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Not long ago, a client of minelets call her Mayashared something that struck me. I had a rare Sunday with nothing urgent on my plate. My kids were with their grandparents. My inbox was quiet. I could have done anything. Instead of feeling relaxed, I panicked. I literally didnt know what to do with myself. She laughed softly but tears were in her eyes. I realized . . . I dont know how to exist without a task list. If Im not accomplishing something, I feel like I dont matter. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/acupofambition_logo.jpg","headline":"A Cup of Ambition","description":"A biweekly newsletter for high-achieving moms who value having a meaningful career and being an involved parent, by Jessica Wilen. To learn more visit acupofambition.substack.com.","substackDomain":"https:\/\/acupofambition.substack.com","colorTheme":"salmon","redirectUrl":""}} Maya isnt alone. In my coaching work, Ive heard this story many timeswomen who have full, meaningful lives yet feel theyre only as good as what they checked off today. In a culture that rewards output and treats busyness like a badge of honor, its easy to confuse productivity with worth. But what happens when you slow downor are forced to? Who are you without the to-do list, the perfect calendar, and the high performance? This article invites you to pause and honestly examine where your worth may be tied to how much you get done. Its about recognizing patterns that keep you in constant motionand beginning to loosen their grip so your value is rooted in something more lasting. Warning signs you might be outsourcing your self-worth to productivity You dont have to be burned out or in crisis to be stuck in this trap. Often, its invisibleespecially when things seem to be going well. Here are some subtle signs: You feel anxious or restless when youre not actively getting something done. You judge your days success by accomplishments, not feelings. You feel guilty or uncomfortable during downtime. You struggle to enjoy activities unless theyre productive (reading must educate, exercise must burn calories). You only feel good about yourself when exceeding expectationsat work or home. Another client, Elenaa physician and mom of threesaid, I know rationally that Im a good mom and doctor. But the only time I feel that way is when Im accomplishing something measurablepublishing, presenting, finishing charts. Otherwise, I feel like Im failing. Elena wasnt asking to do less. She wanted to feel enough even when she wasnt at full throttle. That distinction matters. Reclaiming your self-worth doesnt mean abandoning ambition. It means building a foundation where your identity isnt tied to output highs and lows. Why this runs so deep Tying worth to productivity isnt a personal flawits shaped by powerful cultural forces. We live in a society that prizes output, where worth is measured by results, not relationships or inner experience. Women are socialized to be competent, accommodating, and endlessly availableto anticipate needs, keep things running, and never drop the ball. Add motherhood, with its endless work and little feedback, and its easy to internalize that your value depends on how much you handle without breaking. The pandemic intensified this. With work, school, and home merging, many working moms became the nerve centermanaging logistics, meals, meetings, and everyones emotions. The doing never stopped. And when people praised our resilience and ability to keep it together, we absorbed the message that being useful was what made us worthy. The costs of outsourcing your worth This isnt sustainable. Even if it works temporarily, it erodes well-being. Your sense of self rises and falls with accomplishment. Burnout looms as rest feels like failure. Disconnection creeps inyou struggle to be present with loved ones unless everything is tied up. When things go off script, disappointment turns to shame, as if falling short means youre fundamentally flawed. Most damagingly, this mindset convinces you rest, joy, and self-compassion are rewards to be earned, not essential parts of being human. When worth is always up for reevaluation, peace remains out of reach. What reclaiming your worth looks like This work is slow and layerednot a quick fix or a slogan. Its a recalibration of how you relate to yourself. Start here: 1. Notice the NarrativesPay attention to thoughts that arise when youre not productive: I should be doing more, Im falling behind, I dont deserve to rest yet. Notice whose voice this echoesa parent, boss, or cultural script? Naming these is the first step to disarming them. 2. Redefine SuccessCreate space for a fuller definition of success: being present for bedtime without planning tomorrow, holding a boundary at work, or letting something be good enough. Reflect daily: What felt aligned? When did I feel like myself? Where did I honor my values? 3. Practice Being, Not Just DoingChoose small moments to simply be: sit with coffee without scrolling, walk without exercising, and rest without earning it. Your nervous system may resist at firstthats normal. Over time, youll build capacity to sit with yourself without judgment. 4. Anchor to Identity, Not OutputAsk: Who am I when Im not performing or producing? This can feel scary but also freeing. You are more than a multitasking manageryou are a person with humor, intuition, creativity, and resilience. Begin rooting your worth in being human, not heroic. One client, a lawyer and mom of two, shared: I still work hard, but now I can pause during the day to breathe. I let dishes wait without calling myself lazy. And strangely, I feel more powerfulnot lessbecause my worth isnt riding on every task. Being enough High-achieving moms are admired for how much they handlebut that admiration can come at a cost. Beneath competence and reliability often lies a quiet desire: to feel whole even when nothing is getting done. You dont need to give up your drive or goals. But you deserve a life where worth isnt constantly measured: a life where rest is allowed, not earned; where joy has space without justification; where being enough isnt something you proveits something you simply trust. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/acupofambition_logo.jpg","headline":"A Cup of Ambition","description":"A biweekly newsletter for high-achieving moms who value having a meaningful career and being an involved parent, by Jessica Wilen. To learn more visit acupofambition.substack.com.","substackDomain":"https:\/\/acupofambition.substack.com","colorTheme":"salmon","redirectUrl":""}}
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Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Companys weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. You can sign up to receive this newsletter every week here. Exclusive Interview With Ciscos Jeetu Patel Data centers are popping up all over the world to support the quickly growing demand for all kinds of AI apps and services. Cisco, of course, is no stranger to the data center, and its been working hard over the past few years to make itself a vital part of the AI technology stack. I asked Cisco EVP and chief product officer Jeetu Patel how he sees the current situation in generative AI, and about how his company fits into the picture. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. Can you give me your 30,000-foot view of the transition to generative AI? Were now moving from this mode of chatbots intelligently answering questions for us to us now moving into a mode where agents are conducting tasks and jobs almost fully autonomously on behalf of humans. As that happens, theres going to be an augmentation of the capacity of billions and billions of agents thatll actually get added on over the course of the next few years. But the requirements that you have around low-latency, high-performance, high-energy-efficiency infrastructure, as well as around safety and security so that the user can establish trust with these AI systems, is going to have to be fully reimagined. Can you describe in simple terms how Cisco plays in the AI tech stack? At the very baseline, we build our own silicon and ASICs [application-specific integrated circuits] for the network itself. I think were the only non-Nvidia silicon provider that is part of Nvidias reference architecture where our networking is tied with their GPUs and we actually make sure that those work together in a reference architecture that an enterprise can deploy. We then have our own systems, which are the physical boxes for the networks and the servers on the compute side, and the optics and the optical systems that actually can do ultra-long haul data center interconnect, as well as interconnect between clusters. We then provide the safety and security platform thats needed to secure AI as wellwere one of the largest security players in the market. We provide a data platform in Splunk. Were actually building our own bespoke custom models for security and networking. You mentioned latency as a key challenge. How critical is response time for AI applications? If it takes three seconds for an AI voice agent to respond to you, you know its a robot and you dont want to talk to it. But if you do it within 500 milliseconds, you have a very different kind of behavior from the human. In our user testing, outside of efficacy, latency is one of the most important things. It has to be interruptible and it has to have enough training on EQ [emotional intelligence] and sentiment analysis, so that if youre sounding annoyed, it doesnt say, Hows the weather today? How do you handle the security challenges with multiple AI models? Most of these models are putting their own safety and security guardrails in the models. But models can get tricked through jailbreaking techniques. Weve built a product that not only does the visibility of what data is flowing through the model and when the model is getting fine-tuned, so you can do a continuous validation. . . . We validate the model within a matter of minutes through an algorithmic red-teaming exercise rather than it taking weeks or months for companies to validate the model. We jailbroke DeepSeek within 48 hours. We can take that model and then create runtime enforcement guardrails for every application developer. The end outcome is that no developer has to rebuild the security stack every time they build an application, and no model provider needs to be responsible for every single way that a model can be jailbroken. So every app developer building on top of DeepSeek will benefit from this pool of knowledge that Cisco knows about how to jailbreak the model and how to protect against that? Thats exactly right. We believe that you need a neutral party that provides a common substrate of security for every app developer, every model builder, every agent developer, so that the developer can innovate fearlessly. Are AI companies putting big data centers in the Middle East because they have plenty of power and room to grow, or is it to better service customers in that region? Its literally both. You dont have enough power to fuel all the demand for AI right now. The amount of usage that OpenAI is getting right now is literally like breaking the internet. They came up with $20 a usertheyre losing money on $20 a user, from what the industry says. So they added a plan for $200 a user. My guess is theyre going to lose money at $200 a user. They have a plan for $2,000 a user. They will lose money for $2,000 a user. Tha’s not a bad thing. It tells you that there is intrinsic demand. The demand for data centers is going to be insatiable for a very long time. As models get more efficient over time, youll have small models with very large context windowsyou might have a million-token context window, very small model, very small data set with a very small footprint to be able to get the inference done. But were not quite there yet. Is it because of inference costs that they cant make money? Whats the big cost driver? Right now its the usage and the cost of GPUs. Its expensive. But the beauty about this is its the wrong thing to focus on to get a company to profitability at this stage. What they should focus on is the acquisition of as many users as possible so that they can have the daily workflow fusion of ChatGPT for both consumers and enterprises. Once that happens, they can figure out a way to optimize later. But right now, starting to optimize would be putting cycles in the wrong thing. There are two dimensions that are a really good signal for the AI industry: Nvidia is wildly profitable, and ChatGPT is losing money. Both those things tell you the future of AItheres such insatiable demand that even at a very high cost, people are buying GPUs and theyre willing to lose money because the adoption is so high. More AI coverage from Fast Company: Why OpenAI and Microsofts AI partnership might be headed for a breakup AI is supercharging war. Could it also help broker peace? AI tools collect your data across devices. Here’s how to be selective about what you share The debate over state-level AI bans misses the point Want exclusive reporting and trend analysis on technology, business innovation, future of work, and design? Sign up for Fast Company Premium.
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Research on misinformation and disinformation has become the latest casualty of the Trump administrations restructuring of federal research priorities. Following President Donald Trumps executive order on ending federal censorship, the National Science Foundation canceled hundreds of grants that supported research on misinformation and disinformation. Misinformation refers to misleading narratives shared by people unaware that content is false. Disinformation is deliberately generated and shared misleading content, when the sharer knows the narrative is suspect. The overwhelming majority of Americans95%believe misinformations misleading narratives are a problem. Americans also believe that consumers, the government and social media companies need to do something about it. Defunding research on misinformation and disinformation is, thus, the opposite of what Americans want. Without research, the ability to combat misleading narratives will be impaired. The attack on misleading narrative research Trumps executive order claims that the Biden administration used research on misleading narratives to limit social media companies free speech. The Supreme Court had already rejected this claim in a 2024 case. Still, Trump and GOP politicians continue to demand disinformation researchers defend themselves, including in the March 2025 censorship industrial complex hearings, which explored alleged government censorship under the Biden administration. The U.S. State Department, additionally, is soliciting all communications between government offices and disinformation researchers for evidence of censorship. Trumps executive order to restore free speech, the hearings and the State Department decision all imply that those conducting misleading narrative research are enemies of the First Amendments guarantee of free speech. These actions have already led to significant problemsdeath threats and harassment includedfor disinformation researchers, particularly women. So lets tackle what research on misinformation and disinformation is and isnt. Misleading content Misinformation and disinformation researchers examine the sources of misleading content. They also study the spread of that content. And they investigate ways to reduce its harmful impacts. For instance, as a social psychologist who studies disinformation and misinformation, I examine the nature of misleading content. I study and then share information about the manipulation tactics used by people who spread disinformation to influence others. My aim is to better inform the public about how to protect themselves from deception. Sharing this information is free speech, not barring free speech. Yet, some think this research leads to censorship when platforms choose to use the knowledge to label or remove suspect content or ban its primary spreaders. Thats what U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan argued in launching investigations in 2023 into disinformation research. It is important to note, however, that the constitutional definition of censorship establishes that only the governmentnot citizens or businessescan be censors. So private companies have the right to make their own decisions about the content they put on their platforms. Trumps own platform, Truth Social, bans certain material such as sexual content and explicit language, but also anything moderators deem as trying to trick, defraud, or mislead us and other users. Yet, 75% of the conspiracy theories shared on the platform come from Trumps account. Further, both Trump and Elon Musk, self-proclaimed free-speech advocates, have been accused of squelching content on their platforms that is critical of them. Musk claimed the suppression of accounts on X was a result of the sites algorithm reducing the reach of a user if theyre frequently blocked or muted by other, credible users. Truth Social representatives claim accounts were banned due to bot mitigation procedures, and authentic accounts may be reinstated if their classification as inauthentic was invalid. Is it censorship? Republicans say social media companies have been biased against their content, censoring it or banning conservatives unfairly. The censorship industrial complex hearings held by the House Foreign Affairs South and Central Asia Subcommittee were based on the premise that not only was misleading narrative research part of the alleged censorship industrial complex, but that it was focused on conservative voices. But there isnt evidence to support this assertion. Research from 2020 shows that conservative voices are amplified on social media networks. When research does show that conservative authors have posts labeled or removed, or that their accounts are suspended at higher rates than liberal content, it also reveals that it is because conservative posts are significantly more likely to share misinformation than liberal posts. This was found in a recent study of X users. Researchers tracked whose posts got tagged as false or misleading more in community notesXs alternative and Metas proposed alternative to fact checkingand it was conservative posts, because they were more likely to include false content than liberal posts. Furthermore, an April 2025 study shows conservatives are more susceptible to misleading content and more likely to be targeted by it than liberals. Misleading America Those accusing misleading narrative researchers of censorship misrepresent the nature and intent of the research and researchers. And they are using disinformation tactics to do so. Heres how. The misleading information about censorship and bias has been repeated so much through the media and from political leaders, as evident in Trumps executive order, that many Republicans believe its true. This repetition produces what psychologists call the illusory truth effect, where as few as three repetitions convince the human mind something is true. Researchers have also identified a tactic known as accusation in a mirror. Thats when someone falsely accuses ones perceived opponents of conducting, plotting or desiring to commit the same transgressions that one plans to commit or is already committing. So censorship accusations from an administration that is removing books from libraries, erasing history from monuments and websites, and deleting data archives constitute accusations in a mirror. Other tactics include accusation by anecdote. When strong evidence is in short supply, people who spread disinformation point repeatedly to individual stories (sometimes completely fabricated) that are exceptions to, and not representative of, the larger reality. Facts on fact-checking Similar anecdotal attacks are used to try to dismiss fact-checkers, whose conclusions can identify and discredit disinformation, leading to its tagging or removal from social media. This is done by highlighting an incident where fact-checkers got it wrong. These attacks on fact-checking come despite the fact that many of those most controversial decisions were made by platforms, not fact-checkers. Indeed, fact-checking does work to reduce the transmission of misleading content. In studies of the perceived effectiveness of professional fact-checkers versus algorithms and everyday users, fact-checkers are rated the most effective. When Republicans do report distrust of fact-checkers, its because they perceive the fact-checkers are biased. Yet research shows little bias in choice of who is fact-checked, just that prominent and prolific speakers get checked more. When shown fact-checking results of specific posts, even conservatives often agree the right decision was made. Seeking solutions Account bans or threats of account suspensions may be more effective than fact-checks at stopping the flow of misinformation, but they are also more controversial. They are considered more akin to censorship than fact-check labels. Misinformation research would benefit from identifying solutions that conservatives and liberals agree on. Examples include giving people the option, like on social media platform Bluesky, to turn misinformation moderation on or off. But Trumps executive order seeks to ban that research. Thus, instead of providing protections, the order will likely weaken Americans defenses. H. Colleen Sinclair is an associate research professor of social psychology at Louisiana State University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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