Morgan Lavoie

speaker

350 appearances 16 recordings 1 series first heard Dec 2024 last heard May 2025

Morgan Lavoie’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin · How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon · 17 Jan 2025 podcast

I did. I did. And it goes back to, so I studied neuroscience in college and I had a genetics professor who was kind of giving his background. And he was like, well, like a career advisor asked me once, what's the most important thing that you should be doing right now? And he said, it's studying the brain and genetics. And so that's what he did. And my answer to that question has always been,

around the climate crisis and everything that's going on in Los Angeles right now has just been sort of like echoing that back to me. And I'm not actually doing anything. I'm not doing anything helpful where that's concerned. And so that also led me to go through an exercise, which I learned from you, which is your mission statement exercise. Can you describe what that is?

I have found that so helpful and I applied that to this problem because I thought, okay, so, you know, the problem is global warming.

Global warming, it's a problem.

But what am I actually good at? And that's kind of more how I thought about using the mission statement exercise. Like how can I leverage what I'm good at to make any sort of an impact? So what I arrived at for my mission statement is I am good at simplifying academic topics through storytelling. That's something that I've always been good at.

I was a tutor in college and I helped people in their science courses who had to take them liberal arts major. It was a requirement to graduate and just tried to use storytelling to explain the academic concepts. I do that at MNN through writing business and finance content, often very academic, but I can make them more palatable through storytelling.

So I think a newsletter is actually a good format for me for this. But where I feel like there is a need is a lot of the people who write about climate write about the very far end of the spectrum in terms of action, which looks like making lifestyle changes that are very dramatic. Like people writing about not flying on airplanes anymore or only wearing hemp.

I'm not going to do that. And so what I want to see and what I would benefit from is somebody writing from the perspective of what can you do to be better, but not the best. And so I have sort of in my head called my newsletter greener for that exact reason. Like, how can you be greener?

And so my idea is that throughout the course of the week, I would focus on one thing that's hurting the planet, like microplastics, the meat industry, things like that. And then I would think of something that I could do consistently throughout the week as a sort of challenge to help that problem. Like this week, I'm not eating any meat. How did that feel? What was hard about that?

This week, I'm not using any single use plastic. What was hard about that? Did I do it? And- Then writing about that and my experience with it. And then, you know, sort of like at the top, my first section would be, why is this a problem in the first place?

And something that I am thinking about doing too is at sort of the end of the newsletter, I would say what the challenge that I'm setting for myself is going to be throughout the next week so that people could try it too. And I think that that would sort of to incentivize people to continue to read because they are kind of like following along. We're doing this together sort of a thing.

So that is my idea. What do you think?

Yay. Perfect. I want to hear all of it.

So that's the advice that I got from Jason. And oh my God, it's so painful to listen back to me explaining my idea. If it takes you five minutes to explain a newsletter concept, it probably needs some work just as a general rule. But let me just take a step back. The idea for Greener hit me two years ago on a day in June when the sky in New York was red.

And this wasn't the first time I had felt anxiety around climate change. I doom scroll on climate news and click on any headline about how the world is going to end in 150, 30 years. So while it wasn't a new feeling, I had never really done anything about it.

And like I said to Jason, I'm not going to pull up a seat alongside Greta Thunberg on a sailboat in order to get to my friend's wedding in California. To be honest, whether it's my love of my carbon indulgences or just laziness and a dependency on convenience, that extreme way of living is just not going to be something that I do. But I know I have to make some changes because I see it happening.

I see the effects of climate change all the time. I grew up in Maine and Maine winters used to be just the bane of my existence. We used to get so much snow that at our local movie theater, the people that worked there would change the names on the marquee by climbing the snow banks. That's how high it was. You could reach the marquee in the movie theater just by standing on the snow bank.

But now winters are just manageable. January used to be so bitterly cold that it felt wrong to be outside. But now the mildness, it just feels worse. It's kind of like the quiet, too quiet of temperatures. But there are bigger signs, of course. I mean, look to Los Angeles, which we'll be covering more in the coming weeks.

But beyond that, flooding, earthquakes, hurricanes, wildfires, I know I need to change and I know I need to be greener. But I couldn't find a resource out there that was situated in this middle ground that I wanted to occupy.

Every resource I found was either a really drastic departure from what my life looks like now, a la sailboats and Greta Thunberg, or just eye-rollingly obvious ordinances to turn the lights off and take shorter showers. And I couldn't find anything for where I was at, just non-judgmental advice for someone not wanting to be perfect, but just better.

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