#ThirstyThursday Issue #251

🚀 A new talent incubator puts UConn freshmen on real industry projects.

🚪 Turning a side hustle into the thing that pays your rent.

💼 High demands with low control is the mix that breaks people at work.

🪙 Intuitive budgeting ditches the spreadsheet for a rough “money map.”

Takeaways:

• A design.md file is the rulebook: colors, fonts, spacing, buttons, cards. Upload it once and Claude Design turns it into a Design System that every future slide, carousel, and graphic inherits.
• Add your logo, your go-to icons, and a voice principles file, then build one reusable presentation template with title slides, section dividers, and logo placement already set. That template is what kills the reformatting.
• Put your standing feedback in a CLAUDE.md file so corrections stick. “Use transparent backgrounds for icons” or “make labels more prominent” carries into the next deck instead of getting re-typed every time.

Watch the tutorial on Youtube.

Forget the ping-pong tables. Culture comes down to whether people feel seen for their work, and the data there is hard to ignore: well-recognized employees are 45% less likely to leave, and 53% say they’d stay longer if their manager recognized them more. Yet most employees rarely get any.

Bonusly makes recognition a habit without adding to your plate. It’s a peer-to-peer platform: people give each other points for good work, points cash out for real rewards, and a recognition feed makes the good stuff visible instead of buried. Its AI companion, Bizy, reads the patterns and flags where connection is fading before it becomes a resignation.

Getting started takes an afternoon: connect Slack or Teams, set a monthly point allowance, and let the team run with it.

📙 Get our full Bonusly breakdown here.

Takeaways:

• A tax write-off, or tax deduction, reduces your taxable income by the amount of qualifying business expenses. Common examples include office supplies, advertising, software subscriptions, professional fees, business travel, and equipment used for your business.
• If something is used for both business and personal purposes, you can generally only deduct the business portion. This can apply to expenses like your cell phone, vehicle, or home office, while larger business assets may need to be deducted through depreciation.
• Keep receipts, invoices, statements, and notes showing the business purpose of each expense. Separating business and personal accounts and consistently tracking expenses in accounting software or a spreadsheet can make deductions much easier to document at tax time.

Catch the explanation on TikTok.

Takeaways:

• Export the profile first: desktop > your profile > More > Save to PDF. Upload that to Claude and it can audit your headline, About, Experience, Skills, Featured section, and keywords in one pass.
• The prompt does the heavy lifting: “Act as a LinkedIn strategist. Audit this profile and identify what is preventing people from hiring, following, or buying from this person.” Then ask for a keyword-rich headline, an About rewrite, XYZ-formula Experience bullets, and ATS-friendly keywords.
• Treat the first draft as a draft. “Cut the About section to five sentences,” “make my headline more founder-focused,” “add stronger action verbs,” and “make it sound more human” are the follow-ups that get it usable.

See the post on LinkedIn.

Fall makeup is a different bag than summer makeup, and rebuilding it one product at a time is how a $38 balm turns into a $200 receipt.

Jones Road is running its Labor Day sale through Sunday 9/7, and the discount scales with the set you build:

• 20% off 3 to 4 full-size products
• 25% off 5 to 6
• 30% off 7 or more

The pre-built Curated Sets are included, so you can skip the choosing entirely.

Miracle Balm ($38) is the one everyone asks about, a lit-from-within finish that reads as skin, no glitter and no cakiness. It is the easiest place to start a set, or the last thing to round one out.

No code needed, and US orders over $55 ship free.

👉 Build your fall set and save up to 30% before Sunday.

Takeaways:

• Warmth and competence cues account for up to 82% of the impression someone forms of you. Both are learnable, which means the read people take on you is adjustable rather than fixed.
• Your delivery carries more than your script. Facial expression and gesture matter, and so do cadence, tone, and volume, usually before anyone has processed the actual words.
• Your “ornaments” talk too. Color, jewelry, and accessories all feed the read, so on the days it counts, dress the impression you want to make.

Hear it from a body language expert on TikTok.

🎟️ S Get your invite now (NYC): On 9/16, join an intimate forum w. Scott Galloway & 50+ enterprise CAIOs.

🕯️ Safe around kids and pets, with no open flame, no fumes, and no water tank growing mold.

📩 Five minutes of nutrition, fitness, and health news each morning from All Healthy, trusted by 1M+ readers.

🥂 Joanna’s choice for a zero-proof pour that does not taste like sad juice.

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• Thu 9/17 @ 10AM PT: Beyond the Brand with Laura Weldy (SGS Only* | Join the waitlist)
• Fri 9/18 @ 9AM PT: Part 2 of a 2-Part Investing Series with Tess Waresmith (SGS Only* | Join the waitlist)

* Smart Girl Society is our private community for women who want deeper conversations, accountability, and tools that actually make life easier. Join the waitlist to get in the next round.

🧠 Quiz of the Week: [insert quiz name + link]

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