Mary walks down Market St toward Oxford Street on a cold February day. It's 1866–Lynn, Massachusetts. Despite taking careful steps, Mary slips on a patch of ice and crashes to the ground. Electricity prickles up and down her spine. Each attempt to right herself is met...
“Positive thinking” comes in many forms: New Thought, the prosperity gospel, manifestation teaching, self-help guides, and more. It’s hard to argue with thinking positive thoughts! But when positive thoughts become a substitute for curiosity and inquiry about real challenges, positive thinking can lead us away from real solutions. In this episode, I explore my own encounters with the world of positive thinking and how facing reality has actually given me more hope.
No matter where you go online today, you’re bombarded with messages about getting paid. One quick YouTube search for “make money online” brought me to a video—actually, a series of videos all about the same thing—about the “laziest” way to make $100 per day. After a...
Who doesn’t love to get paid? So we’re going to talk about how that actually happens. Not the dollars and cents of getting paid, but the form and structure. In the previous two episodes, we examined our relationships to work—both paid and unpaid. And it got me thinking about how we actually account for the ways paid work, well, pays—and especially how that impacts business owners and independent workers. I’m talking the difference between wages and profit, how surplus labor creates profit, and specifically how I structure my own pay in order to have a better perspective on my work.
On April 11, 2022, over 15,000 Etsy sellers put their shops on vacation mode and went on strike. They spoke out against Etsy’s latest fee increase. They also protested a mandatory marketing program that costs additional fees and the Star Seller program, which tried to...
It seems like every business owner or freelancer I know wants to quit social media. But very few people are actually doing it. It seems easier to imagine the end of your business than the end of social media, to paraphrase Mark Fisher. There’s something about our relationship to social platforms that makes them feel inescapable. And, perhaps without even noticing, it’s started to see like we’re working for them more than working for ourselves. In this episode, I unpack our relationship to platforms and who profits from our labor. And it starts in an unusual place: the recent Etsy strike.
What did you want to be when you grew up? I had a few ideas: pastor, band director, and professor. As a fairly unimaginative kid, I cycled through those three moderately practical options until 20 years old. My mom tells a story about me preaching from the top of our...
I grew up expecting to love what I did for a living. I was encouraged to choose a career that I was passionate about. But when I did, I bumped up against the stark reality that work I loved didn’t pay the bills. At least not in any straightforward way. In this episode, I explore the context of “doing what you love” and how it shapes the way we build our businesses or careers today.
I'm sure I've picked up most of my US History knowledge outside of US history classes. For instance, I played in the pit orchestra for Annie in high school. And I learned quite a bit about the Great Depression. You probably know Annie's famous anthem, Tomorrow. And...
“Rugged individualism” is the very language we speak in America. It shapes the way we approach work, family, and society. And rugged individualism has a direct impact on the decisions we make about our businesses and careers. In this short Extra Context bonus, I unpack where rugged individualism comes from and highlight a different way forward.
Host of What Works
Tara is a podcaster, small business community leader, strategist, and speaker. She’s been helping small business owners build stronger businesses for over a decade.