Rewriting the Alphabet and Your Career - Looks Like Work, Season 1, Ep 2
Some projects start with a brainstorm. Others with a whiteboard, a coffee, maybe a Miro board if you’re feeling fancy.
And then there are the ones that start with a street sign you can’t fully read.
For Liron Lavi Turkenich, a typeface designer and design entrepreneur, a walk through Haifa set off an eight-year odyssey. She saw a sign with Hebrew and Arabic side by side, realized she was subconsciously ignoring a third of it, and thought: What if I could make both readable at once?
Everyone said it couldn’t be done. Academia shrugged. But her engineer family just said: “It’s solvable.”
The result? Aravrit — a hybrid script that melds Hebrew and Arabic into a single, readable writing system. It’s now in museums from London to Barcelona and in the minds of programmers, designers, and dreamers who thought they were “just” their job titles… until they heard Liron speak.
But this conversation isn’t just about type design. It’s about being multi-passionate without losing your mind. About working on more than one project at a time without burning out. About how sending that one cold email or replying to that one tweet can change your trajectory.
We talk about:
The suffering of being multi-passionate (and how to find new heroes to model)
Managing multiple projects with productivity systems that actually stick
The mess page as your secret weapon for focus time
How daily reflections turn hindsight into real-time insight
International speaking gigs — from TEDx Vienna to Stanford — born from simply saying “yes”
Finding the work only you can do, and learning to delegate the rest
What work-life balance means when you never get bored of your own company
Liron’s anchor question is deceptively simple:
👉 “What have I learned today?”
It’s not about lofty annual goals or five-year plans. It’s about catching growth as it happens — before it slips into the rearview mirror.
Her story is a reminder that the thing you can’t stop thinking about — the one other people might call too weird, too niche, or too ambitious — might be exactly the thing that changes your industry, your career, or even your corner of the world.
"When I finished the TEDx talk, there was this computer programmer that came up to me and he said... 'You made me think that I can also make an impact.'"
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Resources & Mentions:
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