What Works

I have learned a lot about cognitive empathy by learning copywriting. After all, copywriting is a puzzle—the puzzle of figuring out what someone is thinking or feeling and how you can connect your idea to that thought or feeling.

So, it seemed only fitting that I would invite a copywriter to this series on decoding empathy to share her process and give you a behind-the-scenes look at cognitive empathy in practical application. In this episode, I get real nerdy with Samantha Pollack, a positioning strategist and copywriter, and think about how the digital doppelgangers we create via our personal brands might help us get curious about who is behind others' digital doppelgangers.

Footnotes:

Find every essay and episode in the Decoding Empathy series.

Every episode of What Works is also released in essay form at whatworks.fyi!
  • (00:00) - Introduction
  • (01:16) - Doppelganger by Naomi Klein
  • (04:58) - The tension between who we are and who we want to become
  • (09:11) - Behind the scenes of Samantha's copywriting process
  • (12:36) - How Samantha learns more about her client's customers
  • (16:01) - How to write in someone else's voice
  • (17:45) - How to write in someone else's voice
  • (21:45) - Two more tools for learning about customers
  • (26:08) - Sometimes people surprise you
  • (26:54) - What's the difference between the person and the personal brand?
  • (31:09) - Doppelgangers remind us to be curious about ourselves, others, and how we're all connected
  • (33:07) - Credits
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What is What Works?

Work is central to the human experience. It helps us shape our identities, care for those we love, and contribute to our communities. Work can be a source of power and a catalyst for change. Unfortunately, that's not how most of us experience work—even those who work for themselves. Our labor and creative spirit are used to enrich others and maintain the status quo. It's time for an intervention. What Works is a show about rethinking work, business, and leadership for the 21st-century economy. 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.