Episode 13: What Does it Actually Mean to Do the Work?
August 6, 2026
This week on Dear Vernon, Laura McKowen, Founder of The Luckiest Club, and Eric Johnson, CEO of The Luckiest Club, tackle a question that comes up constantly in recovery spaces, and one that honestly deserves a much better answer than it usually gets.
The question: what does it actually mean to do the work?
If you've spent any time in sobriety communities, you've heard this phrase. Do the work. And if you're anything like the person who submitted this question, you've probably nodded along while privately thinking: okay, but what does that mean? Is there a list? A job description? Because if someone would just tell me what to do, I would do it.
Laura and Eric get into what doing the work actually looks like in real life, and it turns out it does come down to a few core things, even if nobody ever spells them out clearly.
Laura breaks it down into two buckets that are simpler to name than they are to actually do. The first is getting honest with yourself and with other people. Not in a confess everything to everyone kind of way, but in the quiet, ongoing practice of noticing when you're hiding something, avoiding something, or keeping a secret that's slowly making you sick. The second is looking at the patterns in your life where there's real friction and asking yourself honestly what your part in that pattern might be. That second one sounds straightforward until you actually try to do it, and then it turns out to be most of a lifetime's worth of work.
Eric adds the piece that Laura and he both agree is non-negotiable: you cannot do this alone. The work has to happen in community. Not because you're weak, but because so much of what drives our pain is unconscious, and we genuinely cannot see our own blind spots without other people reflecting them back to us.
They also talk about why people who experience addiction are, in a strange way, forced into doing this kind of deep work in a way that most people never have to. And why that's both the hard part and, eventually, the gift.
If you've been waiting for someone to hand you a tidy list of steps for sobriety, this episode is for you. Fair warning: there is no list. But Laura and Eric make a pretty compelling case for why that's actually okay.
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