The rise of the Gen Z side hustle

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The rise of the Gen Z side hustle   Shola West, 22, works on the media-partnerships team at advertising firm OMD. She combines her full-time role with a part-time business: providing Gen Z career advice through freelance consultancy work. West, who is based in London, says her employer is aware – and supportive – of her side hustle. “At my interview, they made it clear I was welcome to have my personal brand on the side. My CEO recently commented on my LinkedIn post saying what I’d done was brilliant, even though it had nothing to do with my full-time job,” she says. “Their openness means it doesn’t feel like a 9-to-5: it’s a job that works with my passions.” Continued here

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The Afterlives of the Soul: Sister Nivedita on Love and Death   Each month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For seventeen years, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor has made your own life more livable in the past year (or the past decade), please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference.Know as we might what actually happens when we die, we spend our lives trembling at the fact of our finitude, trying to wrest from it some greater poetic truth — something that slakes the soul’s thirst for meaning. Even the spiritual materialists among us are haunted by incomprehension at the cessation of consciousness — how can this entire carnival of wonder just, one day, melt into nothingness? And what, in the end, does it all mean, will it all have meant?These questions come alive in the 1908 book An Indian Study of Love and Death (public library | public domain) by the Irish teacher and activist Margaret Elizabeth Noble (October 18, 1867–October 13, 1911), christened Sister Nivedita by Swami Vivekananda after she emigrated to Calcutta when she was twenty-one to begin devoting her life to India and the sacred search for meaning. Continued here

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How We Render Reality: Attention as an Instrument of Love   Each month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For seventeen years, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor has made your own life more livable in the past year (or the past decade), please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference.Whatever fundamental reality might exist, we live out our lives in a subjective reality defined by what we agree to attend to. “An act of pure attention, if you are capable of it, will bring its own answer,” D.H. Lawrence wrote. But we live largely in the territory of the unanswerable because there is no pure attention — the aperture of our attention is constricted by myriad conditionings and focused by a brain honed on millions of years of evolutionary necessities, many of which we have long outgrown. How the brain metes out attention and what that means for our intimacy with reality is what the philosophy-lensed British psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist takes up in his immense, in both senses of the word, book The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World (public library) — an investigation of how “the very brain mechanisms which succeed in simplifying the world so as to subject it to our control militate against a true understanding of it,” and what a richer understanding of those mechanisms can do for living in closer and more felicitous communion with reality. At its heart is the recognition that “the whole is never the same as the sum of its ‘parts’” and that “there are in fact no ‘parts’ as such, but that they are an artefact of a certain way of looking at the world.” Continued here

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A Refresher on Statistical Significance   When you run an experiment or analyze data, you want to know if your findings are “significant.” But business relevance (i.e., practical significance) isn’t always the same thing as confidence that a result isn’t due purely to chance (i.e., statistical significance). This is an important distinction; unfortunately, statistical significance is often misunderstood and misused in organizations today. And yet because more and more companies are relying on data to make critical business decisions, it’s an essential concept for managers to understand. Continued here

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Quiz Yourself: Do You Lead with Emotional Intelligence?   Rate yourself on five key dimensions, and see how you compare with others. Continued here

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Leading People When They Know More than You Do   If you’re a manager in a knowledge-driven industry, chances are you’re an expert in the area you manage. Try to imagine a leader without this expertise doing your job. You’ll probably conclude it couldn’t be done. But as your career advances, at some point you will be promoted into a job which includes responsibility for areas outside your specialty. Your subordinates will ask questions that you cannot answer and may not even understand. How can you lead them when they know a lot more about their work than you do? Welcome to reality: You are now the leader without expertise—and this is where you, possibly for the first time in your career, find yourself failing. You feel frustrated, tired and disoriented, even angry. This is the point where careers can derail. If you get to this point, or see yourself headed in this direction, what can you do? Continued here

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The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs   The author, whose biography of Steve Jobs was an instant best seller after the Apple CEO’s death in October 2011, sets out here to correct what he perceives as an undue fixation by many commentators on the rough edges of Jobs’s personality. That personality was integral to his way of doing business, Isaacson writes, but the real lessons from Steve Jobs come from what he actually accomplished. He built the world’s most valuable company, and along the way he helped to transform a number of industries: personal computing, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, retail stores, and digital publishing. Continued here

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The 3 Elements of Trust   As a leader, you want the people in your organization to trust you. And with good reason. In our coaching with leaders, we often see that trust is a leading indicator of whether others evaluate them positively or negatively. But how to create that trust, or perhaps more importantly, how reestablish it when you’ve lost it isn’t always that straightforward. By analyzing over 80,000 360-degree reviews, the authors found that there are three elements that predict whether a leader will be trusted by his direct reports, peers, and other colleagues. These are positive relationships, consistency, and good judgment/expertise. When a leader was above average on each of these elements, they were more likely to be trusted, and positive relationships appeared to be the most important element in that, without it, a leader’s trust rating fell most significantly. Trust is an important currency in organizations and any leader would be wise to invest time in building it by focusing on these three elements. Continued here

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Pillars of Resilient Digital Transformation - SPONSORED CONTENT FROM Red Hat   The acceleration of digital transformation because of the pandemic recast the position of the chief information officer (CIO) to that of a big-picture strategist. From ensuring ongoing alignment of IT and business demands to leading the transition to full digital enablement, the CIO role requires expert proficiency in a broad range of both technology and management skills. Continued here

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Can AI Really Help You Sell?   Many salespeople today are struggling; only 57% of them make their annual quotas, surveys show. One problem is that buying processes have evolved faster than selling processes, and buyers today can access a wide range of online resources that let them evaluate products before even meeting a salesperson. AI tools can help organizations close the gap, but most don’t know how to use them effectively. In this article the authors describe how sales AI has been a real game changer at a few companies. They also pro­vide a self-assessment tool, the Sales Success Matrix, that will show sales leaders where to start or improve their AI journeys. Continued here

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What Is Disruptive Innovation?   For the past 20 years, the theory of disruptive innovation has been enormously influential in business circles and a powerful tool for predicting which industry entrants will succeed. Unfortunately, the theory has also been widely misunderstood, and the “disruptive” label has been applied too carelessly anytime a market newcomer shakes up well-established incumbents. Continued here

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Business Leaders Need to Rise Above Anti-Woke Attacks   As the debate over the word woke rages on, business leaders are grappling with the meaning and connotations of the term. (Spoiler alert: Woke means being aware of inequity and injustice.) Many conservative CEOs have followed the lead of politicians in using the label as a weapon, accusing others of contracting the “woke mind virus” or claiming that caring about “woke diversity” ignores the economy’s bottom line. But even politically moderate CEOs have become quick to reject the label.Consider Larry Fink, CEO of the multinational investment firm BlackRock, who has led the charge of investing with environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals in mind. In his annual letter to fellow chief executives in 2018, Fink asked, “What role do we play in the community? How are we managing our impact on the environment? Are we working to create a diverse workforce?” BlackRock has continually led the charge in making ESG a mainstream pillar of investing. Those efforts seem socially aware. Still, Fink claimed that those initiatives are “not woke.” Or take the case of JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon. After George Floyd’s murder in the summer of 2020, Dimon personally took a knee with employees in a New York Chase branch and went on to send a memo to the company’s employees that stated, “We are committed to fighting against racism and discrimination wherever and however it exists.” But, like Fink, Dimon has gone to lengths to separate stakeholder capitalism from the woke label, despite demonstrating awareness of inequity and injustice through commitments like JPMorgan Chase’s $30 billion investment in advancing racial equity. Continued here

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Did Me Too change the workplace for Gen Z?   Like many women, I remember watching the Me Too movement mushroom as I scrolled through Facebook and Twitter in October 2017. While the hashtag #MeToo was first used in 2006 by black feminist activist Tarana Burke, who wanted to tackle sexual violence within her own community, it gained momentum following a viral tweet by actress Alyssa Milano after Harvey Weinstein’s crimes were exposed. Women around the world also began posting about how the misuse of power and privilege enabled sexual misconduct in the workplace.For many women in the workforce, the Me Too movement triggered conversations about the inappropriate (and often illegal) behaviours we’d encountered in our own careers, prompting a mix of anger, catharsis and, for some, painful re-lived trauma. But that wasn’t the case for Gen Z who were still children or teenagers. Born between 1996 and 2012, only the oldest, now workforce-aged, were in university, or applying for their first jobs, when #MeToo trended across social media and grabbed headlines. Continued here

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#quittok: Why young workers are live-quitting on TikTok   Even years into the Great Resignation, workers continue to leave their jobs in droves. While plenty of employees are still sending off official resignation emails to bosses, younger workers are increasingly taking a different tack: live quitting.In July 2021, a clip of UK McDonald’s workers quitting mid-shift went viral ­– and now TikTok is awash with users sharing real-time footage of the moment they told their bosses ‘I quit’. Sometimes tense, often funny and nearly always compelling, these short video clips are attracting thousands – sometimes millions – of views on the social media platform. Continued here

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Edward Burtynsky's photos show the scars of human-altered landscapes   For more than 40 years, the Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky has recorded the impact of humans on the Earth in large-scale images that often resemble abstract paintings. The writer Gaia Vince, whose book Nomad Century was published in 2022, interviewed Burtynsky for BBC Culture about his latest project, African Studies.African Studies is now collected in a book and is on display at Flowers Gallery, Hong Kong until 20 May 2023. Continued here

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Eurovision Song Contest: Why Gen Z have become its biggest fans   There is no show on earth quite like the Eurovision Song Contest. Launched by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) in 1956 and held every year since – except for 2020, when Covid-19 made it impossible – it has grown into an uncategorisable but galvanising international extravaganza. The format is simple but has been tweaked over the decades. Each country sends an act to perform an original song of no more than three minutes in length. Then, after every song has been heard, each country awards two sets of points ranging from one to 12 to its favourite performances: one set is decided by a jury of industry experts; the other is voted for by the public. The winner is the act with the highest points total. In 2017, Portugal's Salvador Sobral achieved an enormous score of 758 with his emotional ballad Amar Pelos Dois – a record that still stands.More like this: – The surprise 80s hit that still endures – Why are Abba so popular? – Gen Z's surprising musical obsession Continued here

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Federal money is coming to fix aging flood control systems - but plans all too often reflect historical patterns and not future risks   Heavy downpours and a thick snowpack in the Western mountains and Upper Midwest have put communities in several states at risk of flooding this spring – or already under water.Flooding is the costliest type of natural disaster in the U.S., responsible for about 90% of the damage from natural disasters each year. It happens almost every day somewhere in the country. Continued here

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Imran Khan's arrest: What it means for the former prime minister and Pakistan's upcoming election   Former Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan was arrested amid chaotic scenes on May 9, 2023, while appearing in court on corruption charges.Khan, who was ousted from power in April 2022, has denied any wrongdoing and has called on supporters to protest his detainment. Continued here

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On its 75th birthday, Israel still can't agree on what it means to be a Jewish state and a democracy   Rhoda and Richard Goldman Chair in Jewish Studies, San Francisco State University As Israel celebrates the 75th anniversary of its founding, and nearly a century and a half after the first Zionists came to Palestine from Europe, the core tension behind the country’s establishment – whether a Jewish state could be a democratic state, whether Zionism could accommodate pluralism – is more obvious than ever. Continued here