Critical Skills

Most first impression advice focuses on you — how you look, how you speak, how you present yourself. This article flips that entirely. Drawing on the quiet philosophy of an MIT Dean of Students and Unitarian Minister, and confirmed by modern conversation research, The Attention Advantage makes a compelling case that the most powerful impression you can leave has almost nothing to do with you. When you make another person feel genuinely seen and heard, they don’t just like you — they remember you. With two vivid real-world stories, accessible science, and a simple challenge readers can try today, this piece offers a fresh, counterintuitive take on one of professional life’s most over-coached topics.

America’s national debt has crossed $38.5 trillion — growing at $92,912 every second.
Interest payments now exceed defense spending.
Social Security faces insolvency by 2032.
And the two political factions that must address these crises can’t agree on basic facts, let alone solutions.
In this new article, we identify three structural realities locked in an impossible contradiction — the Constraint Triangle — and map five futures that can emerge from it:
slow erosion, grand bargain, political realignment, national rupture, or democratic collapse.
Each scenario is grounded in data, not ideology.
The question isn’t whether a reckoning is coming.
It’s which kind — and whether we’re equipped to navigate it.
Read the full analysis now.

AI gave every professional the same engine. So what separates the ones who accelerate from the ones who stall? Here are the eight skills that determine whether AI makes you more valuable — or more replaceable. This is the framework. Put it in your wallet!