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In reading Joe Dolson’s recent piece on the intersection of AI and accessibility, I absolutely appreciated the skepticism that he has for AI in general as well as for the ways that many have been using it. In fact, I’m very skeptical of AI myself, despite my role at Microsoft as an accessibility innovation strategist who helps run the AI for Accessibility grant program. As with any tool, AI can be used in very constructive, inclusive, and accessible ways; and it can also be used in destructive, exclusive, and harmful ones. And there are a ton of uses somewhere in the mediocre middle as well.

I’d like you to consider this a “yes… and” piece to complement Joe’s post. I’m not trying to refute any of what he’s saying but rather provide some visibility to projects and opportunities where AI can make meaningful differences for people with disabilities. To be clear, I’m not saying that there aren’t real risks or pressing issues with AI that need to be addressed—there are, and we’ve needed to address them, like, yesterday—but I want to take a little time to talk about what’s possible in hopes that we’ll get there one day.

Alternative text

Joe’s piece spends a lot of time talking about computer-vision models generating alternative text. He highlights a ton of valid issues with the current state of things. And while computer-vision models continue to improve in the quality and richness of detail in their descriptions, their results aren’t great. As he rightly points out, the current state of image analysis is pretty poor—especially for certain image types—in large part because current AI systems examine images in isolation rather than within the contexts that they’re in (which is a consequence of having separate “foundation” models for text analysis and image analysis). Today’s models aren’t trained to distinguish between images that are contextually relevant (that should probably have descriptions) and those that are purely decorative (which might not need a description) either. Still, I still think there’s potential in this space.

As Joe mentions, human-in-the-loop authoring of alt text should absolutely be a thing. And if AI can pop in to offer a starting point for alt text—even if that starting point might be a prompt saying What is this BS? That’s not right at all… Let me try to offer a starting point—I think that’s a win.

Taking things a step further, if we can specifically train a model to analyze image usage in context, it could help us more quickly identify which images are likely to be decorative and which ones likely require a description. That will help reinforce which contexts call for image descriptions and it’ll improve authors’ efficiency toward making their pages more accessible.

While complex images—like graphs and charts—are challenging to describe in any sort of succinct way (even for humans), the image example shared in the GPT4 announcement points to an interesting opportunity as well. Let’s suppose that you came across a chart whose description was simply the title of the chart and the kind of visualization it was, such as: Pie chart comparing smartphone usage to feature phone usage among US households making under $30,000 a year. (That would be a pretty awful alt text for a chart since that would tend to leave many questions about the data unanswered, but then again, let’s suppose that that was the description that was in place.) If your browser knew that that image was a pie chart (because an onboard model concluded this), imagine a world where users could ask questions like these about the graphic:

• Do more people use smartphones or feature phones?
• How many more?
• Is there a group of people that don’t fall into either of these buckets?
• How many is that?

Setting aside the realities of large language model (LLM) hallucinations—where a model just makes up plausible-sounding “facts”—for a moment, the opportunity to learn more about images and data in this way could be revolutionary for blind and low-vision folks as well as for people with various forms of color blindness, cognitive disabilities, and so on. It could also be useful in educational contexts to help people who can see these charts, as is, to understand the data in the charts.

Taking things a step further: What if you could ask your browser to simplify a complex chart? What if you could ask it to isolate a single line on a line graph? What if you could ask your browser to transpose the colors of the different lines to work better for form of color blindness you have? What if you could ask it to swap colors for patterns? Given these tools’ chat-based interfaces and our existing ability to manipulate images in today’s AI tools, that seems like a possibility.

Now imagine a purpose-built model that could extract the information from that chart and convert it to another format. For example, perhaps it could turn that pie chart (or better yet, a series of pie charts) into more accessible (and useful) formats, like spreadsheets. That would be amazing!

Matching algorithms

Safiya Umoja Noble absolutely hit the nail on the head when she titled her book Algorithms of Oppression. While her book was focused on the ways that search engines reinforce racism, I think that it’s equally true that all computer models have the potential to amplify conflict, bias, and intolerance. Whether it’s Twitter always showing you the latest tweet from a bored billionaire, YouTube sending us into a Q-hole, or Instagram warping our ideas of what natural bodies look like, we know that poorly authored and maintained algorithms are incredibly harmful. A lot of this stems from a lack of diversity among the people who shape and build them. When these platforms are built with inclusively baked in, however, there’s real potential for algorithm development to help people with disabilities.

Take Mentra, for example. They are an employment network for neurodivergent people. They use an algorithm to match job seekers with potential employers based on over 75 data points. On the job-seeker side of things, it considers each candidate’s strengths, their necessary and preferred workplace accommodations, environmental sensitivities, and so on. On the employer side, it considers each work environment, communication factors related to each job, and the like. As a company run by neurodivergent folks, Mentra made the decision to flip the script when it came to typical employment sites. They use their algorithm to propose available candidates to companies, who can then connect with job seekers that they are interested in; reducing the emotional and physical labor on the job-seeker side of things.

When more people with disabilities are involved in the creation of algorithms, that can reduce the chances that these algorithms will inflict harm on their communities. That’s why diverse teams are so important.

Imagine that a social media company’s recommendation engine was tuned to analyze who you’re following and if it was tuned to prioritize follow recommendations for people who talked about similar things but who were different in some key ways from your existing sphere of influence. For example, if you were to follow a bunch of nondisabled white male academics who talk about AI, it could suggest that you follow academics who are disabled or aren’t white or aren’t male who also talk about AI. If you took its recommendations, perhaps you’d get a more holistic and nuanced understanding of what’s happening in the AI field. These same systems should also use their understanding of biases about particular communities—including, for instance, the disability community—to make sure that they aren’t recommending any of their users follow accounts that perpetuate biases against (or, worse, spewing hate toward) those groups.

Other ways that AI can helps people with disabilities

If I weren’t trying to put this together between other tasks, I’m sure that I could go on and on, providing all kinds of examples of how AI could be used to help people with disabilities, but I’m going to make this last section into a bit of a lightning round. In no particular order:

• Voice preservation. You may have seen the VALL-E paper or Apple’s Global Accessibility Awareness Day announcement or you may be familiar with the voice-preservation offerings from Microsoft, Acapela, or others. It’s possible to train an AI model to replicate your voice, which can be a tremendous boon for people who have ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) or motor-neuron disease or other medical conditions that can lead to an inability to talk. This is, of course, the same tech that can also be used to create audio deepfakes, so it’s something that we need to approach responsibly, but the tech has truly transformative potential.
• Voice recognition. Researchers like those in the Speech Accessibility Project are paying people with disabilities for their help in collecting recordings of people with atypical speech. As I type, they are actively recruiting people with Parkinson’s and related conditions, and they have plans to expand this to other conditions as the project progresses. This research will result in more inclusive data sets that will let more people with disabilities use voice assistants, dictation software, and voice-response services as well as control their computers and other devices more easily, using only their voice.
• Text transformation. The current generation of LLMs is quite capable of adjusting existing text content without injecting hallucinations. This is hugely empowering for people with cognitive disabilities who may benefit from text summaries or simplified versions of text or even text that’s prepped for Bionic Reading.

The importance of diverse teams and data

We need to recognize that our differences matter. Our lived experiences are influenced by the intersections of the identities that we exist in. These lived experiences—with all their complexities (and joys and pain)—are valuable inputs to the software, services, and societies that we shape. Our differences need to be represented in the data that we use to train new models, and the folks who contribute that valuable information need to be compensated for sharing it with us. Inclusive data sets yield more robust models that foster more equitable outcomes.

Want a model that doesn’t demean or patronize or objectify people with disabilities? Make sure that you have content about disabilities that’s authored by people with a range of disabilities, and make sure that that’s well represented in the training data.

Want a model that doesn’t use ableist language? You may be able to use existing data sets to build a filter that can intercept and remediate ableist language before it reaches readers. That being said, when it comes to sensitivity reading, AI models won’t be replacing human copy editors anytime soon. 

Want a coding copilot that gives you accessible recommendations from the jump? Train it on code that you know to be accessible.

I have no doubt that AI can and will harm people… today, tomorrow, and well into the future. But I also believe that we can acknowledge that and, with an eye towards accessibility (and, more broadly, inclusion), make thoughtful, considerate, and intentional changes in our approaches to AI that will reduce harm over time as well. Today, tomorrow, and well into the future.

Many thanks to Kartik Sawhney for helping me with the development of this piece, Ashley Bischoff for her invaluable editorial assistance, and, of course, Joe Dolson for the prompt.

I offer a single bit of advice to friends and family when they become new parents: When you start to think that you’ve got everything figured out, everything will change. Just as you start to get the hang of feedings, diapers, and regular naps, it’s time for solid food, potty training, and overnight sleeping. When you figure those out, it’s time for preschool and rare naps. The cycle goes on and on.

The same applies for those of us working in design and development these days. Having worked on the web for almost three decades at this point, I’ve seen the regular wax and wane of ideas, techniques, and technologies. Each time that we as developers and designers get into a regular rhythm, some new idea or technology comes along to shake things up and remake our world.

How we got here

I built my first website in the mid-’90s. Design and development on the web back then was a free-for-all, with few established norms. For any layout aside from a single column, we used table elements, often with empty cells containing a single pixel spacer GIF to add empty space. We styled text with numerous font tags, nesting the tags every time we wanted to vary the font style. And we had only three or four typefaces to choose from: Arial, Courier, or Times New Roman. When Verdana and Georgia came out in 1996, we rejoiced because our options had nearly doubled. The only safe colors to choose from were the 216 “web safe” colors known to work across platforms. The few interactive elements (like contact forms, guest books, and counters) were mostly powered by CGI scripts (predominantly written in Perl at the time). Achieving any kind of unique look involved a pile of hacks all the way down. Interaction was often limited to specific pages in a site.

The birth of web standards

At the turn of the century, a new cycle started. Crufty code littered with table layouts and font tags waned, and a push for web standards waxed. Newer technologies like CSS got more widespread adoption by browsers makers, developers, and designers. This shift toward standards didn’t happen accidentally or overnight. It took active engagement between the W3C and browser vendors and heavy evangelism from folks like the Web Standards Project to build standards. A List Apart and books like Designing with Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman played key roles in teaching developers and designers why standards are important, how to implement them, and how to sell them to their organizations. And approaches like progressive enhancement introduced the idea that content should be available for all browsers—with additional enhancements available for more advanced browsers. Meanwhile, sites like the CSS Zen Garden showcased just how powerful and versatile CSS can be when combined with a solid semantic HTML structure.

Server-side languages like PHP, Java, and .NET overtook Perl as the predominant back-end processors, and the cgi-bin was tossed in the trash bin. With these better server-side tools came the first era of web applications, starting with content-management systems (particularly in the blogging space with tools like Blogger, Grey Matter, Movable Type, and WordPress). In the mid-2000s, AJAX opened doors for asynchronous interaction between the front end and back end. Suddenly, pages could update their content without needing to reload. A crop of JavaScript frameworks like Prototype, YUI, and jQuery arose to help developers build more reliable client-side interaction across browsers that had wildly varying levels of standards support. Techniques like image replacement let crafty designers and developers display fonts of their choosing. And technologies like Flash made it possible to add animations, games, and even more interactivity.

These new technologies, standards, and techniques reinvigorated the industry in many ways. Web design flourished as designers and developers explored more diverse styles and layouts. But we still relied on tons of hacks. Early CSS was a huge improvement over table-based layouts when it came to basic layout and text styling, but its limitations at the time meant that designers and developers still relied heavily on images for complex shapes (such as rounded or angled corners) and tiled backgrounds for the appearance of full-length columns (among other hacks). Complicated layouts required all manner of nested floats or absolute positioning (or both). Flash and image replacement for custom fonts was a great start toward varying the typefaces from the big five, but both hacks introduced accessibility and performance problems. And JavaScript libraries made it easy for anyone to add a dash of interaction to pages, although at the cost of doubling or even quadrupling the download size of simple websites.

The web as software platform

The symbiosis between the front end and back end continued to improve, and that led to the current era of modern web applications. Between expanded server-side programming languages (which kept growing to include Ruby, Python, Go, and others) and newer front-end tools like React, Vue, and Angular, we could build fully capable software on the web. Alongside these tools came others, including collaborative version control, build automation, and shared package libraries. What was once primarily an environment for linked documents became a realm of infinite possibilities.

At the same time, mobile devices became more capable, and they gave us internet access in our pockets. Mobile apps and responsive design opened up opportunities for new interactions anywhere and any time.

This combination of capable mobile devices and powerful development tools contributed to the waxing of social media and other centralized tools for people to connect and consume. As it became easier and more common to connect with others directly on Twitter, Facebook, and even Slack, the desire for hosted personal sites waned. Social media offered connections on a global scale, with both the good and bad that that entails.

Want a much more extensive history of how we got here, with some other takes on ways that we can improve? Jeremy Keith wrote “Of Time and the Web.” Or check out the “Web Design History Timeline” at the Web Design Museum. Neal Agarwal also has a fun tour through “Internet Artifacts.”

Where we are now

In the last couple of years, it’s felt like we’ve begun to reach another major inflection point. As social-media platforms fracture and wane, there’s been a growing interest in owning our own content again. There are many different ways to make a website, from the tried-and-true classic of hosting plain HTML files to static site generators to content management systems of all flavors. The fracturing of social media also comes with a cost: we lose crucial infrastructure for discovery and connection. Webmentions, RSS, ActivityPub, and other tools of the IndieWeb can help with this, but they’re still relatively underimplemented and hard to use for the less nerdy. We can build amazing personal websites and add to them regularly, but without discovery and connection, it can sometimes feel like we may as well be shouting into the void.

Browser support for CSS, JavaScript, and other standards like web components has accelerated, especially through efforts like Interop. New technologies gain support across the board in a fraction of the time that they used to. I often learn about a new feature and check its browser support only to find that its coverage is already above 80 percent. Nowadays, the barrier to using newer techniques often isn’t browser support but simply the limits of how quickly designers and developers can learn what’s available and how to adopt it.

Today, with a few commands and a couple of lines of code, we can prototype almost any idea. All the tools that we now have available make it easier than ever to start something new. But the upfront cost that these frameworks may save in initial delivery eventually comes due as upgrading and maintaining them becomes a part of our technical debt.

If we rely on third-party frameworks, adopting new standards can sometimes take longer since we may have to wait for those frameworks to adopt those standards. These frameworks—which used to let us adopt new techniques sooner—have now become hindrances instead. These same frameworks often come with performance costs too, forcing users to wait for scripts to load before they can read or interact with pages. And when scripts fail (whether through poor code, network issues, or other environmental factors), there’s often no alternative, leaving users with blank or broken pages.

Where do we go from here?

Today’s hacks help to shape tomorrow’s standards. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with embracing hacks—for now—to move the present forward. Problems only arise when we’re unwilling to admit that they’re hacks or we hesitate to replace them. So what can we do to create the future we want for the web?

Build for the long haul. Optimize for performance, for accessibility, and for the user. Weigh the costs of those developer-friendly tools. They may make your job a little easier today, but how do they affect everything else? What’s the cost to users? To future developers? To standards adoption? Sometimes the convenience may be worth it. Sometimes it’s just a hack that you’ve grown accustomed to. And sometimes it’s holding you back from even better options.

Start from standards. Standards continue to evolve over time, but browsers have done a remarkably good job of continuing to support older standards. The same isn’t always true of third-party frameworks. Sites built with even the hackiest of HTML from the ’90s still work just fine today. The same can’t always be said of sites built with frameworks even after just a couple years.

Design with care. Whether your craft is code, pixels, or processes, consider the impacts of each decision. The convenience of many a modern tool comes at the cost of not always understanding the underlying decisions that have led to its design and not always considering the impact that those decisions can have. Rather than rushing headlong to “move fast and break things,” use the time saved by modern tools to consider more carefully and design with deliberation.

Always be learning. If you’re always learning, you’re also growing. Sometimes it may be hard to pinpoint what’s worth learning and what’s just today’s hack. You might end up focusing on something that won’t matter next year, even if you were to focus solely on learning standards. (Remember XHTML?) But constant learning opens up new connections in your brain, and the hacks that you learn one day may help to inform different experiments another day.

Play, experiment, and be weird! This web that we’ve built is the ultimate experiment. It’s the single largest human endeavor in history, and yet each of us can create our own pocket within it. Be courageous and try new things. Build a playground for ideas. Make goofy experiments in your own mad science lab. Start your own small business. There has never been a more empowering place to be creative, take risks, and explore what we’re capable of.

Share and amplify. As you experiment, play, and learn, share what’s worked for you. Write on your own website, post on whichever social media site you prefer, or shout it from a TikTok. Write something for A List Apart! But take the time to amplify others too: find new voices, learn from them, and share what they’ve taught you.

Go forth and make

As designers and developers for the web (and beyond), we’re responsible for building the future every day, whether that may take the shape of personal websites, social media tools used by billions, or anything in between. Let’s imbue our values into the things that we create, and let’s make the web a better place for everyone. Create that thing that only you are uniquely qualified to make. Then share it, make it better, make it again, or make something new. Learn. Make. Share. Grow. Rinse and repeat. Every time you think that you’ve mastered the web, everything will change.

Picture this. You’ve joined a squad at your company that’s designing new product features with an emphasis on automation or AI. Or your company has just implemented a personalization engine. Either way, you’re designing with data. Now what? When it comes to designing for personalization, there are many cautionary tales, no overnight successes, and few guides for the perplexed. 

Between the fantasy of getting it right and the fear of it going wrong—like when we encounter “persofails” in the vein of a company repeatedly imploring everyday consumers to buy additional toilet seats—the personalization gap is real. It’s an especially confounding place to be a digital professional without a map, a compass, or a plan.

For those of you venturing into personalization, there’s no Lonely Planet and few tour guides because effective personalization is so specific to each organization’s talent, technology, and market position. 

But you can ensure that your team has packed its bags sensibly.

There’s a DIY formula to increase your chances for success. At minimum, you’ll defuse your boss’s irrational exuberance. Before the party you’ll need to effectively prepare.

We call it prepersonalization.

Behind the music

Consider Spotify’s DJ feature, which debuted this past year.

We’re used to seeing the polished final result of a personalization feature. Before the year-end award, the making-of backstory, or the behind-the-scenes victory lap, a personalized feature had to be conceived, budgeted, and prioritized. Before any personalization feature goes live in your product or service, it lives amid a backlog of worthy ideas for expressing customer experiences more dynamically.

So how do you know where to place your personalization bets? How do you design consistent interactions that won’t trip up users or—worse—breed mistrust? We’ve found that for many budgeted programs to justify their ongoing investments, they first needed one or more workshops to convene key stakeholders and internal customers of the technology. Make yours count.

​From Big Tech to fledgling startups, we’ve seen the same evolution up close with our clients. In our experiences with working on small and large personalization efforts, a program’s ultimate track record—and its ability to weather tough questions, work steadily toward shared answers, and organize its design and technology efforts—turns on how effectively these prepersonalization activities play out.

Time and again, we’ve seen effective workshops separate future success stories from unsuccessful efforts, saving countless time, resources, and collective well-being in the process.

A personalization practice involves a multiyear effort of testing and feature development. It’s not a switch-flip moment in your tech stack. It’s best managed as a backlog that often evolves through three steps: 

1. customer experience optimization (CXO, also known as A/B testing or experimentation)
2. always-on automations (whether rules-based or machine-generated)
3. mature features or standalone product development (such as Spotify’s DJ experience)

This is why we created our progressive personalization framework and why we’re field-testing an accompanying deck of cards: we believe that there’s a base grammar, a set of “nouns and verbs” that your organization can use to design experiences that are customized, personalized, or automated. You won’t need these cards. But we strongly recommend that you create something similar, whether that might be digital or physical.

Set your kitchen timer

How long does it take to cook up a prepersonalization workshop? The surrounding assessment activities that we recommend including can (and often do) span weeks. For the core workshop, we recommend aiming for two to three days. Here’s a summary of our broader approach along with details on the essential first-day activities.

The full arc of the wider workshop is threefold:

1. Kickstart: This sets the terms of engagement as you focus on the opportunity as well as the readiness and drive of your team and your leadership. .
2. Plan your work: This is the heart of the card-based workshop activities where you specify a plan of attack and the scope of work.
3. Work your plan: This phase is all about creating a competitive environment for team participants to individually pitch their own pilots that each contain a proof-of-concept project, its business case, and its operating model.

Give yourself at least a day, split into two large time blocks, to power through a concentrated version of those first two phases.

Kickstart: Whet your appetite

We call the first lesson the “landscape of connected experience.” It explores the personalization possibilities in your organization. A connected experience, in our parlance, is any UX requiring the orchestration of multiple systems of record on the backend. This could be a content-management system combined with a marketing-automation platform. It could be a digital-asset manager combined with a customer-data platform.

Spark conversation by naming consumer examples and business-to-business examples of connected experience interactions that you admire, find familiar, or even dislike. This should cover a representative range of personalization patterns, including automated app-based interactions (such as onboarding sequences or wizards), notifications, and recommenders. We have a catalog of these in the cards. Here’s a list of 142 different interactions to jog your thinking.

This is all about setting the table. What are the possible paths for the practice in your organization? If you want a broader view, here’s a long-form primer and a strategic framework.

Assess each example that you discuss for its complexity and the level of effort that you estimate that it would take for your team to deliver that feature (or something similar). In our cards, we divide connected experiences into five levels: functions, features, experiences, complete products, and portfolios. Size your own build here. This will help to focus the conversation on the merits of ongoing investment as well as the gap between what you deliver today and what you want to deliver in the future.

Next, have your team plot each idea on the following 2×2 grid, which lays out the four enduring arguments for a personalized experience. This is critical because it emphasizes how personalization can not only help your external customers but also affect your own ways of working. It’s also a reminder (which is why we used the word argument earlier) of the broader effort beyond these tactical interventions.

Each team member should vote on where they see your product or service putting its emphasis. Naturally, you can’t prioritize all of them. The intention here is to flesh out how different departments may view their own upsides to the effort, which can vary from one to the next. Documenting your desired outcomes lets you know how the team internally aligns across representatives from different departments or functional areas.

The third and final kickstart activity is about naming your personalization gap. Is your customer journey well documented? Will data and privacy compliance be too big of a challenge? Do you have content metadata needs that you have to address? (We’re pretty sure that you do: it’s just a matter of recognizing the relative size of that need and its remedy.) In our cards, we’ve noted a number of program risks, including common team dispositions. Our Detractor card, for example, lists six stakeholder behaviors that hinder progress.

Effectively collaborating and managing expectations is critical to your success. Consider the potential barriers to your future progress. Press the participants to name specific steps to overcome or mitigate those barriers in your organization. As studies have shown, personalization efforts face many common barriers.

At this point, you’ve hopefully discussed sample interactions, emphasized a key area of benefit, and flagged key gaps? Good—you’re ready to continue.

Hit that test kitchen

Next, let’s look at what you’ll need to bring your personalization recipes to life. Personalization engines, which are robust software suites for automating and expressing dynamic content, can intimidate new customers. Their capabilities are sweeping and powerful, and they present broad options for how your organization can conduct its activities. This presents the question: Where do you begin when you’re configuring a connected experience?

What’s important here is to avoid treating the installed software like it were a dream kitchen from some fantasy remodeling project (as one of our client executives memorably put it). These software engines are more like test kitchens where your team can begin devising, tasting, and refining the snacks and meals that will become a part of your personalization program’s regularly evolving menu.

The ultimate menu of the prioritized backlog will come together over the course of the workshop. And creating “dishes” is the way that you’ll have individual team stakeholders construct personalized interactions that serve their needs or the needs of others.

The dishes will come from recipes, and those recipes have set ingredients.

Verify your ingredients

Like a good product manager, you’ll make sure—andyou’ll validate with the right stakeholders present—that you have all the ingredients on hand to cook up your desired interaction (or that you can work out what needs to be added to your pantry). These ingredients include the audience that you’re targeting, content and design elements, the context for the interaction, and your measure for how it’ll come together. 

This isn’t just about discovering requirements. Documenting your personalizations as a series of if-then statements lets the team: 

1. compare findings toward a unified approach for developing features, not unlike when artists paint with the same palette; 
2. specify a consistent set of interactions that users find uniform or familiar; 
3. and develop parity across performance measurements and key performance indicators too. 

This helps you streamline your designs and your technical efforts while you deliver a shared palette of core motifs of your personalized or automated experience.

Compose your recipe

What ingredients are important to you? Think of a who-what-when-why construct: 

• Who are your key audience segments or groups?
• What kind of content will you give them, in what design elements, and under what circumstances?
• And for which business and user benefits?

We first developed these cards and card categories five years ago. We regularly play-test their fit with conference audiences and clients. And we still encounter new possibilities. But they all follow an underlying who-what-when-why logic.

Here are three examples for a subscription-based reading app, which you can generally follow along with right to left in the cards in the accompanying photo below. 

1. Nurture personalization: When a guest or an unknown visitor interacts with  a product title, a banner or alert bar appears that makes it easier for them to encounter a related title they may want to read, saving them time.
2. Welcome automation: When there’s a newly registered user, an email is generated to call out the breadth of the content catalog and to make them a happier subscriber.
3. Winback automation: Before their subscription lapses or after a recent failed renewal, a user is sent an email that gives them a promotional offer to suggest that they reconsider renewing or to remind them to renew.

A useful preworkshop activity may be to think through a first draft of what these cards might be for your organization, although we’ve also found that this process sometimes flows best through cocreating the recipes themselves. Start with a set of blank cards, and begin labeling and grouping them through the design process, eventually distilling them to a refined subset of highly useful candidate cards.

You can think of the later stages of the workshop as moving from recipes toward a cookbook in focus—like a more nuanced customer-journey mapping. Individual “cooks” will pitch their recipes to the team, using a common jobs-to-be-done format so that measurability and results are baked in, and from there, the resulting collection will be prioritized for finished design and delivery to production.

Better kitchens require better architecture

Simplifying a customer experience is a complicated effort for those who are inside delivering it. Beware anyone who says otherwise. With that being said,  “Complicated problems can be hard to solve, but they are addressable with rules and recipes.”

When personalization becomes a laugh line, it’s because a team is overfitting: they aren’t designing with their best data. Like a sparse pantry, every organization has metadata debt to go along with its technical debt, and this creates a drag on personalization effectiveness. Your AI’s output quality, for example, is indeed limited by your IA. Spotify’s poster-child prowess today was unfathomable before they acquired a seemingly modest metadata startup that now powers its underlying information architecture.

You can definitely stand the heat…

Personalization technology opens a doorway into a confounding ocean of possible designs. Only a disciplined and highly collaborative approach will bring about the necessary focus and intention to succeed. So banish the dream kitchen. Instead, hit the test kitchen to save time, preserve job satisfaction and security, and safely dispense with the fanciful ideas that originate upstairs of the doers in your organization. There are meals to serve and mouths to feed.

This workshop framework gives you a fighting shot at lasting success as well as sound beginnings. Wiring up your information layer isn’t an overnight affair. But if you use the same cookbook and shared recipes, you’ll have solid footing for success. We designed these activities to make your organization’s needs concrete and clear, long before the hazards pile up.

While there are associated costs toward investing in this kind of technology and product design, your ability to size up and confront your unique situation and your digital capabilities is time well spent. Don’t squander it. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding.

Ever since I was a boy, I’ve been fascinated with movies. I loved the characters and the excitement—but most of all the stories. I wanted to be an actor. And I believed that I’d get to do the things that Indiana Jones did and go on exciting adventures. I even dreamed up ideas for movies that my friends and I could make and star in. But they never went any further. I did, however, end up working in user experience (UX). Now, I realize that there’s an element of theater to UX—I hadn’t really considered it before, but user research is storytelling. And to get the most out of user research, you need to tell a good story where you bring stakeholders—the product team and decision makers—along and get them interested in learning more.

Think of your favorite movie. More than likely it follows a three-act structure that’s commonly seen in storytelling: the setup, the conflict, and the resolution. The first act shows what exists today, and it helps you get to know the characters and the challenges and problems that they face. Act two introduces the conflict, where the action is. Here, problems grow or get worse. And the third and final act is the resolution. This is where the issues are resolved and the characters learn and change. I believe that this structure is also a great way to think about user research, and I think that it can be especially helpful in explaining user research to others.

Use storytelling as a structure to do research

It’s sad to say, but many have come to see research as being expendable. If budgets or timelines are tight, research tends to be one of the first things to go. Instead of investing in research, some product managers rely on designers or—worse—their own opinion to make the “right” choices for users based on their experience or accepted best practices. That may get teams some of the way, but that approach can so easily miss out on solving users’ real problems. To remain user-centered, this is something we should avoid. User research elevates design. It keeps it on track, pointing to problems and opportunities. Being aware of the issues with your product and reacting to them can help you stay ahead of your competitors.

In the three-act structure, each act corresponds to a part of the process, and each part is critical to telling the whole story. Let’s look at the different acts and how they align with user research.

Act one: setup

The setup is all about understanding the background, and that’s where foundational research comes in. Foundational research (also called generative, discovery, or initial research) helps you understand users and identify their problems. You’re learning about what exists today, the challenges users have, and how the challenges affect them—just like in the movies. To do foundational research, you can conduct contextual inquiries or diary studies (or both!), which can help you start to identify problems as well as opportunities. It doesn’t need to be a huge investment in time or money.

Erika Hall writes about minimum viable ethnography, which can be as simple as spending 15 minutes with a user and asking them one thing: “‘Walk me through your day yesterday.’ That’s it. Present that one request. Shut up and listen to them for 15 minutes. Do your damndest to keep yourself and your interests out of it. Bam, you’re doing ethnography.” According to Hall, “[This] will probably prove quite illuminating. In the highly unlikely case that you didn’t learn anything new or useful, carry on with enhanced confidence in your direction.”  

This makes total sense to me. And I love that this makes user research so accessible. You don’t need to prepare a lot of documentation; you can just recruit participants and do it! This can yield a wealth of information about your users, and it’ll help you better understand them and what’s going on in their lives. That’s really what act one is all about: understanding where users are coming from. 

Jared Spool talks about the importance of foundational research and how it should form the bulk of your research. If you can draw from any additional user data that you can get your hands on, such as surveys or analytics, that can supplement what you’ve heard in the foundational studies or even point to areas that need further investigation. Together, all this data paints a clearer picture of the state of things and all its shortcomings. And that’s the beginning of a compelling story. It’s the point in the plot where you realize that the main characters—or the users in this case—are facing challenges that they need to overcome. Like in the movies, this is where you start to build empathy for the characters and root for them to succeed. And hopefully stakeholders are now doing the same. Their sympathy may be with their business, which could be losing money because users can’t complete certain tasks. Or maybe they do empathize with users’ struggles. Either way, act one is your initial hook to get the stakeholders interested and invested.

Once stakeholders begin to understand the value of foundational research, that can open doors to more opportunities that involve users in the decision-making process. And that can guide product teams toward being more user-centered. This benefits everyone—users, the product, and stakeholders. It’s like winning an Oscar in movie terms—it often leads to your product being well received and successful. And this can be an incentive for stakeholders to repeat this process with other products. Storytelling is the key to this process, and knowing how to tell a good story is the only way to get stakeholders to really care about doing more research. 

This brings us to act two, where you iteratively evaluate a design or concept to see whether it addresses the issues.

Act two: conflict

Act two is all about digging deeper into the problems that you identified in act one. This usually involves directional research, such as usability tests, where you assess a potential solution (such as a design) to see whether it addresses the issues that you found. The issues could include unmet needs or problems with a flow or process that’s tripping users up. Like act two in a movie, more issues will crop up along the way. It’s here that you learn more about the characters as they grow and develop through this act. 

Usability tests should typically include around five participants according to Jakob Nielsen, who found that that number of users can usually identify most of the problems: “As you add more and more users, you learn less and less because you will keep seeing the same things again and again… After the fifth user, you are wasting your time by observing the same findings repeatedly but not learning much new.” 

There are parallels with storytelling here too; if you try to tell a story with too many characters, the plot may get lost. Having fewer participants means that each user’s struggles will be more memorable and easier to relay to other stakeholders when talking about the research. This can help convey the issues that need to be addressed while also highlighting the value of doing the research in the first place.

Researchers have run usability tests in person for decades, but you can also conduct usability tests remotely using tools like Microsoft Teams, Zoom, or other teleconferencing software. This approach has become increasingly popular since the beginning of the pandemic, and it works well. You can think of in-person usability tests like going to a play and remote sessions as more like watching a movie. There are advantages and disadvantages to each. In-person usability research is a much richer experience. Stakeholders can experience the sessions with other stakeholders. You also get real-time reactions—including surprise, agreement, disagreement, and discussions about what they’re seeing. Much like going to a play, where audiences get to take in the stage, the costumes, the lighting, and the actors’ interactions, in-person research lets you see users up close, including their body language, how they interact with the moderator, and how the scene is set up.

If in-person usability testing is like watching a play—staged and controlled—then conducting usability testing in the field is like immersive theater where any two sessions might be very different from one another. You can take usability testing into the field by creating a replica of the space where users interact with the product and then conduct your research there. Or you can go out to meet users at their location to do your research. With either option, you get to see how things work in context, things come up that wouldn’t have in a lab environment—and conversion can shift in entirely different directions. As researchers, you have less control over how these sessions go, but this can sometimes help you understand users even better. Meeting users where they are can provide clues to the external forces that could be affecting how they use your product. In-person usability tests provide another level of detail that’s often missing from remote usability tests. 

That’s not to say that the “movies”—remote sessions—aren’t a good option. Remote sessions can reach a wider audience. They allow a lot more stakeholders to be involved in the research and to see what’s going on. And they open the doors to a much wider geographical pool of users. But with any remote session there is the potential of time wasted if participants can’t log in or get their microphone working. 

The benefit of usability testing, whether remote or in person, is that you get to see real users interact with the designs in real time, and you can ask them questions to understand their thought processes and grasp of the solution. This can help you not only identify problems but also glean why they’re problems in the first place. Furthermore, you can test hypotheses and gauge whether your thinking is correct. By the end of the sessions, you’ll have a much clearer picture of how usable the designs are and whether they work for their intended purposes. Act two is the heart of the story—where the excitement is—but there can be surprises too. This is equally true of usability tests. Often, participants will say unexpected things, which change the way that you look at things—and these twists in the story can move things in new directions. 

Unfortunately, user research is sometimes seen as expendable. And too often usability testing is the only research process that some stakeholders think that they ever need. In fact, if the designs that you’re evaluating in the usability test aren’t grounded in a solid understanding of your users (foundational research), there’s not much to be gained by doing usability testing in the first place. That’s because you’re narrowing the focus of what you’re getting feedback on, without understanding the users’ needs. As a result, there’s no way of knowing whether the designs might solve a problem that users have. It’s only feedback on a particular design in the context of a usability test.  

On the other hand, if you only do foundational research, while you might have set out to solve the right problem, you won’t know whether the thing that you’re building will actually solve that. This illustrates the importance of doing both foundational and directional research. 

In act two, stakeholders will—hopefully—get to watch the story unfold in the user sessions, which creates the conflict and tension in the current design by surfacing their highs and lows. And in turn, this can help motivate stakeholders to address the issues that come up.

Act three: resolution

While the first two acts are about understanding the background and the tensions that can propel stakeholders into action, the third part is about resolving the problems from the first two acts. While it’s important to have an audience for the first two acts, it’s crucial that they stick around for the final act. That means the whole product team, including developers, UX practitioners, business analysts, delivery managers, product managers, and any other stakeholders that have a say in the next steps. It allows the whole team to hear users’ feedback together, ask questions, and discuss what’s possible within the project’s constraints. And it lets the UX research and design teams clarify, suggest alternatives, or give more context behind their decisions. So you can get everyone on the same page and get agreement on the way forward.

This act is mostly told in voiceover with some audience participation. The researcher is the narrator, who paints a picture of the issues and what the future of the product could look like given the things that the team has learned. They give the stakeholders their recommendations and their guidance on creating this vision.

Nancy Duarte in the Harvard Business Review offers an approach to structuring presentations that follow a persuasive story. “The most effective presenters use the same techniques as great storytellers: By reminding people of the status quo and then revealing the path to a better way, they set up a conflict that needs to be resolved,” writes Duarte. “That tension helps them persuade the audience to adopt a new mindset or behave differently.”

This type of structure aligns well with research results, and particularly results from usability tests. It provides evidence for “what is”—the problems that you’ve identified. And “what could be”—your recommendations on how to address them. And so on and so forth.

You can reinforce your recommendations with examples of things that competitors are doing that could address these issues or with examples where competitors are gaining an edge. Or they can be visual, like quick mockups of how a new design could look that solves a problem. These can help generate conversation and momentum. And this continues until the end of the session when you’ve wrapped everything up in the conclusion by summarizing the main issues and suggesting a way forward. This is the part where you reiterate the main themes or problems and what they mean for the product—the denouement of the story. This stage gives stakeholders the next steps and hopefully the momentum to take those steps!

While we are nearly at the end of this story, let’s reflect on the idea that user research is storytelling. All the elements of a good story are there in the three-act structure of user research: 

• Act one: You meet the protagonists (the users) and the antagonists (the problems affecting users). This is the beginning of the plot. In act one, researchers might use methods including contextual inquiry, ethnography, diary studies, surveys, and analytics. The output of these methods can include personas, empathy maps, user journeys, and analytics dashboards.

• Act two: Next, there’s character development. There’s conflict and tension as the protagonists encounter problems and challenges, which they must overcome. In act two, researchers might use methods including usability testing, competitive benchmarking, and heuristics evaluation. The output of these can include usability findings reports, UX strategy documents, usability guidelines, and best practices.

• Act three: The protagonists triumph and you see what a better future looks like. In act three, researchers may use methods including presentation decks, storytelling, and digital media. The output of these can be: presentation decks, video clips, audio clips, and pictures. 

The researcher has multiple roles: they’re the storyteller, the director, and the producer. The participants have a small role, but they are significant characters (in the research). And the stakeholders are the audience. But the most important thing is to get the story right and to use storytelling to tell users’ stories through research. By the end, the stakeholders should walk away with a purpose and an eagerness to resolve the product’s ills. 

So the next time that you’re planning research with clients or you’re speaking to stakeholders about research that you’ve done, think about how you can weave in some storytelling. Ultimately, user research is a win-win for everyone, and you just need to get stakeholders interested in how the story ends.

As a solution developer for too many years, I can’t recall how many times I’ve seen promising ideas go from being heroes in a few weeks to being useless within months.

Financial items, which is the industry in which I work, are no exception. It’s tempting to put as many features at the ceiling as possible and expect something sticks because people’s true, hard-earned money is on the line, user expectations are high, and crowded market. However, this strategy is a formula for disaster. Why? How’s why:

The fatalities of feature-first growth

It’s simple to get swept up in the enthusiasm of developing innovative features when you start developing a financial product from scratch or are migrating existing client journeys from papers or telephony channels to online bank or mobile apps. You might be thinking,” If I can only put one more thing that solves this particular person problem, they’ll appreciate me”! But what happens if you eventually encounter a roadblock as a result of your security team’s negligence? not like it? When a difficult-fought film fails to win over viewers or fails due to unanticipated difficulty?

The concept of Minimum Viable Product ( MVP ) comes into play in this area. Even if Jason Fried doesn’t usually refer to this concept, his book Getting Real and his radio Rework frequently discuss it. An MVP is a product that offers only enough significance to your users to keep them interested, but not so much that it becomes difficult to keep up. Although the idea seems simple, it requires a razor-sharp eye, a brutal edge, and the courage to stand up for your position because” the Columbo Effect” makes it easy to fall for something when one always says” just one more thing …” to include.

The issue with most funding apps is that they frequently turn out to be reflections of the company’s internal politics rather than an experience created exclusively for the customer. This implies that the priority is to provide as many features and functionalities as possible to satisfy the requirements and desires of competing inside sections as opposed to a distinct value statement that is focused on what people in the real world actually want. These products may therefore quickly become a muddled mess of confusing, related, and finally unlovable client experiences—a feature salad, you might say.

The significance of the foundation

What is a better strategy, then? How may we create products that are user-friendly, firm, and, most importantly, stick?

The concept of “bedrock” comes into play in this context. Rock is the main feature of your item that really matters to customers. The foundation of worth and relevance over time is built upon it.

The core must be in and around the standard servicing journeys in the retail banking industry, which is where I work. People only look at their existing accounts once every blue sky, but they do so every day. They sign up for a credit card every year or two, but they check their stability and pay their bill at least once a quarter.

The key is in identifying the main tasks that people want to complete and working relentlessly to render them simple, reliable, and trustworthy.

How can you reach the foundation, though? By focusing on the” MVP” strategy, giving clarity the top priority, and working toward a distinct value proposition. This means avoiding pointless extras and putting your customers first, making the most of them.

It also requires some nerve, as your coworkers might not always agree on your eyesight right away. And dubiously, occasionally it can even suggest making it clear to customers that you won’t be coming to their house and making their breakfast. Sometimes you need to use the sporadic “opinionated user interface design” ( i .e. clunky workaround for edge cases ) to test a concept or to give yourself some more time to work on something more crucial.

Functional methods for creating stick-like economic items

What are the main learnings I’ve made from my own research and practice, then?

1. What issue are you attempting to resolve first, and why? Who is it for? Make sure your goal is unmistakable before beginning any work. Make certain it also aligns with the goals of your business.
2. Avoid putting too many features on the list at again; instead, focus on getting that right first. Choose one that actually adds price, and work from that.
3. When it comes to financial goods, clarity is often more important than difficulty. Eliminate unwanted details and concentrate on what matters most.
4. Accept constant iteration as Bedrock is a powerful process rather than a fixed destination. Continuously collect customer feedback, improve your product, and work toward that foundational position.
5. Stop, glance, and talk: You must test your product frequently in the field rather than just as part of the shipping process. Use it for yourself. Move the A/B testing. User opinions on Gear. Talk to those who use it, and change things up correctly.

The foundational dilemma

This is an intriguing conundrum: sacrificing some of the potential for short-term growth in favor of long-term stability. But the reward is worthwhile because products created with a concentrate on core will outlive and outperform their competitors and provide people with ongoing value over time.

How do you begin your quest for core, then? Take it slowly. Start by identifying the underlying factors that your customers actually care about. Concentrate on developing and improving a second, potent have that delivers real value. And most importantly, check constantly because, whatever you think, Abraham Lincoln, Alan Kay, or Peter Drucker are all in the same boat! The best way to foretell the future is to build it, he said.

The Last of Sheila’s standing has improved in recent years, especially after a particular permeability director named it as a significant impact on the Benoit Blanc movies, but it still feels incredibly underappreciated. Sheila was on the one hand vintage in]…] and on the other hand a terrifyingly smart murder mystery and a brutal sarcasm of the Hollywood movie industry.

The first article in Den of Geek was Ian McShane Recalls The Last of Sheila, Stephen Sondheim, and Anthony Perkins ‘” Inside Jokes.”

Small-time American crime Mark Read achieved the kind of celebrity that might only exist in the ’90s before the release of the movie Chopper. Despite serving time in the American prison structure after being found guilty of shooting a friend in the chest, Read rose to the position of an unlikely bestselling author and interviewer, often willing to accept credit for crimes he was found guilty of, as well as many others he was not.

However, that 2000 crime drama, an original that brought writer-director Andrew Domink, sun Eric Bana, and of course the person and story Chopper to an international audience, as well as many others who later came up with the legend, completely strengthened his legend. That includes American Jai Courtney, who admits that he was unaware of Read until he received the Chopper DVD as a young child in the 1990s.

25 times after the movie’s release, Courtney laughs,” God knows if I was also allowed to watch it.” It was definitely one of those items that rolled about on DVD and made you pass between your pals. It eventually made it means into his DVD player, as well as many others. It’s a must if you meet someone and talk about the movies you like, but no one has seen them. I’ve actually found myself buying a DVD player and finding the Video on eBay to show it to people who haven’t seen the film before.

It served as a guide for the upcoming <a href=””>Suicide Squad and Exception stars, and it continues to be used as a tool by Courtney now. For instance, when he stops by our studio to appear in the In the Den movie set over, it is in advance of the transfer of Hazardous Animals, a terrible clever rhythm on the serial killer and fish video subgenre. In that movie, Courtney portrays a man named Tucker as one of the two animals who occasionally takes visitors out to swim with fish and eventually ends up feeding them to the sharp-toothed creatures.

According to Courtney, Tucker is a performer of this caliber. The ship deck serves as a kind of step for him because he is such a storyteller. He is a guy who may not take all visitors home, but regardless of how the trip turns out, he is having a good time. He adores it. He definitely sees himself as one with the shark, and I believe he is very excited about it. He is also passionate about his conservation and his fight against the shark.

Courtney acknowledges that watching what Bana did with the real-life Chopper Read in the 2000s might have had a subliminal influence on this move.

Courtney says,” I think what you see Eric do with that position is very profound.” He transforms what might be thought of as a kind of two-dimensional villain into something very endearing. If you’ve ever seen an interview with Mark” Chopper” Read himself, I’m sure you’ve got an idea of how incredible this is. Sincerely speaking, it about resembles an imitation. He’s like a top replicate, as Bana is.

Before Chopper made Bana a global celebrity, opening the door to everything from <a href=””>Hulk and <a href=””>Troy to Steven Spielberg’s Munich, the artist was generally known as a stand-up and picture graphic on Australian television shows like Full Frontal and. According to Courtney,” He had a few great, very quotable characters,” he recalls watching the show as a kid. And according to legend, the real-life Chopper was also a fan who watched the series while incarcerated before telling Andrew Dominik to make Bana as the movie version of himself.

” I don’t know how true that is, but from what I understood, he kind of handpicked him,” Courtney asserts. Whether or not it was true, I’m certain he would make that claim. The real-life Read had a talent for accepting credit for crimes he probably had no business doing, as the movie Chopper demonstrates.

According to Courtney, “one of the interesting things about him being such a colorful character is that he laid claim to many more killings than he was ever ever charged with,” and some of that may have been partially made up. And I believe that has somewhat damaged his ego, which is interesting.

However, for a young aspiring actor growing up in Australia, the appeal of Chopper was just the bravado of the performance and being able to quote so many of Bana-as-Read’s lines. Even though the movie has real-world roots and that the majority of the first half of Chopper was shot in Pentridge Prison, a Victorian correctional facility where Read spent decades, his theatrical moments and violence have a Hollywood crime thriller vibe.

Consider the two first scenes of that prison setting, in which Chopper stabs Keithy George ( David Field ) and when his real-life mate Jimmy Loughnan ( Simon Lyndon ) stabs Chopper. In both scenes, Bana plays the victim as a quasi-astonished and even sympathetic figure on the other end of the knife before playing the attacker.

According to Courtney,” There’s that incredibly acute attack on Keithy,” which kind of comes out of it being very calculated. There is a critical moment before a hyperviolent beat and this kind of violent explosion. He then passes him a cigarette and is almost remorseful right away. There is empathy in there. Just this dude who had so much light and shade, and I think that was such a dynamic performance. It’s really motivating.

It was the performance that eventually led to the release of Gladiator, which was later followed by a similarly insane turn by Russell Crowe in Romper Stomper ( 1992 ), not long after Mel Gibson established a precedent for this type of Aussie genre mania in the acutely titled Mad Max ( 1979 ). Is everyone in Australia a few degrees away from the true north, Roger Ebert wrote in his review of Chopper in 2001 for a reason.

Courtney says,” That’s a good quote,” and she laughs. He also mentions how many of those Australian performances by fellow Australians like Bana and Crowe influenced him when he was just starting out.

Courtney responds,” Russell’s a friend.” I started working with him ten years ago, but those people are a lot of fun. Hugh Jackman and Joel Edgerton are both close to my generation, and they are also a little closer to my generation. I was watching all those men who were succeeding at a point where it was either starting to feel like I was on the verge of something.

The line also entices comparisons to Sean Byrne’s directed film, which is distinctly Australian, Dangerous Animals, which is heightened and genre-mad.

Courtney ponders whether or not people should compare their behavior to that of Dangerous Animals. It was a fascinating movie to make. I wasn’t entirely sure of what I was entering. Really, you can’t predict anything about these processes. You can only make an educated guess as to how you want things to turn out, and Sean was a great partner. So when I read it, my instinct was to make this character more interesting and more colorful in order for it to work. Because I believe it’s just less interesting to me if he plays with this wash of evil intentions. However, Tucker sounded like someone you could be stuck next to on the bus, the bar owner, or the driver of your taxi that wouldn’t stop. He has a familiarity with him.

You can’t escape these guys, just like sharks in the sea.

Dangerous Animals is currently touring the United States.

The first article on Den of Geek was Jai Courtney Dives into the Legacy of Chopper and Australian Genre Cinema.

When Mario Kart World was first revealed in January along with the Nintendo Switch 2, gamers were understandably excited. After all, it had been more than a decade since a brand new game in the beloved series had hit consoles. And then in April, Nintendo revealed that Mario Kart World would retail for $80 if […]

The post Mario Kart World: Is It Worth That Price? appeared first on Den of Geek.

Before the film Chopper came along, small-time Australian criminal Mark Read achieved the type of celebrity that might only occur in the ‘90s. Despite serving time in the Australian prison system after being convicted for shooting a mate in the chest, Read became an unlikely bestselling author and interview subject, always happy to take credit on the page for crimes he was convicted of—as well as many more he was not.

Yet what fully cemented his legend was that 2000 movie, a crime film so innovative that it introduced writer-director Andrew Domink, star Eric Bana, and of course the man and myth that was Chopper to an international audience—as well as many more who came up afterward reared on the legend. That includes fellow Australian Jai Courtney, who admits that as a kid growing up in the ‘90s, he never even heard of Read until someone slipped him the Chopper DVD.

“God knows if I was even allowed to watch it,” Courtney laughs 25 years after the film’s release. “It was probably one of those things that kicked around on DVD and you passed between your mates.” Yet it found its way into his DVD player—and many more since. “If you meet someone and you’re talking about the films that are your favorite films, and someone hasn’t seen it, it’s a must… I’ve even been guilty of buying a DVD player and finding the DVD on eBay in order to screen it for people who haven’t seen the movie before.”

It became a touchstone for the future star of Suicide Squad and The Exception, and one which echoes in the work Courtney still does today. For example when he stops by our studio to appear on the In the Den video series above, it is ahead of the release of this summer’s bloody clever riff on the serial killer and shark movie subgenres, Dangerous Animals. In that film, Courtney plays a little bit of both predators as a guy named Tucker—someone who takes tourists out to swim with sharks, and sometimes ends up feeding them to the sharp-toothed beasties.

“Tucker is such a performer,” Courtney explains. “He’s such a storyteller that the boat deck even functions as a kind of stage for him.” He is a guy who may not bring all tourists home, but no matter how the excursion goes, he’s having a good time. “He loves it. I think he’s really passionate about it, passionate about his conservation and the crusade he’s on, he really sees himself as one with the shark.”

It’s also a turn that Courtney admits might have subconscious influences from watching what Bana did with the real-life Chopper Read in the 2000s.

“I think what you see Eric do with that role is quite profound,” Courtney considers. “He turns what could maybe be interpreted as a sort of two-dimensional kind of villain type into something that’s incredibly lovable. I mean, I’m sure if you’ve ever seen any interview with Mark ‘Chopper’ Read himself, you understand just how insanely good this is. It’s almost like an impersonation, honestly. He’s like an excellent mimic, Bana is.”

In fact before Chopper made Bana an international star, paving the way for everything from Hulk and Troy to Steven Spielberg’s Munich, the actor was known primarily as a standup and sketch comic on shows like Full Frontal in Australia. “He had a few great, very quotable characters,” Courtney says of his memories watching the show as a kid. And according to legend—aka Mark Read—the real-life Chopper was also a fan who watched the series in prison before telling Andrew Dominik that he should cast this Bana kid as the movie version of himself.

“I don’t know how true that is, but from what I understood, he kind of handpicked him,” Courtney says. “I’m sure he’d lay claim to that whether it was true or not.” As the movie Chopper shows, the real-life Read had a knack for taking credit for crimes he probably had nothing to do with as well.

“One of the interesting facts about him being such a colorful character is he laid claim to many more killings than he was certainly ever prosecuted for,” Courtney points out, “and there was a sort of perception to some of that, that it might have been completely made up. And I think that damaged his ego somewhat, which is interesting.”

But for a young aspiring actor growing up in Australia, the appeal of Chopper was just the bravado of the performance, and being able to quote so many of Bana-as-Read’s lines. In spite of the film’s real-world roots, and the fact that even most of the first half of Chopper is filmed in Pentridge Prison, the Victorian correctional facility that Read spent decades in—his flashes of theatricality and violence feel like something out of a Hollywood crime thriller.

Consider two early sequences in that prison setting, one where Chopper stabs Keithy George (David Field) and, later, when his own supposed mate Jimmy Loughnan (Simon Lyndon) shivs Chopper. In both scenes, Bana plays first the attacker and then the victim as quasi-astonished and even sympathetic to the person on the other end of the knife.

“There’s that incredibly acute attack on Keithy,” Courtney recalls, “which kind of comes out of it being very calculated. There’s an opportune moment, and then it’s a hyper violent beat and this kind of explosion [of violence]. But then he’s almost remorseful immediately after and he’s passing him a cigarette. There’s an empathy to it there. He was just this dude that had so much light and shade, and I find that just such a dynamic performance. It’s really inspiring.”

It was the performance that ended up taking Bana to Hollywood around the same time that a similarly deranged turn by Russell Crowe in Romper Stomper (1992) led eventually to Gladiator—and not that long even after Mel Gibson set a template for this style of Aussie genre mania in the acutely titled Mad Max (1979). There’s a reason in his review for Chopper in 2001, Roger Ebert wondered “is everyone in Australia a few degrees off from true north?”

“That’s a good quote,” Courtney laughs. He also notes how many of those performances of fellow Australians like Bana and Crowe inspired him when he was starting out.

“Russell’s a friend,” says Courtney. “I got to work with him some years ago now, about 10 years ago, but those guys are a huge inspiration. Heath Ledger, of course, and Hugh Jackman, and a little closer to a contemporary of mine is Joel Edgerton. I was looking at all those guys who were cracking through at a time when it was either starting to become just like a distant dream in my eyes or something that felt like I was on the cusp of.”

The line also invites comparisons to the heightened and genre madness in the distinctly Australian Dangerous Animals, which is directed by the Tasmanian-born Sean Byrne.

“It’d be cool,” Courtney muses about folks making comparisons with Dangerous Animals. “It was an interesting film to make. I didn’t quite know what I was stepping into. You can’t predict really anything in these processes. All you can do is make a kind of educated guess at how you’d like things to turn out, and Sean was a great collaborator. So when I read it, my instinct was that I needed to go big with this character in order for it to work, and to give it that color. Because I think if he’s played with this wash of evil intention, it’s just less interesting to me. But Tucker felt like someone you could be stuck on the bus next to, the guy you sit down next to in the bar, the dude driving your taxi that won’t shut up. There’s a familiarity to him.”

Like sharks in the sea, you can’t escape these guys.

Dangerous Animals is now playing in the U.S.

The post Jai Courtney Dives into the Legacy of Chopper and Australian Genre Cinema appeared first on Den of Geek.

The Career of Chuck has clues in this article. An optimistic teacher attempts to motivate her students with a little verse first in The Existence of Chuck’s last next section. Do]…] She reads some famous ranges from Walt Whitman’s epic poem Song of Myself in front of the noisy course.

The first article on Den of Geek was The Life of Chuck: Unpacking the Interpretation of Charles Krantz’s Multitudes.

Small-time American crime Mark Read had a celebrity past that might not have existed in the 1990s before the release of the movie Chopper. Despite serving time in the American prison program after being found guilty of shooting a friend in the chest, Read rose to the position of an unlikely bestselling author and interviewer, often willing to accept credit for crimes he was found guilty of, as well as many others he was not.

However, that 2000 crime drama, an original that brought writer-director Andrew Domink, sun Eric Bana, and of course the person and story Chopper to an international audience, as well as many others who later came up with the legend, completely strengthened his legend. That includes Asian Jai Courtney, who admits that he was unaware of Read until he received the Chopper DVD as a young child in the 1990s.

25 times after the movie’s release, Courtney laughs,” God knows if I was also allowed to watch it.” It was definitely one of those items that rolled about on DVD and made you pass between your pals. It eventually made its way into his DVD player, and many more have since. It’s a must if you meet someone and talk about the movies you like, but no one has seen them. I’ve actually found myself buying a DVD player and finding the DVD on eBay to show it to people who haven’t seen the film before.

It served as a guide for the upcoming <a href=””>Suicide Squad and Exception stars, and it continues to be used as a tool by Courtney immediately. For instance, when he stops by our studio to appear on the In the Den movie set over, it is in advance of the transfer of this season’s terrible clever riff on the fish and serial killer themes, Dangerous Animals. In that movie, Courtney portrays a man named Tucker as one of the animals who occasionally feeds visitors to the sharp-toothed creatures.

” Tucker is such a performer,” Courtney asserts. The ship deck serves as a kind of step for him because he’s such a narrator. He is a man who may not provide all visitors home, but regardless of how the trip turns out, he is having a good time. He adores it. I believe he is very excited about it, passionate about his work, and passionate about his protection cause; he sees himself as one with the shark.

Courtney acknowledges that watching Bana’s take on the real-life Chopper Read in the 2000s might have had an impact on her choice of direction.

Courtney says,” I think what you see Eric doing in that position is very profound.” He transforms what might be thought of as a two-dimensional criminal type into a truly endearing character. If you’ve ever watched an interview with Mark” Chopper” Read himself, you’ll understand how incredible this is. Sincerely speaking, it about resembles an imitation. Bana is like a top resemble, and he is.

Before Chopper made Bana a global celebrity, opening the door to everything from <a href=””>Hulk and <a href=””>Troy to Steven Spielberg’s Munich, the artist was generally known as a stand-up and picture graphic on Australian television shows like Full Frontal and. According to Courtney,” He had a few great, very quotable characters,” he recalls watching the show as a kid. And according to legend, the real-life Chopper was also a fan who watched the series while incarcerated before telling Andrew Dominik to make Bana as the movie version of himself.

” I don’t know how true that is, but from what I understood, he kind of handpicked him,” Courtney says. Whether or not it was true, I’m certain he would make that claim. The real-life Read, as the movie Chopper demonstrates, had a talent for accepting credit for crimes he presumably had no connection to.

According to Courtney, “one of the interesting things about him being such a colorful character is that he laid claim to many more killings than he was certainly ever prosecuted for, and there was a perception that it might have been entirely made up.” And that, in my opinion, somewhat damaged his ego, which is interesting.

However, the appeal of Chopper was merely due to the bravado of the performance and being able to quote many of Bana-as-Read’s lines for a young, aspiring actor from Australia. Even though the movie has real-world roots and that the majority of the first half of Chopper was shot in Pentridge Prison, a Victorian correctional facility where Read spent decades, his theatrical moments and violence have a Hollywood crime thriller vibe.

Consider two of the opening sequences in that prison setting, one in which Chopper stabs Keithy George ( David Field ) and another in which his real-life mate Jimmy Loughnan ( Simon Lyndon ) stabs Chopper. In both scenes, Bana plays the victim first as the attacker and then as the victim as she appears to be surprised and even understands the victim.

According to Courtney,” There’s that incredibly acute attack on Keithy,” which kind of comes out of it being very calculated. There is a critical moment, and then there is a violent beat and this kind of violent explosion. He then passes him a cigarette and is almost remorseful right away. There is empathy in there. Just this dude who had so much light and shade, and I think that was such a dynamic performance. It’s really motivating.

It was the performance that eventually led to the release of Gladiator, which was later followed by a similarly insane turn by Russell Crowe in Romper Stomper ( 1992 ), not long after Mel Gibson established a precedent for this type of Aussie genre mania in the acutely titled Mad Max ( 1979 ). Is everyone in Australia a few degrees away from the true north, Roger Ebert wrote in his 2001 review of Chopper for a reason.

Courtney says,” That’s a good quote,” and she laughs. He also mentions how many of those Australian performances by fellow Australians like Bana and Crowe had an impact on him when he was just starting out.

” Russell’s a friend,” says Courtney. I started working with him ten years ago, but those guys are incredibly inspiring. Hugh Jackman and Head Ledger, of course, and Joel Edgerton, who is a little more contemporary than I am. I was watching all those men who were succeeding at a time when it was either starting to feel more like a distant dream or something that made me feel like I was on the cusp of”.

The line also entices comparisons to the heightened and genre madness in the distinctively Australian Dangerous Animals, which is directed by the Tasmanian-born Sean Byrne.

Courtney ponders whether or not people are making comparisons to dangerous animals. It was a fascinating movie to produce. I wasn’t entirely sure of what I was entering. In these processes, you can’t really predict anything. You can only make an educated guess as to how you want things to turn out, and Sean was a great partner. So when I read it, my instinct was to make this character more interesting and more colorful in order for it to work. Because I believe it’s just less interesting for me if he plays with this kind of evil intention. However, Tucker sounded like someone you could be stuck next to on the bus, the bar owner, or the driver of your taxi that wouldn’t stop. He has a familiarity with him.

You can’t escape these guys, like sharks in the sea.

Dangerous Animals is currently touring the United States.

The first post on Den of Geek was Jai Courtney Dives into the Legacy of Chopper and Australian Genre Cinema.

The newest installment to a cherished brand, The First Week of May, officially opened the summer movie season for more than 20 years. In 2002, we got Spider-Man. Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Final were released in the final month of April 2018 and 2019 and were first released in 2012 as The Avengers. However, with the […]

The release date for the Legend of Zelda movie confirms the rise of video game franchises initially appeared on Den of Geek.

Before the release of the movie Helicopter, Australian native Mark Read achieved the kind of brand that might only be found in the 1990s. Despite serving time in the American prison program after being found guilty of shooting a friend in the chest, Read rose to the position of an unlikely bestselling author and interviewer, often willing to accept credit for crimes he was found guilty of, as well as many others he was not.

But that 2000 film, a crime drama so novel that it introduced writer-director Andrew Domink, sun Eric Bana, and of course the person and story that was Chopper, as well as many others who came up afterwards, entirely reaffirmed his legend. That includes American Jai Courtney, who admits to not having heard of Read as a child growing up in the 1990s until a friend gave him a copy of the Chopper DVD.

25 years after the movie’s transfer, Courtney laughs,” God knows if I was also allowed to watch it.” It was definitely one of those items that rolled about on DVD and made you pass between your pals. It eventually made it means into his DVD player, as well as many others. It’s a must if you meet someone and talk about the movies you like, but one hasn’t seen them. I’ve actually been guilty of buying a DVD person and finding the Video on eBay to display it for people who haven’t seen the film before.

It served as a guide for the upcoming <a href=””>Suicide Squad and Exception stars, and it continues to be used as a tool in Courtney’s work immediately. For instance, when he stops by our studio to appear in the In the Den movie set over, it is in advance of the transfer of Hazardous Animals, a terrible clever rhythm on the serial killer and fish video subgenre. In that movie, Courtney portrays a guy named Tucker as one of the predators who occasionally feeds tourists to the sharp-toothed beasties.

” Tucker is such a performer,” Courtney asserts. The boat deck serves as a kind of stage for him because he’s such a storyteller. He is a guy who may not return all visitors, but he is having a good time no matter how the trip turns out. He adores it. I believe he is very passionate about it, passionate about his work, and passionate about his conservation cause; he sees himself as one with the shark.

It’s a turn that Courtney acknowledges may have subconscious influences from watching what Bana did with the real-life Chopper Read in the 2000s.

Courtney says,” I think what you see Eric do with that role is quite profound.” He transforms what might be thought of as a kind of two-dimensional villain type into something incredibly endearing. If you’ve ever seen an interview with Mark” Chopper” Read himself, I’m sure you’ve got an idea of how incredible this is. It almost seems like an impersonation, to be honest. He’s like a top mimic, as is Bana.

Before Chopper made Bana a global star, opening the door to everything from <a href=””>Hulk and <a href=””>Troy to Steven Spielberg’s Munich, the actor was primarily known as a stand-up and sketch comic on Australian television shows like Full Frontal and. According to Courtney, who was a kid when he first saw the show,” He had a few great, very quotable characters.” And, according to legend, the real-life Chopper was also a fan who watched the series while incarcerated before telling Andrew Dominik to make Bana as the movie version of himself.

” I don’t know how true that is, but from what I understood, he kind of handpicked him,” Courtney asserts. Whether or not it was true, he would be certain that. The real-life Read, as the movie Chopper demonstrates, had a talent for accepting credit for crimes he presumably had no connection to.

According to Courtney, “one of the interesting things about him being such a colorful character is that he laid claim to many more killings than he was ever ever charged with,” and some of that may have been partially made up. And that, in my opinion, somewhat damaged his ego, which is interesting.

The appeal of Chopper was only the bravado of the performance and being able to quote so many of Bana-as-Read’s lines, for a young aspiring actor growing up in Australia. Even though the movie has real-world roots and that the majority of the first half of Chopper was shot in Pentridge Prison, a Victorian correctional facility where Read spent decades, his theatrical moments and violence have a Hollywood crime thriller vibe.

Consider the two first scenes of that prison setting, in which Chopper stabs Keithy George ( David Field ) and when his real-life mate Jimmy Loughnan ( Simon Lyndon ) stabs Chopper. In both scenes, Bana plays the victim first as the attacker and then as the victim as she appears to be surprised and even understands the victim.

There is an “incredibly acute attack on Keithy,” Courtney recalls,” which kind of comes out of it being very calculated. There is a critical moment, and then there is a hyper violent beat and this kind of violent explosion. But then he almost remorselous and leaves him a cigarette behind. There is empathy in there. Just this dude who had so much light and shade, and I think that was such a dynamic performance. It’s really inspiring.

It was the performance that eventually led to the release of Gladiator, which was later followed by a similarly insane turn by Russell Crowe in Romper Stomper ( 1992 ), not long after Mel Gibson established a precedent for this type of Aussie genre mania in the acutely titled Mad Max ( 1979 ). Is everyone in Australia a few degrees away from the true north, Roger Ebert wrote in his review of Chopper in 2001 for a reason.

Courtney makes a joke about how” that’s a good quote.” He also mentions how many of those Australian performances by fellow Australians like Bana and Crowe had an impact on him when he was just starting out.

Courtney responds,” Russell’s a friend.” I started working with him ten years ago, but those guys are incredibly inspiring. Hugh Jackman and Head Ledger, of course, and Joel Edgerton, who is a little more contemporary than I am. I was watching all those men who were succeeding at a point where it was either starting to feel like I was on the verge of something.

The line also entices comparisons to the intense and genre-driven madness in the distinctively Australian Dangerous Animals, which is directed by the Tasmanian-born Sean Byrne.

Courtney ponders whether or not people should compare their behavior to that of Dangerous Animals. Making the movie was fascinating. I wasn’t entirely sure what I was entering. Really, you can’t predict anything about these processes. You can only make educated guesses about how things will turn out, and Sean worked well with him. So when I read it, my instinct was to go big with this character in order for it to work and give it that color. Because I believe it’s just less interesting to me if he plays with this wash of evil intentions. However, Tucker sounded like someone you could be stuck next to on the bus, the bar owner, or the driver of your taxi that wouldn’t stop. He has a familiarity to him.

You can’t escape these guys, much like sharks in the sea.

Dangerous Animals is currently performing in the United States.

The first article on Den of Geek was Jai Courtney Dives into the Legacy of Chopper and Australian Genre Cinema.

But what on earth is a passionate stress?

Envision a person determined to do it all. She has two wonderful children whom she, along with her father who is also working mildly, is homeschooling during a crisis. She has a demanding customer fill at work—all of whom she loves. She gets up early to get some movement in ( or frequently catch up on work ), does meal training as the children are eating breakfast, and gets to work while positioning herself near “fourth quality” to listen in as she juggles clients, jobs, and expenses. Sound like a bit? Also with a supportive group both at home and at work, it is.

Sounds like this person has too much on her disk and needs self-care. But no, she doesn’t have occasion for that. In truth, she starts to feel like she’s dropping balls. No accomplishing much. There’s not enough of her to be here and that, she is trying to divide her head in two all the time, all day, every day. She starts to fear herself. And as those thoughts creep in more and more, her domestic tale becomes more and more important.

Instantly she KNOWS what she needs to accomplish! She may DO MORE.

This is a challenging and dangerous period. Understand why? Because when she doesn’t end that new purpose, that storyline will get worse. Instantly she’s failing. She isn’t doing much. SHE is not enough. She may fail, she might fail her home… so she’ll get more she should accomplish. She doesn’t nap as much, proceed because much, all in the attempts to do more. Caught in this period of trying to prove herself to herself, not reaching any purpose. Always feeling “enough”.

But, yeah, that’s what zealous burnout looks like for me. It doesn’t happen overnight in some magnificent sign but rather carefully builds over weeks and months. My burning out process looks like speeding up, hardly a man losing focus. I rate up and up and up… and therefore I simply quit.

I am the one who was

It’s interesting the things that shape us. Through the camera of youth, I viewed the worries, problems, and sacrifices of someone who had to make it all work without having much. I was happy that my mom was so competent and my dad sympathetic, I never went without and also got an extra here or there.

Growing up, I did not think pity when my family paid with food stamps, in truth, I’d have probably taken on any debate on the topic, orally eviscerating anyone who dared to criticize the crippled girl trying to make sure all our needs were met with so little. As a child, I watched the way the fear of not making those ends meet impacted people I love. As the non-disabled person in my home, I would take on many of the physical tasks because I was” the one who could” make our lives a little easier. I learned early to associate fears or uncertainty with putting more of myself into it— I am the one who can. I learned early that when something frightens me, I can double down and work harder to make it better. I can own the challenge. When people have seen this in me as an adult, I’ve been told I seem fearless, but make no mistake, I’m not. If I seem fearless, it’s because this behavior was forged from other people’s fears.

And here I am, more than 30 years later still feeling the urge to mindlessly push myself forward when faced with overwhelming tasks ahead of me, assuming that I am the one who can and therefore should. I find myself driven to prove that I can make things happen if I work longer hours, take on more responsibility, and do more.

I do not see people who struggle financially as failures, because I have seen how strong that tide can be—it pulls you along the way. I truly get that I have been privileged to be able to avoid many of the challenges that were present in my youth. That said, I am still” the one who can” who feels she should, so if I were faced with not having enough to make ends meet for my own family, I would see myself as having failed. Though I am supported and educated, most of this is due to good fortune. I will, however, allow myself the arrogance of saying I have been careful with my choices to have encouraged that luck. My identity stems from the idea that I am” the one who can” so therefore feel obligated to do the most. I can choose to stop, and with some quite literal cold water splashed in my face, I’ve made the choice to before. But that choosing to stop is not my go-to, I move forward, driven by a fear that is so a part of me that I barely notice it’s there until I’m feeling utterly worn away.

So why all the history? You see, burnout is a fickle thing. I have heard and read a lot about burnout over the years. Burnout is real. Especially now, with COVID, many of us are balancing more than we ever have before—all at once! It’s hard, and the procrastinating, the avoidance, the shutting down impacts so many amazing professionals. There are important articles that relate to what I imagine must be the majority of people out there, but not me. That’s not what my burnout looks like.

The dangerous invisibility of zealous burnout

A lot of work environments see the extra hours, extra effort, and overall focused commitment as an asset ( and sometimes that’s all it is ). They see someone trying to rise to challenges, not someone stuck in their fear. Many well-meaning organizations have safeguards in place to protect their teams from burnout. But in cases like this, those alarms are not always tripped, and then when the inevitable stop comes, some members of the organization feel surprised and disappointed. And sometimes maybe even betrayed.

Parents—more so mothers, statistically speaking—are praised as being so on top of it all when they can work, be involved in the after-school activities, practice self-care in the form of diet and exercise, and still meet friends for coffee or wine. During COVID many of us have binged countless streaming episodes showing how it’s so hard for the female protagonist, but she is strong and funny and can do it. It’s a “very special episode” when she breaks down, cries in the bathroom, woefully admits she needs help, and just stops for a bit. Truth is, countless people are hiding their tears or are doom-scrolling to escape. We know that the media is a lie to amuse us, but often the perception that it’s what we should strive for has penetrated much of society.

Women and burnout

I love men. And though I don’t love every man ( heads up, I don’t love every woman or nonbinary person either ), I think there is a beautiful spectrum of individuals who represent that particular binary gender.

That said, women are still more often at risk of burnout than their male counterparts, especially in these COVID stressed times. Mothers in the workplace feel the pressure to do all the “mom” things while giving 110 %. Mothers not in the workplace feel they need to do more to” justify” their lack of traditional employment. Women who are not mothers often feel the need to do even more because they don’t have that extra pressure at home. It’s vicious and systemic and so a part of our culture that we’re often not even aware of the enormity of the pressures we put on ourselves and each other.

And there are prices beyond happiness too. Harvard Health Publishing released a study a decade ago that “uncovered strong links between women’s job stress and cardiovascular disease”. The CDC noted,” Heart disease is the leading cause of death for women in the United States, killing 299, 578 women in 2017—or about 1 in every 5 female deaths”.

This relationship between work stress and health, from what I have read, is more dangerous for women than it is for their non-female counterparts.

But what if your burnout isn’t like that either?

That might not be you either. After all, each of us is so different and how we respond to stressors is too. It’s part of what makes us human. Don’t stress what burnout looks like, just learn to recognize it in yourself. Here are a few questions I sometimes ask friends if I am concerned about them.

Are you happy? This simple question should be the first thing you ask yourself. Chances are, even if you’re burning out doing all the things you love, as you approach burnout you’ll just stop taking as much joy from it all.

Do you feel empowered to say no? I have observed in myself and others that when someone is burning out, they no longer feel they can say no to things. Even those who don’t” speed up” feel pressure to say yes to not disappoint the people around them.

What are three things you’ve done for yourself? Another observance is that we all tend to stop doing things for ourselves. Anything from skipping showers and eating poorly to avoiding talking to friends. These can be red flags.

Are you making excuses? Many of us try to disregard feelings of burnout. Over and over I have heard,” It’s just crunch time”,” As soon as I do this one thing, it will all be better”, and” Well I should be able to handle this, so I’ll figure it out”. And it might really be crunch time, a single goal, and/or a skill set you need to learn. That happens—life happens. BUT if this doesn’t stop, be honest with yourself. If you’ve worked more 50-hour weeks since January than not, maybe it’s not crunch time—maybe it’s a bad situation that you’re burning out from.

Do you have a plan to stop feeling this way? If something is truly temporary and you do need to just push through, then it has an exit route with a
defined end.

Take the time to listen to yourself as you would a friend. Be honest, allow yourself to be uncomfortable, and break the thought cycles that prevent you from healing.

So now what?

What I just described is a different path to burnout, but it’s still burnout. There are well-established approaches to working through burnout:

• Get enough sleep.
• Eat healthy.
• Work out.
• Get outside.
• Take a break.
• Overall, practice self-care.

Those are hard for me because they feel like more tasks. If I’m in the burnout cycle, doing any of the above for me feels like a waste. The narrative is that if I’m already failing, why would I take care of myself when I’m dropping all those other balls? People need me, right?

If you’re deep in the cycle, your inner voice might be pretty awful by now. If you need to, tell yourself you need to take care of the person your people depend on. If your roles are pushing you toward burnout, use them to help make healing easier by justifying the time spent working on you.

To help remind myself of the airline attendant message about putting the mask on yourself first, I have come up with a few things that I do when I start feeling myself going into a zealous burnout.

Cook an elaborate meal for someone!

OK, I am a “food-focused” individual so cooking for someone is always my go-to. There are countless tales in my home of someone walking into the kitchen and turning right around and walking out when they noticed I was” chopping angrily”. But it’s more than that, and you should give it a try. Seriously. It’s the perfect go-to if you don’t feel worthy of taking time for yourself—do it for someone else. Most of us work in a digital world, so cooking can fill all of your senses and force you to be in the moment with all the ways you perceive the world. It can break you out of your head and help you gain a better perspective. In my house, I’ve been known to pick a place on the map and cook food that comes from wherever that is ( thank you, Pinterest ). I love cooking Indian food, as the smells are warm, the bread needs just enough kneading to keep my hands busy, and the process takes real attention for me because it’s not what I was brought up making. And in the end, we all win!

Vent like a foul-mouthed fool

Be careful with this one!

I have been making an effort to practice more gratitude over the past few years, and I recognize the true benefits of that. That said, sometimes you just gotta let it all out—even the ugly. Hell, I’m a big fan of not sugarcoating our lives, and that sometimes means that to get past the big pile of poop, you’re gonna wanna complain about it a bit.

When that is what’s needed, turn to a trusted friend and allow yourself some pure verbal diarrhea, saying all the things that are bothering you. You need to trust this friend not to judge, to see your pain, and, most importantly, to tell you to remove your cranium from your own rectal cavity. Seriously, it’s about getting a reality check here! One of the things I admire the most about my husband ( though often after the fact ) is his ability to break things down to their simplest. ” We’re spending our lives together, of course you’re going to disappoint me from time to time, so get over it” has been his way of speaking his dedication, love, and acceptance of me—and I could not be more grateful. It also, of course, has meant that I needed to remove my head from that rectal cavity. So, again, usually those moments are appreciated in hindsight.

Pick up a book!

There are many books out there that aren’t so much self-help as they are people just like you sharing their stories and how they’ve come to find greater balance. Maybe you’ll find something that speaks to you. Titles that have stood out to me include:

• Thrive by Arianna Huffington
• Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss
• Girl, Stop Apologizing by Rachel Hollis
• Dare to Lead by Brené Brown

Or, another tactic I love to employ is to read or listen to a book that has NOTHING to do with my work-life balance. I’ve read the following books and found they helped balance me out because my mind was pondering their interesting topics instead of running in circles:

• The Drunken Botanist by Amy Stewart
• Superlife by Darin Olien
• A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived by Adam Rutherford
• Gaia’s Garden by Toby Hemenway

If you’re not into reading, pick up a topic on YouTube or choose a podcast to subscribe to. I’ve watched countless permaculture and gardening topics in addition to how to raise chickens and ducks. For the record, I do not have a particularly large food garden, nor do I own livestock of any kind… yet. I just find the topic interesting, and it has nothing to do with any aspect of my life that needs anything from me.

Forgive yourself

You are never going to be perfect—hell, it would be boring if you were. It’s OK to be broken and flawed. It’s human to be tired and sad and worried. It’s OK to not do it all. It’s scary to be imperfect, but you cannot be brave if nothing were scary.

This last one is the most important: allow yourself permission to NOT do it all. You never promised to be everything to everyone at all times. We are more powerful than the fears that drive us.

This is hard. It is hard for me. It’s what’s driven me to write this—that it’s OK to stop. It’s OK that your unhealthy habit that might even benefit those around you needs to end. You can still be successful in life.

I recently read that we are all writing our eulogy in how we live. Knowing that your professional accomplishments won’t be mentioned in that speech, what will yours say? What do you want it to say?

Look, I get that none of these ideas will “fix it”, and that’s not their purpose. None of us are in control of our surroundings, only how we respond to them. These suggestions are to help stop the spiral effect so that you are empowered to address the underlying issues and choose your response. They are things that work for me most of the time. Maybe they’ll work for you.

Does this sound familiar?

If this sounds familiar, it’s not just you. Don’t let your negative self-talk tell you that you “even burn out wrong”. It’s not wrong. Even if rooted in fear like my own drivers, I believe that this need to do more comes from a place of love, determination, motivation, and other wonderful attributes that make you the amazing person you are. We’re going to be OK, ya know. The lives that unfold before us might never look like that story in our head—that idea of “perfect” or “done” we’re looking for, but that’s OK. Really, when we stop and look around, usually the only eyes that judge us are in the mirror.

Do you remember that Winnie the Pooh sketch that had Pooh eat so much at Rabbit’s house that his buttocks couldn’t fit through the door? Well, I already associate a lot with Rabbit, so it came as no surprise when he abruptly declared that this was unacceptable. But do you recall what happened next? He put a shelf across poor Pooh’s ankles and decorations on his back, and made the best of the big butt in his kitchen.

At the end of the day we are resourceful and know that we are able to push ourselves if we need to—even when we are tired to our core or have a big butt of fluff’ n’ stuff in our room. None of us has to be afraid, as we can manage any obstacle put in front of us. And maybe that means we will need to redefine success to allow space for being uncomfortably human, but that doesn’t really sound so bad either.

So, wherever you are right now, please breathe. Do what you need to do to get out of your head. Forgive and take care.