We talk constantly about agein politics, in leadership, in debates about retirement and the future of work. Yet we rarely stop to ask a simple question: What is age, exactly? Most of us rely on a single number, as if people were stamped with a vintage year like bottles of wine. But age is far from a fixed or universal metric. It is multidimensional, deeply unequal, and increasingly misleading when used as a shortcut for ability, potential, or readiness.
As people live longer, change careers more often, and experience work in different conditions, understanding what age actually measures is becoming essential for companies trying to build fairer workplaces and adapt to demographic shifts. The future of work will not be shaped by older workers alone. It will be shaped by widening age gaps. And by how organizations respond.
Chronological age: The number of years since birth
This most familiar kind of age governs everything from school entry and voting rights to retirement policies and workplace norms. Yet this way of organizing human life is a relatively recent bureaucratic invention, made possible by modern administrative systems.
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Chronological age made sense in standardized industrial societies, where careers were linear, life expectancy was shorter, and work was more uniform. Today, it is a blunt instrument. As a predictor of health, performance, motivation, or longevity, it performs poorly. Two people of the same age can have radically different capacities and trajectories, shaped by education, income, working conditions, stress, and life events.
But organizations still lean heavily on this number to make decisions about hiring, promotion, development, and exit. In a world of increasingly unequal aging, this reliance is becoming not just inaccurate but unfair.
Biological age: The condition of the body and brain
Advances in medicine and epidemiology show that people age at dramatically different speeds. Some 55-year-olds have the physiological profile of someone in their forties. Others show signs typically associated with much later life.
These differences are shaped by socioeconomic conditions, education, exposure to chronic stress, environmental factors, and levels of autonomy at work. Long hours, repetitive strain, shift work, and lack of control take a biological toll over time. Thats why for some workers longer careers are perfectly sustainable while for others, worn down by decades of strain, working longer can mean never enjoying a healthy retirement.
Biological age forces us to confront an uncomfortable truth: Aging is not equal, and work is one of the most powerful drivers of that inequality.
Subjective age: All about self-perception
Most adults report feeling younger than their chronological age, sometimes by a decade or more. And thats great because feeling younger is often associated with better physical health, cognitive resilience, and emotional well-being.
But the gap matters. Feeling moderately younger can be energizing. Feeling dramatically younger can slip into denial, leading people to ignore health signals or overestimate physical limits. Subjective age shapes confidence, ambition, openness to learning, how people interpret feedback, and how they imagine their future.
Interestingly, as people age their definition of what counts as old tends to move upward. Its a reminder that age is psychological and cultural, constantly renegotiated.
Professional age: The number of years in a company or a craft
How long you have been doing a particular role or craft or been working in an industry matters probably more than the birth date on your ID.
Its increasingly common to be a beginner at 50, a mid-career experimenter at 60, or a seasoned expert at 30. People retrain, pivot industries, take career breaks, and reinvent themselves in ways that would have been rare a generation ago.
Alas, many organizations still assume that chronological age and expertise rise together, which causes a mismatch between talent practices and reality. Experienced beginners are underestimated. Young experts are questioned.
The gaps between these different ages tend to grow
Gaps grow between chronological and biological age, shaped by inequality and work conditions. Between chronological and subjective age, shaped by health, mindset, and culture. Between chronological and professional age, shaped by career transitions and lifelong learning.
Workplaces built on the assumption that age neatly tracks with ability, experience, or stamina are increasingly out of sync with society. As these gaps widen, age-based policies become less sustainable and more discriminatory. And they waste enormous amounts of human capital.
Make the workplace more age-agnostic
To address these issues, we need to move toward a more age-agnostic approach. For example:1. Stop using age as a proxy for skill, adaptability, or potential. Move away from coded assumptions about being too young or too old. Base decisions on actual competencies, learning habits, motivation, and the cognitive and physical requirements of roles. Chronological age predicts little of this.
2. Redesign work for people who age differently. Introduce more flexibility in schedules and locations, invest in ergonomic improvements, rotate tasks to reduce physical strain, increase autonomy, and offer phased retirement or transitions into mentoring and knowledge-transfer roles. The goal is to reduce the biological cost of work.
3. Treat reskilling as a lifelong process. As career transitions become normal, invest in training without age limits. Support adult apprenticeships and coaching for second- and third-career moves. Fifty-year-old juniors may be among the most underutilized talent pools.
4. Actively audit for hidden age bias. Scrutinize recruiting and promotion practices for coded language (high-energy, digital native) and reluctance to train older employees. Address ageism with explicit guidelines and accountability.
5. Promote intergenerational collaboration. Build mixed-age teams where experience and fresh perspectives reinforce each other through reverse mentoring, cross-generational projects, and shared problem-solving. Age diversity is also cognitive diversity.
Age is not a single measure. It is a constellation of biological, psychological, social, and professional realities that rarely align. The companies that will thrive in an aging, unequal, multistage career world are the ones that understand these gaps, reduce the inequalities behind them, and design systems that support people across long, varied working lives.
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Like fingernails, human hair is something that’s considered normal and fine when it’s attached to the body, but gross in any other context. Hair clogs our drains. Seeing a single strand on our plates is grounds for returning food at a restaurant. And after it’s cut off at salons and barbershops, it’s promptly swept up and thrown away.
Hair is usually destined for the dustbin, but what if it could be reused as a raw material for design? One designer is exploring some novel uses for hair, including making a biotextile that feels like wool.
Designer Laura Oliveira collected clippings at two Portugese hair salons for her master’s thesis in product and industrial design at the University of Porto in Portugal. (The hair was donated anonymously after the two salons signed informed consent forms.)
Oliveira received several large bags’ worth of hair that she cleaned and sorted by color, texture, and length. Over the course of the project, she developed what she calls a “hairbraium,” an archive of categorized human hair samples that she used as her materials library.
[Photo: Laura Oliveira and Mayra Deberg]
Hair as a material
Fashion designers have used human hair before (see Turkish designer Dilara Findikoglu’s Spring 2023 collection). In fact, hair has deep roots as a material. Textile made from human hair that dates to the Middle Ages has been found in Peru. Today, Dutch company Human Material Loop turns hair into yarns and textiles.
[Photos: Laura Oliveira and Mayra Deberg]
Oliveira made her biotextiles by applying various textile techniques to hair, like carding, wet felting, and needle felting. The felted biotextiles were slightly scratchy, but structured and dense, “similar to coarse wool,” she says. She also experimented with other, more unconventional methods, like combining hair with glycerin, agar-agar, and pine resin. When combined with pine resin, which is usually brittle when solid, the hair absorbed it and improved its resistance and structural stability.
[Photos: Laura Oliveira and Mayra Deberg]
“This project taught me a lot, both technically and conceptually,” Oliveira tells Fast Company. “Through the research and experimentation, I realized that hair has impressive properties and could potentially be applied in multiple fields, from agriculture and textiles to art and product design.”
[Photo: Mayra Deberg]
In addition to the fabrics, Oliveira turned hair into needle felt balls, tchotchkes, and filling material that could be used inside pillows and puffer jackets. With resin, she says hair’s potential as a raw material is mainly for artistic and design objects, where the goal is to create stronger bio-based composites that explore new aesthetic and tactile possibilities.
“Overall, these materials are still in an experimental stage,” she says. “While they show interesting potential, they would require further research and testing to improve their mechanical performance, durability, and consistency before being considered for larger-scale or real-world applications.”
Medicare has launched a six-year pilot program that could eventually transform access to healthcare for some of the millions of people across the U.S. who rely on it for their health insurance coverage.
Traditional Medicare is a government-administered insurance plan for people over 65 or with disabilities. About half of the 67 million Americans insured through Medicare have this coverage. The rest have Medicare Advantage plans administered by private companies.
The pilot program, dubbed the Wasteful and Inappropriate Service Reduction Model, is an experimental program that began to affect people enrolled in traditional Medicare from six states in January 2026.
During this pilot, medical providers must apply for permission, or prior authorization, before giving 14 kinds of health procedures and devices. The program uses artificial intelligence software to identify treatment requests it deems unnecessary or harmful and denies them. This is similar to the way many Medicare Advantage plans work.
As health economists who have studied Medicare and the use of AI in prior authorization, we believe this pilot could save Medicare money, but it should be closely monitored to ensure that it does not harm the health of patients enrolled in the traditional Medicare program.
Prior authorization
The pilot marks a dramatic change.
Unlike other types of health insurance, including Medicare Advantage, traditional Medicare generally does not require healthcare providers to submit requests for Medicare to authorize the treatments they recommend to patients.
Requiring prior authorization for these procedures and devices could reduce wasteful spending and help patients by steering them away from unnecessary treatments. However, there is a risk that it could also delay or interfere with some necessary care and add to the paperwork providers must contend with.
Prior authorization is widely used by Medicare Advantage plans. Many insurance companies hire technology firms to make prior authorization decisions for their Medicare Advantage plans.
Pilots are a key way that Medicare improves its services. Medicare tests changes on a small number of people or providers to see whether they should be implemented more broadly.
The six states participating are Arizona, New Jersey, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas, and Washington. The 14 services that require prior authorization during this pilot include steroid injections for pain management and incontinence-control devices. The pilot ends December 2031.
If the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, which administers Medicare, deems the pilot successful, the Department of Health and Human Services could expand the program to include more procedures and more states.
Introducing a hurdle
This pilot isnt changing the rules for what traditional Medicare covers. Instead, it adds an extra hurdle for medical providers before they can administer, for example, arthroscopic treatment for an osteoarthritic knee.
If Medicare issues a denial rather than authorizing the service, the patient goes without that treatment unless their provider files an appeal and prevails.
Medicare has hired tech companies to do the work of denying or approving prior authorization requests, with the aid of artificial intelligence.
Many of these are the same companies that do prior authorizations for Medicare Advantage plans.
The government pays the companies a percentage of what Medicare would have spent on the denied treatments. This means companies are paid more when they deny more prior authorization requests.
Medicare monitors the pilot program for inappropriate denials.
What to watch for
Past research has shown that when insurers require prior authorization, the people they cover get fewer services. This pilot is likely to reduce treatments and Medicare spending, though how much remains unknown.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services chose the services targeted by the pilot because there is evidence they are given excessively in many cases.
If the program denies cases where a health service is inappropriate, or of low value for a patients health, people enrolled in traditional Medicare could benefit.
But for each treatment targeted by the pilot, there are some cases where that kind of healthcare is necessary.
If the programs AI-based decision method has trouble identifying these necessary cases and denies them, eople could lose access to care they need.
The pilot also adds to the paperwork that medical providers must do. Paperwork is already a major burden for providers and contributes to burnout.
AIs role
No matter how the government evaluates prior authorizations, we think this pilot is likely to reduce the use of the targeted treatments.
The impact of using AI to evaluate these prior authorizations is unclear. AI could allow tech companies to automatically approve more cases, which could speed up decisions. However, companies could use the time saved by AI to put more effort into having people review cases flagged by AI, which could increase denials.
Many private insurers already use AI for Medicare Advantage prior authorization decisions, although there has been limited research on these models, and little is known about how accurate AI is for this purpose.
What evidence there is suggests that AI-aided prior authorization leads to higher denial rates and larger reductions in healthcare use than when insurers make prior authorization decisions without using AI.
The bottom line
Any money the government saves during the pilot will depend on whether and how frequently these treatments are used inappropriately and how aggressively tech companies deny care.
In our view, this pilot will likely create winners and losers. Tech companies may benefit financially, though how much will depend on how big the treatment reductions are. But medical providers will have more paperwork to deal with and will get paid less if some of their Medicare requests are denied.
The impact on patients will depend on how well tech companies identify care that probably would be unnecessary and avoid denying care that is essential.
Taxpayers, who pay into Medicare during their working years, stand to benefit if the pilot can cut long-term Medicare costsan important goal, given Medicares growing budget crisis.
Like in Medicare Advantage, savings from prior authorization requirements in this pilot are split with private companies. Unlike in Medicare Advantage, however, this split is based on a fixed, observable percentage so that payments to private companies cannot exceed total savings, and the benefits of the program are easier for Medicare to quantify.
In our view, given the potential trade-offs, Medicare will need to evaluate the results of this pilot carefully before expanding it to more statesespecially if it also expands the program to include services where unnecessary care is less common.
Grace Mackleby is a research scientist of health policy and economics at the University of Southern California.
Jeff Marr is an assistant professor of health services, policy, and practice at Brown University.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Nikolai Tesla was a revolutionary thinker with bold, transformative ideas. Yet it was George Westinghouse and Thomas Edison who shaped how electricity was brought to the world. The personal computer was invented at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), but it was Apple that brought the Macintosh to market. William Coley pioneered cancer immunotherapy, but James Allison made it a reality.
We grow up believing that if an idea is good, it will naturally rise to the top. Yet thats rarely, if ever, true. To make an impact, you need to understand power and influence. It isnt about titles, authority, or formal position. Its about understanding how decisions actually get made, how people get mobilized, and how systems really change.
To do that, you need to master three forms of power: hard power, soft power, and network power. Hard power compels. Soft power persuades. Network power amplifies. Real influence comes from knowing how to combine all three. Thats the difference between having a good idea and building the traction you need to bring about the impact you want to see.
How a Group of Kids Harnessed Institutional Hard Power to Bring Down a Dictator
In 1998, five young activists met in a café in Belgrade. Still in their twenties, they were, to all outward appearances, nothing special. They werent rich, or powerful. They didnt hold important positions or have access to significant resources. Nevertheless, that day they conceived a plan to overthrow their countrys brutal Milo¹eviæ regime.
The next day six friends joined them, and together they became the 11 founders of the activist group Otpor. They had some experience with activism, taking part in the protests against the war in Bosnia in 1992 and then in the Zajedno movement in 1996. But those efforts had fallen short, and Milo¹eviæ continued to rule with an iron hand.
Yet they had learned from the experience, and an activist introduced them to the Albert Einstein Institution as well as the ideas of Gene Sharp. They found that there are sources of power that support the status quo and these have an institutional basis. As long as these remain in place, nothing will ever change. But if you can shift them, anything becomes possible. Even a seemingly all-powerful dictator needs to control or influence institutions to carry out their will.
So Otpor set out to influence key institutions, such as the media, local businesses, and international organizations, and had a particularly innovative strategy for influencing the police. When Milo¹eviæ tried to steal the election, people took to the streets, in what is now known as the Bulldozer Revolution. Those institutional shifts proved decisive in bringing down his government. The Serbian strongman would die in his prison cell in The Hague in 2006.
Everyone with an idea is, in some way, like those five kids in the café in Belgrade. If youre ever going to get anywhere, you need access to hard power. And that means unless you already control institutions that can make decisions, youre going to have to learn how to influence them. Thats the essence of hard power strategy: shaping decisions by shaping institutions.
The Pervasive Soft Power of Ramanujan
As the story of Otpor shows, influencing the hard power of institutional authority is critical for driving through transformational change. Otherssuch as the Occupy movement, Black Lives Matter, and the Gezi Park protests in Turkeywere able to mobilize massive numbers of people, but without institutional influence they were unable to achieve significant progress.
Still, you cant just use institutional heft to overpower. You also need to attract people to your cause, and thats where soft power comes in. Consider the story of Ramanujan, a destitute Indian with little formal education. In 1913, he sent his work to G.H. Hardy, a prominent mathematician working at one of the worlds most prestigious institutions, Cambridge University.
It feels almost strange to ask why Ramanujan reached out to Hardy and not the other way around. As a leading professor at a major center of learning, Hardy carried a lot of institutional clout, while Ramanujan had none. But in the end, it was Hardy who did Ramanujans bidding and, in fact, considered it to be one of the greatest privileges of his life to do so. How did that happen?
Ramanujan was able to harness the three foundational elements of soft power: ethos, pathos, and logoscredibility, emotion, and logic. Ramanujan was, by any measure, one of the greatest mathematical minds the world has ever produced. His story as a poverty-stricken man doing complex mathematical proofs in his spare time was emotionally compelling, and the logic of bringing him to Cambridge was clear and undeniable.
In other words, for a variety of reasons Hardy found Ramanujan attractive, and thats at the core of the concept of soft powerit is the power to influence without coercion. Hard power might get people to do what you want, but that can create resentment and backfire. Soft power is how you get people to want what you want, and that can sometimes be more valuable.
The Power of Tony Sopranos Networks
As a Mafia boss, Tony Soprano clearly understood hard power and strictly enforced his will. He was also no stranger to soft power, joking and cajoling with his associates. But at the root of Tonys power were his networks. He was, in gangland parlance, connected, not only to other criminals, but to government officials, religious leaders, and legitimate businesspeople.
Yet it isnt only mob bosses who nee to be connected. One of the best examples is the Medici Family in Renaissance Florence. The Medici weren’t kings. They didn’t hold official power, but they became one of the most powerful families in Europe. How? Because they sat at the center of multiple overlapping networks.
Through their bank, they were connected to merchants, princes, and even popes. They built alliances through strategic marriages. They funded artists, scientists, and thinkers. And they acted as bridgesconnecting powerful people who wouldn’t otherwise talk to one another. That made them extraordinarily influential. That’s network power.
The same pattern shows up again and again. Bill Gates used network power to weaken IBM and dominate the tech industry for over a decade. Microsoft didn’t own the hardware. It didn’t control distribution. But everyone needed its software. That’s what made the company dominant. That’s network power.
In the 1980s, when home video recorders were just coming to market, Betamax built a better product, but VHS built a better network and came to dominate the market. Next time you make a purchase, think about what you use to pay. Visa, Mastercard, American Expressthat’s also network power at work.
While soft power can persuade and hard power can compel, it is network power that can help you gain scale, expanding access to information and providing the connectivity needed to communicate ideas and actions widely.
Setting Your Ideas Up for Success
Most of us grow up believing in merit. Were raised to think that the truth will win out and the best idea will always win in the end. Unfortunately, thats not really true. As much as we might like to believe that our ideas can stand on their own, the truth is that we need power and influence to put them into action.
Stanford professor Jeffrey Pfeffer, who teaches the incredibly popular course Building Power to Lead, defines power as the ability to get things done your way in contested situations, and that gets to the meat of it. People dont encounter our ideas in a vacuum, but in a sea of other ideas, ambitions, prerogatives, and priorities.
For people to adopt an idea, it needs to cross their thresholds of resistance, points at which joining in no longer feels risky or costly. To get them over that hump, we need to access power and influence, which comes in three forms: hard power, soft power, and network power. Hard power lowers thresholds by changing incentives. Soft power lowers them by making adoption desirable. Network power builds momentum and propagates the idea forward.
These dont work in isolation, but in combination. Hard power can force a decision, but risks resentment. Soft power can win buy-in, but without connection to authority, it cant deliver results. Network power can get you access, but not action. When you use all three in tandem, however, you dont just push ideas forward, you pull people in, motivate them to make your cause their own, and encourage others to do so as well.
So dont just ask whether your idea is good enough. Think about how youre going to access the power and influence you need to set it up for success. That, more than anything, will determine whether you succeed or fail.
Ah, brainstorming. The corporate rite of passage where creativity goes to die. It usually involves a room full of well-intentioned people offering ideas that feel familiar but not fresh. Why does this happen? Because most people stick to the safe zone, avoiding anything that might make waves, or worse, ruffle feathers.
But heres the problem: safe ideas dont change the game. If you want ideas that truly shake things up, youve got to do something radical. You have to give your team permission not just to think differently but to think outrageously. And to do that, you need to encourage them to come up with ideas so bold, they might just get them fired.
How to Generate ‘Firing-Worthy’ Ideas
Heres how it works: start your brainstorming session as usual, letting your team throw out the predictable, respectable suggestions. Once those are on the table, and everyones energy is thoroughly underwhelming, its time to shake things up completely.
Tell your team: Now I want you to pitch ideas so outrageous, so audacious, they could theoretically get you fired.
Thats when the magic happens. Pretty quickly, the energy in the room goes up dramatically, people start laughing, and ideas start to fly. Without the usual guardrails, the brain feels unrestrained. Instead of staying within the confines of reasonable, your team starts coming up with wild, bold, and totally unfiltered ideas:
What if we launched this product in zero gravity?
What if we eliminated this process entirely?
What if we let customers design their own versions and just sold that?
When you mandate that people let the irrational, crazy, or uncomfortable act as their guide, fear dissipates, and creative thinking better takes hold.
Permission to Dream Big
By removing the fear of judgment, you unlock your teams ability to think without limits. People stop worrying about how their ideas will be perceived or whether theyll sound ridiculous. Instead, they focus on possibility.
When we realized our brainstorm sessions were resulting in lackluster innovations and leaned towards incremental improvements versus transformational ideation, we knew we had to remove the shackles that were surrounding peoples brains,” says Victoria Platt, Vice President, Airline Strategy & Transformation, SITA. “So, in our next session, we told participants to imagine that privacy laws dont exist, there are no state or federal regulations, industry standards dont matter, the budget is boundless, resources are boundless, and it doesnt matter if the technology for an idea doesnt yet exist. The idea was to just think BIG and pull back to reality later.”
In that next session,” Platt says, “40 strong ideas were generated . . . four of which are currently being developed for radical cost savings and provocative revenue generation. We took a bold chance and got bold results.
And no, youre not actually going to act on ideas that would get anyone fired (obviously, no ones suggesting a new policy involving legal loopholes or ethically questionable practices). However, what you will get are new hunting grounds you never thought to explore. Often, these firing-worthy concepts arent as impractical as they seem; theyre just bold enough to challenge the norm.
Apples modern designs didnt come from playing it safe. The company dared to envision products that were invisible to the eyesleek, minimalist, and without the clutter of traditional gadgets or overwritten marketing copy. At the time, those ideas sounded ridiculous. Today, theyre the gold standard of design.
From Crazy to Commercially Viable
Heres the best part of the exercise: outrageous ideas are what unlock brilliance. Once you weed out irrelevant concepts and focus on ones with actual potential, your team can start refining them into actionable concepts:
Killing a process? It could lead to improved customer-service support that no one thought possible.
Letting customers design their own versions of your products? Perhaps it evolves into a customizable product line you can charge much higher prices for next year.
The point is to remove the handcuffs on ideas that hold us back. Risk often leads to reward when youre willing to take that first leap.
Pushing Boundaries as a Practice
Entrepreneur Jim Rohn said: If youre not willing to risk the unusual, youll have to settle for the ordinary. Too many teams stick to the sensible and safe, producing ideas that are fine but forgettable. But extraordinary results come from taking chances and from daring to color outside the lines.
Encouraging your team to pitch ideas that would get them fired isnt just about shaking up a meeting: its about shifting the entire culture. It signals that boldness is valued, creativity is celebrated, and innovation is required.
Stop having mediocre brainstorms. Give your team the freedom (and the challenge) to pitch the kind of concepts that just might get them fired. Youll get lots of laughs and some truly wild suggestions. But youll also get something even better: the kind of thinking that redefines the game.
Below, Shadé Zahrai shares five key insights from her new book, Big Trust: Rewire Self-Doubt, Find Your Confidence, and Fuel Success.
Shadé is a peak performance educator to Fortune 500 companies, leadership strategist, and former lawyer. Over the past decade, she has trained leaders at Microsoft, Deloitte, JPMorgan, and LVMH, educated millions through LinkedIn Learning, and spent five years researching self-doubt and self-image as part of her PhD.
Whats the big idea?
When you change how you see yourself, you change whats possible for you. Big Trust doesnt require becoming someone new; it requires you to finally trust who you already are. By strengthening the four drivers of Big Trust, you give power to back yourself when it counts.
Listen to the audio version of this Book Biteread by Shadé herselfbelow, or in the Next Big Idea App.
1. You will never rise above your opinion of yourself
In the 1970s, Dartmouth professor Robert Kleck ran a fascinating study. He sent participants into conversations with strangers, but before he did that, he took a group and applied a scar to their face. They saw the result in a hand mirror, confirming that they had a disfigurement. Then both scarred and non-scarred groups were sent into conversations.
Afterward, the scarred participants reported that people treated them differentlythey felt that others were less friendly, more tense, and more uncomfortable. They were convinced the scar changed how the world saw them. Except . . . the scar never existed.
Right before the interaction, the researchers pretended to touch up the makeup but secretly wiped the scar off completely. So, they walked in with no scar at all, but they believed they had one. And because they believed it, they expected they would be treated differently.
Expectation shaped their interpretation. Thats confirmation bias and selective attention in action. They didnt respond to reality. They responded to the reality that their self-image prepared them to see. This is the power of self-image. You dont respond to the world as it isyou respond to the world your brain expects to see based on how you see yourself.
They responded to the reality that their self-image prepared them to see.
So, ask yourself: What invisible scars am I carrying into every room, every opportunity? How are they shaping the way I show up?
In my work with high performers, Ive seen this pattern again and again. When someones self-image is distorted, every room feels threatening. Every text left on read feels like rejection. Every silence feels personal. Every piece of feedback feels like a verdict.
One of the fastest ways to uncover these invisible scars is by identifying the labels youve attached to yourself. Labels like Im boring, I always mess up, Im not confident, Im not leadership material, Im too much, or Im not enough. Most of these werent created by you. They were given to youby family, early teachers, old bosses, past partnersat a time you were too young and too unsure to question them. But labels are just stories. And stories can be rewritten:
Swap Im indecisive with Im thoughtful and deliberate.
Swap Im intense with Im passionate and deeply invested.
Swap Im boring with Im steady and grounded.
Simple, but neurologically powerful. Every reframe weakens an old neural pathway and strengthens a new one. Bit by bit, your brain updates its blueprint. When the blueprint changes, your self-doubt loses its grip. The essence of Big Trust is updating your blueprint to trust your worth, capability, and capacity to show up fully when it counts.
2. Transforming your self-image with Big Trust
Big Trust is that deep, internal sense of self-trust, and its shaped by your self-image. Self-image isnt abstract. Its made up of four measurable dimensions that psychologists call your core self-evaluations. Decades of studies (including meta-analyses of over 100 papers) show that these four dimensions predict job performance, career satisfaction, happiness, and earning potential.
The idea that personality is fixed is outdated. Yes, we tend to stay consistent over time, unless we intentionally target a specific aspect with new habits and experiences. When we do, we can reshape our traits in meaningful ways. And core self-evaluations are based on four psychological personality traits:
Acceptance your sense of Am I enough as I am? It reflects what psychologists would call self-esteem.
Agency your belief in your ability to make things happen. This is the lived experience of self-efficacy.
Autonomy the degree to which you feel in control of your life and choices, instead of feeling like it just happens to you. This reflects your locus of control.
Adaptability your ability to stay steady when life doesnt go to plan and regulate your emotions when things feel uncertain. This maps onto emotional stability, sometimes called the opposite of neuroticism.
Together, these form your Doubt Profile, the psychological fingerprint for how and where self-doubt shows up. Heres what this looks like in real life:
If youre low in Acceptance, you constantly feel like you need to prove your worth. You take feedback personally and chase approval as though your value depends on it.
If youre low in Agency, you doubt your abilities. You compare yourself to others, feel like an imposter, and wait to feel ready . . . which means you rarely take action.
If youre low in Autonomy, you feel powerless. You get stuck in blame, resentment, or old stories that keep you small.
If youre low in Adaptability, emotions like anxiety or overwhelm take over when the stakes are high. You know what to do, but you cant bring yourself to do it.
None of this is fixed. These four elements of your self-image are trainable. When you strengthen the Big Trust attributes, you reshape the underlying personality patterns that have been keeping you stuck:
You build Acceptance so your worth stops feeling conditional.
You strengthen Agency so you move even when doubt is loud.
You grow Autonomy so you reclaim your power.
You cultivate Adaptability so your emotions dont shrink your potential.
When you work on these four attributes, youre not just thinking more positively. Youre fundamentally reshaping the self-image that your doubt has been feeding on for years. When you understand the four attributes beneath your self-image, you finally know where to direct your energy. And once you strengthen them, self-doubt stops running your life.
3. Overthinking isnt a thinking problemits a self-trust problem
Overthinking is ften what your brain does when it doesnt feel safe handing over the steering wheel to you. When your self-image tells your brain, Youre not safe in uncertainty, your mind compensates by producing more thinking, more scenarios, more mental rehearsals. And because of our built-in negativity bias, the mind typically fixates on the negative: What if I fail? What if I cant do it? What if I embarrass myself? You start catastrophizing, because your brain is trying to create a sense of certainty where none exists. It magnifies what could go wrong to keep you safe. If youre aware of all the possible risks, maybe you wont try. And if you dont try, you cant fail, or be rejected, or judged. On some level, your brain thinks its protecting you.
And to be fair . . . it is. But its also keeping you stuck. The antidote to overthinking isnt clearer thoughts or more clarityits deeper self-trust. When you strengthen the four Big Trust attributes, decision-making becomes lighter. You no longer need more information or perfect information. You dont spiral into worst-case scenarios. You dont get trapped in What if I choose wrong? because you know you can handle whatever happens next. You have Big Trust.
I often tell my clients, Youre not overthinking because youre unsure of the world. Youre overthinking because youre unsure of yourself in the world. When you shift that, when you trust your own competence, resilience, and adaptability, the overthinking naturally settles. Youre not forcing your mind to quiet down, but it no longer has a job to do.
You start catastrophizing, because your brain is trying to create a sense of certainty where none exists.
One of the simplest yet most powerful tools comes directly from research on anxiety and worry. Its called Stimulus Control for Worry, and its incredibly effective at reducing overthinking. Instead of letting worries hijack your mind all day, you train your brain to contain them. Every time a worry or distracting thought pops into your head, write it down. Then say, Ill worry about you later.
Then, each day, schedule worry time. Up to 30 minutes to pull out your list of worries and let your mind run wild with worry. Once the time is up, thats it. Close the notebook or the app.
After that, decide your next step. Ask yourself, Is this worry real, or am I catastrophizing? Is there anything I can do about this? If yes, commit to doing something. If not, redirect your focus to something that deserves your energy.
And finally, periodically review your worry list. Look for patterns. Notice how many worries never became problems. This strengthens self-trust because you begin to see, in your own handwriting, how often your mind predicted danger that never arrived. You start to internalize that youre safer, more capable, and more resourceful than your brain gives you credit for.
4. Confidence is an outcome of self-trust
When I run workshops or speak to audiences, and I ask people what they think the opposite of self-doubt is, about 90 percent will say confidence. And what that tells me is that most people are waiting. Theyre waiting to feel confident before they take action. Theyre waiting for readiness, certainty, and the perfect moment. But thats the wrong goal.
Years of psychological research point to the same truth: confidence doesnt come before you take action. It comes after. Heres the loop that builds confidence:
You take a small action.
You watch yourself do it, and survive it.
That creates a proof point.
Your skills grow. Your competence grows.
Your brain updates its internal script: I can handle this.
Thats self-efficacy rising, and as self-efficacy rises, confidence follows. Confidence is the result, not the prerequisite. Its the outcome of action, not the gateway to it.
So, if confidence comes after, what comes before we take action? Thats Big Trustthe trust in yourself that you can handle whatever happens next because, even if the outcome isnt perfect, youll learn, adjust, and improve. Even the word confidence gives it away: it comes from the Latin con + fidere, meaning with trust. Dont wait to feel confident to act; act to become someone you trust.
5. Identity changes lasthabits are how you rebuild self-trust
Self-trust isnt built in big, dramatic moments. Its built through small, repeated habits that teach your brain a new story about who you are. We often think change happens when we finally feel ready, or when motivation strikes, or when we find the perfect strategy. But identity doesnt shift from insight alone; it shifts from evidence.
If your habits say, I avoid hard things, or I break promises to myself, or I wait until I feel confident, your brain stores that as identity. It becomes your self-image. But when your habits say, I follow through, I take small risks, I choose what matters over whats comfortable, your brain updates your identity to match. Big Trust is built through repetition of aligned action.
Enjoy our full library of Book Bitesread by the authors!in the Next Big Idea app.
This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.
Working at the office all day was a struggle for Nicola Sura. Shed seen the toll that working a corporate job had taken on her moms physical and mental health, and she never wanted the same thing to happen to her.
Around six months into Suras first full-time role in 2019, she started questioning her life choices, as well as those of everyone around her.
I was, like, how are people doing this? Everyone seems completely fine. Everyone’s just going about their day, Sura, who works in corporate retail, tells Fast Company. It was killing me to just be there for eight hours at my desk.
The move to working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic was when Sura learned a trick that would change everything: time theft.
She started taking long lunches and watching TV while on the clock because nobody was monitoring her, and she finally found time to do her chores.
I started feeling, like, okay, this is how I’m going to get through corporate America, Sura says. For me, it was always a means to survival.
Time thievery is defined as stealing back moments in the workday to run errands, put on the laundry, take a nap, and do anything else that isnt in your job description, without taking official breaks.
Sura now runs a TikTok account where she helps her 57,000 followers become better time thieves. Her number one rule: You have to be good at your job to get away with it.
If you are very clearly a slacker or very clearly struggling, then it won’t work, she says. That is the foundation you have to start from, or else you will get fired.
A productivity hack, or a risky coping mechanism?
Time theft has become more common since the working-from-home era.
One recent survey of over 5,000 people across Europe by the market research firm YouGov Switzerland found that 80% of work-from-homers admitted to doing nonwork tasks during paid hours. A 2025 study, published in the journal Behavioral Sciences, found that working conditions that have become more commonplace since COVIDsuch as a lack of supervision for those working from homecorrelated with employees taking extended personal breaks and sending personal messages during paid work time.
Productivity experts and organizational psychologists have mixed views on time thievery. Some see it as risky, or as an unhealthy coping mechanism that masks deeper dissatisfaction. Others see it as a natural progression toward a more flexible way of working. Circa 2020 or earlier, some remote workers might have felt guilty tending to the laundry during a lull in the daybut given the nature of remote work, why feel guilty about juggling chores at all, so long as the work gets done?
Selda Seyfi, a management consultant who writes about productivity on her Substack called “Maximize Your Minutes,” views time theft as energy management and an intentional integration of what you want to do versus what you have to do.
The whole concept assumes we still work in a 1940s factory model where your employer owns your brain for eight hours, she says. Any deviation from that is seen as stealing, which feels outdated.
Seyfi also argues that its unrealistic for workplaces not to expect employees to do necessary life admin, especially when banks and post offices are only open during work hours. Everyone talks about protecting weekends, but no one questions you when you’re checking emails at 9 p.m., she says. The boundary always seems to go one way.
How reclaiming time changes workplace dynamics
From an organizational perspective, when used occasionally, time theft can reduce absenteeism and presenteeism, says Amanda Tobe, an organizational psychologist who specializes in career progression. She says it can reduce anxiety and mental fatigue when used within reason, supporting emotional regulation and cognitive functioning, which may indirectly improve focus and work quality.”
Anita Williams Woolley, associate professor of organizational behavior at Carnegie Mellon Universitys Tepper School of Business, notes that many jobs are lumpy: Some days are overloaded, others slower.
People use lighter periods for errands, because work isnt perfectly matched to a 9-to-5 grid, she says. Employers who dont acknowledge that force workers to do this without being transparent.
Williams Woolley adds that errands can offer stress relief and a sense of autonomy, especially when work feels inflexible or surveilled. But she warns that there may be costs: Secrecy can push people into a more transactional relationship with work, eroding trust and belonging, she says. Even if performance is strong, unreliability can stick.
Theres also the risk of discipline for time thieves who push their luck. Employers who suspect workers of being absent for long swaths of the day may enforce policies such as monitoring laptop activity, or even dishing out punishments like fines. In 2023, for example, a remote accountant was dismissed and fined around $1,000 for time theft after tracking software was uploaded to her work laptop.
Career happiness coach Jenny Holliday warns that even if you get away with it, time thievery may work in the short term but become costly over time. She says it can mask deeper feelings of resentment or disengagement, and even be a means of revenge.
If you’ve been passed over for a promotion or a pay raise, why not spend half your day on other things? she says.
Productivity doesnt look the same for everyone
Sura isnt convinced by the criticisms, especially as more companies push employees back into the office full time. She doesnt see time theft as quiet quitting or coasting. While she may occasionally reframe the truthlike saying her internet is down so she can catch up on sleep or watch a movieshe says shes anything but unproductive.
Sura has since moved on from the job where she learned that it pays to be a time thief, and has held a couple of corporate roles since. She now juggles contract work with being a full-time content creator. In her previous roles, she was consistently promoted and received positive feedback from managers and colleagues, so she knows firsthand that productivity doesnt look the same for everyone.
Your work speaks for itself, she says. You can do good work without operating at a 100% capacity all the time. Slowing down and working at a sustainable pace matters.
Another criticism Sura often hears is tht time thieves leave others to pick up the slack. She rejects that, too.
Nobody is telling you to work harder, she says. Go ahead and also be a time thief. We should all be existing this way.
On the heels of its intriguing Super Bowl ad, AI.com is garnering all sorts of interestso much, in fact, that the company’s website crashed as Super Bowl viewers scrambled to see what the company no one has heard of was all about.
The new AI platform, founded by Crypto.com CEO and cofounder Kris Marszalek, reportedly spent a whopping $85 million on the Super Bowl spot, only to garner such a heavy volume of traffic that he had to post on X: “Insane traffic levels. We prepared for scale, but not for THIS,” followed by three fire emoji.
That 30-second commercial, which ran during the coveted fourth-quarter ad slot, encouraged fans to go to the site and create an AI handle, lured by the promise it would “perform real-world tasks for the good of humanity.”
What exactly does that mean? According to the company’s release: “With a few clicks, anyone can now generate a private, personal AI agent that doesnt just answer questions, but actually operates on the users behalforganizing work, sending messages, executing actions across apps, building projects, and more,” the company said.
The company also asks people to “join now to claim your unique ai.com/username,” which requires entering credit card information to allegedly “verify that you’re a human” in order to secure a handle.
Fast Company has reached out to AI.com for more details on why a credit card is required for verification.
However, many who scrambled to the site were left with more questions than answers. One X user wrote: “I’m on the site but it’s not clear what http://ai.com offers!”
On Meta’s Threads, user hridoyreh posted: “Why and for what exactly do I need to add a card for my AI.com username? Is this how they want to recover the $70 million they spent?” To which one user replied: “Ran into that this morning and was a big NOPE from me.” And another commented: “Literally no idea what that website / product does.”
Marszalek reportedly bought the domain for $70 million, which is estimated to be “the single largest domain purchase in history,” according to the company, as reported by the Financial Times.
According to AI.com’s release, the company’s “key differentiating feature is the agents ability to autonomously build out missing features and capabilities to complete real-world tasks. … Such improvements will subsequently be shared across millions of agents on the network, massively increasing the utility of each agent for ai.com users.”
It also said users will soon be able to deploy their agent to do a range of actions, like trading stocks, automating workflows, organizing and executing daily tasks with their calendar, or even updating their online dating profileall while remaining private, permission-based, and fully under the users control.
As backlash over Bad Bunnys Super Bowl LX halftime show rippled through conservative media, a notable group of right-leaning commentators broke with President Donald Trump to defend the performancein some cases walking back their own earlier criticism.
Despite Bad Bunnys message of love and unity, the performance has been placed squarely at the center of the culture war in recent weeks.
After initially calling for viewers to turn off the halftime show and labeling Bad Bunny a fake American citizen who publicly hates America, influencer and boxer Jake Paul, 29, has now claimed amnesia over his viral rant.
Guys i love bad bunny idk what happened on my twitter last night ?? wtf, he posted on Monday morning. He also claimed his initial post was misinterpreted online, clarifying that it was Bad Bunnys values he was calling fake not his citizenship.
Guys i love bad bunny idk what happened on my twitter last night ?? wtf— Jake Paul (@jakepaul) February 9, 2026
The overnight switch-up might be less a change of heart and more a reaction to the tide of public opinion turning against him.
Even his brother and fellow influencer publicly disagreed with the take. Logan Paul replied to the post, writing: “I love my brother but I don’t agree with this Puerto Ricans are Americans & Im happy they were given the opportunity to showcase the talent that comes from the island.”
A fake American citizen? Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez also responded on Monday on X. Didnt you MOVE to Puerto Rico to avoid paying your taxes while kids across America go hungry?
A fake American citizen?Didnt you MOVE to Puerto Rico to avoid paying your taxes while kids across America go hungry?Meanwhile Benito actually funds low income kids access to arts and sports programs, while you defund them.Of course youre mad. He makes you look small. https://t.co/lLfY8pcBLn— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) February 9, 2026
Mike Nellis, former Senior Advisor to Vice President Kamala Harris, also chimed in to say: Future historians will mark Jake Pauls meltdown over Bad Bunny as the moment the left officially won the culture war.
President Donald Trump was another vocal critic of Bad Bunnys halftime show, taking to Truth Social to call it “absolutely terrible, one of the worst, EVER,” in a social media post on Sunday. But by Monday, a number of conservative commentators and Trump allys had hit back at the President.
Anti-woke broadcaster Piers Morgan, who has previously been friendly towards the president, responded on Monday: Couldnt disagree more, Mr President. I absolutely loved Bad Bunnys halftime show… Oh, and Spanish is 1st language for 50m+ Americans!
Couldnt disagree more, Mr President. I absolutely loved Bad Bunnys halftime show. Amazing (best in Super Bowl history?) theatre/choreography, great energy, superbly confident performance, and a very welcome unifying message.Oh, and Spanish is 1st language for 50m+ Americans! pic.twitter.com/9rVUEmisRI— Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) February 9, 2026
Im sorry but I just genuinely question your taste level if you didnt enjoy the Bad Bunny halftime show, Republican Meghan McCain also posted on X. And everything in life doesnt have to be ruined with politics.
Im sorry but I just genuinely question your taste level if you didnt enjoy the Bad Bunny halftime show.And everything in life doesnt have to be ruined with politics.— Meghan McCain (@MeghanMcCain) February 9, 2026
Bad Bunny spotlighted Puerto Rican culture in a 13-minute spectacle at Levis Stadium in Santa Clara, California, reaching an estimated 135.4 million viewers. Over on YouTube, Turning Point USA streamed its own alternative concert featuring Kid Rock, Brantley Gilbert, and two other country artists, which peaked at about 6.1 million concurrent viewers.
Investor and Shark Tank star Kevin O’Leary once declared that to succeed in business you must be willing to grind out 25 hour work days. He has since walked back on that idea, calling it, in his own words, sheer stupidity.
In fact: The worst advice I hear young founders talk about all the time is that they want to work 18 hours a day. How stupid is that? OLeary said in a video posted on his Instagram page last week.
The eat-sleep-work lifestylealso known as the 996 schedule first imported from China, which stands for 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a weekhas since gained momentum among Silicon Valley tech companies.
Despite his previous declarations, OLeary says it’s high time to put that idea to bed. Youve got to get some sleep, you have to eat well to stay focused, he says. Thats how youre successful.
Being tired is practically a personality trait in corporate America. Harvard University research found 55% of CEOs get six hours of sleep a night or less.
Yet, research consistently shows that productivity is closely tied to sleep. One 2019 study found that sleep-deprived entrepreneurs were more likely to favor weaker business ventures, failing to look past the surface-level features of new business ideas to understand their long-term potential.
For the sleepless founder, making important decisions also becomes more difficult after a long day of work, as the effects of decision fatigue start to take hold.
Theres lots of evidence that you should make the major decisions right after you wake up when you have the maximum energy and your mind is clear, OLeary says.
Success should not come at the detriment of your health. This idea that you dont get any sleep, as if its good for investors, is sheer stupidity, he says. Eating well, getting sleep, and exercising are his actual secrets to optimization.
O’Leary now sees those founders hustling 18 hours a day (or at least, those who look like theyve been) as poor bets. If you show up looking half-dead, Im not investing, OLeary wrote in the video caption. Youre not a hero, youre a liability.So, the next time you feel pressure to camp out in the office, take a page out of OLearys playbook and:
Go home and get a good night’s rest.
Show up to work looking and feeling fresh.
Tackle your most important tasks first thing.
In doing so, youll not only look better and feel better but maybe most importantly. . .work better.
