I have always loved to quantify things. For years, I asked my teams to rate things on a scale of 1 to 10, whether it was a temperature check on how a meeting went, how strongly they felt about a decision, or how excited they were about an opportunity. The engineer in me craved quantification. And these ratings helped me create data where none previously existed.

This desire came to a head when I was diagnosed with cancer last year. I read voraciously once I had the mammogram and saw the images. I found out it was over an 80% chance it was DCIS even before the biopsy confirmed it. So I was mentally prepared to hear the news when they shared the results with me. I find comfort in knowing my realistic odds because it helps me manage my emotions and expectations.

When the colonoscopy a few weeks ago showed a mass, the doctor said I needed to do a CT scan to see what it was. Suddenly, a routine procedure turned into something more. I had no way of contextualizing the situation, so I started hunting for clues to help me make sense of the news.

The doctor who did the colonoscopy said there was no way to know given the location. He suggested I wait until the biopsy and meet with the gastroenterologist when the results come in. When I met with her, she said the surface biopsy was clean, but suggested I wait until the CT scan. Then the scan results returned, and she repeated that there was no way to know if it was cancer. I asked her what the chances were, and she struggled to answer. I felt like I was playing a guessing game. When someone tells you there is a chance it is cancer, your first thought is 1% or 100% or somewhere in between?

Eventually, after asking every doctor I met with what the chances were, the surgeon said it was hard to tell, but the probability it was cancer is 60%. He caveated that it was just a guess based on his experience, but I immediately felt relief. He went on to explain that even if it was cancer, if it hasn’t spread, then the surgery should remove it fully without further treatment such as radiation or chemo.

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What You Say is Not What Others Hear

After we scheduled the surgery, we spoke to the kids. I explained that there was a 60% chance of cancer, but a very good chance that the surgery would resolve everything either way.

I thought it was good news! After all, last year, basically it was nearly a certainty that I had cancer. This time, I had a number, and the number was not bad.

I kept going, trying to build the case to them. Even if it spread a little bit, I said, there is still a good chance I will not need chemo. Even in the worst version of this, maybe there is only a 10 percent chance that something serious happens. I was stacking probabilities like a deck of cards, showing them each one, certain that if I just laid out enough good odds, they would feel what I felt when I heard the numbers. This is a manageable risk, not a looming disaster.

I saw this all as excellent news and a good-ish prognosis. That is not what they heard at all. While they initially didn’t show much reaction, that night two of them came to me really upset.

“What if you are really unlucky? You already had cancer once. You are not lucky.”

“That is the same chance Bethany had of getting into Duke. Things that have a small chance happen all the time.”

“You are going to die. And Dad will remarry someone we don’t like because he can’t be alone.”

“Both your parents died of cancer. And our other grandma was diagnosed with lymphoma just before she died.”

It was a rough evening. Yes, my parents died of cancer, but my mom basically had stage IV cancer for 8 years. And the lymphoma was not what killed their other grandma, though they did find it after she passed.

Listening to their rationale as to why they were scared, I saw the world through their eyes. The numbers I offered as comfort had become, in their mind, a probability that their mother might not survive this and that their whole family might be rebuilt around a stranger. I handed them a spreadsheet, and they read the worst-case scenario.

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How We Process Information Differently

Here is where I went wrong. Each of us reaches for the thing that helps us make sense of fear, and we assume it will help the people we love the same way it helps us. My husband David has spent this whole process saying, over and over, you will be fine. No numbers, no nuance, just a flat statement repeated until it becomes true through sheer repetition. That is how he processes uncertainty. He ignores the parts he cannot control and holds tightly to the parts he can will into being. When I expressed my frustration to my sister, she replied, “It’s just how optimists deal with uncertainty. They assume the best until they hear otherwise.” Whereas her husband is Pablo from The Backyardigans. He is anxious and panicky about bad news and assumes the worst. Quite the dichotomy.

I reached for numbers. My husband reached for certainty. My daughters, listening to both of us, built a worst-case scenario. None of us were lying to each other. We were all just running our fear through the filter that works for us, then handing the output to someone else as if it would work for them too.

What We Say Vs What Was Heard

I have thought a lot about how often this happens outside of hospital waiting rooms. In leadership, we do this constantly. A founder who finds comfort in data will drown a nervous team in dashboards, certain that more numbers will help them understand the nuance of their traction. A manager who copes through optimism will tell a struggling employee everything is fine during a reorg, without realizing that vague reassurance can feel like their worries are being dismissed. We communicate the thing that soothes us, and we assume the message lands. But everyone listens through their own filter. The message is whatever the other person’s filter changes the output to without your knowledge.

A few things I am trying to hold on to:

Know your own filter before you use it on someone else. I did not choose to quantify my diagnosis because it was the clearest way to reach my kids. I chose it because it was the way I deal with things. That is worth noticing before you speak, not after someone reacts badly.

The delivery is not the message. I said 60 percent and heard hope since it was not 100%. My daughter heard a door left open to the worst outcome. Neither of us was wrong about what we heard. We were just running the same information through different machinery.

Reassurance without realignment does not land. I spent hours after that conversation trying to walk the numbers back, to prove the odds really were in my favor. She was no longer listening but rather reacting. Sometimes the answer is not a more fulsome explanation. It is sitting with someone in the fear itself before you try to convince them out of it.

More likely than not is the whole sentence. I do not know what the future holds. But more likely than not, I have cancer that will be treated and resolved. And more likely than not, I will be fine. That is genuinely all I know right now. Everything past that is a question for another day, and I am trying to let it stay there instead of running the odds on it in front of the people I love.

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I still do not fully know how to reassure my kids, because part of me is not entirely sure either. What I am learning is that the reassurance was never going to come from a better and more well-reasoned argument. It comes from showing up and listening to their fears and helping them process them.

If we learn to speak to the fear each person has, it will reduce the friction of communication and help us connect on a human level.

Update on the Next Cards Drawn:

Thanks for all of the support. I drafted this post before the surgery and subsequent pathology report came out. The final cards were drawn Thursday, three days after Monday’s surgery, when my colorectal surgeon called and shared the good news that the growth was surprisingly not cancer.

What a huge relief!

Turns out it was an endometriosis growth that would have obstructed my bowels at some point, so it was good to get it taken out. It may be related to the medicine I am taking for last year’s breast cancer, so more follow-up is required.

I am resting at home after a grueling week. Thanks for all of the well wishes and prayers!

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Last year, I shared that I had been diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer and posted Drawing the Cancer Card, sharing my experience. I have become a fervent advocate for screening and early detection.

I never thought I would be here saying this a year and a half later, but I may be drawing the cancer card again. It feels surreal to even type that out.

I did a routine colonoscopy a few weeks ago. I had one a decade ago and an upper endoscopy five years ago. I even did a full-body scan with CT contrast last year in Taiwan.

Everything seemed rather normal, but when I woke up, the doctor said he removed two polyps, but also that he saw a suspicious obstruction and did a biopsy. Immediately, the first card was turned, and it was a bad one.

The biopsy came out clear, but apparently, that happens a lot with colon growths because the cancer is hidden inside, in a spot that was inaccessible during the procedure. So I did an abdominal CT scan. Another card drawn. Turns out, the growth is not small (about 3.5 cm across), which is bad news, but the next card was in my favor because it is in a good place for surgical removal.

I asked the surgeon how likely it was cancer. He hesitated. He has done hundreds of these surgeries and finally said, “There is no way to tell, but maybe 60%? Either way, it has been removed.” I am a quantifier, and I find comfort in knowing the odds. More than a 50% chance of cancer, bad card.

I did another test to check some markers, and the results were within the normal range. A good card this time.

Next was a chest CT to see if it has spread. Another card drawn. Turns out no news is good news. Same shadow on the liver, but otherwise normal. Then the surgery, which I go into today. If they remove it fully, that is a good card. If it is not removable or causes complications, it is a bad card. Next is the actual dissection and testing of the interior cells, as well as the biopsy of the lymph nodes. More and more cards to see where you land.

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Preparing for the Best and Worst at the Same Time

Source: Colorectal Cancer Alliance

I just turned 50 this year, and I am still young in cancer terms. It is clear there has been something growing for some time. Cancer knows no age limit. In fact, deaths from colorectal cancer among those under 50 have been rising while other cancers are falling, the exact pattern in the chart above. According to the New York Times, researchers have identified a “birth-cohort effect” in colorectal cancer, where each generation born since the 1950s carries a higher risk than the one before it, with those born in 1990 roughly twice as likely to develop colon cancer and four times as likely to develop rectal cancer as those born in 1950. It is unclear what is causing the increase, though researchers suspect it could be a mix of the Western diet, ultra-processed foods, increased use of antibiotics, or lower intake of fiber.

Life is full of surprises. I was super excited to send my middle child off to Duke for her freshman year. Our startup is getting some traction, and I finally feel like I have my arms around everything. Then you draw the wrong card, and everything screeches to a halt.

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Keep Drawing

I keep coming back to something my friend Mauria told me during my breast cancer diagnosis. She said each visit, each test, each phone call is its own card. You don’t get to see your hand in advance. You only get to decide how you play the card in front of you, right now, before the next one is dealt. I thought I had learned that lesson already. I did not expect to need it again so soon.

My goal is to not overthink it. Don’t anticipate the negative. Just let the cards come as they come.

David has been steady through all of it, the way he always is, though he still has a tendency to keep saying, “Everything will be fine,” as a way to reassure himself and me. I sent him my Chicken Talking to Ducks article to remind him how that went last time.

We finally told the kids. They had a muted reaction. We had to move our flights to make the surgery date, so we told Bethany first to ask if she wanted David to stay with her for the one extra day. She was unsure, but told her dad to come home with me to make sure everything went well. Jonathan is still home and taking care of his little sister while we send Bethany off before heading into his junior year at Boston College.

Many years ago, when Danielle was about six, I had a bad headache. David joked, “It’s not a tumor.” She asked what a tumor was. Then, once we told her, she said, “Mommy. Please don’t die. If you die, I’ll be really sad, but I’ll also be a little bit happy.” I asked her why. She replied, “I would be sad because I wouldn’t have a Mommy anymore, but then we can finally get a dog.”

When we told her about the latest news, she said, “So if you die, can I finally get a cat?” I said, “Absolutely not,” and we laughed through the tense moment.

Fear doesn’t get easier the second time. If anything, because now I know exactly what is ahead, it feels more daunting. I don’t want the kids to live with that fear and dread, so I want to focus on what is right in front of us. Both my parents died of cancer, and I know what that process looks like. I don’t want that shadow hanging over their heads as it did for our family for so many years.

Proof It Was Worth It

A couple of weeks ago, as the second round of cards started flipping, I was hosting a dinner at my house. A woman I had met before but didn’t know well told me that after reading about my breast cancer diagnosis last year, she scheduled her mammogram. She found out she had breast cancer. Because she caught it early, she has recovered. She wanted me to know that sharing our story helped change her life.

I never thought writing about my own diagnosis would impact others, but my promise to Mauria was that I would urge everyone we knew to get the screening. Later I told her that I think about 40 or 50 people had mentioned getting the mammogram, and at an average diagnosis rate of 13%, perhaps we helped half a dozen people catch their cancer early enough to be easily treated.

Standing in my own kitchen, hearing someone tell me how early detection traced back to something I wrote, I understood in a new way why I keep doing this publicly instead of privately.

I guess I thought my advocacy work for early breast cancer detection through mammograms was part of my calling. Now, apparently, the colorectal cancer world would like me to join the chorus to advocate for more colonoscopies too.

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What I’m Relearning From Possibly Drawing the Card Twice

Advocacy only works if you actually do it. I write about early detection. I tell other women to get their mammograms. But the reason this growth was found at all is that I did not skip the colonoscopy even though I had done a full-body scan last year. Writing about vigilance and practicing it are two different disciplines, and this was a reminder that I have to keep doing the second one.

The body does not check your calendar. I had a launch, a send-off, a full life moving at full speed, and none of that mattered to a cell that had been growing quietly for who knows how long. You do not get to negotiate timing with your own biology. You only get to decide how you respond when it interrupts you anyway.

Knowing the odds is not the same as controlling them. I am a quantifier. Give me a percentage and I will hold onto it. But 60% is still a coin flip with weight on one side, and I have had to sit with the discomfort of a number that is informative but not decisive. Some things you cannot spreadsheet your way out of.

One card at a time is the only sustainable way to live this. I cannot solve for positive biopsy results, the chest CT, the surgery, and the lymph node pathology all at once. Trying just leads to frustration and anxiety. The only thing that actually works is playing the card in my hand today and setting the rest down until they are dealt.

The Screening I Almost Skipped

The chart at the top of this piece is not abstract to me anymore. Colon and rectal cancer deaths have been rising in younger adults for two decades while nearly every other major cancer has been in decline. That is not a coincidence, and it is not something that only happens to other people. I am 50 and active. I cook most meals at home and work out regularly, and I still ended up here. I had two polyps removed during the colonoscopy, one of which was pre-cancerous.

Colonoscopy screening guidelines have already caught up to this reality. Both the American Cancer Society and the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force now recommend starting screening at 45 instead of 50, specifically because of the rise in cases among younger adults. But guidelines only save lives if people follow them, and right now, fewer than one in four adults between 45 and 49 have been screened. Knowing the right answer and acting on it are not the same thing, which is a theme that keeps showing up everywhere in my life this year.

If you are over 45, or younger with a family history or any symptoms that do not resolve, please do not wait for a friend’s birthday request or a scare in your own body to make the appointment. I did the colonoscopy because it was time, not because anything felt wrong. That is exactly why it worked.

I do not know yet what card I will draw next. I will not know until after the surgery, and then again after the pathology, and then again after whatever comes after that. Maybe I am in the 40%, and this was all a scare that I can put behind me. Or maybe I have a long road ahead. Or somewhere in between. I know how to do this now because I have done it before. I will play the hand I am dealt, one card at a time, and I will share what I learn along the way to help others remember to schedule their screenings.

As you read this now, consider what you have been putting off, and take action. It could make all of the difference.

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A week after stepping down from Ancestry, I hosted a Women In Product party at my house.

As I filled out my own name tag, a friend who had also recently stepped down from an executive role turned to me with the Sharpie in hand and asked, “What do we write under our names?”

A moment later, she flagged down another guest who had just left a senior role of her own and invited her with the words, “Come join the Blank Name Tag Club!”

We laughed when it happened, but it stuck with me since.

So much of our identity gets wrapped up in what goes in that blank space, whether it is a job title, a company name, or a role. But we forget that the space underneath is ephemeral. Yes, work is connected to your identity, but it’s not your only identity.

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We do this to ourselves every day, but we just don’t notice

Open LinkedIn right now and look at your headline. What does it say? Head of [this or that]. VP of [something]. Ex-[big name company]. We spend years building that line, and at some point we stop noticing that other people, including ourselves, read it as the answer to who we are, not just something we did at a moment in time.

The thing under your name on your name tag, or the headline on your LinkedIn, carries a lot of water. At some point, it goes from a description to a foundational identity. So when the job, title, or company disappears, even by choice, your identity feels thinner. It’s not because you lost something tangible, but because you have one less thing to hang your hat on.

I talked to a friend recently who had just sold the company she founded. “I just feel like I’m in the gray,” she told me. “I don’t know what to do with myself.” Another friend was four days into being laid off after many years at a big tech company, and she was already scheduling interviews. I asked her why she was in such a rush since she’d worked straight for 15 years. She didn’t really have an answer, but sitting in the blank space felt worse than filling it with anything at all, even the wrong thing.

I understand that instinct completely, because I lived it for years. I graduated from school and started my first job a week later. Every transition after that, I did the same thing. Take the weekend off, then go. I never let myself sit in the silence long enough to ask what I actually wanted, because the silence was uncomfortable and the next title was right there, ready to answer the question for me again.

If you can’t sit with the blank name tag, even for a little while, you will keep reaching for the next title just to make the discomfort stop. And you will end up in the next chapter without ever having decided what you wanted it to be about.

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Three things to do to discover your post-name-tag self

I built a small process for myself during my own transition this past year, and I’ve shared it with dozens of folks going through their own journey.

Reset. Before you do anything else, stop moving. Take a breath and make space for thinking. This is the hardest step for high achievers, because our instinct is to treat the pause itself as the failure. It isn’t. The pause is where the actual work happens.

Reflect. This is where most people get it wrong, and it’s worth slowing down on. I talked to three people recently who had all been laid off for reasons that had nothing to do with them. Sometimes, it is a corporate restructuring, their manager brings in their own team, or a company fails. Each of them told me a story that made it sound like they deserved it. If I had just tried harder. If I had just known X. I pushed back on all three. Our minds go looking for a reason we could have prevented what happened, because a preventable story feels safer than a random one. But if you carry that story into your next conversation, your next role, you are fighting a war that already ended. Reflection isn’t about finding where you failed. It’s about telling yourself the true version of what happened, then setting it down.

Reimagine. Only after you’ve actually sat in the quiet and told yourself the honest story do you get to ask the real question. What did I like? What did I not like? What do I want the next chapter to be about, now that nobody is assigning me a title? This is the step people skip because it requires you to want something before anyone has approved it.

I think about Brad Smith’s path and what I learned from him. He was CEO of Intuit for over a decade, and when he stepped down, he became president of Marshall University. He’s written openly about that in-between, what it’s like to have built and led something at the highest level and then have to discover what’s next. I go back and read his reflections regularly. There’s something clarifying about watching someone else do this in real time from one of the top jobs in the world.

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The permission slip

I was recently on Meghan French Dunbar’s show, Unbehaved, and she asked me the same question she asks every guest: What permission slip would you give the listener?

Mine, without much thought, was this: rewrite your story. Not to make yourself look better, but rather to make it more accurate. Most of us are carrying around a version of events that quietly blames us for things that were never ours to control, and that version is shaping how we walk into the next room and what we type into the line under our name.

I am not just a mentor, advisor, or executive. Nor am I just a wife and mother. I am all of it at once, but none of it is the whole answer. There are interesting facets of you to be explored and examined beyond just a few words.

If your name tag were blank tomorrow, not because anyone took anything from you, but because you finally had the room to write it yourself, what would you put under your name?

I recently sat down with Meghan French Dunbar, author of “This Isn’t Working,” for her show Unbehaved, where this conversation started. You can hear the full episode here or wherever you get your podcasts, and you’ll find her take on her own version of the blank name tag on her Substack, also called Unbehaved.

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Every few days, I leave something on my front porch in my designated Buy Nothing box. An extra water bottle I got at a conference. A skirt that didn’t quite work for me. Some snacks my kids thought they liked at the store, but changed their minds about. I have given away over a thousand items, from an extra gallon of milk before heading out on vacation to a spare TV we didn’t want to take with us on the move. Within a day or two, the item is off to a new home somewhere in my neighborhood.

I have been part of this local group for years. The requirements to join are strict, and the admins enforce the rules fairly. Our community is small, and it is built around a shared zip code. But we share a sense of being in the same neighborhood and trust. The group has at least a dozen things listed every day, including furniture, electronics, and clothes our kids outgrew overnight. My husband thinks the food is the funniest part. But half-finished bags of food, or even leftovers, are popular. Taking food from strangers is the kind of thing that seems odd, but in a high-trust community, it has never once been a problem.

Compare that to our larger regional Buy Nothing groups, which cover more zip codes and more people. They technically work the same way, but they feel different: more distant and less intimate. And then there’s Facebook Marketplace, which I worked on, where you’re transacting with true strangers, and trust has to be built transaction by transaction.

The difference between these three circles isn’t the platform, which remains the Facebook app. Rather, it is trust.

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The Trust Problem Is Bigger Than It Looks

I wrote last week about Ten Charts I Can’t Stop Thinking About. One of them was about how low-trust America has become. Roughly half of Americans believe their fellow citizens are morally bad. This is alarming. We think our fellow Americans are bad people, much more so than in any other country.

Source: Pew Research Center

That statistic has consequences far beyond politics. Low-trust societies spend more on security, legal costs, and verification. They also advocate for more policing and harsher penalties for offenses. Low-trust societies have lower organ and blood donations.

Low trust makes everything slower and more expensive, because you have to build in protection against the worst case instead of assuming the best one. A high-trust society often supports social programs because the money is going to your neighbors, but if you think half of them are bad people, you are less likely to support free school lunch, food stamps, or Medicaid, because you assume people may take advantage of the system.

I felt this most viscerally on a work trip to Utah. A group of us from the Bay Area got out of the car, and as we do in SF, we took our bookbags out of the car. We even debated pulling out our suitcases. One of our Utah colleagues watched us do this and looked genuinely confused. “You can leave that. No one is going to steal it,” he said. “We don’t even need to lock the doors.”

Source: SF Chronicle

I was shocked. In California, leaving a visible bag in your car is practically an invitation to a break-in. I have had friends lose laptops and luggage this way. While it has gotten meaningfully better in San Francisco since Daniel Lurie became mayor, I still would never leave anything of value in my car. That instinct to take your things doesn’t go away because the statistics improve. Once you’ve been burned, you carry that caution with you.

That’s what low trust does. It doesn’t just cost you when something actually gets stolen. It costs you cognitive friction every day in the form of vigilance.

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Organizations Have the Same Problem, at a Smaller Scale

I have seen this exact dynamic play out inside companies. Some teams operate like my local Buy Nothing group. Team members give each other the benefit of the doubt. They share credit freely and openly. They give honest feedback, and there’s an ease to their conversations. Mistakes are treated as information, not ammunition to be used down the line.

Other teams operate like the larger groups, or even Facebook Marketplace. Every interaction is a transaction. People protect their scope, hedge their commitments, and secretly negotiate with other teams. I have watched teams like this develop what researchers call “in-group trust”: a tight, defensive circle where you trust the few people in your immediate pod and no one else. It works well until it doesn’t. It is protective, but also poisonous. The circle-the-wagons mentality helps drive a local maximum, but risks everything outside that circle. People stop collaborating across teams because it feels risky to depend on someone who isn’t part of the group.

The irony is that in-group trust often masquerades as a strength. Team loyalty looks like a good thing from the inside. But if that loyalty is built by defining an “us” against a “them,” you haven’t built trust. You’ve just moved the low-trust problem down a level, from the company to the department, from the department to the XFN or pod.

How High Trust Actually Gets Built

None of the high-trust systems I have described (my neighborhood, that Utah trip, the best teams I’ve been part of) got that way by accident. A few things they had in common:

Repeated small interactions, not big declarations. Nobody in my Buy Nothing group signed a pledge to trust their neighbors. Trust accumulated one bag of spare clementines at a time. In organizations, it’s the same. Trust is built through the small, unglamorous moments where you did what you said you’d do, not through a mission statement about collaboration or teamwork.

Proximity that makes people specific instead of abstract. My tight local group works because I actually know these people, even if only a little. The regional group feels distant because the people in it stay abstract. On teams, this means trust breaks down the moment people become job titles or Slack handles instead of humans you’ve had real conversations and been through trials with.

Transparency as the default, not the exception. On one team I led, we had a rule: say the thing, in the room, out loud. No side conversations, no quiet lobbying after the meeting, no regrets about what you didn’t say. We built that rule because trust can easily erode to the point where everyone suspects a hidden agenda. Saying the thing ensured transparency and trust.

Leaders who go first. Trust rarely spreads because someone announced it should. It spreads because someone with more power or tenure took the first risk, extended the first benefit of the doubt, and admitted the first mistake. Once people see that the risk of trusting doesn’t get punished, they take it themselves.

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The Real Question

The real question isn’t whether your team or your neighborhood has high trust or low trust today. It’s whether the circle of trust is expanding or contracting day by day. Tribal trust that never grows past a small, defensive “us” is just a more comfortable version of low trust. Real high-trust cultures keep widening the circle with each small, repeated act. You don’t even see the threshold crossed until one day you leave your bookbag with a laptop in it in your car.

Where is the edge of your circle of trust right now? And what would it take to move it out one ring further?

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Great visualizations make the invisible visible. They help us see patterns too slow or too large to notice in daily life. And sometimes, they make me rethink something I was sure I already understood.

If you want to explore the earlier ones, here are the previous editions:

• Ten Charts I Can’t Stop Thinking About

• Ten More Charts I Can’t Stop Thinking About

• Ten Charts I Can’t Stop Thinking About: Third Edition

• Ten More Charts I Can’t Stop Thinking About: Fourth Edition

• Bonus: Ten Charts that Explain the AI Era

Here’s what caught my attention over the past few months.

1. Cancer deaths are up, but that’s not the full story

Source: Our World in Data

At first glance, the red line is alarming: cancer deaths worldwide have more than doubled since the 1980s. It looks like we are losing the fight against cancer. But the story is more complicated and hopeful than it appears.

The raw number doesn’t account for the fact that the world’s population has grown enormously over this period, and that people are living longer. When you adjust for both population growth and age, the age-standardized cancer death rate has actually declined.

This chart stopped me because it’s a perfect illustration of how the same data can tell completely different stories depending on how you frame it. Raw numbers without context can mislead us, and it’s important to understand that context.

2. We are eating alone more than ever, and it’s making us less happy

Source: World Happiness Report 2025

According to the American Time Use Survey, Americans are eating all their meals alone 53% more than they did 20 years ago. Research shows that sharing eight or more meals a week with other people provides the same happiness boost as doubling your income. Those who eat with others rate themselves much higher on life satisfaction.

I think about my own life and how many of my closest relationships were built around a table: family dinners, team lunches, breaking bread with friends. Food is how we slow down long enough to connect and spend time together. As more people live alone, it becomes harder to find connection and community with others.

3. Young women are less likely than young men to want to get married

Source: Pew Research Center

In the fourth edition, I shared a chart showing that young men are becoming less supportive of gender equality. This chart shows the other side of that shift: girls are now less likely than boys to say they want to get married. In the 1970s, girls were more eager to marry than boys. That has reversed.

These two charts speak to a larger trend. When one group signals that it doesn’t value or respect the other, it changes what the other group wants. Women are increasingly financially independent, educationally ahead, and less willing to enter relationships where they aren’t treated as equals. These aren’t disconnected trends.

What I find so important about data like this is that it makes visible something that has been quietly building for years. Culture is changing what people want, and what people want is changing the landscape.

4. Teen pregnancy has crossed a threshold

Source: Aaron Becker

Since 2022, women over 40 have had more children each year than women under 20. That crossover point would have been unimaginable a generation ago.

This is a convergence of two long-running trends: teen pregnancy rates falling dramatically thanks to better education and access to contraception, and more women choosing to have children later in life, often after establishing their careers and financial footing.

In the fourth edition, I wrote about young people hitting major life milestones later. This chart is the most concrete expression of that shift. The decision of when to have children, if at all, has changed fundamentally in one generation. For those of us who had children young, it’s a reminder that our path is no longer the default.

5. Weight loss drugs are changing what America eats

Source: Bloomberg via Killer Charts

There are always second-order effects, but they aren’t always obvious at the start. Six months after adopting a GLP-1 medication, people spend significantly less on chips and savory snacks (down 11%), sweet bakery items (down 9%), and cheese (down 7%). Cookies, soft drinks, meat, butter, bread, and ice cream are all down between 4 and 7 percent.

These drugs are changing more than weight; they’re changing grocery carts. Scale that out to the tens of millions of people affected, and you’re looking at a real shift in what a country eats. With 12% of the US now taking GLP-1s, things are evolving quickly.

I think about the ripple effects of big behavioral changes more than most people do. This one is worth watching closely.

6. Young adults are becoming less conscientious, and the implications are dire

Source: FT via @jonathanhaidt

This chart gave me pause in a way I didn’t expect. Among adults aged 16 to 39, there has been a sharp drop in commitment and perseverance, and a marked increase in distraction and carelessness. Older adults (60+) have stayed relatively stable.

I think about this in the context of being the parent of three teens and also managing teams. Over the years, I’ve seen how much of career growth comes down to showing up fully, following through, and taking ownership. Careers are built over long periods of commitment, and this level of distraction could work against that. Building good habits early sets young people up for success.

7. Marriage is becoming a luxury good

Source: Wall Street Journal via @profgalloway

This chart is blunt. Among Americans with college degrees, marriage rates have declined modestly. Among those without a college degree, the decline is steep, nearing 50%.

Marriage used to be the default for most Americans, regardless of education or income. Now it’s increasingly the domain of the economically secure. This has profound implications, because the data consistently shows that stable two-income households build wealth more effectively, and the gap between those who can afford to build them and those who can’t is widening.

This has wide economic implications. When economic precarity makes it harder to commit, it compounds over time: in finances, in family stability, and in the opportunities available to the next generation born of these relationships.

8. Americans are more likely than other countries to believe their fellow citizens are bad

Source: Pew Research Center

Polarization has real effects on how we view one another. In a 27-country survey, Americans were the most likely to think their fellow Americans were morally bad. That’s an alarming statistic. When half a country believes the people they interact with are immoral, they’re more likely to want to restrict the rights of others, impose their worldview, and support drastic actions that align only with their own values.

In contrast, just across the border in Canada, only 7% of people think their fellow citizens are morally bad. High-trust and low-trust societies function very differently, and we’re now at a place where many of us feel like we can’t trust half the people in our own country. Something to think about.

9. Women find men their own age attractive; men find women around 20 attractive

Source: Sam Trautwein

I included this one because I laughed out loud when I saw it. Women tend to prefer men of their own age, but men basically find 20-year-old women most attractive. Men in their late 40s actually have kids the age of those they find attractive. It’s such an odd mismatch.

Interestingly, while men expressed a preference for women around 20, they actually messaged women closer to their own age on the dating app OKCupid. Expressed and revealed preference deviated. A worthwhile lesson in human nature, and in how markets actually behave versus how people say they’ll behave.

10. Death rate declines show real human progress

Source: Our World in Data

It’s easy to be pessimistic about the world, but the data tells a different story. Life expectancy has climbed for people of nearly every age, and the improvement is staggering when you look at the details.

Infants born in 1800 had a death rate thirty-six times higher than those born in 1980. Ten-year-olds born in 1800 were fifty times more likely to die than ten-year-olds born in 1980. Even fifty-year-olds saw an eleven times higher death rate in 1800 than in 1980. Overall infant mortality, which was above 10% in the 1800s, has fallen below 1% today.

This isn’t an accident. Clean water, antibiotics, vaccines, and better cancer treatments didn’t just add years to our lives. They gave us the chance at a longer, richer one.

If you see a chart that makes you think, share it with me! I love seeing data visualizations that open up our minds to new ways of thinking.

For those who don’t know me, I’m Bethany. I just graduated from high school and am heading to Duke University in a few weeks. My mom and I write a monthly column together called “Tiger Mom and Her Cub” on AsAmNews, where we discuss divisive topics from two generations’ perspectives.

Though we’re close now, our relationship wasn’t always this easy. For a long time, I struggled to talk to her. Every conversation felt like more pressure to do more things to set myself up for success. It didn’t help that we got a dog during Covid, and I was assigned the evening walk with her every night. It got to the point where I didn’t just dread our walks. I resented her as a person, and I did whatever I could to get out of going.

In hindsight, I understand that she was only trying to make sure I’d have a good future. She wanted me to build grit and find my own purpose, to discover things I could be passionate about, both in high school and beyond. But most of the things I tried, I didn’t enjoy. I was so stuck in my own dislike of what she asked me to do that I couldn’t see past it.

My mom could see the bigger picture. When I entered high school, she asked me how much pressure I wanted her to put on me, on a scale of 1 to 10. I was too occupied with myself to see it for what it was: an olive branch. She was giving me a chance to tell her to lay off, and I didn’t take it. I obsessed over the number I gave her and what it meant for my life, indifferent to what it was doing to us.

When we started writing the column together, I was finally able to see past my own teenage self-absorption. The premise forced us to sit down and understand each other’s perspectives. It wasn’t fast. But as we explained our sides on issue after issue, something started to build. For the first time, it felt less like my freedom was being stifled and more like we were working toward something together. I got to see where she was coming from, to recognize her pressure as an attempt to give me a good life. And I was finally able to tell her exactly how I felt.

I’ve learned a lot about relationships from her over the past 17 years, especially as the column has changed our own. Next month, I’m heading to Duke University, a new adventure for me. It will be the first time I’ve lived outside of California, and the first time I’ve lived away from my parents. I’ll have to make new friends and build a new community in a place I’ve never called home. There’s no better time than now to write down the most important things my mom has taught me about relationships.

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1. Meet People Where They Are

This goes hand in hand with understanding where someone is coming from. Once you get their perspective, you have to use it to build a connection with them where they are, not where you wish they were. During that period of my life, I was buried in my own anxiety and the pressure I believed my parents had put on me. I understood what mom was trying to achieve, but I didn’t need a mom who existed to make me do things. I needed a mom who was willing to listen to me.

I told her she needed to lower the pressure, to take it from a nine to a six. To her credit, she took the change and ran with it. She met me where I was, listening to my rants and learning my goals. She still pushed me toward new opportunities and growth, but now it came from a mom who understood her daughter didn’t want to drown in pressure.

2. Give People Room to Be Themselves

Where every walk used to be about something I needed to do, our walks five years later are more natural. The conversation goes where it wants to, and we both talk about whatever we’re actually interested in. There’s no pressure to perform as the perfectly productive daughter. All our walks require now is for both of us to show up and be real.

Sometimes mom listens to me rant about my friendships or school. Sometimes I listen to her talk about my siblings. Sometimes I tell her about something new I want to try. No matter what, we give each other space to be our authentic selves without judgment.

3. Help Without Keeping Score

One thing I’ve watched mom embody over and over is helping people without expecting anything back. I’ve seen her give away hundreds of things through Buy Nothing groups on Facebook, connect people she barely knows, and consistently show up when people need her. When I asked her why, she told me, “If you can help, you should.” At first I assumed it was because someone might help her back one day. But she doesn’t do it for that reason at all. She helps out of abundance. She feels blessed and wants to pass that along.

I’ve watched her give her time and energy even when there was so much else going on, and for a long time I didn’t understand it. Now I see how much it means to the people she helps, and to her.

4. Be Curious, Not Critical

Importantly, we don’t just talk. We listen. Active listening is at the center of how mom builds relationships. You treat people as if what they’re saying matters to you, because it should.

You have to show people their value. When they’re talking, stay engaged. The only time we touch our phones on our walks is to buy something or look something up. Otherwise, we keep our focus on each other, modeling the kind of listening we want in return.

Asking questions is part of it too. Even if I’m talking about picking up embroidery or some other small hobby, mom asks questions. She always says to be “curious, not critical,” and now I understand what that means. That one habit has changed the quality of our conversations, and our relationship along with it. Now I look forward to our walks, a long way from where we started.

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5. Be Honest, Even When It Costs You

It matters a lot to mom that she doesn’t lie. The only exception is April Fool’s Day, when she’s played some epic tricks on us, but that’s a special case. Whenever I ask her something, she either answers me honestly or not at all. Lying to me isn’t on the table.

That’s made it easy to trust her, even when I’m not independently inclined to believe something at first. I know she values openness and isn’t hiding things from me. Once I understood that, it became much easier to take her judgment and advice for what it is: her attempt to give me the best life possible.

Mom brings the same honesty to everything else. She refused to tell my school I was sick when I had my driver’s test scheduled. She doesn’t tell my dad things I say to her in confidence if he asks, though she does encourage me to tell him myself. She was honest with us when my grandparents passed away, and when she was diagnosed with cancer. Sometimes her honesty works against me, but it’s also why people know they can trust her.

I see the results of her work all the time. People drop off flowers, food, and gifts to thank her for her help. We run into strangers who thank her in the Costco parking lot. She gets notes appreciating something she did, and I’m not sure she even remembers what she did for them.

My mom builds community one connection, one walk at a time. Our own relationship is proof: I once did everything I could to get out of walking with her, and now those walks are the thing I’ll miss most about home.

In a few weeks, I’ll be three thousand miles away, starting over in a state I’ve never lived in, with no history to fall back on. I won’t have five years of walks to build trust the way we did. What I’ll have is what she taught me on those walks: meet people where they are, let the conversation go where it wants to, help without keeping score, stay curious instead of critical, and tell the truth even when it costs you something.

I don’t know yet who my people at Duke will be. But for the first time, I know how to find them. That’s the part of her I’m taking with me.

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My parents told me growing up that I was a bicentennial baby since I was born in 1976. I didn’t quite understand it as a kid, but they said it with pride. They were naturalized US citizens, and they were excited that I got to be born during such a moment of celebration for their chosen country.

Two Suitcases and a Few Hundred Dollars

My parents came to the United States in the early 1960s to attend college, arriving alone with a couple of suitcases and a few hundred dollars each. They knew almost nothing about the country they were landing in.

For nearly eight decades before that, under the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, people who looked like them had been barred from entering this country at all, and those already here couldn’t become citizens. The law wasn’t fully repealed until 1943, and even then, the annual quota was capped at 105 people. It wasn’t until 1965, just before my parents’ generation came of age, that the door opened wide enough for people like them to walk through it.

They walked through it with almost nothing. When they arrived, each of them was asked to choose an “American name” that would be easier for people to pronounce. My mother became Audrey. My father became William.

They both grew up in Hong Kong, on similar paths, but never met there. Instead, they found each other years later in the melting pot of New York City, working as waiters at a resort in the Catskills. When they wrote home to say they were getting married, they discovered their families had lived only a few streets apart the whole time.

There was no calling home to check in, no video chatting on a hard day. Communication was letters and the occasional long-distance phone call, timed to the minute because it cost more per minute than most people made in an hour.

When they married, few relatives could make the trip, so my mother’s godparents stood in as witnesses at a small church. She sewed her own wedding gown. Afterward, my parents helped clean up the church themselves, then drove to a town near Niagara Falls because that was what they could afford for a honeymoon.

They built a life from there, joining the millions of immigrants who came here dreaming of something new.

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The Cost Underneath the Gratitude

My parents were deeply grateful for what America gave them. They said so, often and sincerely. They loved this country and wanted every future generation of our family to be part of its story.

And even in the midst of that gratitude, they were told, in ways large and small, that they didn’t quite belong. Gratitude and grievance lived in the same house in our family, and it took me most of my life to understand that both were true at once.

My father was an engineer, but the company he worked for in New York refused to recognize his degree. They kept him on as a technician, at a fraction of the pay, and he suspected it was because he was one of the only Asian employees there.

Rather than fight it, he took a job with the federal government in South Carolina, a place he had never visited. An Indian-American friend had made the same move and told him the government didn’t discriminate the way private companies did. In 1982, my parents packed up our family and moved us from Queens, one of the most diverse places in the country, to a small Southern town where the Asian population was well under one percent.

Being the Forever Foreigner

At age six, I did not understand what it cost them to make that trade. I only understood that I was one of the only Asian kids in my town, and that people constantly reminded us we didn’t belong.

Strangers shouted at our family, “Go back to where you came from.” I was bullied for how I looked, what I ate, and how my parents sounded. I wanted more than anything to disappear into the background.

For years, I resented my parents for the move. My sister and I begged to go back to New York. It took me decades to understand why they made the choice they did. They had walked away from one place only to land somewhere with almost no built-in community. So they built one themselves.

I used to think being grateful meant not complaining. I know now that the two aren’t in conflict. You can love a country and still name the ways it made things harder than they needed to be. My parents did both, quietly, for their entire lives. I am only now learning to do it out loud.

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What They Taught Me About Being American

America is a promise, not a guarantee. My parents didn’t come here because everything was going to be easy. They came here because of the promise of what they could build for future generations. When I was at Ancestry, one of the things that struck me most was the stories of people who boarded a ship for America knowing they might never see home again, who sailed a one-way trip into an unknown land and simply prayed things would work out. The country they arrived in didn’t always welcome them, but they persisted, and they became the parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents of the people who are here today. My parents made that same bet, one generation later.

Ship manifest for my uncle, who sailed from India to the US after WWII

Belonging is built, not given. My parents were told, more than once, that they weren’t wanted. A church they hoped to join turned them away when they applied for membership, even though it actively supported missionaries in Asia. They didn’t argue. They found another church that welcomed them, and stayed there for the rest of their lives. They never waited for permission to belong somewhere. They kept looking until they found a place that would let them build a life, then built more places alongside it. They helped launch a Chinese school. They started a Chinese Bible study. They found their place within the local Chinese restaurant community. All the while, they stayed active members of our church, our neighborhood, and our local school.

Frugality was never really about money. It was about respect for what had been given to them and what it took to get it. My father never let food go to waste at our table, because he remembered what it was like to eat milk over rice as his only meal, back when that was all he could afford. Every dollar my parents saved was a small act of faith that the sacrifice would be worth it for the next generation. They bought a home, road-tripped across the country, and lived their version of the American Dream.

The dream compounds. It doesn’t just transfer. My parents left behind more than their homeland. They gave us a country to love and a place to call home. They toiled to build something lasting, the same way so many immigrants before them had. Every generation in an immigrant family inherits both an opportunity and an obligation. You don’t get to just enjoy what was built. You’re expected to add to it for the next generation.

From the Eyes of a Native-Born American

My sister and I are the culmination of the dreams my parents carried with them. We graduated from college, went on to successful careers, and raised American children of our own. My kids never grew up feeling that lack of belonging, partly because we live in a place where we are not outliers, but an unexceptional part of the community.

When I was a kid growing up in South Carolina, I loved the Fourth of July: the fireworks, hot dogs, picnics, the whole nine yards. But I always felt a bit out of place, not because I didn’t feel American inside, but because people felt the need to remind me that I was a forever foreigner.

I am watching my children grow up differently, in a community where they have always felt like they belong, where no one asks them where they are really from. They are inheriting an American Dream that two people, with a couple of suitcases and a few hundred dollars, decided to bet everything on, eight decades after their families were told they weren’t wanted here at all.

I feel a version of that inheritance too, watching the fireworks now instead of quietly wondering if they were meant for someone else. Not because anything was handed to me, but because two people refused to let a closed door stay closed.

America’s Story Is Still Being Written

This year, on the 250th anniversary, I keep thinking about how young this country still is next to the civilizations my parents came from, and how much has been rewritten and re-earned in that short time. The exclusion laws that kept my parents’ families out for generations are gone. That we are here, and thriving, is proof of it.

I was born in America’s two hundredth year, less than a decade after immigration laws still could have kept people who looked like my parents out of the country entirely.

For as long as we have had civilization, humans have migrated in search of freedom, opportunity, and safety, always longing for a place to call home. That longing, and what it costs to answer it, is what it means to be a child of immigrants.

What does the Fourth of July mean to you this year? Whether your family has been here for ten generations or one, the story of those who came to these shores is part of what makes America a place we can all call home.

A few days ago, I came across a post on Threads that made me pause. I read the title to my kids, and they had a good laugh at how one of the greatest athletes of her generation, maybe of all time, Simone Biles, could be reduced to an “NFL wife.” My girls asked, “Who is her husband?”

The backlash against the author was swift and loud.

And then the author, McQuade Warnold, did something most people in that situation don’t do. He showed up and owned the mistake. In a three-part thread, he explained that he writes for an NFL website, that the SEO keyword driving the headline was “NFL,” and that he had genuinely never considered how dismissive it would read. He said he had followed Simone Biles for years and had nothing but respect for her. And then he said: “I realize now I should have done better. I apologize.”

You can read the full coverage here: Straight Arrow News

What happened next surprised me. While many thanked him for his apology, there were an equal number who went after him for it, picking apart the wording, relitigating the offense, cataloguing the harm, explaining exactly why his words were insufficient. The tone of those comments was harsh, designed to make sure he felt the full weight of what he’d done.

I had a different reaction. I posted my own response on Threads: when someone apologizes and commits to change, that is exactly the moment to offer grace.

The reason is simple. When someone makes a mistake, they have three options: stay silent, apologize, or double down. If we make apologizing the most painful of the three, we shouldn’t be surprised when people choose one of the other two.

The Apology That Never Came

I know what it feels like to be on the other side of an accountability that never came.

My father had a persistent cough for years. He saw his doctor repeatedly. Each time, he was told it was something minor: allergies, then asthma, then bronchitis. The cough kept getting worse. Finally, the doctor relented and ordered a chest X-ray, thinking it might be pneumonia. What it showed was stage IV lung cancer that had already spread.

My father was not a smoker. Because of that, his doctor had assumed he was low risk and never seriously investigated. That assumption cost my father his life. He passed away eighteen months after his diagnosis.

I found out he was sick at one of the most vulnerable moments of my own life. I was pregnant with my youngest daughter, Danielle, deep into a difficult pregnancy that had already left me barely functioning. Every day I was growing a new life while watching cancer slowly take my father’s. The two things existed side by side in a way I still struggle to describe. I knew I was bringing a child into a world where my dad would never get to see her grow up.

When my father called to tell my sister and me that he had stage IV cancer, he asked, “Is that out of 10?” He didn’t know what the doctor meant, and the doctor never explained it to him. My sister and I had to tell him over the phone, without being there, that his cancer was likely terminal. When my father asked if his daughters could listen in to hear the results together, the doctor said, “I don’t have time for that.” That avoidance, that lack of empathy, has stuck with us to this day.

I remember calling the doctor afterward, after the diagnosis, after everything. I wanted to understand what had happened. Why years of a worsening cough had been dismissed. Why a non-smoker with stage IV lung cancer had been sent home with allergy advice for so long. His office was dismissive. Maybe he thought he’d followed the right protocols. Maybe he was afraid that acknowledging the mistake would open him up to liability. I will never know. What I do know is that I was furious, and I had nowhere to put it. I was pregnant. We had a dying father to tend to. My sister and I decided not to pursue anything further because we didn’t have the capacity to fight.

All I wanted to hear was: “I’m sorry. I missed something, and I will be more careful going forward.”

That was it. Two sentences. An acknowledgment of what happened and a promise to be more careful in the future.

The silence was its own kind of wound. Not because an apology would have brought my father back. Nothing could have done that. But I wanted the doctor to acknowledge that he made a mistake, and that his mistake cost a life.

I still wonder, more than fourteen years later, whether that doctor thinks about him. I wonder if he became more vigilant. I wonder if he researched lung cancer in non-smokers. I wonder if he ever learned that lung cancer in Asian American men occurs in non-smokers 30 to 40% of the time, 2 to 3 times the overall US rate.

A part of me hopes my father’s case changed something in how he practiced. But I will never know, because he never told us.

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Apologies Change Outcomes

My experience is not unusual. Research on why patients and families pursue legal action after medical errors consistently points to the same finding: it is rarely about the money. According to a Lancet study, the four most common reasons people file malpractice claims are:

• Wanting to prevent the same thing from happening to someone else

• Needing an honest explanation of what went wrong

• Seeking compensation for real losses

• Wanting accountability

What sits beneath all of them is a breakdown in communication and empathy. Doctors, when faced with a medical error, are often trained to avoid explanation, limit apologies, or say nothing at all. The reason is fear. Saying, “I’m sorry,” feels like an admission of guilt. It feels like opening a door to a lawsuit. So the training, the legal advice, and the institutional pressure all push in the same direction: silence.

Here is the painful irony. The silence almost always makes things worse. Studies show that malpractice payments are consistently higher when an error is not disclosed and an apology is not given. When four Massachusetts hospitals adopted a Communication, Apology, and Resolution program, only about five percent of nearly 1,000 reported safety events resulted in legal claims. Patients who feel heard are far less likely to escalate. The apology doctors fear is often the very thing that would have protected them.

Medical errors are the third-leading cause of death in the United States, accounting for more than 250,000 deaths per year. That is an enormous number of families waiting on an explanation. Most of them are not looking for a settlement. They are looking for someone to look them in the eye and say: here is what happened, this is what went wrong, we are sorry, and here is how we will prevent it from happening again.

We have built a system that makes those words nearly impossible to say. And then we wonder why no one says them.

This is the paradox at the center of accountability, in medicine, in the workplace, and on the internet. We say we want people to own their mistakes but when someone actually does it, publicly and honestly, we treat the apology as an invitation to intensify the attack.

I have thought about this a lot in the context of persuasion. So much of what we do, in our careers and in our relationships, is trying to change people’s minds. We want colleagues to see a problem differently. We want leaders to reconsider a decision. We want the people who caused harm to understand what they did. And yet, when someone finally gets there, when they say “you were right, I was wrong,” the temptation is to say “I told you so.” To make them feel the full weight of how long it took.

That impulse destroys the very thing we were trying to build. If someone changes their mind and we make them regret it, they will not change their mind again. They may double down instead.

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Why Grace in the Face of Apologies Can Change Things

Grace is the first thing we should practice in the face of an apology.

Separate the mistake from the person. What someone did and who someone is are not the same thing. The journalist who wrote that headline was not trying to erase Simone Biles. He is not a misogynist. He was careless, following an SEO playbook without thinking through the implications. While that is worth correcting, it does not require destroying him over a mistake.

Welcome the change, not just the apology. An apology without changed behavior is just words. Changed behavior without any acknowledgment that the apology was received doesn’t welcome change. When someone crosses the distance between wrong and right, meet them there. Say: I hear the apology, I see the change, and I appreciate the effort. Let’s move forward.

Let go of being right. This is the hardest one. When we have been hurt, something in us wants the other person to really feel it before we release them. We want the ledger to be balanced. But holding on to the score doesn’t fix what happened. It just keeps us standing at the site of the injury. You can be right and still choose to let the offense go.

Understand that your response shapes the future. When you offer grace publicly, you signal to everyone watching what the norms are. You show that genuine accountability is safe and welcome. Because if people do not feel safe apologizing, they won’t apologize at all. You take away the chance to apologize and grow.

Grace requires setting aside the real hurt that came before the apology. It requires believing that the change matters more than a full accounting of how long it took to get there. That is genuinely difficult. I am not saying the feelings underneath it all aren’t valid.

When I watched that pile-on unfold under a sincere apology, I kept thinking about my father’s doctor. About what it would have meant to hear two simple sentences. About how differently that chapter might have closed. I didn’t need him to be punished. I needed him to see what happened and change for the next patient he saw.

The journalist on Threads made a choice. He didn’t have to publicly apologize, but he put himself out there. The punishing comments that followed may have made him rethink his choice

I would rather live in a world where imperfect people can admit their mistakes and find a welcome for their apology. That is not a world that happens on its own. It is one we build, one response at a time, every time we choose grace over score-keeping.

The next time someone says “I was wrong,” and really means it, let that be enough. Welcome them to the other side. That is how change actually happens.

What is the apology you are still waiting for? And is there one you have been withholding?

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Our kitchen is the center of our home. We (maybe the royal we) cook almost every night, and over the years, we’ve collected way too many tools and appliances. Most get used once and then forgotten, but a few have earned permanent counter space.

Here are ten kitchen things that have made the cut and stayed relevant over the years.

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1. Baking steel: the secret to restaurant-quality bread and pizza at home (The original - $129 ; A Slightly Less Expensive Version - $80)

I am not usually an early adopter, but when Kenji Lopez-Alt mentioned the power of a baking steel, I preordered it in 2015 before it was even produced. I ended up getting it months and months later and was so excited when it arrived. It has had a prized position in our household ever since.

The best way to use it is to set it up about 4” from the top of the oven and turn the oven to broil on High. The steel heats up to 500°F+ in about an hour. Then, turn the heat down to broil on Low. Use a pizza peel and slide the pizza in. We roll our pizza dough on parchment and just slide the whole thing in, then remove the parchment at the 3-minute mark and bake for 2 more minutes. Crispy crust and perfectly cooked toppings in just 5 minutes.

2. Lodge cast iron: a pan that gets better with age ($25)

I use my Lodge cast iron pan almost every day. It’s perfect for dumplings, enoki beef rolls, pancakes, and more. The large size, while heavy, is perfect for cooking for a family of five. I bought my pan before my youngest, who is now in high school, was born, and it’s still in perfect shape after all of these years! Truly a #buyitforlife item.

Most people avoid cast iron because they think it’s hard to clean, but really, you just need to scrape and wash it. Yes, a bit of soap is okay. Even Lodge says so. I even bought the Lodge scraper set to keep mine in tip-top shape. The best part is that it gets better with use. Take good care of it, and you can even leave it to the next generation.

3. KitchenAid kitchen shears: the most underrated tool in the drawer ($8)

I know this sounds crazy, but I have five pairs of kitchen shears in my kitchen. I love love love them, and use them for everything. We gave up pizza cutters in favor of these shears. I use them to open sealed packages, break down chicken, cut green onions, and so much more. I need five pairs because we’re always using them for every little thing. We were always looking for them, so I found a sale on Kitchenaid shears and bought them in bulk!

4. Kitchen tongs: versatile tools for everyday use ($11 for two)

Like kitchen shears, I’ve bought tongs by the truckload. I have about 6 or 7 sets in my drawer, many of which I’ve had for years. The silicone ones have better grip and don’t scratch your pans, so get them in a few different sizes. We use them for salads, grilling meat, fishing things out of the air fryer, and so much more. Get a reliable, dishwasher-safe set, and you’ll have no regrets!

5. Pyrex glass mixing bowls and storage: the no-plastic way to cook and store food (various cost)

I replaced all of the plastic bowls, storage containers, and measuring cups in my house with Pyrex and have never looked back. These go from fridge to microwave to dishwasher and back to the drawer without any worries. Do yourself a favor and swap out your plastic containers, which leach microplastics into your food, for glass. I’ve had several sets for over a decade, and they keep going strong.

6. Zojirushi rice cooker: perfect rice every time ($169)

I bought this rice cooker nearly 20 years ago, and it’s still going strong. I even melted the outside once by putting it too close to the stove, and it hasn’t affected the function at all. I love that it makes perfect rice every time. Growing up, my parents always cooked rice on the stove, but my in-laws were true rice cooker fans. When I bought this, I was a bit unsure, but after hundreds of uses, it has never let me down. It’s much more expensive than a normal rice cooker, but get one for the next two decades, and you won’t regret it!

7. Ninja air fryer: heat your food without heating up the whole kitchen ($160)

I used my friend’s Ninja air fryer when he hosted our offsite at his house, and it was so incredible that I had to get one of my own. I thought it would be too big and not get used enough, but it’s more than earned its place on my counter. We use it daily for everything from reheating leftovers, to cooking fish, to making veggies. As an added bonus, I use fitted parchment liners, which means I only really have to wash it once every couple of weeks (or sooner if something falls to the bottom). The dual zones mean we can cook meat and veggies at the same time.

8. Breville oven: a countertop oven for everyday use ($330)

I bought this in 2018 to replace my old Breville, which I’d owned for eight years at that point. I sold my old one on Facebook Marketplace to someone who went on to love it just as much as I did. Now, eight years after owning this one, it’s still going strong. We’ve never owned a toaster, so we use this as a toaster, cookie oven, and an all-around workhorse. Outside of baking and toasting, we also use it for proofing dough and keeping food warm while waiting to gather the troops for dinner. It’s a great companion to the air fryer for getting dinner on the table quickly.

9. KitchenAid mixer: the workhorse behind every baking project ($500)

If you’re a baker, you need a KitchenAid mixer. I use mine mostly for breads and pizza dough, but my daughter, who loves to bake, has made over a hundred different things with it over the years. It’s a huge investment, but mine has been in my home for over 15 years. I did have to repair it recently when the gears stripped, but it was an easy fix and good as new.

There are many versions of the KitchenAid mixer, several of which are cheaper than the large one I have, so pick whichever one fits your lifestyle. My husband bought my mother-in-law one from Marketplace, and she used it for many years before she passed.

10. Kitchen scale: uplevel your baking with this key tool ($10)

I bought this kitchen scale for my late mother-in-law in 2020, and when she passed, it came back to my home. It sits beside the one I bought in 2014, which is still going strong despite being discontinued. A good kitchen scale is the single best way to uplevel your baking. We weigh out all of our ingredients to ensure a good outcome.

Honorable mention:

Sodastream: save money and reduce waste for families who like bubbly water ($70)

I added this one for my kids. I asked them what they couldn’t live without, and they said it was their Sodastream. Fair warning, it’s not exactly #buyitforlife. Unfortunately, we’ve broken three of them already and are now on our third. On the bright side, they show up regularly on Facebook; I got one from our Buy Nothing Group and bought another from Facebook Marketplace.

A good kitchen isn’t about having every gadget in the world. It’s about having the few workhorse items that stay with you for years and years. This list is those things for me.

What’s the one kitchen tool you would never give up? Tell me in the comments.

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Note: The links attached are Amazon affiliate links so you can see the items. All affiliate money is donated to charity at the end of the year.

Not because he loved buses per se, but because he was fascinated by the doors. Press a button and people walk in. Press it again and they go out. The driver controls the flow. That simple idea became his inspiration for working in technology — the idea that you could build something that moves people, that decides who gets in and where they go.

Decades later, he built an app used by more people than live in his parents’ home country. Armenia has a population of three million. List.am, the online marketplace Suren built there, has 3.5 million monthly active users. He has built something for Armenia that has more users than the country has citizens.

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Most founders would use that incredible product-market fit as a launchpad — a push for more money raised, more countries reached, more MAU, more GMV. When investors and advisors push him to expand into other markets, he has a simple response: “To make more money isn’t a good enough reason. There are far more variables in business than just revenue.” His mission with List.am is to help make Armenia a better place to live. Expanding to other countries wouldn’t serve that mission. So he doesn’t expand and has no plans to.

In a world obsessed with scale, he carries a level of clarity and focus rarely seen.

The Founding of a Founder

This is not Suren’s first startup. Before List.am became the center of his work, he built two significant companies. The first was Crowdstar, a social mobile gaming company born out of experimenting with apps on social media platforms. He describes the work of designing games as “a form of living digital art,” where you craft fictional experiences for millions of people and try to stay one step ahead of what they’ll want next. But ultimately, pure entertainment was hard to stake a real mission on. So he moved on.

His next company was the one that made him. Epic is a digital reading platform now used in over 96% of U.S. elementary schools, reaching 50 million children and a billion books read. It came from a personal place: watching his own kids discover reading, and noticing that while videos and games were everywhere, books were expensive, inaccessible, and not fun. He and his co-founder, Kevin Donahue, set out to build a reading experience as engaging as a video and as fun as the games he once built. He cared deeply about the mission of making reading accessible to everyone.

In 2021, Epic was acquired by Byju’s for $500 million. By any measure, a hugely successful outcome. But the path there was messier than most people know.

When Epic launched, Suren handled customer support himself and responded to every email. He noticed something surprising. Many of the users weren’t parents, which was his intended audience. They were teachers, with different needs and different use cases from what he had envisioned. So he and his co-founder did something that seemed, at the time, counterintuitive to the point of recklessness given the cost. They gave Epic away for free to any teacher who wanted it. No strings attached.

What they got back was a distribution engine that became the envy of the industry. Teachers started recommending Epic to each other, then to parents. The consumer product grew. Revenue followed the mission, not the other way around. “We created a powerful new growth channel,” Suren said, “simply by understanding our users — their needs and desires and going above and beyond to deliver the experience they truly wanted.” As a parent whose kids loved Epic, I saw the power of turning reading into engagement and engagement into learning.

The lesson: your best growth strategy might be hiding in your data. The users who show up unexpectedly, for reasons you didn’t plan for, are often the ones who will carry you somewhere you never anticipated going.

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The Next Chapter

List.am started long before Epic or Crowdstar. Suren built it as a hobby, in the early days of the internet in Armenia, because he thought the country needed a proper local marketplace. Someone needed to build it, and he decided it would be him. What he did not expect was how important it would become.

Today, List.am is the largest online marketplace and internet platform in Armenia. But saying it’s a marketplace undersells it. Think of it as the connective tissue of the Armenian digital economy. It integrates with government services. It helps citizens navigate bureaucracy, buy and sell goods, find housing, hire workers. It supports local businesses in ways that ripple outward through communities. It is woven into daily life in a country where daily life has not always been easy.

Internally, Suren’s goal is equally ambitious: to bring Silicon Valley work culture to Armenia. To show that people there can operate at a world-class level. He wanted to ignite the type of passion and craft to bring tech to the country. And he achieved it.

When I asked him about the pressure to expand into new markets, there was no hesitation. Staying true to the mission isn’t a sacrifice for him. That’s the whole point. “I want to be able to look back and feel proud of what we’ve accomplished as a team,” he said. He isn’t chasing scale and growth. He is seeking deepening impact in his chosen market. He wants to go further in, not broaden further out.

That orientation extends to how he thinks about building in general. He approaches every company the same way: either obsess over a specific problem and go all in, or experiment and learn until something clicks, then build from there. There’s no magic formula. Just focus, and the willingness to keep pushing.

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What We Can Learn

There is something quietly countercultural about what Suren has built. In Silicon Valley, we are trained to celebrate growth milestones: fundraising rounds, valuation, DAU/MAU, and revenues. We treat expansion as the natural direction of any good idea. We assume that if something works in one market, it should work everywhere, and therefore it should.

Suren’s story challenges that assumption at every turn.

Epic worked because he followed the users who showed up, not the ones he planned for. He gave the product away to teachers when every rational instinct said don’t. He let the mission lead, and revenue followed. Most founders try to engineer that sequence, but instead, he paid attention to what his users were telling him.

List.am works because he refused to let success become a mandate for more. He built something indispensable in exactly one place, for exactly the people he cares most about. He turned his ambition inward and downward, into the root system of a country, rather than outward and upward toward some abstract global total addressable market.

The lesson for every founder is not that you should stay small. It’s that you should know who you are building for. A clear mission isn’t a constraint on your ambition. It is the thing that makes your ambition legible. It tells you what to say yes to, what to say no to, and when you’ve already won even if no one else has noticed yet.

Today, List.am has 3.5M users in a country of 3M people. His scale extends beyond the borders of his country.

He once said that what excited him as a kid was the idea of controlling the flow. A bus driver decides who gets on, who gets off, where the doors open. Suren has applied that same logic to his entire career. He decided what matters to him, then decided who he is building for. He opened the doors for exactly the people they were meant for, and he has kept them open.

Most founders want to drive everywhere. He just wants to serve his route.

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The Discipline of Showing Up

What followed was not what any of us expected. The three of us didn’t tell polished love stories. We told convoluted tales of adversity and near misses. Stories about first impressions that turned out to be completely wrong. Stories about how we almost didn’t say yes to that date, and how close we each came to walking away before things even started.

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This brings me to the yellow tie.

I met my husband David at church my first weekend as a freshman at Duke. He was a senior at UNC, a couple of years older than me, wearing a pinstripe suit and a bright yellow tie. My first impression: he looked ridiculous, jokey, and unserious.

Over the following months, we moved in the same church community. He had a strange sense of humor, the kind that felt overly familiar. I told a friend at the time that he was borderline rude. What I didn’t know was that he thought his jokes were a way to be warm and inclusive, even disarming. I was a shy girl who didn’t appreciate it, and I avoided him whenever I could.

A year after we met, we ended up carpooling to a church retreat eight hours away. He offered to drive my friend and me. I agreed, mostly because my dad wanted a guy in the car for the road trip. At the retreat, he asked me out. I was so caught off guard that I asked him about a mutual friend I thought he was dating. He said, “What about her? She’s in China.” I genuinely believed he was asking me out while his girlfriend was abroad. A spectacular misunderstanding on both sides. I turned him down, and we went our separate ways.

Later that summer, we drove separate cars full of people to another retreat in Wilmington from Chapel Hill. During that retreat, he asked me out again. I decided to give him a chance. He had just graduated and was heading to law school, so we had only a couple of weeks anyway.

He told me to meet him at the Ben and Jerry’s on Franklin Street in Chapel Hill. I dropped everyone off, then drove straight there. This was before cell phones. I waited. Fifteen minutes. Thirty. Forty-five. No David. I gave up and started walking back to my car, certain I’d been stood up. That’s when I heard honking and someone shouting my name from a passing car. It was him.

I reluctantly stayed for the date, mediocre as it was. I went home unconvinced. We parted ways when he left for law school in Boston. A few months of back and forth followed, and we ultimately decided against long distance. Then, on December 22nd, after a year and a half of misunderstandings, avoidance, and a disastrous first date, we officially decided to be together. And nearly three decades later, here we are.

The other two at that dinner table had their own versions of this story. One described a husband who pursued her for months while she remained uninterested. The other talked about a first date so awkward that he didn’t call her back. It was only by chance that he picked up when she called him. Three happy marriages that might never have happened in the internet age.

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The History of Dating and Connections

I’ve been thinking about how people met their spouses across time. For most of human history, proximity was the algorithm. A sociologist named James Bossard analyzed 5,000 marriage licenses in Philadelphia in 1931 and found that one-third of couples had lived within five blocks of each other before marrying. The probability of marriage fell steadily with increasing distance (Bossard, 1931). A follow-up study in Duluth found the same pattern. You married people who lived extremely close to you, sometimes in the same building.

That started to change after World War II. Friends overtook proximity as the primary matchmaker, rising from about 20 percent of couples in 1940 to a peak of 40 percent by 1990. For more than six decades, your friends were essentially curating your dating life. They knew you and they knew the other person. When you connect two people, what do you share? Not a photo of them or some quote. You share what you have in common, and why they connected you. Any introduction carried implicit information: this person has been seen, and someone who cares about you thinks it’s worth your time.

Then the internet arrived, and that vetting disappeared. Meeting through friends peaked around 1995 and has been declining ever since. By 2013, online dating eclipsed friends as the most common way couples in America meet, according to Stanford sociologist Michael Rosenfeld’s landmark study. By 2024, roughly 60 percent of new couples report meeting online (Rosenfeld, et. al).

This is more than a shift in technology. It is a collapse of context.

When a neighbor introduced you to someone, that neighbor had already witnessed them living their life. When a friend set you up, they knew your quirks and hobbies . The introduction was knowledge transfer. That has been replaced by a profile made up of a few photos and a handful of pithy sentences, a format that rewards the first impression above everything else because there are a thousand more profiles behind this one, and you can always keep scrolling.

We have trained ourselves to decide who someone is in three seconds and move on if they don’t immediately impress us. There’s a strange irony in all of this. We live in a culture that celebrates the slow burn. Romance novels are built entirely around the distance between the meet-cute and the happily ever after. The adversity is the story. Pride and Prejudice without Darcy’s insufferable first impression is just two people who got along fine from the start. Enemies-to-lovers, second-chance romance, opposites-attract reluctant partners: these narrative arcs aren’t about a swipe and a match. They’re about the journey of a relationship.

Relationships thrive in friction and grow through adversity. Yet we have built a dating culture that eliminates every one of those conditions, handing all the power to the first impression and assuming something better is one swipe away.

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The Danger of the First Impression

The first impression is almost always incomplete. And sometimes, as I learned, just wrong.

My mother knew that someone I dated before David wasn’t right for me. She never said a word. When I finally ended it and asked her why she had stayed quiet, she said, “I was afraid that if I objected, it would push you closer to him. I needed you to come to that conclusion yourself.” She was wise enough to know that some conclusions had to be made by myself.

The man in the yellow tie went from someone I found off-putting to someone I built a life with. Our relationship didn’t change overnight, but he kept showing up time and time again. Whenever my kids ask about how much I disliked their father when we first met, I tell them: “Your dad is a fun-gi. He grows on you.” They think it’s hilarious.

Think about the relationships that matter most to you right now. How many of them started exactly the way you expected? How many required patience, a second chance, a willingness to look past the thing that almost made you walk away?

Technology allows us to judge people on very little data. We can write them off because of a photo or a few words. Think about how much less rich our lives are because we judge too fast or cut off too soon.

And then harken back to a world where we see each other as fully. That is what we miss if we judge too soon.

A few weeks ago, I sat down to dinner with a group of executives, founders, and investors in San Francisco, hosted by my friends at MediaMint. It was the kind of dinner that feels completely ordinary here and utterly surreal everywhere else.

We went around the table to introduce ourselves and share how we were using AI. Someone was building an agent to manage their household. Another person was running three agents in parallel before leaving the house, so there would be results waiting when they got home. One executive was using NotebookLM to generate custom podcasts about AI news so she could stay current during her commute. Someone else was using AI to summarize long documents that, as it turned out, may have been written largely by AI in the first place.

There was real excitement in that room. But underneath it, something else was running quietly, like a current.

Fear.

Not fear that AI was coming. Everyone at that table knew it was already here. It was the fear of falling behind. The fear that every moment you weren’t building, automating, testing, or optimizing was a moment wasted. Walking down the street and noticing the trees had somehow become an opportunity cost.

At some point, I looked around and said what I was thinking: “This is very normal for San Francisco. But this is not normal for the rest of the world.”

One investor called it AI psychosis. It’s a dramatic phrase, but I understood exactly what he meant. It’s that feeling that every minute not spent learning, building, or automating is a minute permanently lost. And the strange part is that the people most affected are often the ones who are furthest ahead. Everyone in that room was likely in the top fraction of a percent in their understanding of AI, and yet no one felt calm. No one felt like they had enough time.

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The candy store problem

My friend George Lee, who has spent years working inside some of the fastest-moving companies in tech, described it perfectly. He said working at a cutting-edge tech company is like being a kid in a candy store. Everything looks exciting, new, and delicious. The danger isn’t that you try something. The danger is that you overdo it.

I found myself doing exactly that.

I subscribed to a dozen AI newsletters. I checked LinkedIn and Threads constantly to see what was happening. I tried to follow every new trend and learn every new technique. I told myself I was staying current. I told myself this was what staying relevant looked like.

But I didn’t feel smarter. I felt more behind than ever. As if knowing more had somehow made me more aware of how much I didn’t know. The ocean kept getting bigger the further I swam into it.

That’s the paradox no one talks about. The more you consume, the more there is to consume. The faster the field moves, the faster you have to run just to stay in place.

More efficient, more busy

Someone told me recently that AI had made them significantly more efficient, but also significantly more busy. It was almost as if being able to do more created more to do.

I haven’t stopped thinking about that.

Because it might be the central tension of this moment. AI can help you do more. But doing more doesn’t automatically mean doing it better. When you clear the pile in front of you, you often discover a longer pile hiding behind it. When you remove the friction of starting something, you also remove the natural stopping points that used to make you ask whether it was worth doing at all.

Before AI, if a task took ten hours, you had to make a decision. Is this worth ten hours of my life?

Now, if it takes ten minutes, you just do it. And then you do ten more things like it.

I think about it like a treadmill. You keep adding speed because you can. But a faster treadmill isn’t taking you somewhere different. It’s taking you to the same place, only more breathlessly.

We tell ourselves we’re saving time. But sometimes we’re just filling the saved time with more motion.

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The world is not your LinkedIn feed

Here’s something worth remembering: most people are not doing any of this.

Most people are not spending their evenings setting up their Mac Minis to run OpenClaw. Most people are not using AI to generate podcasts about AI so they can discuss AI at the next event about AI. Most people are not kicking off multiple agents to run tasks while they walk their dog.

Most people are working their jobs, raising kids, caring for aging parents, paying bills, managing a household, and occasionally trying to figure out what everyone keeps talking about. For them, AI is something they’ve heard is important but don’t know where to start. It’s a technology that feels both magical and completely alien.

ChatGPT launched in November 2022. That’s less than three years ago.

Three years after the consumer internet started breaking into broader awareness, it was 1998. Google had just been founded. Amazon was still mostly selling books. Facebook didn’t exist. YouTube didn’t exist. The iPhone didn’t exist. The behaviors and companies that now define our digital lives hadn’t taken shape yet.

We were right that the internet would change everything. We were often very wrong about how, when, and who would lead it.

That’s where we are with AI. We are not at the end of this story. We are in the first chapter. And most of the world hasn’t started reading yet.

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What AI can and can’t do

I believe deeply in what AI can do. I spend my days thinking about how it can transform how we work, remove the drudgery from our jobs, and help people do things that used to feel out of reach.

But I also know what I don’t want.

I don’t want my life to be about hyper-optimization. I don’t want to measure my days by how many agents I ran or how many things I’ve successfully automated away. I don’t want every walk to become a learning session and every quiet moment to become a productivity problem to solve.

I want time to think, to consider, and to strategize. I want scarcity to drive prioritization and prioritization to drive decision-making. I want to sit with a hard question long enough that a real answer emerges, not just the first one.

That is what makes us human. And it is what AI cannot replace.

The most important decisions and epiphanies of my career were not made faster with better tools. They were made in the margins — on a long flight, during a quiet walk, in a conversation I almost skipped, while reading something on a whim. Those moments don’t show up in any workflow. But they are the ones that have mattered most.

The permission you didn’t know you needed

There’s a difference between staying curious and staying frantic. You can engage seriously with AI without being consumed by it. You can be thoughtful about what’s coming without making it the organizing principle of your entire life.

So here’s what I want to offer you, because I needed someone to say it to me.

It’s okay to let some things go. You don’t have to have an opinion on every model release or try every tool. The important developments will find you. It’s okay to protect the pauses, because not every idle moment is wasted — some of your best thinking happens in the gaps. It’s okay to go deep on fewer things, because one tool that actually changes how you work is worth more than ten you sampled and abandoned. And it’s okay to ignore the bubble. San Francisco is not the world. LinkedIn is not reality. Measure yourself against your own goals, not someone else’s performance.

The stillness isn’t a bug in your productivity. It’s a feature.

The real question

AI will make us better at many things. It will reduce repetitive, tedious work. It will change jobs and create new ones. It will help some people do things that used to require an entire team.

But the question was never whether AI can help us do more. It can. The question is what we choose to do with the space it creates.

Will we use every gain in efficiency to add one more thing to the treadmill? Or will we use it to unleash what humans are uniquely suited for — thinking carefully, connecting meaningfully, and spending our time on the things that actually matter?

AI should not make you feel like you’re always behind. Sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is stop running for a minute. Creativity and ingenuity have never come from doing more. They come from making space to think, daydream, and wonder.

That is something AI can’t take away.

Not my face. Not what I was wearing. The cross.

I have worn it for thirty years. My then-boyfriend, now my husband of more than two decades, gave it to me when I was twenty years old, about six months into our relationship. I put it on and have rarely taken it off. I did not choose it as a signal or sign to others. I was not thinking about what I wanted to communicate to the world. I was a college student who received a gift from someone she was dating. Yet for thirty years, it has been one of the most prominent things people notice about me.

Seeing that photo in a classroom full of students stopped me cold, because I had been invited to talk about personal branding, a topic I have always found a little awkward. It can sound like performance, like you are packaging yourself into something slick and marketable. But looking at that photo, I realized something I had never quite put into words before. The most visible part of how people experience me was something I never chose. It was just true.

That is the thing about personal brands that no one tells you clearly enough. You already have one. It is already speaking. The question is not whether people are forming associations about you, because they are. The question is whether those associations reflect the truth of who you are.

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What we broadcast without knowing it

Over the years, that cross has opened more conversations than I can count. People have asked me about my faith, what I believe, and how those beliefs shape my decisions at work and at home. Some who share my faith have told me their own stories. Others who have been hurt by organized religion have opened up about that too. People asked questions and shared experiences. A small piece of jewelry became, without any intention on my part, a doorway into more honest conversations than almost anything I have consciously crafted.

That is not unique to me. We are all broadcasting things we did not deliberately choose. It may be our accent, the way we dress, or the questions we ask. We are being judged whether we remember people’s names or details about them. Some of what people associate with us, we chose intentionally. Most of it accumulated over years of simply being ourselves in the presence of other people.

The point is not to manufacture something that you want to present that is compelling but inauthentic. The point is to pay attention to what is already being received and ask yourself whether it reflects who you actually are.

Jeff Bezos famously said, “Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.” Most people hear that as a challenge: go make sure your brand is positive. But actually, you need to first understand what is already being said.

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The story underneath the signal

During the class, students worked on short personal brand statements, then Professor Flynn called on them to share. Most of the first attempts sounded polished but distant. Good but somewhat generic statements. But they could have stood for anyone, and I asked them, “Make your statement, an N of 1.” Read aloud to your classmates, they should know it is you.

One student shared he wanted to work in consumer packaged goods and help brands tell better stories. That sounded reasonable, but I did not understand why it mattered to him. I asked him to tell me the story behind it.

He explained that many products do not work well for Black men, and he wanted to help companies build and tell stories about products that actually served his community, people who had been overlooked for too long.

The room shifted. What had been a general statement about brand storytelling became something specific, personal, and real. It was about belonging and representation.

Another student said he wanted to work in transportation, maybe the airline industry. Again I asked why.

He told us that when he was young, he moved far away from his extended family, and flying was what kept him connected to the people and places that made him feel rooted. Travel was how he stayed connected to those he loved.

Transportation was not about logistics. It was about the ache of distance and the joy of return, and a child who learned that movement could be a bridge to those he loved.

Both times, I asked the room whether they felt more connected after hearing their why. Both times, almost every hand went up.

Here is what I kept thinking about as I watched this unfold. Neither student had built a brand strategy. They had simply told the truth about their “Why?” and suddenly their brand meant something deeper and more real.

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What this means for you

I have been wearing that cross for thirty years and only recently started to understand what it has been saying on my behalf all this time. It has been telling people about my faith, my marriage, my sense of where I come from, and what I hold onto. I did not plan any of that, but it is just as much my brand as anything else about who I am.

That is the question. Not “what do I want my personal brand to be?” but “what is already true about me that I have not yet put into words?”

Ask people you trust what they associate with you and what stories they tell about you when you are not there. Some of what they say will feel exactly right. Some of it will not, and that gap is worth understanding.

Then ask yourself what you wish they knew. Not what sounds impressive. What is actually true about why you care about the work you do.

The student who wanted to build better products for Black men did not need a brand strategy. He needed someone to ask him one question. The student who wanted to connect families through travel did not need a tagline. He needed to say the true thing out loud.

Most of us already know the true thing. We just have not said it yet.

I did not choose that cross as a signal. I chose it because it meant something to me. And it turns out that is exactly why it resonates with others. The things we carry because they are true are almost always the things that land.

Deb’s Note: From time to time, I bring in guest authors to Perspectives to share their point of view and bring a different take on a topic I want to learn more about. When I first read this piece from Molly, I found myself going back through my own life, thinking about the clubs I am in, the ones I never announced, the ones I carried quietly for a long time before finding someone else who was in them too. There is real generosity in writing something this honest, and I think you will feel that as you read it. I hope it gives you the same thing it gave me: the relief of feeling a little less alone in something you thought only you were carrying.

Life is full of clubs you don’t know exist until you’re in one.

I first discovered this when I had my first miscarriage. It’s one of those binary life moments: either you’ve had a miscarriage, and you know what that experience is like, or you don’t. When I met someone who was in the miscarriage club, I didn’t have to explain why it was hard. They already knew.

That’s what clubs are. When you meet someone who’s in yours, you feel immediately understood. You skip the part where you have to justify yourself. You just... know that they know.

There are so many of these clubs. In work and in life.

The “I got laid off” club
The “children of first-generation immigrants” club
The divorce club
The IPO club
The IVF club
The harassment club
The “I got acquired and had to run the integration” club
The “I had to shut my company down” club
The cancer club
The “I’ve lost a child” clubThe list is actually endless.

It goes without saying that being a member of different clubs varies wildly in terms of both what it feels like and how important it is to your identity. Some of those you’d choose again in a heartbeat. Others you’d give anything to not be in. But either way — once you’re in, you’re in. You keep the membership card forever.

Some clubs carry shame

Some clubs make you want to actively hide that you’re in them.

Getting laid off or fired can feel like a mark you’ll carry forever. I’ve watched a lot of friends go through it — especially at the CEO and C-suite level, where, honestly, it happens a lot. The more senior you get, the more likely you are to get fired at some point. It’s just the nature of a bigger, more public role. Every single time, the person feels like: “this defines me now. No one will ever be able to look at my resume or hear my story without the headline being ‘they got fired.’” UNTIL they meet someone else in the “I got fired” club, particularly someone whose career they admire. Finding other people who have been through it and come out the other side makes such a difference to the level of shame and isolation you feel.

I’ll tell you a story about a club I’m in. A while ago, I took a C-level job at a company that needed to be turned around. It didn’t work. I have carried shame and embarrassment about that role and my feelings of failure ever since — on almost every level. If only I hadn’t taken the job. If only I had gone in with a much stronger, clearer plan. If only I had done a layoff sooner. If only I had asked for X or Y. If only, if only, if only. That kind of failure has a way of becoming a story you tell yourself over and over, and the story is rarely generous.

Recently, though, I was talking to a friend who’d been through something similar — a turnaround that failed. As he walked me through it, I found myself listening differently than I listen to my own story. I could see clearly all the external factors working against him – the bad board, the structural problems that existed long before he arrived. What I saw was that he did some of the best work of his career in an impossible situation. And I thought: there was genuinely no way for him to win.

And then, quietly, my brain said: why is it so easy for me to see that for him and so hard to see it for myself?

Shame clubs make you think you’re the only one in them — and that you deserve to be. The “I failed” club, the “my company didn’t make it” club, the “I was pushed out of something I built” club. These aren’t clubs people announce at dinner parties. And because nobody announces them, you can go a long time thinking you’re the only one in them, when in reality there are people all around you carrying the same thing quietly and judging themselves just as harshly.

The “I’m struggling with my mental health” club. The “my marriage is falling apart” club. The “I burned a relationship I really valued” club. The “I’m drowning financially” club. These aren’t clubs people want to announce.

One of the most powerful things about finding your club — especially the ones with shame attached — is that naming it out loud is often what creates it. The club doesn’t exist until someone is willing to say “me too” first. When you share that you’re in it, you give other people permission to find you.

And once you’re a veteran — once you have some distance from the initial shock and some perspective — you have something valuable to offer newer members. The thing that helped you most when you were in it: someone who already had the words, who didn’t need it explained, who could say “I know exactly what you mean” and actually mean it. Someone who could also help you see the future. I’ve had people do that for me, and I’ve been able to do that for others.

Clubs give you more than comfort; they give you language

The best thing about finding your club isn’t just that it makes you feel less alone. It’s that it gives you language for something you couldn’t previously explain.

People talk about this a lot when it comes to losing someone close to them — a spouse, a parent, a child. That if they’re talking to people who haven’t been through that kind of loss, it can feel like a battle, but when you find someone who has, you immediately feel at ease.

It works the same way at work. The first time I had to do a layoff, I felt like I was carrying something I couldn’t put down and couldn’t describe. I felt shame, anger, guilt. When I finally talked to someone who’d been through one, I didn’t have to describe it at all. They already knew what it felt like. That conversation didn’t give me advice; it gave me words. And the words made it easier.

When you’re in something hard and you can’t find the words, it’s exhausting. Finding someone in your club ends that. You stop struggling to explain. They already have the words, and sometimes, in hearing their words, you understand your own experience better.

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Sub-clubs

Clubs have sub-clubs. And sometimes, connecting with someone in the club but not your sub-club can actually make you feel worse, not better.

A friend of mine was diagnosed with a serious, scary, late-stage form of breast cancer. She found that talking to people who’d had early-stage diagnoses was actually disheartening because her experience was so different. It’s not that the broader breast cancer club doesn’t matter. It does. But the closer someone’s experience was to hers, the more she actually felt understood.

Someone gave me similar advice after I delivered my first child. There’s a club of people who have carried and delivered babies, but there are sub-clubs within that. My friend told me to find people whose delivery was closest to mine, because that specificity matters enormously when you’re trying to understand your own recovery and what comes next.

A relevant work example is acquisitions. There are so many different types of acquisitions, and finding people who have been through one with the same power dynamics or similar deal structure as yours can make a big difference to how relevant the advice is.

The instinct when you’re in the middle of something is to find anyone who’s been through it. And that can be a good start. But it’s worth going further — to find the people whose version most closely mirrors yours. It makes a difference to whether you leave feeling seen or more confused.

Go find your people — the specific ones

Once you understand the idea that there are all these clubs that people are in, you start to see them more easily, even the ones you’re not in.

A few months ago I was at dinner with a close friend. It was the one-year anniversary of her mom’s death — I hadn’t even realized it when we made the plan — and at some point during the meal it came up. She started talking about what the last year had been like, what losing her mom had actually felt like, and I found myself listening in a particular way, carefully, like I was being let into something. I feel lucky that both my parents are alive and healthy, but I know it’s a club I’ll be in someday. One of the ones I’m scared to join.

Recognizing the clubs you’re not in can teach you a lot. What do your friends who are in the “I’ve lost a parent club” wish they had known? If you watch a friend in the “chronic back pain” club it will make you both grateful for your lack of pain and want to do a lot of core strengthening.

Most of the clubs that have mattered most to me are ones I never asked to join. You don’t sign up for the miscarriage club, or the “really extremely fast acquisition” club, or the “taking care of your friend who is dying” club. You just wake up one day, and you’re in it. For a long time, I tried to muscle through those moments alone, like finding other people who’d been through it was somehow an admission that I couldn’t handle it myself. It wasn’t. It was the smartest thing I could have done.

When you find yourself in a club, the most useful thing you can do is go find the other members. Not just anyone who’s been through something similar. The members of your sub-club – the specific people whose experience most closely mirrors yours. Finding them will help you stop hiding or trying to muscle through it. It will give you perspective, tools, and immediate relief.

They’re out there. And somewhere, someone is hoping you’ll find them first — that you’ll be the one who says “me too” and gives them permission to stop carrying it alone.

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Molly Graham - company builder. Lover of weird metaphors. Current work: Host, TED’s WorkLife Podcast. Founder, Glue Club & The Guild. Previous work: Facebook, Google, Quip, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

People would yell at my family to “go back where you came from” while we walked down the street. I brought steamed buns (bao) to school, handmade with my mother, and my classmates questioned why I would eat something so weird. Every difference felt magnified. The food we ate was strange. The heavy accent my parents had made them stand out. The shape of our eyes was unlike that of others. No matter where I went, I felt like a walking billboard for someone who didn’t belong.

So I spent much of my childhood trying not to be seen.

Never fitting in

I tried to be smaller, quieter, and much less noticeable. I figured if nobody paid attention to me, maybe they would stop commenting on how different I was. But not a week went by without some joke, slur, or casual remark reminding me that I was the “other.” Sometimes people meant it maliciously. Other times they treated it like harmless humor. Either way, it made me want to shrink within myself and be invisible.

When I told my parents, they would usually say the same thing: ignore it. They are just ignorant. My parents understood something I didn’t yet fully appreciate. Survival often meant not making waves. When the local Southern Baptist Church didn’t accept our family as members, we left, and suddenly, we became Presbyterian which they remained until their passing. There we found a community and connection. They never let things get to them and moved on without much fuss even though I know it hurt to be rejected.

They had immigrated from Hong Kong to America for college with almost nothing. They built a life here through grit, sacrifice, and stubborn optimism. In our home, we spoke Chinese. We celebrated Chinese traditions. My parents created community wherever they could find it, helping start Chinese school, Bible study groups, and friendships with far-flung Chinese families they found. They joined the Chinese restaurant community.

They were unapologetically themselves in a place that rarely reflected them back. At the time, I didn’t understand their confidence. I couldn’t understand why they thought living in this town was their American Dream. I desperately wanted to blend in and be like everyone else.

Every few years, after saving for a long time, my parents would take us back to Hong Kong. Going from a small Southern town to one of the busiest cities in the world felt like stepping onto another planet. Six million people on an island was a shock to the system for a child who grew up in a town with fewer than 14,000 people. The skyscrapers, billboards, and unending lights felt like another world, but I didn’t fully belong there either.

My relatives told me I dressed too American. I was too tan, too tall, and too fat. The shopkeepers who saw us thought we didn’t understand them when they insulted my sister and me in Chinese because we looked like foreigners. Our Cantonese sounded old-fashioned, frozen in time from the version my parents had brought with them decades earlier. Cantonese, it turns out, evolves. My parents had unknowingly passed down a linguistic time capsule.

In South Carolina, I was too Asian. In Asia, I was too American. For a long time, I thought that tension meant something was wrong with me. Now I understand it differently.

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What it means to be Asian American

Being Asian American often means living between worlds and seeking belonging where you can. We learn to translate your culture, expectations, and identity. You learn when to code-switch. You spend a lot of time lost in translation. But you also learn resilience.

I recently listened to comedian Aziz Ansari talk about growing up in a small town in South Carolina. His family, like ours, found community where they lived, even though they were really different. That resonated deeply with me because so many immigrant families built islands of belonging in places where they otherwise felt alone.

My daughter Bethany interviewed her grandmother before she passed away. During that conversation, my mother-in-law spoke about how grateful she was for America and the life she was able to build here. That stayed with me.

My parents and in-laws all came here for college and ended up spending the next sixty years in America. They were forever foreigners in the eyes of some people. Their accents never fully disappeared. Their traditions remained different. But they loved this country fiercely and devotedly.

They believed in America even when America did not always fully embrace them back. As a child, I thought strength meant blending in. Today, I think strength means something else entirely.

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What it means for the next generation

My kids don’t think that much about Asian Americans. They have all been in Chinese class since they were toddlers, but they resist speaking it unless required to. They love Asian food, but live in a place where it is abundant and accessible.

The other day, one of my kids attended an event, and afterward, she said, “That was the first time in my life I felt like I didn’t belong.” I was confused, and then I realized she had grown up in a community where 40% of her high school looks like her. Never had she felt a sense of alienation and otherness that had marked most of my childhood. And to experience that for the first time as a teen was surprising to me.

It is funny how chinamaxxing became a thing recently. I am bemused at the fact that things that were once considered weird are now sought after. Ube, lychee, and tapioca are things I grew up with, and now they have become mainstream in our culture. The bao that was once weird is now accepted. The dumplings we made at home because we lived too far from an Asian grocery store can now be bought at any supermarket. Now kids all over drink boba and eat eggball waffles.

Progress is a strange thing. It does not erase what came before. The fact that my children can grow up eating bao without shame does not undo the little girl who sat in the cafeteria wishing her lunch looked like everyone else’s. The fact that Asian food, music, books, films, and stories are now more visible does not mean belonging is automatic. It means the aperture has widened to include more ways to belong.

That is what Asian American History Month means to me now.

It is not just a celebration of culture, food, or achievement. It is a remembrance of the people who came before us, who crossed oceans, accepted indignities, and created belonging out of almost nothing. It is honoring those who embraced life in a country that did not always love them back. It is recognizing the quiet courage of parents who told us to brush it off because they were trying to survive, even as we teach our children that they do not have to disappear to belong.

When I was growing up, there was a pushback on being a “hyphenated American”. When people asked me where I was from, I would say “New York.” They would then ask, “No really, where are you from?” I would answer again, “New York.” They would ask, “What are you?” And I would say, “American,” because I refused to give in and use the hyphen.

For much of my life, I thought being Asian American meant living in the hyphen, never fully one thing or the other. Too Asian here. Too American there. Never being good enough to fit in anyplace.

Now I see that hyphen differently. It is the place where my parents’ sacrifices meet my children’s acceptance of who they are. It is where the steamed buns my classmates once mocked become the bao my kids can pick up on the way home from school without thinking twice.

I used to think belonging meant becoming smaller. My father used to proudly tell everyone, “The highest I could aspire to is to be in Congress, but my children? They can be president.” Maybe my parents had it right after all.

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Last week, I had three conversations with people who had each been laid off. Though the circumstances were very different, the emotional experience was almost identical. They were grieving the loss, and each of them began to turn that experience inward.

These were people who, just days earlier, had been operating at a high level. They were leading teams, making decisions, and talking to customers. They went from full calendars, clear purpose, and key goals to silence. The rhythm to their days suspended in mid-air, held in a kind of stasis as everything around them seemed to move on without them. They went from knowing where they fit in that symphony and now inexplicably playing to an empty room.

When I asked each of them what story they were telling themselves about what had happened, the answers were strikingly similar, even though the situations themselves were not. They weren’t talking about strategy shifts or leadership changes or broader market dynamics. They were talking about themselves, about what they must have missed, what they should have done differently, how they could have prevented it.

It was as if they were trying to take something inherently uncertain and make it feel explainable by turning it into a personal failure.

There is something comforting, in a strange way, about believing that if something went wrong, it must have been within your control. Because if it was within your control, then maybe next time, you can avoid it or fix it.

But that isn’t always what’s true.

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How the story affects our actions

Years ago, while I was working with my coach Katia, there was one question she asked me over and over again, often at moments when I was most certain I understood what had happened.

“What is the story you’re telling yourself?”

At the time, it felt almost too simple, like it couldn’t possibly get at the complexity of what I was dealing with. But over time, I realized that the question wasn’t about simplifying the situation. It was about separating what actually happened from the guilt and regret I had layered on top of it.

Those two things are not the same. In moments like this, the meaning we assign can be far more powerful than the event itself. The narrative stood between me and the objective reality, and it colored every reaction and respond I had.

Fighting the wrong war

Someone I trusted introduced me to a product manager they described as “exceptional”. This PM had thrived in their previous role, had strong recommendations, and seemed like exactly the kind of person we would want to bring into the company. I had her brought in for an interview with a team that was focused on her space.

After reading the negative feedback, I requested to interview this person myself. And the interaction was so different from what I expected, so much so that it was almost disorienting. She was guarded, defensive, even at times combative. The conversation felt less like an exchange of ideas than someone who was trying to figure out if I was going to accidentally screw her.

I couldn’t reconcile it with everything I had heard from her reference. Afterward, I followed up with the referrer to understand what I was missing. It turns out that she had just exited a difficult situation with their previous manager. Her trust was shaken and she was trying to avoid being in the same situation again. While that is understandable, her approach to the interviews was a response to the story she was telling herself.

What was protective in one context became limiting in another. She was telling herself that she needed to protect herself, which ended up costing her an incredible opportunity. By fighting the last war, she could not move forward.

How stories become walls and walls become barriers

When something difficult happens, whether it’s a layoff, a broken relationship with a manager, or a moment where things didn’t go the way we expected, we don’t just move on from the event itself. We build a story around it, one that helps us make sense of what happened, and then we carry that story forward into everything that comes next.

It then becomes the reality of what happened. We start showing up based on that reality. Others start reacting to that behavior which then reinforces the story we told. Gradually over time, the story becomes the truth.

There is a difference between learning from an experience and letting it dominate your point of view. Seeing the blind spots for what they are and rewriting the story allows us to break free.

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Rewrite the narrative

For those who recently were laid off, they were living in bewilderment and confusion. For a long time, their careers in tech felt relatively predictable. If you perform well, you grow your career. You advanced and got promoted. There was an implicit belief that things would continue to move forward in a way that was, if not guaranteed, at least directionally consistent. There was stability. That assumption is breaking down.

To make sense of what happened, they each looked inward. They were plagued with “If onlys…” but I asked them to rewrite the story. What if there was nothing they could have done? What if it happened that they were unlucky to be on the project that was cut?

I asked them each to tell me, “What is the story you’re telling yourself?” And each wondered if they could have tried harder or done more. They consider whether they have failed in some way. Perhaps, but perhaps it was truly out of their control, but approaching the path forward with disappointment and anxiety would not make their journey easier.

I asked them to accept what happened as a stumbling block, but to leverage it as a stepping stone to the future. By reframing, it gave them a new way of retelling the story so that they could look forward not back, and would prevent them from fighting the last war.

I wanted them to show up to the next interview without a sense of desperation and fear, but with confidence and assurance of their value. In small and subtle ways, the way they show up would reflect the story they were telling.

If you are stuck, learn to rewrite the story.

1. Write down the story you are telling yourself. Explain what happened both good and bad in a single sitting. Don’t edit or try to optimize. Just get the words out. Tell the story of what happened, including what you did or others did. Consider the actors and what they mean. If possible, consider describing to someone in a video or transcript so it comes more naturally.

2. Read or listen to what you wrote. What was the crux of the story? What feelings did it evoke? Most people notice patterns when they do this. The story is not neutral. It has a point of view, judgement, and conclusions. Right or wrong, it is real.

3. Rewrite it without judgement. What if you shifted the ending to focus away from blame and on learning? What would the story tell you?

The story you tell yourself doesn’t just describe what happened. It determines what you do next and how others perceive you.

You may not be able to change what happened, but you can change the story you carry forward and the actions you take from there. And sometimes, that’s the one thing you need to free you to move forward.

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I recently met Martin Yan, the man behind the long-running, pioneering show Yan Can Cook.

We were at a dinner hosted by Hyphen Capital, brought together by Dave Lu, who has a gift for convening Asian American leaders. It was one of those rare gatherings where every seat held someone with an interesting story, and yet somehow the room still felt intimate, almost like a table full of friends.

I was seated across from Jean, a partner at Cooley who had flown in from New York for the event. Beside her sat Martin Yan. As the dishes from the Chinese banquet began to arrive, I noticed something that caught me off guard. Martin was quietly serving Jean, and then the others at the table, moving from person to person without drawing any attention to himself. There was no announcement, no sense of performance, just a simple act of care from the most recognizable person in the room, surrounded by C-suite executives, artists, and community leaders.

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I leaned over to Jean and joked, “This might be the only time you’ll ever be served Chinese food by Martin Yan himself.” I asked if I could take a photo, and he laughed, playing along, holding a dish mid-air as he posed. He was warm and gracious, completely present in a way that made the moment feel both light and memorable.

3,500 Episodes of Showing Up

As the meal went on, he began sharing stories about his life. He talked about his show, his cookbooks, and his love of travel. At one point, he turned to the table and asked us to guess how many episodes of Yan Can Cook he had filmed.

I thought back to being a kid, standing in our kitchen, watching him on a small television while my mom cooked dinner. She loved watching him because he showcased the dishes she grew up with, even as we lived in a small town in South Carolina where few people looked like us. His show felt like a bridge between worlds, something familiar in a place that often felt foreign.

I knew he had been around for decades, so I guessed maybe a few hundred episodes. Others at the table offered their guesses. He smiled and then said, almost casually, “Over 3,500.”

Three thousand five hundred.

The number was hard to process. If he had filmed every day, that would have been nearly ten straight years of shows. He talked about the pace, filming back to back, traveling for weeks at a time, making it all work in conditions that were far from perfect. When someone asked him how he managed it, he didn’t offer a grand answer or a carefully crafted philosophy. He simply said, “You just have to show up and do it.”

That line stayed with me.

Most People Stop Before They Start

Because not long before that dinner, I had come across a statistic that surprised me. Only 8% of podcasts make it past ten episodes. People start with excitement. They plan, script, record, and launch. They share it with friends, celebrate the beginning, and then, somewhere along the way, they stop.

Not because they failed, but because they stopped showing up.

Persistence sounds simple when you say it out loud, but it is much harder to live. Showing up, day after day, especially when the work feels repetitive or the results are uncertain, requires a kind of discipline that most people underestimate. It is easy to start something. It is much harder to continue when no one is watching, when the payoff is unclear, when the work becomes routine.

And yet that is exactly what Martin Yan did, 3,500 times over.

At a time when Asian Americans were barely visible in mainstream media, he brought Chinese cuisine into homes across the country. For many people, his show was their first and only exposure to a culture they did not grow up with. He made it accessible, joyful, and human, not something distant or exotic, but something that could be understood and appreciated.

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The Woman Who Never Stopped Either

That idea of showing up stayed with me as I thought about another experience I had recently.

I visited Cameron House in Chinatown, a place with a long and powerful history. The building is named after Donaldina Cameron, a woman who, in the late 1800s, dedicated her life to rescuing young girls from trafficking and forced labor. She showed up every day to do work that was difficult, dangerous, and often unseen. When the 1906 earthquake destroyed the building, the work did not stop. It moved and continued, carried forward by those who believed in the mission she had started.

Over 150 years later, that work still continues.

Donaldina Cameron did not know what her legacy would become. She was not building toward recognition or historical significance. She simply did the work in front of her, one day at a time, saving over a thousand girls, hiding them when danger came, and helping them find safety and a new life.

The scale of what she accomplished is extraordinary, but what stands out even more is the consistency behind it.

The same kind of consistency that Martin Yan described so simply at dinner.

You show up. You do the work.

The Phone Call I Never Forgot

I think about this often in my own life. I have done over a thousand coaching calls, including two just last week. People reach out during moments of uncertainty, when they are trying to make a decision or navigate something difficult, and I try to be there for them. There are times when I wonder if those conversations matter in any lasting way.

Then I remember being on the other side of one of those moments.

When I was a freshman at Duke, I once called a law professor, intending to leave a message. Instead, Amy Chua picked up the phone. She didn’t know me, and she had no reason to stay on the line, but she did. She asked questions, listened, and gave her time to someone who was, in every sense, a stranger.

That conversation stayed with me.

Years later, I saw her at a party and almost didn’t go up to her. It felt awkward to remind her of something she likely wouldn’t remember. But I did it anyway, and I thanked her. She didn’t recall the conversation, but she was kind and gracious in that moment too.

It made me realize something simple but important.

You never really know which moments will matter.

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Presence Is the Point

Most conversations fade. Most interactions pass without leaving much of a trace. But every once in a while, something sticks, and it shapes how someone sees themselves or what they believe is possible.

Those moments are rarely planned. They happen because someone chose to show up.

That is what stayed with me most about Martin Yan that evening. It wasn’t just the number of episodes or the longevity of his career. It was the way he carried himself at the table, serving others without hesitation, as if that was the most natural thing in the world.

He showed up for his audience for decades. He showed up for the culture he represented. And in that moment, he showed up for the people sitting around him, one plate at a time.

What Lasts

We often think impact comes from big, visible moments, but more often it is built quietly, through consistency, through presence, through the willingness to keep going when it would be easier to stop.

So much of life comes down to that simple idea.

Showing up, again and again, even when it feels small, even when it feels unnoticed, even when it feels like it might not matter.

Because over time, that is what creates something meaningful.

And that is what lasts.

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When I wrote my first post for Deb's blog, I told you I was the behind-the-scenes one. The sister who didn't need the spotlight. The one who shows up quietly and makes things work. What I didn't tell you was how I got there.

It wasn’t temperament. It wasn’t some zen-like comfort with invisibility I was born with (do I look bossy in that photo above?). It was a skill. Hard-won, sometimes painful, learned-the-hard-way skill that took me from a middle school snack table to a chemical plant in West Texas to a startup Slack channel where I was apparently deploying insufficient emojis.

I have always been the person who sees what could run better and cannot help herself from fixing it. Growing up, that instinct had a name. Not a kind one. Deb was the driven one, the one who aimed for 100, the one who made everyone feel her presence when she walked into a room. I was the oldest, but she was the one people noticed first.

And I was bossy.

That was the word for me. For a long time, I thought it meant something was wrong with me. It took me three very different rooms and about forty years to understand what it actually meant.

Bossy is a skill. And like any skill, it takes a long time to learn how to use it well. Women are twice as likely to be called bossy at work, even though they aren’t more likely to act that way.

Bossy Without Allies Is Just Exposure

“Caroline, you are so bossy.”

I was in 7th grade. He was in 8th. We were at an after-school art club, running a snack sale, and Patrick (not his real name), who had appointed himself in charge through no process I recognized as legitimate, did not appreciate the way I was organizing the cash box and optimizing our revenue per transaction.

I froze. I had spent my entire young life being good. Straight A’s. Respectful. Quiet when quiet was called for. My parents told me to keep my head down and not make trouble. I had worked so hard to make myself small, to take up exactly the right amount of space (not too much, never too much) and still, somehow, I had ended up here: standing in front of a table of granola bars, chocolate chip cookies and rice crispy treats while a boy twice my size told me exactly what he thought of me.

The part that stung most wasn’t the word. It was the crime I’d committed to earn it. I had noticed something that could be done better. I had done it better. And apparently, that was enough to be a problem for Patrick.

Because boys who take charge are leaders. They’re decisive. They have vision. When Patrick positioned himself as the authority over a middle school bake sale with zero credentials and maximum confidence, nobody blinked. But when I, armed with actual math and a reasonable theory about snack pricing, stepped in and made things run better? That was threatening.

Bossy is the word they use when a girl does what a boy gets praised for. It’s the polite version. The grown-up packaging for an old message: you are too much, get back in your lane. Patrick was in 8th grade and said it without dressing it up. The men in conference rooms I walked into later had learned to be more careful. But the message was identical.

I got that message loud and clear at age eleven. And for a long time, I slid back into the shadows.

What I understand now: Bossy without allies is just exposure. The instinct was right. The execution was isolated. Patrick had the room. I had the cash box and nobody was watching my back. That’s not a bossy problem. That’s a coalition problem. The skill wasn’t wrong. I just hadn’t learned how to use it yet.

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Bossy With Strategy Is Power

About a dozen years later, I was a brand new engineer at a chemical plant in West Texas, handed a problem with no obvious solution. We had an anaerobic concrete reactor in the waste treatment unit that needed an internal inspection, but couldn’t be taken offline. It had to keep running while we figured out whether the walls inside were holding up.

So I did what I do. I researched. I cold-called professors who specialized in ultrasonic testing technology, read their papers, tracked down companies working on the problem, and built a case. Then I walked into a room full of Reliability Engineers and proposed a solution.

The response was immediate.

“Caroline, you’re a brand new engineer. We’re not interested in your Star Wars technology.”

The technology worked. It was real, it was tested, and it was exactly the right tool for the job. But I was twenty-something, I was new, and I was in a room full of engineers who were engineers before I was out of diapers. They had been solving problems their way for a very long time.

I’d made the same mistake as the snack table without realizing it. I’d walked in and been right out loud, in front of everyone, all at once. Bossy with no runway. That’s a fast way to lose before you’ve started.

So I adjusted. I found the one engineer who hadn’t crossed his arms, the one who’d asked a question instead of throwing a dismissal. I went back to him one-on-one, without an audience, without anyone’s ego on the line. He got it and once he got it, he became my ally.

Then I brought in an outside expert. Someone with credentials the room couldn’t dismiss, who could say the same thing I’d been saying and be heard differently because of the letters after his name. Was it frustrating? A little. Was it effective? Completely.

The technology was adopted. The reactor got its inspection.

What I understand now: Bossy with strategy is power. This wasn’t less bossy than the snack table. It was bossy at a higher level. I stopped leading with the idea and started building the conditions for the idea to land. The meeting before the meeting is the real meeting. Find your allies before you need them. Brief them privately. Let them arrive already converted. The goal was never to be the hero. The goal was to get the reactor inspected.

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Bossy Is Not a Fixed Setting

I spent the next twenty years applying that lesson. Work the room before the meeting. Find your ally. Let the idea travel on someone else’s credibility when it needs to. I got good at it. Good enough that I built it into an identity. The behind-the-scenes one. The woman who makes things run without needing anyone to notice.

I thought I had finally cracked it. Don’t be too loud. Don’t be too much. Make things run and let others take the bow.

And then a startup made a note about my emoji usage and I had to start all over again.

In 2022, after fifteen years of running our family business, I pivoted into helping startups find their footing. What I hadn’t prepared for was this: for the first time in fifteen years, I was not the one in charge.

I walked into organizations built by people half my age, fluent in tools I’d barely heard of. Slack. HubSpot. AI workflows. A communication culture where tone was conveyed not just in words but in punctuation choices and the strategic deployment of emojis.

I didn’t want to get it wrong. So I did the thing I’d spent years learning not to do. I made myself small. I watched. I said little. I was careful in a way that felt deeply unnatural after a decade and a half of being the person everyone looked to for answers.

And then I got feedback that I needed to soften my tone.

With emojis.🫠

I had spent my career learning to project authority in rooms full of skeptics, and now I was being told that a well-placed 🙌 would do more for my credibility than anything I’d learned in fifteen years of running a company.

I laughed. 😂And then I got to work.

I learned the channels: public, private, and threaded replies. I learned that a message without a single emoji could read as cold to someone who’d grown up communicating this way. I learned that being the least digitally fluent person in the room wasn’t a threat to my identity. It was just a new room to figure out.

What I understand now: Bossy is not a fixed setting. It’s a read-the-room skill. The emoji note wasn’t telling me to stop being bossy. It was telling me the room needed me to show up differently. Bossy in a startup looks like warmth, presence, and engagement. I hadn’t lost the instinct. I’d just forgotten to translate it.

Here’s where I’ve landed, forty-something years after a 7th grader tried to put me in my place over a snack table:

Bossy was never the problem. Bossy without self-awareness is the problem. Every room needs someone who sees what’s broken and can’t look away. The skill is learning how that person shows up.

Alone, bossy is vulnerable. With strategy, bossy is powerful. Translated for the room, bossy is influence.

Most women spend their whole lives being told one of two things: you’re too much, or you’re not enough. It took me three very different rooms to understand that the answer to both is the same. Know your room. Build your coalition. Never apologize for seeing what needs to be fixed. And never confuse the strategy with the instinct.

The instinct is almost always right.

I’m still organizing the cash box. I’m still the person who notices what could run better and can’t quite help herself from saying so. The difference is I’ve stopped treating that as a flaw to manage and started treating it as a skill to deploy. I still work quietly in the background but I now know how to read the room, build coalitions, and how to make things happen.

The world doesn’t need fewer bossy women. It needs more of us who have learned to be bossy well.

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I was six years old when we moved from Queens to a small town outside Charleston, South Carolina.

My parents had spent their entire lives in New York City. Everything we owned was packed into cardboard boxes and loaded onto a truck heading south. My mother asked us to draw lines on the tape so we would know if someone tampered with the boxes. When we arrived at our new house, there was an unused recreation room in the very back of the house where most of the boxes went. Slowly, over months and then years, my parents found what they needed to build their new life in South Carolina. But many stayed sealed.

As we grew up, that back room was always a mess. There were stacks and stacks of unopened boxes that created a fun playground for two mischievous little girls who went to play Hide and Seek and King of the Hill among those boxes.

A few years later, we moved again; this time to a nearby small town with better schools. The mountain of boxes moved with us. This time, they went into the garage. My dad lovingly bought and assembled metal shelves to hold the boxes. I remember the walls lined with them, with dust settling on top. This time, we stayed for 10 years in that house, and many of the boxes remained unopened.

We are what we carry along

When I was seventeen, the naval shipyard where my dad worked was closing, so he was reassigned to another town. This time in Georgia. My mom stayed behind with me so I could finish high school, and I helped prep boxes for the move. One afternoon I noticed a box still sealed with the same moving tags from more than a decade earlier.

I was curious. What could possibly be so important that it survived multiple moves but was never needed?

When my dad came home for the weekend, I suggested we throw it away. If he had not needed it in over a dozen, surely he did not need it now.

He hesitated. What if it were something valuable? So he took a box cutter and opened it. Inside were coils of old telephone wire and equipment, all surplus from when he had worked for the phone company in New York. He had not thought about it in years, and he had never opened the box.

Yet after we looked at it, he carefully taped it shut again and brought it with him to his next home in Georgia.

Clutter is often just delayed decision-making.

When my father passed away fourteen years ago, that same box was still there, but this time their Georgia home. And this time, we discarded the contents that we could not give away. I ended up donating two dozen hats he had collected, at least thirty pairs of barely worn shoes, and all of the trophies from my high school days that I had begged him not to move to Georgia after I graduated.

It is strange how our belongings travel with us. They move from city to city, from house to house. Sometimes they outlast the seasons of our lives that created them.

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Coming full circle

Recently, I have been sorting through our own boxes. We moved last year, but we only took our furniture and three loads of laundry with us. And over weeks and then months, we carefully and gradually only went back to take the things we needed. We kept everything else in the garage as we rented out our home on Airbnb. We decided this year to move it to a long-term rental, so the day finally came when we had to move everything out of the garage.

It has been surprisingly painful. We have all of the things I have avoided sorting through sitting on my patio waiting on me to make the hard decisions. Most of what we own is evidence of a life we are no longer living or had inherited from both my parents and in-laws.

I also found a decorative shell plaque that used to hang in my parents’ bedroom. They bought it on a trip from Asia before they had kids, and now I am not sure what to do with it. I am debating finding a home for it, but I don’t want it to be in a bin forty years from now waiting for my kids to make a decision I couldn’t.

What do we keep? What do we let go of? That is the question.

When my mother-in-law passed away, it happened so quickly. One day she was fine. Within two weeks, she was gone.

Her laundry was still in the washer. Dishes were still in the sink. It was as if her life had paused mid-sentence. The house simply waited for her to return. We packed up her dresses. Her shoes that she had worn only once or twice. The quiet evidence of a life that had been moving forward right until it stopped.

Standing in the middle of all this stuff, I keep asking myself the same question.

How much do we really need?

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How to edit your things and your life

Decluttering is not just about cleaning out a garage. It is about changing how we live.

1. Dedupe
Start by gathering like with like. When we moved, I discovered at least a dozen pairs of scissors scattered throughout the house. I put them all in one place. Standing there looking at the pile, I realized something simple. A household does not need this many scissors.

We often buy duplicates because we cannot find what we already have. The first step to decluttering is sometimes just taking inventory and figuring out what you have.

2. Add, don’t subtract
Decluttering can feel overwhelming because we assume we have to go through everything we own and decide what to remove. That is exhausting. Every object becomes a decision, and every decision carries emotion.

There is an easier way. Instead of starting with subtraction, start with addition.

Find a separate space. It could be a closet, drawer, or shelf. Then begin choosing only the things you truly love and actually use. The items you reach for get put into circulation, and everything else is discarded or donated at the end of 90 days. Clarity often comes not from forcing ourselves to let go, but from intentionally choosing what to keep.

3. Be intentional
Every object takes up more than physical space. It occupies mental space. Before keeping something, ask whether it serves the life you are living today. Not the life you once had. Not the life you imagine you might have someday.

I gave up my ravioli trays because I realized that, as cool as that dream was, I was never going to make ravioli at home. And that’s okay. I gave up my painting supplies and canvases in the same way. Accept that you are changing and your needs are too.

4. Force hard decisions
What I found is that everyone has the “room that shall not be named” where things accumulate, hidden from view. Mine was in our garage, and moving forced it out into the open. Once we had to face sorting through 100 boxes of randomly packed things, we found things we never imagined we even had. There were three crates of brand new baby clothes much of which we passed on to new mothers in need in the neighborhood. I found appliances that were never used (soymilk maker, I am looking at you) and decorative trays and mismatched silverware that just took up space. I found the candle from my husband’s fourth birthday and the baby hats our kids came home with from the hospital. We had just pushed these off to the future us, and now we are facing that decision headon.

5. Keep the memory, not always the object
I have memories from my parents of things they loved, trips they took, and events they attended. But I don’t have space or home for half sets of silverware and platters from long ago. I decided to scan every photo and video tape we had, keeping things that no longer served. Then we sent the items to new homes where they could be loved.

Our parents grew up in a world of scarcity. They saved everything. Our generation lives in a world of abundance. We are surrounded by disposable clothing, online purchases, and abundant possessions.

Our children will inherit not only what we build, but also what we accumulate. We keep objects because they mean something to us, but sometimes they also weigh us down.

Letting go is not disrespect, but rather making space.

Before you go to bed tonight, open one drawer. Choose three things you no longer need. Let them go. Then move forward without the box you never opened.

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In early 2023, a few weeks after ChatGPT launched, I ran an experiment I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.

I fed the model a set of questions from a podcast I’d recently recorded — real questions, the kind that require judgment about leadership, disruption, and organizational change. I told it to answer as if it were me: Charlene Li. Then I had people rate the responses blind, on a scale of 1 to 10, without knowing which answers were mine and which were the AI’s.

The results shook me. On some questions, the AI scored higher than I did. It was more concise, better structured. I outperformed it on the genuinely creative answers such as the unexpected angles, the questions nobody had thought to ask yet. But averaged across the whole set, AI performed at roughly 80% of my level.

I felt like chopped liver. Like my time was already running out.

The anxiety that followed was specific and unsettling. It felt like a new version of “publish or perish,” a race between me and my AI doppelgänger, where every new model release would close the gap a little further. Future fatigue set in. I couldn’t see how to stay ahead of something that was already so close behind.

And then I did something that changed how I saw the whole thing. I looked very carefully at that 20% difference.

What I found wasn’t a list of skills or topics. It was something harder to name. My stronger answers had a different quality — I was reading the emotional timber of the question, digging below the surface to the question that lay underneath it, connecting it to a conversation or idea I’d encountered recently that wasn’t in any AI training set. I wasn’t just answering. I was bringing myself to the answer in a way the model couldn’t replicate, because I was the only one who had lived my specific combination of experiences, relationships, and half-formed thoughts.

That’s when I stopped asking the wrong question.

The wrong question is: Can AI replace me?

The right question is: Who does this force me to become?

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When your foundation dissolves

For most of our careers, professional identity has been built on what we know. For thirty years, mine looked like this: I ran a research and advisory firm, Altimeter Group, with a full team — researchers, editors, a controller, and sales. We produced reports slowly and deliberately. I wrote, spoke, and advised in a traditional manner. That work, and the expertise it represented, was my identity.

Maybe your career looks different. But the foundation is the same: we got promoted for knowing things and built authority on competence.

AI doesn’t just threaten that foundation. It dissolves it. I can now do everything Altimeter did — research, synthesis, content creation — at a pace and scale that would have been unimaginable then. The team I once needed? Agents. And when the foundation goes, so does the identity built on top of it.

I’ve spent thirty years studying how technology disrupts organizations and the people in them — sitting inside the transformation as it happened, not just analyzing it afterward. At Adobe, I watched leaders navigate one of the most wrenching pivots in Silicon Valley history: abandoning the packaged software model that had made them great and betting everything on the cloud. Customers signed petitions. Employees raged internally. People would pull me aside and say, in the same breath, “You won’t believe the amazing things we’re doing and the insane things we’re doing.” But the leaders never wavered. They saw the fear, understood the anxiety, and held the line anyway. That steadiness — while staying deeply human — is what separates leaders who create transformation from those who just survive it.

My central conviction has never wavered: it’s never really about the technology. It’s always about the people. That’s what Dr. Katia Walsh and I found after two years interviewing over fifty executives for Winning with AI: The 90-Day Blueprint for Success, published earlier this week. The leaders who are winning aren’t the most technically fluent. They’re the most human.

I am probably not the first person you would expect to write a book on AI. I’m not a technologist. For most of my career, AI was inaccessible to me: too technical, too opaque, requiring skills I didn’t have. ChatGPT was the first AI tool I could actually use. And even then, it took time. That early version made plenty of mistakes; you couldn’t fully trust it. So when it turned out it could do a pretty decent job of imitating me, my head was spinning. I felt pressure as someone who advises leaders on disruption, I was supposed to have answers. Instead, I had vertigo.

What I’ve come to realize is that this is exactly why I was the right person to write a book on AI. Not despite being a non-technologist, but because of it. If I could find my footing in AI, understand it deeply enough to advise the world’s largest organizations, and build an entirely new way of working with it, so can you.

That’s when I stopped trying to outrun the feeling and started asking what it was telling me. What I heard was this: I had a lot to learn. And so did everyone else. The muscle I needed wasn’t AI expertise I didn’t have. It was adaptability. The ability to learn something new, feel lost, and keep going anyway. I’d been building that muscle for thirty years without knowing it had a name.

I still feel it. In 2025, I tried vibe coding by building a group scheduling app almost entirely through AI prompts. I barely know how to use Terminal on my MacBook. I went in circles for weeks, stuck on things any real developer would have solved in an afternoon. I eventually handed it off to my son, an AI product engineer, who sorted it out in a fraction of the time. It would have been easy to read that as failure. But I’d pushed myself into unfamiliar territory, stayed there longer than was comfortable, and understood the architecture of what I’d built in a way no tutorial could have taught me. The frustration was the curriculum.

I still get imposter syndrome about AI. I probably always will. But I’ve stopped thinking that disqualifies me. If anything, it means I’m still in the game.

If you’ve felt that disorientation, you’re not having a breakdown. You’re having an awakening. The disorientation is the signal.

What leaders actually do

Here’s the distinction that changes everything: managers maintain the status quo. Leaders create change. They step into voids. In every era of technological disruption — the printing press, electricity, the internet — the defining question was never whether things would change. It was who would show up to shape what the change became.

This is that moment.

I know a truck driver, now in his mid-forties, who understood this instinctively. A few years ago, he could see autonomous vehicles on the horizon, not tomorrow, but coming. So he got licensed to transport hazardous materials. His reasoning was clear-eyed: that’s where automation will go last. The regulatory complexity, the liability, the edge cases, it would take decades. He knew that. So he invested in extending the years he could do the job he loves, not by resisting change but by reading it clearly and moving to where it would reach him last.

He’s driving with that license now, though not every run requires it. The full transition is still probably a decade away, he figures. But as someone who genuinely loves his work, he didn’t wait for disruption to arrive at his door. He led himself first.

That’s the sequence that matters right now. Lead yourself first. Then lead others. Then lead your organization. It’s not easy to disrupt yourself, especially when you can see the change coming, which goes against every instinct to protect what you’ve built. But there’s a difference between being swept along by disruption and steering into it. My truck driver friend didn’t wait to find out which one he’d be. He decided.

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Lead it, or it leads you

As AI grows more powerful, the fears grow louder, and they’re not wrong. Nearly two-thirds of workers expect AI to make the workplace feel less human this year. When something feels that large and threatening, the temptation is to step back and let others sort it out.

I understand that impulse. But I’ve come to believe it runs exactly the other way.

AI is being built right now by companies, governments, and individuals with wildly different values and intentions. The leaders who will shape how this goes need to be people who care about how it goes. Here’s the data point that stops me: according to BCG’s AI at Work 2025 report, employee positivity about AI rises from 15% to 55% with strong leadership support. Your presence in this conversation is not a neutral choice.

You can only push back on something you understand. You can only advocate for responsible, ethical use of AI if you’ve actually engaged with it. Avoidance isn’t neutrality. It’s ceding the room to whoever shows up.

What the 20% actually contains

Back to my experiment. What AI couldn’t replicate was the 20% that came from a unique perspective: the unexpected angle, the creative leap, the question that only emerged from reading the emotional undercurrent of what was actually being asked.

That 20% is not a consolation prize. It’s the whole game.

But here’s the risk: it’s easy to let that edge go dull. Not because AI takes it from you, but because you stop reaching for it. When a tool can synthesize, summarize, and structure on demand, the temptation is to stop asking the questions that only you can ask — the ones born from your specific combination of everything you’ve lived, built, and learned. That synthesis isn’t in any training set. It’s yours alone. And it only compounds if you keep investing in it.

What it actually looks like to start

There’s probably something you know you should be using AI for but have been putting off. Maybe you don’t have time. Maybe it feels hard. Maybe you feel like you need to know more before you try.

You already have what you need. It’s called curiosity. Here are three places to start:

1. Use AI to learn how to use AI. Open a tool — ChatGPT, Claude, whatever you’ve been meaning to try and just ask it how to use it. Ask it to walk you through a task you do every day. You are one question away from starting.

2. Bring it into real work, not a test. Use AI on something that actually matters to you this week, a communication you’ve been struggling with, a document you’ve been avoiding. The stakes make the learning real.

3. Do it in public. Use AI visibly, with your team. Make a mistake in front of them. Say “I don’t know how this works yet, let’s figure it out together.”

And here’s what it will feel like when you start: uncertain. Messy. Like you’re missing something obvious.

Good. That feeling is called leading.

Your team isn’t watching for certainty. They’re watching for courage, for someone willing to move toward the unknown before it’s completely mapped. I didn’t have Terminal figured out when I tried vibe coding. I still don’t! But I showed up anyway, and that mattered more than the app I was trying to build.

The identity crisis AI is giving you isn’t a threat to who you are. It’s an invitation to become who you need to be.

So here’s the question I’ll leave you with: What’s the experiment you’ve been putting off and what would it mean for the people around you if you stopped waiting and just began?

Step into it.

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Charlene Li is the co-author of Winning with AI: The 90-Day Blueprint for Success (with Dr. Katia Walsh), available now. She is a New York Times bestselling author and one of the leading voices on leadership, disruption, and digital transformation.