If you’re a regular reader, you’ll notice you haven’t heard from me since, oh, 2023. Alas! Just as everyone else started a Substack, I hit an epic case of writer’s block. I have spent the past year wondering: do I have anything at all to say?
And, I have spent the past year saying a lot, every week on the show, Hello Monday. About careers and capitalism, about the promises and disappointments of technology, about midlife and how the heck anyone is supposed to make meaning out of the time-starved chaos of care-giving/paying the bills/being ambitious/voting/potty-training/etc. January 2025 brings new urgency to my desire to explore these themes, deeply, in conversation with people (like you) who are also wrestling with them. And so, I’m bringing the newsletter back. It’ll arrive every Monday morning with the sharpest take-aways from the show and a string of observations. I hope you’ll flag it in your Inbox, and reply when an idea resonates.
Maybe you’re wondering, who is Jessi Hempel exactly?
I’m a writer and a co-conspirator. By day, I’m a senior editor-at-large at LinkedIn where I host Hello Monday.
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. These days 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.
Maybe you’re wondering, what’s Hello Monday about?
Hello Monday with Jessi Hempel is your go-to show for building a successful career while managing the demands of a full life. You can find it anywhere you listen to podcasts, and starting Monday, you can find it in full video on YouTube (!!). 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.
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 activists 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 conversations 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.
You could also be wondering, why this newsletter?
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.
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