Many entrepreneurs launch beauty startups because they see a glaring gap in the market. It’s only after they’ve formulated their products and launched them that they learn how incredibly difficult it is to turn a profit as a beauty business.
That wasn’t the case for Tisha Thompson, founder of LYS (short for Love Yourself), a clean cosmetics brand that is inclusive to all skin tones. Since launching the line in 2021, Thompson has grown LYS’s sales to upward of $10 million. And she did so in a counterintuitive way: by building a bootstrapped brand that launched immediately into Sephora with just $500,000 in startup capital.
Thompson’s success is remarkable, particularly because many other Black founders in the beauty industry are struggling. This summer, the popular makeup brand Ami Colé shuttered after three years in business. Founder Diarrha NDiaye-Mbaye says she wasn’t able to find enough capital to stay afloat. Many other Black-owned beauty brands, including Beauty Bakerie, Ceylon, and Koils by Nature, have also been forced to close.
For Thompson, it’s important to offer a counterpoint to these stories, and to show retailers and investors that it is possible to succeed as a Black-owned brand that targets Black consumers.
“There’s this narrative that Black-owned businesses are failing, and that’s really unfair because there are many white-owned businesses that are also failing,” she says. “Every brand has its own story, and I just want to show that a Black-owned business can be profitable. I want to tell the industry: Don’t give up on us.”
[Photo: LYS Beauty]
Identifying A Gap In The Market
Thompson has always loved makeup. As a teenager, she would spend gym class doing makeovers for her friends instead of running laps. But when she started her career in the beauty industry, she began to see that many companies did not seem to value her as a consumer. “For so long, makeup has left people who look like meplus-size black womenout of the conversation,” she says. “They were not marketing to us at all.”
As she was coming up in her career, the clean beauty industry was taking off, and she got a job at Pür, a brand that formulates products without toxic ingredients. Brands like Beautycounter and retailers like Credo highlighted how unregulated the beauty industry is, and how many questionable ingredients are in our products. But it always struck her that the clean beauty industry was not targeting Black women.
[Photo: LYS Beauty]
“They didn’t prioritize women of color in their strategy,” Thompson says. “They were predominantly marketing around an older white woman and selling products at a higher price point.”
Thompson realized there was a gap in the market for a more inclusive clean makeup brand. But knowing how expensive it is to launch a beauty company, she didn’t think she was in a position to start one. “I don’t come from money, and I don’t have access to money,” she says. “It seemed like an impossible dream.”
Then in 2019, Thompson’s father died, and this changed her calculation. She decided to take the plunge and began writing up a business plan. “Sometimes when something traumatic happens, you lose your rational thinking,” she says. “I realized life is short and I might not be here tomorrow. So I decided I would try to be the change I wanted to see in the world.”
Getting to 8-Figure Revenue
Before launching LYS, Thompson had spent 15 years in the trenches of the beauty industry. She was a makeup artist at MAC, ran marketing for Pür Cosmetics, and handled finances at the beauty conglomerate Astral Brands, which owns Butter London.
“My superpower today is understanding the finances of the beauty industry,” she says. “Beauty is a very expensive business, and to run a company you need to understand all the detailsfrom the cost of goods to sales to operations.”
Launching a beauty brand requires spending money on formulation, packaging, and inventory, as well as on marketing to get the word out. Many beauty founders start to raise money as soon as they have an idea. But Thompson was a lot more conservative about taking money because she knew that investors tended to prioritize growth and scale, which could make it hard to become profitable.
Thompson poured the small inheritance her father left her into this startup. She also found an angel investor who was willing to put some money into the business. But this amounted to less than half a million dollars, far less than many other beauty brands.
[Photo: LYS Beauty]
Then she did something a little crazy. To get the brand out into the world, Thompson realized she needed the help of a retailer like Sephora. Since she didn’t know anybody at the company, she decided to reach out cold.
“I basically drunk-texted ephora,” she says. “I had a glass of wine one night, went on LinkedIn to find a merchant, and sent them my deck of slides about the brand. I thought it would go into a deep dark hole, but 10 days later, I got an email back from Sephora saying they’d love to talk.”
Like Thompson, Sephora’s merchants identified that most clean brands weren’t targeting the Black consumer, and they thought her business idea was smart. So they signed her up to sell her products on the Sephora website as a test to see if it had the potential to do well in-store. Thompson used her startup capital strategically, mostly to meet Sephora’s inventory needs. She poured money into formulating products, designing packaging, and manufacturing.
[Photo: LYS Beauty]
What she didn’t do was spend money on hiring staff or on marketing, which are often major expenses for beauty startups. Instead of spending money on social media marketing, Thompson reached out to 300 influencers who might be willing to promote her brand for free because they believed in her mission.
“I had a lot of relationships with creators from my former life,” she says. “I reached out to the most impactful creators who could help me get this brand off the ground, and almost all of them posted a video at launch. YouTube filled up with people promoting the launch of the first Black-owned clean makeup brand at Sephora.”
On launch day, LYS blew through four months’ worth of inventory in 24 hours. Sephora quickly decided to launch the brand in its stores.
Saying No To Black Lives Matter Money
Thompson’s approach was different from many other Black-owned beauty brands that launched during this period. After the murder of George Floyd in 2020 and the growth of the Black Lives Matter movement, many investors began to realize that they had failed to support Black founders and set aside funds to invest in Black-owned businesses. Retailers like Target and Sephora made commitments to devoting more shelf space to Black-owned brands.
Many Black founders benefited from this sudden support. Ami Colé’s founder received $1 million in investment very quickly, allowing her to launch in Sephora. Ceylon Beauty, a skincare brand for men of color, received a $50,000 grant from Glossier as part of a program for Black founders. Koils by Nature, a haircare brand, was picked up by Target.
But when Donald Trump entered office at the start of this year, waging an assault on companies that were committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion, many investors and retailers changed their tune. All of these brands relied on continued funding for working capital, but investors were unwilling to keep supporting them. They’ve all since shut down.
During the Black Lives Matter movement, Thompson started receiving calls from investors wanting to fund her business. But she decided to turn them down. She could not possibly have predicted that money would later dry up for Black foundersher reason for rejecting this capital was more practical. She wanted to maintain more equity in her company.
“Without scale as a Black-owned business, I knew that you would have to give up more equity than the average brand,” Thompson says. “I looked around and saw these brands giving up a lot more of their company for small chunks of money.”
And besides, she didn’t need the money because she had found a way to remain cash positive, without any investment, by keeping her expenses low and pouring all profits back into the business. “I was the only employee for the first two years of the business,” she says. “This was an extremely lean operation.”
This year, Thompson realized she couldn’t continue to scale without investment. The brand was already generating upward of $10 million in annual revenue, thanks to its partnership with Sephora. The next frontier was to go international. In March, LYS announced it had received eight figures of funding led by Encore Consumer Capital. While this is a lot of capital, Thompson says the point of raising this money was to find a strategic investor who had connections in international markets.
[Photo: LYS Beauty]
“This investor has backed Tarte and Supergoop, which are brands that have reached a scale beyond what I am capable of,” she says. “The international market is uncharted territory for LYS, but these investors are able to just pick up the phone and make an introduction to a retailer in Europe or Asia.”
Thompson is excited for LYS’s next chapter, as it begins to announce partnerships with department stores and retailers overseas. But just as important, she wants to inspire other Black entrepreneurs to not give up, even though it seems like a bleak time to be a founder of color.
“When I was coming up in the industry, I didn’t see a lot of founders like me, and that made me doubt whether I could really do this,” she says. “I want other Black founders to realize that running a successful company is attainable.”
If the three years since the release of ChatGPT have signaled OpenAIs dominance of generative artificial intelligence, its worth recalling that the company’s rapid rise would have been impossible without another Big Tech backer.
In 2019, Microsoft agreed to supply OpenAI all the compute it needed, with near exclusivity. In exchange, Microsoft retained the right to use OpenAIs tech until the arrival of artificial general intelligence, or AGI: the point at which AI systems are able to act like humans and respond to whatever task theyre given, regardless of whether theyve been trained to solve it.
As generative AIs capabilities blew past initial expectations, the question of when AGI will arrive became a major point of contention in OpenAI and Microsofts agreement. In addition, Microsoft feared that OpenAI’s plans to restructure toward a public benefit corporation and open its platform could dilute its influence.
Then, in late October, the companies announced a new arrangement, one that looks like a win for Microsoft. Microsofts IP rights for both models and products are extended through 2032 and now include models post-AGI, with appropriate safety guardrails, according to a company blog post announcing the renegotiation.
The AGI clause, then, is no more. So what does it tell us about both companies beliefs about the path to AGIand how long it could take?
In many ways, the announcement felt inevitable. Microsoft had reportedly spent months trying to remove the AGI clause, for fear that AGIs arrivalor OpenAIs claim of its arrivalcould threaten its access to the most advanced generative AI models on the planet, just as such technologies become commercially invaluable. After investing more than $13 billion, Microsoft wanted to ensure it could maintain access.
Michael Veale, a researcher at University College London, wonders whether the world is reading too much into the change in agreement. He reckons that the firms have planned to scrap it because its too gameableor too easy for OpenAI to declare when it has been reached, at its own convenienceto provide the commercial certainty they want from a contract, he says.
Veale believes that AGI is too woolly a concept on which to base a long-term agreement with such high financial stakes. Its hard to say what the decision means on the basis of the reporting around the terms changes, he adds.
Alessandra Russo, a professor in applied computational logic at Imperial College London, is also uncertain about what to make of the changed terms of the agreement and how it interacts with both companies timeline for AGI. One thing she is confident about is her belief that AGI isn’t on the horizon. People are always moving the posts a little bit further back, because of the realization that this technology is not as was initially expected, she explains.
Catherine Flick, professor of AI ethics at the University of Staffordshire, shares this take, noting that the shift is more an indication of both companies trying to sustain the hype around AGI to justify their investments in the tech, rather than a deep-seated belief that AGI truly is around the corner.
The practical snag with an AGI trigger is verification. Theres no agreed test or arbiter, which makes any clause gameable for the commercial certainty both sides want. As Flick puts it: How do you even verify AGI?
One way the two companies have tried to solve this is by agreeing to remove the unilateral declaration of AGI that has previously given Microsoft pause. The companies say that once AGI is declared by OpenAI, that declaration will now be verified by an independent expert panelbroadening the number of people who can or would declare it to be so.
Even if that point arrives, Flick argues declaring AGI is a mutually sustaining confidence boost designed to steady nerves across the wider AI supply chain and to keep capital flowing while capabilities progress slowly, rather than leaping. Its also part of the perpetuation of this hype cycle, she says, at a moment when definitions blur and milestones remain mobile.
That said, at least publicly, those in charge of the companies are accelerating their timeframes for when AGI might arrive.
In January, Sam Altman published a blog post declaring that the world is getting closer to AGI, and that his company was making preparations for how to deal with its imminent arrival. Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsofts AI division, isnt as bullish about the timescale. In a December 2024 interview, he pegged the arrival of AGI within the next five to seven years.
Not everyone agrees. The fact that theyre still talking about AGI, says Flick, its cloud cuckoo land.
In President Donald Trump’s ongoing second-term White House remodel, even the typography is getting the Mar-a-Lago treatment.
New signage has begun rolling out at the White House this fall. First, the words “The Presidential Walk of Fame” appeared in September in the gold Shelley Script on the West Colonnade. The signage appears above the presidential portraits Trump installed to troll former President Joe Biden.
Now new images show lettering that reads “The Oval Office” written in the same font, and which appears to be going up on its exterior wall.
The White House press office did not immediately respond to a request for comment about whether more signage will be going up. An auto-reply to Fast Companys inquiry included text that blamed Democrats for staff shortages due to the ongoing government shutdown.
President Donald Trump departs the White House on November 5, 2025. [Photo: Celal Gunes/Anadolu/Getty Images]
Shelley script goes off-script
Trump’s new, gold White House signs are aesthetically aligned with other recent redecoration efforts, including his planned ballroom. To critics who find it tacky, though, it’s not necessarily the type choice that’s off.
“Shelley is one of a handful of long-standing, go-to formal script fonts,” Charles Nix, senior executive creative director at Monotype, tells Fast Company in an email. “Its testimony to the quality of the design (and the skill of the designer) that it perseveres as visual shorthand for formal or fancy.
Famed type designer Matthew Carter designed Shelley Script for Linotype in 1972. It’s been used for everything from winery websites to book covers, according to Fonts in Use, and it’s a go-to choice for wedding invitations.
“The typeface is perfectly fine, and it does seem in keeping with the dignity of the White House,” type historian Paul Shaw says. “The problem is not the fit, but the idea of even slathering the phrase The Oval Office on the exterior. It looks like part of a theme park.”
Further, Shaw says, “The Walk of Fameis this Hollywood or Las Vegas?cements that tacky association. Fortunately, this is one of the least egregious things that this short-fingered vulgarian has done in the past 10 months.”
[Photo: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images]
Mar-a-Lago North
Script fonts also seem less the domain of the West Wing than the East (RIP), before Trump had it torn down to make room for a 90,000-square-foot ballroom.
The fonts of the West Wing are the fonts of the state, like Courier New, which is used in executive orders. While the West Wing is for government functions of the executive branch, the East Wing, where the offices of the First Lady were once located, was for soft power. Before it was destroyed, the East Wing housed the White House Calligraphy Office, which produces the White House’s most famous script lettering on social documents like invitations and state dinner menus.
Trump has already added gilded embellishments to the Oval Office and turned the Rose Garden into a concrete patio that resembles the one at his Florida home and club. Now it seems he’s cribbed its typography as well, with each detail making the people’s house appear much more like Mar-a-Lago North.
Being laid off is bad enough. Falling victim to strategic realignment or the growth playbook? Thats just adding insult to injury.
Last week, Amazon shared a memo sent to staff as the company implemented mass layoffs. The post detailed the overall reduction in its corporate workforce of 14,000 roles (about 4% of its white-collar workforce).
While news of the layoffs attracted media attention, the focus across social media wasnt so much on the contents of the memo as the headline itself: Staying nimble and continuing to strengthen our organizations.
Corporate buzzword masterclass, Morning Brew wrote in a now-viral post on X. You werent fired, you were part of our ongoing nimblization initiative, one X user responded.
It’s the type of corporate-speak that weve come to expect as companies continue to lay off sizable numbers of employees.
I thought restructuring was a good one, staying nimble is an even funnier way to say mass layoffs, another quote tweeted.
POV: you are about to get nimbled, one joked.
On November 3, Amazon announced a multiyear strategic partnership with OpenAI to the tune of $38 billion. The layoffs are part of a restructuring meant to reduce bureaucracy and remove organizational layers, according to the memo.
Amazon is not alone. UPS, Target, Nestlé, and Paramount joined the growing list of companies laying off employees this year. YouTube also quietly introduced voluntary exit packages for employees who are willing to take the first hit, according to an internal memo first reported by Alex Heaths Sources AI newsletter.
The impressive linguistic gymnastics when announcing job cuts are intended to assuage those on the receiving end. But more often than not they have the opposite effect. Sometimes, you just have to laugh at the absurdity, a Reddit user posted back in 2023 in the popular subreddit r/Layoffs. I lost one job to Enabling our future. I lost the next one to The Growth Playbook.
A report from outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas showed almost 950,000 U.S. job cuts this year through September, the highest levels seen since the pandemic. At the same time, more than one in four workers without jobs have been unemployed for at least half a year.
Whether it’s a “streamlining processes,” “rightsizing,” or “realigning,” the end result is the same: Another influx of workers added to the stagnant pool of unemployed.
Times are tough. Stay nimble out there.
My aha moment about how to use artificial intelligence effectively came from an engineering group that built an operating model for experimenting with AI.
They didnt pilot AI once and move onthey built lightweight checklists and safety rails so teams could try, learn, and scale, week after week.
Some guidance was deeply technical, but the lesson was universal: Make continuous experimentation part of how the team works. Not a side project. Thats the job in front of every leader now.
AI is changing work at two levels at once: Individuals capabilities are being augmented, and teams are collaborating differently. The best results dont come from isolated power users. They come when managers redesign how the whole team gets work done together.
In practice, that means every manager becomes the teams chief experimentation officer. Because the technology will keep improvingand the way its embedded into processes will keep changing.
In this piece, premium subscribers will learn:
The four key principles for designing a workplace that experiments continuously
The new KPI managers should focus on
Why you dont need a reorg, and what to do instead
1. Dont just roll out AI. Redesign the work.
Start with the work itself. Not just the tool set. As AI takes on tasks, dont let the freed-up time quietly refill with more of the same.
Decide, explicitly, how youll reinvest that capacity into higher-value activities: coaching and peer learning, deeper customer engagement, or structured ideation. Write those shifts into roles and goals so people experience the upside of adoption, not just another layer of obligations.
Then, treat adoption as a managed habit. The technology improves every few weeks; norms should evolve with it.
Make experimentation part of the operating rhythm: Embed tools into real workflows, coach individuals on where and how to use them, and revisit the playbook as capabilities change. Pair that flexibility with simple guardrailswhat to try, what to avoid, and how youll check qualityso the team can move quickly and securely.
Momentum has to be top-down and bottom-up. Senior leaders set a clear direction. Managers create the flywheel by curating grassroots experiments, codifying whats repeatable, and sharing wins across teams. Frontline teams surface new ideas.
Finally, keep the team inclusive as you evolveand be clear. Many groups will add agents alongside people. Early lessons from implementation at Microsoft suggest the best guidance for agents looks a lot like good human management: crisp goals, scope, guardrails, and quality checks. Bring everyone into the process so the benefits of whats newly possible are broadly shared, and your team gets more productive, more effective, and more resilient with each iteration.
2. Your new KPI: learning velocity.
Heres the tension: Leaders want certainty. AI rewards speed of learning. The companies pulling ahead are the ones that learn faster than the problem changes.
Because products and models improve quickly, a tool that didnt help two months ago may be essential today. Your cadence of experiments becomes the competitive edge competitors cant see and cant easily copy.
And as AI replaces parts of a job, managers should deliberately change roles and expectations. Dont treat AI as a sidecar. Build it into how your team actually works: the meetings you run, the documents you draft, the research you do. Coach each person on where AI helps in their role, and revisit often.
If a tool didnt work two months ago, try it again as models and products improve. Be clear in your guidance (goals, scope, guardrails, quality checks) for people and agents.
3. Guardrails arent brakes. Theyre speed rails.
Simple, transparent guidelineswhats inbounds, whats out, and how results get reviewedlet people move fast without inviting risk. Those sales checklists, for example, arent bureaucracy; they are the mechanism that makes speed repeatable. As systems and workflows change, update the playbook in ways that expand participation, build skills, and keep risk proportionate to the reward.
Run a steady cadence of small, team-level experiments, and pair speed with safety rails (checklists, inbounds/out-of-bounds, review steps). Capture what works, scale it, and sunset what doesnt.
Measure managers on ongoing adoption and innovation, not a onetime rollout.
4. Close the gap between whats possible and what you practice.
Managers still own outcomes, talent, and culture. In an AI-driven workplace, they also own the system that learnshow the team tries, measures, codifies, and scales better ways of working.
You dont need a reorg to begin. You need a charter, a plan for the time AI frees up, and a cadence that keeps learning alive.
Start small and real. Make the next experiment easier than the firstbecause youve built the rails.
As the tech keeps improving and embedding deeper into processes, the leaders who treat experimentation as a discipline, not a one-off, will unlock the most value for their teams and their customers.
The people of New York have spoken. In electing Zohran Mamdani mayor, they voted for generational change, democratic socialism, and joyful pop-culture politics. The historical significance of Mamdanis victory will be parsed for days, weeks, and years to come.
But the people of New York did not just elect a mayor, they also voted to change the way housing gets built in one of the tightest housing markets in the United States. Voters passed three ballot initiatives designed to speed up and increase housing production by an even greater margin than Mamdanis victory.
With these ballot initiatives, Mamdani also won a huge victoryone he didnt even campaign for, though he did voice his support for the measures the night before the election. These ballot measures will make at least some of his housing policies meaningfully easier to achieve, including his promise to build 200,000 low-income apartments, and his desire to spread housing construction more equitably across the city.
Mamdanis victory signified voters hunger for change, especially when it comes to new approaches to reducing the cost of living. The housing ballot measures were yet another indicator of the same phenomenon. Local leaders elsewhere should take note.
What New Yorkers Voted For
Local media outlets like The City and The New York Times have good explainers on the ballot initiatives. Ill briefly describe the most significant updates here and how they might impact housing in the U.S.s most populous city.
Ballot Measure 2 creates a new expedited review and approval process for all publicly funded affordable housing projects, turning what can be an 18-month process into a 3-month process.
It also creates a new affordable-housing fast track for all housing projects in the 12 community districts (out of 59 total) that have permitted the least-affordable housing in recent years.
These 12 community districts will mostly be more suburban parts of the city in eastern Queens, south Brooklyn, and Staten Island. They are, as it happens, the same parts of the city that supported former Governor Andrew Cuomo in the mayors race. (Cuomo endorsed the ballot measures.)
Ballot Measure 3 creates an expedited rezoning and environmental review process for small housing projects and zoning variances. Projects allowed under this policy would generally be limited to 45 feet in height in low-density areas, or a 30% increase over allowed density in higher-density areas.
This measure will allow totally new project types that are not currently built in New York, including missing middle housing in low-density zones. Larger projects that require zoning variances will now be able to get them in a quicker process through the nonpolitical Board of Standards and Appeals, rather than the City Council.
Ballot Measure 4 creates a new appeals board that gives projects rejected by the City Council another chance at approval. Eligible projects would have to include affordable housing, whether through the citys local inclusionary zoning policy, called Mandatory Inclusionary Housing, or as a city-funded affordable housing project. This measure effectively ends the practice of member deference, in which a single council member can block a project in their district.
In sum, these measures will make it much faster to approve all affordable housing projects and many market-rate housing projects; they reduce uncertainty for all housing proposals; they will allow new housing to be built in neighborhoods that have traditionally built very little; and they move power over development away from the City Council and to the mayor and appointed boards like the Planning Commission and Board of Standards and Appeals.
Mamdanis vision for housing
All of these outcomes correspond to housing policy goals that Mamdani has articulated, including the goal of constructing 200,000 new, union-built, deeply affordable housing units over 10 years. Funding that promiseespecially while sticking with union labor and very deep levels of affordabilitywill be a tall order. But these ballot measures will make achieving this overall goal more of an economic problem than a political one. Getting affordable developments built will not require project-by-project land use battles.
Mamdani has also voiced his support for spreading housing production more evenly across the five boroughs, particularly to wealthier neighborhoods. Ballot Measure 2 does exactly that, through its special rules for the NIMBYest community districts, and Ballot Measure 3 moves toward the same goal by opening up new development opportunities in low-density areas.
As his campaign progressed, Mamdani emphasized the importance of government efficiency and effectiveness. These ballot initiatives will allow government to act more quickly on its housing goals, spending less staff time and resources on approval processes.
The newly elected mayor has also warmed to the idea of market-rate and mixed-income housing being part of the solution to the citys housing crisis. While mostly focused on 100% affordable housing projects, these measures will help market-rate projects, too, by eliminating council member deference and streamlining mixed-income projects in NIMBY strongholds.
What these ballot measures will not do is move the needle on Mamdanis signature campaign promise to freeze the rent for rent-stabilized tenants. That action goes through a whole different entitythe Rent Guidelines Boardand comes with a host of legal and political questions.
What the ballot measures may do, however, is set the stage for a sort of grand bargain around housing production and tenants rights. By supporting both of these policy goals simultaneously, Mamdani could build his credibility among constituents in both camps. Theres also some evidence that tenants tend to be more supportive of housing development when strong renter protections are in place, as Rogé Karma reported in a recent piece in The Atlantic.
Throughout the campaign over the ballot initiatives, the largest opponent was the New York City Council, whose powers will unquestionably be diminished by these new policies. The Councils no campaign relied on the fact that the initiatives were developed by a commission appointed by Mayor Eric Adams, a highly unpopular figure in New York politics.
But soon neither Adams nor Cuomo (the candidate Adams endorsed) will be in City Hall. The new powers afforded by these ballot initiatives will be held by a 34-yea old democratic socialist. How will he use them to reshape the city?
How I spend my hours in the day is how I live. To make the most of my waking hours, I practice the one-hour rulea simple habit that helps me learn, reflect, and think. I give myself 60 uninterrupted minutes a day to try and become a little wiser than I was yesterday. I consciously take control of my growth to transform how I think, how I decide, or live. It takes commitment. But just an hour a day learning, thinking, and reflecting is helping me improve my life processes. Thats it. Sixty minutes.
Five hours a week. And you are upgrading yourself daily. That means reading something that stretches you. Reflecting on what went wrong and why. Sitting in silence and letting your mind wander on purpose. The result is more clarity. Fewer regrets in life. And growth that actually sticks. One focused hour doesnt just change your day. It rewires your direction. And gives your brain time to connect, create, and course-correct.
Think week
In the 1990s, Bill Gates called his time away to reflect think week. He used seven days of solitude in a cabin in the forest to read, think, and write about the future.This ability to turn idle time into deep thinking and learning became a fundamental part of who I am, Gates said.The logic is timeless. Consistency beats intensity. An hour a day compounds faster than you think. One book a month, 12 a year. Twelve new mental frameworks. Twelve ways you now see the world differently.
You dont have to disrupt your schedule to apply the rule. It doesnt have to be one stretch. You can use pockets of time in the day to get the same impact. An hour is long enough to change your life. And short enough to be doable. Its the sweet spot between wishful thinking and practical results. You can learn a new skill, reflect on what went well or didnt go well in the day. Or simply sit and think without your phone. The return of intentional time to learn, think, or reflect compounds in all areas of your life.
The three pillars of the one-hour rule
1. Make learning an active process. Feed your brain something worth reflecting on. Your input will always determine your output. What you feed your brain determines how you decide, how you speak, and how you work. But dont just consume, engage. Reading 10 pages means nothing if youre not putting the ideas to use.
Dont just collect information, digest it. If you read about negotiation, go try it on your coworker or someone who can give you feedback. Learning sticks when you take action. Try things. Fail forward. Every time you stretch your understanding, you expand whats possible for you.
2. Reflect on the new knowledge. If learning is the input, reflection is the processing system. Its how you turn experience into usable wisdom. We do not learn from experience . . . we learn from reflecting on experience, says philosopher and psychologist John Dewey. Without reflection, youre basically walking in circles. Lots of movement, no direction. What worked? What didnt?
What lesson did you take from whats not working? Write it down. Youll start to see patterns. Habits that hold you back. Decisions that move you forward. Thats your personal feedback loop. Reflection turns problems into clarity. Make sense of your day. What could you have done differently?
3. Think to turn learning into wisdom. Most people are too busy reacting to life. They recycle the same opinions, habits, and ideas. Thinking is how you question your perspective on anything. Its you sitting alone with your mind, connecting dots no one else sees. Its letting your thoughts wander. And then following the interesting ones. I like to do this while walking. Something about movement untangles thoughts. Ive solved more problems in sneakers than behind my desk. Thinking gives your brain the room to process ideas. And when it does, it surprises you.
Your mind starts connecting dots when you commit to the rule. You will begin to notice patterns in your own habits, at home and at work. That one-hour-a-day habit can help you handle conflict better, do your work better, or live better at home. Try it. One hour for your own transformation. Just you, your curiosity, and 60 minutes of honest focus.
Do that long enough, and youll realize you were not just learning for an hour a day. You were rebuilding your entire life. One hour of learning, reflecting, and thinking daily can put you in control of the direction of your life. Thats the power of the hour. Its small enough to start today. And big enough to change your life. Its how you leap ahead.
For years, email, texting, and messaging apps have ruled how we communicate. But one timeless human skilloften neglectedis quickly becoming a true difference-maker in the digital age.
Active listening.
Its both an art and a discipline, and its what separates average leaders from exceptional ones (while making them instantly likable in the process).
The truth is, active listening is the foundation of effective communication and the heartbeat of strong relationships. Yet as technology consumes more of our attention, were losing touch with this skilland with it, a powerful competitive advantage in business.
When you focus on your peopletheir growth, their needs, their challengesnone of it works without listening deeply first.
Listen more than you talk
After 25 years of coaching leaders, Ive learned that the most effective ones know when to stop talking and start listening. Few things elevate a conversation more than genuine attentiveness. When you truly listen, you show respect for people at every level, demonstrate curiosity, and practice humilitythree traits every great leader needs.
I call this authentic listening. Its the ability to understand whats really happening on the other side of the conversationto sense the will of a group, help clarify it, and create alignment around it.
Management thinker Peter Drucker said it best: The most important thing in communication is hearing what isnt said.
Authentic listeners do exactly that. They listen intuitivelynot just for facts or responses, but for meaning. They lean into conversations with empathy, seeking to understand what matters most to the other person.
This kind of listening is selfless, not self-centered. It always circles back to one powerful question: How can I help this person right now?
The hard part of listening
Good listening always requires humility. In my coaching sessions with executives, I make one thing clear from the start: If you want to grow as a leader, you have to embrace the humble responsibility of inviting feedbackand then have the courage and openness to truly listen to it. Thats a tall order for many leaders, especially the higher you climb up the corporate ranks.
There are several approaches to successfully listening for feedback. For example:
Be open. Listen without interruption, objections, or defensiveness.
Be responsive. Listen without turning the tables. Ask questions for clarification.
Be accountable. Seek to understand the effects and consequences of your behavior.
Be self-aware. Be aware of your own emotional reactions, body language, and how youre coming across in the listening.
Be quiet. Refrain from making or preparing to make a response, or trying to explain, defend, or fix.
The last part of listening
A lot of people think listening just means sitting quietly and absorbing what someone else is saying. But according to the authors of Radical Listening, the best listeners dont just nod alongthey ask great follow-up questions. For example:
Questions that connect to the speaker. This shows youre paying attention to what was just said and engaged in the conversation.
Open-ended questions. Instead of a simple yes or no, open-ended questions invite deeper insights.
Questions to encourage more sharing. Great follow-up questions help people open up about their plans, emotions, and perspectives.
At first, asking questions might feel like the opposite of listening. But research tells a different story. In fact, studies show that employees consistently link good listening with strong leadership, a connection that holds true across cultures and organizations worldwide.
As you move forward, embrace listening by relating to others with more curiosity and intent. Treat it like a human experiment in your professional development journey, with listening as a key tool in your toolbox.
Speaking of toolbox, heres a roadmap to develop your listening skills and master your interpersonal communication, with steps straight from my coaching sessions with top global clients.
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Marcel Schwantes
This article originally appeared on Fast Companys sister publication, Inc.
Inc. is the voice of the American entrepreneur. We inspire, inform, and document the most fascinating people in business: the risk-takers, the innovators, and the ultra-driven go-getters that represent the most dynamic force in the American economy.
The most obvious use case for generative AI in editorial operations is to write copy. When ChatGPT lit the fuse on the current AI boom, it was its ability to crank out hundreds of comprehensible words almost instantly, on virtually any topic, that captured our imaginations. Hundreds of “ChatGPT wrote this article” think pieces resulted, and college essays haven’t been the same since.
Neither has the media. In October, a report from AI analytics firm Graphite revealed that AI is now producing more articles than humans. And it’s not all content farms cranking out AI slop: A recent study from the University of Maryland examined over 1,500 newspapers in the U.S. and found that AI-generated copy constitutes about 9% of their output, on average. Even major publications like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal appear to be publishing a minimal number of words that originated from a machine.
I’ll come back to that, but the big takeaway from the study is that local newspapersoften thought to be the crucial foundation of free press, and still the most trusted arm of the mediaare the largest producers of AI writing. Boone Newsmedia, which operates newspapers and other publications in 91 communities in the southeast, is a heavy user of synthetic content, with 20.9% of its articles detected as being partially or entirely written with AI.
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Why local papers rely on AI
Putting aside any default revulsion at AI content, this actually makes a lot of sense. Local news has been stripped down to the bone in recent years as reader attention has fragmented and advertising dollars have shrunk. A great deal of local papers have folded (more than 3,500 since 2005, according to Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University), and those that remain have adopted other means to survive. In smaller markets, like my New Jersey town, it’s not uncommon for the community paper to republish press releases from local businesses.
The fact is, writers cost money, and writing takes time. AI, of course, radically alters that reality: for a $20 a month ChatGPT subscription, you now have a lightning-fast robot writer, ready to tackle any subject. Many unscrupulous people treat this ability as their own room full of monkeys with typewriters, cranking out articles just to attract eyeballsthe definition of AI slop.
But there’s a difference between slop and AI-generated copy written to inform, with the proper context, and edited by a journalist with the proper expertise. In a local news context, the use case for AI writing that’s most often cited is the lengthy school board meeting that, if covered, would take a reporter several hours of listening to transcripts, synthesizing, and contextualizing just to cover what happened. With AI, those hours compress to minutes, freeing up the reporter to write more unique and valuable stories.
More likely, of course, is that the reporter no longer exists, and an editor or even a sole proprietor simply publishes as many pieces as they can that serve the community. And while it’s not the ideal, I don’t see what’s wrong with that from a utilitarian perspective. If the copy informs, a human has done a quality check, and the audience is engaging with it, what does it matter whether or not it came from a machine?
AI mistakes hit different
That said, when mistakes happen with AI content, they can undermine a publication’s integrity like nothing else. This past summer, when the Chicago Sun-Times published a list of hallucinated book titles as a summer reading list, it caused a national backlash. That’s because AI errors are in a different categorysince AI lacks human judgment and experience, it makes mistakes a human never would.
That’s the main reason using AI in copy is a risky business, but safeguards are possible. For starters, you can train editors to catch the mistakes that are unique to AI. Robust fact-checking is obvious, and using grounded tools like Google’s NotebookLM can greatly reduce the chance of hallucinations. Besides factual errors, though, AI writing has many telltale quirks (repeated sentence structures, dashes, “let’s delve . . .,” etc.). I call these “slop indicators,” and, while they’re not disastrous, their continued presence in copy is a subtle signal to readers that they should question what they’re reading. Editors should stamp them out.
Which is not to say publications shouldn’t be transparent about the use of AI in their content. They absolutely should. In fact, I’d argue being as detailed as possible about the AI’s role at both the article level and in overall strategy is crucial in maintaining trust with an audience. Most editorial “scandals” over AI articles blew up because the copy was presented as human-written (think about Sports Illustrated‘s fake writers from two years ago). When the publication is upfront about the use of AI, such as ESPN’s write-ups of certain sports games, it’s increasingly a non-event.
Which is why it’s confusing that some major publications seem to be publishing AI copy without disclosing its presence. The study claims that AI copy is showing up in some national outlets, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. This appears to be a similar, if smaller scale, issue as the Sun-Times incident: Almost all of the instances were in opinion pieces from third parties, though it appears to be happening around 45% of the time.
That suggests third parties are using AI in their writing process without telling the publication. In all likelihood, they’re not aware of the outlet’s AI policy, and their writing contracts may be ambiguous. owever, it’s not like the rest of the content was totally immune from AI writing; the study revealed it to be present 0.71% of the time.
Getting ahead of AI problems
All of this speaks to the point about transparency: be straight with your audience and your staff about what’s allowed, and you’ll save yourself headaches later. Of course, policies are only effective with enforcement. With AI text becoming more common and more sophisticated, having effective ways of detecting and dealing with it is a key pillar of maintaining integrity.
And dealing with it doesn’t necessarily mean forbidding it. The reality is AI text is here, growing, and not going away. The truism about AI that’s often citedthat today is the worst it will ever begoes double for its writing ability, as that is at the core of what large language models do. Of course, you can bet there will be train wrecks over AI writing in the future, but they won’t be about who’s using AI to write. They’ll be about who’s doing it irresponsibly.
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Being asked to apply for a promotion is often framed as an unqualified win: validation that your work is seen and your potential recognized. Yet for many high-achieving professionals, that invitation can spark as much ambivalence as excitement.
Because the question isnt only Can I do this? Its also Do I want to live this way?
Promotions can be career accelerators, but they also reconfigure your days, your priorities, and your sense of balance. The challenge is learning to evaluate the opportunity without being swept away by itto discern whether its truly aligned with this season of your life.
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The recognition feels gooduntil the logistics set in
Theres an undeniable thrill in being seen. Someone has connected the dots between your competence and your potential. A promotion can expand your reach and amplify your impact.
But recognition isnt the same as readiness. The women I coach rarely question whether they can do the job; they question whether they can do it well while maintaining the life theyve intentionally built.
Before saying yes, imagine your typical Tuesday six months from now. What fills your calendar? Whats energizingand whats draining? If the answer feels expansive, thats information. If it feels heavy, thats information, too.
Beware the just for practice mindset
Many people apply with low expectations, telling themselves theyre just interviewing for practice. But interview processes are designed to entice youthey make you picture yourself in the role and attach to the possibility.
Thats not a reason to opt out, but its a reason to stay clear-headed. Know what success looks like before you begin, so youre deciding from intention, not momentum.
Ask two grounding questions
When youre stuck between ambition and hesitation, two questions can clarify your thinking:
Can I live with the outcome if I dont apply and dislike who gets the job?If that thought bothers you, it may signal that you care deeply about the work or the direction of your organization. What looks like ambivalence might actually be conviction.
Can I live with the outcome if I do apply and dont get it?If rejection would shake your sense of worth, pause and make sure you have the support to weather it. If you can answer yes to both, youre operating from clarity rather than fear.
Readiness vs. willingness
When someone says, Youd be great for this, theyre recognizing your readiness. But willingnessthe energy and capacity to take it onis a separate question.
You may have every credential yet still feel an internal no. Maybe your kids need you differently right now, or youve finally found equilibrium after years of intensity. Thats not a lack of driveits discernment. Sustainable growth depends on timing.
The real cost of up
Leadership often brings influencebut also more meetings, politics, and distance from the work you love most. One client put it bluntly: I thought a promotion would mean more freedom. It meant more meetings about other peoples freedom.
If the day-to-day realities of the new role sound energizing, thats your green light. If they sound exhausting, its okay to hit pause. Ambition doesnt have to mean saying yes to everything.
Build the infrastructure for success
If you move forward, do it deliberately. A bigger job requires a sturdier foundationat work and at home. Clarify what support youll need, what boundaries will sustain you, and what you can delegate. Thriving in a higher role isnt about doing more alone; its about designing systems that help you hold more together.
Decideand own it
If you say yes, treat the process as a two-way interview. Ask about resources, expectations, and what success actually looks like. Enter the role with curiosity and flexibility, not perfectionism.
If you say no, do it with confidence. Try something like: Im honored to be considered. Right now, Im focused on deepening my impact where I am and want to be intentional about my next step. Thats not avoidanceits leadership.
The paradox of promotion
Promotions are both validating and destabilizing. They can expand your influenceor stretch you too thin. The goal isnt to make the right choice, but an honest one.
When someone taps you on the shoulder and says, You should apply, take the compliment. Then take a breath. Listen to both voices inside youthe one that craves growth and the one that craves peace. True wisdom lives in the space between them.
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