✅ Today’s Checklist:
📅 TOMORROW 10/22 @ 9AM PT: Three simple AI fixes for less busywork and a stronger case for your next raise. Save your free seat.
🤔 Trivia: Why do apples float when you bob for them? Find out.
🎃 Everything you need for Halloween, from costumes to candy, in one place.
Simple – waiting for one liner
💡 Radiologists want every woman’s breast cancer risk assessed by age 25.
😬 57% of workers say anxiety makes them work harder, and it tends to backfire fast.
🎁 Snack gift boxes for every client, coworker and remote teammate on your list.
You paste in the plan you’ve been sitting on all week, the one you’re pitching to your boss on Friday, and ask AI what it thinks. It tells you the proposal is clear, well structured, and compelling. You feel great. Then your boss asks one question in the first thirty seconds that the plan has no answer for.
It isn’t just you. Stanford researchers tested 11 AI models, including ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, and found they endorsed people’s views about 49% more often than humans did. People also rated those flattering answers as more trustworthy and said they’d go back to that AI next time. So the answer that feels best is often the one that helps you least, and it’s also the one that keeps you coming back.
You can get a more honest read with a few small changes.
1. Ask for the case against it. “What do you think?” invites a compliment. Try: “Give me the three strongest reasons my boss would say no to this, ranked by how likely each one is.” Now it has to go looking for problems.
2. Take yourself out of it. Paste in your plan and say: “A colleague sent me this proposal and asked for honest feedback. What are its weakest points?” It’s a lot easier for AI to be blunt about a plan when it doesn’t think you wrote it.
3. Give it permission to disagree, once. Add a line to your custom instructions: “When you think I’m wrong, say so directly, and skip the opening compliments.” When we asked, 62% of you had never opened custom instructions, weren’t sure what they were, or hadn’t touched them in ages, so this one takes two minutes and works in every chat after.
That gets you honest pushback. The other half is when you ask for it. If you ask for AI’s opinion before you’ve formed your own, its take becomes yours without you noticing. That order is the third fix I’m teaching tomorrow, so you walk into the meeting with your own thinking, already pressure-tested.
🗓️ The Explain-It-Once Method: 3 Simple AI Fixes to Cut Busywork and Get Paid More. Tomorrow 10/22, 9am PT, free. Save your seat.
Joanna (TA Co-Founder)
It’s 4:47 p.m. and you’re on tab nine: LinkedIn in one window, a spreadsheet in another, a half-written cold email in a third, and a sneaking suspicion the address you found is two jobs out of date. Prospecting eats the hours you meant for actual selling.
Apollo pulls that whole scramble into one place. Apollo is the only tool you need to run modern GTM, featuring data enrichment, sequencing, automated messaging, and intelligence all in one connected system.
Start with the data: 240M+ contacts across 30M+ companies, with 98% email accuracy, so your outreach reaches the person who can actually say yes. Then let the AI Assistant build the list and draft the sequence. Already living in Claude, ChatGPT, or Perplexity? Apollo works right inside them, so you can ask for “VP of Marketing at Series B fintechs in Austin” and get real names back.
Whether you manage a sales team of twelve or you are the sales team, it fits. Over 600,000 companies already run on it, and the Free plan lets you try it before you pitch it to your boss.
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about my best friend’s mom’s fight with terminal breast cancer, and sadly, we lost her this past week.
I’ve had the privilege of walking five of my loved ones through the end, and I handled the administration for most of them (or rather, all the admin that death leaves behind).
Somewhere along the way I became the “expert” friends and family call for this part. When my uncle died with no will or trust, I was his next of kin, which meant a mountain of paperwork, affidavits and court filings. If you’re in it right now, just know I’ve been there. Death is hard.
Life is tough, but so are you. You’ve got this. One day at a time, one thing at a time.
When my best friend asked me what to do, I realized I should write it down for everyone. Her mom had her affairs in order, which makes this so much easier, so I wrote it for both situations: the person who left a trust behind, and the person who left nothing sorted at all.
Start with these five:
Order extra death certificates. They take about two weeks, and you’ll want 5 to 10 certified copies.
Build one master list of every bank, card, account, bill and vehicle, plus everyone who needs to hear the news. You’ll reuse it more than once.
Get into the safe deposit box early. Some banks seal it the moment they learn of a death, and you want the will, deeds and policies out first.
Check beneficiary designations. Whoever’s named on a life insurance policy, 401(k) or IRA gets it directly, no matter what the will says.
Flag their file with the three credit bureaus to stop identity theft before it starts, then pull their credit report to find accounts you didn’t know existed.
The full checklist covers the rest, from Social Security to their Apple account to the house (and yes, cleaning out the fridge, because future-you will be grateful). Laws vary by state, so use it as your map and loop in an attorney when things get complicated.
TA Team Tip: Every one of us on the TA team is in therapy, and we can’t recommend it enough. You cannot pour all of this out of an empty cup, so if you can, find a therapist who can help you carry the grief while you handle everything else.
If you’ve been through this and something saved you that isn’t on the list, hit reply and tell us. We’ll add the best tips to the checklist so the next person has an easier road.
Thania (TA Content Mgr)
You’ve spent years getting good at something, like managing people, planning events, getting new hires through their first 90 days or untangling a budget. Plenty of people would pay to learn that from you. A workshop is one of the simplest ways to teach it, whether it becomes a side hustle or just the thing you’re known for at work.
The harder part is running one people actually remember. Life-Changing Workshops is hosting a free, live masterclass on exactly that, from the team behind Designing & Leading Life-Changing Workshops (40,000+ copies sold). You’ll learn:
How to design a session around experience and discovery, beyond a stack of slides
How your presence as the leader shapes the room
What this could look like for your own expertise, whether it’s your first workshop or your fiftieth
It runs three hours, live on Monday, Oct. 26, from 9am to 12pm PT. Spots are by application.
👉 Thinking about trying Pendulum? Read our full review before you buy.
🌿 Calmer evenings and deeper sleep, paid for with FSA dollars.
🧠 Therapy that fits around your calendar: BetterHelp matches you with a licensed therapist in 24 to 48 hours.
💨 Already own DeWalt batteries? This cordless turbo blower clears desks, car seats, and patios.
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