Hey 👋 I’m Jessi
I’m a writer and a co-conspirator. By day, I’m a senior editor-at-large at LinkedIn where I host Hello Monday. Follow me on LinkedIn for my most immediate updates.
As a child, I hoped to be a poet. I spent most of my career writing for magazines like Wired, Fortune, BusinessWeek and TIME. My favorites stories involved spending time trying to understand some of our most important leaders, people like Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and one of AI’s most important scientists, Fei-Fei Li.
I care deeply about how tech evolves. Now I spend more of my time thinking about how all of that software changes things for people I know and care about. I live between Brooklyn, NY and Tupelo, MS with my wife, our two young children, and a precocious puppy named Iggy Peck.
During the pandemic, I wrote a book about how everyone in my family came out of the closet. At first it seemed really different than my earlier work. But in the end, it addressed the same themes that all my strongest magazine stories explored: how we, as people, try to understand each other better, connect, and feel like we belong.
It’s called The Family Outing, and you can find it here.
About Hello Monday
Hello Monday with Jessi Hempel is a go-to show for building a successful career while managing the demands of a full life. As someone navigating the balance between career aspirations, financial security, and personal commitments, I try to speak directly to the challenges of this stage of life. Over the past six years, the show has evolved from exploring the changing nature of industries to something even more personal—understanding how we, as individuals, transform to keep up with these shifts. It’s about how we cultivate the resilience and reinvention we need to make ends meet and find fulfillment in today’s increasingly complex work environment.
If you’ve landed here, you’re likely in the midst of a significant change: dealing with a lay-off; quitting a job you once loved; starting to transform a hobby into a career; figuring out how to care for an aging parent, welcome a new baby, or send a teenager off to college. Each episode features immediate pragmatic takeaways gleamed from conversations with leaders, entrepreneurs, and change-makers who have taken bold career pivots, tackled workplace challenges, or found personal growth amid professional turmoil. These are people who’ve reshaped their lives on their own terms, showing us the power of resilience, curiosity, and self-awareness in uncertain times.
At its core, the Hello Monday community understands that financial security and meaningful work are deeply connected. My interviews go beyond job titles, focusing on how we can balance professional ambition with the responsibilities of family, health, and personal well-being. For anyone ready to rethink what they want from work and life, Hello Monday is both a sounding board and a guide.
About this substack…
This newsletter is my place to explore the ideas that come up in my Hello Monday interviews, my conversations with colleagues working in technology, and the reporting that I do for articles and books. I collect the articles and audio I want to remember here, and keep up with the people I follow.
I don't write for thousands. I write to exchange ideas with people I've met and who matter to me, in hopes that together we can figure out something more about where humanity is going and how we all evolve. This is a team sport. Please let me know what to think about, where to train my attention, where you are training yours.
