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In a time when hiring has slowed dramatically, layoffs have become the norm, and AI has flattened early differentiation, even job titles have blurred. The problem is that capable, experienced people increasingly describe feeling stalled, unseen, or interchangeable in todays workforce. Consider the current landscape of advice to understand the dilemma. People are encouraged to stand out, but without guidance on how to do so. Theyre told to pick a lane and niche down, while careers are becoming more nonlinear. Whats missing is a true strategy that reflects how work actually functions today. Thats where optimal distinctiveness becomes an advantage. Social psychologist Marilynn Brewer introduced optimal distinctiveness theory to explain a fundamental human need: to belong and be ourselves at the same time. People do their best when they feel included, safe, and distinctly valuable. When either side of that equation is neglected, performance and well-being suffer, along with employability. Excessive sameness leads to conformity, disengagement, and muted creativity. Excessive difference leads to isolation, friction, or marginalization. In the middle is optimal distinctiveness: where individuality strengthens the group, rather than competing with it. And its a career strategy that meets this moment. Why the Old Career Playbook No Longer Fits the Market The labor market has shifted, but traditional career strategies havent. Job growth is uneven and cautious. Early-career workers are being hit hardest, while senior leaders face roles that are broader, less defined, and more fluid than before. In a 2025 Chief x Harris Poll of women leaders, 83% reported that the career success playbook they were handed early in their careers no longer applies to them. Nearly all described making career moves that defied traditional ideas of safety and linear progression. Across levels, the same concern keeps surfacing in different forms. Early-career professionals wonder how to break through. Mid-career professionals worry about staying relevant. Senior leaders ask how to evolve without losing themselves in the process. Beneath these questions is a shared dilemma: People either generalize themselves so much that they become forgettable, or they describe their work in ways so complex that others cant place them. Neither approach helps in a job market that increasingly rewards clarity and recognizability. Lin-Manuel Miranda, Virgil Abloh, and Staying Distinctive A widely recognized example of optimal distinctiveness in action is Lin-Manuel Miranda. He didnt succeed by blending into Broadway norms or rejecting them outright. Instead, he fused hip-hop, history, and musical theater in a way that was legible to the industry yet unmistakably his own. His work was distinct without being alienatingand that balance is what made it resonate so widely. A less obvious but equally instructive example is Virgil Abloh. Trained as an architect, Abloh moved fluidly between streetwear, luxury fashion, art, and design. Rather than positioning himself as a traditional designeror an outsider disrupting fashion from the marginshe articulated a clear intersectional identity. His work was understandable within established systems yet distinguished by his integration of disciplines that rarely spoke to one another. That clarity made him not only recognizable but also referable. People knew when to call him in, and why his perspective mattered. Together, these examples point to the same lesson: Career advantage today doesnt come from fitting neatly into existing boxes or standing so far outside them that others dont know what to do with you. It comes from being distinct in a way others can recognize, remember, and place. Optimal Distinctiveness as a Career Strategy At work, optimal distinctiveness means being recognizable enough to be relatable and differentiated enough to be memorable. And it matters more as AI accelerates sameness. Human decisionswhether someone is hired, referred, trusted, or rememberedstill hinge on whether someone is easy to understand and clearly valuable. Optimal distinctiveness means using language that’s clear and specific, and often at the intersection of multiple roles or domains. Sarabeth describes herself as a creative disruptor. The phrase is familiar enough to feel accessible, yet specific enough to signal how she works. It gives people an intuitive sense of when and why to engage with her. She sees similar shifts with clients who initially describe themselves through job titles and role-based summaries. One of Sarabeths clients was a senior professional with experience spanning strategy, operations, and organizational development. On paper, her profile looked impressive but interchangeable. But when she reframed her work around the intersection of those domains, her positioning became clearer and more distinct. Instead of being experienced in many things, she became known as an opportunity-spotter who creates sustainable human systems. Once that intersection was articulated, conversations changed, referrals became easier, and the work itself felt more energizing because the language finally reflected how she experienced her contribution. Connecting Identity to Impact This is where optimal distinctiveness aligns closely with my illumination process. Across leadership development and career transitions, the same pattern shows up repeatedly. People create more impact when they reclaim what makes them distinct, clarify which aspects of that distinctiveness matter now, and express it in service of the collective rather than at odds with it. One of my clients, a senior leader at a global life sciences company, approached me about feeling invisible despite a strong track record. She had been rewarded for reliability and execution, but over time had muted the part of herself that excelled at talent development. Through our work, she reframed her role around that strength and intentionally redesigned how she showed up in meetings and strategic conversations. She didnt change jobs, but she changed how she was understood, and her influence expanded almost immediately. Innovation doesnt come from blending in completely, nor from separating yourself entirely. It emerges when people feel secure enough to belong and confident enough to contribute something uniquely their own. Finding Your Optimal Distinctiveness Optimal distinctiveness rarely arises from credential stacking or clever titles. It tends to surface at the intersection of a few core professional identities that you consistently draw on. When people map those identities and ask who they are at the overlap, a form of hybrid expertise often becomes visiblesomething that doesnt fit neatly into a single category but feels accurate and grounding. Naming that expertise usually starts with a core noun that reflects how you operate at workarchitect, builder, connector, translator, catalystfollowed by language that adds precision rather than complexity. The strngest signals narrow understanding instead of expanding it. Pressure-testing that language in conversation is essential. When it fits, people lean in with curiosity rather than confusion. When it doesnt, the awkwardness is usually immediate. In a labor market defined by uncertainty, clarity becomes a form of agency. Optimal distinctiveness gives people a way to shape how theyre understood without contorting themselves to meet outdated expectations. The future of work is unlikely to reward those who conform most smoothly or perform uniqueness most loudly. It will favor those who can articulate who they are, how they create value, and why that combination matters now. If multidimensionality is the reality of modern careers, optimal distinctiveness is a practical way to navigate itstaying visible, relevant, and human in systems that increasingly struggle to see people clearly.
Category:
E-Commerce
After a fairly significant hardware upgrade in 2025, its sounding like things will be quieter for the iPhone this year. Bloombergs Mark Gurman reported in his newsletter this week that the iPhone 18 Pro and 18 Pro Max will represent minor tweaks from their predecessors and wont be a big update. Much of the attention in fall 2026 is expected to be on Apples first folding phone. Gurman did, however, note that the iPhone 18 Pro and 18 Pro Max will have a new camera system with a variable aperture, which caught my eye as a phone camera obsessive. There have been rumors about this for years, but I wasnt expecting it to be perhaps the key feature of what are likely to be this years most popular iPhone models. Thats because variable aperture is an idea thats come and gone in smartphones several times in the past. Does Apple have a truly new take on the concept, or is it just late to the party? {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/12\/multicore.png","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/12\/multicore-mobile.png","eyebrow":"","headline":"\u003Cstrong\u003E\u003Cstrong\u003ESubscribe to Multicore\u003C\/strong\u003E\u003C\/strong\u003E","dek":"Multicore is about technology hardware and design. It\u0027s written from Tokyo by Sam Byford. To learn more visit \u003Ca href=\u0022https:\/\/www.multicore.blog\/\u0022\u003Emulticore.blog\u003C\/a\u003E","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"SIGN UP","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/www.multicore.blog\/","theme":{"bg":"#f5f5f5","text":"#000000","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#000000","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#ffffff"},"imageDesktopId":91454027,"imageMobileId":91454030,"shareable":false,"slug":""}} Aperture 101 Aperture refers to the size of the opening that a lens allows to hit a sensor, or film back in the day. The setting is expressed in whats called f-stops, for example f/1.4 or f/2.0; smaller numbers represent bigger apertures. The larger the aperture, the greater the amount of light, which means the photographer can use a faster shutter speed for a given amount of brightness. Larger apertures also produce a shallower depth of field, allowing the photographer to isolate their subject by blurring the background. Thats not to say that a larger aperture is always desirable. On a manually controlled camera, sometimes its necessary to stop down the lens to a smaller aperture to avoid overexposing the photo in bright conditions. Lenses also generally perform better at medium apertures in terms of sharpness, so its not advisable to shoot wide open at all times unless you know what youre doing. Aperture is an essential parameter for enthusiast photography on dedicated cameras, but it tends to be less of an issue on smartphones. The smaller sensors in use mean that its difficult to get significantly shallow depth of field, while the fully electronic shutters are capable of far faster speeds than any mechanical camera, which virtually eliminates the risk of overexposure. As a result, the vast majority of smartphones have their apertures fixed as wide as possible, since the light-gathering benefits usually outweigh all else. Prior efforts That hasnt stopped smartphone makers trying to make variable aperture a selling point. The Nokia N86 in 2009 was among the firstthough somewhat cropped by todays standards, its 28mm-equivalent f/2.4 lens was considered unusually wide-angle for the time, and automatically stopped down to f/3.2 or f/4.8 depending on the ambient lighting. The N86 also had a mechanical shutter, so the variable aperture did have something of a raison detre. In the era of modern smartphones, Samsung was first to try something similar with the Galaxy S9 in 2018. The aperture was an unusually bright f/1.5 wide-open, while it could also stop down to f/2.4. In practice there was very little difference between the two settings, and the feature was jettisoned two years later for the Galaxy S10. Chinese phone makers soon took the idea to the next level. Huaweis 2022 Mate 50 Pro went all the way from f/1.4 to f/4, letting you dial in ten steps across the range. Xiaomi, meanwhile, had a two-step f/1.4 and f/4 system in the 13 Ultra in 2023, and the following years 14 Ultra featured a stepless f/1.63-f/4 lens that could be set to any aperture you liked. Xiaomis last two flagship phones, howeverthe 15 Ultra and the particularly excellent 17 Ultra by Leicahave abandoned this kind of lens design. If I had to guess, I imagine that the decision was linked to those phones huge telephoto modules; at smartphone scale, variable aperture lenses are a mechanically complicated design that take up a lot of space. But I dont think it will have been a particularly difficult call for Xiaomi to make. In practice, the feature just wasnt that useful. I shot a lot with the 13 Ultra and 14 Ultra, and even though they had biggest-in-class 1 sensors, they would almost always default to larger aperture settings. It would occasionally be useful to be able to stop down to f/4 when taking close-up pictures of food, for example, to render more of the dish in sharper focus, but even then the difference wasnt dramatic. Why Apple? So why might Apple be targeting its own version of a feature that many rivals have attempted and abandoned? Honestly, Im not sure. Perhaps Apple will use a bigger sensor or larger maximum aperture and wants to mitigate the impact on depth of field in edge cases. Maybe it plans to go softer on its heavy-handed image sharpening and lean into traditional optical quality. Or the plan might just be to market the iPhone 18 Pro as the ultimate foodie camera. Im unconvinced itll be the right tradeoff, but Im intrigued to learn more about the implementation. Apple is often known for putting a compelling new spin on existing technology. Just remember, if youre watching the iPhone launch event in September and a section on variable aperture comes up, that this is an idea that much of the industry has already tried and decided wasnt worth pursuing. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/12\/multicore.png","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/12\/multicore-mobile.png","eyebrow":"","headline":"\u003Cstrong\u003E\u003Cstrong\u003ESubscribe to Multicore\u003C\/strong\u003E\u003C\/strong\u003E","dek":"Multicore is about technology hardware and design. It\u0027s written from Tokyo by Sam Byford. To learn more visit \u003Ca href=\u0022https:\/\/www.multicore.blog\/\u0022\u003Emulticore.blog\u003C\/a\u003E","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"SIGN UP","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/www.multicore.blog\/","theme":{"bg":"#f5f5f5","text":"#000000","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#000000","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#ffffff"},"imageDesktopId":91454027,"imageMobileId":91454030,"shareable":fale,"slug":""}}
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E-Commerce
Generative AI may be both the most useful and the most mystifying tool of our modern-tech era. The problemaside from all the endlessly documented issues around accuracyis that generative AI generally seems to function in a DOS-like blank prompt form. The onus is squarely on you to figure out what to ask and how to put these saucy systems to use. That black-box feeling is especially apparent when you look at NotebookLM, an “AI-first notebook” launched by Google nearly two years ago. The idea behind NotebookLM is that you upload your own source materials within carefully confined notebooks, and you can then lean on Google’s Gemini AI to interact with that material in all sorts of illuminating ways. Since each notebook is limited only to whatever source materials you supply, the prevalence of those pesky hallucinations seems to be less of an issue. And since everything within your NotebookLM notebooks is kept completely privatenot even used for any manner of AI model training, according to Googleyou can connect it to all sorts of subjects and use it to gain a level of deep insight that was never before so easily accessible. But again, theres the black box challenge. When you first pull up NotebookLM, it’s tough to know where to begin and how to interact with the thing in practical, approachable ways. Even as someone who writes about technology for a living and has spent more time than most mortals thinking about this service, I realized I hadn’t entirely figured out how to use it in a way that would genuinely be helpful in my day-to-day life. So I challenged myself to dig deep, get beyond all the conceptual excitement, and come up with a series of real-world use cases for NotebookLM that any regular human could both appreciate and emulate. I’ve got 15 super-specific scenarios, all tried and tested, in which the artificial intelligence answer machine could be useful for you. Follow this road map and see which path holds the most promise from your perspective. 1. Your on-demand product answer machine Up first is a possibility that’s supremely simple yet packed with productivity potential: Create a new NotebookLM notebook called “Product Manuals.” Then, every time you purchase a new appliance or device of some sort, search the web for a PDF version of its manual and add it into the notebook. If you really want to get wild, include an image of any warranty cards, too. Then, anytime you need to know anything about those productshow some part of them works, how to fix something that’s gone awry, or if and how you’re eligible for a warranty-related repairjust fire up that same NotebookLM notebook and ask, ask, ask away. 2. Your instant car support system Next, try using NotebookLM to help wrangle the most expensive gadget you own. Do a similar web search for your current vehicle’s owner manual, then drop it into its own NotebookLM notebook with the vehicle’s name as the title. Repeat for any additional vehicles you own and any new ones you purchase down the road. After recently trading in our old minivan for a hybrid Honda CR-V, my wife and I wasted far too much time flipping through the vehicle’s paper manual to try to figure out what some random button on the dashboard did. Later, after downloading a PDF of the manual from Honda’s website and then uploading it into NotebookLM, it took me all of 10 seconds to reach the same answersimply by asking.Lesson learned. With your car manual in NotebookLM, you can simply ask questions and get instant answers. 3. An interactive car maintenance journal While we’re thinking about cars, every time you go to the mechanic, snap a photo of the service receipt and upload it into a NotebookLM notebook created specifically for that one vehicle. You can make it even more useful by uploading the same owner’s manual you found a moment ago into that notebook, too. Doing so will give you two very practical benefits: First, anytime a question comes up about what work you’ve had done on the vehicle or when a certain repair took place, you can just pull up that notebook and ask. Second, with the manual and its instructions there alongside all of your history, you can bring the two sources of info together to ask NotebookLM targeted questions that take the manufacturer’s guidance and your past services into considerationlike, for instance, when you should rotate your tires next or what other possibilities you should be thinking about at your next oil change appointment. And on a related note . . . 4. An interactive home maintenance journal Start a NotebookLM notebook for your house, then upload every invoice and estimate you get for a home repair as well as every receipt from a new appliance purchase. Whenever you next need to know when, exactly, your roof was replaced or in what year you got your current furnaceor even what brand and model it isyou’ll have a single simple place to ask and get answers. And that’s a heck of a lot easier than having an overflowing folder of assorted old papers to sift through in every such scenario. 5. Your personal company wiki Does the company you run, or maybe just work for, have more handbook-type info than any reasonably sane human could possibly ingest and remember? If so, use a dedicated NotebookLM notebook to store all of itguides, documents, operating procedures, even lists of contacts for different departments and purposes. From that moment forward, when a question comes up about how smething is supposed to work or whom you’re supposed to contact for some particular purpose, your answer will never be more than a single quick question away. 6. Your instruction-expert wizard Why limit yourself to work, maintenance, and appliances? With anything that has an instruction manual involved, dump a digital version of the document into its own NotebookLM notebookeven for board games. The next time any kind of question comes up related to those instructions, you’ve got a fast and effective way to get answers. 7. A contract deposit box Whether you’re a freelancer juggling new contracts every month, an employee signing a new agreement each year, or an employer asking dozens of workers to sign your ever-evolving documents, creating a centralized repository for all your contracts can be a real time-saver in the future. Need to remember when you last signed something with a specific person or provider? Not sure what the terms of some agreement requiredor when a particular document expires? Whatever the case may be, once the info’s all in NotebookLM, you’ve always got an easy place to askand let the system find the answer for you. NotebookLM is perfect for parsing complex contract terms or analyzing multiple contracts together. 8. Your meeting memory Provided you’re using something to record important meetingsbe it a general-purpose AI-powered note-taker, a video-call-specific summarizer, or an app designed to take notes during regular audio callsthat history will be much more useful if you bring it over to a NotebookLM notebook. With such a system in place, you can simply go to NotebookLM and ask targeted questions about any of your past meetings instead of having to dig through the transcripts individually. 9. An interview inquiry station While we’re thinking about transcripts, if you conduct any kind of interviewswith job candidates, as a journalist, or for any other purposetake each transcript and create a NotebookLM specifically for it. (Or, if you have a group of related interviews, put them all in one notebook.) Upload either the audio or the text, depending on what’s available, and then take the opportunity to ask NotebookLM questions about your conversationbe they specific (like what the person said about some particular topic) or broad (like asking NotebookLM what interesting quotes came up during the interview that you might have missed). Upload an interview to NotebookLM and let it act as your guide to the conversation. You’ll obviously still want to refer to the full transcript at timesand to double-check the accuracy of any quote you’re actually citing anywherebut it can be a helpful way to find something fast when you can’t remember the exact words involved or to stumble onto something you might have otherwise glossed over. 10. An intelligent feedback interpreter If your business relies on any manner of feedback to guide its operations, do yourself a favor and create a NotebookLM notebook where you can upload those resultsas spreadsheets or in whatever form they take. From reviews to survey responses, you’ll then be able to ask NotebookLM to help summarize the key themes and trends, pick out recurring positive or critical responses, and even find particularly memorable quotes for potential testimonial use. 11. Your performance review reviewer For anyone managing employee performance, NotebookLM can be a major asset. Create an individual notebook for each employee and place all their performance reviews therethen, when the time comes for the next assessment, you’ll have an easy way to revisit past highlights to identify trends and provide context for comparison. 12. A financial reality checker Provided you’re comfortable with the notion, NotebookLM can turn up some really interesting insights by analyzing things like your tax returns, bank statements, and credit card statements over the years. (For what it’s worth, Google is explicit about the fact that it doesn’t in any way access, share, or use any data uploaded into NotebookLMeven for AI model training.) With that type of info in its own dedicated notebook, you can ask NotebookLM to give you an overview of your spending habits, to identify areas where you could cut back or potentially be eligible for additional tax benefits, and to surface other such pointers that you can then investigate more thoroughly on your own or with an accounting professional. NotebookLM can be incredibly effective at analyzing financial summaries and helping you both find specific answers and spot broader trends. 13. An audio-video reading resource Ever find yourself running into interesting-looking videos or podcasts and just not having the time or inclination to sit through them in their entirety? Make yourself a NotebookLM notebook called “Audio-Video,” then drop a link to any YouTube video or audio clip you encounter into that area. You can then ask NotebookLM for the high pointsor for any specific info you’re looking to findfrom any of the clips individually or even collectively. 14. An elevated reading list NotebookLM can be a fantastic way to collect links you want to read for later revisiting. With a notebook called “Reading List,” you can see the entire text of any article whose URL you add in, right then and there and in a stripped-down and simplified formatand you can ask NotebookLM for information about, or even summaries of, any or all of your saved links, too: What was that article I saved from New York a while back? Give me the most important takeaways from that Fast Company piece I saved on privacy the other day. I’m never going to catch up with everything I saved this week. Show me a summary of all the articles I added over the past seven days. You get the idea. And finally . . . 15. Your calendar companion Get a whole new level of insight into how you’re spending your time and what’s actually gone down on your calendar by exporting your complete calendar history, and then importing it into NotebookLMwhere you can create a custom notebook to interact with it. In Google Calendar, this is as easy as clicking the gear-shaped icon in the desktop website’s upper-right corner, selecting “Settings,” then clicking “Import & export” in the left-of-screen side menu and clicking the “Export” option. You’ll then need to take the resulting .ics file and convert it into plain textwhich you can do in a matter of seconds with a free conversion website like this one. Finally, with the resulting .txt file in a NotebookLM note, try asking questions about anything from how many meetings you attended over a given time period to how many hours you spent at the doctor’s office last year. You can also ask for specific info such as how often, on average, you get haircuts or how long it’s been since you last had a job interview. ~google-notebooklm-calendar.jpgYou might be surprised at the types of insights you uncover with your calendar data in NotebookLM’s metaphorical hands.~ The possibilities are practically endlessand all you’ve gotta do is ask. For even more practical productivity discoveries, check out my free Cool Tools newslettera single new tech treasure in your inbox every Wednesday.
Category:
E-Commerce
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