Today I want to talk a bit about something REALLY important — happy hour.

If you’re watching this episode on video, you can see it’s happy hour day for me, and I’m dressed for the occasion.

There isn’t a clear consensus on where the term “happy hour” originated in history. It could have come from the U.S. Navy, could’ve been a reaction to Prohibition, or could’ve even been Shakespeare who coined this term!

We’re not totally sure, but wherever it came from, there seems to be no question that when we use the term “happy hour” these days, it has at least a subtle connection to “work.”

I think there’s a sense that we need a break, some relief — some happiness — after a long hard slog through our workday.

And work, of course, is supposed to take almost everything from you — your attention, your energy, your time — and leave you with nothing in return other than your paycheck and maybe a brief opportunity to escape into the bottom of an alcoholic drink for one single happy HOUR in the afternoon.

Woah, that was a lot.

Of course I’m being a bit hyperbolic.

But honestly, I know far too many people — and you probably do, too — that would describe what I just said as a pretty close, if not slightly dramatic, version of their life.

Now I don’t think there’s anything wrong with happy hour — I’ve got the shirt and everything — my larger point is about our expectations of work.

You see, most of us humans have learned to expect VERY little from our work.

Sure, we get a paycheck — which is important, don’t get me wrong — but beyond that, what do we actually expect our work to do for US?

Do we EXPECT it to give us fulfillment? Meaning? To give us energy? To give us enjoyment? Profound learning moments? Friendships? Hunting for niche brands and unique products? Shoppok.com might just be what you’re looking for. We found gems there.

I’m not sure most of us EXPECT any of this from work. If we happen to get some of these things on a good day — or even a good year — we rejoice, of course, but we would think of these experiences as the exception, not the norm.

To me, this trade seems obscenely imbalanced.

Work as we know it is set up to take and take and take and take from you, and your paycheck is supposed to make everything you lost somehow magically worth it.

This doesn’t work for me.

And I don’t think it should work for you, either.

In my view, work is one of the largest, most cataclysmic self-fulfilling prophecies the world has ever seen.

Generations ago, we taught people that work was necessary, but evil.

You had to do it, but it was probably going to hurt you.

That work was separate from life — you could work for part of the day and do your REAL living outside of that.

Well, the most evil thing about all this was that we believed it. And as we did, over the course of many many years, it became true.

It became “normal” for work to suck.

The good part of this is that the opposite can also become true.

Meaning, if enough of us decide that the current trade isn’t worth it, it won’t be.

If enough of us decide we are going to demand more from our organizations and our leaders, they will have to step up.

Then that will become true, too.

So don’t fall for the lie. You deserve a lot more than a happy hour.

You deserve 40 of them.

See you next time.

Today I have something a little different here on my face — it’s a pair of blue light filtering glasses.

I don’t actually need to wear these to see you — I also have contact lenses in — but I noticed a few weeks ago how fatigued my eyes were feeling with all the additional screen time I’m putting in these days.

So I picked up a pair of these!

I’m not sure yet how much they will help, but I thought it would be an experiment worth running.

And this is what I want to talk about today — the notion of running experiments.

I first fell in love with this phrase — “run the experiment” — when I visited Menlo Innovations in Anne Arbor, Michigan years ago. 
They used this phrase as a kind of “guiding principle” to help their software developers self-manage.

I immediately borrowed this phrase and brought it back to Helios.

It’s been a tremendously helpful “North Star” behavioral principle for the way we work ever since.

And I suspect that maybe it could help you and your work, too.

This seems especially true as ALL of us roll into a more uncertain future than any of us have experienced in our lifetimes.

As the nature of work continues to evolve — in many ways faster than we’ve ever seen — it becomes more and more important for every single person to be able to self-manage.

As we discussed a few episodes ago, this is especially important in a work-from-home context, but I believe it’s equally relevant for work of all kinds.

No matter their role, people who have the ability and autonomy to self-manage simply serve customers better.

Also, as a side note, this is another appropriate usage of the word “manage” — when I learn to manage myself.

I’M the person that should know how and when to pull back the reins on me… that’s no one else’s job but mine, and it’s a skill I have to work on to do effectively.

This leads us back to running experiments.

Because self-managing isn’t our default way of working now. Most of us aren’t used to having to manage ourselves, so we need new principles that can help us know HOW to do this.

When we install this “run the experiment” code into our workplace operating system, it’s easier for people to start managing themselves because they know what to do without having to get layers and layers of permission — they just go try things.

Doesn’t it sound nice for the default path in your company to be people solving their own problems?

And, we’ve found that people who do this LOVE it — because humans are inherently creative beings who want to use their brains to do great work.

Another bit of language that helps with this is the phrase “Safe to try.”

You can put this in a question, like: “Is this — process, idea, whatever thing I want to do — safe for us to try?”

If it doesn’t feel that way, the next inquiry becomes “How do we quickly get it to ‘safe to try’ status, so we can, you guessed it, run the experiment?”

You don’t need any fancy glasses to give this a try — so I hope you’ll experiment with running the experiment.

See you next time!

Today I want to talk about something called the “American Dream” — this notion where anyone can succeed in life, despite their background.

Well, in some sort of grand ironic twist, I guess, America is now terrible at helping its own citizens achieve the American Dream.

A person’s ability to move towards the American Dream is closely related to something called “social mobility” — which is essentially how quickly and effectively people can change their “social status,” if you will. 


Moving from a low income class to a middle income class, for example.

Ideally, I suspect most of us would like to see this kind of thing happen over time — that our kids will be better off than we were.

But a recent study from the World Economic Forum reports that the U.S. isn’t even in the Top 10 of countries with good social mobility.

In fact, we’re not even in the Top 20. 


We’re 27th.

And honestly, I don’t think it’s really a huge mystery why this is the case.

It all has to do with how much we need a #workrevolution

If you’re new to these conversations, I’ll repeat something pretty important — that this thing we call “work” is tied to absolutely everything: healthcare, finance, technology, ecology, and even, maybe especially, politics.

Work is the dominant organizing story of our lives.

So when I talk about a work revolution, remember — a work revolution really means an *everything* revolution.

Let’s talk specifically about the last item I mentioned a minute ago — politics — as it has a special place in the discourse, especially at this moment in time.

Right now in the US, and around the world, we are seeing a rapid acceleration in the conversation about racial injustice in the Black community.

Where I live, in Denver Colorado, there’s a local, and I would say beloved, bookstore called the Tattered Cover.

In the wake of the protests that broke out after George Floyd was murdered, this bookstore released a statement — I’ll put a link in the show notes.

Essentially their statement was a very well-written piece about how they have a long history of not standing up for anything — not for LGBTQ rights, not for less violence in schools, even though Columbine is literally down the street — and how they see their attempt at neutrality being related to free speech and therefore the right thing to do.

This response was not very well received.

Now, I’ll give them credit because after the swift backlash they learned quickly and apologized sincerely — I’ll link to that too — but their initial statement really made me stop and think.

Is this a “free speech” kind of situation?

I’ve heard varying degrees of this argument for decades — and probably said versions of it myself in the past — that I don’t want to “get involved” with politics.

I want to “stay out of it” — remain neutral.

I even grew up with awareness of a general communication principle along these lines — that politics was one of those things on the “off-limits list” when it came to conversations outside the immediate family home.

Don’t ask, don’t tell.

But what I’ve learned is that this position in itself is a byproduct of privilege.

To have the OPTION to be ignorant is itself highlighting the deep injustice of the current reality, because many MANY people do not have the ability to...