Practical career wisdom, without the stiffness.
How to Be Awesome at Your Job is a brisk interview show for people who want work to feel more effective and less draining. Recent conversations translate expert ideas into everyday moves: asking how someone feels, protecting attention, recovering from burnout, and leading with steadier trust.
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How to Be Awesome at Your Job is a career-development interview show about getting better at work without becoming colder, busier, or more performative. It is practical first. The show brings in people with concrete frameworks, then pushes toward examples that a working professional can actually use. Recent episodes cover resilience in chaos, persuasion, AI and career identity, workplace joy, burnout, humor, management trust, and invisible organizational norms. The range is broad, but the center of gravity is consistent: better work comes from clearer attention, better conversations, steadier recovery, and more intentional leadership. The show likes a useful mental model. It also likes a story that proves the model has lived somewhere outside a slide deck. Anne Grady’s appearance turns adaptability into a discussion about discomfort, attention, and the cost of constant task switching. Joshua Bandoch’s persuasion conversation shifts the focus from winning arguments to understanding what people feel before they reason. Aneesh Raman’s AI episode frames the future of work less as a machine-versus-human contest and more as a reason to bet on human strengths. Amy Leneker and Guy Winch bring the emotional toll of work into the open, from panic attacks and burnout to the need for deliberate recovery. Chris Duffy makes the case for laughter as a workplace skill rooted in attention and connection. Ashley Herd’s management advice centers on calm, trust, and usable communication. Nilofer Merchant challenges inherited office norms and turns frustration about politics into a clearer map of how decisions actually get made. The show suits people who want a smarter work life, not a louder personal brand. It is friendly, fast-moving, and grounded in the small behaviors that change a day at work.
Made for: The show is for thoughtful professionals, managers, and ambitious team members who want more skill, clarity, and steadiness at work. It especially fits people who like expert interviews but need the advice translated into everyday workplace behavior.
What sets it apart: Its strength is the way it turns big workplace ideas into plain, testable moves. The interviews stay warm and curious while repeatedly asking what the idea looks like in meetings, decisions, attention, recovery, and leadership.
Get more fun, wins, meaning, and money from your job! With 25,000,000 downloads and mentions in The New York Times, Forbes, and Linkedin Learning. This show helps grow your skills and impact at any job that requires thinking and collaborating. Each week, Pete interviews thought-leaders and results-getters to discover specific, actionable insights that boost work performance. Their stories and advice sharpen the universal skills to flourish at work. Boost your time/energy management, leadership, confidence, career opportunities, and fulfillment—while still getting home earlier. Try starting with episode 0: START HERE and listener favorite episodes we put at the beginning numbered: A, B, C, D,…
Based on 5 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Pete Mikaitis turns expert conversations about work into specific questions, exercises, and management practices that listeners can carry into the office.
How to Be Awesome at Your Job turns workplace advice into practical conversations, with Pete Mikaitis pressing guests for ideas that can survive contact with an actual office.
A promotion ask gets one small rewrite: "How do you feel?" instead of "What do you think?"
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Adaptability is treated as a set of practical habits.
Anne Grady presents adaptability as a work skill that can be practiced, not just admired. She keeps the advice grounded in everyday behavior: leaning into discomfort, training attention, and cutting down phone-driven distraction.
Persuasion gets stronger when the question shifts from what people think to how they feel.
The piece makes a clear case that persuasion often turns less on logic than on timing, feeling, and readiness to listen. It draws a sharp line against the usual habit of leading with facts, then offers a practical test: asking how someone feels can open a door that asking what…
Chris Duffy makes workplace humor feel practical by treating laughter as a habit of attention.
Workplace humor gets a grounded, useful treatment in How to Be Awesome at Your Job's conversation with Chris Duffy. The episode frames laughter less as a performance by the funniest person nearby and more as a way of paying closer attention.
A practical case for management as calm, consistent trust-building.
The episode treats management less as a set of tricks than as a daily practice of earning trust. Ashley Hurd draws on her background as a former general counsel and head of HR to make a practical case for calm communication, clearer formats, and asking better questions before…
A grounded case for questioning inherited workplace norms before they quietly define what a team can do.
Workplace habits come under useful pressure in this review of Merchant's Our Best Work. The episode's strongest thread is the difference between a norm that has lasted and a norm that still deserves authority.
Motherhood, named with care.
Political outrage at full speed.
Useful systems for overloaded workdays.
Career power without apology.
Neal Schore argues that reclaiming time means “the time you stop giving away,” not manufacturing an extra hour.
Anne Grady starts with discomfort.
Pete Mikaitis opens with a blunt question.
This episode features an interview with Aneesh Raman about building AI-proof careers by focusing on human skills, self-belief, and strategic adaptation to technological changes.
Amy Leneker shares her personal experience with stress-induced panic attacks and burnout from her C-suite career, and discusses her method to help professionals lead with less stress and more joy at work.
Psychologist Guy Winch discusses how to prevent burnout by strategically managing mental fatigue and recovery, based on his book 'Mind Over Grind'.
Chris Duffy joins Pete McIntyre to talk about humor at work.
Ashley Herd tells Pete Mikaitis that 40% to 60% of managers have no training, even though they are often promoted because they were already good at their jobs.
["How to Be Awesome at Your Job episode 1138 centers on Nilofer Merchant's Our Best Work, How to Break Free from the 24 Invisible Norms That Limit Us.", "Pete Mikaitis hosts the interview, and Merchant is introduced as the founder of Intangible Labs, a former Apple leader, a top-50 management thinker, and an author of four books.", "The conversation asks what changes when 'ours,' 'best,' and 'work' are defined as shared human expression instead of capital optimization.", "Merchant connects that thesis to idea theft, office politics, Apple, REI, and Marie Schmidt's golf story to show how workplace norms shape credit, access, and agency."]
Mark Divine, a former Navy SEAL commander and author of Unbeatable Mind, tells Pete Bukaitis how Zen-based breathing and meditation kept him calm while a collided parachute fell from about 1,200 feet.
Nir Eyal opens with Kurt Richter's 1950 rat experiment, in which rats conditioned to expect rescue swam 60 hours instead of 15 minutes, as evidence that beliefs unlock hidden capacity.
This episode features Mark Murphy discussing the five critical roles essential for building winning teams, based on his research and book 'Team Players'.
This episode features an interview with Brian Ahearn about his book 'Influenced From Above', which explores how Christian faith and psychological principles of influence intersect to enhance leadership.
This episode features an interview with JoAnn Garbin, former Microsoft Director of Innovation, discussing the four universal patterns of winning innovation and sharing insights from her book and experiences.
This episode explores how understanding hidden markets—systems that allocate scarce resources like time and attention through non-price mechanisms—can help professionals get more of what they want in life and work.
Carolyn Dewar discusses her book on navigating the four seasons of leadership, based on studying 200 CEOs to help leaders avoid complacency and set the right tone.