and television adaptations of the tale itself, but in many other contexts as well.

Password security was introduced to computing in the Compatible Time-Sharing System and Unics (Unix) systems developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Bell Laboratories in the 1960s. Today we use passwords to restrict access to our personal computers and computing devices, and to access remote computing services of all kinds. But a password is not a physical barrier or obstacle, like a lock on a gate. Rather, it is a unit of text: that is to say, written language. As an important part of the linguistic history of computers, password security links my research in the history of writing to my interest in the early history of computing. But it is an episode in that history that may now be coming to an end.

In the earliest civilizations, writing was used to record financial and other administrative transactions, ensuring that records could be consulted in the case of disputes over debt, land ownership, or taxation. Soon, there was another use for writing: what we now call mail. Writing made it possible to communicate without being physically present, because a written message could stand in the writer’s place.

When I use a password, it also stands in my place. The password represents me within a virtual or nonphysical system, regardless of whether I am physically present, entering a passcode on a smartphone or a PIN code at an ATM, or physically absent, connecting remotely to my bank with a web browser. Anyone else who knows my password can also use it this way.

Related story: Everything You Know About Passwords Is Wrong

This characteristic of password security, which has its roots in writing’s (necessary and useful) dissociation from the writer’s physical presence, is also the root of its problems. Poorly chosen and repeatedly used passwords are easy to guess, either through computational techniques (such as the “dictionary attack,” which might test all known words and word combinations in a particular language) or so-called social engineering (that is, tricking someone into disclosing a password).

Once it has been guessed, there isn’t much to prevent a password from being used for unauthorized purposes, at least until the theft is discovered. But even the strongest password, a sequence of alphanumeric and punctuation characters utterly devoid of linguistic meaning and long enough to defeat automated password guessing by software running on the fastest processor hardware available to a professional criminal (these days, that means international organized crime), can be used anywhere and at any time once it has been separated from its assigned user.

It is for this reason that both security professionals and knowledgeable users have been calling for the abandonment of password security altogether.

Looking to introduce new methods of authentication, device manufacturers are moving toward biometrics, from the fingerprint sensors on any recent smartphone to Android 4.0’s Face Unlock feature, iris or retina scanning, and others. It seems unlikely that password security will last anywhere near another half-century.

Brian Lennon is an associate professor of English and Comparative Literature and Director, Digital Culture and Media Initiative, Pennsylvania State University. This story originally appeared at the Conversation. 

A big multinational company recently sent me a speaking client who “lacked leadership presence.” Looking at her resume, that seemed odd. She was accomplished. She was energetic. She was focused. What was she missing?

When we met, I quickly realized that her voice sounded rather nasally. So I asked her a question: “Do you have a hearing problem?”

“Yes!” she replied. “How did you know?” I suspected that might be the case because her voice had a particular quality to it that I’d heard before in clients with hearing difficulties. Her voice told me something about her that I wouldn’t otherwise have known.

You may not have a hearing problem, but your voice conveys all kinds of information about you to listeners—perhaps more than you realize. It’s true that our voices and speech patterns are fraught terrain, especially for women, who often face gender bias in and outside the workplace based on how others believe they sound. Still, there are a few characteristics of our voices that affect how we’re perceived regardless of gender. Here are four ways to tell what your voice might be revealing about you every time you speak.

1. Test For Resonance

We tend to interpret a strong voice as a sign of confidence. But what’s a “strong voice”? It’s one that’s resonant—the sound is full and rich. That isn’t a question of pitch or volume. It all depends on where the sound is coming from in your body.

Put your fingers on your throat and make an “ohh” sound. If your regular speaking voice feels the same way, it may be too gravelly. Now pinch the bridge of your nose and make an “eee” sound. If your regular voice feels this way, your voice may be too nasally. Finally, make a “mahh” sound and note what your lips feel like. If your ordinary speaking voice sounds like this, you’re in the sweet spot of resonance. It may take practice, but that’s where you want your voice to be if you want to project confidence.

2. Loosen Up

Your voice also reveals your stress level. Typically our voices get crackly when we’ve got a lot of tightness in our throats—often as a result of stress. The muscles around your vocal chords are constricting, limiting your air flow. Your audience will assume you’re as high-strung or uptight as you sound. But if your voice is smooth, you won’t speak with this tightness. The muscles around your vocal chords can relax, and your sound flows. Listeners will feel that you’re at ease and see you as strong.

You can figure out how much tightness there is in your voice by listening to the way you finish sentences. If your tone tends to drop at the end, you likely have a smooth voice. If your sentences go up at the end or if your voice start to break up a little bit—kind of like that unpleasant feeling of swallowing potato chips you haven’t chewed enough—it’s probably on the tight side.

Smooth voices should actually feel smooth when you speak—like swallowing ice cream or a nice glass of scotch. Listen to the ends of your sentences, or make that “ohh” sound again and notice what it feels like.

3. Adjust The Volume Controls

Your voice can also hint at (or scream) your level of emotional control. This is where volume comes in. If you’re too loud, chances are you’re managing your emotions by pushing harder—too hard. I’ve had many executives sent to me because they were basically shouting on a regular basis without realizing it.

If your volume is too quiet, on the other hand, you might be thought to be holding back a flood of emotions. I’ve also worked with clients who are hard to hear, even in a small room. Both extremes convey much the same thing, though—that you’re not fully in control of your feelings.

Speaking volume can actually be tricky to self-diagnose. You may think you sound just fine while others don’t. The best solution is often some sort of technology. Ideally, you would use a VU-meter, which is what I use with my clients. Otherwise you can find an app that serves as a decent substitute (here are a few more details on your options). The same way you need to look in the mirror to make sure your clothes fit and match, you often need some sort of recording device to see if your volume is right.

4. Take Its Temperature

Our voices can also project warmth—or not. If your voice has a round quality, it’ll sound warmer. A “round” voice is smooth and even, with one consistent flow—think of James Earl Jones. If your voice is sharp and abrupt (the opposite of round), you’ll project more coolness. This isn’t necessarily the worst thing in the world; you may grab your listeners’ attention that way. But the risk of a sharp voice is coming off as attacking, like those robotic Daleks in Doctor Who.

To feel what a round, even voice is like, place your hand in front of you and extend it outward, like you’re hitting a backhand shot in tennis. As you extend your arm, make an “ohh” sound. This will get you in the habit of elongating your vowels and smoothing out any choppiness.

The next time you speak, think first about what aspects of your personality—you or even just your mood—that you want to reveal and which ones you want to keep hidden. Your voice lets you choose.

Early in Ivanka Trump’s airy new advice book, Women Who Work: Rewriting The Rules For Success, there is a section titled “Begin with the End in Mind.” In these pages, Ivanka advises readers searching for their goals to envision how they would like to be remembered later in life.

Ivanka conducts this exercise by imagining herself at a “milestone birthday” table, surrounded by “blush-colored peonies” and “the people who’ve mattered most to me”: her family, her oldest friends. At such an idyllic future fête, she wonders, “What would others say about me?”

Ivanka portrays herself in Women Who Work as an entrepreneur who has made it her “life’s work to inspire and empower women in every aspect of their lives.” But as the cast at Saturday Night Live (along with perhaps half the country) have asked: How?  The primary example of Ivanka’s feminist advocacy is her Women Who Work initiative, after which the book is named.

Women Who Work, which Ivanka claims “became a movement,” was launched as a content marketing campaign for her fashion business, which sells mid-range clothing and accessories that are as risk-averse and unexciting as this 212-page book, a collection of career, productivity, and leadership advice cobbled together from best-selling leadership texts, TED talks, and short interviews that have already been published on her fashion company’s website.

From the start, Ivanka’s feminist avatar has had dollar signs in her eyes. “My company was not just meeting the lifestyle needs of today’s modern professional woman with versatile, well-designed products; it was celebrating those needs at a price point she could afford,” Ivanka recalls in the book. Those needs may have included sandals or a purse with a phone charger in it.

None of the advice in Women Who Work is particularly radical, and unlike her previous book, The Trump Card, there are few personal anecdotes that bring Ivanka to life on these pages. Although Ivanka says the book was written before the election, the last few pages of Women Who Work read like a preview of her White House agenda, touching on the necessity of funding for female entrepreneurs and paid parental leave and acknowledging the gender pay gap.

Those are important issues, but look between this book’s stitching to find the topics Ivanka chooses not to address. Somewhere between the eternal pursuit of Inbox Zero and the need for more female leaders lie serious problems that hold professional women back, like institutional sexism, harassment, and racism–issues that have permeated her father’s campaign and presidency like cigarette smoke on a wool coat. There are plenty of leadership books that fall short with this kind of stuff, but Ivanka had a front-row seat to her father’s gendered and racially abusive campaigning as this book was being written. She stood by him the whole time.

Is the absence of these topics in her book the result of cluelessness or fear? A likely culprit is privilege. In Ivanka’s world, if you make the right lists, work hard, network, and “stake your claim,” you will probably break the glass ceiling. If only the real world worked like that for everyone else.

Crumbs of Ivanka’s out-of-touchness are sprinkled throughout the book. During the campaign, Ivanka laments, she was so busy she “wasn’t treating myself to a massage.” In another section, Ivanka writes,“Time is the great equalizer,” quoting a rich friend, ostensibly oblivious to the fact that many women don’t have in-home help like she does, or can’t access childcare (which they still might not be able to afford under Trump), or have to work 60 hours a week for shamefully low wages sewing dresses that might have her name on them.

At one point in Women Who Work, Ivanka recalls advice passed along by her husband, Jared Kushner. Life, Kushner tells his wife, is a marathon, not a sprint. Perhaps Ivanka is playing a long game–looking far ahead into the future and plotting how she wants to be remembered: a loving mother and wife, a dedicated entrepreneur, and an advocate for women, as she reminds us throughout the book.

How Ivanka, our newly crowned assistant to the president, ends up “providing empowerment” to women as a member of the White House has yet to be seen. Ivanka appears to be involved with a global fund being developed to support female entrepreneurs through a World Bank initiative, the details of which are not yet clear. What we do know is that in the past 100 days Donald Trump has made a number of attempts to roll back women’s rights.

Related: How Working Women And Families Have Fared After 100 Days Of Trump

Meanwhile, far-right pundits and racists think Ivanka is having a moderating effect on Trump, and are raising their ire against her (and Jared, too). Her defensive strategy appears to be smiling like she’s auditioning for a toothpaste commercial while providing gracious non-answers to interview questions, insisting that behind the scenes she disagrees with her father but rarely disclosing what she actually disagrees with him about. This is not doing wondersfor her reputation as a women’s champion.

Yes, Ivanka Trump the human still has a financial interest in Ivanka Trump the business. She sometimes markets that business by wearing Ivanka Trump-brand merchandise—most recently on the global stage in Berlin. Ivanka may have decided to donate the income from her book to charity, but the attention it receives still benefits a brand that is literally and symbolically linked to her name. (A well-organized and passionate boycott continues to apply pressure on retailers who carry Ivanka Trump wares.)

Though she is not making a salary in her new White House role (which might be allowing her to skirt nepotism laws), the exposure and the access to power it affords her, in the long term, may be worth a bundle, depending upon what her laminated reputation looks like after swimming through this swamp. Ethicists think Ivanka should shut her business down, given the conflict concerns that have already arisen due to her refusal to truly divest herself from her companies. Nevertheless, in her book, Ivanka proudly discusses her work on the Old Post Office (a hotel close to the White House that has attracted foreign dignitaries hoping to curry favor with the president, and in which she still retains a financial stake) as well as other Trump properties, describing them in brochure-like language.

But let us return to that peony-lined table in Ivanka’s mind where her family and friends have collected in the future, appraising her and her life. One thing Ivanka has proven is that she is loyal to the Trump family to a capital T. “Dad, you never cease to amaze me!” Ivanka writes at the end of her book. “You have taught me to dream big and then surpass those goals—and to never, ever give up.” At the peony party, praise for Ivanka will no doubt be quite high. But what about beyond the petaled fringes of that gathering?

In the business world, it is easier to optically align oneself with a cause: join a board, speak on a panel, launch an “authentic” marketing statement and use it to sell a watered-down, nonthreatening feminism as wobbly as a pair of cheaply made shoes. But in politics, you generally have to take a stand, and you have to take action. Perhaps Ivanka will find an ethical way to spur a global entrepreneurs fund, or convince Congress to pass a parental leave act that includes both mothers and partners, or support a child care bill that doesn’t primarily benefit the rich. There are signs that she wants to make such things happen (and she’s not the only one).

Here’s something I don’t necessarily think was absent from Ivanka’s book, but is important to consider: Empowering women is about more than “women’s” issues. Rolling back protections for women workers isn’t feminist, and neither is denying climate change or discriminating against Muslims in our airports. Trying to curtail a free press is not feminist, and questioning our constitutional set of checks and balances is not feminist. Is Ivanka aligned with these attempts? History is still being written. But one thing certain is that there are a great many tables in the future, perhaps not all so well-adorned with flowers, for her to sit at, and be judged.

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Think about the workplace 10 years ago: The first iPhone wouldn’t be released until July 2007. There probably wasn’t “an app for that.” Open floor plans hadn’t yet become a privacy-busting phenomenon. And people weren’t obsessed with “the cloud.”

Certainly, smart devices, cloud-based platforms, and the way we work have been transformed over the past decade. We’re changing jobs more often—now, more often because we want to. And the breakneck speed of technology is once again transforming the way we will work.

But it’s hard to know exactly what the workplace will look like in 10 years, says Barbara Mistick, president of Wilson College and coauthor of Stretch: How to Future-Proof Yourself for Tomorrow’s Workplace. So keeping yourself marketable and relevant for a long career is a constant process of evaluation, education, and adaptation, she says. Here’s what you need to do to keep yourself prepared for—and even ahead of—what comes next.

Pay Attention To What’s Going On In (And Outside Of) Your Industry

The first thing you need to do is evaluate the best sources of information about your industry or career path, Mistick says. What conferences, organizations, websites, publications, or other resources have the best and most insightful information and resources? Connect with those resources so that you’re staying apprised of the information they have to offer.

Beyond that, you should also be watching innovation in other industries, says strategist and adviser Elizabeth Crook, author of the new book Live Large:  The Achiever’s Guide to What’s Next. Technology and process innovation aren’t typically limited to one sector. For example, if you’re in marketing, keep an eye on what’s happening in finance. Could the machine learning and automated approaches to checking out customers’ financial health give you clues about better targeting your market?

When you explore different areas, you never know what you’ll find that’s relevant, she says. Crook says she recently read a book about quantum physics that reminded her there’s more than one way to do things. That seems like a basic concept, she says, but it helped her not get mired in stale thinking.

Schedule Checkups Twice A Year

You probably go for a medical checkup every year or two. You get your car serviced regularly. But are you scheduling time to ensure that your own skills and education are up to date? If not, that’s a mistake, Mistick says. Her strategic plans for customers are typically focused on two to three years because 10 years is too far out to accurately predict. Similarly, professionals need to “reevaluate every couple of years to make sure that whatever skills you’re working on, they’re still the skills you think you should be working on,” she says.

Find Ways To Stretch Your Skills

Once you get to a certain point in your career, it’s easy to get complacent or think you know it all. That’s deadly. In order to stay relevant and marketable, you need to keep finding ways to stretch your skills, Mistick says. “Your company or organization is not going to provide the level of professional assistance or development that you need in order to keep your career relevant. I’d say the No. 1 thing you have to do is realize that the responsibility for your professional development is on you,” she says.

So seek out projects where you’ll need to learn new skills or tools. For example, if you’re trying to develop more managerial and leadership skills, seek out opportunities to work on your company’s strategic planning projects. Share your goals with your supervisor and mentor to help you find opportunities, she says.

Document Your Development

Keep a professional development log to track the classes, continuing education, and other development opportunities in which you’ve participated, advises Mark Anthony Dyson, creator of The Voice of Job Seekers blog and podcast. He recommends blogging or podcasting to develop an online presence and brand yourself as a leader and lifelong learner. However, if you’re not comfortable with such a highly visible format, building an online presence by publishing occasional content about your sector, viewpoints, and achievements can be a good way to build your visibility. Your interviewers are going to be looking for that, he says.

“You’re giving yourself a chance to be different than everyone else,” he says.

Step Out Of Your Comfort Zone

Don’t adopt storylines that will hold you back, such as “I’m not a tech person, or “I could never learn to code.” You’re probably going to have to get increasingly comfortable with technology as it becomes a bigger part of every job, Mistick says. Work on skills that are obviously more in demand, such as the ability to collaborate virtually and manage change. Staying ready for the future will likely mean doing things you really don’t want to do or feel prepared to do. But the minute you let that fear or hesitation stop you from learning what you need to navigate the future of your work, you’re beginning to let your skills expire.

“You can’t be focused on trying to keep everything in a neat little box. You have to step outside that,” she says.

One of the worst mistakes BlackBerry ever made–and it made many–was failing to recognize the inevitability of obsolescence for physical keyboards. When Apple revealed the iPhone in 2007, BlackBerry executives couldn’t comprehend being productive on a device whose only input was a touchscreen, and made disparaging comments instead of adapting.

Nearly 10 years later, I’m having trouble being productive on the BlackBerry KeyOne, the only current high-end Android phone with a physical keyboard on its face. (It goes on sale in the U.S. on May 31, reportedly for $549.) The KeyOne is supposed to be a throwback to BlackBerry’s glory days, but it’s really a reminder of how far smartphone typing has come without real keys.

Full disclosure: I’ve never been a BlackBerry addict–my first smartphone was an iPhone 3GS–so perhaps I just can’t understand the creature comforts that a physical keyboard provides that helped make BlackBerrys so popular in their heyday. But even after a week of using the KeyOne as my everyday phone, typing on a virtual keyboard is easier and objectively faster.

The Last BlackBerry (Sort Of)

We’ll get to the keyboard critique shortly, but first I must admit a certain thrill to showing off the BlackBerry KeyOne for friends and family.

The common refrain–I didn’t realize BlackBerry still made phones–is not entirely misguided. BlackBerry no longer manufactures its own handsets, instead outsourcing the job to other companies such as Chinese manufacturer TCL, which is making the KeyOne, and it long ago abandoned its BlackBerry 10 OS in favor of Android. Although BlackBerry claims responsibility for the KeyOne’s design, the company won’t be designing any new phones from now on. That job will also fall to third parties as BlackBerry focuses on enterprise services.

The KeyOne certainly has the vibe of a swan song, with aluminum trim, gently curved glass, and soft, dimpled plastic on the rear side that seems vaguely like leather. The rounded chin and sharp top edges are clever nods to classic BlackBerry designs, and the keyboard serves as both a functional feature and a design flourish. No one would guess that the KeyOne was anything but a BlackBerry–unless they assumed the company was out of the phone business already.

Learning To Type

The novelty of a new BlackBerry phone wore off quickly as I tried to acclimate with the physical keyboard, using it in place of an iPhone 6 Plus as my everyday handset. Beyond the usual texting, emailing, and tweeting, I also used the KeyOne to draft a chunk of this review.

At first, the keyboard felt clumsy to use. The keys are so cramped that I’d occasionally mash a couple of them together. Even after learning to be more deliberate with thumb placement, I’ve been leaning on auto-correct to fix mistakes, and was never able to type without looking at the keyboard for guidance.

About five days in, I felt like my typing had achieved a solid pace, but along the way I became frustrated by some aspects of the KeyOne’s layout. The phone has no dedicated keys for numbers or punctuation, instead hiding them behind an “alt” function button. Being able to long-press the appropriate key would’ve helped, but BlackBerry has instead mapped the long-press to capitalization, which I seldom needed. (Sentences automatically begin with capital letters anyway, and there are shift keys on either side of the keyboard.)

The physical keyboard also has some inherent downsides: One-handed typing requires more pressure compared to tapping on a virtual keyboard, and therefore feels slower. The physical keyboard also doesn’t support gesture typing, in which software predicts what word to type as you glide a finger over each letter.

Putting Physical Keys To The Test

Because of all these issues, typing on my iPhone 6 Plus with Google’s Gboard keyboard was faster in every imaginable scenario, even after a week of practice.

To test this out, I typed the same memorized 90 words–the quick brown fox pangram, the Pledge of Allegiance, and the first stanza of a Phish song–in various ways. Typing with both thumbs, the iPhone’s virtual keyboard beat the BlackBerry’s physical one, 33.9 words per minute to 30.7 words per minute. With the iPhone cradled in one hand and gesture typing with my other index finger, typing speed rose to 34.5 words per minute.

With one-handed use, the virtual keyboard’s advantage was even more dramatic. Typing with one thumb on the BlackBerry KeyOne yielded a sluggish 20.2 words per minute, versus 24.8 words per minute with touch typing on the iPhone, and 35.1 words per minute with gesture typing.

Granted, speed isn’t everything, and the BlackBerry KeyOne provides some unique benefits. You can map app launch shortcuts to each key, for instance. And there’s the intangible satisfaction that comes with feeling confident about which key is under your thumb.

At the same time, having ever-present keys means less room on the screen for watching videos or playing games, and having to stretch to reach buttons that would normally be further down-screen. Also, I couldn’t get used to the fingerprint sensor’s placement inside the space bar. When I wasn’t typing, I always subconsciously expected it to behave as a home button.

Beyond The Keyboard

In fairness, the physical keyboard isn’t the BlackBerry KeyOne’s sole selling point. On the hardware side, the 3505 mAh battery is monstrous given the KeyOne’s smaller screen, and I had no trouble going a night or two between charges. The shortcut button on the phone’s right side is also a nice touch, letting you quick-launch into an app or activity of your choice.

The phone, which runs Android 7.1 Nougat, comes with some useful software as well. The Hub+ app consolidates email, text messages, calendar alerts, social media, and messages from apps like Slack into one place. There’s also a a built-in password manager, and an app called DTEK that evaluates system security. True BlackBerry enthusiasts can even exchange messages among themselves through BBM. While these same apps are available on any Android device for free with ads, or ad-free for 99¢ per month, the KeyOne makes a point of showcasing them.

Yet all the while, the keyboard physically crowds out those features, taking up screen space and hindering productivity. Most of the phone-using public realized this a long time ago. But even in its final breath as a hardware designer, BlackBerry can’t quite admit that the time for its signature feature has passed.

On a Wednesday evening in April, I find myself in a well-appointed home in Brookline, a wealthy Boston suburb, sipping wine and eating macarons with a dozen oncologists from the Dana Farber Cancer Institute. Sitting around a coffee table displaying Asian art and colorful books about design, the women—colleagues from the same medical research group, aged between 40 and 60—aren’t talking about their work.

“Oh, you never wear bright colors, but that red looks so good on you,” says one to the other. “I keep buying these pants every season, because they fit so well,” another says. “They are perfect for hiding problem areas on your tummy.”

I’ve joined these women for a trunk show run by Cabi, a social shopping brand that operates in the U.S., the U.K., and Canada. It was founded in 2001 by Kimberly Inskeep, a finance executive looking for a flexible career after her kids were born, and Carol Anderson, a fashion designer in need of a new way to market her products. Together with ten of their friends, they launched Carol Anderson by Invitation (hence, Cabi), a line of clothing that they would sell in their homes in a party-like setting. In the brand’s parlance, they were creating “alternative stores.” Over the last 15 years, the company has steadily grown, and its team of 3,500 salespeople around the world generate more than $250 million in revenue a year.

The concept of selling directly to your friends has been around since the 1950s Tupperware party. But direct selling has been boosted by new trends over the last few years. Thanks to social media, salespeople now have access to bigger networks and operate like other members of the gig economy, earning money in a way that suits their schedule. The sales workforce in this sector is 77% female (compare that to Uber, which overwhelmingly attracts male drivers), and the most successful brands are predominantly for women: Cabi, Worth, Stella & Dot, Beautycounter, Rodan + Fields, and Ellie Kai are blowing up. Globally, direct selling increased by 7.7% in 2015, reaching a new revenue record of $183.7 billion.

Meanwhile, traditional brick-and-mortar retail is in free fall. More than 8,600 physical stores will shut their doors this year, four times the number that closed in 2016, which translates to 147 million square feet of retail space vanishing. In the midst of this brutal retail climate, social selling appears to be offering consumers something that is missing from both the brick-and-mortar experience and e-commerce. I’m at the Cabi party to understand what that is.

Annie Kippe, a Cabi stylist, is at the Brookline trunk show to show this season’s 100-piece collection. Before her presentation begins, everyone gathers informally around the dinner table. The host, who will receive a 50% discount on all her Cabi purchases for holding the event at her house, has prepared a spread of cheese, fruit, tarts, and wine. As we nibble and sip, Kippe explains that she lives in New Hampshire with her husband, a surgeon, and her four kids. In a previous life, she was a marketing executive, but much like Cabi’s founder, she off-ramped when the kids came along. “I kept going to Cabi trunk shows,” Kippe, who is wearing a flowery Cabi two-piece ensemble, tells me. “Then I thought, Being a stylist could be a real career for me.”

She joined Cabi six and a half years ago; now she works there full-time. She travels for trunk shows several nights a week (the frequency depends on her kid’s schedules) and invites clients to her home for personal styling sessions. Cabi treats stylists as independent business owners, rather than employees. Each one must spend $2,500 to pay for the season’s collection. They then go on to make between 25% and 30% commission on each piece sold, yielding an average of $30,000 in yearly earnings. Eighty-six percent of stylists stay on from season to season, which is much higher than the 25% average for social selling brands. A Cabi stylist can also make money by enlisting new stylists. “The startup cost is intentionally high,” Cabi president Kimberly Inskeep tells me by phone after the party. “We want our stylists to approach this business seriously because we think this is how they will achieve the greatest success.”

After about half an hour of socializing, everyone moves to the living room, where Kippe has put up a simple folding screen on which she hangs  several Cabi outfits at a time. She gives a little spiel: “We’ve all had disappointing experiences at the mall,” she says, while the oncologists nod in agreement. “Maybe not getting the kind of service we would like. Or buying pieces that stay in our closet for years, unworn. Cabi is trying to provide an alternative.”

She then pulls out each piece in the collection from behind the screen, offering ideas about how to wear each one. The clothing is priced on par with J.Crew or Banana Republic, from $69 for a colorful camisole top to $189 for a trench coat. The clothes aren’t particularly cheap, but the women here don’t seem to be looking for a deal. They’re looking for someone to tell them what to wear to work or a beach party.

Cabi products are generally manufactured in China and made of polyesters and rayons, as opposed to high-end materials like silks or cashmeres. Cabi clothing doesn’t have a particular aesthetic per se, but it offers a wide array of looks to accommodate diverse tastes. The designers focus on their target customer, a busy woman in her forties who’s looking for clothing that will fit easily into her wardrobe. The brand emphasizes flattering fits, offering little tricks like discreet elasticized waistbands to flatten the stomach or strategic ruching to hide parts of the body a customer might want to downplay. Tonight, Kippe regularly points out how particular pieces were a godsend to her when she was trying to mask some excess baby weight when her children were little. The women in the audience nod appreciatively.

Ultimately, the appeal of the brand comes down to the personal styling advice. The women in attendance listen attentively to Kippe, making notes on the lookbooks she has given them. They jot down the tip that a spaghetti strap dress can be made office-appropriate with a blazer and that it is currently fashionable to mix prints.

The atmosphere at the trunk show is warm and cozy, the communal dynamic that many people used to enjoy with mall shopping replicated here in someone’s living room. The women are relaxed, chomping on snacks and even getting a little tipsy. All evening, there’s been an ongoing joke about how one of the women in the group wears very plain, monochromatic outfits to work and has no desire to change up her look. “Polka dots are the perfect, neutral print for women who don’t usually wear prints,” Kippe says. “No way,” responds the skeptic. The room erupts with laughter.

After Kippe’s 45-minute presentation, the oncologists are invited to try on pieces behind the screen or in one of the rooms the host has set aside for changing. Then they fill out their order sheets. Some women are going to stock their closets with Cabi outfits, others have selected one or two pieces, and several don’t buy anything at all. Even though not every attendee splurges, it’s easy to see how a Cabi stylist can make a good living and how the company is so successful.

Cabi appears to be particularly well suited to tonight’s group—made up of, for the most part, busy, middle-aged professionals with disposable incomes and full family lives. One attendee points out how efficient it is to be enjoying a fun girls’ night out while simultaneously sorting out her wardrobe for the next few months. “Two birds with one stone,” she says.

These women don’t have time to spend hours rifling though racks of a boutique, and as people who grew up shopping in physical stores, they’re not inclined to scroll through pages and pages of outfits online. Cabi and other direct selling brands are filling an important gap in the marketplace by catering to consumers who appreciate being able to touch products and try them on without the pressure to make a quick decision that often comes with a visit to, say, Macy’s or Ann Taylor.

I saw several women nod when Kippe described a bad experience with in-store customer service. At Cabi trunk shows, clients can build a relationship with a stylist, asking her for advice at the party and then by email, text, or Facebook later on. (Kippe regularly alerts her clients when a new style comes in that she knows they will like.) The relaxed, friendly atmosphere is meant to foster inclusion and acceptance, so no one feels judged for her body or personal taste.

Of course, amid all the bonding and sisterliness, the bottom line is: These parties are perfectly calibrated to entice attendees to spend their entire clothing budget on Cabi pieces. Some of the people here tonight already do. “Annie has been my personal stylist for six years now, if you can believe it,” one woman tells the group. The woman speaking is, in fact, a certified Cabi devotee, the person who organized this event and invited everyone in the room. “My entire wardrobe is basically Cabi,” she continues. “But I think there are a couple of pieces from today that I need to add to my closet.”

Earlier in the night, she was asked to model a $189 blue-and-white striped trench coat. By the time the evening winds down, she still hasn’t taken it off. She can’t bear to.

Another satisfied customer.

“Did I forget anything?” Clothes—check. Laptop—check. Passport—check. Friends . . . emotion washed over me as I zipped up my suitcase and braced myself for another day of red-eyed goodbyes. I was about to leave Seoul, right around when I’d started to feel like I was finally settled in.

Fourteen months ago, I packed up my life in New York City and hit the road to start my own business as a digital nomad. Learning to navigate each new city’s metro system and overcoming international travel snags has gotten easier, but saying goodbye is still just as hard. With over a year under my belt now, here’s how I’m learning to cope with the peaks and valleys of my newfound career.

Related: What I Wish I Had Considered Before Becoming A Digital Nomad 

1. Find A Few Constants When Everything’s Changing

Seeing the world this past year has been amazing—I feel really lucky. There were many moments when I felt as high as a kite, but there were also plenty of times when the constant instability took its toll. In my first few months of traveling, I’d drop my bags at my new city’s accommodation and race out the door to see all the sights. It was fun, but being constantly on the move soon started to burn me out, and my work suffered.

Now, when I get to a new city, I unpack my bag, sign up for a gym, find a nearby grocery store for home-cooked meals, and get my life as close to “normal” as possible. Putting some kind of routine in place helps me be as productive as possible for my company, no matter where I am geographically. I try to stick to a normal workweek and leave exploring for the nights and weekends.

Fellow digital nomad Casey Rosengren, the founder of Hacker Paradise, a traveling community for developers, has learned the same lesson I have. “I think the most important thing is having a routine and prioritizing it wherever you go,” he says. “I will call gyms up in advance when I’m switching locations to make sure they have the gear I’m looking for, so once I land, I know where to go. Staying places longer and finding places with a kitchen goes a long way toward staying healthy.”

2. Opt For Longer Stays

One mistake I made when I first started traveling was to bounce around from place to place. That wasn’t just draining after a while, it often left me feeling lonely and disconnected. I quickly realized that spending a week or two in a new location wasn’t enough time to make strong connections.

Many digital nomads say that coping with loneliness is a real stumbling block to making the lifestyle work. We’ve all experienced it at some point in our journeys. “If you’re single and always on the go, it’s very difficult to form the bond and find someone lasting to date,” Anita Dhake, founder of a blog called The Power of Thrift, points out. Dating while nomading can be next to impossible. Elaina Giolando, who set out on a globetrotting career in her early 20s, recently told Fast Company that being single was a prerequisite: “I’m not necessarily single on purpose, but it definitely makes it easier to accept jobs that people with partners and families can’t.”

But there are lots of ways you can still make crucial human connections. After spending three months in Korea, I felt comfortable. I knew my way around. The local kimbap restaurant knew me by name. I met a group of great people who quickly went from strangers to friends I felt like I’d known for years. Korea is now a second home that I’ll be coming back to in the fall.

Related:Six Tools I Can’t Live Without As A Digital Nomad 

The key was just extending my stay. Not only does staying put in one place give you the time to make stronger bonds, but it also helps you be more productive. “The hardest part of digital nomadism is to strike the right balance between working and traveling. There are some months where I need a lot of focus, and having to find a place to live and work in a new country can be very stressful,” says François Grante, founder of the email lookup tool Hunter.io. “If you need to focus on your work, it’s essential to not take flight every week.”

3. Draw Support From Other Digital Nomads

When I started traveling, I had never even heard of “digital nomads” or considered becoming one. I was just trying to save money to launch my business by living in Spain. After learning more about the digital-nomad lifestyle, I took to forums and Facebook groups to connect with others who were also traveling while working. The friends I made from these communities are worth their weight in gold, and they’ve been real saviors when the road less travelled got rough.

When going to a new city, I recommend using platforms like NomadList to connect with others like you, or even just searching Facebook for “digital nomads in [chosen city].” From dealing with grief to rough patches in the business process, certain challenges are best faced alongside friends who are also trying to balance work, travel, and everything in between.

4. Trade “Goodbye” For “See You Later”

Though my Instagram feed might have featured a beautiful cityscape before taking off from Korea, what it failed to disclose were the preceding hours, which I spent blubbering in bed to John Mayer ballads, sad to be leaving. Despite the weepy day, I found solace in having had the opportunity to meet such great friends, and I am left with beautiful memories for life.

Goodbye magical land of dog cafes, cute socks, kimchee and fun. ???? ???????? Merhaba Turkey + Hola España! ✈

A post shared by Arianna O'Dell (@ariannaodell) on Apr 16, 2017 at 7:07pm PDT

“You meet so many people in transition,” says journalist Foo Conner, which makes saying goodbye such a struggle—especially when you’ve got to do it again and again every few months. “We make deep connections and lose them overnight. The sense of loss really hits when you’re crossing paths and strike up a wonderful conversation. You know it’s temporary, but imagine canceling tickets and plans for that extra tea that day.”

This couldn’t be more true. Still, I’ve found comfort in knowing that the gift of digital nomadism means I can always revisit the amazing friends I’ve made around the world. When you don’t have a 12-month lease on an apartment waiting for you to go back to, there’s nothing stopping you from booking a return visit to a city where you used to live. My past 14 months as a digital nomad have been a roller-coaster ride, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything. And in the process, I’ve learned an incredible amount about myself and the world around me.

See you on the road?

If you’re a parent, you’ve done it. Maybe in the car. Maybe in the kitchen. Maybe when you’ve stepped on Lego in the dark for the 3,000th time. Swearing in front of your kids is one of the less publicized parental rights of passage. And now for Mother’s Day, Kraft says it’s OK.

Melissa Mohr, author of Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing, breaks it down in this ad from agency CP+B Boulder. She says a recent Kraft study revealed that 74% of moms admit to swearing in front of their kids. The other 26% are full of sh*t. And just as dropping F-bombs around the offspring is fine once in a while, so too is feeding your kids mac n’ cheese. The message to moms here seems to be, whether it’s passing on your longshoreman’s vocabulary or eating dinner out of a box, don’t be too hard on yourself either way.

Kraft is attaching Mother’s Day cards with “Fail-Cancelling Earplugs” to select boxes of mac n’ cheese to help shield kid’s ears. Which sort of contradicts the ad’s message, but makes for a decent gimmick. Or you can order your own pair to cancel out the worst of the pandering momvertising that will surely rain down on us over the next week.