Hey, TED Talks Daily listeners, I'm Elise Hu.
Today we have an episode of another podcast from the TED Audio Collective handpicked by us for you.
For many of us, January is a time of reflection and renewal, a time to start over or aim to make some positive changes, but it can also be a time of overwhelm and stress.
In this special unsolicited advice episode of Fixable, the first one of 2026, hosts Anne Morris and Frances Fry tackle this issue by exploring how important rest and the power of intention are.
They offer unexpected tips and tricks for recovering from constant stress, owning what you need to feel alive and engaged, and creating an experience of work that unleashes your ambition.
Whatever you're dealing with at work, Fixable is there to help offering actionable insights to create meaningful change in your life and workplace.
Listen to Fixable wherever you get your podcasts.
And if you've got a problem you want fixed, call their hotline at 234-FIXABLE.
That's 234-349-2253 to leave Anne and Francis a voicemail with your workplace problem.
Learn more at the TED Audio Collective at audiocollective.ted.com.
Now on to the episode.
Enjoy.
Frances, we are more than halfway through the year now, gearing up for a quick summer break.
I feel like so far we've done what we came to do on the show.
I completely agree.
I have loved the master fixers, the teach-ins.
I think we've done everything.
I think it's been a good semester.
And, you know, I might be most proud about the fact that we give just enough advice.
Yeah.
I feel like we have been holding back a little bit, I have to say.
I think restraint has been a theme of the first half of this year.
I think so.
And it's unnatural for me, as you know.
I think it, I say it, is usually how I operate.
But for our listeners, I'm trying to moderate a little bit.
Yeah.
Well, it's good news because our plan today is to practice no restraint at all.
We had a lot more to say to Rosemary about recovery and how to get your mojo back at work.
And we're going to say all of it on this episode, which feels like the perfect way to help prepare our listeners for a proper summer season of rest and renewal.
I love it.
I love it so much.
Welcome to Fixable, a podcast from TED.
I'm your host, Anne Morris.
I'm a company builder and leadership coach.
And I'm your co-host, Frances Fry.
I'm a Harvard Business School professor, and I'm Anne's wife.
This is a show where we believe meaningful change happens fast, with some intentional rest and recovery along the way.
There is a reason a week is followed by a weekend.
Exactly.
Today on the show, we're going to give unsolicited advice to anyone who is feeling stuck at work right now, both overwhelmed and under-inspired.
We're going to tackle both parts how to get unstuck and, but also how to create an experience of work that is worthy of you and your short time on this planet.
Oh, I love your ambition.
I want us to deal with the deficit of life force, the burnout part, the part of work that feels like literally unsustainable.
And then I want to talk about how you replace that mediocrity with something else, something bigger that may even create a surplus of energy.
If we're making this equation work, we want to dial down the negative parts, but we also have to dial up the positive ones.
How does that sound as a plan?
Well, from my math mind, we are nowhere near the frontier, so I'm optimistic.
So we sometimes call this state, this experience of work, exhausted mediocrity.
And when we say that, it really hits some people hard.
And it's this mix of feeling both stressed and bored at the same time.
So our friend Adam Grant sometimes uses the word languishing to describe a variety of this experience.
It's a beautiful word, but it's something beyond just feeling stuck or stagnant.
It's also an experience where our nervous systems are jacked up, but we're not getting any payoff for it.
We're never outrunning the lion.
We're never bringing down the woolly mammoth.
We are just in this state of activity without any return.
It almost feels criminal that we're exhausted and we don't even get excellence for it.
We're exhausted and mediocre.
If I was going to be mediocre, I'd like to be well-rested.
Totally.
Something.
And today we want to get after both of these parts, which I think of as almost a renewal equation.
So there's part one, the exhaustion, which is this deficit of life force, the burnout, the part of work that is feeling unsustainable because we don't have enough energy, energy holding us up.
And then the second part is how to replace that deficiency with something else, something bigger, something more ambitious, something that's going to more reliably create, dare I say, a surplus of energy where we might even be jumping out of bed to get after it.
In our experience of work,
I feel like this is going to be a gift that so many people are ready to receive.
Okay Frances, let's start with the cause of the problem here, on the exhaustion side.
So your lovely colleague, Leslie Perlow, has done a lot of thinking on this.
Why are we all so tired at work?
Because we care so much is one part of the answer.
What Leslie's language would be, because we are always on.
And so she did just a breathtaking study Which compared teams that everyone was always on.
It was in professional services where you really are, like, your client needs you to be always on.
And she had teams that were always on individuals were always on and then teams that were collectively always on but individually had scheduled a time off.
Orders of magnitude better performance in the latter.
So you can, for a team, be always on, but it doesn't mean each individual.
Although what I see in practice is that if we're an always-on culture, everyone is always on.
And what I know from Leslie's beautiful work is that that is going to lead to exhausted mediocrity.
That is no way to win.
You are giving up performance if you're doing that.
So that's the first one.
Is that The scheduled time off for individuals?
Yeah, I was going to ask what's the remedy.
So I'm in a culture, there's an implicit expectation that I'm always on.
What's the remedy?
I think make always on a group thing, even a duo thing.
So one of us will be always on.
Got it.
That's, I think, the way and that's how she designed the experiment, because we don't want to give less service to the client, but we want our team to be able to deliver higher quality when they are on.
Okay.
So if it's a team of Anne and Frances, we can still be an always-on culture, but Anne is on part of the time, Frances is on the other part of the time.
Yeah, and I would say we have an always-on value proposition to the customer.
We don't have an always-on culture.
We have a scheduled time-off culture.
So Leslie's book is called Sleeping With Your Smartphone, which is super memorable.
Yeah.
So there's also a piece of this that is not just about job design, which I think you're offering a beautiful remedy here.
But what do I do if I've just been pulled in to the reality of being alive right now, which is an always-on human experience?
Yeah.
So I always have Leslie Perlow sitting on my shoulder, which is I have to take scheduled times off.
So I have to turn off the news.
I have to turn off the... I don't think anything replaces that.
We need scheduled time off.
Always on for any source isn't going to work.
But to be alive right now, usually a cause of exhaustion, always on is one of them.
So...
The phrase I like from her work is intentional disconnection.
Yeah, I think that's exactly right.
Being deeply disciplined about, you know, putting the phone away.
Ariana Huffington has done a lot of thinking on this in her Thrive movement.
Has a little bed for your phone.
She tucks her phone in at night.
I think all of this stuff is really helpful and it's very aligned with...
Jim Lehrer and Tony Schwartz's peak performance literature, where they found that these elite athletes allowed them to truly excel in a sustainable way over time, as they brought the same amount of discipline and obsession to their rest and recovery as they did to their training and their nutrition and all these other things we associate with elite performance.
And channeling Leslie's advice, I feel like Everyone chasing this is honoring our human biology, which is that we were designed to rest and recover, rest and recover, rest and recover, not these marathon work lives that we're trying to live.
Yeah.
And it's both marathon work lives that other people are imposing on us perhaps, but we also do it ourselves.
Like we're taking our smartphone to bed.
I got to tell you, I don't think it's because anyone else is imposing anything on us.
I think it's an inside job.
That's, I think, what we have to be accountable for.
I think how much agency we actually do have to schedule rest, set some boundaries.
I think the world is also very open to this.
I
Everyone is in a lot of pain, which is terrible.
We feel it.
I feel this acutely.
But it does mean that there's also an openness that I think is unprecedented to experiment and come up with solutions, both in our individual lives, but also inside teams and systems as large as organizations.
It's a great point.
And then use the formal and informal power we have to try new things.
Yeah.
Because this is not working.
And it's a great time to experiment, to your point.
The world seems very open.
Everyone is palpably feeling the problem.
Now's a great time to experiment with solutions.
So Frances, is there some kind of optimal schedule here?
There is not.
So interestingly, intentionality gets the headline.
You have to be intentional about the off time, but it doesn't say you have to do it between the hours of nine and five and you have to do it from here to there.
There was no evidence that one was universally better than the other, but the intentionality of the off.
That was the key ingredient.
Beautiful.
So let me poke at one other source of exhaustion that I see a lot of, which is the infectiousness of other people's emotion.
Oh, goodness.
So I'm coming at this as on the kind of empathetic scale leaning more towards maybe, than you, being deeply aware of other people's emotions.
But I want to say that you are very good at designing a life where you are limiting your exposure to emotions that you know are not going to serve you.
Yes.
So...
Talk us through this.
Sure.
You know, we just talked to Amanda Ripley.
And you know, one of the lessons from her work is that other people's emotions are a huge variable in our experience as human beings.
We know this is true for the emotions of leaders, which is this broadcast feature you have.
So what do I what do I do if that's part of my challenge?
So my operations DNA will say that you have two tools.
You can.
If there's something that's like you need to not get the full strength of it, you either reduce it or you accommodate it.
Those are my only two choices?
Those are your only two choices.
So you either reduce or accommodate.
So by reducing I think that's what I do, which is I reduce the amount that I let other people's emotions influence me by limiting my interaction with other people.
Like I literally, I quarantine either them or me and that's reduced.
And it's a great strategy.
Not everyone can reduce in every context.
If you can't, you have to figure out how to palatably accommodate, how to palatably accommodate it.
As good as I am at reducing, that's how bad I am at accommodating, which is why I'm so good at reducing.
So I want to be super clear.
But let me give you the second option because I do have degrees of freedom to reduce.
So accommodating, you know, the popular version of it today would be Mel Robbins' Let Them.
That's a beautiful accommodation.
The ultimate accommodation.
And what is Let Them?
Let them, for listeners who don't know, are a wonderful word.
First of all, it's like mystical, if you ask me.
But I'll tell you what it is, which is when, if someone else is doing something that feels negatively, emotionally contagious, let them.
They're being passive aggressive.
Let them.
If they're being inconsiderate, let them.
And she just goes through this mantra of instead of trying to control it, you let them, and then you do your own inside job of you get to choose how to respond to it.
But you... at all costs, do not try to control them.
It's like the 100% accommodation strategy.
Now, this has worked so well for people, they're getting tattoos.
Say let them.
But I'm not an accommodator in that regard.
I'm a reducer.
And what I find liberating about it, because I'm a little bit of a sponge myself, so I have to be disciplined about these kinds of boundaries.
I feel it's less about control and more about feeling responsible.
Like co-responsible.
That's great.
Like if you are upset, then I'm co-responsible for helping you feel better.
And let them to me is also about giving myself permission to not have to be a part of the solution for everybody's pain.
Maybe I have signed up for your pain, Frances.
Well, I'm very grateful for it.
Part of the contract, but that does not scale to the rest of the world.
Yeah.
I think we should think about reduce and accommodate.
I will go ahead and give a hierarchy.
Reduce everywhere you can, which is quarantine, limit, contain.
And then when you can't, let them.
That's your introverted conclusion here.
I'm my extroverted wife.
Yes, just limit your exposure to other human beings.
Problem solved, people.
You're making my point for me.
All right.
The summary for a tactic is, to the energy, if I had to pick a word, it's intention.
It's bringing deep intention to breaks, to job design, to boundaries, and really taking ownership and using the agency we have.
It can be variable depending on the situation, but using the agency, we have to take this issue quite seriously.
And even taking your intentionality all the way to how you emotionally respond to other people, as you just pointed out.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You got to own it.
You got to own it.
You're the problem.
It's you.
All right, Francis.
Part two of the equation energy sources.
A response to the mediocrity.
Part of exhausted mediocrity.
I'll start us off with another quote, which one that I love and we've shared with our listeners before, which is Howard Thurman, one of the great 20th century theologians.
He said, don't ask what the world needs.
Ask what makes you come alive and go do it because the world needs people who have come alive.
So This is the question I want to ask.
If I'm feeling a lack of aliveness in the workplace, how do I get in touch with that life force and find a way to dial it up?
This is such a rich topic and I can't wait to hear from your perspective, because you coach people on this all the time.
I'll begin with a couple of thoughts.
One is to come alive, it really helps to work on something you're passionate about.
It is order of magnitudes helpful.
I love you saying that, because I feel like passion has been beaten up as a variable in the last few years.
It is now in vogue to say it is frivolous to follow your passion.
And I now I can't help but saying I look at the demographics and if I just showed you the photos of the people that were saying it, there are very clear demographic tendencies of who's saying this.
And I like the people very much, but I disagree on their point that passion is overrated.
I think passion is underrated in the quest to alive.
Where we will agree is that it's not sufficient.
But where we disagree is it... It's not for serious people doing serious things.
Yeah.
And here's what's always funny to me.
The people who claim that passion doesn't matter have come alive doing things they're passionate about.
Oh, yeah.
The messengers are quite, quite passionate.
Yes.
And quite alive.
So the word that's also activating for me is mission, because I think what it is is finding a purpose for your life that is bigger than you.
But I want to say it does not have to be world peace.
Although if it is, we could use you out here.
But it has to be a purpose that is noble to you.
And it can be taking care of your family.
It just has to be bigger than you and your ego and identity for this to work.
I do feel like totally internal focused passion is going to somehow turn into toxicity.
Like if we're only thinking about ourselves, we have to end up being unpleasant to be around.
Oh, yeah.
I think we see that pattern all the time with people getting stuck in that place.
Yeah.
So, I mean, tactically, how do I figure that out in your experience?
Yeah.
So when I used to coach MBA students who were thinking about like, what did they want to do with, particularly the ones that came to HBS to transition from one field to another?
And they were like, I knew I wanted to transition, but I don't know what I'm interested in.
Like, let's say I could go anywhere.
I don't know.
And what I invited them to do was to be an anthropologist about themselves and just focus, float around beside them and notice where do you stop and dwell?
If you're reading the headlines of a newspaper, which articles do you read?
When you're looking at the magazine rack, which do you pick up?
When you're looking at YouTube, be judgment free.
Mm-hmm.
Observe where you are dwelling.
That's a pretty good first order of what catches your interest.
When I ask people to do that and they come back and tell me it always begins with I was super surprised to find that eye.
Yeah.
I love that.
I'll sometimes phrase it with people, what makes you weird?
You know, what makes you different?
What made you weird as a kid?
What did you do that the other kids weren't doing?
Before I found my way to writing, one of the weird things I would do, which had nothing to do with my job or my identity, was to just do these silly writing contests.
And one of them that I won, which is still my greatest publishing achievement, was Starbucks.
Starbucks was doing this.
You know they had a competition where you could send in quotes that they would put on the side of a cup.
And I was like, I don't know, 22.
And I was in a Starbucks in New York.
And I was like, oh.
Oh.
I can win that contest.
So I sent in this quote.
Well, six months later I got a package in the mail from Starbucks with a pound of coffee and a tiny little single plunger coffee maker and then like 60 cups with my quote on the side.
Yeah.
This is what I want.
They put it all over the world in the hands of millions of Starbucks customers.
I know because a subset of those customers has tracked me down for the last 20 years because the quote starts.
The irony of commitment is that it's deeply liberating.
There's my girl.
And so I still get messages like, I decided to propose to my wife or I decided to quit my job.
So that was fucking weird, right?
And yes, I got a signal back that, okay, maybe there was something here.
So that was useful.
But the more useful data in my experience and my experience coaching people is the fact that I was doing it in the first place.
I love it.
What do you do that's weird?
What are you doing on the down low?
What are you doing on the down low?
Yeah, that doesn't really fit with the persona you have shared with the world.
Yeah, it's really good.
It's really good.
What I'm doing on the down low right now.
Yeah, this is something I feel like I should ask my wife.
Oh, I'm creating crazy shit all day long.
All day long.
And it is, if you look at the pattern, a clue to the things you're passionate about and the gifts you can share with the world.
This is another episode.
But it is, to your point, an absolutely legitimate place to start.
And if you really are struggling, start here.
Yeah, I do think it's just a beautiful way.
And if I anthropologically observed what I'm doing, I am experimenting like crazy with the art form of videos for teaching.
Because, and it reveals, I really want to democratize access to education.
Like I really want to, and I don't know how, but I think videos are going to be part of it.
And so if you saw me on the down low, when you're like, what are you doing?
For sure, this is what I'm doing.
No, in the middle of the night, that's what you're doing.
That's what I'm doing.
You know, early morning, that's what you're doing.
And it absolutely connects back up to what you are most deeply passionate about, which is scaling access to learning and insight to everyone.
I think that's how I would summarize your mission in the world.
Yeah.
But here's the thing.
This top-down mission, purpose, we're going to rehabilitate the word passion.
Yes.
God bless you, Scott Galloway.
And Reid Hoffman.
And Reid Hoffman.
They're wonderful men.
Scott's been on the show.
We feel what they're passionate about.
We are so rooting for these beautiful, emotional men, build empires on top of their passion and influence our boys.
Please please, continue to.
Okay, but that's not enough.
We also need to think about this problem from the bottom up.
Which is what are the?
Okay, we've dealt with the macro passion purpose, but you also have to deal with your micro needs.
I like this On a daily basis.
This is where you and I really, we just go down different paths.
This is a fork in the road.
And we can't outrun these.
And this was a hard lesson for me to learn.
I started out in the not-for-profit world.
The mission was deeply activating.
The daily experience was so brutal for me in some of these organizations.
Yeah.
Because I had a need for steep learning, variety, competition, risk-taking.
I have to have a certain amount of risk in my life.
And we're 20 years into the marriage.
So if I'm not getting it at home...
No, no, no, no.
Get it at home.
I got to go.
I got to take responsibility and go out in the world and do like stuff with stakes.
Yeah.
You know, get on stages and and build companies that might fail and all that stuff.
I got to go get those needs met.
So what I'll say to people is, OK, mission.
Great.
Beautiful.
Let's figure it out.
But now you wake up in the morning.
You go into work.
What happens next?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And here's how I like, if I was going to take that beautiful thought and just put in five categories of bottom-up needs, and I like to think about them because you and I we're similar on a minority of them.
Oh, the overlap is minimal.
I think that's why we're good collaborators.
I think it's really beautiful.
But so variety, you need it in so many aspects of your life.
You are like desperately seeking variety.
I am desperately seeking the optimal way.
Once I have optimized.
Mastery, optimal, like it's a totally different need.
There is not a lot of variety in mastery.
I mean, there's variety early on when you're learning, but as you get closer and closer.
And so, for example.
Like the 10000 hours.
Do you know how much my throat closes whenever I hear you're supposed to?
You need to do something for 10000 hours before you're good at it.
Oh my God, it's my nightmare.
And then for me, it also goes all the way down to, you know, what I eat.
Like, I do not seek variety in what I eat.
I think it's a really serious thing.
Makes me neither a good or a bad person.
You seek a lot of variety in what you eat.
I see you coaching me to remove the judgment.
Yeah, yeah.
You come at me with a lot of judgment on this one.
Variety is not superior.
You're eating the same turkey sandwich you've had For 50 years.
And there is, and your variety is not superior to my consistency.
It's not.
No, but here's what's really important about this conversation.
We'll let the listeners decide.
Here's what's really important about the conversation is it is about without judgment, because this is another inside job without self-judgment.
I'd like a little without other judgment.
Go ahead.
Naming, naming, owning, solving for your micro needs at work.
Your needs.
And yeah, and I think it really is important.
And if you need variety, don't deny yourself variety.
And if you need consistency, don't deny yourself consistency.
And I think those are on the variety and the mastery.
Where you and I do overlap, I think, is that we both need steep warning curves.
Boredom comes in fast and furious and hard for us.
And when we're bored, nothing good happens.
And so we have to keep making things more challenging in order to be able to stick to it.
Yeah, often it's one of the places where I'll start coaching people is okay, let's come up with a list.
Like, what do you need most from work?
Give me your top five.
And how well are you meeting these needs?
You, not this corporation that is doing this to you.
How well are you meeting these needs right now?
And then how might we evolve this job so that it gets closer to what you need?
And if you can't get it here, then let's plot an exit for where you can find it.
I love the bottom-up and the top-down and the top-down needs and the anthropologist's judgment-free perspective of ourselves.
One more.
I want to get in one more sandbox on this, Frances.
And I'm going to describe this one as at a zero.
Okay.
Yeah, I love this.
And there is a point, you and I talk to a lot of companies.
We work with a lot of great teams.
There is a point early on in every conversation we have with leaders and teams of leaders where you say some variation on oh interesting.
Those goals are terrific.
And what would happen if we added a zero?
You also sometimes call this the magic dust question where, if you could sprinkle magic dust, what would be different tomorrow than it is today?
It is a totally electric moment when you give people license to really dream.
So what does that look like for people listening on the scale of an individual life?
Yeah.
So I think...
In my experience, and this is quite counter to a lot of the popular advice that I hear.
So I will tell you in my experience, but I'm right, but I will just tell you humbly, in my experience, that the more ambitious you are, you will achieve more.
Ambition is our friend.
So adding a zero to a goal is a delicious way to thrive.
Cutting a timeline in half is a delicious way to experiment and find new creative ways of doing things.
And I sometimes look at the advice the same way that I hear the advice that oh, passion is overrated.
I often hear that from a lot of men.
You know what I hear from a lot of women?
Without their saying it, it's, you know what?
Just concentrate on the micro steps.
Just do one small thing today.
And it's so empathetic, but I couldn't disagree more.
Don't start with a small thing.
Add a zero.
I actually think if you start with a small thing, you're going to end up in a path that I can totally see the destination from here.
And I don't want to be able to see the destination.
I want it to be that far away.
And the path may be one step at a time, but what I hear you saying to people is let's pick a destination that's worthy of you.
Like this is, you're going to get up every day and do something hard.
So like what I need and I need it to feel, I want you to give it your all.
I don't want, I don't want it to be so possible as just, just do one micro thing tomorrow.
Oh, that's your 10,000 hours, how your throat closes.
My throat closes to this so much.
Cause I'm like you're.
These people are not going to live up to their potential if you let them do that.
And people sometimes ask about timelines.
I think a lot about Peter Drucker's observation that people often overestimate what they can do in a year, but they underestimate what they can do in five years.
And so the timeline I'll sometimes push people on is three to five years.
Let's start with the three to five years.
If you want to dare to dream and I suspect you're shorter but if you want to dare to dream what your life could feel like in three to five years, what could happen.
What could go right?
As human beings, we're wired to think so much about what could go wrong.
Let's really bring some ambition to what could go right.
And I, you know, I don't know if it's the age of AI or now.
I feel like we are just way underestimating what can happen in three to five years.
I don't even know how to think about that.
I mean, here's my reference point.
Most people have annual development conversations and they talk about like oh well, you know what am I going to do this year.
When I, I'm like, that's obsolete. you should be having them quarterly and then monthly.
Some of your high performers, weekly and maybe even daily.
So this notion of like, even when you say three to five years, I'm like, oh goodness, no.
And I bet if Peter Drucker were alive today, he would update the time, but I'm just hypothesizing.
Yeah, I like dragging him into this against his will.
But I think that's totally provocative thought.
I love it.
In the age of AI, how would we update that observation?
And I think the point is very well taken.
Here's what I'll also say is a lesson from our work. is that a huge amount of energy gets released.
Once you figure out what the ambition is, a huge amount of energy gets released from simply beginning.
Oh, yeah.
Like taking action, addressing problems, choosing to be in motion.
It's not just an antidote to anxiety, which it is it also, if you think about the emotional impact, the release of relief into the system And the license to dream about what could go right as we start to move forward.
There is just tremendous power to being in motion.
You know I would have these coaching conversations with people and we'd be halfway through and I got them in touch with their ambition.
And then they were like, all right, you know what?
I'm going to schedule a meeting with you and three to five weeks, i'm gonna go really think about it.
Three to five weeks and we'll have a planning session then and i was like, or how about now?
And i just became known as how about now?
I'm sure people closed their doors when they saw me coming, but i have to tell you, when we did the how about now?
It was gorgeous, often better than the three to five weeks.
Those three to five weeks yes, you're planning, but you're also just finding creative ways to say no and to limit your ambition.
I love that as a summary mantra bumper sticker for this second part of the equation, which is to get started on dreaming big.
Thank you for listening to this episode.
Your participation helps us make great shows like this.
Please keep reaching out to us.
If you want to figure out a question about your own workplace problem together, send us a, And we hope that you'll enjoy them.
Fixable is a podcast brought to you by TED and Pushkin Industries.
It's hosted by me, Anne Morris.
And me, Frances Fry.
This episode was produced by Rahima Nassa.
Our team includes Constanza Gallardo, Banban Chang, Michelle Quint, Daniela Baloreso and Roxanne Heilash.
Our show is mixed by Louis at StoryArt.
