Heya Reader...

Three years ago, I gave a TEDx talk called Enoughness and the Marginalization Tax.

I re-watched the video in preparation for the retreat and had an unsettling moment of clarity.

You know, when you hear your past self say something and think:

Oh. I was talking about something bigger than I realized.

At the time, I was talking mostly about entrepreneurs.

...about the pressure to keep growing at all costs and the very "American" idea that if you just work hard enough, persist long enough, and want it badly enough, you can make almost anything happen.

...and about what happens when that simply isn’t true.

I called part of that problem the Marginalization Tax: the extra resources some people have to spend just to get access to the same opportunity, result, or standard everyone else is supposedly working toward.

Sometimes that tax is money, but often it's time, energy, an emotional investment, and other resources that limit your capacity to do, be, have, or experience anything in life.

Back then, I was looking at that mostly through the lens of the individual business owner.

Now I can’t stop seeing the organizational version.

Leaders make decisions all the time that look perfectly reasonable on paper while passing those costs on to someone else.

“Everybody needs to come back to the office.”

Okay. What about childcare, disability-access, or transportation cost?

“We need everyone to do more with less.”

Yikes! Who's paying for that "efficiency" with their evenings, health, or ability to do good work?

“We’re keeping all six priorities.”

Okay. Whose capacity is expected to magically expand so the math works?

That’s the part I understand differently now.

A decision can look equal from the top and still be wildly unequal in what it costs people to carry it.

And if leaders don’t account for that cost, it doesn’t disappear.

It shows up somewhere else.

In turnover, burnout, or dropped balls.

In resentment that leads to Quiet Compliance - where people put their heads down and "go along to get along" or do the bare minimum just to check a box.

A lot of my work now is about helping leaders see the real decision underneath the obvious one.

I'm recognizing that my TEDx talk was an earlier version of this work.

I just didn’t have all the language for it yet.

If you haven’t seen the talk (or haven’t seen it in a while) you can watch it here:

​https://lisarobbinyoung.com/txb​

There are also some bonus resources on that page to help you implement your own version of Enoughness for yourself or your organization.

Where have you seen a decision that looked “fair” or “efficient” on paper create a very different cost in real life?

That question feels a lot more important to me now than it did three years ago.

Until next time,

- Lisa