Here’s some research about professional success that I wasn’t aware of before, but this totally tracks with what I’ve observed in my career:

In fact, studies consistently find that traits such as conscientiousness (the quality of being dependable and disciplined), emotional stability or agreeableness have a stronger link with professional success, relationship durability and longevity than the links between those outcomes and someone’s intelligence or socio-economic background.

Now here’s the problem…

All this makes it disconcerting that levels of conscientiousness in the population appear to be in decline. Extending a pioneering 2022 US study which identified early signs of a drop during the pandemic, I found a sustained erosion of conscientiousness, with the fall especially pronounced among young adults.

Digging deeper into the data, which comes from the Understanding America Study, we can see that people in their twenties and thirties in particular report feeling increasingly easily distracted and careless, less tenacious and less likely to make and deliver on commitments.

Source: The troubling decline in conscientiousness →

This tracks. It’s definitely my most-used emoji.

Whether you’re overwhelmed, overextended, or simply over trying to keep it together, the 🫠 Melting Face is the perfect pictographic companion for the full spectrum of emotional discomfort—from awkwardness to shame to existential dread. […]

Because, in the words of Erik Carter, the graphic designer involved in proposing the emoji: “Sometimes it does feel as though the best we can do is smile as we melt away.”

Source: Lifetime Achievement Award: The 🫠 Melting Face Emoji →

Some real talk here about the nature of work, and what’s important:

Good work should do at least one of these things: fund the life you actually want to live, align with values you can defend at dinner parties, surround you with people who challenge you to grow, or teach you skills that compound like interest over decades. Great work does several of these at once. But work doesn’t have to feel like play, and you sure as hell don’t have to love every minute of it.

Source: Why are we lying to young people about work? →

Ok I love this story.

I’ve been reading a lot of Robin Wall Kimmerer lately. She tells a story in The Serviceberry that’s become a sort of guiding star for me, about the experience of a linguist who was studying a hunter-gatherer community in the Brazilian rainforest.

“He observes that a hunter had brought home a sizable kill, far too much to be eaten by his family. The researcher asked how he would store the excess. Smoking and drying technologies were well known; storing was possible. The hunter was puzzled by the question […]‘Store my meat? I store my meat in the belly of my brother,’ replied the hunter.”

And yes to this:

I’ve been thinking so much about what it would mean for me to “store my meat in the belly of my brother”—to give to my loved ones and communities and trust that my generosity will circle back to me when I need it. I know it’s how I want to live. It’s how I want us all to be able to live.

→ Interdependence is My New Retirement Plan

I was all in on Reddit for a few years, but that stopped after the Apollo app got nerfed. I think I need to invest some curation time in the site again—this is a lovely essay:

The only two questions that people ever really ask on Reddit, if you think about it, are these: Am I alone? Am I okay? And after all these years, in subreddit after subreddit, no matter what the topic at hand is, the same answers keep coming: You aren’t alone. And you might not be okay. But we’re here.

I agree with Elle Griffin that Social Development > Self-Development:

This might sound obvious, but I think we live in an era of “secure your own oxygen mask before helping others,” and while that might be a helpful mantra for airplanes I think many of us don’t seem to recognize when we are already wearing oxygen masks. We don’t need to keep adding even more oxygen to ourselves, we need to start directing our attention to others. We need to focus less on self-development and more on social development.

Elle goes into wonderful detail about what this means at a practical level—highly recommended post. Also worth noting no one is saying self-development is bad. It should just be a balance:

Those who participate in self-development and self-care in a healthy way, and for the benefit of themselves and their communities, are not the subject of this essay. But in excess, self-development can create a world of self-interested individuals and that’s what I’m up against here. I’m against the continual process of self-betterment at the expense of community-betterment. I’m against participating in too much theory and not enough action. We can focus on being more loving and more empathetic and more compassionate all we like but we won’t actually be any of those things unless we do something to help our families, our close communities, and even the world at large.

I thought about that piece as I was reading Mandy Brown’s What is your work now?

When talking to people about their work, one question I often ask is, “what is your work now?” Not what is your job or career, but what is your work. Jobs and careers are, at best, the means by which we get our work done while also keeping a roof over our heads; but our work is always bigger than that. Our work is not only what we deliver for a boss or an organization, not only the metrics we’re unjustly measured on or the revenue targets we’re held to, but all the change we make in the world, all the ways we we use our unique gifts to contribute to a living world, to our own liberation and to the liberation of every living being around us. This is the work that rarely shows up on a job description but we can never let go of, the work we yearn for even when we’re tired, the work we grieve when we’re cleaved from it.

The key here being, “all the ways we use our unique gifts to contribute to a living world, to our own liberation and to the liberation of every living being around us.” It feels like this is a good time to think about what our jobs are for. What do we work for?

I know that for me, my job is about shipping value to customers, but for the last few years my work has been to show engineers what good product management looks like, and that we can move mountains if we partner together well. Suddenly that feels like too low of a bar though, so… time to revisit!

I love this reflection about personal resilience from Mandy Brown:

That is, we grow not only up—not only skyward—but down, into the roots, back to that from which we came and to which we will, one day, return. We become, in time, more rooted and resilient, more capable of surviving the storm, less easily shaken away from ourselves by idle wind or rain. When I think about growing down instead of up, I think about becoming centered, about knowing what work is ours to do (and, critically, what work is not), about a slow, steady power rather than a rash and inconstant one. After all, as anyone who’s ever lived among city trees can tell you, neither brick nor concrete nor iron can stop a root as it seeks out water. We should be as steady in our search for that which nurtures our own lives.

You don’t say…

Before providing employees with solutions to manage their stress, Fleming recommends that employers do more to tackle the ways in which their business might be causing the stress. A Deloitte survey of US workers, in 2022, found three systemic factors had an “outsized impact” on wellbeing: leadership behaviour; job design; and organisational working practices. It prompted the researchers to conclude that “perks and programmes”, alone, achieve little.