Kelly speaks with Erin McGoff, an award- winning filmmaker and content creator – known as the “internet’s big sister” through her AdviceWithErin branding. She received a Pulitzer Fellowship in 2017 and was named a Forbes 30 under 30 recipient in 2025. She has a new book: “The Secret Language of Work: Hyper-Helpful Scripts for Every Situation.” 

It’s COVID, you’re a freelance editor in a tiny New York apartment. How do we go from you uploading a video on TikTok to you talking to me on a podcast about your new book 

“It’s a good question. Yeah, so I was working as a freelance video editor. The film industry had kind of shut down. So, I was really bored and I hopped on TikTok like a lot of other millennials did, and I’ve always really, really loved giving career advice, and the film industry requires you to be really scrappy. So, I just gathered a bunch of these great tips, and I just sat down and I posted, ‘how to answer the worst job interview question, tell me about yourself.’ And I showed some bad examples, which were pretty funny. And then I showed my template, a good example, which was past, present, future. Two to three sentences about your past, two to three sentences about your present, what you’re currently doing, and then two to three sentences about your future and where you want to go. And I remember I just edited it like right on my phone, even though I’m a professional editor and I had a whole setup. I just did that. I added some captions and then I went to bed and I woke up and it had millions of views, and I was like, whoa, okay, there’s something going on here.” 

Can you define the hidden curriculum as part of the hidden rules of work? 

“There are no classes in college or high school about how to act in the job. These are traditionally things you have to learn from your community, and most people don’t have access to that kind of information. So, they have to learn hard knocks style or they actually don’t learn them at all. For example,  many people never negotiate their salary because they just think that’s rude. Or maybe their parents even told them that it’s rude. But the hidden curriculum actually says, no, that’s an etiquette in the US professional culture in the United States. You should negotiate your salary. So, the book is writing down these hidden rules and this hidden curriculum that no one ever formally taught you. But my whole thing is access to it. The book is like, here it is.” 

Some of the inspiration for this book came from a bad internship you had, which you ultimately figured out was mostly your own fault. 

“They just give me total grunt work, just busy work. And I didn’t know what to do because I wasn’t learning and I kind of felt like I was wasting my time. But I just didn’t know how to speak up because I told them I would do anything in the internship interview. I told them I would sweep the floors. So, I couldn’t complain about them giving me tedious Excel spreadsheets to organize. But I was really frustrated at the same time because I could have been using that time to work at a job that paid me. This was an unpaid internship. And so that was kind of the moment when I realized like, there’s things I want to communicate and I don’t know how to communicate them and I’m going to become the master of communication. And you can’t wait for somebody else to come give you your dream job or your dream opportunity. You have to learn how to advocate for yourself and speak up for yourself.”