The Latest: Nobel Medicine Laureates Helped Millions

How companies are rejiggering the workweek to offer 4-day and 32-hour options. Welcome to Work Smarter, Fast Company‘s newsletter on career, leadership, and productivity advice. You can sign up to receive this newsletter every week here.

Yonason Goldson explains how leaders who project an autotelic sense of mission, vision, and nobility promote a cultural attitude geared to succeed. Many years ago, I introduced my six-year-old son to Chutes and Ladders. He took to the classic board game immediately, and we bonded while moving our respective pieces up and down the board. At last, he rolled a five and counted square by square until his piece landed on the finish line.

While pregnancy discrimination can be notoriously difficult to prove, the majority of the workers ‘Fast Company’ spoke with believed their pregnancies made them more vulnerable—and affected their ability to secure new employment. Nichole Foley had worked at Google for well over a decade when she was laid off in the fall, as part of yet another round of layoffs at the tech giant.

Enlarge / The surface of Ryugu. Image credit: JAXA, University of Tokyo, Kochi University, Rikkyo University, Nagoya University, Chiba Institute of Technology, Meiji University, Aizu University, AIST (credit: JAXA) An asteroid that has been wandering through space for billions of years is going to have been bombarded by everything from rocks to radiation.

Enlarge (credit: Géza Bálint Ujvárosi / EyeEm via Getty) Ruth Ann Norton used to look forward to seeing the blue flame that danced on the burners of her gas stove. At one time, she says, she would have sworn that preparing meals with the appliance actually made her a better cook. But then she started learning about the toxic gasses, including carbon monoxide, formaldehyde and other harmful pollutants that are emitted by stoves into the air, even when they’re turned off. “I’m a person who grew up cooking, and love that blue flame,” said Norton, who leads the environmental advocacy group known as the Green & Healthy Homes Initiative.

It’s no secret we all dawdle too much on our smartphones. The founder of phone addiction app BePresent has some thoughts on reducing the time suck and getting back to deep work. The threats of social media are making front-page news. Proposed bans of TikTok for ties to the Chinese Government or state governments enacting legislation limiting social media are getting mainstream attention across the country.