Love of the Week

This week, on Tuesday at 11:27 a.m. EDT to be exact, I had the very happy realization that AI will not make humans irrelevant.

Hooray! To put it mildly.

For this eureka, I have you to thank. Well, some of you, if you were among the 14,000 people who signed up for my interview on LinkedIn Live with the platform’s top journalist and resident sage, Jessi Hempel. Technically speaking, our topic was how to stand out in a crowded job market. But when audience questions started coming fast and furious, I found I kept answering each one the same way.

Know your unique personal narrative and don’t hesitate to share it. Say true things. Abhor jargon and avoid it with everything in you. Openly acknowledge your flaws and shortcomings. Mention the elephants in the room. Talk about yourself with humor and vulnerability. Say you want the job. Yes, say it.

TL;DR: Be authentic.

It’s the only job-hunting strategy that works.

Here’s why.

Managers (like me) are already exhausted by AI-concocted resumes and robot-honed cover letters. It’s all such BS. We know anyone and everyone we hire is going to be a bit of a mess, imperfect in one or two ways, or more.

And yet, job-seekers are enlisting AI to try to erase that reality, jamming our inboxes with fantasy novels. Attention! I cannot and do not blame them. God no. The market is tight and unpredictable. If you’re not an engineer, and even if you are, it can feel brutal out there.

But the antidote is not to be less real. It’s to be more. That’s what will make you stand out. And not just getting hired, but staying hired.

I’m not talking about easing up on competence. Delivering results is a ticket to the game. But in a world being eaten alive by homogenizing machinery, your quirky originality, your bumpy-lumpy humanity, your savvy, your very you-ness, will set you apart.

That truth dawned on me while answering questions from you (or people like you) this week, and I will gladly keep answering them forevermore to keep remembering it.

Don’t get me wrong. I think AI is great. I use it all the time. But people, in all their messy people-y-ness, are greater still, exactly because they’re everything AI is not.

Hate of the Week

I just finished reading Zarna Garg’s memoir, “This American Woman.” Hated it. OMG, loathed it.

Not the book. Finishing it! I wanted it to go on and on, and when it didn’t, I felt like my best friend had dumped me.

And not because Zarna is hilarious and so fun to be around. Of course she is, she’s a professional comic. But because she is fueled by repurposed grief. That was news to me. Important news.

I happen to be a memoir junkie. One Christmas, looking for my gift, one of my kids discovered I had read literally every book on Amazon’s list of “The Best 100 Memoirs of All Time.” If that number had been 300, it would have been the same deal.

Memoirs, to me, are great teachers about how to live and not live. Better than most business and career books, frankly. That’s why I often tell my most ambitious students to read the memoirs by Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, and Mindy Kaling. All are virtual primers on achieving success on your own terms.

I would also add to that list Cher’s recent memoir, which is a work of genius. Sure, I might be the only person who thinks that, but I would actually like to teach that book to my MBAs someday because it includes the rock-solid truism that (drumroll please) your life will be a lot better if you treat every person you meet like the wonderful bestie you were desperately waiting for. Cher succeeded for a lot of reasons, like talent, but her people skills? Next level.

All the memoirs I have read, including Zarna’s, make me think I should write a memoir someday, and maybe I will. If so, it delights me that I will have these newsletters to remind me of what I was thinking along the way. For instance, like this week, when I realized that Zarna’s ambition was inextricably linked to her unimaginable loss. (Read the book and prepare to cry.) I sometimes find myself apologizing for everything I am doing these days with my life and Becoming You Labs. People from my old life ask me why I don’t slow down; why must I go-go-go all the time. At last I have a true answer. We all cope and heal in different ways, and one way is taking your heartache and converting it to jet fuel. I may be done reading Zarna’s book, but I will never forget it.

Hmm of the Week

One of the coolest things about the reach of my book and podcast is that people ask me to hold Becoming You workshops all over the place. Just this week, I was invited to do so in London, Singapore, Santa Fe, and Palm Beach. I would say yes-yes-yes if it were not for teaching-teaching-teaching in New York. Indeed, that’s why currently we hold the workshops, like the one coming next month, on NYU’s campus. Maybe someday that will change, but not quite yet. (In 2026, possibly!)

When I teach Becoming You to MBAs, the class is six weeks. My open-to-the-public workshops, however, are almost always three days, because that’s the most time that non-students people can spare.

But get this – a highly respected medical school has just asked if I could take my Becoming You MBA curriculum and expand it to one year. That’s how much time, they said, they wanted young doctors to spend with its material, so that they could not just better understand themselves, but also understand their patients.

I almost cried. One year to roll around in the concepts and practices of Becoming You? I mean, yessssss. I love-love-love the idea. But, hello, that’s me, right? What do you think, my Becoming You friends? Is one year too much time? Or no? Let me know, because I am “hmm-ing” on this quite a bit. Thank you!

And thank you also for being an honest-to-goodness person – AI be damned! – and, I’m quite sure, the wonderful bestie the world has been desperately waiting for. Me included.

What's coming?

→ Becoming You Three-Day Intensive, register here

Whatever You Do, Don’t Just Trust Your Gut — Try This Instead

Every day, we make decisions—big, small, and everything in between, each one shaping our careers and relationships, and sometimes even the course of our entire lives. And yet, most of us were never taught how to actually make a decision. Instead, we accept the conventional wisdom: "Just trust your gut." Too bad that advice is only right half the time. Yep, research shows that gut has a 50% hit rate. So why not just go toss a coin? Or wait -- there's a better way, and it's so easy too. All you have to do it...press play.

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