Few believe Meta will abandon VR entirely, but many see an unmistakable pivot as resources move toward AI systems and devices such as smart glasses.
The post Meta’s Reality Labs Cuts Add to Fears of ‘VR Winter’ appeared first on TechRepubli…
Twenty years ago, as the top digital and innovation executive for Citi’s credit card business, I led the team that spent months building what looked like a brilliant partnership. We’d found a startup with a disruptive payments platform—one…
The acquisition is a shift toward tighter control over the physical supply chain required to scale quantum computers.
The post Quantum Firm IonQ to Buy Chip Maker SkyWater for $1.8B appeared first on TechRepublic.
Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pa…
As an operative researcher for luxury retail companies, I spent my career grabbing onto one corporate contract after the next, like a tree-swinging retainer monkey. But in a tariff-distressed industry, those contract “branches” grew further and furthe…
I’m always amazed at how easily we give our time to others without thinking, and then are mad later when it was wasted. What exactly did we think was going to happen? That everyone was going to be prepared, productive, and appreciative?
Time …
A lot of people chase bigger paychecks and fancier titles, convinced that their next role will finally make them happy. I know I did.
That’s why I spent years stuck in a job that, on paper, many would consider glamorous. But deep down ins…
Henry Ford famously noted, “Whether you think you can do it or not, you are usually right.” His point was that beliefs, especially about our talents, performance, and even luck, can be self-fulfilling. Irrespective of whether they are right or wrong, they will become true by influencing objective success outcomes.
Ford was hardly alone. Along the same lines, decades of psychological research show that beliefs matter, often profoundly so. Perhaps the most influential work comes from Albert Bandura’s theory of self-efficacy, defined as people’s beliefs in their capability to organize and execute the actions required to manage prospective situations. Across hundreds of studies, higher self-efficacy has been linked to greater motivation, resilience, learning, and performance. People who believe they can improve are more likely to set challenging goals, invest effort, persist in the face of difficulty, and recover from failure.
Closely related ideas emerged from attribution theory and expectancy value models, which showed that individuals who attribute success to effort rather than fixed ability, and who believe their actions will make a difference, tend to perform better in school and at work. The most popular variant of these, at least in the world of HR and management, has been Carol Dweck’s research on growth versus fixed mindsets, which popularized the idea that believing that abilities can be developed encourages learning-oriented behavior, greater perseverance, and better responses to feedback.
Taken together, this body of research persuaded a large number of people of the importance of mindset, implying a counterintuitive causal chain whereby beliefs shape performance—rather than the other way around. Specifically, the story goes, irrespective of how rational our thoughts are, they will likely shape attention, effort, emotional reactions, and behavior, which in turn impacts tangible results and outcomes.
A mental software update
Suitably, much of the self-help industry has run with this idea at full speed. Bookstores, podcasts, LinkedIn feeds, and corporate off-sites are now saturated with advice urging us to “reframe,” “manifest,” “believe harder,” and “upgrade our mindset.” According to this logic, success is largely a mental software update away. Change your thoughts, and the universe will follow!
This is where things start to get a little silly. Mindset does not suspend physics, probability, or competence. It still matters whether you can actually cross the road without getting hit by a bus. And even if you firmly believe you are Serena Williams on the tennis court, lacking the ability to play tennis means you may be the only person on earth who shares that belief. Confidence does not magically produce a serve, a backhand, or a Grand Slam title.
Motivational cosplay
At its most extreme, mindset culture drifts into motivational cosplay: people repeating affirmations in the mirror while ignoring the inconvenient details of skill, preparation, competition, and luck. Worse, it can quietly turn failure into a moral flaw. If you didn’t succeed, you must not have believed enough, visualized hard enough, or optimized your morning routine sufficiently. Structural barriers, unequal opportunities, and plain bad luck are written out of the story.
The irony is that the science never claimed mindset was omnipotent. Beliefs help when they are tethered to reality. They amplify effort, persistence, and learning, but they cannot substitute for ability, practice, or opportunity. Positive thinking works best when paired with negative feedback, deliberate practice, and a sober assessment of constraints.
In short, mindset matters (a bit), but not in the magical way the self-help industry sells it. Thinking you can do something helps you try. It does not guarantee you will succeed. And no amount of positive thinking will turn wishful confidence into world-class talent.
Modest effects
Indeed, a closer look at the scientific evidence indicates that popular interpretations on the power of mindset and positive thinking have gone too far.
First, the effects of mindset are actually not that large. Meta-analyses show that growth mindset interventions produce small to moderate effects, particularly when compared with structural factors such as prior ability, socioeconomic status, quality of instruction, or access to opportunity. Put differently, believing you can improve is helpful, but it is no substitute for actually improving. Between thinking you are as good as Lionel Messi and being half as good as him, the latter is unequivocally preferable—unless your goal is to impress people who don’t understand soccer, in which case you can hope to deceive or fool them! Confidence without competence may feel empowering, but it rarely wins matches, promotions, or championships. (It does make for popular sitcom characters like Michael Scott or David Brent, though.)
Second, beliefs do not operate in a vacuum. Confidence helps most when it is paired with real skills, feedback, and environments that reward effort. The problem with overvaluing confidence or self-belief is that, roughly half the time, it is correlated with actual ability. When people are genuinely competent, their confidence is often earned, which is why Muhammad Ali could plausibly claim that “it isn’t bragging if you can back it up.” In those cases, belief is less a psychological trick than a reasonably accurate signal of underlying skill.
The trouble starts when confidence drifts away from competence. Underconfidence, while uncomfortable, can be oddly functional: It pushes people to prepare more, seek feedback, and close gaps they suspect (or know) they have. Accurate confidence, by contrast, reflects self-awareness—a realistic calibration between what one can do and what the situation demands. Delusional confidence is different altogether. It may help people impress, persuade, or temporarily fool others, but this is usually a short-lived strategy unless everyone else is equally deluded. When confidence consistently outruns competence, the cost is eventually paid, either by the individual when reality catches up or by everyone else who has to deal with the consequences.
Third, an excessive focus on mindset risks slipping into a form of psychological moralizing, where success is credited to the “right attitude” and failure is blamed on the individual’s thinking rather than on constraints, inequality, or bad luck. This becomes especially problematic when people are encouraged to believe not only that they live in a meritocracy, but also that their outcomes hinge primarily on how strongly they believe in themselves. In such a world, effort and optimism are not just virtues but moral obligations, and when success does not materialize, the only plausible culprit left is the self.
The result is a quiet but corrosive form of self-blame. If belief is supposed to be the main lever of success, then failing to succeed feels like a personal deficiency of character, motivation, or mental toughness. Structural barriers fade into the background, while disappointment is internalized as guilt. Ironically, this narrative can be demotivating, not empowering.
A better way
A more helpful alternative would be to focus less on upgrading people’s beliefs and more on developing their actual skills and competence. This remains valuable even when individuals start out with low confidence in their abilities, which may simply reflect an accurate awareness of the gap between their current and ideal selves. Closing that gap through practice, feedback, and learning does more for long-term performance and well-being than insisting people feel confident before they have much to be confident about.
Needless to say, there is also evidence that positive beliefs can backfire when they become detached from reality. Inflated self-beliefs are linked to poor calibration, overconfidence, and reckless decision-making. In organizational settings, confidence without competence can be costly, especially when it crowds out learning, dissent, or accurate self-assessment.
In some cases, acknowledging that you are simply not very good at something is not an act of pessimism but of strategic realism. Persisting in a poorly matched role or career path on the basis of “false hope” can be actively harmful. Psychologists refer to this as false positive self-beliefs or miscalibrated optimism (which appear to be the norm), where individuals overestimate their likelihood of success and continue investing in goals that are unlikely to pay off. By contrast, recognizing limits early allows people to redirect their effort toward domains where their abilities, interests, and opportunities are better aligned.
There is also a social cost to miscalibration. If others realize you are less capable than you believe yourself to be, the reputational penalty is typically higher than if you had reached that conclusion first. Self-awareness signals judgment and maturity; obliviousness signals risk. In practice, what matters most is not how good you think you are, but how good others think you are, because it is other people who allocate opportunities, responsibilities, promotions, and trust.
Ironically, some of the best performers are those who initially underestimate themselves. Mild underconfidence can motivate preparation, learning, and skill acquisition, leading to steady improvement and positive surprises. Conversely, people who overestimate their abilities often stagnate, mistaking confidence for progress and reassurance for feedback. Over time, belief divorced from performance does not just fail to help; it actively prevents development.
The science, then, supports a more nuanced conclusion. Mindset matters, but it is not magic. Beliefs are best understood as enablers rather than engines of success. They help people make use of their abilities and opportunities, but they cannot substitute for them.
And yet, we tend to praise self-belief far more enthusiastically than self-knowledge. Confidence is celebrated as a virtue; realism is often mistaken for negativity. But from the perspective of everyone else, self-knowledge is usually the more valuable trait. Most of us have worked with at least one person who is spectacularly pleased with themselves, modestly competent at best, and blissfully unaware of the gap between the two. Their confidence may be admirable in the abstract, but it is considerably less charming when they are making decisions, leading teams, or presenting their “vision.”
If we evaluated the world from other people’s point of view, we would quickly realize that it is not in anyone’s interest for the unjustifiably confident to succeed because of those very flaws. When people advance on the strength of misplaced self-belief rather than demonstrated competence, the costs are externalized: Colleagues pick up the slack, organizations absorb the damage, and reality eventually intervenes, often expensively.
A healthier mindset, then, is not blind optimism but informed confidence: knowing what you can do, what you cannot yet do, and where your effort will actually pay off. In short, self-belief may feel good, but self-knowledge gets things done.
Reality rewards competence, not confidence. The only role of belief is to signal whether you know the difference.
Think of your creativity like a high-performance garden: If you focus only on the visible harvest (outputs) and never allow the soil to lie fallow (liminal space) or the bees to roam freely (play), the ground eventually becomes depleted. Boredom is the signal that the soil needs replenishing, ensuring that your next season of work is a flourish rather than a struggle.
In our current “busyness addiction,” we have come to glorify the hustle, over-indexing on output while neglecting the very well-being that fuels it. We treat leisure and rest like guilty pleasures rather than sacred pauses. Yet the truth of the Imagination Era is this: Our best work often happens when we are not visibly working. To flourish in a world of ubiquitous technology and unprecedented burnout, we must stop grinding and start cultivating what I call the “sexy bits” of productivity: boredom, play, and the magical in-between of liminal space.
Boredom: An Invitation to Create
We often reprimand ourselves for feeling bored, yet boredom is not a behavior to repress, it’s an invitation. It serves as a neurological cue to find new sources of stimulation. When we allow ourselves to be bored rather than reach for a digital distraction, we activate the brain’s default mode network (DMN), the “meaning-making” part of the brain that connects dots, finds patterns, and synthesizes information when we are not laser-focused on external tasks. It acts like a “washing machine” for our ideas, taking deeply felt information and making sense of it.
By viewing boredom as a trigger for curiosity, we move away from a mechanical “1 + 1 = 2” productivity mindset toward one of cultivation, where we value what is evolving in the dormant, invisible realm.
Consider the following sobering insights from neuroscience and workplace research.
“Mind-wandering” is your competitive advantage. While we spend 47% of our waking hours thinking about something other than what we are currently doing, mind-wandering isn’t a distraction. It’s a survival mechanism that, when channeled, aids in “aha” moments for problem-solving. Daydreaming is scientifically linked to an increase in alpha waves in the brain’s frontal cortex, a pattern directly associated with enhanced divergent thinking and creativity.
Yet we’re suppressing it relentlessly. Here’s where it gets urgent: According to a November 2023 Linearity blog post, 80% of people believe that unlocking creativity is critical to economic growth. Yet 75% of respondents in a Thrive My Way study reported being pressured to be “productive” (output-oriented) rather than creative at work. We’re systematically shutting down the very neural pathways that drive innovation.
Here’s something you could do to carve out time for creativity at work: Institute “thinking hours” in your calendar, protected time (even just 30 minutes daily) where team members are encouraged to step away from their screens with no agenda. A 2021 study by Tork found that 9 out of 10 employees reported being more likely to stay at a company where management encouraged taking breaks. That’s not wellness theater; that’s a retention strategy with a 90% success rate.
So position this carved-out time explicitly as creative work, not procrastination. Measure the impact on idea generation in your next sprint or project cycle.
The Power of Play and Meta-Cognition
To navigate today’s complex systems, we must reintroduce play, which toy designer Brendan Boyle defines simply as “engagement.” The opposite of play isn’t work; the opposite of play is boredom. Integrating play at work, whether through prototyping rough draft mock-ups or gamifying meetings, boosts morale and stimulates critical executive leadership skills like empathy, negotiation, and the ability to improvise.
This playful mindset is enhanced by meta-cognition: the practice of thinking about one’s own thinking. By engaging in what I call “backcasting” (reflecting on past experiences to make sense of skills acquired) we build an “inventory of courage.” This self-inquiry allows us to recognize that our pains plus our gains equal our assets, providing the firm foundation needed to leap into the unknown.
The data on this is striking, and it challenges everything we think we know about efficiency.
That same research by Thrive My Way showed that creativity training delivers a 350% return on engagement. Groups trained in creativity tools and principles generated 350% as many ideas—and those ideas were 415% more original—than those from untrained groups. This isn’t a soft-skill metric. This is innovation measured in the ideas that move your business forward.
But we’re facing an engagement crisis. As of 2024, only 20% of employees are engaged, marking the lowest level of employee engagement ever recorded. We’re grinding harder while our teams check out. The correlation is clear: We’ve optimized engagement out of work entirely.
You can avert an engagement crisis at your own company by launching a “play audit” in your next strategy session. Identify two nonnegotiable meetings per month that will be redesigned around play. Those could be improv exercises, Lego Serious Play, or physical problem-solving. Track engagement scores and idea quality before and after. You’ll likely find that the most serious strategic challenges get solved when your team stops taking them so seriously.
Engaging the Liminal Space Amid Distraction
We live in an age of “stolen focus,” where the average knowledge worker now switches tasks every 47 seconds. The shift is staggering: In 2004, the average knowledge worker switched tasks every three minutes. That’s a 73% compression of attention span in less than two decades.
Research from distraction expert Gloria Mark indicates that we spend approximately 47% of our waking hours thinking about what isn’t currently happening, a type of mind-wandering often linked to unhappiness. This constant task-switching drains cognitive resources and spikes cortisol levels, creating a neurological state designed for crisis response, not creativity.
The antidote is to intentionally engage in liminal space—that transitional “betwixt and between” phase where growth happens under the surface. Liminality can be physical, like a commute, or metaphorical, like the fallow time between project cycles. Instead of filling every gap with a screen, we should embrace restorative ambiguity, where we feel expectant and at peace in the not knowing.
The financial toll of ignoring this is substantial, and something we all need to hear.
Burnout is an economic crisis masquerading as a personal problem. Workplace stress is not just a personal issue but a massive economic one, costing U.S. industries more than $300 billion annually in absenteeism, turnover, and diminished productivity. Some 71% of knowledge workers reported experiencing burnout at least once in 2020, with burned-out employees taking 60% more sick days and being 2.6 times more likely to seek a different job.
Many of us are performing productivity instead of creating it. The pressure to appear busy is pervasive, with 83% of full-time U.S. workers admitting to engaging in “performative work behaviors” (productivity theater) in the past year. Your teams aren’t actually more productive, they’re just better at looking busy while running on fumes.
Whether it’s a two-minute daydream break or a weeklong sabbatical, these pauses allow us to unburden the cognitive load on our neocortex. By valuing the dormant times as much as the growth spurts, we transform our work from a series of tasks into a progression of cultivated learning experiences. In this new operating system, rest is not a soft perk, it’s a fundamental human right and a critical tool for sustainable, innovative leadership.
Try mapping your organization’s task-switching velocity. How often are meetings scheduled back-to-back? How many channels are teams expected to monitor? Implement “no-meeting blocks,” similar to what Zapier did when it instituted a “get stuff done” week. These could be two-hour windows weekly where no meetings are scheduled. Explicitly frame these as liminal space where people can complete deep work or simply think. Monitor retention and productivity metrics over a quarter. You’ll likely see both move upward.
The Bottom Line
We stand at a crossroads. We can continue grinding our teams into burnout while generating incrementally better ideas, or we can cultivate organizations that honor boredom, play, and strategic pause as the foundations of sustainable innovation. The choice sounds simple until you realize it requires us to fundamentally redefine what “productivity” means.
The organizations that will outthink their competition in the next five years won’t be the ones that eliminated downtime. They’ll be the ones brave enough to design it in. They’ll be the leaders who understand that creativity isn’t a luxury, it’s infrastructure. And they’ll be the companies that attract and retain the best talent because they respect something far more valuable than productivity theater: the human capacity to flourish.
Your move.
“If you’re a millennial and you’re going through your midlife crisis, this post is for you.”
So begins a viral TikTok video posted last month by comedian Mike Mancusi. Many millennials are now in their forties, with the youngest about to turn 30, p…
