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What Amazon’s Holiday Report Reveals About Our Weird Shopping Habits

We sure do love Gummi Bears, and Cards Against Humanity is an urgent purchase.

It wouldn’t be the holiday season without revealing year-end press releases from major corporations, especially retailers. The king of online retail, Amazon, just issued a 3,000-word report of holiday shopping, watching, and listening stats that says a lot about us. Much of the data comes from users of Amazon Prime, the $99-per-year subscription service that provides free and discounted deliveries, plus access to Amazon’s video and music collections. Amazon picked up more than 3 million Prime members in the third week of December alone. (An estimate from June already had Prime at about 40 million subscribers.)

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Your Must-Listen Podcast Playlist For 2016

Serial was just the beginning: here’s what you should listen to next—helpfully arranged by what you already like.

A recent study by the Pew Research Center revealed that less than half of Americans have ever heard of podcasts, and of those, 17 percent only listen to one show. That’s a shame, because in the wake of the success of creative standard-bearers like Serial and WTF With Marc Maron, there has been an explosion in the number of podcasts. Now, some of the best, brightest, funniest, and most fascinating voices around can only be heard on podcasts.

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Why Adversity Can Be The Best Thing For Your Career

For many an entrepreneur, wholly unglamorous stuff—poverty, chores, embarrassing losses—has been the key to later success.

We speak of looking up to people we admire. And so often, when we look up to successful people in our line of work, it seems like they must have always been at the top. But the reality is so often the very opposite. As Fast Company has learned by interviewing a variety of creative and successful people over the past year, failure often contains the seeds of success. Indeed, some of the most successful people started out at the very, very bottom—in a slum or tiny village, even—and still treasure the lessons they learned from those years.

So if you’ve been stuck at the bottom in some sense in 2015, try looking at it as a blessing in disguise. Here are six ways to embrace and learn from adversity.

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