#109 Autism at Work, Early Blogging & Unconventional Paths - Tara McMullin

[00:59] Paul: Welcome to The Pathless Path. I'm Paul Millerd, and in this podcast, we examine the invisible scripts that run our lives and dare to imagine new stories for work and life. Today I'm talking with Tara McMullin. Excited to talk to you today, Tara. You have done so much. You've been creating online for more than a decade, maybe close to two decades.

You're a host of a podcast, What Works. You are a co-founder of a podcast production agency, and you've also closely studied small business owners, probably people like me, solopreneurs, creators, wanderers of the internet for many years. And in addition to that, you've also recently written about how you've come out as autistic, publicly and what that means for your relationship to work in the workplace in general. I think it'll be a really interesting lens just to talk about, um, how we think about work more broadly, but welcome to the podcast, Tara.

[02:01] Tara McMullin: Well, thank you. I am so glad to be with you and very looking forward to talking about these things.

[02:07] Paul: Incredible. So a place I often start on this podcast is with the stories we grow up with. And many people have different stories they grew up with about what they are supposed to be doing. Um, almost everyone in every culture I've talked to has a story. So what stories around work or what you were supposed to be doing as an adult did you grow up with?

[02:32] Tara McMullin: Yeah, I love this question. So I think the main story that I grew up with around work was that I could do what I loved a living and that I didn't have to make a lot of money doing it. And my brain, as I think is true for a lot of people, interpreted that as you can do what you love for a living, which is not going to make you much money, right? And so money, I was more focused on doing something that I really enjoyed, something that I was very interested in, something I found really engaging, way more than thinking about the money. Piece of it. And so, you know, like so many people, I think, in my generation, went and got a humanities degree that I could do absolutely nothing with career-wise.

I don't regret that decision at all. It was— it's awesome. I love my educational background. But when I left school, I didn't know how to navigate the world of work. I didn't know how to go out and find a career. That wasn't just more learning, which is also a wonderful thing.

But I just wasn't prepared. You know, I come from what I would now call a working-class background. My mother worked for herself as a seamstress. So I had this model of extreme flexibility and ownership, but within the context of making very, very, very little money per year. So that taught me something as well. That was a story that I was working with.

And then my dad was a cop, and that was a— and that was work that he really loved as well. But it wasn't like creative work. It wasn't passion work. It wasn't— it wasn't something that I kind of aspired to myself. And so that was kind of a— not a negative role model, but a, a modeling of a different type of career that I knew I didn't really want. So, yeah.

So most of my stories around work have to do with balancing this idea of doing what you love versus making money. And I think that's still very much a story that people are unraveling. But yeah, that it really It shaped or didn't shape my early career, and I've spent the last almost decade and a half now kind of unpacking that particular story so that I don't bring it into my business or into my own self-employment in a way that doesn't serve me.

[05:16] Paul: It's easy to carry these scripts. I know so many people have internalized the idea that work, especially if you're going to make money, has to entail some sort of suffering. So then the inverse script of that is if you're actually liking what you do, you shouldn't expect to be paid for that. Um, do you have any moments early on in any of your businesses where you had to sort of reframe that or start to think in different ways?

[05:43] Tara McMullin: Yeah, I mean, just very early on, so much of it was kind of identifying what was a reasonable amount of money to make in the in the first place. Like, I would say that because of my background, my expectation of what I was going to earn was extremely low, right? Like, I thought, oh, I'm a, I'm a religion major, uh, the best I'm gonna do is like $35,000 a year, right? I didn't have any idea of what a professional salary could look like. I didn't know when I started a business what that could look like. And so a lot of the reprogramming early on was just, no, what does it actually take to live a decent life?

What does that actually cost in America, in this economy? And figuring out how to do that, doing things that I enjoyed. And so that was sort of what the restructuring was. It was almost a case of changing my expectation around money in the first place and then sort of reverse engineering the what does that work look like from there.

[06:54] Paul: Money beliefs are so deep. It's, uh, my, my wife is Taiwanese, uh, so we have like two radically different economic systems. And like, I realized how much our ideas of like what we're supposed to make is basically just tied to what basically jobs pay in your country or the industries you're part of, or like the family you grew up on. And she had this script of, well, I'm Taiwanese, like I can't charge more than this. And I think the interesting thing now is the internet is basically making that not true anymore where you can just compete on the open market now.

[07:36] Tara McMullin: Yeah, absolutely. I, yeah, I think that sort of the leveling of wages and the leveling of what certain work is worth globally is a really interesting trend to sort of keep one's eye on over the next 10 years or so.

[07:53] Paul: So when did you make the shift from maybe defining yourself as somebody that was gonna do what they love, or at least carve out kind of what your mother had and a humanities major, maybe you had a narrative of, okay, I can't expect to make a lot of money to sort of seeing yourself as an entrepreneur. Yeah.

[08:15] Tara McMullin: So when I started started my business, which I'm putting in air quotes for listeners. I didn't really know I was starting a business. I started a blog. It was back when the predominant way that people made money through blogging was advertising. And my goal was to basically make some money on the side. I was at home with a newborn baby and I just wanted, I wanted some sort of outlet and I wanted that outlet to produce some revenue.

Um, although I wouldn't have spoken about it in those terms at that point, because I didn't know to speak in terms like that. Um, but really quickly within that first year, I started to recognize what the potential could be for earning. And by the end of that year, I had had a month where I brought in more revenue than I had made in my previous full-time job in a year. And it was, it was not a ton of money, $28,000. But to do it in a month as opposed to a year was a pretty eye-opening experience. And I think that's probably the point where I started to ask some much bigger questions about what am I really doing here?

What am I building? How am I going to go about this? What is the sort of vision that I have for where this could go? What am I interested in exploring as an entrepreneur? And that's when things really started to ramp up. And I really started to see myself then as going from a sort of an either-or framework, either doing work I love or making money, to a both-and framework.

I can do work I love and make good money, and I can do it ethically. And, and that's what I'm going to go after. That's what I'm going to look for. So that's how I started building things out. And that happened probably within the first, um, well, that, that sort of inflection point happened in that first year. But by the end of the second year, I was just blown away by the possibilities that were in front of me.

[10:26] Paul: Yeah. In this, was this the early 2000s, I think, or, uh, it was the late 2000s. So 2009 creating online, cuz you, you said you did some creating online, I think in the early 2000s.

[10:40] Tara McMullin: Yeah, I had a Zanga account in 2003. That was my very, very first blog. And oh, how I dream about the if, you know, the if only, if I would have only kept blogging there then, I think I would have had a very different early adult experience. But I'm glad I got back to it when I did. And it was still pretty early, relatively speaking, in the online business space anyway.

[11:07] Paul: Writing for me has been consistently showing up in my life, but it wasn't until I was like 35 years old that I sort of connected the dots. I was like, oh, writing is here all the time. Um, did you, did you have a similar, uh, aha, or did you kind of always know that writing was a core part of what you should be doing?

[11:27] Tara McMullin: It's such a great question. I don't think anyone's ever asked me this before. So I have a very I have a number of very distinct memories when it comes to writing and sort of understanding my identity as a writer. The first one was in 10th grade when we— the class— I was in honors English, and our class was tasked with writing some sort of paper. And we had this notoriously hard teacher, and he sent back— or he gave us back our papers, And he just stood up in the front of the room, absolutely disgusted with us. Like, you people have never learned how to write.

You don't know what a thesis statement is. And this is, you know, I just, I can remember sitting in that class. Like, I can feel myself at that desk with him in front of the chalkboard, just being disgusted. But he broke down for us at that point this is what a thesis statement is, this is how you structure a paper, all of those basic things that I would like to think we all learn in middle school or high school, but what I've realized is that we absolutely do not. So that was sort of the first place where I was like, I wanna do this right, and probably part of it was people pleasing. Like I wanted to get on the good side of the really hard teacher because that's who I am.

But it was, I was drawn into what he was teaching in a way that I don't think anyone else in the class was. And then later in college, there was another— college is when I started to enjoy writing more, when I realized that, you know, banging out 500 words, it's just like not a big deal, or banging out a 5-page report. It's just, it's fun. Like, let's do this. I still didn't think about writing as a career, though. But there was another class with a professor, this time a professor that I absolutely loved, one of my advisors, and it was a film and religion class.

And again, it was a sort of a general studies class. So there were lots of non-majors in the class, lots of people who were not familiar with the kind of thinking that we were doing in that particular class. And We had to turn in a paper and he turned them back to us after he'd graded them, absolutely disgusted with everybody's paper except for mine, which he read the thesis statement of as an example to the rest of the class. And that is the moment I first started thinking to myself, oh, I'm good at this writing thing. I am a writer. And then, you know, taking up blogging, doing it professionally for years and years now in, in one capacity or another has really helped to form that identity.

So I would say it's been since I was 20 years old or so that I had that sort of identity. But it's only been in the last couple of years where I'm like, now writing is basically my career and that's what I want it to be. And I got to figure out what I'm going to do to pursue that because it actually looks different than what I had been pursuing as an entrepreneur to that point.

[14:47] Paul: Yeah, it's, it's interesting how writing has become so central. I mean, the internet has just given almost anyone who has ideas or expertise or perspectives to share the widest possible audience. Did you have a sense of the scale of this when you were writing early on, or was it still pretty nascent? I mean, I know the early blog days, I was like a I was a Google Reader person, but I was not really contributing.

[15:14] Tara McMullin: Yeah. I would say that while I did not grasp the scale or had any vision for how things would grow, I do remember that in that initial foray in blogging, I was reaching people I didn't know and they were commenting and we were having conversations. And that, you know, as a 19, 20-year-old way back in 2003, so almost 20 years ago now, that was a huge aha moment. Just that, you know, okay, this internet thing, I have loved it for a very long time, but now I can talk to people I don't know and what I'm thinking about is something that they're thinking about and then we could think about it together. So that piece was a bit of an aha moment, but in terms of like, recognizing where blogging would go, what social media would become, because this is, you know, this is pre-Facebook. Now, that was not something that was on my radar.

I cannot, I cannot fake any prescience on that one.

[16:28] Paul: Yeah. And it's evolved so much. I was looking back in your bio and it seems like you've done like a number of different podcasts, a number of different courses. You've done stuff on your own. You've done stuff on platforms like CreativeLive. Was there an organizing principle for you in terms of how you were approaching everything starting then, or have you just sort of evolved as the ecosystems evolved too?

I imagine it's a mix of both.

[16:55] Tara McMullin: Yeah, I would say it's a mix of both. Definitely coming down harder on the side of just figuring it out as I go.

[17:03] Paul: Same.

[17:04] Tara McMullin: Yeah. But I think one of the kind of organizing questions in my life in general is trying to figure out why people do the things that they do, and what sort of underlying beliefs or worldview contributes to that behavior. And that is what ties my religion degree to what I do now. It's what ties my interests in sociology and politics and economics to what I do now. It's what, it's definitely what I hung my hat on in terms of a marketer or someone who is teaching marketing is like, I can peel back these layers and show someone how to think from someone else's perspective. You know, if you know this, this, and this about them, well then let's kind of craft that worldview and kind of understand what their needs might be, what their desires might be, what their pain points might be.

And so that question, and it comes all the way straight through to the book that's coming out in November as well, is it's really, around this worldview question and the, the quest to understand why people do what they do. And I know you wanna talk about autism as well, but I think it's a huge part of, it's a huge strength of mine as an autistic person to take that analytical of a perspective around, uh, understanding people because understanding people does not come naturally to to me. And so really having to analyze worldview and belief system and action, behavioral, the behavioral pieces of the puzzle, that is, it's necessary for me, which in some ways is a weakness, but in a lot of ways in terms of thinking about teaching, thinking about writing, thinking about coaching, That's a real strength for me and it's something that not everyone does.

[19:07] Paul: Yeah, you wrote that because of autism, it leads to some of your greatest strengths, hyperfocus, pattern recognition, systems thinking. So by default, you've always just been somebody that's trying to decode what's happening because you didn't have a sort of natural sense of that.

[19:25] Tara McMullin: Right.

[19:26] Paul: Maybe let's take a step back. Like when did you, when did the first moment of like, Oh, maybe this is something I should explore, or maybe I'm not quite, um, processing information like other people.

[19:40] Tara McMullin: Yeah, this was also a really long and disjointed process. So I would say the first time I started asking questions was actually back in the '90s. I can remember, um, you know, being probably midway through high school and maybe seeing a news report on something like 60 Minutes, and it was talking about this thing that more people were talking about, Asperger's syndrome. And, you know, these are— this is what it's like to be someone with Asperger's syndrome, and these are the symptoms, and this is how you know. But in that same report, it was made very clear that, like, this is something that boys experience. This is something where, you know, it's the— it's the Rain Man stereotypes.

It's, you know, you're obsessed with numbers. It's all of that. And so those kind of features, while untrue, made me think, oh, I guess that's not me. Like, everything else you're saying about this feels relevant, but clearly I'm not a boy. And while math, I enjoy it, it's fine, it is not an obsession of mine. So therefore, I guess this isn't me.

And, you know, that's what any one is going to do at 16, I think, is latch on to the thing that makes it, makes it a negative. So that was then. I think that there have been times, you know, between then and 2021, just last year, when, you know, I've asked more questions, I've thought about things differently. I remember when Asperger's was actually taken out of the DSM and replaced just by Autism Spectrum Disorder as a as a whole big umbrella of things. I remember that very clearly and kind of starting to ask questions again then. I think that was 2013, 2014.

But it wasn't until the pandemic hit that I really started to notice how other people's emotional states, other people's way of processing fear, anxiety, group interaction, how different my way of doing those things was from other people. And I started to notice how much it— how much extra work it took for me. And so it wasn't that I couldn't do it. It was just that the process of like understanding, okay, this is what someone is feeling right now, or this is how they're relating to this situation. It's a long process. It's— and I got to think through all the steps to be able to do it.

And at that time, I was hosting 3 mastermind groups with about 10 people each in them. And these are all business owners. There's this crazy economic shock and everybody is on edge. Everybody is just dripping with anxiety around whether their business is going to make it or not. And then on the other hand, you know, we had people whose business had never been better thanks to the pandemic. And then like weighing that as a facilitator, I just, I lost it in terms of, you know, was exhausted all the time.

I would get done with work at the end of the day and literally lose the ability to speak to my husband, right? Like, the most natural relationship that I have in my life, I wasn't able to keep up with because all of my reserves were spent in these social environments during, during the pandemic and then afterward as well. But it wasn't that year that I started to ask those questions again. It was really in that sort of in the aftermath of that, deciding I needed to take a break from facilitating and coaching and really focus on just getting well again and getting my energy back, my capacity back. So it was March or April of 2021 when I started to— I was listening to some interviews with, with women who mentioned sort of in passing that they were autistic. And I was like, oh, okay, interesting.

And then I saw some folks on some women on Twitter that I really respect mentioned that they were autistic. And I was like, Oh, interesting. Okay. And then it's the sort of cliché, well, I'll go take a test, right? Autism in adults assessment, right? Hitting that into Google and taking a couple tests and all of the tests coming back, no, you're highly likely to be autistic.

From there, read some books, talked to my doctor, talked to a therapist, and everyone's like, yeah, you're pretty much describing the prototypical female profile of autism with no intellectual impairment. I say all that because there's so many things that being an autistic woman has its own sort of unique story to it. Obviously, having no intellectual impairment around autism has its own particular story around it. And those things combined make it so that a lot of folks who think about autism don't think about somebody like me or like the other folks that I was connecting with. But yeah, so anyhow, that was, that was early 2021. And for the last year and a half or so, I've just been kind of unpacking all of that and recognizing sometimes just how autistic I am, which is a funny thing sometimes.

[25:36] Paul: It seems like the, one of the biggest misconceptions is that it is a spectrum at like the highest level. And in reality it's kind of a group of traits. Correct. And then maybe the spectrum is on those traits, right?

[25:49] Tara McMullin: Right.

[25:49] Paul: So if you look at all these different traits, there's probably, 100 different ways it shows up in people, right? Is that the better way to think about it? And what are some of those distinct traits?

[26:03] Tara McMullin: Yeah, great question. So yes, autism is not a spectrum from low functioning to high functioning or from mild to severe, which is 100% the biggest misconception about what autism spectrum disorder is all about. So yes, one way to think of it is almost the diagram that I like is sort of a radial depiction of the spectrum with different pie pieces being different traits. So sensory, you know, sort of what's the word I'm looking for? I don't know. My, my words are escaping me today.

Basically deficiencies in being able to process sensory. Stimulus. So like for me, sound is a really big one. I have a really hard time concentrating or really even just feeling present if there are a lot of sounds around me that I, you know, and I'm trying to concentrate on something else. But for a lot of other people, it's lights. It can be texture.

I'm really picky about clothes. Like a lot of autistic people are, and what fabric I wear, and where the tags are on clothes and things like that. So that's one kind of the social piece, which is not to say that autistic people are antisocial or all loners. There are extroverted autistic people, there are introverted autistic people, there are people with deep relationships and people with not a lot of deep relationships, but there are definitely differences when it comes to social relations. Kind of awareness of emotions is another one. My husband and I were just talking about this one yesterday that, you know, the way I feel an emotion to me does not register as an emotion, as a feeling.

I have a hard time understanding what's going on inside inside my body. And that's a pretty common thing among autistic people. Another big one that is very strange for me, but it's very common, is delays in speech processing. So basically, hearing language, it takes me longer to process what someone has said than it does a non-autistic person typically. And that can be difficult for me because I have a reputation for being really quick on my feet, being good in an interview, all of these things that rely on speech processing. But I can see or I notice when something doesn't jive.

And I also notice when, you know, like after a conversation like this, I am on hype, you know, I am hyper-focused on what you're saying, how you're saying it, making sure that I'm processing it as much as I can in real time. And so at the end of this, I will be very tired, which is fine, but it's a good thing to know. So that's a few of the different traits around autism. And, and yeah, everyone experiences those traits differently. If you know one autistic person, you know one autistic person is typically what's said.

[29:39] Paul: That's a good way to put it.

[29:40] Tara McMullin: Yeah.

[29:41] Paul: Yeah. Has the shift to video been good or harder for you?

[29:46] Tara McMullin: So much harder. So much harder because, oh man, for so many reasons. So eye contact for one is difficult. That's another very typical autistic trait. So in some ways I'm good at eye contact online in that I am not actually looking at your eyes, right? I'm looking at the camera.

[30:08] Paul: The camera.

[30:09] Tara McMullin: So I have an out, but when I'm listening to you or when I'm thinking, I am very conscious of the fact that I'm looking up here and what I'm pointing up for listeners. And so that's something that has been strange. Also, like, even though you can see someone on camera and your brain thinks, I know what's going on with this person, you miss out on so much physical context. And so much of what we communicate is in how we are presenting our thoughts or information. And so we miss out on that on Zoom. And, you know, for a lot of people, that's, you know, not optimal, but it's fine.

For me, it means my brain is working even harder. And then the other thing about video that has been really difficult for me is that I'm hyper-conscious of my own body language. And so I know that I, you know, I'm kind of performing with my face, I'm performing with my hands, I'm performing in my, just my general stature in front of the camera. And because I can see it, I'm extra vigilant of it. Like, it's something I'm always vigilant of, but I'm extra vigilant because I can see it in front of me or in the corner of my eye. And I find that turning it off is worse than having it on.

So if I know you can see me, but I can't see me, that's a problem because I will assume that my face is making really funny faces because it will be. And so it's more helpful for me to have the camera on. But yeah, Zoom and just video in general has been a really difficult thing for me over the last 10 years.

[32:01] Paul: You talk about autistic masking, which I think relates to what you're talking about, and especially at work, right? You're trying to figure out how to act, how to behave, and it's, It's probably easier running your own thing, right? It's even harder when you're working in the middle of a large organization. I think I always, I was always kind of a weirdo in these big organizations. I'm way better of a fit doing my own thing, but I think it's such an interesting lens because more companies are now becoming aware of what they're terming like neurodivergence, right? It's just, different traits, different tendencies, different deficiencies.

And like, I think autism has been this really unique lens, especially because it's been so prevalent in like tech and things like software engineering, where companies now have to prioritize this to get those kinds of people. But in some sense, it's also just bringing more awareness to the fact that so many people are masking to some degree. In the workplace? How have you come to an increased awareness of things like that? So there's a lot there.

[33:14] Tara McMullin: No, no, it's a great question. So masking is something that I have always known that I do, right? I used to call it different things when I was working in retail management. I always thought about how that, that when I walked through the door of our store, I was putting a particular hat on and I'd wear that hat until I walked out. At the end of the day, and then I'd be exhausted. But, you know, I was aware that there were different personalities that I put on to fit into different social situations and that sometimes I didn't have the energy to put those different personalities on.

What I have learned, kind of looking at that experience through the lens of autistic masking is how pervasive it is, how immersed I am in that. So that, like, again, my husband will say, you know, I want to be the person you don't have to mask around. It's like, well, that's not going to happen because the only time I am not masking is when I'm by myself. Now, that's not true of all autistic people. Some autistic people are much more comfortable with taking that mask off. And maybe there will be a day when I am less cognizant of the— when I'm doing less self-monitoring.

But, you know, I know there are certain things that I do, that I say, how I present myself that bother him. And I try to not do those things. Right. Well, that's masking. And I don't want to be in a position where I'm constantly annoying him with of clarifying words and making sure that we have precise— it's largely around vocabulary and precision are the things that I fixate on that he can't stand. But so, yeah, so masking is something that doesn't just happen at work.

For me, it happens all the time, everywhere. I'm doing it right now. So yeah, I think in terms of the workplace, it's a really interesting thing to think about. There's a paper by some researchers named Amy Pearson and Kieran Rose that talks about how the sort of the purpose of masking is to reduce external consequences. And so that in the workplace can be things like getting passed over for a promotion, getting a bad performance review, you know, not being able to speak up in a meeting, all those sorts of things that way more than we expect hinge on social interactions. So we mask so that those things don't happen to us.

But at the same time, that creates immense internal consequences. It can create a feeling of self-alienation. It can feel— it can create just a lack of identity. You know, you don't know who you are. And so that's been something that I've been working on a lot. But it's really difficult.

I mean, I think there's some— I think for anyone who is masking or code-switching in the workplace, it's really difficult to know when it's okay to be a little bit more yourself. And I think even when a workplace says, hey, we want you to be yourself, we want you to bring your whole self, it's like, yeah, you do, cool. I know intellectually you mean that, but when I do a thing that annoys you, what are you going to remember? Are you going to remember that I'm autistic and that this behavior is, is part of who I am? Or are you going to remember that you're annoyed? It's going to be the latter.

And I don't fault anyone for that. I would love to see that change, but I think that's the reality in the workplace today.

[37:26] Paul: Yeah, this stuff is so hard to decode, I think. I mean, I used to study organizational culture, right? And when I see companies saying things like, bring your whole self to work, I know they're lying.

[37:37] Tara McMullin: Right.

[37:38] Paul: But a lot of people take that literally, right? If the reality of the workplace is there are certain incentives, and they're going to promote the people that are reacting appropriately to those incentives. That's just how a culture works inside of a company. But we're coming to an increasing awareness that large amounts of people, perhaps, aren't actually understanding that bring your whole self to work doesn't actually mean bring your whole self to work. It basically means bring the self to work that will thrive in this organization. Otherwise, we'll probably ignore you, not give you a pay raise, or you're going to have to find another job.

[38:18] Tara McMullin: Yeah, completely agree. Completely agree.

[38:22] Paul: Yeah, have you had— so how have you changed the way you've worked now? You've talked about disclosing to people proactively. Have you made any other adjustments, especially with the people you're working with?

[38:37] Tara McMullin: Yeah, absolutely. So I have actively dismantled all of my working relationships. Not, not really. But, you know, the— in 2017, I really took the business all in on a community model. And we were building this basically social network and support network of small business owners and freelancers. I had a full-time employee, I had a couple of part-time employees, and I was hosting mastermind groups at the same time.

And so my work was very people-forward. It was extremely social. And like I said, I knew those kinds of activities tired me out, but I didn't know the real cost of doing that, you know, 40, 50 hours a week. So I held on for 5 years. And then at the end of last year, I realized that I needed to shut it down and that I needed to be done with that kind of work. So it actually ended very positively.

Another company took on the community. They took on my full-time employee. And I was just sort of allowed to be on my own for the first time in 5 years. And so, yeah, I have recognized that while being social is always going to be part of my work in one way or another, that building my business model around being social was— is just not something that I have within my capacity. And I think that that's, that's an interesting thing that I have been thinking more and more about as I've been processing all of this, which is that One of the other stories that I really grew up with around work is you can do anything you set your mind to. You have all of this potential to do all these amazing things that you can't even imagine right now.

And part of the autism processing and journey for me is recognizing that I have actual limitations and that there's nothing wrong with having limitations and that just because I have a limitation in one place doesn't mean I don't have potential in another. And so kind of right-sizing my expectations, right-sizing what I put myself into in terms of relationships, in terms of just having to do the things that are difficult for me has been— I mean, it sounds so silly, right? Like, you have limitations. Of course you do. But But we live in a culture where that is kind of frowned upon to think about having limitations. So this year I have been 100% devoted to my writing, which includes my podcast.

So doing some freelance writing, doing, you know, writing the book, all of those things, and continuing to produce my newsletter and my podcast and sort of just feeling my way into what is a really different conception of work than what I'd been doing for the previous 13 years. And in a lot of ways, it is taking some huge steps back, right? Like I spent years kind of trying to own a business owner mindset and an entrepreneur mindset and really thinking about building a company. And recognizing that, you know what, okay, I built a company. I don't want a company. I want great work that I can do without burning out or without burning out as frequently anyway.

You know, and I have the production agency that I can kind of put the extra ambition and energy into. But yeah, my work now is, So is a lot smaller than it used to be, but in a way that actually allows me a greater potential, I think.

[42:47] Paul: Does it feel like you can now play this game, uh, for like 20 years now?

[42:52] Tara McMullin: Oh yeah. Like I could totally just keep writing a newsletter and doing a podcast for the next 20 years. Absolutely. Or just write more books. Like I just desperately wanna write the next book.

[43:02] Paul: That's so amazing. Has, have those two things, the, the writing and creating been the things that have opened up the most since stepping away from the more socially and like human relationship type work you were doing?

[43:17] Tara McMullin: I am able to pursue it in a different way than I was pursuing it before. So I've been able to take a lot more creative risks with the podcast. So I kind of shifted from a straight up interview format into a narrative format this year. I would have never had the capacity to do that before. Even if I would have had the time, just the mental capacity I wouldn't have had. I'm able to do a lot more research and thinking about ideas that aren't marketable than I had before.

I've really taken a shift from being a content marketer who thinks about ideas to being an idea thinker, an idea thinker, an idea person who also knows something about content marketing. And that's probably been the biggest change just from a professional standpoint. And it's also the change that I'm constantly just like so grateful that I made. And, you know, yeah, it just, it has opened a lot more doors. I see a lot more career path possibilities because of that shift. Probably even more so than just stepping away from the human relationships piece.

[44:32] Paul: What ideas are you most excited about now?

[44:34] Tara McMullin: Oh, well, on Twitter last week, I announced, I said, I regret to inform you that my new special interest, special interests are another autistic thing, is discourse analysis. So right now what I'm really interested in is like taking little bits of text whether that's written text or verbal text, and thinking about the ways that those words and how they're delivered communicate cultural meaning that is not explicitly expressed in those words. So that's what I'm most excited about. I love this. And other things, just kind of where we're at as an economy. With as confusing and mixed up as all of the indicators are, I think we are potentially at some sort of inflection point.

It may be an inflection point that goes on for years and years without resolving in a particular direction. But, you know, I think we're in a place where people are starting to ask bigger questions about like, is this economy really working for us? Does managing interest rates this way really work? Should there be a universal basic income? And so I'm really interested in those questions and exploring them from a sort of independent work side as well.

[45:55] Paul: I love those questions. Yeah, I think it's probably a meta question I think a lot about. It's been really interesting to shift from like I was working in consulting firms and most of the clients I was working with were like the industrial economy. And now I'm sort of doing my own thing, working with the internet, which seems so like obvious that this is going to change everything and you're part of like this tailwind that is carrying you forward.

[46:21] Tara McMullin: You—

[46:21] Paul: I mean, if you're willing to do your own thing these days online, you can sort of just keep showing up and you'll kind of— you'll stumble upon like some success eventually if you stay in the game. But our whole economy, and I write about this in my book, is still built on the idea that like to be a good person in this society, you should pursue a stable full-time job.

[46:46] Tara McMullin: Yeah.

[46:48] Paul: Which doesn't quite exist. But we don't really have an alternative story yet that's emerging. And it's— we're in this transition, we're in a liminal state, and we don't quite know what's next.

[47:01] Tara McMullin: Yeah. Yes. And I think there was a long time where I thought what was next is what people like you and I are doing now. But I— but that's not the answer either, as far as I'm concerned. I think it's a good choice. Yeah, I think it's a good choice for a lot of people in this moment.

And we have to buy our own health insurance. We don't have unemployment insurance. It's so bad. Like all of the things that are tied to employment. You're right. There's the moral component to it.

And then there's the, like, exploitative component. To it as well. And so we're trying to get out of the exploitation piece, but at the same time, then we're missing out on what is considered the stability of a stable 40-hour-a-week job. So yes, I mean, I could talk about the economy all day long, but yeah, yes to all of that.

[48:01] Paul: If you haven't checked out her stuff, Kyla Scanlon, who I think we're going to be interviewing soon, her Stuff is incredible. It's like the most— it's the weirdest, most interesting, most thoughtful breakdowns of the economy.

[48:15] Tara McMullin: Excellent.

[48:16] Paul: I'll send you some.

[48:17] Tara McMullin: That would be great.

[48:19] Paul: Shout out to Kyla if she's listening. But yeah, it's interesting. I think to be on a path like this, you need to be— and I wonder if like this kind of path is like perfectly suited for somebody that's more neurodivergent. I tell people that like my unique comfort with hanging out online, making virtual friends for hours and not really getting drained by that and like having fun creating things online combined with like my sort of, ah, if I blow everything up and lose all my money, it's like, whatever. Like, that's not normal. Like, you shouldn't pursue this.

Like, I don't think most people would be comfortable in this path. And part of my awakening on this path is realizing I'm a bit weird. When did you sort of realize, "Okay, this unconventional path is suited for me"?

[49:17] Tara McMullin: I mean, I think I realized it way back in 2009. I didn't have all of the information around why I felt that way. Then, you know, now I'm able to give kind of this bird's eye view analysis from, you know, all sorts of different perspectives of why this is the right fit for me. But I have, I have always loved the internet. You know, my parents got our first computer, I think, in '92. You know, we got on Prodigy from there.

We got on American Online from there. You know, so I have Yeah, so I have been internetting in one form or another since I was 10 or 11 years old. And it has made a huge impression in my life. I, you know, I wish that— well, there's so many things I wish. I wish in college I would have realized that internet was something that I could incorporate into an idea of what a career could be. But we just We just weren't thinking that way in 2000 to 2004, yet, at least not in rural central Pennsylvania at a small liberal arts college.

So yeah, I mean, it's been very early on that the internet has just clicked for me. I love what you said about being able to just be online and hang out with people and like it not be a thing. I have often remarked that I am a very hardcore introvert in person, but I am a digital extrovert. Like, I have zero issue just—

[50:55] Paul: Ah, that's such a great—

[50:56] Tara McMullin: Right? Like, I'm just so good at not caring when I get on Twitter. Like, I'll just say whatever. I don't overthink social media interactions the way I am constantly overthinking in-person interactions.

[51:13] Paul: Yeah, you talked about this in an essay, which was really cool. You talked about taking up space and how in real life that's often a heavy lift for you, but online it's like, I can do this and I feel comfortable doing this. And it gives, I mean, given some of the things you're working with around like your traits, it's way easier for you to achieve your goals operating digitally.

[51:38] Tara McMullin: Yeah. I don't know if this is true of more autistic people or if this is just one way that my particular brand of autism comes out, but one thing that makes me feel a lot more comfortable in a social interaction, online or offline, is knowing that the other person knows some background information about me. And so online, we have a profile page, there's a bio, there's a website link, there's photo. I know that when you see my tweet, that information is a click away, right? I know that when someone listens to the podcast and they— or lands on the podcast for the very first time and they see there's almost 400 episodes in there and they see the topics that I'm talking about and they see the description, I feel really comfortable that if they press play, they're not they kind of know what they're in for, right? And so the same thing happens in person.

If I'm speaking at a conference, for instance, I really prefer to be the opening speaker than the closing speaker because once I've spoken, then when people come up and talk to me, they're talking to me about my talk. And that's background information that makes it feel so much more comfortable. As opposed to the one time I think I was a closing speaker. I was terrified the entire conference because people would keep coming up to me and I think they expected me to say something, but I didn't know what to say. And, you know, and we're having these awkward exchanges in bathrooms and like behind the scenes and I'm just like, oh God, I just want to talk and like, get out of here. So yeah, so that's a, that's a particular thing.

And as you were, as you were kind of asking that, I was also thinking back to your previous question about has video made things easier or harder? And I think one of the things that has, has changed how I interact online, definitely in terms of social media, is, you know, probably 5-ish years ago when many more of the platforms started to prioritize video, I definitely felt a little like a fish out of water. You know, I didn't want to do it. I wasn't interested in it. I tried and tried. But I have pretty much maintained an either audio-only or written text-only presence.

And so yeah, so that's just another piece of like how I think through how comfortable it is or not to show up online.

[54:24] Paul: Yeah. And how do you think about engaging online? You talked about this a little, but you said you can kind of just put stuff out there and you don't really worry about the reaction. I think it's kind of similar how I approach things. It's like I kind of like put ideas out there and I'm always curious to see like the best, the thing I get most excited about is like when somebody like slightly disagrees but then like adds on it, right? And like pushes me a little further.

Is that sort of how you think about social media too? Yes.

[54:52] Tara McMullin: And it's actually something that as my profile grew, as my audience grew, I got less of, right? Because when you have a, when you have a reputation with the people who are following along, um, and I have, despite, you know, all everything else, I have a very confident speaking voice, a confident writing voice. And so people assume that when I talk, whether that's written or verbally, that what I'm saying must be true. And so I found that my own audience wouldn't push back on me very much. And so I've had to sort of seek out that pushback, even if it's a passive pushback by, you know, reading people who disagree with me or by reading things that I just don't know about. But yeah, I think that there This is something that I actually think about often, which is the sort of the culture of a particular space online.

So one of the things that I love about Twitter is that it is a space in which people are— the discourse is a lot more informal. And it is fine to post something that starts a conversation where maybe you end up in a different place at the end of that conversation. You know, that is a very typical Twitter experience. But someplace like Instagram, where even though maybe the non-curated look is what's hot right now, which is just another form of curation, it is a place where people are thinking about the plan a lot more. And so there I feel less likely to post something in informally. I get more nervous before I post something informally.

Whereas like Twitter, like, I don't know, I just tweeted something about asking if anybody had watched The Anarchists yet and was it just libertarians behaving badly or was there like any discussion of actual anarchist politics? And, you know, please let me know. Like, that doesn't, that doesn't bother me at all.

[56:57] Paul: There's— yeah, and there's definitely somebody on Twitter that probably has a perfect response for that too. It's, yeah, I think Twitter is one of these things that has the reputation is the most disconnected from the reality of it. Of course, if you're like only going on there for politics, you're going to get outrage and tribal stuff. But yeah, it's a really interesting space for like thinking out loud and finding other people that want to get smarter, think deeper, reflect. Um, yeah. And people think that, like, and I'm excited to see what you find on, like, discourse, but people think, like, disagreement is how you get to better ideas.

But often it's kind of a shared excitement about moving in a completely different direction, especially in today's world where it's like tribal conflicts never get solved. They basically just shift to new conflicts.

[57:55] Tara McMullin: Right, exactly. Yeah. Synthesis. Process is an important part of building new ideas, right? So taking, taking what's good from here, taking what's good from there, taking a question from this other place, taking a fact from this other place and saying, okay, well, where does that leave us now? How does that further my knowledge or my insight, my understanding?

Yeah. And I think Twitter is a phenomenal place to do that, even if it still then requires backing up and actually thinking through something, I have found the process of being more open on Twitter and more informal on Twitter to be a really helpful experience as a thinker.

[58:36] Paul: Amazing. Yeah. So where can people follow along? Your podcast is What Works. I checked out a couple episodes. I really liked the, the narrative format is really cool.

I love when people start like producing at a higher level, it like raises the stakes. And I'm like, oh, I need to push myself to create more interesting stuff. But yeah, the podcast, Twitter, I'll link it up. Where else can people find out about you and maybe plug your book?