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Thrive in 2023 with Tiffany Dufu, Ken Page, and Liz Fosslien

·53 min·3 clips

Tiffany Dufu names “imaginary delegation” as assigning tasks without saying them out loud.

The episode opens with Caitlin Schiller and Benjamin Soller noticing the familiar New Year pressure to do better, do more, and do it all at once. They do not seem interested in that version of January. Instead, they keep steering toward clearer ideas and away from the long, overpacked list-making that can make a fresh year feel heavier than it needs to. The show treats books as a way to get to the point faster, not to pile on more noise. From there, the conversation moves toward Ken Page's section and the promise of a more useful reset. Ken Page brings the strongest shape to the discussion. He introduces the gift-wound matrix and starts from the idea that gifts are not just strengths in the obvious sense. He treats them as places where people feel things deeply and where the world may not know what to do with that depth. That makes gifts feel less like polished talents and more like parts of a person that can be hard to carry. He also pushes back on the easy story that wounds simply produce gifts. Instead, he suggests that wounds can come out of gifts. The conversation sits with the fact that some people are especially sensitive, while others carry a kind of intensity that is just as hard to manage. Most people, he suggests, are some mix of both. The episode gives that idea room to land. It does not rush the listener toward a tool or a formula. It keeps returning to the question of what happens when you start naming the things you have been calling too much, too sharp, too tender, or too different. The language around core gifts is practical in its own way. It is meant to help listeners identify what lives underneath their insecurities. That is why the episode keeps circling back to words like name, excavate, and cherish. Those verbs matter here. They turn the conversation from self-help slogan into a slower practice of recognition. The final stretch stays gentle and companionable. The hosts point toward reflection, writing some thoughts down, a walk, or a conversation with someone else as ways to keep working with the ideas after the episode ends. The result is a New Year conversation that feels thoughtful without getting stiff. It cares about usefulness, but not at the expense of emotional honesty. That balance gives the episode its shape. The listener is left with a simple, persistent question about the parts of themselves that feel largest and hardest to fit. The show asks them to see those parts differently.

As heard by us

A quieter New Year reset that treats sensitivity as something to understand, not fix.

The episode works best as a quiet New Year reset instead of another push to overhaul everything at once. Caitlin Schiller and Benjamin Soller keep the focus on distilled ideas rather than long resolution lists, and that gives the conversation a calm, measured pace.

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Why you'd press play

Press play when you want a New Year reset without the resolution theater.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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