What Works

Can economics help you decide whether or not to quit social media? Yes!

Show Notes

Welcome to “The Economics of…”—a new series from What Works. In this series, I’ll be exploring how economic concepts and frameworks can help us run our businesses or manage our careers. Each episode will have some fundamental economics education and a case study to make each concept tangible. 

Today, we’re tackling a pretty fundamental economic concept: opportunity cost. Opportunity cost helps us understand what we have to give up in order to get what we want. Sounds simple enough, right? Well, it is. But opportunity cost asks us to dig deep to discover the hidden costs of any decision—and that can be anything but straightforward.

In this week’s case study, I talk with Tell Me A Story founder Hillary Rea about the opportunity cost of quitting social media (or rather, the opportunity cost of not doing all the things she has the time to do now!).

Footnotes:
An essay version of each podcast episode drops every Thursday at explorewhatworks.com. If you'd like to have it delivered straight to your inbox each week, sign up for What Works Weekly—FREE: explorewhatworks.com/weekly

“Thanks to What Works, I’ve broken up with goal setting as usual. Tara has laid out a liberated way to identify what matters to me and move towards it without striving, suffering, or burning out.” — Annie Schuessler, Rebel Therapist
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What is What Works?

"Work" is broken. We're overcommitted, underutilized, and out of whack. But it doesn't have to be this way. What Works is a podcast about rethinking work, business, and leadership as we navigate the 21st-century economy. When you're an entrepreneur, independent worker, or employee who doesn't want to lose yourself to the whims of late-stage capitalism, this show is for you. Host Tara McMullin covers money, management, culture, media, philosophy, and more to figure out what's working (and what's not) today. Tara offers a distinctly interdisciplinary approach to deep-dive analysis of how we work and how work shapes us.