The last couple of weeks have been rough on the home front: toddler #1 gets sick, toddler #2 gets sick, I get sick, my partner gets sick… and meanwhile we’re keeping two companies afloat and supporting our wonderful clients and team (or maybe they're supporting us—reciprocal support).

So full disclosure: I don’t have the bandwidth this week for my typical long-form newsletter.

What I do have are some loose threads I’ve been chewing on lately: ideas I’m trying to live out as I work on creating the world I want to live in. So instead of one long essay, I’m pulling out a few little chunks.

1. A game you thought you knew: Monopoly

You’ve probably overturned a few tables because of its intense, competitive, hours-long play.

But there’s a back-story I find really interesting; one that ties into what I’ve been thinking about this week as a client creates a new kind of game that challenges how we show up inside systems, narratives, what we’re taught, and what we might rewrite.

The origins

In the early 1900s, a feminist and inventor named Elizabeth “Lizzie” Magie patented a game called The Landlord’s Game.

Her intent was to illustrate and critique the economic system she saw: land monopolization, the rich getting richer, the rent-taking class prospering while others struggled.

The game was explicitly designed to demonstrate the Georgist idea that land is a shared resource and that private control of it leads to economic injustice.
The original game had *two sets of rules*: one “monopolist” version (winner-takes-all) and one “anti-monopolist” version (wealth shared, rents redistributed). I’ll let you guess which one became the global phenomenon we know today.

What happened

Fast-forward and the game evolves via word of mouth and eventually gets stolen by a man named Charles Darrow. The Landlord's Game becomes what we know as Monopoly (published by Parker Brothers in 1935).

The critique dimension largely disappears. The game becomes a celebration (or at least a simulation) of ruthless capitalism: buy, develop, force your opponents out, bankrupt them.

And, of course, Lizzie Magie received very little recognition (or financial reward) compared to the success of the game that followed her concept. You can read more about her story here, if you're interested.

Why it matters (to me)

I’ve been thinking: what narratives are embedded in the systems we play by? In the games we grow up with (literally and metaphorically)? In what has been stolen from others for personal gain?

We say “don’t hate the player, hate the game.” But we, the players, keep choosing to play the same games that we are very unlikely to truly win.

What if we rewrote our version of the game?
What if the rules said collaboration over exclusion, shared value over extraction?
What if “winning” meant everyone got to stay on the board—or even start on the board (because at this point, we can't in good faith deny that some people don't even have access to it)?

Sometimes what we think is “just how things are” turns out to be “just the dominant version of the story.”

2. Empathy as Infrastructure

In the wake of the second “No Kings” protest (and the mix of praise, fatigue, and backlash that followed), I’ve been remembering my own involvement in organizing the Women’s March for the state of Louisiana in 2016–2017. It was my introduction to the chasm between white feminism and intersectional feminism, and to what it means to sit down, listen, and follow the people who have been doing this work long before you arrive.

A persistent theme as I scroll is a call for revolution. Some call for a soft revolution. Some a revolution of fire and brimstone. Even astrology right now points toward revolution. And as we look around at each other wondering… is that what this is ramping up to?—I keep looking at history for pattern recognition and where revolution has succeeded and failed in the distant and not-so-distant past.

From what I'm seeing... revolutions fail not because people lose heart, but because they don’t know how to support one another afterward.

We know how to fight... or at least we think we do. We know how to destroy, because destruction is the first step of creation, and chaos is simpler than maintenance. We know how to burn things down. We rarely know how to build what comes next.

The Bolshevik Revolution offers a pretty clear example of this. The Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in 1917 with promises of peace, land, and bread (Encyclopedia Britannica; Al Jazeera Opinion, 2017). Yet what followed was not a broad, sustained movement of collective rebuilding but a consolidation of power, suppression of dissent, and drift into authoritarianism.

The uprising succeeded and the revolution failed.

In the simplest of terms; it lacked infrastructure. It had the will to topple, but not the skills to lead without the scaffolding that came before. Turns out leading (and not the authoritarian kind) requires skill, patience, and… empathy.

Maybe empathy is that missing infrastructure (the system we keep “forgetting” to fund).

Maybe what the world needs is the capacity to stay in dialogue, to hold nuance when the urgency fades, and to build what lasts when victory isn’t the goal anymore.

Maybe empathy isn’t soft. Maybe it’s structural.

And this leads into something else I've been noodling on: how in the world can people in power sleep at night?

One theory: they don't actually see people as people. Truly. We're assets. Line items on a balance sheet. We're either producing revenue or decidedly not.

Too much to write about here to jam into this email. But I'll share more of what I've been researching here down the road. (And this is part of why I'm submitting an application to a PhD program for Transformative Social Change.)

3. What I’m Trying to Practice

Shorter writing. This week I’m giving myself permission to publish less (both in length but mostly pressure). Because two toddlers + companies + sickness = enough.

Identifying the narrative I’m living by, and asking: who wrote these rules? Are they mine? Are they serving the world I want?

Claiming space for nuance. Recent conversations remind me how rare nuance is right now (on social media, in business, in culture) and how much I want to create spaces where we can think instead of just react.

Re-writing the game. Using the metaphor of Monopoly / The Landlord’s Game: what are the “board,” the “rules,” the “tokens” in my life and business? Which ones do I accept “because that’s how it’s done”? Which ones do I challenge?

4. What I’ve Been Reading & Listening To

Books:

I’ve been trying to alternate fiction and nonfiction: one to reconnect with imagination, the other to stretch perspective.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff
Zuboff traces how surveillance has been woven into the everyday conveniences we’ve come to depend on: how data collection and behavioral prediction have become the business model of modern life. What I love most is how she threads in her own experiences and the history of technology to make it personal and relatable. It’s helped me contextualize so much of what I’m feeling right now: the erosion of privacy, the monetization of attention, and the way we’re being shaped by systems we didn’t consent to build.

The Sirens by Emilia Hart
A novel that spans generations of women: twins Mary and Eliza, shipped from Ireland to New South Wales in the 1800s, and modern-day sisters Lucy and Jess in 2019—2019 in and of itself a time of fantasy before COVID flipped us all on our heads. It’s feminist, mystical, and full of reclamation: of story, of body, of power. After so much nonfiction, it felt good to get lost in a world that tapped lightly back into the fantastical.

Both have reminded me that reading, whether for understanding or escape, is a way of remembering that the future we’re trying to build will demand both rigor and imagination.

Podcasts:

Tipa Revolution: Are you ready to fundamentally shift the way you live your life? That’s the question my new friend Natalie Domond is asking in her debut podcast, Tipa Revolution, named for the “small-step revolution” that invites us to reimagine change as something personal, relational, and sustainable.

This project has been years in the making, and I was lucky enough to join Natalie, her friends, her colleagues, and her two sweet daughters for the watch-party of her first episode (thank you for the invitation, Natalie!). I listened while snuggling my sick two-year-old, letting her words wash over me—beautiful storytelling, gentle courage, and the reminder that real revolution begins with tiny, intentional shifts in how we live.

You can listen to Tipa Revolution on Apple Podcasts or YouTube, and follow Natalie on Instagram for more of her thoughtful reflections.

That’s all I’ve got this week.

I’m somewhere between toddler fever dreams and deadlines and Pinterest-worthy Halloween snacks for school Halloween parties—trying to keep my kids hydrated and my inbox semi-functional, but also trying to stay awake to what this moment is asking of us.

Maybe the common thread between Monopoly, the Bolsheviks, Shoshana Zuboff, The Sirens, and Natalie Domond’s Tipa Revolution is this:

Real change doesn’t start with the big moves. It starts in the small ones.

The almost imperceptible, seemingly insignificant choices to see differently, to listen longer, to build something that doesn’t require someone else’s loss to sustain it.

That’s the revolution I’m practicing right now: slow, relational, definitely messy.
And honestly? It’s enough.

xo,
Brittany

P.S. I can’t believe I’m saying this after starting this whole business from nothing in February of this year… but my calendar is officially full through the end of 2025.

That still feels bananas to write.

I’m starting early conversations, though, with founders and leaders who are looking ahead to 2026—especially the ones who know they can’t keep carrying everything themselves. The ones who’ve built something successful and alive, but also… maybe a little unsustainable. (I say that with zero judgment. It’s part of the process.)

My work these days isn’t about “hustling harder” or chasing scale for its own sake. It’s about building the structure that can actually sustain what you’re building—without losing yourself, your team, or the meaning that got you here in the first place.

If that’s where you are (or know you’ll be soon) reach out. I’d love to start the conversation early.

P.P.S. I've been supporting one of my clients with hiring, and we received this email from an applicant:

This is the kind of small, almost imperceptible work I’m most interested in right now: how we make business more human.

How do we build systems (even in hiring) that recognize the person on the other side of the email? How do we slow down long enough to notice care in motion; to feel it even as we push for funding, revenue, and getting to market?

That’s the work beneath all the strategy. The work that makes everything else worth building.

Rewriting the Rules: What Monopoly, the Bolsheviks, and Modern Business Have in Common