Work is harder than anyone tells you it is.
Not harder in the grind-and-hustle sense. Harder in the mundane, daily, unglamorous sense that most business writing skips. One issue a week. No fluff. No funnel. Just the writing.
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Work is harder than anyone tells you it is.
Not harder in the grind and hustle sense that gets packaged into LinkedIn inspiration. Harder in the mundane, daily, unglamorous sense: the politics you didn't sign up for, the meetings that eat your week, the manager who praises you publicly and undermines you privately, the work that was supposed to matter and somehow doesn't, the career you chose that now chose you back.
This is the reality most business writing skips. Not because those writers don't know it. They do. Because the genre has calcified around a different promise: buy this, learn this, apply this, and work will be simpler, more lucrative, more fulfilling. Ten hacks. Five frameworks. Three mindset shifts. A system. Blah, blah, blah…
Between us, we have spent decades in the rooms where the work actually happens — in boardrooms, back channels, offsites, onboarding programs, the uncomfortable silences after someone asks the real question. We wrote Welcome to Work because we could not find a book that said what we knew to be true about those rooms. We are writing Work: Unfiltered for the same reason.
Work: Unfiltered is a newsletter written by two people who have done this for a long time and have gotten tired of the way it's usually discussed. It is for the reader who suspects there is a better way — not because the current way is broken for everyone, but because it is clearly broken for most people. And the polite consensus pretending otherwise is starting to feel insulting.
We are going to write about work the way we actually think about it. Directly. Without the hedging that turns most business writing into weather forecasts. Without the anecdote-hook-framework-CTA pattern that makes every newsletter sound like the same newsletter. Without the assumption that if we give you the right system, everything will click.
Some of what we say will be wrong. Some of what we say will land badly. Some of it will contradict what we wrote three months earlier, because that is what thinking actually looks like under honest conditions. We would rather be usefully wrong in public than safely vague in private.
Because the genre is crowded with what this isn't, we want to be explicit.
One issue a week, alternating between our two voices. Short enough to finish with a coffee. Long enough to have said something. No images, no pull quotes, no design flourishes — unfiltered is not a metaphor, it is a format. Just the writing.
We are going to disagree with each other sometimes, in print, on purpose. The newsletter has two authors because the truth of most workplace questions has at least two sides, and pretending otherwise is part of what broke the genre in the first place.
If this lands, reply. If it doesn't, reply harder. We read everything. We don't always answer — but the sharpest disagreements end up in print. Disagreement is not a bug in this newsletter. It is a feature we are counting on to sharpen the work over time.
Kevin Gosa and Bryan Horvath. Co-authors of Welcome to Work: 58 Unwritten Rules for Winning at Work. Two decades-plus of facilitating, consulting, coaching, and quietly observing the gap between how work is described and how work actually is.
We are not everyday business bros. We are not your gurus. We are two people with a shared conviction that it is possible to write about work honestly and a commitment to find out whether anyone wants that.
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