be more easily influenced
let your curiosity and evolution triumph over your ego and comfort in the familiar.
Welcome to Good Work - your weekly work therapy appointment.
Each week you’ll get an idea to consider and an exercise to put it into practice, plus my POV on a reader question about work. The goal will always be to push you toward more good work, because I think you’re capable of it.
Today’s idea
Can you hear it? Our parents and our teachers cautioning us against being easily influenced when we were kids? Telling us that just because Timmy said something was cool didn’t mean it was? It’s time to grow past that, because opening yourself up to being influenced by the people and the world around you is one of the fastest unlocks to a high growth, discovery-led life.
Consider new ideas and perspectives you read here on Substack. Invest in conversations you have with peers, leaders, and strangers - ask follow up questions. Investigate and dig deeper into content you consume. Delight in and test new technology, and try on new possibilities. Soak up new environments and norms you find yourself in. Treat art, music, culture and trends as important inputs into your work. Change your mind about things you used to think were true.
At a certain point, you need to let your curiosity and a willingness to evolve triumph over protecting an identity you created and adopted in outdated circumstances.
The key is not to be influenced any anything and everything, but instead to identify and separate your core belief system from your working belief system. Then, you can hold your core system close while pushing your working system to adapt over time based on new information.
Your core belief system are your values, and your values are your filter as you internalize new information. For me personally, these values include doing no harm to others, favoring progress over tradition, creating strong community systems, measuring value beyond dollars, etc.
Your working belief system is your POV on the current world around you, particularly when it comes to work. With all the information you have, what do you think is currently important? What can you de-prioritize? What skills should you invest in learning? What does good look like in your field? What’s the highest impact work you can be doing? etc.
I recommend the following framework each time you encounter an interesting new perspective or piece of information:
Step 1: Parse
The human brain can only consume a few pieces of information at once - choose the ones that apply most directly to your daily life. For example, if you attend a panel with thought leaders in your field, you’ll need to parse through everything they say to pull 3-4 key messages or takeaways out.
Step 2: Evaluate
Take those 3-4 nuggets and evaluate them against your working system and your core system. Where do they align? Where do they conflict? If they conflict with your existing systems, have you developed conviction that you should shift your working system to include this new information?
Step 3: Integrate
Update your working system with the new information. It’s like a software update! Sometimes software updates are nearly unnoticeable, and sometimes they really fuck your shit up. Either way, they’re important.
It’s cool to evolve. It’s interesting to be well informed. It’s compelling to be able to cite a variety of examples to support your beliefs. It’s admirable to change your opinion. Be willing to be influenced.
In practice
You’re not trying to become impressionable; you’re learning how to let new information touch you without destabilizing who you are.
Notice what affects you
For the next 24 hours, pay attention to the moments that shift you.
Something that makes you pause, feel curious, rethink an assumption, or feel energized
A line you highlight, a comment that sticks, a song that changes your mood, a conversation that lingers
At the end of the day:Write down 3 things that influenced you.
Note the format (conversation, writing, video, environment) and the feeling it created.
Practice noticing what gets through your filter.
Map your influence patterns
Your taste leaves clues. Make a quick list:3 people whose work reliably shapes how you think
3 pieces of media you return to regularly, or have returned to recently
3 places (digital or IRL) that inspire you
Then ask:What values or themes connect them?
What kinds of ideas seem to influence your working beliefs?
What ideas or perspectives never land for you and why?
Practice being influenceable
Choose one input this week that you’d normally scroll past or dismiss:
A perspective outside your industry
A creator with a different background or style
A tool, format, or idea you’ve been skeptical of
Run it through the framework:What’s worth integrating or considering?
What doesn’t belong in your core or working system?
What small update could this prompt in how you work or think?
Hold your values steady, let your working beliefs stay flexible, and you’ll know exactly how to let the world influence you without losing yourself.
Office hours
Q: What is your take on being “professional” vs. being “authentic” at work?
A: Being “professional” and being “authentic” aren’t opposites. Professionalism is just the skill of expressing your authentic self in a way that respects context, power dynamics, and the people around you.
Authenticity isn’t about unfiltered self-expression or saying everything you think; it’s about alignment with self. When your values, perspective, and behavior are consistent (even if you’re adapting your tone, language, etc to the room you’re in), you build trust.
The problem isn’t authenticity at work, it’s the outdated version of professionalism that confuses credibility with emotional distance, neutrality, or sameness. Real professionalism is clarity, reliability, good judgment, and care for impact - there are plenty of ways to deliver on that while still acknowledging and expressing your personality, belief systems, and interests.
Free yourself from the goal of fitting a mold, and instead invest into learning how to bring more of yourself into the room in a way that’s useful, legible, and constructive.
Until our appointment next week,
