Take a glance at Nicole Brewer’s finances, and you might not be eager to trade salaries. The 43-year-old Detroit native makes about $40,000 a year teaching English at a university in Nizwa, an ancient city in Oman. Add in side hustle income as a freelance writer and travel agent, and the total for 2024 climbs to $44,000.

But delve deeper into the way she lives, and you might start to envy her. Brewer pays just $650 a month for a furnished two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment that’s just a five-minute walk from her job. Utilities are included.

Like the students at her university, she gets winter and summer breaks. And thanks to her low cost of living, Brewer generally spends them traveling, including vacations in Namibia, Seychelles and most recently, Bali.

Brewer has lived and taught abroad since 2009 — a move she made when jobs became scarce back home during the global financial crisis. Her advice for those who are considering following in her footsteps: “Follow your heart, follow your passion and definitely do your research.”

The decision to move abroad is a big one, and Brewer acknowledges that living as an expat isn’t always easy.

“It’s definitely not without its challenges. I will say it’s not an easy life to be on the other side of the world from your family, especially when emergencies and family situations come up,” she says. “You have to take the good with the bad.”

She wasn’t immune to culture shock either — especially when she moved to a Middle Eastern country as a non-Muslim and non-Arabic speaker. But none of that kept her from pursuing the life that she wanted.

“If someone wanted to live the expat life, I would definitely say to not let fear or outside voices deter you from your dream,” Brewer says. “If I would have listened to people about moving to the Middle East — people were like, ‘Oh, it’s so dangerous.’ And here I am, living my best life in Oman, one of the safest countries in the world.”

Brewer didn’t expect the people in her life to understand that Oman would be a safe, fulfilling choice for her since they hadn’t conducted her level of research.

Before embarking for Oman, Brewer lived for three years in South Korea, her first move after leaving her life in the States. Beforehand, she’d researched ESL teaching programs that would not only pay her but help her get acclimated.

Plus, she’d used social media to find other people living the life she was after.

“On Facebook, there’s ‘Brothers and Sisters of South Korea’ and different social groups for expats who are already there or considering moving to different countries,” she says. “I really utilized social media and contacted people and asked questions about teaching English in other countries.”

For anyone considering living abroad, the people who are already doing it are the most valuable resource, Brewer says.

“Reach out to people like me and other expats who are living in unique places. We are out here. We are on social media. We’re on different forums online,” she says. “We’re easily accessible to answer your questions.”

For Brewer, helping others realize their dreams abroad feels like part of the responsibility of being a happy, successful expat.

“I want to pay it forward — people did that for me. So I’m definitely willing to do it for other people,” she says.

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For close to a decade, I’ve worked with hundreds of students and their parents as an extracurricular coach at Spike Lab. 

I’ve seen my students win major awards, raise venture capital, build businesses and launch impressive projects that helped them stand out in a college admissions process that prizes exceptionalism — both in and out of the classroom. They’ve gotten accepted into Ivy Leagues, including Stanford, Harvard and Princeton.

While working with these students, I’ve learned a lot about their family relationships. Here are four things I’ve noticed that their parents do early on.

Snowplow parenting is when parents clear a path to make things easier for their kids.

This could be something as small as coordinating logistics with me via email on their kid’s behalf (sometimes pretending to be them), to something as big as writing their kid’s college essay for them. 

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This well-intentioned but misguided trap prevents kids from developing agency. It teaches them that if they don’t do something, someone else will do it for them.

The most successful kids learn to take ownership, especially when it’s difficult. Instead of snowplowing, be a sounding board and guide that your kid can turn to for help only when necessary. 

Let your child face the natural consequences that come from their inaction. They will learn not to make the same mistake again. 

I’ve seen kids with a wide range of niche interests. I’ve watched them create incredible projects that deepen their hobbies in impactful ways, whether it’s building elementary school math curriculum grounded in baseball statistics or starting a knitting circle for jocks.

While many parents try to push their children in more serious directions, it’s better to let their interests lead the process. You never know what kind of success can come from supporting those passions and helping them flourish.

But not every hobby has to become a passion. And parents should never lead students toward activities just because they think it will look good on college applications.

Soccer practice. Singing lessons. Art class. Piano. It’s not uncommon now for elementary schoolers to have schedules as packed as high school seniors.

The result is that children today are busier than ever, often with activities that deprive them of valuable unstructured time. Research has found that the more time kids spend in less structured activities, the more they will develop independence.

Though structure has its place, allowing your kids to be bored and to take ownership of their time from an early age is one of the best ways to foster independence and creativity. 

One of my most emotionally mature students walked to school from an early age, which studies have shown has a range of developmental benefits. Even daily quotidian choices like what to wear and what to eat can flex decision-making muscles.

One of the single best habits a parent can form is modeling positive behaviors for their children.

Want your kids to not to be addicted to their screens? Don’t be on your phone all the time in front of them. Want them to be active? Let them see you exercise. 

Think about the person you want your child to become. Ask yourself: Am I demonstrating those traits in front of them? Is there anything I’m doing that opposes the values I want to pass on?

Be mindful of the examples you set for them. If you want them to grow up to be responsible, purposeful, hard-working, and above all, happy, embody those traits yourself. 

Theo Wolf is a writer and educator, with a focus on passion and purpose development in young adults. He is on the founding team of Spike Lab, a coaching program for high school students, and helped build Snowday, a free search engine for high school summer and extracurricular programs. Theo is a graduate of Cornell University and a mentor at Harvard University’s Lemann Program on Creativity and Entrepreneurship. 

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Over the next decade, advances in artificial intelligence will mean that humans will no longer be needed “for most things” in the world, says Bill Gates.

That’s what the Microsoft co-founder and billionaire philanthropist told comedian Jimmy Fallon during an interview on NBC’s “The Tonight Show” in February. At the moment, expertise remains “rare,” Gates explained, pointing to human specialists we still rely on in many fields, including “a great doctor” or “a great teacher.”

But “with AI, over the next decade, that will become free, commonplace — great medical advice, great tutoring,” Gates said.

In other words, the world is entering a new era of what Gates called “free intelligence” in an interview last month with Harvard University professor and happiness expert Arthur Brooks. The result will be rapid advances in AI-powered technologies that are accessible and touch nearly every aspect of our lives, Gates has said, from improved medicines and diagnoses to widely available AI tutors and virtual assistants.

“It’s very profound and even a little bit scary — because it’s happening very quickly, and there is no upper bound,” Gates told Brooks.

The debate over how, exactly, most humans will fit into this AI-powered future is ongoing. Some experts say AI will help humans work more efficiently — rather than replacing them altogether — and spur economic growth that leads to more jobs being created.

Others, like Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman, counter that continued technological advancements over the next several years will change what most jobs look like across nearly every industry, and have a “hugely destabilizing” impact on the workforce.

“These tools will only temporarily augment human intelligence,” Suleyman wrote in his book “The Coming Wave,” which was published in 2023. “They will make us smarter and more efficient for a time, and will unlock enormous amounts of economic growth, but they are fundamentally labor replacing.”

Gates is optimistic about the overall benefits AI can provide to humanity, like “breakthrough treatments for deadly diseases, innovative solutions for climate change, and high-quality education for everyone,” he wrote last year.

Talking to Fallon, Gates reaffirmed his belief that certain types of jobs will likely never be replaced by AI, noting that people probably don’t want to see machines playing baseball, for example.

“There will be some things we reserve for ourselves. But in terms of making things and moving things and growing food, over time those will be basically solved problems,” Gates said.

AI’s development does come with “understandable and valid” concerns, Gates wrote in a 2023 blog post. Today’s top-of-the-line AI programs are rife with errors and prone to enabling the spread of falsehoods online, for example.

But if he had to start a new business from scratch, he’d launch an “AI-centric” startup, Gates told CNBC Make It in September 2024.

“Today, somebody could raise billions of dollars for a new AI company [that’s just] a few sketch ideas,” he said, adding: “I’m encouraging young people at Microsoft, OpenAI, wherever I find them: ‘Hey, here’s the frontier.’ Because you’re taking a fresher look at this than I am, and that’s your fantastic opportunity.”

Gates saw the AI revolution coming nearly a decade ago: When asked which industry he’d focus on if he had to start over from scratch, he quickly chose AI.

“The work in artificial intelligence today is at a really profound level,” Gates said at a 2017 event at Columbia University alongside Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett. He pointed to the “profound milestone” of Google’s DeepMind AI lab creating a computer program that could defeat humans at the board game Go.

At the time, the technology was years away from ChatGPT-style generative text, powered by large language models. Yet by 2023, even Gates was surprised by the speed of AI’s development. He’d challenged OpenAI to create a model that could get a top score on a high school AP Biology exam, expecting the task to take two or three years, he wrote in his blog post.

“They finished it in just a few months,” wrote Gates. He called the achievement “the most important advance in technology since the graphical user interface [in 1980].”

Disclosure: NBCUniversal is the parent company of CNBC and NBC, which broadcasts “The Tonight Show.”

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Sometimes, your first day of a new job sets the tone for the rest of your tenure.

That’s why Snap co-founder and CEO Evan Spiegel gives new employees on his design team a very difficult task on their first day, he said on Monday’s podcast episode of “The Diary of a CEO.”

“We have design critiques once a week for a couple hours,” said Spiegel, 34, whose company owns social media app Snapchat. ”[On] your very first day, you have to present something … Of course, on your first day, when you have no context for what the company is working on … How on Earth are you supposed to come up with a good idea? I mean, it’s almost impossible.”

The tactic may seem unfair, but it lays the groundwork for the creativity and critical thinking skills that the employee will need to succeed at the company, Spiegel said. It can also help people quickly get over their fear of failure, encouraging them to take more work-related risks.

“Your worst fear has come true that we’re sitting there all together and we’re looking at an idea that’s not that great. I mean, sometimes they’re pretty good, but ultimately not that great,” he said. “And I think that opens the door to creativity because it already happened. You already failed.”

The exercise helps people build confidence and mental resilience, and acts as a bit of a bonding activity for employees, said Spiegel.

Overcoming a fear of failure — or any other fear, for that matter — can be predictably challenging. Effective strategies can sound silly, like attaching a funny accent to the voice inside your head or giving yourself a hug, but they’re likely to work if they can “disrupt” the pattern inside your brain, phobia specialist Christopher Paul James told CNBC Make It on July 1.

Facing your fears head-on can work too, according to leadership consultant and retired Navy SEAL officer Jocko Willink.

“The first thing you’ve got to realize is that most of the fear that you have isn’t a reality. It’s just built up in your head,” Willink said in February 2019. “So what you need to do to overcome your fear is to go and face it. Go and look at it. Go on the attack.”

Overcoming your fear of failure during your first day on the job probably feels daunting, especially with an audience of your brand-new colleagues. Whether you’re thrown directly into a tough situation or not, you can mitigate your first-day jitters with a little advance preparation.

You can make the biggest, quickest impact as a new hire by understanding your company’s mission and how your role can contribute, Lori Castillo Martinez, executive vice president of talent, growth and development at Salesforce, said in October 2024. So, talk to the hiring manager about expectations and company culture during your job interview process. Talk to a current or former employee on LinkedIn or email before your first day.

That way, when you’re asked to come up with a new, creative idea on the spot, you’ll be more prepared contribute something valuable. “It’s worth experimenting and being curious, leaning into the opportunity to identify your purpose and decide what kind of impact you want to be as a new hire,” Castillo Martinez said.

Even if your idea falls into the 99% category of not-so-good ones, you’ll have gained some useful experience, said Spiegel.

“The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas,” he said. “So the team is just constantly generating a number of ideas and products and features … Our job is to try to figure out what the great ones are.”

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A lot of parents tell their children that can achieve anything if they work hard and apply themselves. But that doesn’t account for luck, which is a huge factor that many highly successful people have said they owe their careers to, points out Anthony Mackie, star of the 2025 movie “Captain America: Brave New World.”

“We are lying to our kids,” Mackie, 46, said in a recent interview with The Pivot Podcast. “We tell [them] … if they do right and they make the good grades and they go to the programs, they will become successful. ‘If you work hard enough, your work will [pay off].’ And that’s not true.”

In many cases, “success is given [and] not earned,” Mackie continued.

Mackie had been an actor for over 10 years before landing the role that many consider his big break, as Sam Wilson in 2014′s “Captain America: The Winter Soldier,” he said. After graduating from the prestigious Juilliard School in 2001, he performed in both on- and Off-Broadway productions and in Academy award-winning films, like 2008′s “The Hurt Locker.” However, the New Orleans native struggled to break out in Hollywood’s highly competitive landscape.

Mackie estimates he “put in 10,750 hours of training” before landing that life-changing job. He was proactive, too: He wrote letters to executives at Disney’s Marvel Studios over a decade ago in the hopes of landing a role in one of the studio’s popular superhero films, he told The Hollywood Reporter in 2023.

While the letters didn’t result in any roles right away, Mackie eventually landed a meeting with directors Anthony Russo and Joe Russo. They offered him a part in an upcoming film, though they couldn’t share many details: ”[They said], ‘We can’t say what character you’re playing or who else is going to be in it. Would you do it?’” Mackie said.

The actor agreed because he liked the directors and believed joining the Marvel Cinematic Universe was an opportunity he couldn’t pass up, he said. Fortunately for Mackie, the role of Sam Wilson proved popular enough to grow from a small character into a headliner.

Mackie is far from the only successful person to recognize the power of luck. You can be the smartest and most deserving person in the room, the billionaire and Berkshire Hathaway vice chairman Charlie Munger told students at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business in 2018, but there are no guarantees: “There’s also a factor of luck that comes into this thing.”

He added: “I did not intend to get rich. I wanted to get independent. I just overshot.”

Similarly, in 2023, Mark Cuban told GQ that any billionaire who says they could definitely start over from scratch is “lying their a– off.” That’s because a person also needs “luck” and good “timing” to run a highly lucrative company, particularly in the fast-moving tech industry.

If he’d been born three years earlier, he likely wouldn’t have the status that he has today, Cuban added.

Put simply, being in the right place at the right time, and having connections, can be as important as having the skills and experience.

People who benefit from luck the most have a few traits in common, according to Richard Wiseman, author of “The Luck Factor” and a psychology professor at the University of Hertfordshire.

1. They’re optimistic. Even when they find themselves in bleak circumstances, “lucky” people recognize that things “could have been far worse,” Wiseman wrote for CNBC Make It in 2022.
2. They always jump at new opportunities. Lucky people display an openness and adaptability that puts them in situations to network and make new connections, according to Wiseman.
3. They listen to their intuition. Too much time spent pondering can lead to “indecision,” he added, writing that lucky people tend to “make quick decisions …. By trusting their gut, they’re more likely to take action and expose themselves to new opportunities.”
4. They recover quickly from setbacks. This allows lucky people to remain positive when things don’t go how they’d hoped and “increases the likelihood of them continuing to live a lucky life,” according to Wiseman.

Embodying these four traits can help put you in a better position to make your goals a reality, he added.

The second and third traits in particular helped Mackie, who, in 2025, became a new face of the “Captain America” franchise, once led by former co-star Chris Evans.

“When you’re given a huge opportunity like that, you have to take into consideration that you might fail,” Mackie said. At first he was afraid, but he didn’t let that stop him. He had a network of mentors and supporters who could help, he realized: “I had to lean on those teachers and the people around me who got me to that point.”

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