Joanne Tombrakos's Blog

Not that long ago, I began to start my classes by taking a moment to collectively turn our devices to Do Not Disturb. This is paired with a slide image of where to find the Do Not Disturb function on the phone (in case one is not sure). From time to time, it also includes a reminder that my students are paying a lot of money to sit in my classroom (NYU is not cheap), and if I were them, I would want to pay attention and get my money’s worth out of me.

I had thought about banning laptops as some colleagues had started doing, and letting the students take notes the old-fashioned way – with paper and pencil, but that seemed a bit contradictory when I am teaching Digital Marketing Strategy or Social Media and the Brand. So the Do Not Disturb button was my compromise with myself.

According to Gloria Mark, technology distracts us every 47 seconds.

Let that sink in.

Forty-seven seconds.

My GenZ grad students are more easily distracted and more addicted to their devices than previous generations. But it’s not just GenZ that’s attention-deprived. It’s all of us.

Starbucks announced that its Pumpkin Spice Latte would be available on August 26, six days before Labor Day. They want us to be thinking about falling leaves, sweaters, and Thanksgiving while we’re in the middle of our end-of-summer barbecues.

It’s not just Starbucks. Back-to-school sales started as the last firework went off on the 4th of July, and I have no doubt CVS will have Christmas candy filling the shelves before Halloween is over.

I get it. As someone who spent a career in marketing and advertising, brands are always thinking ahead to the next quarter. But dragging us along when we’re still working on our tans does nothing to help us manage our distraction addiction.

And then there is the news. When exactly did everything become a breaking news alert?

Monday night, in a rare moment of me watching live television, Jeopardy was interrupted by breaking news. My first thought was, what ridiculousness will this be, and why are you interrupting my show? Turns out there was real breaking and very disturbing news of a shooting in Midtown Manhattan.

But that was an outlier. Every news outlet interrupts with their version of “breaking news,” whether it’s interrupting live television or sending an alert to your phone. Sometimes there is a real reason to take us out of the moment, as was the case Monday night, but most of the time it’s just an unnecessary distraction that someone is making money off of.

While it’s a stretch to think that as one person we can circumvent an entire industry that is built on distracting us so they get our attention, we do have agency in this. Turning on Do Not Disturb at the beginning of one of my classes doesn’t miraculously bring everyone into the moment and distraction-free, but that’s not the point.

The point is I try. I take a small step. For them and for me.

While the majority of my students get it, I have no doubt some ignore me, convincing themselves that I don’t notice the difference between the attention they give to checking an Instagram alert and taking notes. (I do. Reading the room is one of my superpowers.)

Managing technology-related distractions so we are 100% in the moment with where we are has become one of the challenges of our time. It gets in the way of our relationships, our work, our enjoyment, and our learning. It’s contributing to societal rudeness as people walk down the street, immersed in their cellphones as though it was their best friend.

We can’t make the phones go away, nor the industry that is making money by distracting us, but we can learn to manage it in the same way we manage our diets.

If we want to stay healthy, we’re conscious of what we eat and when we eat it. We read labels. We stay away from processed food. We understand that everything in moderation is ultimately what keeps us healthy.

I love chocolate, and nothing is going to make me stop eating it. But I don’t eat it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and never right before I go to bed. I exercise control.

The most successful diets include changing habits, and the best way to change a habit is to start small. So turn on Do Not Disturb for an hour, read a book and see what happens. It’s a small step, but it is a start.

(This was originally published on Does This Make Sense? on Substack. Subscribe for free!?

The post The Distraction Addiction And What To Do About It (hint: it’s not eating more chocolate!) appeared first on joanne tombrakos.

One of the negotiating tips I received in my neophyte days of selling was to always underpromise and overdeliver. I was told it was a much easier way to keep a client happy. Overpromising was a surefire way to get yourself in trouble – especially when it came to advertising sales where the actual delivery on a given campaign could only be estimated, rarely guaranteed. Underpromising ultimately built trust while the opposite was a quick slide into distrust and in the business world trust is everything.

I made it a habit early on to always say what I was going to do and then do it. I continue to strive to make promises I can keep. Being someone people know they can trust has opened a lot of doors for me which is why I’ve never understood why people overpromise or for that matter make promises they know they won’t keep. There is a cost to that because the fact is that ultimately the truth rears its head. You get caught and the door that was once open shuts.

If I promise you that by simply buying my book you will immediately close the next pitch you make I would be overpromising. I might get lucky and the stars might align and you just might sign that next client, but the odds are reading my book was not a direct line to you closing that business.

But if I promise you that by reading my book, you will see how you can use my framework to craft more engaging and persuasive pitches that is a promise that delivers.

Brands make promises all the time. This toothpaste will give you whiter teeth. This cream will make all your wrinkles disappear. But if they overpromise and underdeliver they are pretty much guaranteed to lose the next sale. At the very least they will get a bad Amazon review and lose future sales. Promises should speak to our needs but they only satisfy the need if and when they deliver.

Politicians overpromise all the time. They tell us they will bring down the price of eggs on Day One (note: I paid $5.49 for a half dozen eggs in Whole Foods this week). They tell us they will unilaterally freeze rents when that is something that is much more complicated than it sounds to implement.

In today’s noisy world, the overpromises seem to get bigger all the time. People use it as a way to break through the noise and be heard in a world where everyone is talking at once. They promise as big as possible without giving much thought to how that promise will be fulfilled. Unlike a business deal where deliverables are written into a contract, it seems not enough people are asking how that promise will be realized or even seem to care when it comes to politics.

The thing is when a promise isn’t made good there is a cost. Eventually, you get caught – whether you are selling a product or a politician selling an idea. People get angry. They remember what you promised. They lose trust at a time when according to Edelman’s Trust Barometer trust is at an all-time low. Trust is also something desperately needed to heal society in these polarizing times.

The crazy thing is the solution is really simple. If you are going to promise what you are going to do, make sure you know how you can do it. The cost is too great not to.

This article was originally published on Does This Make Sense? on Substack. Subscribe for free!

The post The Cost Of Overpromising And Underdelivering appeared first on joanne tombrakos.

Before Google when people wanted to search for businesses, there was this thing called the Yellow Pages. For those reading who don’t remember, it was a big thick book that along with providing listings of all the businesses in your geographic location could substitute as a doorstop.

Their marketing slogan which was launched in 1962 and lasted until the late 1990s was “Let your fingers do the walking.” It was clever, catchy, and in six simple words conveyed the essence of their story. It was also a great place to advertise. In much the way a search on Google signals intent to buy so did letting those fingers do the walking. In other words, your chances of reaching a consumer close to purchase were higher than a 30-second commercial on broadcast television.

What the slogan did not imply was to let those fingers do the thinking. It was a good tool – but a tool nonetheless, one that required using our cognitive skills.

I often tell my students that if they want to stand out from the crowd they need to take a moment to pause and think because most people don’t. And now we stand on the precipice of a new world order in which LLMs (Large Language Models) like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity want to do the thinking for us.

The powers behind all this technology want us to believe it’s all good but it’s not. The owners of the platforms are lobbying to prevent any legislation that puts boundaries or liability around what they can and can’t do regarding AI and have managed to get Congress to give them a ten-year waiver in the “big, beautiful bill” sitting in Congress. What that will look like after the Senate gets through with it is anyone’s guess. What is not as big a guess is what these LLMs will do to our brains.

I really did not need a study to tell me that using LLMs like ChatGPT can affect our cognitive ability. I have always been an observer of human behavior plus I read a lot. And I think. But I am always happy when data supports what I already knew – that technology is not just disrupting our social skills (read: Jonathan Haidt), it is also affecting our cognitive ones.

This week MIT released a study that did just that, Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task.

There is a lot of technical stuff in the paper that researchers and data analysts salivate over. If that is your thing – do read. If it’s not the main thrust of what they found is that the more we let LLMs think for us, the less we have the ability to think for ourselves. Like any skill that is not practiced and honed, it gets rusty from non-use.

I use Claude a lot. Claude helps me out of creative slumps and often offers good insight into a project I am working on. But not always. Sometimes Claude is wrong.

I encourage my students to hone their AI skills. These LLMs should act as their assistant so they do better work, get outside feedback, research, and think more deeply and critically. The fact is if AI can do the job all by itself, they won’t have one.

I use Perplexity as well. I like it better than Google for search. But it too makes mistakes. When I was searching to get information as to exactly when the Yellow Pages went from print to online everything it initially gave me referred to the UK version which has now become yell.com with the US version and what is now the yellowpages.com. I knew enough to keep asking questions so I could get the facts I needed – but what about the person who doesn’t have the same frame of reference? Do they accept what they got as fact?

Tools have always helped us to get the information we need whether it was the Yellow Pages, a research library, or a Google search. But they are tools. Not substitutes for humanity.

Perhaps this moment calls for us all to pause and think about how we want to use this technology – while we all still have the ability to think for ourselves.

This article was originally published on Does This Make Sense? on Substack. Subscribe for free.

The post Thinking – the Underrated Skill AI Is Trying To Make Obsolete appeared first on joanne tombrakos.

For many years I had the habit of being so anxious to see how things were going to end in whatever novel I was reading that I would skip to the last pages to find out. I’d like to say it got in the way of my enjoyment of the story line but it didn’t. At that point in my life my need to know ruled. I was young and impatient, anxious to know how the story ended.

I was in a rush.

Instead of savoring each line that was written I wanted to know what would happen in the next chapter before it was read. I needed to know how it would all turn out so I could relax and enjoy the story – at least that is what I thought at the time. I wanted the happy ending despite knowing even then that not all stories have happy endings.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately.

We are living in such uncertain times with a world leader (and I use the term leader loosely) who thrives on people’s discomfort with uncertainty, throwing a daily dose of whatever insanity he wants to pepper the world with. Most days it feels like I am at the penny arcade on the boardwalk, with a mallet in my hand, playing a game of Whac-a-Mole. Just when I think I’ve hit my quota another ugly head pops up and there is some other craziness that emerges.

I am no longer young or in a rush for time to pass too quickly yet these days there is a part of me that is like the young girl who skipped to the last few pages so she could read in the comfort of knowing how the story ends. It would be easier to manage all this insanity if there was a certainty that this was like a Mission Impossible movie. In the end you know the good guys and gals win even though you cringe through every scene where there is a question mark that maybe you’re wrong. You rest in the safety of that knowing. Except real life is not like that.

There is no flipping to the last pages of a book where the ending is already written. There is no speed reading to get through the next two years and get this over with. (Yes I wrote two years because I remain hopeful that the power in Congress will shift at the midterms.) Instead there is the daily work of navigating these waters of uncertainty. And yes it is work.

Each day we are all writing a new entry to this larger story just as we are writing the story of our own lives. That might be calling your representative, speaking up at a town hall, voting in everything from a primary to a general election or simply committing a random act of kindness. Open the door for a stranger. Look up from your phone and acknowledge the world around you. Note: action – no matter how small – is more gratifying than sharing or commenting on a post on social media.

For me I find managing the never ending distraction of the daily game of Whac-a-Mole to be the most challenging. As a friend pointed out to me the other day over coffee, we are all living our lives and no matter how positive they may be on any given day there is always this dark cloud hanging in the distance, distracting us from our individual purposes.

The ending of all this may not be certain, but one thing I am sure of is that we all have a hand in writing it.

This article was originally published on Does This Make Sense? on Substack. Subscribe for free.

The post When There Is No Skipping To The End: Learning To Live In The Middle Of The Story appeared first on joanne tombrakos.

I’ve lost track of the number of pitches I have sat through in the last few weeks. It’s that time of year. Finals. And when you teach marketing and real-world classes every final is a pitch.

I’ve heard new business ideas pitched. I’ve heard new product lines for existing businesses pitched. I’ve heard campaign pitches for brands. I’ve heard solutions to the problems Porsche and Converse gave to my Real-World Strategic Partnership students to solve. I’ve heard convincing pitches. I’ve heard some that left me convinced and some that left me wondering in a good way. I’ve heard engaging pitches and some that I know in the real-world the client would have gotten up and left the room after ten minutes.

The one commonality I found through them all and the comment I found myself repeating when giving feedback is the tendency there is to focus on the whats and not the whys.

We like the whats – all those details we spent hours painstakingly going over and over and over again to make sure our idea has validity. All those details from the insights, the clarification of what this thing is you’re pitching and how it works to what it’s going to cost.

The whats are necessary. They have convinced us that whatever it is we are pitching is worthy of being heard, that we have thought this thing through. They bring us comfort because the whats are solid and concrete so we cling to them as though we’re hanging from the edge a cliff to save ourselves from falling into the unknown.

But the whats are not what convinces your audience. The whys do.

When you’re in the weeds of preparing a pitch it’s easy to forget that a pitch is about persuasion, that a pitch is about getting someone else to see what you believe to be a really great idea.

Persuasion does not happen in a list of bullet points unless you’re explaining why those points are important and why what you’re pitching has value to your audience. An impressive insight properly cited that does not explain the reason it’s there becomes meaningless without explaining why it matters. Without the whys, the whats mean nothing and without the whys your pitch is more likely to fail.

Why your idea matters infers interpretation. It requires you to think and create your story. It is not black and white, but grey. It requires stepping back and being self-critical. When done right the why taps into the audience’s emotions. And in the end every successful pitch is about the emotion of a story.

Every writer worth their words has ‘show me, don’t tell me’ drilled into their brain. It is the core of good story and has been since the beginning of time. Which is exactly what a good business pitch is. A good story. Unfortunately too many people forget that when they’re pitching. They get too caught up in the details.

If you think people are going to figure out the whys behind your whats all by themselves, they’re not. In fact your pitch is doomed to fail.

The audience does not want to figure it out themselves. They want it simplified. They want you to show them why. They want to be told the story of the whats that explain why it’s important that they listen.

So when preparing your next pitch it’s smart business to start by asking yourself: Why does this matter? What is the story I am telling? When you can do that your chances of delivering a solid pitch skyrocket.

Ps. I wrote a whole book on how to pitch using story. One of my students recently told me it was the “secret sauce.” Maybe it will be for you too.

This article was originally published on Does This Make Sense? on Substack. Subscribe for free.

The post Where Too Many Pitches Fail appeared first on joanne tombrakos.

I get questions every day from current and former students about finding a job. Lately, I’ve seen an increased frustration whether they’ve just graduated or are about to graduate. They are not alone. 

These are uncertain times. While I’ve lived long enough to know that there is little certainty in life, there’s no doubt I could make the case that what we are experiencing today is extraordinary uncertainty. Case in point is the job market.

According to LinkedIn’s Workforce Confidence study, confidence to get or keep a job for Americans is at its lowest since the pandemic and more than half have been actively looking for over a year. I am not one to make predictions, but given what we’ve seen in the early days of the new administration combined with companies using AI to increase efficiencies (code for cutting jobs) that confidence level is not going to go up any time soon. According to a 2024 Microsoft survey 53% of those surveyed were concerned that AI could replace their jobs.

All is not lost. I’ve had experience living through times of increased uncertainty. I entered the job market in a recession. I’ve lived through several since, the dot-com crash, the 2008 mortgage crisis, and NYC during 9/11. I worked at CBS when the company merged with Westinghouse and Time Warner during the AOL debacle. I lost my job twice. I know it’s not easy, but I also know it is not impossible to navigate the turbulent waters and not just survive, but thrive.

The question becomes how to stay focused on the goal – in this case, getting a job when there is so much turmoil. Hard skills are important but it’s putting your soft skills into action that sets you apart. Here’s what has worked for me.

This is one I have struggled with myself but acceptance is necessary in order to move forward. It’s easy to wallow in the challenges and obstacles. It’s harder to accept that this is what we are dealing with, like it or not, and planning a strategy from there. So if a job is what you’re after accept that it’s not going to be easy. It never is. It never has been. Follow that with the acknowledgment that even though it will not be easy, you will eventually get a job, and allow yourself to believe that.

After my first big deal when I started selling radio ads, my then boss congratulated me. Not used to that kind of acknowledgment I downplayed it and told him I was just lucky. In that moment it was what I truly believed. He was not much older than me but offered some wisdom that has stuck ever since. He told me that he did not believe in luck. He believed if you made a habit of doing the right things you would be in the right place at the right time – hence what I was calling luck.

I have learned over the years the key to that philosophy is to stay disciplined, do what needs to be done every day, manage the stress so it does not turn into impatience, breathe, and then let it go. It may not be tomorrow or next week or even next month but eventually what you want will arrive.

Essentially, when you are looking for a job you are selling yourself and like all selling it is a numbers game. Yes, you want qualified leads but in times of uncertainty, this is no time to get too picky. It’s one thing to envision your dream job, but for now, you may have to settle for the on-the-way to your dream job job.

Anyone who thinks uploading their resume to a portal via LinkedIn is going to get them a job is sadly mistaken. In the year 2025, corporate HR could not make it much harder to get face-to-face in front of a hiring manager – which at the end of the day is where the decision will be made.

Instead, the sorting process starts with an algorithm that may or may not sift out the best candidates from the virtual pile. They’re looking for keywords, not key people. (Note: algorithms are helpful but they’re not perfect. We’re already learning that GenAI can help us, but just like humans it’s far from infallible.)

This is not to say you don’t need to apply for open positions. Of course, you do, but if all you’re doing is applying and waiting, the odds are you will continue to apply and wait and wait and wait.

Breaking through the barriers to entry is probably the most challenging in today’s environment where we can barely get past the ChatBot who answers the phone to get to a human. When I started out you could literally sit in the lobby of an office and wait, hoping someone would break down and give you twenty minutes to pitch yourself. Those days are gone. Today you need a security check to get into an elevator.

But again, this is not impossible. It just means you have to think more creatively. Find the email for the hiring manager. Follow the company on LinkedIn. See what mutual connections you have. Go crazy and keep the post office in business and send a letter on nice stationery that stands out from junk mail. Look for ways to get your resume to the top of the virtual pile and risk being annoying. Instead look at it as being persistent.

I have never once gotten a job because of my resume. Not once. And I’ve had some pretty great jobs. But I have gotten jobs because of the networks I’ve built over time – that if nothing else got me in the door.

If you’re new to the workforce you’re just building your network. So start with whatever your University offers. Join organizations in your field. Whenever possible attend events in-person. No matter how attached we are to our phones, nothing will ever replace the importance and effectiveness of connecting with someone in the real-world.

Check your screen time. If you are spending more time scrolling TikTok and Instagram than you are on LinkedIn or having a real-life conversation with someone who might help you, it’s no wonder you’re not making progress in your job hunt. (Note: a connection on LinkedIn is not necessarily a relationship. Connecting with someone and having absolutely no interaction for the next few years does not equate to someone who is going to help you get a job or give you a reference.)

If you cannot tell us who you are, what you do, and why this makes you a viable candidate in one sentence we are not going to want to know anything more. That one sentence will not only help you convince a hiring manager, it will also help you develop your pitch and convince yourself.

In my book, Crafting Your Pitch, A Storytelling Framework, I stress that until you convince yourself you have a great idea you won’t convince anyone else. The same holds true for a job. If you are going into an interview not one thousand percent convinced you are the prime candidate, you won’t convince anyone else.

I continue to be shocked at how many people do not send a thank-you note after a meeting or after I have helped them with something. I am shocked at how many times I have let someone know about an open position and they waited a week to apply. Be first. Don’t wait. The old sales wisdom that if you snooze, you lose still holds a lot of weight.

At the end of the day getting a job is about one human connecting with another human and inviting them to join the team. So be human. In other words, don’t sound like the GenAI version of the email you wrote to introduce yourself or to recap the meeting you just had. Sound like you have given this some thought. If you can’t come up with three good reasons to remind them why they should hire you, maybe they shouldn’t.

This article was originally published on Does This Make Sense? on Substack. Subscribe for free and never miss a post!

The post How to Get a Job in an Age of Uncertainty appeared first on joanne tombrakos.

This week I was discussing the attributes that apply to the personality profile of a design thinker in one of my NYU classes. When I got to optimistic I found myself taking a long pause. Here I was standing in front of a room of the best and the brightest of our future leaders. I want them to share the optimistic outlook on life I have always prided myself on having. Yet these past weeks of the new presidency, each day I find myself struggling with optimism, waking up wondering what fresh new hell the Trump administration will bestow upon the world before I have had a sip of my morning coffee.

I find myself angry at the people who voted him in, angry at those who voted for a third-party candidate who had no chance of winning, and angry at those who chose to throw away their vote because they’re under the illusion their vote doesn’t count. I’m angry at the Republicans who are clicking their heels and lining up in formation behind every ludicrous executive order that comes out of the White House and angry at the Democrats for not fighting back hard enough.

Anger is not a familiar emotion for me. That’s not to say I’ve never been angry. Of course, I have. But my anger has been short-lived and fleeting. A moment of anger at the person not moving fast enough up the subway stairs because they’re in the middle of a game of Candy Crush on their phones. An angry tirade with the AI chatbot that greets me before I get to a human to make a doctor’s appointment. It’s mild anger and it vanishes quickly. Anger has never been something I have had to manage. Until now.

I know I am not alone. I know I have choices. I can stick my head in the sand and pretend there is nothing I can do to stop the dismantling of democracy. I can let my anger exhaust me – which is the goal of the current administration. Or I can dig into my toolbox, be diligent with my self-care, and stay strong so I can make a difference every day, no matter how small. It’s my choice.

I’ve been in high-stress situations before where the chaos and toxicity suck all the energy out of you and leave you feeling depleted of energy. Each time I figured out what to do and made it to the other side – still standing. Here I am again. Toolbox out. A time-tested list of what has worked in the past and continues to work for me as long as I stay disciplined and committed.

The first time I experienced the kind of stress that put my job on the line was when I was living in Washington, DC. I started getting up at 5AM and heading to the gym before the office. It wasn’t always easy, especially in the dead of winter when it’s dark and cold outside, but as soon as I started working out the better equipped I was for the day. The stronger my body, the stronger I felt.

Sitting quietly and doing nothing more than focusing on my breath is perhaps one of the hardest things I have ever had to learn. And I am still not all that great at it. I am not the kind of person who can sit for an hour and not open her mouth to speak. But I can sit for ten minutes with my Calm app. I can take ten minutes to tap and open up my energy centers. I can focus on breathing fully as opposed to holding my breath and wondering what insane executive order will be signed next with the flourish of a giant Sharpie.

That can look like a lot of different things for different people. For me, it is my writing. The second time I experienced the kind of job stress that threatens to tear your insides apart I joined a writing group. It’s where my novel, The Secrets They Kept was born. Today it is as simple as my Morning Pages or writing this Substack. For others, it can be music, art, or cooking. As long as it balances the outside forces you can’t control it helps you to focus on something you can control.

Whether it’s the family you are born into or the one you’ve chosen, people make the difference. And yes, I still believe there are more good people out there than the media wants us to think. At a time when too many have decided their relationship with their mobile device is the most important one, being in the company of a living, breathing human who you can laugh, cry or just sit with is paramount.

I don’t particularly care what it says about me that it’s easier to get the news highlights of the day from Stephen Colbert or Jimmy Kimmel than CNN but it does. They make me laugh and laughter breaks up the negative energy. There is science behind it. As awful as some of this stuff is to stomach, keeping a sense of humor is a better alternative than not having one.

I am one of those people that likes to make lists. No matter how small the task, I get great pleasure from crossing off one that is completed. Make your list so you are heard. It can be as simple as calling your elected representatives at 202-224-3121 every single day and demanding they do something to stop the madness. If you post on social media, vet it and source it first so you are not contributing to the dearth of disinformation and misinformation. Get involved in local elections. Perhaps the easiest way to be heard right now is to extend kindness wherever you are. It’s simple, it doesn’t cost a penny and it is a step in the right direction.

This article was originally published on Does This Make Sense? on Substack. Subscribe for free.

The post When Optimism is a Struggle: 7 Tools to Balance Anger with Action appeared first on joanne tombrakos.

Over the holidays, I got an email from a student who had taken my Social Media and the Brand course in the Fall. Because social media intersects every aspect of our lives as marketers and individuals and the norms change on a daily basis, it’s a class that lends itself to vibrant discussion.

This student was a particularly active participant, always willing to challenge me and my perspective, which I welcome and encourage from my students. As long as an argument can be backed up by reason and fact, I am willing to listen. More than once, a student has changed my viewpoint—or at least opened me up to seeing things through a different lens.

The subject of his note started with him telling me he often disagreed with how I viewed X(Twitter). That did not surprise me. I knew that already from our discussions. He was not alone. I have many students who are fans of both the platform and Musk, and I am not. As someone who was an early Twitter adopter and once considered it my favorite social network, my opinion of both has been on a steady decline since the day Musk bought it.

But what did surprise me was that he was writing to tell me he had been wrong. It was the H-1B visa debate between Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy and Trump supporters that consumed X for a few days in December that did it for him. He witnessed in real-time what could happen as a result of the lack of content moderation and accountability. In this case, it had resulted in targeted hate and racism towards groups of what he considered honest and hardworking individuals. It affected him personally.

It takes a lot for someone not only to admit they were in his words “wrong” but to take the time to let the other person know and I commended him for it. As I wrote back to him, the truth is he was not “wrong.” He had information – he just hadn’t had enough information until that point that allowed him to see another side. He had been looking at the topic through a singular lens and had been holding on to that view. While my job is to open his eyes to the idea there is more than one way to look at something, I had not yet succeeded. Like any information source these days I too compete with an individual’s social media feed.

That may sound absurd that at a time when we all have access to more information every minute of every day than we ever did before that we seem to have less perspective. But that is a direct result of the bubbles we create in our choices of who to follow on our favorite social media platforms combined with algorithms designed by billionaire-led companies whose primary goal is to make money, not the accurate spread of information.

Often it is not until we witness something that personally affects us or we have experienced it ourselves that the light goes on.

There are many people at this very moment who are “surprised” at what the newly elected president of the United States is doing in his first week of office. They are surprised he wants to buy Greenland and that he is stopping the information flow to US citizens from the CDC. They are shocked that the US Constitution has been replaced on the official White House website with a list of Executive Orders.

The thing is they didn’t seek information before they voted. They just took in whatever showed up in their feeds whether it was from a reputable source or someone pretending to be one. They either didn’t take the time to read Project 2025 or believed the then-candidate when he disavowed knowing anything about it. They chose to live in the comfort of their insular social media bubbles, seeing only what Zuckerberg’s Meta platforms, X, or TikTok served up to them.

I don’t anticipate that anything is going to change anytime soon. Meta has decided content moderation causes too much money, yet there are already reports that they’re shadow banning accounts including @heyjanehealth and @plancpills which are sources of women’s reproductive health information. Note to @Zuck – shadow banning is a form of content moderation that is arguably censorship. Platforms use it to block or partially block a user’s content. In this case, it could be argued Meta is censoring accounts that offer women reproductive health information.

The thing is – eventually the truth does rise to the surface. It may be in six months when the realization that trying to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America or threatening to invade Canada will not bring down the price of eggs or overall grocery bills. It may be next week or next year. But it will happen. Seeking information from more than one source and vetting that source is a step in the right direction however for many it may not be until as happened to my student, it hits home personally.

This article was originally posted on Does that make sense? on Substack. Subscribe here for free.

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When my cousin came to see my new apartment this Fall I wanted her opinion on how I had arranged things in my new space. Our shared Greek roots combined with both being raised in New York assured me I would get an honest opinion which is what I wanted. Or so I thought.

When she told me in no uncertain terms she did not like the pillows on my couch, I was taken aback. Those pillows had been on my sofa for years, in three different apartments. I was attached to those pillows. And not just because I had spent a ridiculous amount of money on them in Domain, a now-defunct store I would wander through when I worked on 19th Street in the Flatiron district. Those pillows were not just decorative – they held memories. Along with too many to count friends and family members, they had witnessed laughter, tears, and occasional arguments on my sofa. Confidences and stories were shared in their presence.

My immediate reaction was to get protective of my pillows, to do all the things that I tell my students not to do when receiving what I like to call “tough love.” I wanted to defend that my pillows were still in good shape, pretty but never practical when it came to comfort. I wanted to hold on to them and not let go. Instead, I took a breath, I asked why and I listened.

As it turned out, my cousin had never liked the pillows. From her viewpoint, they were “too modern” for my taste.

My initial reaction was to forget about what she thought. This was my apartment. I could do what I wanted but the more I thought about it and really listened the more I realized she was right. At some point over the last five years, my tastes had shifted to my version of mid-century modern. Those pillows did not match that shift. In fact, when I looked around the rest of my living room they were the last vestiges of what my tastes had been.

After she left I started thinking about how different my living area would look with new pillows. I could bring in another color. New pillows could shift the energy of the space and make my existing furniture look fresh and new.

A couple of weeks and a trip to Home Goods later, those pillows were headed for the donation box. Their replacements were not only much more comfortable but cost far less than the originals.

I let go of something I had been holding on to long past its expiration date.

As 2024 comes to a close I am thinking a lot about those pillows. What else do I want to let go of as I step into 2025? What needs to be left behind? What changes can I make not just in my physical surroundings but in everything I do and how I do it that can usher in a new fresh energy in much the way my bargain olive green velvet pillows have brought to my living space?

I am not sure exactly what that will entail as this very tumultuous year comes to an end but I know it will start with small incremental steps towards more focus, more joy, more creativity, more daily acts of kindness, more conversation, and more listening – even when I am not sure I will like what I hear. Letting go of what was is never easy – until you do it and wonder what took you so long.

Wishing those who have taken the time to read this a joyous and healthy new year – one in which you let go of what is no longer serving you to make room for what will.

This article was originally published on Does This Make Sense on Substack. You can subscribe for free here.

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As someone who has spent her career in media and marketing and now as an educator, the homework has never stopped. Whether it’s researching a new client or doing a deep dive into the next trend on TikTok, homework is and has always been part of the day job. This is why it never ceases to amaze me when I get something like this in my inMail on LinkedIn.

“Hey Joanne, this might sound a bit out of the blue, but have you ever thought of writing a book? I know someone who turns great stories into bestsellers. Would you be open to an intro? Let me know or you can grab a time for a quick call here….”

Full stop. 

Yes. Not only have I thought about it, but I have also written not one but four books. It’s not like that information is hidden somewhere in the deep dark recesses of the internet. It’s right there on my LinkedIn page.

I’d like to tell you that it is an isolated incident but it’s not. I get it firsthand on LinkedIn and through my website all the time. Attempts to connect that show not one iota of homework completed. Sometimes I will take a few minutes to make it a teachable moment. Other times I just sigh, hit delete, and move on.

The thing is it’s not that hard to do your homework anymore. All you need is a good internet connection. Whether you go what I will say is soon to be old school Google searching or use an LLM like Chat GPTor Perplexity,  homework is a whole lot easier than in the dark ages of my youth when you had to go to a library and scour old newspaper articles for information.

Just for fun, I asked Perplexity if they could give me any information on books Joanne Tombrakos has written.  Here’s what I got:

“According to the information available, Joanne Tombrakos has published at least four books to date. Her works span both fiction and non-fiction genres, with a focus on personal development, marketing, and storytelling.

Tombrakos’ background in digital marketing, personal branding, and corporate experience seems to have influenced her non-fiction works, which appear to be geared towards helping others improve their professional skills and personal productivity.”

See. It wasn’t that hard. In fact, it appears that AI understands me and my books more than that human trying to convince me that I should think about writing one.

This week one of my students asked me if I thought that generative AI was going to make us stupid. After a long pause, I told her it was a philosophical question that would take more time than we had that day to discuss – not to mention a cocktail. But as I have been thinking about it maybe it is not stupid as much as making us lazy and far too reliant on what is served up to us in a search query than in our own critical thinking skills.

Individuals like the one who wants me to think about writing a book take the easy way out. They do a keyword search that they assume is infallible and giving them what they need and then press send. It’s a modern day version of an old school tactic we used to call spray and pray which relies on sheer numbers instead of the quality of leads contacted.

It’s not just in business. We had an election this month in which many people based their decisions on a sound bite that was served up to them in their social media feed without doing any homework to see how true or untrue that might be. Many are already surprised as they learn of what the President-elect is planning on doing claiming that is not what they voted for. Homework. Doing their homework would have avoided that.

Even when you do your homework you have to approach it with a healthy dose of skepticism as not everything that’s served to us is correct. Misinformation and disinformation run rampant. Even Netflix’s algorithms make mistakes.  I am not sure what button I accidentally pushed that would make them think that I have any interest in the Paul vs Tyson fight but that did not stop the email from suggesting I might like it –  proving once again that algorithms alone are not enough to do the job.

When you take the time to do your homework, you get more than one perspective. You get to think, hone your critical thinking skills and you get to decide what you like and your viewpoint instead of letting someone else decide for you.  The result will not only get you more qualified leads, it will make you more qualified for whatever you want to do – personally and professionally.

This was originally published on Does This Make Sense ? on Substack. Subscribe for free here.

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