As a kid, Mallika Chopra’s father, Deepak Chopra, would ask her to explore four questions: Who am I? What do I want? How can I serve? What am I grateful for?

Now as an entrepreneur, public speaker, and the author of the new children’s meditation guide Just Breathe, Mallika uses those questions to help others know their intentions and improve their lives. She has taught meditations to thousands of people around the world, including her two daughters, Tara and Leela. Here’s how she parents.

Jamia Wilson grew up reading books from the Feminist Press, so she’s proud to be the literary publisher’s executive director (the youngest person, and the first woman of colour, to lead the 47-year-old press). When she became director, Wilson was already an outspoken activist and writer whose work had appeared in the Feminist Press titles Slut and I Still Believe Anita Hill.

We talked to Wilson in print and on video about her work habits, her inspirations, and the concrete ways the Press fosters teamwork.

Kids are born innovators. Any parent who’s caught their child building pyramids out of restaurant creamer cups knows this. KiwiCo helps them channel their creativity with monthly subscription boxes of STEAM-focused activities — with these hands-on kits, little makers might build an arcade claw, design their own pinball game, or create a paint pendulum. The company was founded by Sandra Oh Lin, a mother of three in California. We asked her how she parents.

Maker Faires around the world attract over a million visitors each year. When Maker-in-chief Sherry Huss co-created the first Maker Faire in 2005, she’d already been organising tech and media events for nine years. Now she’s run 12 years of Maker Faires, managing a worldwide team while carrying on several side projects. She gave us an extensive look at her work habits, her management techniques, and the process of launching and running each Faire.

In her new memoir Now My Heart Is Full, Laura June writes about how becoming a parent has helped her make peace with the memory of her own mother, her mother’s alcoholism, and their difficult relationship. Here, she talks about life with her daughter Zelda, from her belief that babies sometimes need to be left alone to the way motherhood has made her more creative than ever.

Maurice Cherry pays it forward. The designer runs several projects that highlight black creators online, including designers, developers, bloggers and podcasters. His design podcast Revision Path, which recently released its 250th episode, has won awards from AIGA and the Creative Market Awards. He told us about his work process, lessons he’s learned from guests, and all his favourite gear, from professional mics to a four-in-one multipen.

Futurist Amy Webb has led the Future Today Institute since today... was the future. That sounds less profound than we hoped, but Webb’s work is profound.

Since Webb founded it in 2006, Future Today has analysed trends in culture and technology for clients including Microsoft, American Express, Univision (Lifehacker US’ current parent company), the White House and the US Federal Reserve. She’s also published two books and given the TED talk “How I Hacked Dating”.

We talked to her about the perfect carry-on bag, differences between media technology around the world, and the method her Institute uses to efficiently break up their work day.

On How I Work, we like to find people with especially challenging jobs. Making the recipes at a meal-kit-by-mail service seems challenging: Each recipe must be crowd-pleasing, easy to follow, and use ingredients that can be shipped around the country in vast quantities divvied into tiny portions.

At Plated (acquired last year by grocery company Albertsons), that job belongs to Elana Karp. We talked to her about creating and testing recipes, shooting video guides, and her evolving culinary career.

You can eat pizza for a living, if you’re good enough at it — and if you work hard and get to know everyone in the pizza business. Scott Wiener turned his love of pizza into Scott’s Pizza Tours, a growing business conducting food tours by foot and by bus in Manhattan.

In this video episode of How I Work, we shadowed him for a day and learned how he chooses locations, trains tour guides and makes industry connections, doing his work out of pizza shops and carting supplies around on his bike.

Hrishikesh Hirway pulls songs apart to learn how they work.

On his podcast Song Exploder, Hirway has interviewed artists such as Solange, Iggy Pop, Norah Jones, Björk and Arcade Fire about their writing, recording and mixing processes. Hirway makes his own music as half of the band Moors with Atlanta’s Lakieth Stanfield, and as a composer for TV and film. He also co-hosts The West Wing Weekly podcast with West Wing actor Joshua Malina.

We talked to him about how this multi-threaded artistic life weaves together. We also got a play-by-play of how Hirway makes each episode of Song Exploder.

Douglas McGray's first magazine doesn't look like a magazine. Pop-Up Magazine, currently on tour, is a live variety show that uses different techniques to tell a story onstage. McGray also runs the California Sunday Magazine (which does look like a magazine), a weekly magazine about California, the American West, Asia and Latin America. We talked to him how he organises a live show, his philosophy on cross-disciplinary collaboration, and his favourite shortcut - a literal one.

Every overnight success is years in the making. Boxing trainer Leyon Azubuike's first attempt at starting a gym didn't pan out, but he went back to work as a private coach and tried again. Now his gym, Gloveworx, has two LA locations and is soon expanding to New York. We talked to him about his career path, his coffee substitute, and how he still runs private training sessions while managing a growing business.

This year Dr Joyce F. Brown celebrates her 20th year as president of New York's Fashion Institute of Technology, the SUNY arts and business school whose high-profile alumni include Calvin Klein, Carolina Herrera, Joel Schumacher, Frankie Knuckles, Nina Garcia and Michael Kors. Before becoming the first woman and the first African-American to serve as president of FIT, she was vice chancellor of the City University of New York, New York City deputy mayor for public and community affairs, and a professor of clinical psychology.

We talked to Dr Brown about how she got here, how she works, and how to make decisions in an academic environment.

Hovhannes Avoyan started PicsArt, an app suite and social network for making and sharing art and pictures, after his daughter got bullied to tears for putting her art online. Now the network has over 100 million monthly active users. We talked to Hovhannes about his inspiration and his development process, and how he applies his positive approach to his own company.

Before Mari Takahashi joined entertainment company Smosh, her job was ballet dancing, and her career aspiration was to make a living teaching dance. Now she's in charge of Smosh Games, a YouTube channel with over seven million subscribers, where she regularly appears in videos such as her Minecraft show MariCraft. She told us how she gets her work done, the tools she uses, and about being strategic but flexible.

Kevin Gibbs created something you might use every day. Before founding workplace software company Quip and selling it to Salesforce, Gibbs created Google Suggest. We talked to him about building and running a company using the company's own product, and the insight that made him a better public speaker. His answers are insightful and self-effacing - we're really proud to bring you this instalment of How I Work.

For 16 years, LegalZoom has filled in the gap between free internet advice and hiring a lawyer in the US; its services have become standard for many American small businesses, entrepreneurs, and solo contractors and freelancers. For the last 13 years, John Suh has led the company as Executive Chairman and CEO. We talked to him about how he runs the company and handles his own work.

If Susan McPherson's career has a theme, it's that a business should make the world a better place. Her communications agency McPherson Strategies focuses on corporate social responsibility, and McPherson herself advises women-led startups such as Hint Water (where she's also an investor) as well as in non-profits such as Girls Who Code and the Lower Eastside Girls Club. We talked to her about connecting people, managing an eternal to-do list, and working with a remote team.

Very, very few sites can make a name for themselves in the "funny fake news" format. There's basically the Onion, and Reductress. Today we're talking to the one with the tagline "Women's News. Feminized." Recent headlines include "How To Stay Calm Even Though Everyone Missed What You Just Said and It Was Really Good" and "Wow! This Beautiful Woman Won't Shut Up and Take the Fucking Compliment".