I found a cartoon. 1965. Oscar winner. Ten minutes long.

Go watch it. Right now. I mean it.

The Dot and the Line is a mid-century love story — orchestral staccatos, saturated colors, a narrator who sounds like he’s straight out of old-school Hollywood. The plot: a sensible straight line is hopelessly in love with a red dot. The dot is in love with a squiggle. The squiggle is... free.

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The squiggle doesn’t do anything with the freedom. He just moves. Wherever. However. To a cocktail jazz soundtrack. Charming and chaotic and completely directionless. And the line, watching this, decides that’s what freedom looks like. So he tries it too.

He flails.

I’ve been an “official” entrepreneur (whatever that means) for about three months now. And the hardest thing (one I knew was coming, just not like this) isn’t necessarily the revenue or the clients or the grinding loneliness of building something from nothing.

It’s the constraints. Specifically: which ones to keep.

Twenty years in corporate teaches you a very particular set of rules about what is valuable, what is worth your time, what success looks like. Profit is the organizing principle. Growth is the metric. I didn’t agree with all of it. But I learned it. Internalized it. Built a career inside it.

And then I walked away.

Now I’m the squiggle. Free. Terrifying. Moving in any direction I want. Some days that feels like power. Some days it feels exactly like the line trying to imitate the squiggle.

Just flailing.

The line in the cartoon, however, figures something out, “For months he practiced sides, bends and angles…Before long he learned to…express himself in any shape he wished.”

I learned something like this at IDEO years ago. Design thinking lives inside a specific tension: diverge first, then converge. Go wide — really wide, no-wrong-answers wide — before you earn the right to focus. The divergence without convergence is just noise. Discipline in the craft AND discipline in the meaning.

The freedom is in knowing which constraints matter. Which ones are yours.

The cartoon calls the line a vector. A quantity with both magnitude and direction.
Not just movement — oriented movement.
Not just effort — directed effort.

That’s what I’m trying to build. Not a business that just moves, but one that knows why it’s moving and where. Grounded in what I actually believe about people and work and what’s worth doing. Not in what the market rewards this quarter or what my old corporate brain still insists is “real” value.

Don’t get me wrong. I still have to feed my family. And I’m incredibly clear on the fact that we’re all inside systems we didn’t make. Economic systems. Social systems. Information systems being rewritten in real time. None of us opted in. All of us are navigating.

The question is whether we know what we are inside those systems. Whether we have magnitude — something genuinely ours to offer — and direction — a reason for the offering that holds even when the signals change.

The squiggle has neither. The squiggle just moves.

To the vector, belong the spoils.

Amen.

P.S. Are you a squiggle right now, or a vector?

3 Things That Caught My Attention This Week

📝 My former boss, ex-IDEO Chief Creative Officer Paul Bennett, has been penning some glorious essays lately. His latest, on shared emotional geographies and the role of design in shaping how we feel, has taken up a permanent residence in my brain.

🎧 For my Spanish-speakers, Chisme Corporativo is my new favorite podcast to brush up on my “professional” vocabulary 😉 #iykyk — Dos chicas Mexicanas chismeando sobre el mundo empresarial.

💌 Profoundly obsessed with this project. Crossing Guard in Vermont starts snail mail club. It’s my dream creative side gig.

Nicole is classic genX: grungy, direct, deeply skeptical. Humble. Her story? Mindblowing.

Former Shell refinery executive in Singapore, one of the most sophisticated operations jobs on earth, moves home to California, settles in Truckee and opens a cookie shop.

I mean, honestly, it sounds straight out of a Hallmark movie. But with an edge.

This has always been my FAVORITE way to spend time: getting to know people’s stories. It’s what drew me to a career in journalism. It’s what led me to user-research and product.

The thread for me has always been the same: people are endlessly fascinating and how they choose to show up in this world will never, ever cease to amaze me.

It’s also my favorite part of my latest life and career iteration.

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I launched Main Street Operator this year. Becoming an entrepreneur was always something I wanted, I just never knew exactly what. If you’d told 20-year-old me it would happen in mid-life, while raising two toddlers, I wouldn’t have believed you. But it never felt right until now. Survey data suggests most women who own businesses today launched them in their 40s. Holler.

I’m building this slowly, iterating my way forward. And honestly? That’s the most exciting (and terrifying) part. Every step compounds. Nobody tells you that early enough. Most of my career was spent tending to someone else’s ideas. This one’s mine.

This is the first in a series I’m hoping to do around things I believe. Hold me to it.

Here are 8 things I believe after 20 years working at the intersection of people, stories, and technology.

1. Local operators will save us.

Entrepreneurs serving local communities are some of the hardest working, biggest-hearted humans alive. In a world fracturing along every line, they’re the ones still building real connection: between neighbors, between businesses, between people who need something and people who provide it. Their work is vital.

2. Main Street remembers what corporations don’t: the point is to serve.

Corporations have drifted so far toward extraction that they’ve lost the plot. Main Street operators never did. They still measure success by whether the customer got what they needed, whether the crew got home safe, whether the work was done right. That orientation wins long-term. And in an AI arms race, it becomes an even bigger edge, Main Street never lost the human part. That’s why I do this work.

3. Local operators are incredibly sophisticated — just not in the ways we’ve been taught to value.

They’re masters of their craft, their customers, and their communities. The systems layer is the one piece they haven’t needed to own. That’s changing.

4. The thinking that builds billion-dollar tech products works just as well on Main Street

I spent years building products at Uber and Instacart. The core of that work was always three questions: Do people actually want this? Can we actually deliver it? Does the math actually work? Those same three questions — Customer Reality, Delivery Reality, Business Reality — unlock a wine shop, a paving company, a climbing gym. The Operator Triangle is product thinking applied to the businesses the world actually needs.

5. The power asymmetry between enterprise and Main Street is collapsing.

Enterprise software was always just a wrapper around a database: a $50K/year visibility layer to answer “what’s the status?” LLMs have blown that open. For the first time, a small operator can access their own data, build their own workflows, and run with the same intelligence that used to require a six-figure tech stack.

Sidenote for the nerds like me: The new dependency is on the model layer, which means workflows are portable…but hell if I know what that will mean long-term. Very curious to learn.

6. Operator intuition is an asset — but it creates a trap.

The operator’s gut has gotten them far. It works. Hell, most local service businesses make more than venture-backed Series B startups. But gut-driven decision-making requires the owner to be present for every call, every judgment, every fire. That’s the owner-operator bottleneck. The fix is to prove what the intuition already knows, so the business can act on it without the owner in the room. Run the business like an experiment. Get your time back.

7. Operational excellence beats financial engineering.

Private equity rolls up Main Street businesses by applying systems and squeezing margin. But an operator who builds tight systems, retains customers, and runs real margin doesn’t need to sell out to survive. They can outperform the PE-backed competitor down the street because they actually give a shit about the work, the people, and the community. You can beat PE at their own game without gutting the soul.

8. Both/and, not either/or.

Growth AND life. Ambition AND presence. The hustle-and-sacrifice narrative is a lie that benefits the people selling the hustle. You can build something meaningful without it consuming everything else. Watch me.

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Got a belief of your own that drives your work? Lemme know!

3 Things That Caught My Attention This Week

📚 I’ve told everyone about this book — it’s written as a series of letters. The protagonist is highly imperfect. And there’s an EXCELLENT letter to Joan Didion that changed how I think about the concept of “seasons of life.”

🎧 New favorite podcast — Shoutout to @guestworkinvesting - I first came across Kaustubh through his excellent substack. Former PE guy, turns Main Street operator. I’ve listened to two episodes so far and love it. Two dudes shoot the shit about building real local service businesses. It’s the perfect mix of smart, bro-ey, and real.

📰 This was an excellently written, hella depressing, thought-provoking take — on the state of things in San Francisco and tech.

Well, for now at least 😂

I could not be more thrilled (and simultaneously terrified) about this latest career transition. More on that soon.

But I wanted to take this moment to reiterate, may our vision for life be so much more encompassing than our current roles, titles and circumstances.

I see so much uncertainty in the job market these days (it is part of what prompted the below essay for Mind The Product). But if I might offer a reminder, to stay attuned to the subtle relational forces around you. You never know where they will take you ✨

Alright, without further ado, here’s an excerpt of a piece I wrote, prompted by the wonderfully curated experience of and ’s Act Two.

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This is not an essay about product management.

This is about what it’s like to navigate the heights of creativity and the depths of exhaustion, simultaneously. It’s about what it means to really learn, by doing.

The AI mandate

This summer, against the backdrop of rapid changes in the product landscape, I dove headfirst into the circus of AI tools. Prototyping. Researching. Designing. You name it, I tried it.

Most of my education was self-led through hands-on projects, podcasts, and YouTube. Some was structured through online courses, much was with my team at work. All of it left me wanting.

The tools and use cases for building with large language models change so rapidly that I inevitably feel unsatisfied, knowing I’ll never catch up. And worrying. Because there’s this sense that learning AI is imperative for the long-term viability of my career. It’s this prescribed framing of what success in my field looks like that really discomforts me.

Don’t get me wrong, I love learning. It’s the best part of the PM job. Watching the wholesale transformation of how we build, in real-time, is astonishing. Yet the gravity assigned to “upskill in all things AI” feels like it’s missing the point.

The possibility of AI makes me feel more creative than ever, yet the industry narrative focuses on speed to market and an upskilling arms race.

So I’d like to propose a different approach: How might we make this more fun?

Choosing a playground

Having spent the last decade of my career at the intersection of technology, real-world logistics, and labor, I’m uniquely interested in AI’s role in real-world operations. As a proud geriatric millennial, raising kids far from family, I’m also constantly seeking ways to feel more connected with my community.

I was inspired by Groupon founder Andrew Mason, who recently opened a physical board game social club in Berkeley as a way to experiment with building a brick-and-mortar business around AI tools. Instead of just reading about AI, he built something real where he could actually test it.

So I decided to play in my small mountain town. I started with services I use, identified ones that seemed fun to explore (wine shop, paving company), and offered to solve one or two workflow problems for them, using AI.

In the process, I remembered what I love about this job.

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4 reasons why working with small businesses can level up your skills

Rapid iteration cycles

Stakeholder alignment hell doesn’t exist in Main Street businesses. Ship something Monday, get feedback Tuesday, iterate Wednesday. This cycle forces you to develop product intuition through fast feedback loops. And it’s glorious.

Constraint-based thinking

When working with old-school businesses you learn to solve problems with existing tools before building new ones. Their operations are already complicated enough. Take a local pool and spa company with $14M in revenue and 700 customers on a maintenance route. They had a leaky bucket problem. Literally. Their chemical usage was through the roof because techs were heavy-handed with treatments.

The solution? Skip the fancy inventory software. Instead, we added QR codes and digital scales to their existing workflow, then used an LLM to spot patterns. Transformative results, no data analyst required. This mindset forces creativity in ways a massive budget never will.

End-to-end product ownership

You ARE the research, strategy, execution, and customer success team. You can no longer hide behind specialists; you feel every part of the product lifecycle. You get to own everything, which makes you a better PM, and makes AI less of a luxury and more of a lifeline.

Real user empathy

Solving a problem for someone in your community is immediate and visceral. I can’t hide from the local wine shop owner who takes her kid to the same soccer practice as my three-year-old. There are no user personas here, just actual people I’m solving real problems for. You learn fast what actually matters.

What this has to do with AI

As working parents with two kids under three, my husband calls our collective exhaustion “a lifestyle.” But here’s the thing: when you have 45 minutes between putting your kids to sleep and your own collapse, you can’t waste time on another course that just scratches an itch. My activities really have to count. This constraint has, in fact, become my greatest competitive advantage.

— Keep reading the full text here

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With profound thanks to all my Act Two’ers for the edits and encouragement: and so many more!

“Mamá! Elena se está moviendo a la… a la… a la… ”

Four agonizing seconds pass as her eyes flit, arms gesturing wildly toward the staircase where my 1-year-old is perched precariously, determined to practice her bouldering skills.

You can see the processing in my toddler’s brain as she searches for the right word.

Then, right as the awkwardness of the pause hits a make-or-break moment, a flash crosses her face and her lips curl upward, “La escalera!” she says triumphantly, having retrieved the word.

It’s glorious. And terrifying, if I’m honest. Watching the acquisition of language in real time. It’s this omnipresent reminder of how fragile and powerful the human brain is, all bottled up into a raging, boogered, glorious child.

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Watching her wrestle with language retrieval, I recognize the same struggle in myself, except instead of searching for Spanish words, I'm fumbling for ways to express complex ideas.

Last week, as I tackled the graveyard of unfinished books and forgotten project scraps under my bed, I discovered a handwritten note from my birthday a few years ago.

“I still love learning, but am often frustrated by what I perceive as the limits of my intellect.”

It was a reminder that much like my kid, I'm constantly mining the recesses of my brain for understanding, only to discover that I often lack the vocabulary to describe what I’ve unearthed.

That is to say, I often feel intellectually lazy. Between the exhaustion of raising two kids under three and an educational background that left me without certain frameworks, I've convinced myself I'm just not built for rigorous analytical thinking.

But I’ve started to notice a pattern – that the way intellect and deep thinking is expressed in our modern society turns me off. As said in a recent interview, “I think we’re coming from a place of believing that women are multifaceted and wanting to treat them like they’re smart…[but] for women to talk like they’re smart usually means to talk like they’re men…it’s so finance-bro-y, and it feels like it’s pretending.1”

So I've built the perfect excuse fortress: too tired, not smart enough, and besides, who needs another mansplainy hot take? But watching my daughter fight for words has shattered that comfortable narrative.

My approach at this stage is two-fold:

1. I’m leveraging Claude and ChatGPT to dissect and map how my favorite thinkers critically approach ideas. Here’s a recent example (peak the mechanism deep dive at the end, I really learned something there).

2. I’m actively reading books that hit on this messy intersection of cognitive functions, processing styles and intelligence. Some current reads include: A Rulebook for Arguments, The Creative Act, Leonardo da Vinci and How To Make Sense of Any Mess.

I don’t know where this takes me, but I am crystal clear that I want to get better at learning. As I was reminded this week by , there is energy in the emergent process. Of becoming a mom. Of becoming a professional. Of becoming a more attuned human. So I’m trying to capitalize on that.

Your turn: Have you ever felt the gap between what you intuitively, internally understand and what you can outwardly express? What resources have helped you bridge that divide?

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With thanks to with and for scratching the itch on how I can become a better thinker and storyteller.

With that, Evgeny extended his hand, and we found ourselves in "business" with a Russian oligarch.

I remember thinking how surreal this felt, negotiating with a man whose business methods I could only guess, all in service of optimizing an algorithm. I definitely didn’t learn that in business school.

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It had started a few days prior, almost like a joke, when a Pakistani product manager, Korean designer, and I, a Mexican user-researcher, gathered with Evgeny's team in an old Soviet hangar on the outskirts of Moscow. Uber had sent us there to better understand and improve our seven-million-dollar incentive program for fleet partners, who accounted for thirty percent of global trips.

What we discovered wasn’t just a taxi operation, but a vertically integrated empire. Evgeny’s ecosystem kept 10,000 drivers running across 16 cities, with a singular objective: keep vehicles in operation 24/7, 365 days a year.

The deal was simple: we'd pay Evgeny a cash bonus for incremental trips. But our riskiest variable wasn't price, it was people. How would he motivate 10,000 drivers to work harder? Our trips-for-cash deal was with the fleet, but what deal would he make with his drivers?

I expected sophisticated incentive structures, perhaps a clever bonus system that might revolutionize our thinking. What we found instead was simpler and more profound.

***

The next evening we camped out in that cavernous warehouse, watching Evgeny's dispatch team in action. The room was dimly lit, dispatchers hunched over desktop computers, faces illuminated by blue screen light. No sophisticated tracking systems, no leaderboards, just people, phones, and well-worn desk chairs.

As dawn approached, when driver activity typically declined, a dispatcher, cigarette dangling from his lips, picks up the phone, calls a driver, and simply says, "Come on, do me a favor, man. Just one more ride."

And it works. No cash needed. That simple interaction revealed a powerful truth: a human asking for a favor in the early-morning hours is far more compelling than any cash bonus our algorithms could deliver.

While AI can predict behavior, it can't mimic the relational calculus that determines whether someone will go the extra mile. Relationships matter.

***

Lately, as my job becomes more and more about automation, robotics, and leveraging AI, I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about what actually makes work meaningful. And I keep coming back to this experience.

What struck me about Evgeny's operation was its simplicity. In a world obsessed with optimization algorithms, the most powerful tool in that warehouse was a relationship that no AI could replicate. Perhaps that's our challenge: as we build increasingly sophisticated systems, we must preserve the spaces between algorithms where the messy, complex, and profoundly human exchange of favors, trust, and connection flourish.

I don’t have an answer, to be frank. But I do believe the answer isn't choosing between human and artificial intelligence, it's about designing systems that amplify what makes us most human.

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With gratitude to Emma Dorge and Claire Butler for the edits this week — this one is long overdue!

In the scramble to rebuild trust, leadership hands down a clear directive: make drivers happier.

If only it were that easy...

At the time, one of drivers' favorite features is "Destinations." It allows them to pick up a ride along their route—perfect for heading home after a shift. But we cap it at two trips per day because uncapping it would throw off the marketplace. Drivers would cluster in certain neighborhoods, surge prices would spike, and riders would be left stranded elsewhere.

Since drivers love this feature and management wants to boost driver satisfaction, removing the cap seems like an obvious solution. Simple fix, right?

Within hours, the system unravels. Prices skyrocket. Riders bail to Lyft. Drivers game the system. The very change meant to improve the experience makes it worse for nearly everyone. We have no choice but to roll it back—publicly, embarrassingly, almost immediately.

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The mistake wasn’t in execution. It wasn't even about insufficient information. It was a failure of systems thinking—of understanding how one part of a business affects the whole.

At Uber, our crisis wasn't just about fixing driver happiness. It was about learning that when you move one piece, you have to see the whole board. And Uber, at its core, wasn't built to optimize driver satisfaction.

The Technology-Operations Paradox

Our response to this systems failure was telling: we tried to solve driver happiness by adding more features to an already complex system. It's a pattern I've watched repeat across a decade of leading products at operations-heavy companies: when problems arise, we instinctively add more people, processes, and spreadsheets.

The Paradox

It starts when something in your business isn't working, and the instinct is to layer on solutions. But each solution adds new dependencies and more overhead. Instead of solving the root issue, you build an increasingly fragile system that requires constant maintenance. Herein lies the paradox:

The more we try to fix problems with added technology and processes, the more operational complexity we create. That complexity then demands even more tech to manage it, trapping us in a vicious cycle.

Consider a food-services company I worked for, hemorrhaging $2 million annually in waste. Our model – offering multiple cuisines from various brands – seemed appealing until spoilage ate at profits. The team's instinct? Build better forecasting models (aka add complexity). But with manual processes everywhere, we couldn't even get reliable data to forecast with.

The Quick Fix Spiral

I've seen this so many times. The pressure to show immediate results ("DO MORE FAST!") overwhelms any opportunity for stepping back and thoughtfully examining the system itself, creating a self-reinforcing spiral of false productivity. With each quick fix, the underlying problems become more entangled and harder to address.

• Problems trigger quick fixes (more processes/tools/features)

• New solutions create more moving parts

• More moving parts make data tracking harder and less reliable

• Unreliable data leads to more problems

In our food delivery example, juggling multiple vendors, brands, and cuisine types had created such system instability that no amount of process optimization– from improved Standard Operating Procedures to data instrumentation to hail-mary UI changes– could solve the problem because they were addressing symptoms rather than root causes.

Eventually, the complexity becomes unsustainable. This is when the hard truth emerges: adding more layers won't work. The only way forward is to step back and rethink the system itself.

The Reset

There's a principle in systems thinking known as POSIWID: the purpose of a system is what it does.

In other words, success isn't about adding more features or checkpoints - it's about building structures that naturally encourage the right behaviors.

Instead of optimizing a broken system, we needed to fundamentally redesign how humans, technology, and processes interact in a scalable way. This means:

• Identifying what behaviors your system naturally produces

• Understanding why users struggle to do the right thing

• Determining what data actually drives decisions

For the food-services startup, this meant recognizing that our distributed supply chain, with multiple brands, was creating a system that was neither profitable, nor frankly, that desirable by our users. When we moved to direct food sourcing with proprietary recipes the results were transformative.

By simplifying our supply network, and creating our own menus, the waste problem vanished. This created a positive feedback loop: without a large distro team to manage, we could pour resources into what actually mattered: our kitchen crews and food quality. And when we pointed our technology at making great food instead of just tracking spoilage, something magical happened: customers started coming back more often and our ratings shot up.

Each win fed into the next, proving something I've seen time and time again - when you nail the system design, problems have a funny way of solving themselves.

The Systems Design Sequence

When you break free from the Quick-Fix Spiral and decide to hit reset, a clear action plan emerges:

• Design the right system first (product thinking): Build a system that naturally guides people toward better outcomes. At Uber, this would have meant creating a marketplace that balanced both driver satisfaction and reliable service from day one. You can't improve your way out of a flawed design.

• Measure what matters (data instrumentation): Only once your foundation is solid can you track meaningful progress. Remember our food delivery company – we only got accurate insights after simplifying our operation to focus on what worked.

• Then, fine-tune (operational excellence): This is when process improvements really take hold. Each small change builds on the last because you're working with a system designed for success, not fighting against it.

Here's the truth I've learned the hard way: operational excellence isn't about layering on complexity - it's about creating an environment where good outcomes happen naturally.

Why isn't this obvious? Because when we see a fire, our instinct is to grab an extinguisher—not redesign the building's sprinkler system. Systems design demands we resist this reactive urge, stepping back when everything in us wants to leap forward.

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Good systems design often feels counterintuitive. At Uber, it would have seemed absurd to suggest that limiting driver flexibility could actually make drivers happier. At our food delivery startup, arguing for fewer menu options when sales were dropping felt like madness. Yet in both cases, constraint was exactly what the system needed to thrive.

So next time you’re faced with a complex business problem, ask yourself: Are you fixing symptoms, or redesigning the system? The difference is the key to long-term success.

Does this align with what you’ve seen? I often find the hardest part is recognizing when your system needs a reset rather than a patch. What signals and patterns have you seen emerge to know the difference? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments!

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Special thanks to the wide-ranging expertise involved in this week’s edits including framework guru , narrative storytelling queen , accountability partner and Biz Ops Superman Sam Wang.

One Friday morning, he noticed their regular server looked off, “No te sientes bien, eh?” After some back and forth, he learned she was sick and uninsured. “Espere aquí,” he motioned and hurried out towards his car, fumbling around in the trunk, before coming back into the restaurant and handing her a small, white box as the executives, preachers and deacons looked on with curiosity.

“Uhm…what did you just give her,” one asked. “Antibiotics," my papi responded.

“You just happen to have antibiotics in your trunk?”

“I brought back medications from Mexico—they’re cheaper there." The group shifted uncomfortably.

“So you keep Mexican medications in your car and offer them to people without a prescription?” asked Ross, whose wife is a clinical professor at Baylor Medical School.

My father met his gaze, eyes twinkling, “I mean, I guess that makes me a drug dealer, huh?”

The wary roar and sideways glances that followed, proved that even after 30 years of friendship, you can still surprise people.

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—

As an adult, I’ve struggled to understand my parents' choice of friends. From the outside, my politically incorrect father who met my adventurous mother while hitchhiking in Mexico, who jointly raised three girls in 7 cities and 2 countries over 18 years doesn’t quite align with the coiffed, gift-bearing dinner guest, born-and-raised-types that they seem to associate with.

I’m also, frankly, confused about why these guys want to hang out with my dad outside of work.

“Mija,” my father explained, when I asked, “I expose them to a way of life and people they wouldn’t otherwise know. In our work, that matters.”

Ah, yes, the work they do…

My father works for a religious organization that unites 5,000 churches and two million members across socioeconomic and geographic lines distributing resources to communities in need. And contrary to most headlines these days, there remain some (few?) church-going folks that do actually care about meeting human needs above political ideology.

Consider their work with formerly incarcerated individuals. Texas locks up more people per capita than any democratic nation1. Families of those individuals, of all races, come to the church for help when their loved ones are released. My papi works alongside his colleagues to secure funding and create resources—housing, employment, mental health support—that churches can offer these families.

Their reach extends globally. From winterizing Syrian refugee camps, to building greenhouses in Oaxaca, to helping feed and clothe immigrants on the border between Guatemala and Mexico and yes, Texas, my father has spent an entire career alongside these men creating bridges to people and places.

While he and my mother don’t always align with their friends’ views, they share some core values. Namely that solving hard problems requires both conviction and a willingness to embrace differences. That's what my father does—tackles messy human challenges alongside people unlike himself.

—

I’ve been thinking about my father and his work lately. And it’s not just for the obvious reasons splashed across our siloed media surfaces. It’s also because I've been struck by how little I understand those around me. Even after years of friendship or collaboration, people continue to reveal their complexities.

It’s in these moments, when frustration threatens to overwhelm me, that I think of my papi’s example—how he has thrived while being markedly different from his peers. I've come to admire this quality in his approach to life: the recognition that solutions emerge more readily when people with different perspectives gather at the table. Plus, as he reminds me with that characteristic twinkle, it's more fun.

I don’t know about you, but the prospect of finding joy while tackling seemingly insurmountable challenges? That's the kind of inspiration I need right now.

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3 Things That Caught My Attention This Week

🎧 “The Opposite of Doom is Curiosity” — this episode of the Ezra Klein podcast was the provocation for today’s essay. In particular his assertion that it’s become harder to conceptualize that it is possible to do good things in today’s attentional economy.

📚 When You Care: The Unexpected Magic of Caring For Others — I’m only halfway through this book, but I already love it, “Our narratives about care have been so one-dimensional, so lacking in curiosity that we fail to see what is possible.”

▶️ LOL It me — as a new mom of two…

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With gratitude to and for the edits this week — it’s hard coming back from a 5-month hiatus after birthing my second daughter, but these ladies helped make it happen.

✨ Quick note: I started this newsletter, largely, because I don’t think there is enough real talk about how to sit comfortably with nuance, especially at work. Thoughts on this essay? As I wade into complex and hairy topics, I would love to hear your take. Respond to this email or leave a comment 🙏🏽

35 working days. 

That’s how much time passed from the moment I was sitting alone in an emergency room, covered in blood, listless from delivering a 4.5-month old dead fetus to when I was sitting on a zoom call with my manager, tears rolling down my face as they detailed the ways I was falling short of their expectations. Namely, they noted, I was not ramping quickly enough into a new focus area, given my level of seniority.

They weren’t wrong, I was not functioning at my normal velocity. But trying to keep up on this new project, assigned to me just four days after my pregnancy loss, felt pointless. I could not, for the life of me, bring the mental acuity and energy that I was being asked for.

Later that week, as I discussed the interaction with my leadership coach, she gently asked me a question that reframed my entire relationship with the experience, “Cris, what does your manager need to learn from this? How can you coach them to be a better leader?”

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***

Emotional regulation and resilience.

These are two critical themes that often come up within the professional communities that I am a part of, the women that I coach and, as noted, in my own career. 

It tends to surface within the context of three “trigger” events: 

1. You get negative feedback and are having an emotional response.

2. The day-to-day pressures at work are on the rise, and the need to manage it all decreases your ability to just deal in a neutral way.

3. More rarely, someone actually says something that speaks directly to or hints at a lack of stoicism (which is considered the norm in these bland corporate environments that we exist in, but I digress). This can sound like, “You’re too [insert emotion] about this [topic/situation],” or “[X Person] was so [insert emotion] in that meeting.”

It’s awful to be perceived as weak or unprofessional for showing emotion. Losing confidence or motivation or trust from others because you reacted emotionally is a real, but shitty outcome.

But also, we’re human! It’s absolutely normal to react to the above-mentioned events of our lives. 

I could write an entire book on ways to address emotional agility and resilience in the workplace. There are proven, tactical strategies to apply at the individual and systemic level (because let’s be real we MUST change the culture of the places we work).

But today, I want to highlight the first and most important thing you can do in these moments: find a way to accept your emotional reality and communicate it with grace to those around you.

When my coach asked me that question, encouraging me to lean in with curiosity as to how I might teach my manager to better support me, I realized that to feel championed I needed them to recognize that my current work output was not a reflection of my past, nor my future.

Here’s the email I ended up sending my boss:

The email didn’t solve the problem, but it changed the way I looked at the situation. It allowed me to reframe the issue from being wholly about my shortcomings and shifted the dynamic to something that I had agency over. It ultimately shaped my decision to quit, because I realized I wanted to work in a high empathy, high performing environment.

It’s a hard-wrought lesson that has shaped me as a leader and human. 

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***

There’s a difference between needing to be “resilient” in the workplace and needing to acknowledge that sometimes we are going through something difficult and need time to process.

Our corporate cultures are not that nuanced. 

We are taught, especially as women, to toughen up and not let our personal lives affect our work output. But that’s largely code for, “I am uncomfortable dealing with your emotions and so I’d rather you hide them."

There are moments in life that call for emotional elasticity, but pretending that nothing happened is NOT actual resilience. The notion that it’s the standard expectation in a professional setting, is, in fact, absurd.

We can and must do better.

3 Ways To Support Staff Going Through A Difficult Time

Yes, as the manager/direct report relationship is complex. And yes, there are weird power dynamics that go both ways. But that doesn’t mean we can’t try to bring more empathy and humanity to the workplace. 

Here are 3 specific ways I have learned to support my direct reports when they are going through a period in which their capacity to “recover quickly” may be limited:

1. VALIDATE & SUPPORT: “I can see you’re really struggling, I looked into it and here are the specific leave options available to you. Is that something you’d like to discuss or learn more about?”

2. DISCUSS & EXPAND THE OPTION SET: “I’m worried that this project you are working on is highly visible and I value you as a human and employee too much to have it impact your career (or mine). Given what you are going through, would you like to consider working on a different, lower stakes project? Let’s chat about what stepping down might mean for your career in the near and long term.”

3. BE REALISTIC. BE HUMAN: “We’re under a lot of pressure right now as an organization and XYZ is what is expected by our executives. I’m concerned by your current response to the demands and I’d love to learn more about what’s behind that. Let’s come up with a realistic plan on how we might meet the needs of our organization/team while also recognizing your current constraints. I can’t promise it won’t be hard, but I promise I will do everything I can to make sure you get the support you need.”

Your turn.

Have you gone through a difficult period at work? What have you found is most helpful? I’d love to learn from your experience. Let me know in the comments below 👇🏽

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Special thanks to Emma Dorge and Surekha Nair for the thoughtful edits this week.

I hated that. 

You know, the idea that my leading attribute amongst the many that secured me the interview was a trait entirely out of my control. But, as a fledgling TV reporter, looking for a move out of cable into network television in a Top 10 market, this was a great opportunity. And this was, after all, broadcast news, where almost every decision about on-air “talent” is made by a few men at the top, based on largely superficial characteristics (read: appearance).

In the seat next to me was a distinguished looking man in his mid-to-late 50’s. He had blue eyes, a light gray suit and a small brown briefcase. I had a bunch of nervous energy to expend, and thus, took his kind eyes as an invitation to strike up a conversation. 

Over the course of the next three hours, I was taken on an unexpected journey.

I learned how he had moved to China in the late 70’s to learn the language, right as the country’s new Open Door Policy1 led to a wave of western businesses entering the country for the first time. I learned how he opportunistically jumped at the chance to be a fixer, of sorts, to help set up these companies in special economic zones, which ultimately transformed China into the world’s factory.

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I sat transfixed as he described the speed and innovation of the era, how he fell madly in love with a local woman and proceeded to spend the next 20 years in the country raising a family and witnessing the rise of a global power. How he ultimately moved to Australia with his family and at the age of 42 decided to go to law-school with a bunch of 20-year olds. How after “doing his time” in big law, he decided to become a United Nations mediation expert. Which is how he found himself on that train to DC, as an international peace negotiator, working a deal.

“I was bored,” his eyes gleamed when I asked how he had the audacity to start an entirely new career from scratch, “It’s MY life after all. Why not?”

13 years later, I remember nothing about the job interview but I still think about this man and the energy, humility and adventure that were clear, organizing principles in his life.

Every single time I have made a major career transition (and let me tell you there have been many at this stage), I think about him. I’m certain that his story played a part in what ultimately gave me the confidence to walk away from a relatively successful career in broadcast news, just two years later. 

As I reflect back on this stoked human and the decade plus of professional experience I’ve amassed since we shared that brief train ride, I’ve come to understand the lessons his story laid bare:

3 Tips On Making Career Transitions (and staying stoked on life):

1. Be willing to compromise → there’s a famous line in Sex And The City where Carrie laments that, “In New York City you’re always looking for a job, apartment, or a boyfriend, but you rarely get all three.” When starting an entirely new career, it’s important to remember you have to make compromises. You cannot expect the same seniority, pay and respect. Something has to give. And you have to be ok with that. My train mate didn’t so much as blink, talking about what it was like to be at the bottom of the totem pole in big law at the age of 44 after the accolades of his prior career. He had a vision for his life that encompassed so much more than ego.

2. Learn the language → every industry (or hobby) has its own vernacular, but a lot of the core concepts remain the same. I remember when I left broadcast news to join the international design firm IDEO, I had to learn to share my ideas in ways that resonated with a new audience of designers. I quickly learned that the narrative approach to sharing an insight remained the same, even if the language and delivery mechanism changed.

   Don’t doubt your experience and value, but learn how to talk about it differently. 

3. Embrace being a beginner → the most salient characteristic of a beginner is curiosity. A beginner KNOWS they will mess up, but their drive to learn must overcome that fear or they will never emerge from that nascent stage. I wish you could have seen this man’s eyes light up as he talked about all that he was learning in this latest job. There’s something fun and freeing about being a newbie. Lean into it with joy and adventure!

I fully plan on shaking up my career again someday. I want to do right by this stranger, and I’m not quite 40 yet 😉 My latest ideas range from a PhD in Behavioral Economics to opening a bookstore-bar-venue where I can host literary/cultural events in my small mountain town… 

What’s at the top of your list? 
What’s stopping you?

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2 Things That Caught My Attention This Week

🎧 The Economics of Girl Scout Cookies: Did you know that during Girl Scout cookie season, other cookie manufacturers decrease their production and sales forecasts? Such is the power of the all-mighty Girl Scout 👧🏽 This short & sweet podcast episode delves into the supply chain, wealth politics and sales strategies of one of my favorite seasons around 🍪

📚 Out of the Sierra: A Story of Rarámuri Resistance: The Rarámuri (or Tarahumara) are an indigenous group in Chihuahua, Mexico first made famous outside the region by the ultra-running community in the book Born To Run. But for some of us, raised amongst this community, they were legendary long before that. I have acute memories of their colorful skirts and beautiful mountain villages when we lived in Chihuahua. My childhood friend, Victoria Blanco, spent more than a decade doing participatory research with this community and her debut book, slated to come out in June, explores the incredible resilience and community of these people. Pre-sales matter, so consider purchasing!

Special thanks to Emma Dorge and Lauri Valerio for the edits this week. And with profound gratitude to the distinguished stranger on that Acela Express that inspired me so. I wonder where his life endeavors have taken him since…

She was referring to a new study1, published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, suggesting that to live longer, women need half as much exercise as men, “Because you finally decided to study female-specific shit?! God f*cking dammit!” her post concluded.  

For some reason this precise combination of aghast horror and swearing induced a manic hilarity deep in my bones. Fat tears started rolling down my face. I cannot tell you if I was laughing or crying. But it lasted for a good 15 minutes. It was cathartic. 

To be frank, I am exhausted. 

I am an employee, mother, wife, boss, entrepreneur, athlete, sister, daughter, friend. The labels go on and on. The pressure of it all has been a lot lately. That silly post reminded me of how impossible it all is. 

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How often do we feel less than, behind, or just exhausted because of the impossible systems we operate in? And yet, those structures and cultural expectations are simply a product of who they were designed for.   

In this case, the problem, as explains in her excellent essay on the subject,2 is “that the vast majority of the knowledge about how our bodies work, comes from studies of a certain type of body that may or may not work like our own.” 

Let’s ponder that for a second. Please, humor me and lean into the ridiculousness of it all.

We don’t study women’s bodies in a rigorous way. Literally the “entire experience of sport was developed around the experience of boys and men” because women’s bodies are too complicated (read: hormonal).  

And so, we’re given generic advice by “experts” to engage in X minutes of cardio and lift weights Y amount and in doing so, adhere to cultural expectations of wellness and slimness and decrease our health risks, blah, blah, blah. And so, as a nation, all these overworked, exhausted, structurally unsupported women get up at 5am, punch that exercise card and do what they can to meet these “studied” minimum standards in a hope and a prayer that they’ll live longer, healthier, happier lives. 

Except, that it’s not generic advice. It’s for men. “This is great news for women who struggle to motivate themselves!” say the study’s authors. 

God f*cking dammit!

The hilarity of trying to “motivate” across so many dimensions to meet standards that were categorically not designed for me, is well, a lot.  

This especially hit home at 2am last Sunday, when I found myself solo-parenting at my folks home, scrubbing my toddler’s vomit from her pajamas for a fifth time that evening. We’d flown to Texas to attend my grandfather’s funeral and father’s retirement party, a fortuitous, if emotionally challenging coincidence. 

As I ran the regurgitated mandarin-laced towel under the sink, my mind began the mental gymnastics of trying to figure out how I would fit everything together that week, now with a sick toddler. The consideration set was large. This was especially the case as I had planned on working that week, relying on my parents for childcare, a notion now in question as I heard my mother loudly retching in the adjoining room. 

At the end of the day, I gave up. I used my PTO and took the entire week off of work, ended up sick myself, spent a lot of extra cash rearranging flights and childcare, and returned home a ghost of a human, to cheery, well-meaning asks of “How was your time off?” from my team. 

What they tell us we need isn’t what we actually need. I need sleep. A lot of it. And yet, I cannot shake this feeling that rest is a luxury that I am not entitled to right now. I feel GUILTY for needing it so profoundly, when I just took 5 days off of work and there are many pressing needs to attend to. 

Maybe a workout will help. 

God f*cking dammit!

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2 Things That Caught My Attention This Week:

📖 ACOTAR: I’m just gonna go ahead and own the fact that I stayed up until midnight last night making my way through the second book of this “fairy porn” YA series. Apparently my need for sleep is not as strong as my need for escape. It took multiple friends nudging and this excellent essay in Culture Study to finally convince me of it. But, y’all, it’s worth the shame 🤷🏽‍♀️

🎧 The One Where You’re Awake At 3:30am Every Day: Speaking of lack of sleep, I found this podcast to have some excellent, non-obvious approaches to insomnia. For instance, if you get hypoglycemic at night (read: low blood sugar), it could induce a wake-up that is hard to recover from. Good stuff starts 20 minutes in. No surprise, fantasy reads aren’t exactly encouraged as part of healthy bedtime hygiene 🙄

Special thanks to Emma Dorge and Lauri Valerio for the edits this week!

2

Culture Study

Whose Bodies Get Studied

What happens when the vast majority of knowledge about how our bodies work….comes from studies of a certain type of body that may or may not work…

Read more

2 years ago · 344 likes · 26 comments · Anne Helen Petersen

I’m not actively seeking drama in my life, but there’s something so primal in the human need to overcome and defeat a long-standing rival – a Voldemort, to my Harry Potter life. 😉

I find it fitting that the term comes from the Greek goddess of vengeance, Nemesis, who doled out rewards for noble acts and punishment for evil ones. Which is to say, the word isn’t just about flat out #meangirl hating on someone, but about justice.

If only that existed in corporate America. 

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I remember a few years back, I was working with this guy – we’ll call him Frank, a husky white dude from New Jersey. He’d often wear a gray hoodie under a black leather jacket, sleeves cuffed, a bit too perfectly.

Eyes brightened whenever he rolled into the room. Laughter exploded with whatever joke came out of his mouth, most notably from the leaders of our organization. I never “got” his humor, but assumed it was my lack of savoir faire in this new industry I was working in.

His pointed slate eyes would extoll me to “not be so serious,” as we prepped for week-long work trips. I always felt less than around this man.

***

I’ve had my fair share of difficult colleagues. You know, the ones from hell that are outright hostile. Frank’s impact on my work experience was more insidious. 

Our interactions left me spending far too much time trying to figure out what the hell was wrong with me. Research shows I’m not alone1. 80% of people on the receiving end of “uncivil behavior” lose precious time ruminating about rude comments from a colleague or wondering why their boss is sending an email during their presentation.

***

Three years later, I’m at a bar exchanging pleasantries with the guy next to me, a “So what do you do?” type convo. At some point, my new friend learns of my past employment history, “Do you know Frank?” 

I apparently could not conceal my cringe. 

“You too huh?” the man laughed. He had worked with Frank at a different company, “I never liked the guy, always seemed kinda smarmy to me.” 

IPA in hand, I had an epiphany. 

I still don’t know how to articulate why Frank was so difficult to work with, but I know that the feeling I had was legitimate, as christened by a total stranger at a bar. 

How’s that for some poetic justice?

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Special thanks to Emma Dorge and Lauri Valerio for the edits this week!

3 Things That Caught My Attention This Week:

🩳 Free People Micro Shorts: I haven’t laughed this hard since Schitt’s Creek ended. Having a bad day? The comments on this post do not disappoint, “OBGYN here…looks like I’ll be double booked a few weeks out.” 🤣 Need more hilarity in your life, dive deep into the follow-on posts, like this one. I DIE 💀

🎧 How To Have The Hardest Conversations: I haven’t read the book Supercommunicators yet, but it’s at the top of my list. This episode of Plain English speaks with it’s author and the takeaways are excellent. This topic really resonated for me, professionally and personally.

🤔 Lenny’s Favorite Decision Making Frameworks: I’m a huge Lenny fan. He is a content powerhouse with a podcast and newsletter that provides some of the greatest value for those of us working in fast-paced, innovative industries. This resource of templates and guides to “help you make better decisions with less drama” is GOLD.

The idea being that in moments of insecurity, or when trying something new, we should embody the persona of someone that has, indeed, done it. First time presenting before executive leadership? No problem, put on your favorite pair of heels (yes even on a Zoom call), sit up tall and act as if it’s NBD.

“Been there, done that.”

The problem, I learned, is that imitating confidence and competence (despite wearing high heels), doesn’t actually solve the problem, which is, you’re facing something you’ve NEVER DONE before. 

Early in my career, I was scheduled to interview Henry Kissinger on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, to celebrate 30 years of diplomatic relations between the US and China. All the other television networks had turned down the interview, in favor of the sexier Gazprom/Ukraine pipeline crisis. 

So there I was, all 24-years of life experience trembling beneath my favorite emerald green power suit, hair in a perfectly coiffed blond bob amidst the quiet roar of the trading floor, desperately trying to manifest gravitas for the truly infinite 5 minutes I was allotted for the live television interview. 

Kissinger was, in fact, very hard to understand, with a thick German accent that my college course on international relations did not adequately prepare me for.

I wish I could remember what I asked him, but I do not. I was so wrapped up with wanting to appear competent before this revered diplomat, that I didn’t hear the insights and anecdotes he shared. Which is a shame, because how often do we get the opportunity to grill controversial world leaders?

Sure, I delivered as the polished, professional that I was hired for. But dammit, it was a boring-ass interview. What might the experience have been like if I’d gone in with the giddiness of a recent graduate interviewing someone she’d spent semesters studying? What might I remember about that moment if I’d allowed my curiosity to drive the questions, instead of needing to prove something, just to feel like less of an imposter? What a waste. 

Time has taught me that there’s something really special about being a beginner at something, and owning it; in learning to ditch the pretense and go all in on the experience. 

By the way, the most memorable part of that interview with Kissinger? 

His breath. I’m still proud of keeping a straight face on international television with wafts of dying bacteria two feet from my face. Yes, I went there. 🙄

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I’ve been on a bit of a writing hiatus this winter (and I can’t even blame epic amounts of snow shoveling). More on that later, for now I’m stoked to be back! Special thanks to for the edits and encouragement.

3 Things That Caught My Attention This Week:

🎧 The Complete History & Strategy of Hermès: “In luxury there’s Hermès, and then there’s everyone else.” If you’ve never listened to the podcast Acquired, this is a banger of an episode to start with. It’s ridiculously long, but if you’re obsessed with good storytelling and history, you won’t want to miss this. From Napoleon to #quietluxury this has it ALL.

📷 Female Climbers: A Manifesto: From handbags to hand holds (what can I say 🤷🏽‍♀️ I’m a woman with diverse interests) this post from Canadian rock climber Allison Vest had me saying “YES!” the entire time, given its broad applicability in our society.

“Not validating women about subjective [issues] might not seem that important, but the social environment created by that is. It’s an environment that elevates and protects men purely based on their abilities.”

🎧 The Alabama Ruling That Could Stop Families From Having Kids: This episode of The Daily is a MUST. Two percent of American children are born through IVF, including my most perfect daughter. I have so much to say about this whole topic, but I’ll just leave you with this pic. One is NOT like the other.

👋🏽 - Cris

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A few months later, still in the bottomless bowels of grief, the world numb around me, I had this cavernous realization this job was not working out. I lacked the support, empathy and engagement to succeed amidst my current reality. I blame no one but the system. But I’m still frustrated that the only way I could figure my way out of that situation was to quit. 

If there’s anything I’ve learned in the last 5 years of my career, it's that it is inordinately difficult to navigate the complexity of real life with an ambitious career. 

Whether that is taking care of an aging or sick parent, going through fertility treatments, planning for parental leave or losing a child. The fact of the matter is there's no roadmap, there are limited protections. And frankly, every company and situation is different. 

Next month I’m hosting a free panel discussion on this topic with the Chief Product & Design Officer of Headspace, Leslie Witt1 and the VP of Provider Growth and Operations at Lin Health, Shira Butler2. 

Shira’s story is so powerful in navigating the challenges of personal and work life with such grace, I figured we should sit down ahead of time to learn from her. Below, our discussion, edited for clarity and brevity.

Key Takeaways:

• Learning to ask for help is key. The advice Shira was given when she decided to become a single mother played into her professional ambitions as she navigated two layoffs while going through fertility treatments and pregnancy.

• Clarifying your life goals can bring courage in how you show up at work. Shira’s vision for the life she wanted played into the manner with which she advocated for raises, promotions and relocations.

• There’s no right way. Every situation Shira encountered, she simply took the information before her and evaluated her options as best she could. It’s humbling and a great reminder that we’re all trying to figure it out.

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Cris: How would you define ambition in your life and in your career? How has that evolved over the years, especially as you navigated complex personal demands of your own? 

Shira:  I've worked in healthcare my whole career in Europe, Africa and the United States. Right now, I'm a leader at a company that delivers pain psychology solutions for chronic pain. That in mind, there are three things I’d highlight. 

First, I wanted a job where I felt impactful – where I had access to a lot of information and the pressures of making difficult decisions and where I could positively impact people’s lives. Second, I determined I could find that in product leadership because I love the bridge between what end users need or want and what you can create from technology. Later on I became a general manager because I wanted to lead teams. 

And then third, I've had a longstanding interest in work-life balance. After graduate school I moved to Switzerland for many reasons, but one of them is that I wanted to witness people who worked really, really hard, and then stopped working at the end of the day and didn't work again until the next morning. I wanted exposure and immersion in a culture like that. 

When I came back to the US, my goal was to bring that with me, and to be somewhere people would say with huge respect:

“Shira works really, really hard, and she can solve this problem for you. But you have to catch her before she goes home.”

Cris: That level of clarity and vision is really inspiring, but very hard to make happen. How have you been able to do that, especially in a US corporate work environment?

Shira: Yeah, I mean, it’s about taking a strategic approach and having the willingness to risk my career.

I always earned respect and trust first, and brought in other pieces slowly. I use researched insights that helped [furthering my point] around work-life balance. For example, there was a great Harvard Business Review article about managing your energy instead of your time. And I love that. 

I use that with my teams. We figured out for each individual person on this team what is your highest level of productivity that you can create value for the company. 

With my bosses, I say, here's some norms and things I think we should do. For instance, in a company all hands. If we recognize this person for what they did, we shouldn't say they work nights and weekends to get this done. We should say they worked really hard. They went above and beyond and delivered this really impactful value.

Cris: So that’s the strategic side, what about the willingness to risk your career. Talk me through an example of that. 

Shira: In my mid thirties, I wanted to give myself the option to be a single mom by choice if I didn't find a partner [by a certain age]. I started by freezing my eggs and it was such an incredible out of pocket cost, it was very jarring.

After that, I ended up sitting down with a financial planner. I needed to know how much to save in order to do fertility treatments and buy a house. We mapped out some models and we figured it out it was more than I was saving, living in San Francisco and working at a job that I loved.

That [realization] made me bolder in trying to advocate for myself to get a promotion. I didn’t tell my company I was doing fertility treatments and didn't say that was part of why I wanted a raise. But I did decide to put my job at risk telling my boss I either had to leave this job or leave the Bay Area to reach my goals. There was no precedent for that at the time. But I had a supportive boss that was willing to try, and allowed me to move and [work remote].

Cris: That’s wild, that a decision you made for your personal life played into the courage and boldness with which you were able to show up at work. Can you dig into that a little bit more?

Shira: In my twenties, I chose to go work abroad because it was an important experience I wanted to have, even though it wasn't clear that it would be good for my career. In fact, many of my mentors told me it would be bad for my career.

So early on, I decided that I wasn't going to only maximize my ability to move up in the world or my salary. Those things were important, but even more important, was making sure that I liked the life that I was living and did things that were really important to me.

Cris: What happened next, after you risked your career by moving to a place you could afford to raise a family?

Shira: One thing I did was get to know women who had decided to have kids alone. They were super badass and one of the best pieces of advice they gave me was to practice asking for help because that would be the key skill to succeeding.

Cris: I feel like that advice is transferable professionally too!

Shira: Yeah, it was. I ended up being part of two layoffs during this journey to motherhood. The first, was right after I’d moved to the new city and was in the process of putting bids on a home and in the middle of my fertility treatment.

Then, I succeeded in getting pregnant and when I was 6 months pregnant, I found out that the child I was carrying had a very serious medical condition and a couple weeks later I was laid off from my new job as part of a larger layoff. That was the scariest layoff of my life.

After a couple of weeks of emotional processing, I reached out to a small circle of people I trusted and I told them what my situation was. Two of those people offered me contract work until I gave birth, knowing what my limitations were, but also knowing how hard I worked and how good a job I could do. That was really really impactful.

I had built the right kind of respect, community and self-confidence to be able to ask for help. And it worked out. I didn't end up getting a full time job until after my daughter was born. I'm still annoyed about the loss of income from not being paid for my maternity leave. But I'm also very grateful for the time I got to spend with my kid.

Cris: Can you tell me more about that resentment? 

Shira: First of all, I had met a partner during this process, but I was still the primary income earner for my family. I held the mortgage on my house and I was terrified of what the costs would be for my daughter because of her medical condition.

I also knew that I had the ability to find jobs, I had done it before. I wasn't angry at my company that had laid me off. They hadn't known I was pregnant because I hadn't told them. They were people like me who were trying to run a business, who were trying to help the world, who were trying to do the best they could. 

So I couldn't direct my resentment or my anger at a person or at the company. But I still feel upset at the situation and system. I made the best decisions that I could at the time.

Cris: What have you learned, overall, about managing this ambitious career and a rich personal life? 

Shira: It's on my shoulders to have discipline around when I work, and when I don't work. I am a high achiever and I contribute a lot and I make my boundaries very clear. I think as long as we are delivering value and delivering results, it doesn’t matter what hours you work. 

I also think it’s important to say, in most of my jobs I did not feel comfortable advocating for things like fertility benefits, or making it clear upfront that I was pregnant while interviewing or that I wanted to control my hours. I worried that I would not be treated with the same level of respect if I said those things upfront and was afraid that would lead my bosses to pass me over for promotions or opportunities. 

So I want people to hear the ways that I DO advocate for myself and the things that are important to me, but to also say that I don't think everybody is in a work environment where you can just be comfortable saying those things out loud and not think that they'll have an impact on you. 

We have to be really careful about what we tell our managers. I think being sensitive to that as a community, and knowing that there's definitely still risk associated with all of those things is important.

I don't have an answer, except that when we are the ones in positions of power, we should make sure that we act and advocate with a lot of integrity.

Cris: Someday your little girl will bring the full force of her ambitions into this world. What do you want that experience to look like for her? 

Shira: I hope that she's able to enter a workforce where we care about what the individual does, and not about the group to which they are attached. I want her to define who she is and what she does and I hope that she has the respect and the trust of the people around her to decide how she works best and what she needs in order to achieve her dreams.

Thanks again to Shira Butler for her willingness to share her story.

In that vein, I’d love to have you join our panel discussion next month. It can feel very lonely, at times. At the very least, we have each other.

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With thanks to for the edits and support on this week’s essay.

Professionally, I made the demanding transition from being a senior user-researcher to becoming a senior product manager at one of the hottest unicorn startups of the time, Uber. Academically, I graduated with an MBA from Duke Fuqua’s School of Business. Personally, I trained for and climbed the 3,000 foot granite monolith of El Capitan for the first time.1

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This was a mystery of a miracle year. 

describes2 an annus mirabilis as a pattern across a range of creative professions when “high achievers experience a year of extraordinary productivity.” Clearly I’m not a genius, but this year was one of significant wonder in the arc of my life. 

Was I exhausted? Profoundly.
Was I stoked? 100%
Did my personal relationships suffer? Without a doubt. 
Was it worth it? Absolutely.

I also hold that it won’t be my last. 

As Patel notes, the power of youth and freedom in shaping these miracle years is outsized, “There are so many distractions that come from being successful. And then there’s aging itself, which brings family, dullness, and complacency.” I am certain that only being responsible for myself played into the burst of productivity I experienced. But it was not the singular thread. 

One driving force was simply unvarnished ambition. Nothing felt impossible. And once I committed to those goals, there was no turning back. 

Must miracle years be relegated to the fleeting attributes of ambition, youth and freedom? Does age itself necessitate dullness and complacency? I argue all of these things are possible, but not inevitabilities.  

excellent essay3, “Are You In The Portal,” touched on this with the provocation that maybe what drives us when we are burdened by more responsibilities in life is a swell of creativity. 

It’s certainly not something embraced in mainstream work culture, where we worship at the altar of hustle and try-hard. 

The only creativity going into my annus mirabilis was how to fit it all in. Like an all-encompassing thousand-piece puzzle, I willed my way forward and learned what was possible when I combined a strong sense of purpose with clearly defined goals, broken down into achievable, visible milestones. 

Lately, though, I’ve found myself driven by a force that I cannot distill into specific objectives. My desires feel more commanding and meaningful. As a product lead, entrepreneur, parent, partner, climber, sister, and friend, my attention and time have never felt more bifurcated. And yet, the unifying thread willing me forward this time is not expertly crafted goals for each area of my life, rather a sense of creative possibility. It’s an empty canvas, not a big puzzle this time. 

A former IDEO colleague of mine, Lisa Baird, talks about creative design as rooted in three things: craft, process and mindset.4 

As I reflect on the upcoming year, I rather like the idea of applying this framework. That is, how might I lean into craft or mindset, rather than process in 2024? 

My miracle year was grounded in the process of ambition.

• I sought my own delights by scaring myself silly scaling a big wall of granite. 

• I secured a fit for the future I imagined in the form of a new career that would ensure greater security and earnings upside.

• I guaranteed a certain response from the world around me by graduating with a prestigious MBA.

But what would a year grounded in the attributes of craft look like, where beauty, coherence and harmony led the way? What might 12 months with a focus on mindset produce, where novelty and departure are the objective functions? 

I believe my greatest professional, educational and athletic endeavors are yet to come. But what if ambition was not the driver?

What would that annus mirabilis look like?

2 Things That Caught My Attention This Week:

📰 Paternity leave changes men’s brain: I am thrilled to share this HBR article and study by a friend of mine . Fathers are made, not born. And, turns out, a key factor in those neurological changes is spending time with their kids. No shit. But now, we have science to back it! Here’s to pushing for more “fatherhood brain training” aka parental leave, as normalized in the workplace.

📖 Greenlights: Speaking of fatherhood training, did you know Matthew McConaughey takes his family with him to all movie shoots? I’m only slightly mortified to admit I read his memoir last week, but I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed this quick read. There’s something inspiring about a man who owns his vanity, recognizes how much luck has played into his success and doesn’t give two shits about what people think, “There is magic to showing up in life as we are.”

With thanks to this amazing group of women for the edits and feedback! and Justine.

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Dwarkesh Podcast

The mystery of the miracle year

An interesting pattern recurs across the careers of great scientists: an annus mirabilis (miracle year) in which they make multiple, seemingly independent breakthroughs in the span of a single year or two. Einstein had his annus mirabilis in 1905. While he was still a patent clerk, he wrote four papers that revolutionized our understanding of the photoel…

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4 years ago · 89 likes · 13 comments · Dwarkesh Patel

3

Culture Study

Are You In The Portal?

Have you been telling yourself “I should really subscribe” and then just keep putting it off til next time and then your credit card is across the room or you can’t sign in on your phone or or or….I get it, wow do I get it. But maybe this will be the day you…

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3 years ago · 740 likes · 157 comments · Anne Helen Petersen

Highway 395, or “the” 395 as Southern Californians are apt to bestow presence to that barren road with the inclusion of a definite article, winds its way alongside a river through narrow canyons speckled with juniper trees, across barren expanses of foxtail grasses and through numerous wildfire burn scars. 

In early November, as the days become shorter and the nights colder, the fiery yellow of the 100-year old cottonwood trees and amber rolling hills turn the various shades of brown into a veritable rainbow. 

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Closer to the sleepy, cowboy community of Bridgeport the jagged, dark peaks of the Sierra subrange known as Sawtooth Ridge impose upon the valley, rendering the blue of the sky even brighter. 

For the next 20 miles the highway climbs. Slowly. Certainly. Until, out of nowhere, the earth falls away in dramatic fashion; 1000 feet to be exact. From this pinnacle, the expanse of the Eastern Sierra unfolds in a most improbable manner. 

The salt-laden lake known as Mono, formed more than 760,000 years ago, lies directly below, its preternatural tufa towers a stark contrast to the heroic white granite of the Dana plateau directly west. As one stands there, wind whipping with the ferocity of an impending winter, the 200 miles of freshly dusted snow-capped mountains on the horizon demand the kind of respect few things in this world can.

It is astonishing.

There was a season of my life when this drive was an ablution. As I haltingly crawled my way out of the chaos that was my ambition and career, as I tried to keep my eyes open after the 7-hour drive with an aimless plan to explore the weakness of my body and rocks, I would get to this place, in the dead of night with its deafening silence and moonlit shadows dancing across that lake and I would remember. 

I would remember that there was more intensity to this life than the all-nighters I pulled with colleagues. I would remember that the elation of a high-stakes project or promotion is incommensurate to the towering sense of possibility before me. I would remember that while countless people might have a say over the arc of my career, my sense of permanence and presence came from elsewhere. 

That’s what witnessing beauty and magnificence gives me. Perspective. A longing. Wonder.

The contours of my reality are different these days. Paradoxically, as I enter the stage of life where I’m supporting my family and leading teams, my work feels more consequential and less important. But the need for inspiration remains. 

I am constantly seeking ways to fold astonishment into my life. 

In some ways, having a child makes it easy. That implausible weaving of characteristics in a tiny human, so familiar yet so foreign, does a damn good job of making me feel small and surprised. But it’s also in the small pauses; the earnest care with which my cashier bags my groceries, that guitar lick that hits just right at the end of a long day, my pup running with abandon across a field of lupines.  

The energy these moments create by breathing air into the monotone magnificence of my existence, laid bare, are the blazes of yellow along my journey. 

Last weekend, we were driving north on the 395 after two sleepless nights at an Eastern Sierra hot spring with a 14-month old, nerves rattled by the exhaustion of DOING FUN THINGS that every working parent wills themself to accommodate.  

As my aging gray Subaru crested the top of that thousand-foot grade, I turned one last time to take it all in, before exhaling deeply, with conviction, moving forward into possibility.

💡 For discussion, I’d love to hear your thoughts on how you find moments of inspiration amidst the chaos of life. What are the specific ways you seek to make yourself small? How might we bring this notion of wonder to our lives and careers?

Leave a comment

With thanks to and for the edits and feedback! And a special shout-out to and who have taught me so much about leaning into my narrative self and painting pictures with words 🙏🏽

✅ 77 million Millennials purchased a home during COVID
✅ 1 in 5 households adopted a puppy during pandemic
✅ 43 million borrowers with student loan payments resumed
✅ 45% of babies born in 2019-2021 to women age 30-39

Yes, I belong to each and everyone of those cash-burning statistics 😱 I have daycare, debt, a dog and a dwelling that depletes my dollars. Add to that my partner is one of those beloved but barely paid elementary school teachers, and it’s an American tale as old as time.

As an ambitious human, who can’t leave clothes in the dryer overnight for fear of wrinkling, I consume a great deal of content on how the heck to manage it all. The former financial news reporter in me can’t help but be slightly horrified that the information I find most compelling at the moment is from a former corporate flak. But Katie Gattie Tassin, otherwise known as Money With Katie, is killing it y’all.

She’s a podcaster and blogger with Morning Brew, and she’s hilarious. From self deprecation, “just a chic with a podcast,” to references that make me giggle out loud, “Saddle up ladies, we ride at dawn!” I feel seen.

In a sea of half-baked, like-pandering, salesy content, it’s such a relief to see some intellectual rigor applied to important ideas.

For instance, when looking into research determined to discredit the myth of the “underpaid public educator” Katie points out that most studies comes from two dudes with a questionable underlying data set, leaving her “wondering which elementary school teacher hurt them.” 😂

She also goes beyond the obvious 401k, index fund, debt-payoff advice to address subjects that actually matter in my life 😉

So without further ado, allow me to guide you through Katie’s work, via the lens of someone who is not a finance noob (ask me about my reporting on exotic swaps), but is looking for support where taxes meet toddlers.

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Becoming a Sugar Mama

Income level is a significant factor in my wanna-be sugar mama status.

It would be easy, then, to assume I'm invested in the oft-touted statistic showing the median American woman working full-time earns 83 cents for every dollar a man earns. This is boring. That’s because age, profession, and race skew the number wildly.

Very few people delve into the harder questions behind the data, which, surprisingly, has nothing to do with outright man-hating. The truth is FAR more complicated, and interesting.

In one phenomenally researched episode1 Katie goes “on a winding journey through everything from Bureau of Labor Statistics data to evolutionary biology,” tackling the very nuanced and important realities of women at work. Do we really work fewer hours than men? Do we choose jobs that are easier? Spoiler alert: No

“Work has long been structured to favor employees who are constantly available and willing to work 24/7, which inherently preferences whichever gender is more available all the time.”

Don’t have enough time? Here’s the TLDR:

Katie works hard at reaching beyond her privileged, high-income background. The aforementioned episode2 on teacher pay is excellent with some mind-blowing nuggets (hello 403b scam 🤯).

As is her deep dive3 into the “working-class girl's life” which, she points out, has taken a back seat to the plight of female self-esteem and body image in feminist issues. She makes a strong case that the ‘hustle culture’ rhetoric flat out ignores the impossibility of choices facing lower-income women.

“Dear audience, we can disagree about the best ways to solve these problems, but I think it's important that we're unified in our agreement that it's a problem worth solving. It's a feminist issue, it's a human rights issue.”

Speaking of girl power, her pushback on the current trend of wealth accumulation as a feminist issue carries excellent subtleties, “You’re telling me that making myself fabulously rich is also good for women everywhere? Incredible!”

“The danger of consistently reinforcing the tenuous connection between specific tactics as ways to “fight back” (salary negotiation techniques, financial literacy) and the larger issues they purport to meaningfully improve (a persistent disparity in income and wealth by gender, women trapped in the low-wage cycle, etc.) is that it suggests a causal relationship where one probably doesn’t exist.4”

And I can’t believe she went there, but yes, her take5 on the resurgence of Sugar Baby culture is, well, fascinatingly on point.

“There's a stripping down of human connection, reducing it to its basest stereotypical impulses: Women just want money, men just want sex. But what happens to money over time? Well, it grows. It compounds, exponentially in fact. But the half-life of youth and beauty, those have an inherent expiration date. It's a troubling dynamic when one party is inherently biologically set up to expire and lose the thing that supposedly gives them value.”

Kids Change Things (no shit)

A decision in my early 30’s, while working at a unicorn startup that wooed employees with fertility benefits instead of 401k matching, is the reason I am a parent today. I don’t say that lightly. That $50,000 coverage for egg and embryo freezing meant that years later, when we finally decided to have kids, our costs were much much lower.

1 in 6 people on this planet are affected by infertility6 and the costs go far beyond finances. But in the US, money is a major factor. As Katie notes, “the out of pocket costs can equal nearly an entire year of the median take home pay in the US.”

In one episode7 she offers specific, tactical guidance on how to navigate the economics of reproduction and birth.

 “I don’t think there should be shame associated with needing to take out loans to amortize the cost of something this large and important over time.”

I’m now among the lucky ones to have a kid, but have become quickly overwhelmed by the cost of childcare and its impact on our financial freedom. Enter Katie:

“Really we're trying to solve for those 20 years when your expenses will be higher and rising, which means your save rate, all else held equal, will be lower.”

This episode8 delves into the nitty gritty of how much kids might set you back, while staying very human about it all. 

“There are basically two obvious ways to navigate the way children impact your finances: to either save and invest a lot before you have them, and/or focus on increasing your income after you do….The fact that we don’t live forever makes these decisions meaningful.”

#Adulting

One of the more difficult things I’ve witnessed over the last few years has been watching my mother manage the emotional, financial and physical experience of caring for her parents. It’s a reality laden with much unsaid and has radically changed the conversation my sisters and I are having with our parents. Or, as Katie perfectly captures:

“Do you wanna be cremated and have your ashes loaded into fireworks? [We] want to make sure to give your earthly selves one last final hurrah.”

Seriously though, this episode9 on aging parents slaps. I learned the intricacies of long-term care coverage and how a reverse mortgage is an option to consider when your loved ones don’t have much saved. 

Last but not least, getting older means more medical costs. It’s an uncomfortable fact. But as I inch closer towards that annual mammogram age 🙄 her deep dive into medical debt resonated, “If we're eyeballing it, roughly $250 billion out-of-pocket expenses in the US are because of price gouging, incorrectly denied insurance claims and billing errors.” 😱

She walks us through a step-by-step approach on how to fight these. And then, get this, the woman she interviews in the episode is the CEO of a medical bill advocacy agency, and she gives us her personal email address. Praise be.

In all her work, Katie doesn’t just paint a picture with data, she explores ways to solve these issues. And she does it with a sense of humor, a dose of reality and importantly, nuance that is sorely missing from most talking heads of personal finance.  

I may have daycare, debt, a dog and a dwelling that depletes my finances, but I also have Money With Katie and her #richgirlsnation, and as she says, “If there is a hack to be hacked, we’re hacking it.”

💬I’m curious

Are you a #richgirlnation fan? Where do you go for advice on how to navigate the finances of real life? How are you managing the hemorrhaging-cash-stage of life? 🤑

Leave a comment

This is my fifth and final essay while participating in Write of Passage Cohort 11. Huge thanks to everyone who helped me edit and refine!

This is my partner’s love language. And that’s the level of guidance I sometimes need to bake an already prepped meal successfully 🤷🏽‍♀️

Two weeks ago my husband, Jared, broke his wrist in a mountain biking accident. Parenting a roly-poly 14-month old with three adult arms is cruxy, to say the least. Evenings have become a choreographed enterprise as I follow his instructions while struggling to maintain my composure with the writhing bodies of our dog and child beneath us.

Ten years into our relationship, Jared knows to take a paint-by-numbers approach to helping me cook. He gives me an outline, suggests shading, and then lets me have-at-it. Unless I’m in crisis. Then we transition into full Ikea assembly mode, like for that pasta dish, with step-by-step instructions that a 5-year-old could follow. 

We’ve learned there’s a subtle, but important, difference between guiding and hand-holding me in the kitchen. Knowing which to ask for, and when, is an insight that has served me in more places than my marriage.

***
Working in tech as the daughter of a preacher and a teacher with a state-school undergraduate degree I sometimes don’t have the language or frameworks that my peers do. That used to leave me feeling like an idiot, when, for instance, the 6-foot tall dude with a perfect middle part would implore me to, “Take a first-principles approach” in the comments of my doc. (WTF does that even mean 🤯) 

To be clear, this is not a knock on my education or background. It’s more that there’s a certain similarity in the way people make sense of the world when they graduate from a place like Stanford or grow up amidst adults who work in industries like law, finance and tech. I’ve spent countless nights deconstructing others' work to try and find patterns to copy to ensure I’m communicating my ideas in a way that resonates in these linear, structured environments.

Even then I often feel off-key, like I’m grasping for the scale and tonic notes so that I can jam and improvise with their tune.

***
My big unlock didn’t come in a flash of brilliance. There wasn’t one singular experience that taught me, “Aha! This is how I know what I need to be a great employee/leader/partner.” Rather, like most of life, it came from the mundane consistency with which I failed. 

After far too many culinary combats, “I already put butter in the pan, dammit!” and countless critical queries from a boss, “It’s still not good enough?!” I realized I needed to stop focusing on my shortcomings and dig into their motivations.  

Here are three things I’ve learned help me get the support I need when trying something challenging (at work or home 😉):

1. Gather context

I think differently than many people around me. That can be a huge strength. ✨ The key is to know when to flex my intuitive, lateral approach and when to lean in with curiosity about why my work isn’t landing right.

⛔”Ok, I’ll try again.”

✅”I want to make sure I clearly understand what you are asking me to do. Is your assumption that if I do X in this particular way, we will accomplish Y?

⛔”Sure, next time, I’ll do it the way you want.”

✅”Can you help me understand why doing it in this way will help us achieve our shared goals?”

2. Admit the obvious and ask for examples

It’s really hard to say, “I am clueless right now.” It’s even harder to admit, “I’m feeling very insecure about this task.” But we have to start somewhere. Doing it in a way that invites engagement is key.

⛔”I don’t know how to do this.”

✅”I can see that the way I am approaching this is not what you had in mind. I need an analogous example of how you’ve seen this done well. Could you walk me through what that would look like or put me in touch with someone that is excellent at it?”

⛔”Ok, let me try again.”

✅”I’m a bit lost here. Can you be specific about what was missing from the first iteration? Do you have a “best-in-class” framework or template that I might be able to leverage during this next attempt?”

3. Explicitly ask for encouragement:

Roll your eyes, but affirmation is key when learning a new skill (yes, your Gen Z colleague is onto something 🙄). It’s why my toddler, when ambling up a staircase on all fours like a drunken sloth, will screech to a halt, seek out my eyes with her big brown pools and once gaining my nod of approval, wiggle her tail with glee before she awkwardly barrels forward.

⛔”Let me know if you have any feedback.”

✅”Thank you so much for the feedback. I’d also like to understand better what I am doing right so that I can double down on that next time.”

⛔”I’m glad you liked it.”

✅”Yay, glad it worked this time. What specifically did you like about it?”

But the best part about this whole damn thing is that when we take the time to figure that out and teach others how to help us, they generally walk away learning something new too. And in rare moments, they feel heroic in the process. 

Like last night, when my dispassionate husband informed me that while it bothers him how I keep the water on full-blast while washing the dishes, “It’s been nice to see you in the kitchen more.” Which is basically his version of Steph Curry’s crowd-hyping, mic-dropping “Night Night” move. Good job kid.

This is my fourth essay while participating in Write of Passage Cohort 11. Huge thanks to everyone who helped me edit and refine! . With a special thanks to and for the stellar examples on how to communicate core concepts about work and life.

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2 Things That Caught My Attention This Week:

📖 A Heart That Works: This is a short book about grief, written by a comedian. It’s astoundingly effective at making you cry and laugh simultaneously. The writing is real, raw and beautiful. If you or anyone you know needs help articulating the experience of loss, this is it. 

“The situation with Mira is one of those ancillary pains that accompany your child’s death, like a barnacle on the whale swimming in and out of your guts day and night.”

🎧 Is there a sane way to use the internet? This podcast goes deep into the underlying rules and structures of how we consume content. This line from Jenny Odell’s work, really stuck with me:

“What if we spent more time with the people who had the context to understand us and less time trying to create things for people who have no context?”

So there I was, doing the 3am post-diaper-change scroll, when I stumbled upon a thread in the Women in Product community.

In the post, a pregnant woman working at a high-growth startup poses a question on how to approach the topic of parental leave with her founders, “When should I tell them and what should I offer?”

She provides the following facts:

• There is no formal leave policy.

• She loves her job.

• She believes in the company’s trajectory. 

She also hints at the following context:

• She’s a high-ranking employee with a lot of equity.

• The typical, hard-charging startup culture is making her anxious that if she takes time off to have a baby, they will use that as a (subconscious) excuse to eventually let her go

• The current tech environment, with almost 200,000 layoffs this year, makes it scary to think about finding a new job.

I know what you’re thinking. But this is not a story about startup culture or the need for a federally mandated paid leave. This is a tale of how the people in that forum responded. 

“Do not volunteer a working maternity leave.”

“If this company would fire you for taking a couple of months to heal from childbirth, why do you want to work for them?”

“The environment you describe sounds toxic and draining.”

I generally find this community very valuable. And to some extent, their answers are not wrong. But the overall tenor of responses mostly ignored her context, failed to provide her an example of what was possible and worse, put the onus on her to act in a “representative” way while not considering her long-term needs. 

See two of her gracious responses, trying to clarify her ask (emphasis in yellow mine):

I believe this post uncovers a broader theme seen across a large swath of society. We are failing to do the hard work of figuring out answers to our basic problems. It’s so much easier to just critique the questions.

Turns out, focusing on the basics can be really powerful. 

Earlier this month, Nobel Prize winning economist Claudia Goldin published a working paper titled “Why Women Won.” In it, the Harvard professor explores why almost half of all legal, political and social rights for women in the last century happened in the 10-year period from 1963 to 1973.

Did you get that? Let me repeat for the people in the back.

Of the 155 critical moments in women’s rights history from 1905 to 2023, 45% occurred in the same time time period that the Beatles came together and fell apart (correlation, not causation 🙄). Before then, women could be fired for being married, they were not seated on juries and they had to use their husband's name on their credit cards. 

As I was reading the research, two particular insights stood out to me as extensible to much more than gender politics. Let’s dig in.

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Embrace Being Basic

That brief period of time from 1963 -1973 when women accomplished so much didn’t happen because they formed a monolithic identity, but because their needs were so basic (i.e. opening a credit card in your own name), that their interests briefly aligned.  

By the 1980s women in the United States were, and still are, deeply divided by income class, ethnicity, race, religion, marital status and more. And the more fractured we become, as our needs become more complex, the less effective we become at organizing. Cue the viral video of the week:

Dr. Goldin is an economic historian and spends hella time looking at longitudinal surveys. In the paper, she looked at survey questions asking Americans questions like:

“On a scale, do you think women should have an equal role with men in running business, industry and government?”

or

“Please rate how you feel about the Women’s Movement?

What she found (as demonstrated below) is that the division amongst American women since 1973 was exponentially more than that between men and women. Basically, once women move beyond the basics, there is more that divides us than unites us.

Which brings me to my next point.

When you’re busy, double down on what matters

An economics paper on the evolution of women’s rights can shine a light on specific steps we can take to overcome our differences. We’ve established that being basic is the first step. Now, I want to explain what happens after we get our needs met and what that means moving forward. 

The short answer is, we’re exhausted and once we get what we need we tend to bail from things. Which is a problem, because it leaves the most extreme of us at the table.

Specifically, Dr. Goldin’s paper showed that in 1973 the feminist agenda was taking shape, but it was unclear how it would matter to “traditional” women. The passage of the ERA and the Roe v Wade decision made that clearer and energized traditionalists. Or, as she shows in economic terms, “the once-latent demand” of those represented by g(Di) in the below graph took shape.

Graphs not your thing? Stay with me! 

There are feminists and there are traditionalists. Unsure of which you are, no problem, we’ve got Barbie.

Did you see the Barbie movie as a manifesto against the patriarchy?
You’re likely a feminist.

Did you see the Barbie movie as a story about a mother/daughter relationship making fun of woke liberals? You’re likely a traditionalist.

**With profound apologies to Dr. Goldin on my methodology here.

We all loved the movie because it filled our latent need to be recognized for the basic bitches within all of us, but the minute anyone gets Weird Barbie, all hell breaks loose.

So What?

I want to acknowledge we’re seemingly stuck.

We live in a world that is doing everything it can to erode the nuance of our lives. But we know that the way forward is to double down on the basics. 

Dr Goldin, in her paper, outlines a brief moment in US history where the stars aligned such that women learned the language, gained the talents and found a way through their differences to accomplish monumental changes that other developed nations to this day don’t have codified in law. 

It’s also a cautionary tale that bailing after getting our basic needs met (which is exactly what happened after that 10-year period) risks a radicalization and destruction of the very things that brought us together in the first place.  

Here’s where I want to go back to that FB group. As the original poster continued to articulate her ask, the women of the group started to listen, and the answers changed from a wholesale critique of the system and her choices, to addressing her needs.

The truth is, we are very divided. And if Dr. Goldin’s paper is any indication, the more rights we gain as a society, the more likely that this dynamic will continue to increase. The more complex things become, the more important it is to do the hard work of addressing core needs and settling in for the long-haul.

As Ruth Bader Ginsburg said, “Fight for the things that you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you.”

What are your thoughts? What do you find can help us through our societal divisions to affect long-term change? How can we better support each other?

Leave a comment

This is my third essay while participating in Write of Passage Cohort 11. Not gonna lie, this one was hard. Huge thanks to everyone who helped me edit and refine! Thanks to for the inspiration on structure and POV! And lastly, thanks to the phenomenal community of brilliant Women In Product that teach me so very much.

Two of my neighbors are brilliant, cuddly and terrifying. 

To be fair, they are dogs. But they’re not just any old canines. They are retired sled dogs from Denali National Park. These wild-eyed Alaskan huskies were raised in the park by rangers who fed them raw meat and traveled thousands of miles during the 40-below winters, patrolling 2 million acres of astonishing wilderness that most of us will never see with our own eyes. 

My pup is not one of these creatures. 

Rio is a 30-pound ball of muscle that looks like a cross between a mini black lab and a german shorthaired pointer. The take-home DNA test I purchased to better understand my rescue tells me he is, in fact, 50% Australian Cattle Dog and an embarrassing 14% Cocker Spaniel.

It fits. He has the agility and speed of a herding dog perfectly wrapped with a merry neediness that can only be attributed to the royal provenance of a Spaniel. Which is to say, he does well living in the luxury-destination of North Lake Tahoe nestled in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains, arguably the most gentle of the snowy ranges in the lower-48. 

A few weeks ago, I was talking with my neighbor Jen. She’s the former Denali ranger who ran her two giant furballs an impressive 24,000 combined miles during their tenure as sled dogs. Jen jokingly mentioned that she occasionally fears for Rio’s life around her majestic beasts as he doesn’t follow what is considered “polite” body language when greeting them on the street. “Most dogs will approach from the side,” she signaled with her hand, “curving their bodies and avoiding direct eye contact to show respect. Rio does the exact opposite.” 

The moment Rio spots another human or animal approaching he’ll lower his shoulders and raise his hips playfully. With his caramel eyes fixed on the target, he’ll slowly amble a few steps forward before breaking into a full-blown gallop towards his target. Then, like a Pamplona bullfighter in the ring waving his muleta, right before colliding with the other creature he will veer off course and either roll over on his back in submission or start aggressively begging for attention with licks. 

I know the effect of an animal coming in hot can be quite jarring. I’ve seen parents, faced with Rio’s no-holds barred approach, sprint towards their toddler and scoop the child to safety, terror in their eyes as my derpy pup spins off-target, tongue out, belly up begging for a scratch.

There’s something hilariously tragic about the whole thing. He’s trying so hard to be friendly and tough. But he’s actually just kinda clueless. 

In his defense, we have not spent enough time teaching Rio the language of appropriate sidewalk etiquette. We have, greedily, leaned into the joy of watching him race across open fields of violet lupine with reckless abandon. We have embraced his playful curiosity as he awkwardly laps water from the creek one moment and jumps into action chasing a squirrel the next.  There’s something special about watching someone lean into their nature.

To observe as they follow their nose towards the juiciest scents. To be a bystander as they surrender to the tensions of their character, no apologies attached. I think that’s why we’ve conveniently forgotten to rein in Rio’s street manners. Because he is friendly and tough, curious and indifferent, clueless and intuitive. 

Funnily enough, our furry Denali neighbors haven’t learned how to behave suitably in this environment either. That’s why Jen was concerned. Her violent and loving creatures understand their role in the pack, with a job to be done. Beyond that, they are as disoriented as Rio on the manicured streets of our mountain town. When unleashed upon a frozen reservoir covered in snow, however, they are positively breathtaking. 

We’re all a bit lost in our changing contexts.

I quite like the image of leaning into ourselves a bit more in these moments. It’s a helpful reminder from these beloved pups of ours.

Cris

Four things that caught my attention this week—

1. 🎥 How Dolly Parton Led Me To An Epiphany

   • If you haven’t heard Radiolab’s series on Dolly Parton’s America, start there. Then watch this 12-minute take on storytelling by one of the best storytellers out there. “Don’t bring your stupid way of seeing the world into my story.“

2. 📖 What Happened to Empathy

   • The tragedy of the last week is not lost on me. This beautiful essay in the Atlantic suggests our shared problem is a lack of human contact in a post-covid, app-driven world. It’s a lovely read.

3. 🔬 What’s Really Holding Women Back

   • It’s not what you think. This 2020 research report shows that for a company to address its gender problem, it would have to address its crushing culture of overwork 🤯

4. 📖 Unbundling AI

   • This is pretty inside baseball but damn does it make you think. Everyone is focused on the science problem with this technology, but what is the product problem? How do you present and package uncertainty?

This is my second essay while participating in Write of Passage Cohort 11. Special thanks to everyone who helped me edit and refine! Charlie Bleecker Haley BrengartnerLatham Turner

It’s a strange thing to be a woman in a mostly-male space. And I’m not talking about the shocking realization that there are no lines for the bathroom 🤯

Earlier this year I attended a work dinner at a hole-in-the-wall Italian restaurant somewhere off the 280 in the heart of Silicon Valley. I had flown in for my first in-person offsite with my startup leads since returning from parental leave 8-weeks prior, and I was running late. 

As I rushed to the back room, I surveyed two banquet tables. The table to my left held 12 men. They were not my dudes. My eyes quickly scanned right and settled on my team, including just one other woman. 

A recent study published in the Academy of Management Journal shows that women make up less than 15% of the workforce in more than one in five startups. For Big Tech, that number is 26%. At this point in my career, 2 startups and 2 big tech companies in, I felt only slight apprehension at the raised eyebrows fixated on the carrier cradled in the nook of my arm holding my smiling, unibrowed 6-month old 👶🏻

Pleasantries were exchanged. Folks “aahed” and “oohed” at my most perfect child. Then, the questions began. “Has she been here the whole trip?” curious minds wanted to know, “Why yes, I brought her along and left her at the hotel with a friend.” The omission of details hung stale in the air and I could sense the neurons firing in the minds of this highly analytical group of operators. 

“I’m her primary source of food right now, so I couldn’t leave her at home,” I deadpanned to the eight childless adults at the table while forcing myself not to glance at my boobs. 

As dinner progressed, and talk of the day’s team-building activities waned, we awkwardly searched for topics to volley around. One colleague asked me about my rock climbing, as of late, knowing how much it was a part of my pre-child identity, “I’m sure having a kid has changed that.” What a strange comment I thought to myself, before transitioning the conversation to his garden.

I use the word strange on purpose. But it wasn’t always that way. In fact, in the first decade of my professional life I would have used the term infuriating. 

My rage in the early years was palpable. The mental gymnastics of my 20-year-old self in that moment would have gone something like, “What the actual 🤬? Did this guy just make a judgment call on how I should be evaluating risk in my personal life? Do I really have to expound on the details of breastfeeding and my choices in that journey to a group of engineers?”

These days, age and experience have tempered my reliance on the fundamental attribution error for stupid comments. After 15 years of working in finance and tech, I’ve come to realize most of my male colleagues are not bad humans (even that one exec who felt it appropriate to call me “Muffin” every time he ran into my 22-year old self in the elevator of that midtown highrise).

The crux of the issue is that I am existing in spaces that were not designed for someone like me. And that means there are no rules of engagement.

To be clear, “me” is an ever-evolving identity. Right now, that means I am existing in a professional environment that was not designed for a working mom in her thirties, “Why no, sadly I will not be joining you for that 10pm, post-dinner drinks at the tiki bar, thank you so much for the invite!” At other times, it meant being a young, Mexican-American journalist on Wall Street wondering if my latest source respected me or wanted to f*ck me.  

Trying to fit my constantly evolving identity into mostly binary spaces, means I am regularly surprised, in unsettling ways. Things are strange. 

Thirty minutes later my infant's coos have turned to shrieks, right as my Founder tells me that he and his wife are thinking of having children, but that “she’ll likely look for an easier job than her current role as a startup COO.” 

I can’t help but wonder if he thinks I’m just phoning in my job. What an unsettling thing to tell your Head of Product, I think, as I excuse myself to catch an Uber back to the hotel for another sleepless night with my latest (now screaming) launch. 

Five things that caught my attention recently—

1. Taylor Swift Likes To Work

   • These days, it’s not cool to admit you enjoy work, much less to own the fact that demanding work can be both fulfilling and fun. I love this take on Taylor’s latest “project” between gigs.  

2. The Truth About The Wage Gap

   • In honor of Claudia Goldin’s Nobel Prize in Economics win (only 3rd woman ever), spend 30 minutes listening to this Money With Katie episode. Katie has been killing it with her data-informed, hot takes. This one, with Ellevest Founder Sallie Krawcheck, hits all the right notes, digging two layers deeper into the “why” behind a widely touted statistic.

3. In a Communication Standoff? Here’s How You Get Out

   • Whether it’s work or home life, communicating is hard. This video by Esther Perel delves into the concept of polarity management (at 25:22). I’ve been trying out this framework in difficult work conversations over the past few weeks and have been pleasantly surprised by the results. 

4. The Retrievals

   • I finally finished this excellent podcast series by Serial and the New York Times on the fertility clinic at Yale. It left me thinking about the tension between feminism and patriarchy. Between privilege and pain. Between submission and control. That is to say, it left me sitting with polarities in a really powerful way. 

5. Make Time To Watch The Sunrise

   • This is so random, but a beloved local in my town died of cancer this past month at the age of 52. I won’t pretend to know him, but the outpouring of love shone through my social feeds. His passion for dawn patrols reminded me that greeting the sun in beautiful places is a privilege I need to seek out more often.

Cris

This is my first essay while participating in Write of Passage Cohort 11. Special thanks to everyone who helped me edit and refine.