Natalie Nixon

Thank you, Nathan.

It's great to be here.

Yeah.

The Next Big Idea Club Select is one of the 12 best productivity books of 2025.

That's high praise.

I was really thrilled to hear that.

Yeah, the short of it is that I've done a lot of different things and I finally got to a crossroads in my life where I was able to merge and converge all of those varied interests and experiences.

So I have a background in cultural anthropology.

I have a background in education, both I was a middle school English teacher in my twenties and also a university professor for 16 years.

And I've worked in the fashion industry

as an entrepreneurial hat designer, as well as in global sourcing for division of the limited brands.

I actually started my current company, Figure Eight Thinking, as a side hustle while I was an academic, while I was a professor.

I gave a TEDx Philadelphia talk

in 2014, proclaiming that the future of work is jazz.

And that talk catapulted me into getting invited into companies to help them build more improvisational ways of working.

And I was doing so many of these engagements.

John, my husband, said, babe, this is a thing.

You should formalize it.

So I did.

I created Figure Eight Thinking as a side hustle and woke up a year later and realized I'm actually having a lot of fun with my side hustle and decided to give it a try