Work & Money

One Slack message away from losing it? Here’s a smarter way to push back at work

Simon Sinek’s priority trick flips the script without putting your job at risk.

There’s “Oh, boy, I have a lot to do today,” and then there’s “I’M ONE SLACK MESSAGE AWAY FROM BURNING THIS PLACE DOWN!”

If the occasional perfect storm of unavoidable crisis makes things at work tough, well… tough, that’s life. But if you wake up every Monday already behind, already stressed, already bracing for the next task dump? That’s not a productivity issue, that’s a conversation that needs to happen sooner than later.

In this story by Erik Barnes, leadership expert Simon Sinek shares a subtle shift that can completely change how you push back. Instead of saying, “I have too much on my plate,” he suggests asking your boss to help you prioritize everything they’ve already assigned.

By shifting the focus from your stress to their priorities, you protect your reputation, create accountability, and quietly build a system that prevents future overload. It also won’t hurt to remind your boss just how much you do.

People who’ve tried it swear it works. The magic is in how you ask.

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And what did we learn?

Yesterday, we shared a deep dive into the early, lesser-known parts of George Washington’s life. I asked you, GOOD readers, if you knew what Washington did for a living before he became the man of legend. Well… I goofed! As Judy Simmons noted, the image in our article showed the answer. So now I don’t know whether 70% of you genuinely knew the answer or were just very observant. Ha!

• A Lawyer, like many founding fathers. (7.8%)

• A land surveyor, mapping the frontier. (73.0%) ✅

• Tobacco Merchant, yellowing his teeth before losing them. (11.3%)

• Nothing, he went straight into military service. (7.8%)

Family

The tiny nightly ritual that may be quietly building empathy in children

What 14 nights of bedtime stories did to kids’ brains surprised neuroscientists

Many parents love reading to their children at bedtime. It’s tradition, it’s fun, it’s a delightful bedtime ritual. Research shows that more than half of families make evening stories part of their routine. I did it without ever stopping to think why, which makes me different than neuroscientist Erin Clabough. She couldn’t help wondering what those 15 quiet minutes are actually doing inside a child’s brain. And what might be lost when we stop reading aloud once kids can decode words on their own.

Clabough and her team studied families with children ages 6 to 8. For two weeks, parents read one illustrated book each night. Half read straight through. The other half paused once at a moment of conflict to ask questions like, “How would you feel?” and “What would you do?”

After just 14 nights, both groups of kids showed measurable gains in empathy and creative thinking. The kids whose parents paused and reflected generated even more imaginative responses. But here’s the surprising part: simply reading was enough to move the needle.

In a culture pulling families toward screens and packed schedules, the takeaway is quietly powerful. Those 15 minutes before bed might be building far more than a love of stories.

Health

He thought it was a gym injury but the pregnancy test said otherwise

A mystery pain, a baffled medical team, and one test no one expects a teenage boy to take.

This is exactly the kind of case the writers of House would have devoured. Teen boy, mystery pain no one can explain, every scan coming back without a clear answer, until the cranky doctor who will not let it go hands him... a pregnancy test.

That was real life for 18-year-old Byron Geldard. What he thought was a gym injury turned out to be something far more serious, as Adam Albright Hanna reports in this story. Specialists at the Teenage Cancer Trust unit in Cambridge used the pregnancy test to look for a hormone that usually shows up in pregnant women, but can also be a red flag for certain cancers.

The result finally cracked the case and helped doctors move fast on treatment that saved his life. Now Byron is sharing his very strange diagnosis story to nudge other guys to take weird symptoms seriously.

On February 11, 2016, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) announced the first direct detection of gravitational waves, proving, again, that Einstein was right.

A century earlier, general relativity predicted that when massive objects accelerate, say, two black holes spiraling around each other, they should send ripples through spacetime itself. As those black holes whip faster and closer, they churn the fabric of the universe, releasing energy as waves that stretch and squeeze space as they pass. By the time one of those waves reached Earth, after traveling 1.3 billion light-years, it caused a distortion smaller than a proton’s width. LIGO detected it anyway.

To do that required instruments of almost absurd scale and sensitivity: two giant L-shaped observatories in Louisiana and Washington State, each with 4-kilometer-long vacuum tunnels. Laser beams bounce back and forth inside those arms, and when a gravitational wave passes, one arm becomes infinitesimally longer while the other becomes shorter. The change is about one ten-thousandth the width of a proton, yet measurable. That precision is why we invested over a billion dollars across decades: not just to confirm a theory, but to build a machine capable of sensing the faint tremors of colliding black holes.

Relativity already helps your phone’s GPS account for distortions in space and time; gravitational-wave astronomy promises something just as profound. A brand-new way to observe the universe.

If telescopes let us see light, LIGO lets us hear gravity. And every time humanity develops a new sense, the biggest discoveries tend to follow.

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