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Haik Avanian

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Mills believes that modern technology can help reduce friction and barriers within small-business lending. The way she sees it, the two challenges in small-business lending boil down to information opacity — since it’s “nearly impossible” to see inside a small business and know what’s going on — and the sheer variety of small businesses that lenders encounter.

“One day you’re lending to a dry cleaner and the next day to a parts supplier, the next to a hairdresser,” Mills said during a panel discussion at the Money20/20 conference in late October. “How do you get a credit file that allows you to understand that business?”

The answer, Mills suggests, rests with application programming interfaces, better known as APIs. APIs are software intermediaries which connect two applications with one another. If you’ve ever called an Uber or sent money to someone through an online payment system, then you’ve used an API.

Mills is calling for an API to streamline small-business lending. Instead of an entrepreneur photo copying her tax information and compiling financial documents to send over to a lender, have a fintech company plug into the entrepreneur’s financials (like a QuickBooks account). The fintech can then send it directly to the lender.

The underlying thinking is that this enables a fintech company to dramatically shave time from the lending process, which can help small businesses get the money they need faster — and perhaps even highlight businesses that are creditworthy.

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I have an intern who is book-smart and a very hard worker. But there’s one big problem — he’s bad at things he thinks he’s a superstar with. A few examples:

• He thinks he’s an amazing writer, but his writing is awful. He misspells words, leaves out words, has no organization, and generally writes in an unprofessional manner.
• He thinks he’s great at public speaking. In reality, his presentations are disorganized. He speaks very quickly and loudly and uses a lot of insider language that most other people don’t understand. He’s also completely clueless about when he’s lost his audience.
• He thinks he’s good at digital. In reality, the social-media posts he’s written are cringe-worthy. His attempts to edit websites have often resulted in me spending hours fixing his work. His photos and videos are blurry, have bad lighting, and aren’t framed well.

I’ve tried talking to him about slowing down and being more thorough with his work. I’ve also gone through all the changes I’ve done to his work, so he understands why they were necessary. I’ve put him on different types of projects that he claims to be brilliant at, so I could find his strengths and make sure that he is lightening my workload instead of doubling it (which is what is happening now). It’s not working.

Even worse, he’s applied for a full-time job with my company and is convinced he’s going to get it, but his interview was awful and he failed his writing test.

I work in a creative industry. I think he has a lot of potential. But I fear he’s just not a good fit for our industry. Any suggestions on how to manage him for the rest of his internship? Is there a tactful way to let him know I think he’s great, but he’s just not good at this work?

Green responds:

When you say you think he’s great, but he messes up everything he tackles and has no sense of his own abilities, I have to wonder if you really think he’s great or if you’re saying that because it feels like a kind thing say.

There’s nothing wrong with being kind! But I suspect it’s muddying your thinking here, because you have an intern who’s screwing up left and right, and you haven’t told him that, and you need to. So let’s talk about what being kind really means in this context.

Being kind in this situation would mean giving clear and specific feedback about where he isn’t currently strong and needs to work on improving. That’s true for anyone you manage, but it’s especially true for interns, who are supposed to be learning. He can’t learn if no one will tell him where he’s falling short and what it would look like to do better.

Being kind also would mean giving him some feedback on his interview so that he’s not thinking he’s about to be hired when that’s so far from the truth.

It is not kind to let him continue thinking he’s fantastic at things you’ve seen he’s terrible at. He’s going to pitch himself to future jobs based on an inaccurate self-assessment, and if he bluffs his way into a job based on those things, he’s likely to end up getting fired. Maybe repeatedly!

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Learning = Stop

Learning requires your brain to analyze and remember instructions and facts. When music is on, however, your brain has to process auditory data on top of processing the instructions and facts. Because of this multitasking, the brain can interpret the instructions and facts improperly, either associating them in odd ways or making mistakes about what’s important enough to store. Thus, if you have to learn something at work, it’s best to turn off your music, especially if you’re learning verbally or through reading and the music has lyrics.

Noisy = Play

If your workspace is noisy, the brain will try to handle all the individual pieces of data in the noise. All that data processing takes energy you otherwise could use to focus on your job. It also increases levels of the stress-hormone cortisol and decreases levels of dopamine. Those hormonal changes negatively affect the prefrontal cortex, hindering executive function. Thus, productivity can go down, even if doing your required task doesn’t require you to learn. In this scenario, listening to music can actually help, because it blocks out the other excessive input that could overwhelm you and keeps you calm.

Repetitive Job = Play

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Many sleep experts take a dim view of using the snooze button in the morning. Setting serial alarms beginning earlier than you need to get up, rather than sleeping straight through until a single alarm, may prematurely pull you out of deep, restorative sleep, the thinking goes. And if you’re snoozing beyond the time you actually meant to get out of bed, that may be a signal that you’re not getting enough rest at night, says Philip Cheng, a sleep expert at Henry Ford Health.

But when Stephen Mattingly—a serial snoozer who completed his Ph.D. in cognition at the University of Notre Dame and then became a postdoctoral researcher at the university—turned to the scientific literature to see if the data backed up those warnings, he couldn’t find much.

Previous studies had found that fragmented sleep at night is worse than short but uninterrupted sleep, and, more positively, that napping may reverse some of the damage associated with sleep deprivation (and potentially also improve heart health). But neither nighttime slumber nor daytime napping is exactly the same as snoozing first thing in the morning.

Some of the only snoozing-specific research Mattingly could find linked snooze-button use to increased chances of lucid dreaming, but he was more interested in the day-to-day health effects of the habit. So he designed a study using both survey and wearable-device data to assess the science of snoozing.

The results, published in the journal Sleep in 2022, suggested that snoozers didn’t sleep less overall or report feeling more fatigued throughout the day than people who got up after one alarm. Snoozers did, however, tend to experience lighter sleep, especially in the hour before waking, and had elevated resting heart rates relative to non-snoozers—results that suggest their stress responses kicked into gear before waking.

That may sound like a bad thing, but the body has a stress system for a reason, Mattingly says. In this context, he says, it may help shake off “sleep inertia,” or the grogginess many people feel after waking, and promote alertness and cognitive function.

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Despite the time-honored wisdom that we should visit a dentist for a checkup and cleaning every six months, many of us just … don’t. According to the CDC, around 35% of Americans have not visited the dentist in the last year. If it’s been a long while for you, and you’re planning to get back in the dentist chair, congratulations: You’re making the right decision for your health, self esteem, and eating power.

“The first step is making an appointment,” Dr. Ruchi Sahota, the American Dental Association’s consumer advisor spokesperson and a family dentist, told me. “pick up the phone or go online. Click the ‘make an appointment.’ Because you have to get into the office so that you can at least find out what your options are.”

Once you’ve made that appointment, here’s what to expect and how to prepare for your dentist visit.

What information should you bring to the dentist?

According to Dr. Sahota, if you’re returning to the dentist after a long time away, you should let the doctor know what kind of toothbrush and toothpaste you’re using, and what tool you’re using to clean between your teeth too. You should also come prepared to discuss non-tooth-related health issues.

“It’s important to know what kind of medicines you’re taking and what kind of things you’re seeing your physician for,” Dr. Sahota said. “Because remember, dentists are doctors of the mouth and head. And there are many issues that can be happening in the rest of your body that you can see a sign of inside your mouth. There’s links to diabetes, cardiac issues—there’s a long list of issues that have a link to poor dental health.”

Don’t be afraid to ask questions

If you’re returning to a dentist after a long absence, you’ll no doubt have questions and concerns to discuss with your dentist. To make sure you don’t forget anything, take notes. “Going back to any kind of a doctor after a long time can be overwhelming,” Dr. Sahota explained. “So a great routine to have is to write down any questions you might have for them.”

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When BBC journalist Rory Carson sought online consultations for a potential mental health issue, three private clinics diagnosed him with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). They charged between £685 and £1,095 for these consultations, which lasted between 45 and 100 minutes, and all prescribed him medication.

ADHD is a highly controversial disorder which emerged in the US in the late 1950s during the cold war, and quickly became associated with stimulant drugs such as Ritalin. Now diagnosed throughout the world, ADHD is central to many debates about neurodiversity.

While Carson’s Panorama investigation into its treatment attracted plenty of criticism, the fact that this disorder could apparently be diagnosed quite casually online is concerning. When he subsequently had a more rigorous (but free) three-hour, in-person consultation with an NHS psychiatrist, he was told that he did not, in fact, have ADHD.

Society’s increasing awareness of mental health issues and demand for mental health support has been driven, in part, by social media and easier access to information online. While this is no bad thing in many ways, the related increase in self-diagnosis (including among children and adolescents) is clearly open to abuse by some organizations offering costly diagnoses and treatments.

But there is another reason for this rapid growth in private mental healthcare. In England alone, the NHS spends around £2 billion per year on private hospital care for mental health patients – equating to 13.5% of its total mental health spend. Due to the reduction in NHS bed provision, nine out of ten privately-run mental health beds are now filled by NHS patients.

While the UK government says it is committed to spending more money on mental health, private investment companies are reportedly queuing up to “seize the opportunities offered up to them by the NHS crisis”. Private providers say they can do more to help avert a mental health emergency exacerbated by the COVID pandemic. Yet, a dozen of the 80-odd privately-run mental health hospitals in England were rated as “inadequate” in the Care Quality Commission’s latest report, which has warned of possible closures.

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Advert for a universal basic income (UBI) scheme in New York, May 2016. Such schemes could offer significant benefits for recipients’ mental health. Generation Grundeinkommen via Wikimedia, CC BY-SA

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