it frustrates me so much because my mind and body are recovering from coming into agreement with the artificial hustle. we call it the pace of unbelief, this idea that if we slow down, everything everywhere is going to fall apart, and things won’t work out. this lie and their operating system runs entirely on our exhaustion.

after nearly four years of being independent, i still constantly have to unlearn and deconstruct from this everything is crazy, everything is urgent, everything matters pace that we were indoctrinated into.

whenever I feel that old panic energy creeping back in, I have to remind myself of my peak corporate insanity: the time that i rescheduled my brain scan to moderate a Clubhouse room with Reese Witherspoon, Zoe Saldana and Tiffany Haddish.

ok so, it was November 2021, i was working at Clubhouse and we are hanging on by a thread and working 24/7. but it wasn’t necessarily because leadership was being all maniacal about working us to death, we just had a super unique situation going on.

Clubhouse is an always-on social platform with users all around the world. so there is always something happening. good, bad and ugly. because we were a live social audio app, the only way to experience the community was through active listening. it’s not like Twitter or something where you could passively scroll through tweets and see what’s going on. when you are on Clubhouse you had to be present in the room and really listen. and there were so many eyes on us everywhere…from competitors, to press, our creators, and everyone watching to see what would happen with us. at the time, we were literally the most written about startup ever. but we were also just a startup. so everyday we did everything we could to build new systems, infrastructure and solve new problems that were coming up as fast as humanly possible.

it created this lethal around the clock work schedule for us. i was fortunate because i had just moved to Atlanta and was now on est. and since we were a fully remote company, hq was SF based in pst. my day looked something like…wake up at 6a, help my daughter to get to school, have an undistracted work block from 8a to noon, be in back-to-back meetings until 7p est and then moderate, host, participate or listen in rooms until midnight. and sometimes be woken up in the middle of the night with news of a crisis in South Korea. oh, and we also hosted a townhall on the app with thousands of people on Sunday morning. so of course, we needed to prepare throughout the weekend and Saturday night. it was crazy.

and so over time, that schedule is going to start to wear down anyone. but when you think about the compounding nature of 15+ years of working in high performance, we-needed-that-document-yesterday kind of cultures, single momhood into bad marriage back to single momhood, and working and leading through a pandemic. i shouldn’t have been surprised when my body was like, girl, no.

i distinctly remember driving through Atlanta after having lived there for about four months. as I was driving, i had this almost hallucinatory moment where reality suddenly hit me that i actually lived in Atlanta. prior to that, i must have been in some cortisol induced transient state, like I was only passing through. I remember thinking, oh my god, i live in Atlanta. how did I even get here?!

for the first time in my life, i started getting the most debilitating migraines. and i was not a migraine person. and these were the can’t-open-eyes, can-stand-any-light, hiding-under-the-blanket, edm-rave-throbbing migraines. my eyesight was blurry. i couldn’t eat. i couldn’t sleep. nothing. this went on for days.

i’m the kind of person who refuses to take over-the-counter medication because i want to feel the intensity of my symptoms to know where i really am in my medical crisis. i was still leading the Zoom meetings camera off from bed, looking at my laptop screen with my sunglasses on, under the covers, still pushing through.

we came up in a time where we just normalized all of this stuff. emailing and slacking at all of the hours of the night was normal. waking up to 13 unread text messages from your boss on Monday was normal. emailing from vacation was normal. and pushing through the feeling of being deathly ill and saying it’s fine was also normal.

at some point, i start to realize ok maybe this is really bad and went to the urgent care down the street. the kind folks there were able to prescribe me something decent to reduce the pain, but it was short lived. when i called back to update them, they recommended i get an MRI because i never had a history of migraines. they emphasized how important it was to check for masses and increased intracranial pressure. so ofc, i go on webmd and convinced myself that i have a tumor, potentially brain cancer and might die. i was able to get a scan scheduled for the next day at an outpatient imaging center near the urgent care after begging the front desk lady and pleading with her that i might not make it.

later that night, i get a call from Chelsea, our entertainment partnerships lead. she is this brilliant British gal whose job it was to convince interesting people in Hollywood to promote things and have conversations on Clubhouse. and the platform was struggling. these were the real headlines at the time:

Inside the Rise and Fall of Clubhouse, a Pandemic Poster Child…

Twitter Spaces, Facebook, and Spotify Are Eating Clubhouse’s Lunch…

Clubhouse Co-Founder Opens Up on Growing Pains…

growing pains was an understatement. the team was starting to lose morale and we could sense that we didn’t have much longer before our top players started looking for other jobs. so when an opportunity came through that could combat the narrative and prove our relevance, we did everything we could to maximize it.

hey, i need you moderate a room tomorrow late afternoon with Reese Witherspoon, Zoe Saldana and Tiffany Haddish, she said. we’ve been working on this one for awhile and it’s locked in. we need a strong host to facilitate and hold court with them… you are the only person who can do it.

when someone says, you’re the only person who can do it, it is the equivalent of professional foreplay.

it never even occurred to me to say, no i’m sorry. i have a medical emergency. i think i have a brain tumor. and i’m not available. the automatic corporate conditioning and urge to sacrifice myself at all costs for the company kicked in and without hesitation i said, yes ofc. i’ll be there. add it to my calendar and send me the talking points.

i had to do it for Chelsea. for our team. for Clubhouse. i had to be there for Reese.

in the middle of another migraine haze, i called the outpatient imaging center back. i got the same lady at the front desk that i begged to prioritize me only a few hours earlier. with a laughable level of seriousness, i said back to her, hey i’m sorry, i need to reschedule my MRI because i have to host a Clubhouse room with Reese Witherspoon tomorrow.

the corporate workplace maintains its power through an operating system of fear, chaos, and an unrealistic pace. it does this incredible job of seducing us into believing we are indispensable, while simultaneously reminding us that we are completely disposable. this produces a perpetual panic loop. it preys on our work ethic, our innate desire to be great, and need to be wanted and valued. the system has mastered telling you two conflicting messages at once: only you can do your job, and anyone can do your job. to resolve that inner tension, we willingly agree to a frantic, inhumane pace just to prove we are needed and that we won’t be thrown away.

for me, the panic sounded like if I don’t do everything i possibly can with every hour available to me, Clubhouse will fail, and it will be my fault. which is crazy. there were a so many forces at play determining whether we would survive. but the truth is, I was too terrified to say I wasn’t available. and that fear was entirely internal. when I actually did bring it up, my boss was usually great. he’d say things like, take the day, it’s okay, we have your back.

work is the leading cause of stress. stress is the leading cause of disease. and work is where we spend the majority of our waking hours. so if we spend the majority of our lives in a chronically stressful, frantic environment, sickness becomes inevitable.

the system wants us to believe we can’t slow down. because if we ever paused, even for a moment, we would realize just how crazy, wasteful, and ultimately unimportant so much of this really is. because the system isn’t going to change, you have to change.

you have to realize that your health is your most important currency. without a healthy body, you can’t do anything of things you desire or hope for. you have to believe in your own talent, your own capability, and trust that you will always be okay, even inside a system that is actively trying to convince you otherwise.

so please, pause. slow down. get the MRI scan. go to the doctor. take the mental health day. book the therapy appointment. turn off your phone. and go on that vacation. use up all of those premium benefits. because they will have no problem using you up. the company will survive without you, but you can’t survive without you.

sending u so much love,

m

i can feel the fall weather slowly making its arrival. Kevin and I got caught up binging Million Dollar Nannies on Hulu on Friday, thanks to a rec from my daughter and Hulu dropping straight into it after the last episode of Project Runway. has anyone seen it? it follows a group of elite celebrity nannies setting up an agency in Ibiza for the world’s 1%. it is unbelievably ridiculous, and a juicy workplace drama with all the works.

also, still can’t believe Dolly is gone 😩

this week, it’s been rough for brands. it just feels like everything is getting way worse, which maybe means it’s darkest before dawn?

it is really hard to watch Target, one of my favorite beloved brands, become a leading candidate for a Harvard Business Review case study about the cautionary tale of the financial, socioeconomic and cultural impact of betraying black consumers who once loved you.

i have some thoughts for the current Target CEO, Michael Fiddelke, but first…

five things you need to know right now about the culture of work…

• Karen Attiah got her job back after being fired by The Washington Post for having an opinion as an opinion writer, an independent arbitrator just ordered the paper to reinstate her immediately with full back pay. we wrote about the implications her win may have on the future of unions.

• to stop the trial over the child and teen tech addiction, Meta abruptly agreed to pay a historic $17b settlement with 47 states. this massive deal forces major changes to FB and IG, including mandatory nightly access blocks and strict two-hour scrolling limit for teens.

• Lovesac foolishly clapped back at its own customers after the CEO posted a sarcastic video mocking someone who complained about the grueling assembly process for his $7000 couch. then the brand account doubled down, triggering a massive PR disaster that ended with deleted videos and a public apology.

• Golf giant Callaway completely imploded its lucrative partnership with Good Golf after greenlighting an ad that depicted a male golfer physically shoving a female player to the ground. major retailers like Dick’s Sporting Goods and Target (ironic) instantly pulled all co-branded merchandise from shelves, forcing Callaway to cut ties and pledge $1 million to women’s safety organizations to stop the bleeding.

• the high-profile female exodus continues at Open AI. Chief Revenue Officer Denise Dresser and robotics head Caitlin Kalinowski bring the total number of prominent women departing the company’s top ranks to six.

dear Michael Fiddelke... (the current CEO of Target)

you know things are bad when Academy Award-winning actress Viola Davis is screaming at you on the internet. God bless the comms person who crafted the apology and said, guys, we cannot even skate around this, we just have to own it and say, ‘we know we messed up.’ that was very wise and i sincerely hope they didn’t have to fight to get that approved.

this is the part that is so hard for me to reconcile… Black people universally loved you. and it is so rare for a brand to achieve that status within our community. we gave you the nickname tar-zhay. we had so much pride in wearing the classic red polo as a first job. and as the fastest-growing group of entrepreneurs in the world, it was a badge of honor for Black women to get partnerships and distribution inside Target. you were a north star.

you were a fundamental part of our weekend routines. some of my favorite memories as an early mom were getting up and going to Target with my daughter and grandmother with no other intention than to just browse and wander. every weekend. for hours. spending money we didn’t need to spend. the holy grail of retail.

i’m not sure if you fully realize that Minneapolis has become a political mirror for the country, representing exactly where America stands today. growing up there, i always loved the city’s underrated superpower…a fierce, underlying political current that most outsiders didn’t notice until recently.

since 2020, our hometown has become the epicenter of national activity. when the crisis of police violence reached a breaking point, Minneapolis became the powder keg with George Floyd, sparking a global reckoning. two years ago, Governor Tim Walz was chosen as Kamala Harris’s VP pick in one of the most consequential campaigns of our time. last year, when a radicalized gunman targeted our state leaders, tragically killing Speaker Melissa Hortman and severely injuring Senator John Hoffman, it exposed the terrifying reality of incited political violence. and earlier this year, after Renee Good was shot and killed by ICE agents, protests erupted with Minnesotans marching in sub-zero weather to fight for justice.

and Michael, i’m not sure if you know it, but you all represent something politically too: the cowardice and lukewarmness of our corporate leaders in this political era.

there are only really three kinds of people: the fearful and insecure who are deeply afraid of progress, the brave and courageous people who fight for progress and the lukewarm people who just pretend none of it is happening and are too paralyzed to pick a side.

now your predecessor, Brian Cornell, clearly picked a side. the second he experienced even an ounce of political pressure to rollback dei stuff, he was quick to be like ok, we’re done! we all saw what happened next, you lost billions in market cap and bore the brunt of one of the longest Black boycotts in modern history. his actions produced results that proved he chose the wrong side because it literally tanked the business. so he had to go, and you got appointed.

and since you’ve been in office, it’s clear you’re trying to engineer a corporate turnaround by avoiding the so-called political stuff. so you don’t mention the dei policies at all. you stayed completely silent when your own employees and the teachers’ union demanded answers about ICE operations on Target properties. instead, you stick to the script, repeating corporate talking points about reclaiming your “merchandising authority,” elevating the guest experience, and driving efficiency.

but this is what i don’t understand… your moat and competitive advantage has always been your brand and your reputation. you don’t have a supply chain advantage or a proprietary technological innovation. your value is determined by how we feel about you.

while Black consumers may only represent 10% of your customer base, we control over $2 trillion dollars in purchasing power and hold the keys to the brand and cultural relevance kingdom. we are the cultural gravity that makes Target cool to the other 90%. and because brand reputation is your only real differentiator today, a betrayal like this is a lagging indicator. it won’t immediately show up in the hard metrics. constantly focusing on short-term quarterly targets like comparable store sales, guest traffic and inventory turns won’t fix a broken brand. it’s a critical blind spot. and i’m sure your CI and brand teams have been desperately trying to flag to you.

in order to maximize shareholder value, you have to regain the trust and love of the Black consumer. and because Black people, and particularly Black women, are currently under political attack, trying to remain neutral is a wild strategy. you have to take a stand. even Milton Friedman would tell you that if your brand relies on cultural trust, protecting that trust isn’t a political distraction, it’s your fiduciary duty.

idk, business leaders have convinced themselves that dei is just a warm, do-gooder feeling. but it’s not. it’s an economic advantage and multiplier. just look at your competitor Costco. they doubled down and the stock has gone up, been up and stayed up. and their CEO has publicly declared that their decision to double down is the reason they’re experiencing explosive growth, unprecedented employee retention and deeper trust with their customers.

by acting as an apolitical operational corrective you are actually being fiducially irresponsible and leaving money on the table for shareholders, yourself and your employees.

and the most devastating, unspoken tragedy of this story is the deep loss of morale and faith your employees must be experiencing.

there is no greater joy than waking up every day to work for a company you love. one that genuinely stands for something good in society. it is the very thing everyone is searching for: a place you can be proud of, an identity you are excited to share out loud with friends and discuss in private moments with your family. our work sits at the absolute epicenter of our lives. it is where we spend the majority of our time, and the experience we have within your walls dictates and determines the quality of our lives outside of them.

when Target turned its back on dei efforts, leadership unknowingly shifted the entire life trajectory of its workforce. over the last eighteen months, your Black employees, especially, have had to bear witness to something they love turn into something they hate. that shift manifests in heavy, deeply personal ways.

it starts on Sunday evening. where employees used to look forward to the week ahead, they are now consumed by an intense, paralyzing anxiety as they think about re-entering your environment tomorrow. all week, they have to walk through your hallways while your white colleagues stare at you with immense guilt in their eyes. the nausea, the sleepless nights, the dread of logging onto a meeting just to navigate the gross negligence of their peers and leaders is exhausting. and because the job market is incredibly difficult right now, they cannot afford to leave. they have to grin and bear it.

and then when they are looking for relief on the weekend, they have to figure out how to cleverly withhold where they work, because the brand has become an embarrassment and a public joke. they are forced to actively manage crisis communications in their own personal lives, fielding texts from relatives and family members wondering what the hell is going on over at Target?!

the feeling of being trapped and contained in a place they were once so enthusiastic to sign up for has turned a dream job into a psychological prison.

now you haven’t asked for my advice, but i’m going to give it anyway. here are 5 things i would do immediately to start the process of repairing trust with the people who matters most right now, which are your employees…

1. fire Cara Sylvester immediately and every single person within the merchandising org that could’ve touched this project. including by not limited to the agency or internal person who pitched it, the person who over saw product details, the creative marketer, the comms lead the hr person attached to the org, everybody. has. to. go. now. i don’t care that Cara is a longtime Target employee who rose through the ranks. there had to be at least 10 levels of approval internally for this and every single person missed it. someone at the very highest levels needs to be held publicly accountable. any other employee would be fired for less.

2. after firing the people involved with the project, then care for the family that is the victim of this project. personally call the Black family who’s child that was, apologize and give them a ton of money for the present and future damages this has caused. there is real emotional damage and distress this family is experiencing right now. i’m not sure if they knew what they were signing up for. but even if they did, they should not have been put in that situation in the first place.

3. once, everything on the project has been handled, halt anything and everything Black from going out the door until you’ve personally been able to review it. this should feel inconvenient and impractical, because it is. the best way to learn what’s really going on is to get your hands in the work immediately. this means any image, product, partnership or campaign that’s in the works. you cannot afford another misstep, Michael. since you all stripped all dei infrastructure, you do not have the internal mechanisms and you do not have the right people in place you can trust. trust is built on character and competence. somewhere along the line, the character of the people in your organization decided this was okay, and there was absolutely zero competence to stop it.

4. only after you have taken those first three actions can you gather your Black employees for a genuine apology in both word and deed. prove your apology is real by offering your salaried Black employees a minimum of three months of paid mental health leave, and give immediate hazard pay to your Black retail staff on the store floors. do not look them in the eyes and apologize if you haven’t properly handled firing the people on the project and caring for the family involved. and do not make them do the labor of submitting FMLA leave on their own. do it for them. they don’t need any more gaslighting. and hope and pray they aren’t gathering their collective therapist and doctor notes to file a class-action lawsuit against you for the hostile work environment they’ve had to endure and exist in.

5. begin the process of pulling together the definitive business case for your board on why you’re going to reinstate some kind of effort to double down on Black employees and Black consumers. make it clear that this is the most viable option to continue to generate billions in market value over the next 10 years. this should include everything from hiring Black executives at the highest levels of leadership, to launching authentic partnerships, and heavily investing in targeted marketing and brand protection. let them know at the next vote you are going to vote on issuing a transparent public apology for the harm Target has caused and then, you are going to get to work.

Michael, don’t just be the CEO that just manages business metrics. be the one who builds a legacy that’s worth being remembered for. a turnaround is possible. nothing is ever too far gone. you can keep playing it safe. or you can choose to save your brand. but you cannot do both.

sending u so much love,

m

it’s so rare that there is a public figure that is so universally loved by all ages and all races. she felt like a living embodiment of joy and kindness. and in an era where keeping our own spirits bright feels like a daily battle, her departure is more than a loss of life. it feels like the loss of a guiding beacon of light. imagine living life in such a way that when you go, the world feels a little darker. i think it’s the delicious, satisfying fruit of a life well lived and doing what you came here to do.

we immediately started playing 9 to 5 on the speakers yesterday. Dolly was lethal with her pen. a master storyteller dripped up and draped down in rhinestones. this is the supremacy of the written word. whenever we need to feel her warmth, match her grit or experience her love again, we can always return to her words.

and her words in 9 to 5 feel more relevant than ever:

workin’ 9 to 5, what a way to make a livin’

barely gettin’ by, it’s all takin’ and no givin’

they just use your mind and they never give you credit

it’s enough to drive you crazy if you let it

9 to 5, for service and devotion

you would think that I would deserve a fair promotion

want to move ahead, but the boss won’t seem to let me

i swear sometimes that man is out to get me

…speaking of men out to get her.

this week, we’ve been celebrating journalist ’s victory over The Washington Post. Karen is an opinion writer. and if you haven’t been following the story, last year in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s death, Karen essentially posted her opinions about it all. WashPo got upset and didn’t like her opinions. so they found just cause and fired her because they said she violated their social media policy. everyone, everywhere said, wait… you’re firing the opinion writer for her opinions? it felt unjust. because it was. and the uproar was immediate. and she fought back.

The Golden Hour by Karen Attiah

The Washington Post Fired Me. I Fought—and Won My Job Back.

Last spring, I was sitting on the couches on the 7th floor of the Washington Post, fighting back tears…

Read more

9 days ago · 1326 likes · 184 comments · Karen Attiah

and, almost a year after her sudden firing, Karen announced she won and got her job back. The Washington Post has been ordered to reinstate her immediately with full back pay and benefits. they also don’t realize that their attempt to silence her only produced a bigger platform. over the last year, she’s gained nearly 60,000 subscribers on Substack, launched courses and has continued to uplift her voice and bring light to issues that matter most. the literal definition of preparing a table in the presence of your enemies.

Karen was able to win this fight because she was a part of a union. and in today’s climate where the modern workplace is breaking and there is so much cultural intimidation, lack of accountability and obsession of power and money from our leaders, it made us think, should we be pushing and pursuing unions more aggressively?

i dropped the question into our ftl subscriber chat to get some thoughts from our community, and the brilliant NY attorney, , confirmed our thinking. she said, I used to practice employment law and I honestly think, in today’s world, unions are one of the last pieces of protection employees have.

now unions are something that historically have had old school, blue-collar connotations. originally created in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they were there to protect employees from crazy workplace conditions. and were used to equip workers to demand a better living wage, 8-hour workdays and basic workplace safety.

today, the number of unionized workers has jumped to nearly 15 million people, the highest raw count in over 15 years. and the people driving the change are young people.

the kids are alright

gen z is the most pro-union generation in decades. and historically, young people were the least likely to care about unions. but today, 88% of adults under 35 approve of labor unions, the highest of any living generation.

and of course they would. they are entering a broken job market. they are existing in skyrocketing housing costs, student loan debt and flat wage growth. so many young people are finding themselves either unemployed or trapped in jobs that aren’t working. they are realizing faster than us that the social contract we have with work is broken and the promise of work hard and you’ll be taken care of is bullsh*t a myth.

they are organizing in the most modern, cool way. unlike the old folks who waited for a top-down union rep to save them, young people are like, hold my beer. they are using platforms like Signal, Telegram, Slack and Discord to share salary data, organizing templates and communicate outside of corporate structures. they are galvanizing and breaking down labor laws on TikTok.

this generation actually believes in the power of dei and workplace fairness is not just about higher wages and better benefits for them. they feel like it’s a necessary, legal check on corporate power that has gotten out of control.

when unions come to the valley

the place unions haven’t quite taken hold of yet is silicon valley, but it feels like they could be next because tech employees realize there is no loyalty and no mercy there either.

Kickstarter became the first prominent tech company to unionize. this happened in 2020. when their initial contract expired, they went on a 42-day strike to protect the 4-day work week and block leadership from deploying unvetted AI tools and they also secured higher base salaries.

companies like Google and Apple have not been as supportive when they hear their employees start to organize. this might be part of the reason everyone wants to start monitoring all employee communications. we’ve seen tactics where they will find convenient reasons to fire staff who are leading pro-union discussions. or try to delay, delay, delay and drag their feet on contract negotiations for months, even years trying to kill momentum.

but we shouldn’t be surprised to see far some of these companies will go to avoid unions. companies like Spacex and Amazon (no surprise) have faced so many unfair labor practice charges that they are attempting to dismantle the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) itself and deem it unconstitutional.

because they know if we realize the leverage we actually have, their era of corporate dominance becomes compromised.

we are at the mercy of at-will

today, about 80% of us are at-will employees, which means that our bosses can legally fire us for any reason without a single day of warning or severance.

we talk about this all the time here on ftl, but so many of modern workplace practices were created in the 19th century, back around slavery y’all. and at-will is another of them.

manufacturing and railroad giants wanted total flexibility to scale-up and downsize overnight. so they worked with judges to come with the concept of freedom of contract. which essentially means that it is fair for workers to quit whenever they want and bosses should also have the freedom to fire whenever they want. but it COMPLETELY ignored the obvious power imbalance, leaving us to fend for ourselves unless we had a private union contract.

ironically, the only state in America where this isn’t true is Montana. which happened in 1987 because courts were handing down massive payouts to wrongfully fired workers. so companies were like, hold up. we don’t want to keep paying this much. so they created a good cause job projection and probation period for workers and businesses got a cap on how much they could be sued for. as a result, managing employees in Montana is completely different than the rest of the country.

and btw, we are the only country in the world that operates like this. in almost all of Europe and the most powerful countries in Asia, at-will employment doesn’t even exist. once we again, we are on the global stage looking crazy.

i’m not saying you should start a union…

but let’s just say you were interested in starting one…

1. you form a secret organizing committee with trusted coworkers, maybe on Signal or Telegram or Substack dm’s…not on company tech.

2. you quietly collect signed Union Authorization Cards until you hit at least 30% of the staff.

3. once you have the cards, you ask management for voluntary recognition. when they inevitably say no, you take those cards to the NLRB (praying it doesn’t get dismantled) to schedule an official election.

4. finally, a neutral secret-ballot vote is held, and you only need a simple majority of whoever actually turns up to vote to legally unionize the whole workplace.

so for instance, if your company had 100 employees, 30 people would need have Union Authorization cards. but let’s say only 20 people showed up to vote, you only need 11 people to vote yes for the entire place to be unionized.

ok… too much too soon?

to support the modern labor movement, vote with your wallet and support unionized shops. respect picket lines when workers risk everything to go on strike. vote on the ballots for policies that actually protect the person over profit. practice quiet, powerful solidarity at work. talk openly about your salary. transparency is the first thing corporations try to kill because they know information is power. when you see a manager unfairly targeting a co-worker, don’t look the other way. and if you are an entrepreneur, prioritize generous and healthy workplace policies from inception.

because the truth is, we are not protected in the workplace. and as the power imbalance continues to widen, the small protections we have are at risk.

not to get too deep, but i sometimes forget MLK jr was assassinated once he got deeper into the labor movement. isn’t that interesting?

i’m so so deeply grateful that Karen Attiah had a union contract protecting her when Jeff Bezos The Washington Post tried to silence her voice.

it’s not lost on me that Dolly Parton was singing about the literal plight of the everyday worker in one of her most popular songs that won two Grammys and was nominated for an Academy Award. maybe it’s so popular because it represents one of our greatest universal pains. our workplace pain. we will always love you, Dolly.

idk, if they don’t feel the need to protect us, maybe it’s time we start protecting ourselves.

just a thought.

sending u so much love,

m

sources:

https://postguild.org/faq/

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.nr0.htm

https://www.epi.org/publication/workers-resolve-drives-increase-in-unionization-in-2025/

https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/the-law/employees/social-media-0

https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/washington-post-ordered-reinstate-columnist-karen-attiah-nyt-reports-2026-08-24/

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/18/technology/kickstarter-union.html

yesterday was my birthday. 41. a dear friend said over facetime, you are now officially in your 40s. grateful to be here and reside in this decade for a min. until recently, i hated my birthday. it always felt like something to get through instead of something to look forward to. but that’s changed because i’ve finally got the people part of life right. had a gorgeous day celebrating and felt deeply loved.

last week, we heard from dozens of women in response to our essay about the cautionary tale of the well-intentioned manager and how important it is to not surrender your psychological sovereignty at work. and while it’s validating to know we’re not alone, the resounding chorus of i’ve experienced this many, many times leaves us with a more sobering question: if this exhaustion is universal, what is the way forward?

well, we have to get really real. and talk about how women everywhere are systematically being evicted from the workplace. but first…

five things you need to know right now about the culture of work…

• nearly 25% of US workers are functionally unemployed. this includes people who are looking for a job, involuntarily working-part time and are earning poverty-level wages, or less than $26k annually before taxes.

• 58% of Americans would turn down a promotion that required them to be available outside of working hours or interfered with work-life balance, even if it came with a bump in pay.

• Eleven years after Hayden Panettiere was retaliated against for disclosing her postpartum depression, Neutrogena admitted they made her feel unsupported following intense public backlash surrounding the actress’s death.

• P&G is the latest company to bet on employees as creators. Chief Communications Officer Damon Jones hinted at the cultural shift following the Cincinnati Music Fest. after showcasing internal talent, Jones openly questioned whether employees are actually an organization’s greatest creative asset.

• Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing, a new Netflix documentary from Rory Kennedy, examines the devastating consequences of prioritizing profit over the safety of people. the film highlights the immense courage of today’s modern heroes — workplace whistleblowers, offering a devastating, enraging yet inspiring look at those risking their careers to expose corporate greed.

women are being evicted out of the workplace.

last Thursday night, i chose violence i was scrolling on LinkedIn and commented on a post by the CEO of Chief, Alison Moore, that agitated me. she posted the alarming stat that’s been circulating this month, women accounted for 100% of the labor decline in July.

my first reaction was to double tap in solidarity. but as i kept reading some of the supporting text that accompanied the perfectly polished graphic in Chief’s green and light gold branding, i felt a divine agitation.

…the report doesn’t explain the 100%...it’s helpful, but stops short of naming root causes....we must better understand root causes...I wish I had the answers. But I do know it’s exactly why the work we do at Chief matters more than ever before right now. Networks. Encouragement. Support. Partnership…

by the end, that thing activated in me where i have to say something. this is the same trait that got me in trouble most of my career. so i asked…respectfully,

i’m curious what chiefs mission is right now. what is the job to be done with the organization today for the people it serves and society in broader terms. not the subscriber number that drive your growth…

and because i was fueled by the exhausting cocktail of late-luteal hormones and early-perimenopause insomnia, i woke up at 1a to a pitch-black room, reached for my phone and to my delight and saw Alison responded:

maya watson I appreciate the question- and will give you the short answer— Chief has and will continue to evolve to meet our women leaders where they are. Right now, our focus is on keeping senior women’s expertise in the workforce by helping them navigate through ( increasingly!) non-linear career paths. That shows up in many ways: coaching, community, connection and more. 💚

for the next 45 minutes, i fired off three additional comments that began with, i say this with deep love and respect… idk, maybe it was the hormones. maybe i was tired. or maybe it’s the fact that women at work are facing a structural emergency and we’re not ringing the bell loud enough.

we are in a full blown crisis.

and the July jobs report was just icing on an already disgusting cake. what worked for women’s advancement in the last season is not even going to come close to cutting it in this season. let’s paint the picture of the moment…

the systemic eviction began in earnest last year with a coordinated attack on Black women, who were pushed out by the hundreds of thousands, a number that has since increased to over 600,000 (i think it’s much more than what’s being reported). corporate America quickly took that as a cue to admit they ever cared and companies everywhere actively eliminated their once earnest DEI commitments, that we sometimes forget included female mentorship programs, formal sponsorships and career pipelines we’ve been building since the 70’s.

then they faked us out with the return-to-office mandates, that were framed as neutral corporate policies but operated as an effective mechanism to evict moms. i hate that i’m quoting Sheryl Sandberg’s organization (especially after just finishing Careless People), but the data proves that only half of corporate America even pretends to prioritize women’s advancement anymore. the other half are actively stripping away the flexible and hybrid structures that allowed us to survive (not even thrive) while also navigating the dissolving societal safety net.

then, the government allowed billions in federal pandemic-era childcare stabilization funding to expire which meant that thousands of daycare centers were forced to spike tuition or close their doors overnight, forcing parents into an agonizing choice between a paycheck and care. the fallout was immediate: the labor force participation of mothers with children under five fell by 2.8% in a hyper-compressed timeline, marking the sharpest mid-year decline in over 40 years.

and if you think HR or federal agencies are coming to save us, which i don’t think anyone does, the recent policy shifts have weakened enforcement bodies like the EEOC, making it exponentially harder to resolve systemic cases of workplace harassment, wage gaps, or pregnancy discrimination.

so, naturally, we’ve tried to pivot and upskill in the AI wave, only to find the oligarch bros blatantly defaulting to its gold old boys’ club settings. women currently account for less than 26% of hires in the booming AI sector, with top female executives leaving the prominent firms en masse. nbd, we’re just actively being locked out of the most consequential, highest-paying tech revolution of our lifetime.

ok, fine, we’ll try to build our own tables. but, the already ridiculous 2% of VC funding allocated to women-led startups has shriveled to a miserable 1%. left with absolutely no choice, we are migrating to the creator economy in droves, constructing our own monetization loops and digital ecosystems because traditional infrastructure has evicted us. it’s why nearly two-thirds of all content creators today are women, according to Goldman Sachs creator research (i pray the Substack founders don’t hate women too).

the deeply frustrating part of this reality is that women are more educated and possess more degrees than men today, making up the majority of the U.S. college-educated labor force. but despite our academic dominance, we still we still hold a pathetic 10% of CEO positions across the Fortune 1000 and less than 29% of leadership roles in the entire corporate C-suite.

and because we are smarter, we can see it all so clearly. it hurts. it’s not fair. and it’s not right. the pain we are all feeling right now is the price of our collective brilliance. no matter how many times we adapt, we are still bargaining with a corporate architecture designed by men who never built it to hold us, never wanted us there, and never imagined we would survive it.

also, this is just work. we haven’t even begun to open the other tabs of modern relationships, marriage, motherhood or the crushing mental load of caring for aging parents.

but there’s a massive flaw in their master plan. we are brilliant, resilient, and everything of value gets birthed through us. we are the mothers of revolutions.

just last week, Fast Company highlighted 21 Black women who are actively pivoting, reinventing themselves, and finding entirely new ways to express their ambition. they are proof that you cannot kill a force that is designed to create life.

for years, organizations have been laying the groundwork, probably unaware they were mobilizing for this moment. they built the infrastructure, gathered talent-dense circles of brilliant women and created sustainable business models. and that should be celebrated. from the Female Quotient to historically Black sororities to communities like Chief. but massive rosters and exclusive membership clubs mean absolutely nothing if we don’t organize and show up when the city of women has been lit on fire.

i can promise that all of these brilliant and capable women who are being evicted out of the building don’t need more content. they don’t need more panels talking about what could happen, or safe conversations about the pain of what’s currently happening, or encouraging pats on the back to stay in the fight. we need brave, strategic and stealth coordinated effort to initiate an entirely new revolution—one designed together by women, for women.

rome is burning, and we are the first burn victims. and I guess what i really wanted to say on that LinkedIn post last week is that we are dealing with structural rejection. and wrapping this rollback in polite phrases like pivots or non-linear journeys trivializes the damage. we aren't voluntarily shifting. the architecture is breaking under us.

we need leaders of these female-led orgs, like you, Alison Moore, who are sitting on top of resources and powerful networks to recognize that they maybe they were placed at the helm for such a time as this. maybe they are meant to be the brave women who stop managing the decline, step out onto the ledge, and build something that has never been done before. we don’t need them asking for answers. we need the people running them to realize they are meant to become the answers they seek.

sending u so much love,

m

p.s. we will be sending out information this about our first monthly virtual meet-up, book club, conversation club thing around Careless People. if you are interested in joining, hop in our subscriber chat and let us know so we can add you to the private chat and email list so we don’t spam everybody else.

it's brave. beautifully written. it's relevant. and i believe her. and it must be legit because why else would Meta take unprecedented legal steps to silence her?!

we are kicking off our first FTL book club with Careless People. if you’re interested in joining, hop into our subscriber chat for more info.

as i was convincing Kevin to start reading immediately, we started talking about those of us who are reimagining their social contract and agreement with the workplace. no longer are the days to just get a job and be happy to be there. these hoes workplaces aren’t loyal. the future of work belongs to those who are clear on who they are, and the work they are truly called and designed to do and move with a different kind of authority and knowing. the ones whose career is going to look less like a straight line and more like a diversified portfolio of personal brand, consulting, entrepreneurship and the occasional residency inside a corporate workplace.

we’ve been noticing this pattern with those who first start as independent freelancers and pick up work and projects with incredible brands. and because they are amazingly talented people, they end up delivering incredible results and completely wow the teams they’re working with. of course then they get offers to come in-house. and btw, this is an incredible way to land a w-2 gig because you get to test drive company culture, see how the teams really operate and build super healthy boundaries from the start. the independence produces a natural authority of someone who’s operating with a strong self-leadership ethic and you are completely detached from the internal politics and immune to the usual workplace chaos.

but the transition moment back in-house is critical. because that natural authority that you carried as an outsider is at risk of eroding. if you are not clear and intentional, it’s easy to succumb to the corporate gravity and get sucked into the collective inertia of the office. while you absolutely must honor the people, the place and the practices, you cannot surrender your psychological sovereignty. while you are a w-2 employee again, you must refuse to come back under their authority. you must fight to keep your light bright. and you must remain a master of your craft.

here’s a story that explains why…

what does this even mean?!

it was July 2019 and we were walking along the scenic waterfront path, making our way from our hotel to Harpa, the main concert hall and conference center that sits on the harborfront in Reykjavík, Iceland. Harpa is an architectural masterpiece. it’s dramatic, sculptural form and its iconic, jewel-like glass facade inspired by basalt rock columns was glistening and reflecting in the sun. the weather was a perfect combination of cool and crisp and the cold air felt refreshing on my face. i can’t believe i’m in Iceland, i thought as i walked with a crew of Netflix employees to our first set of meetings in the morning.

the occasion was our annual quarterly business review (qbr) where Netflix flew in their leadership team for 3 days, to go over the state of the business. normally these meetings were somewhere near the LA campus. but Reed had a long-held dream of bringing everybody to Iceland one day. i have no idea why Iceland, but i was so so grateful to be there.

as i was in line to grab breakfast, my phone started vibrating like crazy. as i pulled it out the pocket of my shiny black, puffy NorthFace, there were a stack of notifications from Slack and Google Chat. our editorial team had migrated onto Slack. but most of netflix was still on google chat.

holy sh*t, a brilliant creative woman on my team said in a slack dm. have you read the opening of the qbr memos?! Ted just said we’re the future of everything! what does this even mean?!

i have absolutely no idea what she’s talking about. i put my plate down and pull up my email to see that the July qbr memos have just dropped. these memos are sent to everyone across the entire company. it’s a way for Netflix to make good on their promise of keeping a transparent culture where all the information about everything is available to everyone all at once. VP’s of each department draft a summary of what happened in the last quarter, how they’re tracking against the broader strategic bets, and what they’re focused on for the next quarter. then the C-Level team pulls it all together and builds a cohesive narrative about where Netflix is. it usually opens with a letter from Reed (CEO at the time) or Ted (Chief Content Officer at the time). this one had an opening letter from Ted.

essentially it said that the work we were doing on the brand and editorial team – launching things like Strong Black Lead, Netflix Film and all our audience-focused editorial-first storytelling – was the future of all marketing and publicity. that the work he had done to build an in-house media and storytelling team – like Conde Nast meets Buzzfeed but built for Netflix – was working, having a big impact and should become the blueprint for how we storytell around Netflix in the future. he said it had implications for the product team, that soon we’d be booking Netflix talent on our own editorial formats and our dependence on external media hits like the Today Show or Hollywood Reporter would become less important because we would have our direct-to-consumer way to talk our audience and fandoms.

it was a stunning admission of the success of our efforts. when we took this direction in 2017, we were laughed at by the broader and more “serious” marcomm teams who didn’t understand what we were doing. if you’ve ever worked in social, you know how hard it’s been to gain the respect of your “traditional’ marketing peers. we were this rag tag team of misfits who believed we could build something meaningful and now Ted just said we were the future of everything. he encouraged all teams around the world to deeply understand who we were, how we were doing it and to find ways to collaborate with us.

hence, why my phone started blowing up from different people all over the organization who now wanted to set time with me.

i remember texting my well-intentioned manager. they were responsible for writing our section of the memos. did you all discuss this? did you tell him to write this? i asked, curious why i was just finding out about this monumental news at the same time as everyone else.

no, they said. Ted gave me a heads up yesterday that he was going to mention something about us. but i had no idea it would be to this extent. how do you feel about it? you should be thrilled.

i paused for a moment to really glean my true feelings. on one hand, it felt incredible to be seen and celebrated. a massive validation that our instincts were right. on the other hand, it just put a huge target on our backs. in saying our team was the future, he just rendered the rest of marketing irrelevant, single-handedly putting everyone else on the defensive. it’s also ironic because i was in the trenches fighting for more headcount and higher pay for a team that was already drowning.

i think it’s good news, i replied. i know the team is excited. i have no idea how we are about to handle all of this incoming, but we’ll figure it out back in LA. drinks to celebrate tonight?

i hear you, but…

a week later, back in LA, my assistant and i huddled to figure out how to navigate the sudden influx of interest. when Ted says something is a priority, the expectation is to move quickly and show results. and it felt like moths to a flame. we had received over 30+ meeting requests. managing that volume manually would take forever. i refused to add more pressure to our core team, who needed to stay focused on executing and scaling our editorial footprint.

i would build the updated pitch decks, outline our frameworks, and define the clear rules of engagement for how other teams could collaborate with us. but as we mapped out the math, it became clear that the individual roadshow and the inevitable follow-ups would take up multiple quarters of work.

in my next 1:1 with my well-intentioned manager, i knew we needed to come up with a strategy that could scale and i had an audacious idea. instead of meeting with everyone individually, what if we hosted the first-ever internal editorial summit?

for three days, we would lay out our entire ecosystem: our origins, the business case, and the initial experiments that proved the model. it would be an opportunity to feature each of our verticals, we had 9 or 10 at this point. every editorial lead would get the chance to present, giving them a high-visibility in front of important internal stakeholders. we would invite teams from around the world, livestream the sessions, and record everything. it would give us a permanent asset to direct people to, providing a library of foundational materials to distribute afterward. we had already checked: the big studio on Lot 8 was available in a few weeks on the dates we wanted.

my well-intentioned manager had always been incredibly kind, creative and supportive. they advocated for our work. but in that room, something felt off. all i remember was the feeling of hesitation and doubt and saying all the reasons why we shouldn’t do it. they raised concerns about the timeline, the sheer scale of pulling it off, and the risk of inconveniencing cross-functional partners by asking for so much of their time and not thinking it was a plausible idea.

i pushed back, citing how much of my own time would be cannibalized if we didn’t do it this way. if we were publicly deemed the future of the company, we shouldn’t be playing small or apologizing for taking up space. I empathized with my well-intentioned manager because i know over time after being at the company for so long, they had been slowly conditioned to play it safe, stay practical and keep the peace. but that’s not who i am or how i move.

so like most things during our time together, i told them, i hear you, but we’re moving forward. that was the beauty of the Netflix culture. i was empowered to make that call and disagree with my well-intentioned manager. that freedom is what turned us into a powerful player in the company in the first place.

that’s super weird

over the next few weeks, we hustled. we built out beautiful presentations, and held grueling rehearsals in studio 8. i felt like Matthew Knowles, demanding that our team of Beyonces run on the treadmill at full speed while singing. after they would practice presenting, i’d say, do it again. that transition was weak, or i don’t feel your conviction when you’re speaking. i don’t feel like you realllyyyy believe what you’re saying.

we needed to be flawless. we cut sizzle reels, built out surprises, walk on music…the works! when we sent out a comprehensive agenda of what to expect and a detailed run of show we received hundreds of rsvp’s, with notes saying, this looks exciting, can’t wait and things like, will be tuning in from Spain, Brazil, Japan.

the summit was a massive success. for three days, they laid out our mission, our why and the vision they had for their editorial outlets. where we could integrate with product, where we could collaborate with content and how we could work with publicity to get talent to do more exciting things. it was truly one of the greatest moments of my time at Netflix because of how they each shined. masters of their craft in full expression.

toward the end of the day on the last day, a brilliant creative man on my team asked, where is our well-intentioned manager? they haven’t been here any of the three days.

i hadn’t noticed until he mentioned it. i was so swept up in the moment, logistics and conversations with our cross-functional partners, that i hadn’t noticed that my well-intentioned manager hadn’t made an appearance at what was a landmark event for our team.

hmm, that’s odd, i told him. maybe they’re out of town.

he said, um, they’re not. they’ve been in their office this entire time in the other building.

wait, they’re here on the LA campus?! i said, confused. that’s really weird.

brilliant creative man on my team replied, yah, that’s SUPER weird.

“i feel competitive with you”

a few weeks later in early September, we were in Amsterdam at a global offsite for our org. we were staying at the swanky Soho House, and my well-intentioned manager asked us to go for an extended walking 1:1 along the canals. things were moving so quickly, that this was the first real quality time we were getting in weeks.

we grabbed coffee, a pastry and began to take in the gorgeous scenery. i could feel the tension starting to leave from my shoulders and felt a hint of relaxation coming through. they said, get me up to speed on everything i’ve missed, and i started to rolling through all of the updates on our conversations post summit. commitments that had been made, open tabs and interesting insights about what could be possible for us.

i felt an opening, and decided to pivot the conversation. i noticed you were absent at the summit. brilliant creative man on our team told me that you were in your office the whole time in the building across the street. is that true?

well-intentioned manager, said yeah. it is true. i couldn’t watch it.

i already knew it was true, but i still couldn’t believe it. i felt a massive wave of disappointment and sadness. and instantly had so many questions. why wouldn’t they want to come and see what we did? how we were advancing the mission of our team? to see and support our rag tag team of misfits shine so bright in front of hundreds of people from around the world? i didn’t understand.

and before i could speak, they continued, listen, Maya. you’ve been able to do things with this team that i’ve never been able to accomplish. it’s hard to watch sometimes how you’re able to bring all of this to life. and at times, i feel competitive with you. i’m not saying it’s right, but it’s the truth of how it feels watching someone like you crush it like this.

wow. it was like getting punched in the gut. i felt blindsided.

they hired me. i am a reflection of them. if i succeed, we succeed. what coach or leader wouldn’t want to support their star player? but corporate leadership isn’t the NBA, and my well-intentioned manager wasn’t Phil Jackson. they were just someone trapped in their own conditioning of a corporate ecosystem designed to breed scarcity, where people are subtly trained to view someone else’s brilliant light as a threat to their own survival.

I let out a soft, humorless laugh to keep the dam of my emotions from breaking through. well i guess that means you’re not advocating for me in rooms i’m not in or fighting for my promotion?

as we kept walking and talking, the picturesque Amsterdam backdrop suddenly felt dreary and dreadful. the tension in my shoulders hadn’t left after all. i immediately armored back up, letting the full weight of the blow land silently inside of me, and came to the profound, undeniable realization: i was officially on my own.

the limitations of the well-intentioned manager

the workplace is inherently designed to be dark. it’s in it’s roots. it was built into the very foundation and roots of corporate architecture. it’s an ecosystem that doesn’t want you to shine bright. in fact, it’s proactively trying to strip you of your light.

a well-intentioned manager is a leader who genuinely wants to be supportive, creative, and kind. but their leadership is ultimately capped by their own corporate conditioning. they will happily champion your work when it is small, safe. but the moment your output crosses into true brilliance (i.e. gaining high visibility, scaling rapidly, or outshining their own accomplishments) that supportive nature morphs into professional jealousy, self-preservation and fear.

do not, under any circumstance, mistake titles, hierarchy or tenure with real authority. workplace authority is make believe authority. if you allow yourself to be led by someone’s perceived power, there is a limit to what will be possible for you.

not everyone is going to have a culture like Netflix that empowers and encourages you to disagree with your well-intentioned manager. but you have to remember that your well-intentioned manager is just a person, who has insecurities, doubts and fears too. and it’s likely, because they are human, they will at some point express from their humanness (as will you).

so this is why it’s not good and not worth the time to please anyone. you can honor the institution and the norms of the culture without surrendering your personal authority or your light.

the truth is, you are not and will not be a permanent resident there. your job is not to get comfortable and appease the powers that be. your job is to come in and do the work that you have been called to do and the highest level of excellence you can do it.

because you can do all the things, like produce a world class summit and change the trajectory of marketing at Netflix, and it’s still not enough. the workplace will still try to dim you even though you are actively advancing their mission and their goals.

so, don’t wait for their permission to do your work. just do it. you are building a portfolio of the best work for your life, not for their comfort.

love them, but don’t follow them. and fight to stay bright.

sending u so much love,

m

the Harpo reunion continues as we write to you from the road. today we are in Palm Beach, FL hanging with my dear friend, . it feels so good to see a palm tree and stare at the ocean. still learning how to stay consistent in writing as we move around.

thank you to everyone who reached out, commented and were moved by Tyrone in this week’s essay that detailed how the epic Oprah show reunion came to be. he is deeply moved by the messages and feels greatly seen. if you haven’t taken a read, we hope it inspires you as much as it inspired us.

Erik was the person who officially hired me at Harpo back in the day. he bacame President of Harpo when he was only 37 and went on to lead the most powerful media brand through the ending of The Oprah Show into the first struggling and then triumphant Oprah Winfrey Network. we’ve always been close. and he’s been a fierce mentor and friend to me. he most recently was hired as the President of Tony Robbins companies. so now at this point, Erik has served as top leader in the two biggest personal brands in the world, putting him in rare air.

as we were texting about the Harpo reunion stuff a week or two ago, i asked how things were going with Tony and if we could shadow him to see what his life looks like today. and he generously invited us to come to one of Tony’s signature events, Business Mastery, as his guest and to show us how it’s done. so we said bet, hopped on a plane to see for ourselves. we love a spontaneous adventure to learn from the greats.

i’ve encountered Tony a couple times in the Oprah world. she interviewed him on her show Oprah’s Next Chapter where she attended his conference, Unleash the Power Within and fire walked lol. he was also a guest teacher on our show Oprah’s Lifeclass when we were on tour in Toronto. but this was the first time coming into his environment. he and his team have always been lovely. and while there has always been controversy around Tony, we are the kind of people who look past noise to study the mechanics of why he’s successful.

and after immersing ourselves in his world, talking to attendees (we met one guy who had attended 26 events!) and listening and learning from Erik, we walked away concluding that Tony is in the business of belief. so is Oprah. in fact, the world’s greatest companies, creators and personal brands all share this foundation. before they can sell a product or service, they must first must build a business rooted belief.

as we leap out of the system into our individual promised lands, it got us wondering if we've taken the time to look beyond what we think we're offering. beneath the surface there is a deeper question we must answer: what is the unspoken conviction and belief that we're actually asking people to buy into? and more importantly, what do you really believe about yourself and your life?

conviction is what people actually buy

i know this to be true based on my experience in the venture capital space. i was always told that investors were investing in me based on the conviction i expressed, not what was on the page. yes, investors care that you’re building something thoughtful and something that has potential to succeed and make money. but ultimately, they want to believe that you believe you’re the answer to the problem you see. the idea is going to change a thousand times. and normally what you pitch and share is not what the business ends up becoming. it makes sense. who’s realistically gonna put money in your hands if you don’t believe?

the economy runs on belief

ok, consider this. the S&P 500 represents roughly 80% of the entire stock market value. well today, 92% of the S&P’s total market value consists of intangible assets, which means the modern stock market is literally powered by what people think, design and believe instead of what they build physically. a massive portion of assets belong to tech and software, whose value is created through multi-trillion dollar valuations based on what society collectively believes is their future utility. other assets have huge brand premiums that are tied to the emotional relationship and trust with consumers. brand equity is just the shared belief that a product is better. isn’t it wild that over the last 50 years we’ve gone from a physical assets economy to essentially a belief economy?

we don’t have a belief problem, we have a remembrance problem

the system and the powers that be are not going to help raise your belief. if anything, they’re going to do everything in their power to strip you of any sense of belief you have. as we make the journey to become the best work of our lives, we have to cultivate a remembrance practice.

the fastest, most effective way to build belief is to look backwards, not forward into the future. looking into the future is actually what produces anxiety. the unknown scares us. and it should because we are not in control of it. but the antidote to anxiety and worry is remembrance. stay focused in the present moment and relentlessly study the past. study the patterns of your life, track evidence of what’s been true. what is the thread you can pinpoint that can raise your belief in who you’re becoming? live and reside there. we are so quick to forget all that’s happened. and to be honest, if you’re sitting here reading this right now then that means you’ve always had what you’ve needed, exactly when you’ve needed it. and that alone, should raise your belief.

the most common barriers to belief

1. a lack of clarity and no clear why. purpose is born from our deepest pain. our work is to take the pain we experienced and use it productively to help others. Tony is clear that his why is to alleviate suffering for others because of his own unimaginable suffering from childhood. Oprah’s why is to make sure every person knows that they matter because she knows the pain of not experiencing it. when you know your why, you can endure any how and convict and attract others with similar beliefs.

2. environments of disbelief. if you get into a pool, you’re going to get wet. we could feel our belief rising in the room of 3000 people at Tony’s event just through sheer osmosis. where are you spending your time right now? what environments are you in? are you spending time in digital spaces filled with fear and fighting? are you surrounded by family who doesn’t believe in the path you’ve chosen? or are you isolated and alone letting dark, intrusive thoughts become the water you’re swimming in?

3. drainers. one of the things we noticed is how frequently Tony asks people to speak what they believe out loud to the people around them and then to have those same people mirror back if felt true or not. he essentially has people practice being in expression of belief for 5 days. often we are surrounded by people who love us, but still fail to raise our belief. we call them drainers. start tracking your inner circle. do the people around you raise your belief in who you’re becoming and how you’re moving or do they insert doubt, fear and confusion. based on the results, move accordingly.

permission to believe

we love Serena Williams. and we love a great doc. and Serena: In the Arena is an eight-episode ESPN documentary series that offers a deeply personal, chronological look at Serena Williams’s 27-year career. from the public courts of Compton to her ascent as one of the most dominant athletes in history. but the series is far more than a mere chronicle of dominance, it's a profound witness to the rise of unwavering belief. In the first episode, she says, I finally gave myself permission to be great…to be Serena. and to believe that i might be the greatest tennis player of all time.

say it with your chest Serena! you're able to watch what a pivotal psychological shift looks like, capturing the exact moment she embraced her destiny as the greatest tennis player to ever play the game.

belief is God's currency

without faith it is impossible to please God. God allows us to live based on the level of our belief. small faith, small life. big faith, big life. faith without works is dead. our convictions are measured not by what we say, but by the momentum and consistency of our actions. or the paralysis or lack thereof. true faith demands a choice. it is the willingness to step out into the unknown and force your hands to match your heart. look at how you're moving right now. based on your actions, what do you actually believe?

this last week raised my belief. inside the Harpo reunion. spending time with Erik. being in Tony’s environment. walking this path with Kevin. we are beginning to see how our lives are lining up with what we believe is true for ourselves and the work we’re meant to do.

each of us has to realize how important we are. how needed we are. we have to really believe that we were created for such a time as this. and there is something so special, so distinct and so necessary we are meant to share with each other. our work is to come fully into agreement with it. to believe that is true. to understand the power of a contagious and magnetic underlying current of belief is not just a nice-to-have, it is the prerequisite for the economic abundance and freedom we’re all searching for.

sending u so much love,

m & k

Lauren, my friend, former Harpo colleague, and forever found family from the trenches, texted at 7:47a on Sunday morning.

i replied, omg, i’m so tired. how did ur night end?
i’m exhausted, she said. i stayed until they kicked us out.

as women in our early 40’s, we were both recovering from the sensory overload of joy from the massive Harpo Studios reunion the night before at Art Smith’s – Oprah’s former private chef – restaurant, appropriately called Reunion on Navy Pier in Chicago.

we were having a digital post mortem over text. our thumbs were flying as we recounted the night’s wildest events, pointed out familiar faces, and traded epic, nostalgic stories. ugh, why is so and so from x department is still SO hot.

as i exhaustedly stumbled out of bed to make coffee – and for the record, i only had two glasses of wine – i was now actively engaged in seven text threads with Harpo family. being in the silence of the morning away from the noise of Navy Pier brought up a swell of emotions that had been impossible to access during the actual chaos of the event. i just kept thinking, i can’t believe we got to be a part of something like this.

Kevin walked into the family room in his pajamas, and we cozied up into our normal positions across from each other on the couch, hot coffee cradled in our hands.

i can’t believe I was at the Harpo reunion with you last night, he said, laughing softly as he took a sip. you’ve talked about how special the culture was for so long, and last night was evidence of how real it was. i mean, i can’t believe Tyrone, the garage guy, organized the whole thing.

Tyrone Owens, 63, the man who used to manage the Harpo Studios parking garage, was the one who pulled off an epic event that brought an entire legacy back to life.

i know, i said, getting emotional, it’s so special.

and almost as if we had spoken his name into existence, my phone vibrated again. it was my former boss, mentor, and surrogate work mom texting me back about what she had found most profound about the night: the Tyrone story—that he is not well and wanted everyone to be together, moves me beyond.

Tyrone, also known to all of us as Big Ty, didn’t just organize a party, he brought the family together at a time we all needed it most, reminding us exactly who we were to each other.

we’ll make room

the texts started flying last week with the same question: are you coming to the reunion?

i’d heard about it a few weeks prior. i wasn’t sure how legit it actually was. it was being organized in a facebook group and since i can’t remember my password, i was asking other people for details who had access.

i wanted to go. but i also wasn’t sure if i wanted to go. the idea of seeing so many people from the past felt overwhelming and angsty. i had stayed in touch with a core crew that had transitioned from working on The Oprah Show in Chicago to working at the Oprah Winfrey Network in Los Angeles. but it had been more than 15 years since the original daytime crew had been back together after the show ended its historic run in 2011.

i first walked through Harpo’s iconic doors back in 2007. i started as a 21-year-old intern. in a very real way, i had grown up inside that building among the greatest team in the history of television. i’ve never felt more alive, inspired, and a part of something so special in my entire life. but i’d also grown up. i’m just not that same person anymore. i’m different. i’ve gained weight, been married, divorced, and had a new lifetime of experiences. i’m perimenopausal and my edges are thinning.

the thought of the reunion brought up all of these insecure feelings: will people remember me? will I recognize them? what will i say when people ask me what i’m up to? and after all this time, was the magic we felt back then even real, or did we just manufacture it in our heads? but how could I not go. it was rumored that over 200 people were coming, people flying in from all over the country – New York, LA, Nashville, Georgia – to be part of it. and it was probably the last time we’d all be in the same place like this again.

Is everyone putting up money? can I bring a friend or a plus-one? what time does it actually start? i asked to different people with knowledge. the guidance was consistent. you gotta call Ty. here’s his number. coordinate with him since he’s the one organizing it.

so on Saturday morning, the day of the reunion, i called.

whose Minnesota area code number is this, Ty answered shortly without saying hi or hello.

Ty, it’s maya watson from harpo. i heard there’s a reunion tonight. i was calling to get the details.

you rsvp’ed too late and we’re at capacity, he replied sounding like an irritated uncle who was overwhelmed on the day of a big event.

oh no, i didn’t know there was a limit! i said disappointed.

hearing the sadness in my voice, he said warmly, no, no, no. c’mon. we’ll make room. we’ll figure it out.

Harpo Studios was a different kind of place

for the last five years, it’s been on Ty’s heart to get the gang back together. Ty started at Harpo in 1990. he was friends with Tom Stacker, Harpo’s head of security. he bought Tom a new bike and came to deliver it to the studio one day. as they struck up conversation as friends, Tom mentioned that he was looking for someone to paint the parking garage for $20,000. Ty’s ear perked up at the opportunity and he said, i’ll do it for $5000. Tom said deal. and after completing a couple more projects with other people on the maintenance crew, he landed a full time position in the garage.

Harpo was just a different kind of place, he said in a phone call with me on Monday. it just always felt like family. i was so blessed there. everyone cared about me. and Oprah spoiled me.

Ty lost his mom at six and his dad when he was twelve and became homeless around the age of sixteen. he understood the profound, visceral pain of not having a family you could depend on. so as a young boy who grew up without an anchor, Harpo Studios became his sanctuary and the home he never had.

the hardest part of my job was waking up! he said laughing.

he clocked in early. every morning, he had to beat Oprah to the studio, arriving by 7a to ensure he was there before her 7:15am arrival. he greeted her each day with a new name: Oprah, Miss O, Winfrey, Miss Oprah, OW, the boss. for over twenty years, Ty was the bookends of her day—the first face she saw arriving, and the last one she saw leaving. he witnessed it all: two decades of the highest highs and the lowest lows of leading the most powerful show in the world.

Ty approached his job with a relentless spirit of excellence. parking every car with care, shoveling snow during the bitter Chicago blizzards, and spending his day detailing vehicles. the studio garage was a sanctuary where the world’s most famous people would pull up away from the paparazzi. Ty became a vault of secrets, overhearing the most intimate, private conversations. as nervous guests arrived to share their deepest vulnerabilities on television, he was the first touch of the Harpo culture and the first line of comfort. when the cameras were done rolling, he was there to welcome them back, witnessing the flood of relief, joy and triumph on their faces.

by day, Ty became the producers and staff confidante. the garage was one of the few places on the property people could smoke, making it the ultimate corporate confessional. he offered a non-judgemental ear as they brought him everything – problems with spouses, parenting struggles and the day-to-day stress of working on the world’s biggest show.

people told me everything, he said. and they knew i wasn’t going to tell anyone.

beyond the day-to-day operations, Ty felt deep gratitude for the culture of hospitality Oprah created.

when I first started, i couldn’t believe that everything I needed was provided for, Ty reflects. breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks. it was all free. i started out homeless, you know? because of Harpo, i ended up with a beautiful wife, four kids, a nice home, and a nice car. i got to see the world with my family.

Oprah cared about the sacrifices her team made. the late nights. the early mornings. and grueling production schedules meant time away from their families and kids. to make sure everyone understood how grateful she was for that, she organized multiple all-expense-paid legendary vacations around the world for the team and their families over the course of the show. because of her, Ty was able to experience a luxury cruise to the Mediterranean and travel to Hawaii with his wife and kids.

it was everything. there’s nowhere else i wanted to work. i couldn’t work for another company. and i would’ve worked at Harpo for free, Ty said. we are a family. anytime anyone called for anything, day or night, i was coming.

it’s time to get the family back together

on February 5 of this year, Ty underwent open heart surgery. he claims he’s had a bad heart for a while. since the show days in the early 2000’s.

he had three surgeries in one day, his wife Jeanine shared. and when he woke up, one of the first things he said was ‘i need to get the Harpo family together.’ after years of attempts, he knew he wanted to make it happen. Jeanine said, ok, let’s do it.

he first created the design for the flyer and helped locked down the location with Art Smith. then the private Facebook group became the source of truth. within weeks, rsvp’s started flooding in. one by one, the word was traveling from Harponian to Harponian that Ty was getting the gang back together.

most of us have deeply missed the feeling and experience we had there and have either been chasing it in other places or quietly grieving that we may never get to experience it again. we were part of this rare alchemy of purposeful, intentional, ambitious work with a group of people who were great and loved what they did, that also had an impact and made waves around the world and had a blast while we did it. it is the workplace equivalent of heaven on earth. and with the current state of the world and the current culture of work, the time felt right this time and we all desperately needed a touch.

on Friday the day before, people from all parts of the company, from research to booking to finance, were sharing photos that they were on their way.

organizing it was a lot, Ty shared. but i woke up on saturday and thought, ‘it’s showtime.’

the day of, Ty’s phone was ringing like crazy with last minute confirmations, like me, saying they were pulling up. he arrived at the restaurant at 4:30p, 30 minutes before the event was meant to start and it was empty. he had the pre-event jitters of wondering if people would actually show. but he laid out the Harpo Studios reunion t-shirts, bags and lanyards he had ordered at the front entrance with a crew of people who were helping him get set up.

by 5:30p the patio was full and nearly at capacity.

the sound of the event was a combination of deep felt, it’s soooo good to see you, and high pitched shrieks of ahhhhh, omgggg, it’s soo good see youuuuu!!!

everyone, including Ty, admitted to feeling a bit overwhelmed and overstimulated by the experience. it was surreal and felt like we were time traveling back in time to the most special time in our lives. when you saw people, some names slipped our minds. but it didn’t matter because you hugged everyone, knowing there was unconditional love as family. by 7pm, the atmosphere was electric with people walking on the street wondering what in the world was going on because the joy, jubilation and celebration permeating the air was palatable.

as the night lingered on, we fell back into our groove as a crew like no time had passed. and at 8p, someone came up to Ty and said Oprah’s here.

i didn’t believe it, he said.

that same person pulled up their phone and showed him a picture of her from the other side of the patio and as Ty looked up, Oprah was standing there, flanked by her best friend Gayle and long-time partner Stedman.

Ty got choked up and couldn’t hold back the tears.

i can’t believe you’re here, he said to her.

she had flown back early after a trip to South Africa to surprise everybody and personally come hug her Tyrone. on a perfect summertime Chi night under the stars, with the breeze from Lake Michigan, he stood up from his scooter, still weak from the surgery with help from Jeanine and one of his sons and posed for a picture with Oprah amidst the rest of his 300+ family, completely surrounded by love.

she whispered in his ear, job well done, Ty. job well done.

on Sunday as we slowly regained our energy, Lauren and I continued in our text reflections from the night:

me: there is no workplace where people would get on the plane and use their own money to reunite with their team.

Lauren: no, and it wasn’t to get a chance to see Oprah.

me: right, no promise of Oprah. we showed up because of Ty. that is just amazing. think about that!

Lauren: truly amazing. a family people felt a part of. an opportunity of a lifetime to do meaningful work. and only those who are a part of it will understand it.

me: idk, it makes me emotional. that is what work is supposed to feel like. i wish this for everyone. that they get to feel a part of something so special with people you love.

Lauren: you spend over half your “life” with these people too. your other family. not everyone is that lucky.

me: 70% of our lives are spent at work. we got the best family.

Lauren: totally.

Ty, we are so, so grateful for your big, beautiful heart.

sending u so much love,

m

p.s. Oprah posted a recap of the reunion on her Instagram.

more essays about the culture of work from Follow the Leader:

this week in the house we’ve been meditating on the the massive, underemphasized skill and competitive advantage that comes from mastering pace.

rush is not our portion. the glamorization of hustle is evil and it’s just another way to keep us in bondage and too tired to take what’s ours or make any meaningful progress. burnout is robbing us of our birthright and the grind is a liar.

our obsession with faster is not a new phenomenon. we Americans love a diet. a get rich quick scheme. and convenience at any cost. this urgent energy is built into the foundation of our workplaces that are designed to keep us confused and in constant motion. because they know if we are able to slow down long enough, we’ll realize just how wonderfully wasteful everything really is.

so we gotta be as obnoxious about slowmaxxing as the manosphere is about looksmaxxing.

slowmaxxing is the intentional trend that rejects hustle culture by intentionally slowing your pace. instead of rushing through everything, it’s the mindset and daily practice of savoring ordinary moments like drinking coffee, walking without multitasking and bringing our full attention to simple acts. together, these acts aggressively crush chronic cortisol levels to help reboot and restore our collectively nervous systems.

so, how might we start to get into practice of slowmaxxing?

tell the truth about the cost of chaos.

in this week’s essay, Maya shares the true story about her body being so addicted to cortisol and adrenaline that it led her to choosing a chaotic environment instead of a calm one (literally) in a major turning point of her career. everyone struggles in making hard career decisions under pressure or chasing the validation of sexy career opportunities. many of us have gotten it wrong and shared practical ways we’re learning to trust ourselves again by learning how to create a life that honors the beauty of the slow.

don’t believe them.

by them, we mean out of touch, greedy tech oligarchs like Marc Andreesen who essentially said that building an interior life is a waste of time and how we should never slow down to reflect in an interview with Ezra Klein (thanks jp). they are financially incentivized to force AI and the stronger, faster, quicker narrative down our throats. and although they may speak with authority, it’s not truth. don’t believe them.

many are coming to the realization of how the culture of quick is a dangerous illusion that’s not producing any real fruit. this week in the NYT, Julie Averill, former Chief Information Officer of Lululemon, called the AI revolution a hot mess and a show. Substack and Linkedin have admitted that the rush to make content using AI is ruining their platforms and recently taken action against it.

understand the why behind the trend.

Jasmine Bina from the Concept Bureau is one of our favorites to read here on substack. she wrote a great piece about how we’re being forced back into our bodies. she illuminates that this deeper somatic and slowmaxxing movement beneath the modern wellness industry is a necessary and deeper desire to reconnect to ourselves. she successfully argues that when everything we know becomes a lie and trust is drastically collapsing everywhere, the body is the last real thing we can trust.

breathe, baby.

if you exist in a modern work environment then you’re probably shallow breathing most of the time which triggers more stress responses. you may even be clenching your jaw, have your tongue pressed against the top of your mouth or hunching your shoulders as you’re reading this. the world wants you to believe that you need all of these expensive supplements, apps or gadgets to calm down when in reality, God built the cheat code directly into your ribcage to calm your vagus nervous system. which is the information highway to your entire physiology, instantly signaling your brain to switch from survival mode to absolute calm.

grab Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art by James Nestor that shows you 10 different ways to breathe and that the most powerful human hardware is something you already own.

invest in hard data.

Jen Randle wrote on substack about how a saturday lunch with friends and a few folks she wasn’t as fond of seemed harmless at first. the stress her body was under would have gone unnoticed if she hadn’t checked her oura ring and noticed an elevated heart rate and suppressed variability – a pattern you’d expect during a hard meeting or deadline sprint.

investing in hardware like oura rings or cortisol tests from everlywell forces you to confront your baseline stress data so you can stop wondering how bad it is and start to build a practice and plan to improve (this is not an ad, btw).

use substack notes to practice rebuilding trust.

the goal is for there to be total congruence between your internal boundaries and your external speech. if your gut says no, your mouth must say no. over-explaining, over-performing, and saying yes to appease others introduces chaos into your life. when we write, we are not just recording our thoughts, we are actively organizing chaos. which leads to stress reduction through cognitive offloading. it specifically helps eliminate the mental loop cycling of thinking about things over and over again.

thankfully substack is not like every other place on the Internet. this is genuinely a community who’s becoming out loud (at least for now). practice working out a decision, sharing something you think that might be controversial, weird, or interesting. the goal is to get in practice of writing about what’s true to you so the next time you’re faced with having to make a decision, you know what truth feels like in your body.

operate in low-power mode.

if you’re already running on empty, adopt a strict 80% low-power mode protocol. stop performing at your usual people-pleasing 110%. don’t volunteer to take additional tasks, stop fixing other people’s problems and give up trying to save the day. you must prioritize radical energy conservation.

this helps creates the capacity to be around your kind of people and do the things that deepen the truth of who you are which actually energizes you. whether it’s a hike club, making homemade cards, being in your garden or working on puzzles.

for example, we’re doing a slow August where we turn down the volume on external meetings and conversations. you can borrow our language if you want when people reach out asking for your time:

hello! thank you for reaching out. i’m in what i call a slow august, intentional time i take each year to rest and restore. that means no additional external calls or meetings, and no work outside our core expression of [writing and engaging with our community online].

i’m holding this one firmly, even for people i’d love to say yes to. the whole thing falls apart the moment i start making exceptions. that said, if there’s something i can answer in a note, send it over and i’ll get to it at a slower pace. anything that needs a real conversation, let’s find time in september.

wishing you some slowness of your own this month.

some people will honor your boundaries. other people might be annoyed. either way you get data round those who support your regulation and those who intended to extract and drain you.

adopt a rest ethic.

isn’t it crazy how we exist in a modern workplace that is designed to prevent rest but elite athletes treat recovery as a non-negotiable strategy? Kevin is the king of rest and has taught so many the power of a rest ethic, where we work from a place of rest and don’t work to earn rest.

we promise we’re not that obsessed with LeBron, but he is one of our muses on rest. in Starting 5 on Netflix, he talks about how much he invests in his rest and his commitment to naps. it’s not lost on us that one of the greatest living athletes of our time, with one of the longest-running careers in modern sports history, openly cites an obsession with rest and recovery as the definitive secret to his unmatched longevity.

…and don’t forget the tortoise wins the race.

sending u so much love,

m & k

p.s. what are your must-have and go-to slowmaxxing practices?

but when we would go to our anything-goes-kind-of-friends houses, they would have a pantry full of contraband. their parents would joyfully ask, are you hungry? go grab a snack! have whatever you want! make yourself at home. opening up their cupboards was like finding a chest of forbidden riches. double stuffed oreos. little debbie zebra cakes. and all the cereals we couldn’t have.

without any hesitation, we would devour 3 bowls in a sitting. eating as fast we could, slurping the sugary infested milk in paranoia to erase any evidence. always to our surprise, the sugary puffs and bold artificial flavoring never satisfied us. no matter how much we ate, it never left us feeling full. but it always, always made us feel worse. and of course when we got back home, we would have crippling stomach aches that gave it away. what did y’all eat over there? in the midst of our sugary crack crash, somebody (aj) would always cave and confess, we had some of their cereal. my mom would dig deeper asking, what kind? and in unison we’d say, they had Trix.

this maladaptive compulsion would repeat over and over again.

do you love sleep?

in October 2020, i had made the painful decision to let Netflix go. i loved it there. and was proud of the work we had done. but i couldn’t keep eating off the empty promises. the resentment and frustration i harbored was becoming louder than my desire to want to do great work there. i knew it was time to move on. i believe you leave a job three times. first spiritually when your soul realizes it can’t fully express there, then emotionally when you stop caring about it all, and then eventually you leave physically. i had left emotionally.

weeks after letting go, i received a call from the head of HR at Calm, the leading app for sleep and meditation. we knew each other from Netflix and he said they were looking for someone to come in and lead marketing globally. they were experiencing exponential growth as a result of the pandemic. with unprecedented levels of anxiety, insomnia was on the rise and people were turning to Calm for relief. he talked about the founders and how they weren’t perfect, but genuinely good people and they were assembling a solid team. they needed to take the brand and the company to the next level. they needed it to break through culture. and he thought of me.

where are you right now, he asked. are you ready to leave to Netflix?

i am, actually, i responded. but i don’t use Calm. and you know i only consider places where i genuinely feel connected and passionate about the product. i can’t build a brand around something i don’t use or care about.

he said, do you love sleep?

i chuckled, i LOVE sleep. i LIVE to sleep.

he played his hand, then you already love Calm. at least do an intro call with their chief strategy officer to get a feel. if you’re down, i’ll email intro you.

i trusted him. and his approach delighted me. i agreed to an intro.

take a deep breath.

over the next month, we started our top secret work affair. i was taking calls after Netflix hours to get to know the team. i began studying everything about them in between meetings and when i was bored on Zooms. i was observing their consumer touch points, taking stock and trying to understand what was there. i continued reading up on all the news of the company, reviews in the app store and the origin story of the founders. more and more, i was imagining myself in the role. which is usually a sign that i being called toward something. i started thinking about the kinds of people we would need to hire, the first moves we would need to make and the kind of culture we would need to create to take the company to the next level.

on election night in November 2020, i remember siting on my couch in Sherman Oaks, with tequila on the rocks, watching CNN. John King and his interactive map was detailing the digital battleground between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. the race was too close. every update from the anchors felt like a sudden drop on a roller coaster. you could feel the thick cloud of anxiety hovering over the country and the pit in everyone’s stomach.

in the midst of the chaos, a :30 ad from Calm appeared that instructed us to take a deep breath with gentle, soft rain falling on green leaves. no words. no voice over. just an invitation to breathe. i thought it was absolutely genius. i could viscerally feel the positive impact of the brand. we needed more of this right now.

i emailed my contact there and said, i’m no longer just curious. i want the job. let’s take things to the next level.

i’m going to do the best work of my life.

by Jan 2021, i had met with all the key players inside of Calm. the head of product. the head of content. the existing team and multiple calls with both founders. i had even done mock strategy sessions with the head of strategy. i was into Calm and they were into me. and i kept waiting for them to put a ring on it, but there was always one more thing.

the last and final request was for me to put together a presentation of a vision for the brand with some hypothetical ideas that gave them a sense of my thinking. i thought it was a bit much and that i should probably be paid for it, but if this was their process i wasn’t going to fight it. what i did know was i was going to put together something so spectacular, it would be undeniable. i had a week to pull it together.

i called up a friend who was a freelance creative director and briefed him and said that i wanted to build a custom animated deck, create a mock harry styles ad (they had just signed him to do a sleep story) and a few other creative beats. while they started on the creative, i started outlining the vision.. i explained how we needed to shift Calm into a lifestyle brand. live events, annual festivals, high fashion pajama collabs, more disruptive ads wherever there was chaos. a list of new voices, faces and partnerships that would help elevate us in culture. how we could reimagine the branding and become synonymous with the sound of a deep breath. we would eventize sleep and turn the sleep stories into netflix title level trailers and promotion.

as i worked on the presentation, i realized how connected i actually felt towards the mission. my background working in personal growth, SuperSoul at OWN, and working on the meditation business was flowing through seamlessly. my entertainment culture experience at Netflix helped me see the sleep stories as our content driver. and i generally had so much reverence for sleep my whole life. as a kid, i used to put myself to bed because i loved it so much. so the idea of helping the world stress less and sleep more felt like important work that i wanted to be a part of and that was good for society. and it was something that i needed to personally really embrace in the midst of the pandemic, after recently separating from my husband and decompressing from everything i experienced at the big red N.

unsurprisingly, i crushed the presentation. so much so, they applauded at the end. i knew i had the job. the next Monday i got an offer over email with everything we had discussed. i called founders and verbally committed to them. i’m going to do the best work of my life. i told them i needed a week to review the paperwork for myself and with my divorce attorneys to prepare for any implications it might have on our settlement.

i was grateful that i was finally getting everything i wanted–the opportunity to shape a global brand in the top marketing spot. real equity in the company. but most importantly, being surrounded by a great group of people to do work that mattered and helped people around the world. i had gotten to know them over the last five months and i felt the goodness and the calm in the air. i could finally exhale.

lust at first sight.

on Wednesday of that same week, the CEO and founder of Clubhouse slid into my Linkedin dms saying they were looking for a marketing, comms and content leader for the company. it was the same day Elon Musk had just agreed to hop on the app with Kanye West.

it felt surreal. Clubhouse was the hottest app in the world at the time. i had been invited to join the social audio experience six months prior and felt like i was part of this exclusive club that millions had been waiting months to join. it was what everyone was talking about. i had said to my team at Netflix that we needed to be a first mover and start figuring out our Clubhouse strategy. i had no idea i was even on their radar. i had no idea that i would even be considered for something like this.

we got on the phone immediately and talked for four hours. it was lust at first sight. the founder was this overly energetic, almost toxically optimistic guy. i had never heard or met anyone like him. he painted this picture of coming in as one of the early employees to build out the next great social platform in the world. they had just been valued at $1B and received hundreds of millions to keep growing. at the time, it was the fastest growing app in the history of tech both in user growth and valuation. he was selling me on the opportunity to be part of it’s rocketship trajectory, to shape the future, to make generational shifting money and to be a part of history.

i told him that i had just committed to Calm two days prior and needed to get back to them by Friday. he replied, then we better move fast.

over the next 24 hours, i cleared my Netflix calendar (i had not told them about Calm) and we organized 15+ hours of interviews and conversations. i wanted his references and he needed mine. we talked all day. and all night. throughout the discussions, i wasn’t even sure what i should be asking about. the job felt so big and ambiguous. i didn’t even know where to start. everything just felt like hype, energy and excitement. i can’t remember the details of any of it. it was just happening to me suddenly.

i knew one of Clubhouse’s leading investors, who told me on the phone, this is the fastest-growing company i’ve ever had in my portfolio. there will always be a Calm, but there may never be another Clubhouse. this is like Mark Zuckerberg calling you up in 2007. do you want to be employee number ten at Facebook? i wasn’t sure i did, but how do you say no?

am i about to be the Black Sheryl Sandberg?! i thought.

every mentor I talked to confirmed that this would set me on a trajectory for the rest of my life. one, i guess, i should want to be on.

during that sprint, i never really felt any depth of connection to the people i talked to or what the company was becoming. they didn’t really know what the company was becoming because everything was happening so fast. but they did know that every other tech giant – Facebook, Twitter and even LinkedIn had declared war on them to build similar technology. they needed to hire and build fast. and they needed an answer by Friday.

i had the worst stomach ache.

Clubhouse made me offer that was almost identical Calm, except the potential financial upside was insane and the status and level of visibility i would get could change my life forever. on our final call Thursday late night before i had to make a decision, the Clubhouse founder said, listen, i’ll be in Santa Monica on Friday afternoon with my family. if you say yes, we can meet in-person on the strand and celebrate.

i remember laying on the couch curled up in a ball with crippling anxiety. i had the worst stomach ache of my life. i was completely and utterly overwhelmed. i think i may have even had a mild panic attack. i couldn’t distinguish if the angst and crushing weight i was feeling was the fear of stepping into the unknown or if it was my body trying to tell me this wasn’t right and i should run. i was tossing and turned all night. to soothe me, i flipped on Idris Elba’s sleep story on Calm to help me relax.

on Friday morning, February 12, 2021, i woke up way before the sun. i quietly went downstairs and made a perfect cup of coffee. i sipped it slowly. i prayed that i had made the right decision. in the light of the dawn, i looked at the clock and it wasn’t even 7a yet. but i wanted to get it over with. i grabbed my phone to make the call. on the first ring he picked up.

what time should i meet you in Santa Monica to celebrate, i said.

what i didn’t know then but i know now is that my body was so burned out and depleted from battling for my worth at Netflix, numbing myself from the pain of being abandoned in divorce, working and mothering through the pandemic, plus the years of exhaustion of just existing as a Black woman that i had conditioned my body to ignore red flags. in my state of depleted willpower, i mistaken chaotic environments for familiar comfort and lost the ability to distinguish real, intuitive danger from chronic anxiety. my nervous system steered me back into a toxic situation because it had become addicted to adrenaline, cortisol and chaos. when your house alarm has been ringing for months, you get used to the noise. a healthier, calm environment actually felt boring, unfamiliar and unsafe to me.

when i walked with the founder on the strand in Santa Monica that day, i knew somewhere deep down it was the wrong decision. but i was locked in. i had signed the paperwork. and i had to force myself to believe it was the right call. the people at Clubhouse were good people. they just weren’t my people. and after less than two years there, the stress and anxiety from that job nearly destroyed me.

i had to first forgive myself for moving too quickly. i let the pace and haste of the situation deterimine my decision making timeline instead of asking for more time to process. i had to apologize to my body for betraying her. for not honoring the truth of what she needed at the time. and putting her through so much stress because of my trauma and people pleasing nature to be seen, validated and chosen. in the thick of it, i had to reframe why i was there. i can still learn a lot. i can still contribute to the best of my ability. i can still take care of the people on my team. but i have to protect myself. but i also had to understand that my best work wasn’t going to happen there. and that was ok.

over time, i’ve had to recondition myself about the truth of who i am. and what my real work really is. i’m not the type to chase money. i sign up for missions. and choosing Clubhouse was the first time i chose a role because of the opportunity to make money. and i can promise you if it worked out i’d be on a yacht somewhere next to Emma Grede in the South of France, not writing the truth of my story to you all.

we didn’t have a common goal. we had a common enemy. and in my experience it’s always better to be for something than against something. and the connection i feel with people in the work really matters because that is core experience. that is the real work. i cannot compromise on that.

even years later, when i think about the decision, i still sometimes beat myself up and wonder what could have happened if i would have chosen Calm. but i’m learning to give myself grace, stress less and to sleep more and to stop chasing the sugary, bright boxed packaged cereal that’s no good for me.

sending u so much love,

m

p.s. talk to us in the comments. how does your body communicate with you in the middle of a tough decision?

if you enjoyed this, more work essays from Follow the Leader…

we’re glad you’re enjoying it with the intent it was written.

must-read: Life is In the Transitions

we shouted out our boy in this week’s essay and he is one of our favorite non-fiction writers. he really doesn’t get the flowers he deserves, but his book Life is in the Transitions is a must-read for all of us in this time. someone gave it to Maya during peak Covid when there was so much chaos in her life personally. it gave her clarity, made her feel less alone, empowered and equipped her to help find her way out.

if you are navigating any kind of transition — job change, divorce, a move, marriage, becoming a parent, navigating loss + grief… pretty much everything, this is an ESSENTIAL book. here’s what you’ll learn:

1. context on why transitions are so messy and uncomfortable and how long they last + why

2. historical context that illuminates why we are dealing with so many more transitions than generations past

3. the sequence of a transition so you can find your bearings in it

4. great guidance on how to be super intentional in the transition

5. relatable and relevant stories to underscore each principle

mastering transitions is the most essential skill for our generation because we literally are in perpetual change. it’s a practical, fast read that you can reference over and over.

future of work: either become a creator-led brand or work for one.

in a world where every piece of information is available but the traditional system of work is fundamentally broken, the new economy belongs to those who build their lives and businesses on the truth of their stories. our real, lived experiences and perspectives are our most valuable assets, our original ip, our ultimate point of connection and the only reason people will care.

• a few weeks ago, Starbucks just made an epic move to empower and pay their baristas to grab the mic on behalf of the company. in this first-of-its-kind deal with TikTok, the company will select certain employees and send them content ideas to turn into TikToks and earn money.

• last week, Gap Inc. just announced that they too are creating a creator program for employees that gives them a way to become influencers, earning commission and product while sharing what they love and bringing the Gap brand to life through authentic storytelling.

• here on Substack, Kevin discovered this GenZ phenom book publicist,

  Abigail Monti and her stack Unsolicited Manuscript. she writes her observations from inside the publishing industry and her company Penguin Random House actually supports her becoming a known creator because they get what we get… if we fall in love with Abigail’s story, we’re more likely to buy their books and support their authors.

the truth will set us free.

the future belongs to those who are willing to share both the torturous and triumphant journey of their stories out loud.

this week we were inspired by Jarrod at Craft & Capital.

Jarrod is an attorney and tech policy advisor who is becoming a leading creator in the business of high fashion. this week, he relaunched his substack and shared his emotional story about being laid off by Amazon and how hard the shift has been as a husband, father and the truth about building outside the w-2 system. we loved his declaration at the end, I will be successful, but I will definitely make mistakes along the way. But I’m done building in silence and only showing my wins. That’s not real life. That’s reel life.

we look forward to hearing you share more on the necessary tradeoffs of becoming a craftsman in this longer format, Jarrod.

permission to… not have a plan.

we love talking to and hearing from people who create safe relational environments for people to tell the truth of their stories. and last week, we caught up with one of our readers who’s a therapist (when ya’ll reach out, we respond btw). we asked her, what are you hearing from your clients in broad strokes. she answered, mass disillusionment from what they thought their lives were going to look like.

so when we saw, Myliek’s article, Permission to Not Have a Plan, we knew we had to share. she succinctly sums up the existential feeling of those who are making the transition from corporate athlete to creativeprenuer: i don’t know what’s next.

she affirms that the answers we’re so desperately wanting come from allowing time and space to do its work. she writes, so much in your life is going to change, and the goal is not to get rid of uncertainty. It’s learning not to confuse uncertainty with incompetence. You don’t know yet, and for now, let that be enough.

thank you for the permission, Myliek.

the latest on the stack: is your writing 100% human?

the Substack streets are at war over the new collaboration with Panagram and their feature that lets readers scan text over 100 words to determine if there is any AI assistance in the writing. some think it’s a great addition to keep Substack a more human place on the internet and not let it become ai drenched like LinkedIn. others believe it’s a witchhunt, an inaccurate tool that’s going to make great writers question themselves. Aurora James wrote about this in her latest, Did I write this?, where she admitted to questioning [her] own sanity, and the validity of [her] words.

here’s our take on this: stop worrying about what people think and start focusing on your intent. this isn’t about the tool. you can disable it and it not be a thing.

this is really about the trust you’re building between you and your readers. you can obsess about what people might think or you can focus on how to cultivate a transparent container where you reveal and are honest about your intent with your writing.

if you use ai to write, tell them and explain why. if you are committed to writing 100% human, let them know why that matters to you and your work. if you decide to turn off the tool, reveal your thinking behind it. ultimately, your readers just want to know why you’re doing what you’re doing. this is how trust is built over time. and trust is your most valuable currency, not a Panagram scan.

for example, in this week’s article, we were honest that we used ai to help organize the thoughts in the last section in how i did this, because it’s the truth of how we got there.

you ask, we answer.

Lauren W. from South Carolina asked, I’m leaning into my path as a documentarian in South Carolina and really designing what this looks like for me--with intention this time, not in a reactive way like before. Your writing has helped me see that everyone isn’t going to understand my vision because I have to carve it out first--and even then it’s only for those who are assigned to it. Now that I have overwhelming evidence I’m on the right path, my question is how do I really talk to my audience?

before you start thinking about how to talk to your audience, our first question is, do you know the pain points of who you’re meant to serve and how your work is designed to help bring restoration in their lives? we often see people jump into content without having a clear understanding of this. a great way to approach this is to examine your own life and interrogate your own pain first, or talk with someone who’s been impacted by your work to get to a deeper understanding. you could ask yourself, what’s frustrating me right now and why does it bother me so much? or ask someone you’ve impacted, without using words from my actual job, how would you say i’ve helped you?

we believe that our pain used productively is the pathway to our greatest purpose. once you are clear on that, then start writing to that person, singularly. when we write here on FTL, we think about one person we know in real life and we only write to them. when you write to an audience, you’re not really writing to anyone. but when you write to one person, you’ll end up writing to many.

if you (or anyone) is looking for help on how to start thinking about your work, your story, who it’s here to serve and the pain they may be experiencing, book a session with us. we’d love to serve you.

sending u so much love,

m & k

p.s. we are looking for a kind, people-first, innovative, creative genius to help us distribute Follow the Leader content across platforms.

someone who loves storytelling, is a visionary creative producer and executor who can translate an idea into many formats. someone who knows the pain of work and is on the courageous journey to becoming their own best work and wants to be a part of our mission to change the culture of work, one visionary creator at a time.

essentially, you are like the Law Roach of social content development + distro.

if that’s you or someone you know, email us at maya@ourbestwork.co or kevin@ourbestwork.co. we want to hear your story and see evidence of you in expression.

we were starting to relax into the weekend while we waited for Chipotle to arrive. we don’t cook on Fridays. as we walked out of our meeting room, i overheard Kevin playing this clip of Ryan Clark getting emotional talking about being fired by ESPN. I asked what happened, but Kevin was still gathering the facts and wasn’t sure yet.

when we got to the family room, Kevin sank into the couch while i started impatiently grazing for snacks in the cabinets.

did you see LeBron is going to Philly? he asked.

ugh, he’s so lame to me! why in the world would he go to another team? and why Philly?! i said so annoyed.

Kevin started reading some facts and commentary he saw on Threads about the move. $8 million contract. 24 months. the team with Jaylen Brown, Joel Embiid, and Tyrese Maxey. And a chance to win another championship with yet another team.

it’s so interesting, I said. Lebron might be the first NBA great that’s not associated with one franchise. there’s Jordan and the Bulls. Bird and the Celtics. Magic and the Lakers. Tim Duncan and the Spurs. i don’t know if there will be one team we’ll remember LeBron for.

Kevin said, yeah that’s right. i think that’s the point. we’ll remember him as Lebron, inc.

i stopped eating the handful of cashews i had grabbed and suddenly remembered that we are supposed to be employee first, and in this instance, player first. my disdain with LeBron stemmed from an old construct and the outdated mindset that to be great it meant you stayed with a franchise and they built the team around you. you didn’t leave when things got hard or through losing seasons. you stayed, endured and your ability to win at one place is what made you a legendary player.

and then Kevin said, Lebron is just the Bozoma Saint John of the NBA.

i looked at him wide eyed and said, we have to write about this.

we have good news

it was a hot July summer day in 2020 and i was anxiously pacing back and forth trying to stay in the light that was shining in through the floor-to-ceiling windows inside my Sherman Oaks house waiting for the two highest ranking Netflix executives to call. i had just returned to work after taking two weeks off after a deeply visceral and unpleasant encounter.

we have good news, Reed Hastings said over the phone to me. thank you for your patience over the last couple weeks. we want you to know we really value you and want you to know how much we really believe in you and your future here. we took action and let what’s her name go. it was clear she was struggling and it was unacceptable how you were handled. the good news is we hired Bozoma Saint John. she starts in September. you now report directly to her. you now report directly to a Black woman. isn’t that great news?!

i paused in shock. uh…yeah…wow. i didn’t see this coming.

Ted added, she’s been briefed on your situation. and even though she doesn’t officially start for a couple months, she wants to talk to you today in the next hour if you’re available.

yes, of course. tell her i’m free. I said back. i’m really grateful you all took action on this. it means a lot to me. i really love this place. i was waiting to see how you all handled this over the to see if i was going to stay. and based on this, i’ve made the decision to stay. thank you.

we hung up the phone and i immediately texted one of my trusted work besties who knew the details of everything that had happened leading up to this.

me: they fired what’s her name. And hired Boz.

trusted work bestie: alkdafljhdsfy!! what?! omg. how do you feel about this?

me: i don’t know how to feel. i’m talking to her in an hour.

trusted work bestie: what are you gonna wear?

me: idk yet.

her image rewired my imagination

i had followed Boz’s career for years. i distinctly remember being mesmerized by this image of her in Fast Company after she demoed Apple Music at Apple’s iconic developer conference in 2016. who was this gorgeous, glamorous, dark-skinned, big hair, don’t care Black woman in marketing? i thought. i immediately looked her up to learn more about her journey and resume. Spike Lee. Pepsi. Beyonce. wow. impressive.

when I was still at OWN, i had bumped into her a couple times when she was one of our VIP guest for the irl experiences we were producing at the time. we always did that Black woman i see you thing from across the room. we only spoke in brief sentences. she was always kind and polite when i saw her backstage at SuperSoul Sessions and The Life You Want tour.

her presence was a physical force. you couldn’t look away from her if you tried. it wasn’t just the sheer height, the kaleidoscope of colors she wore, or the majestic crown of her hair. it was her posture. her poise. she carried a laugh so resonant and a confidence so thick it permeated the air, giving it no choice but to settle directly on you.

i had never seen anyone who looked like that, and definitely anyone who looked like me, occupying the exact rooms i desperately wanted to enter. before her, my ambitions were theoretical. her image alone rewired my imagination, fundamentally shifting the boundaries of what i believed was possible for myself. i didn’t just respect her; i looked up to her as a blueprint.

since then, i tracked her every move through Instagram and industry chatter. i vividly remember her breakthrough Apple Music campaign. the one with Kerry Washington, Mary J. Blige, Taylor Swift, and Drake. iconic, I thought. i had just started at Netflix in 2017 when i watched her sit down with Gayle King on CBS This Morning in a bright red blouse, gold hoops, and braids, thinking, man, she is bold. she had just moved to Uber, stepping in as the face of the brand in the thick of all the misconduct allegations surrounding Travis Kalanick. i knew what that meant: a massive job, a massive check, and massive pressure.

as i learned more about her personal history, my reverence deepened. i was a single mom myself, fiercely determined to climb the corporate ladder and make a name for myself. finding out that she had ascended to the absolute highest echelons of corporate as a single mother was profoundly comforting. it felt like a direct validation: if she could do it, I could do it.

less than a year into her time at Uber, she announced she was leaving for WME. with every rapid pivot from company to company, the narrative around her seemed to change. it felt like she was transitioning from a corporate executive deep in the daily execution to a corporate influencer. my admiration started shifting into suspicion. why was she jumping ship so often? i prided myself on being in the trenches, doing the actual heavy lifting. for me, leadership wasn’t about optics or the spotlight. it was about moving the needle and taking my responsibility seriously both to the internal teams I led and the external audiences we served.

on Instagram, her feed became a parade of famous faces and luxe experiences. it started to feel like her real work was simply being friends with celebrities and getting paid millions to do it. it felt insulting to those of us who kept our heads down, focused on the business, and did the real work. to make matters worse, the rumors started circulating: chatter that she would slide into a company, shake up teams and leave without ever executing the work. watching her get celebrated for optics while we bled for results turned my skepticism into resentment.

so when Reed and Ted told me they had hired her as our new CMO, it felt like a slap in the face. Netflix wasn’t a playground. we were a real company with massive deliverables and non-stop pressure. and after cycling through two CMOs in two years, our department was running on fumes. we needed a stabilizing force, a leader to anchor the ship. instead, it felt like we were getting a celebrity figurehead hired to pose for the cameras.

why are you still here?

but regardless of how i felt, she was the boss now, and our first meeting was minutes away. i was about to log onto a Zoom with one of the most blindingly glamorous Black women to ever scale the corporate ladder. i swallowed my resentment, grabbed my makeup bag, brushed my hair, and put on a red lip.

when the Zoom window popped open, she was smiling radiantly, her porcelain-white teeth flashing brilliantly against her rich, dark skin. she was in immaculate, full hair and makeup, looking every bit the icon she was. when she gestured, I noticed her long acrylic nails, adorned with intricate, colorful artwork. she was completely, unapologetically flawless.

she said, i’m so happy to see you. they told me what’s going on. then with genuine concern in her voice, she asked, sis, are you ok?

and i lost it. i just completely and utterly lost it. the unexpected softness and genuine care of a Black woman asking about my spirit completely shattered my hardened corporate shell. i couldn’t stop the tears if I tried.

as I choked back the tears and fought to steady my breath, the floodgates opened and i laid it all at her feet. i told her how I’d been at Netflix for four years, fed a steady diet of empty promises about reaching the next levels of leadership. i told her about the team I built, one of the most wildly successful marketing engines the industry had ever witnessed. a team where 70% percent of the talent fought for internal transfers just to work under me. everyone wanted in, but for leadership, it was never enough. i was invisible when it came to promotions, while my peers, who hadn’t delivered a fraction of my results, were constantly elevated.

the words just kept coming. i told her how i realized i was only valuable to them when the company was on fire with Black shit. when Black talent had a problem or Black employees demanded accountability or when our CCO was fired for saying the n-word, suddenly they needed me to play shield. i told her about the unimaginable names I’d been called, and the final, crushing blow two weeks earlier: being asked to co-lead the company’s Black Lives Matter task force, only to be called angry and militant and humiliated by another leader, in front of the entire executive team.

i told her i was done. that I’d threatened to walk, threatened to sue. threatened to burn Netflix to the ground. that the frustration from this place had bled into my home, leaving my personal life hanging by a thread. it felt like the walls were caving in, and i was suffocating. i was overwhelmed. and i was tired.

then, my voice shifted from a plea into something else. i began rambling about how grateful I was for her, how her very existence given me life at a time when i needed it, and how I couldn’t even fathom the horrors she must have survived to reach her heights. i see you too, I told her, the tears still falling. we’ve all been watching you, Boz. we had never seen anyone like you. thank you for being who you are.

in that space sat two Black women, stripped of our armor, recognizing the same battle scars on each other’s skin. i wasn’t just crying for myself anymore; i was honoring what it took for her to survive, too. the gravity of that mutual recognition, i watched her eyes start to water too.

she held my gaze, looked me in my eyes and said so beautifully calmly, if you’ve done all of that, and experienced all of that and they still don’t see you, why are you still here?

the ultimate permission

the silence that followed her question was deafening. it was the exact moment the old construct died. i realized then that the resentment I had harbored toward her wasn’t actually about deliverables, corporate stability or her fancy life. it was envy. i was bitter because she had a freedom I didn’t think I was allowed to possess. i had been trapped in the toxic ideology of the loyal employee, while she and LeBron were operating as players who owned the game. she wasn’t just a corporate executive; she was an enterprise. LeBron wasn’t just a basketball player; he was LeBron, Inc. they didn’t belong to the organizations; the organizations should feel blessed to have them.

her question forced me to look at my own hands and realize i held a power i didn’t know i had. that it was possible to be great, to deeply care about the work and the people and to stop waiting to be seen, waiting to be promoted, and start playing for myself. in that one sentence, Boz gave me the ultimate permission: the permission to leave.

i started interviewing for a new team two months later. six months later i left and became a CMO.

work isn’t working

we are living through the most disruptive generational reckonings the workplace has ever seen. we are the most conscious we’ve ever been, armed with therapy, coaching, and unprecedented access to information. we’ve learned how to name our triggers, regulate our nervous systems, and advocate for our needs. this deep self-awareness makes it impossible to tolerate what isn’t right. we can see toxicity clearly now. We can name burnout, manipulation, and dysfunction. so when we say a corporate system isn’t working, we are not being dramatic; we are being honest.

the pandemic accelerated this shift. it forced a global pause that allowed everyone, everywhere, all at once to get quiet enough to hear the truth: work isn’t working for me anymore.

our parents and grandparents survived under a different blueprint. for them, a linear path existed. you clocked in, kept your head down, and trusted that institutional loyalty would reward you with stability and a pension. the system was flawed, but it was functional enough to build a life around.

but our societal contract with work is broken. and as author and workplace researcher notes in Life Is in the Transitions, that linear life is dead. Feiler’s data reveals that modern lives are strictly nonlinear, unfolding in unpredictable chapters, disruptions, and resets. we are changing industries, identities, and values multiple times over a lifetime.

the crisis we feel is that while our lives have become nonlinear, our corporate systems are still built for linear humans. companies have no sense of loyalty, commitment and decency to their people. the jig is up. our parents survived by staying put. but we have to imagine a new way. one where we move with a different kind of intention, authority and agency.

no one is coming to save you

if you are still waiting for a company, a title, a promotion, or a manager to save you or to see how great you really are, you are waiting for something that is not coming. excellent work will not insulate you from a broken system. just look at Ryan Clark, pulled off the air mid-broadcast by a network he gave a decade of his life to for no valid reason.

the ground is moving under all of us. this is the moment our parents never could have prepared us for and the moment the modern corporate athlete must learn to lead themselves. so let the franchise keep its old playbook. let the traditional corporate map burn. the true measure of a legendary career is no longer how much dysfunction you can quietly endure for a title or a logo, but how fiercely you protect your own value and how much you deeply understand your own worth.

sending u so much love,

m

there have been numerous times where i wanted to reach out and share an update on our progress. but i do my best to restrain myself. and i know you say you don’t care and i shouldn’t hesitate. but i just know how needy, suffocating and demanding people can be around you and i never wanted to be that girl. i’ve wanted to steward the access i have to you well because it’s you. i’ve been so mortified sometimes by our exchanges that when we’re done talking i delete the text thread because i can’t stand to look at it. whyyy did i text that?

in all honesty, i don’t watch a lot of your interviews with other people because they rarely bring revelations that i haven’t heard you say before. and i have the greatest hits memorized. it was part of my job. most times people are so grateful to be in your presence that they don’t push. but Keke is different. i really admire how she holds space and the way she engages her guests. i was excited to see what could happen between you two.

i first listened while doing my morning routine and feeding the dogs. i was so impressed with Keke’s balance of reverence, depth of curiosity and ability to gently, yet precisely push for a truer truth. i saw you light up in a way i haven’t seen in a long time. the recognition that you were in the presence of mastery. i felt the full bodied conviction in what you were saying, especially when you started speaking about your faith and the truth of what it really takes to live in expression the way you do. you leaned in. you were activated. it was very cool to see.

i immediately grabbed my phone to text you. there were so many different things i wanted to say…the internet is going crazy off that interview…we can do ALL things through Christ, no weapon formed against me shall prosper. you better preach O!... but again, i restrained myself and put my phone back down.

a couple hours later, Kevin walked into the kitchen to grab coffee. you haven’t met Kevin yet. he and I worked at Netflix together. we live together and he is the co-pilot in this work we’re doing to reimagine the culture of work. he’s the one who put the interview on my radar.

i asked him, have you watched the Oprah and Keke interview yet?

he said, not yet. why?...is it good?

i replied, it’s really special. and it’s especially affirming of the work we’re doing right now. it gets really good in the second half.

and so i watched it again with him. and the second time, a swell of emotion came up and tears started running down my face.

forgive me in advance for the long letter, there are many things that are on my heart that i was convicted to share…

i’ve always felt a very deep connection between us. not in a fandom way. more in a calling kind of way. but i wasn’t sure if i was crazy or making it up in my head. you have this unprecedented ability to make everyone around you feel so seen. and not just the people who are in proximity to you, but anyone who’s ever had the privilege of hearing the sound of your voice. so i’ve questioned and wondered, is what i’m feeling real?

the feeling started young. my mom, like every mom, but especially Black moms, had your show on at 4p religiously. we would watch together as a family, but my mom always took it a step further and prompted us to talk about the topic that day. i remember watching you and capturing this visual and mental model of what a free black woman who’s in full expression looks like. and what that dynamic transfer of activated in my mom and women like her.

when i first moved back in with my parents after Michelle was born, i was 20, living in South Bend, 90 miles outside of Chicago. something in me knew i was going to work for you. so when Abe Thompson randomly showed up at my parents house and he asked me what i wanted to do. i told him, i want to get inside the oprah show. he said, oh i know Oprah. let me see what i can do. send me your resume and i’ll give it to George Burns. it was confirmation that what i felt was real.

when i started as an intern in publicity in 2007, i felt like i had arrived at the mecca of something. there was a kinetic energy that i still don’t have the words for. it felt like holy ground. but immediately, i knew i was not just there to do my little intern job of running errands, answering the phones and making copies. i was there to study something. i didn’t know what it was exactly. but the instinct was to start watching as much tape as i could.

i got my hands on the 20th anniversary dvd box set, the curation of the moments of the show that mattered the most to you and and context as to why. i came home every day after work, after putting Michelle down, and watched it. over and over and over again. i remember asking the guys in the tape library to print copies of every show from the 80s and 90s, adding to my daily playlist.

i reached out to nearly every executive to set up time to take them to lunch. and most said yes. i was curious about their role, what they did and how they contributed to this generational machine. and everyone was so kind. and so bright, both literally and figuratively.

when my internship ended in 2008, i wasn’t ready to accept it. my dad said that i should go to you and ask you for a job. i did and you said no. gracefully, of course. you told me that i was an audacious intern. you also told me to surrender it and that if it was God’s plan for me to be there, there was nothing you or i could do to stop it.

so later that year, when i got a random call from Harpo offering me a job, after wrapping up work with the Obama campaign, it was proof that surrender works. she was right, i thought.

this time around i was meant to study how you were doing this. I was granted access into rooms, discussions, experiences and projects that most people who worked decades for you never got to see. how does she actually lead with intention? how does a company built on service actually operate? how does she manage through a crisis and respond to persecution? how does she translate this iconic brand of 25 years into different verticals and product lines? how does the work move forward? how does she hire? fire? give feedback? how does she rest and care for herself? how does she lead with integrity? how does she make decisions? what does she see that no one else sees? and why? how did this all happen?

i’ve realized recently that there’s only a few dozen people in the world who’ve gotten to witness this. i wasn’t sure what it meant for my life. but i knew I was supposed to be paying attention.

when we were in Maui in 2016 at the sales and leadership retreat, you invited us to take a sunrise hike in your backyard on your mountain. i was hungover from the night before and moving slow. everyone else was pacing ahead of me. you let me borrow your hiking stick and said follow me. we got to this spot, wayyy up high. out of breath. the sun was shining bright and water was glistening. you put your arm around me and you said, look at alllllll of this. all of this is mine. i am a Black girl from the dirt roads of Kosciusko, Mississippi. if I can do this, YOU can do this. and you kept moving. i remember pausing, wondering, what in the lion king just happened? i asked Bob Greene to take a photo of me because i felt like i was going to want to remember that moment. it felt like a divine signal that it was time to go.

on my last day in 2017, as i was walking out of the OWN offices with my stuff, someone ran downstairs and said Oprah is on the phone for you. you said thank you for everything that i gave there. we remincised about how i had grown up there and who i had become. you said it’s time for me to go fly and that you would put in a good word for me with Ted over at Netflix, and you did.

from 2017 to 2022, i was granted access at high levels to two very different kinds of workplaces. Netflix, the global leader in entertainment with a reputation for having one of the most iconic, most progressive work cultures in the world. and Clubhouse, one of the fastest growing tech startups that lived at the epicenter of Silicon Valley.

in their own distinct way, both made me feel like i had to shrink. over time, both suppressed the truth of who i really was. and both robbed me of the feeling of my worth. and there are wonderful people in both places. but now as i understand the roots and complexity of the modern workplace, their root systems were built on extraction, manipulation and chaos. something that i had never experienced when i was in your environment. something so bad, that it nearly destroyed me in a five year window, after spending almost 10 years at Harpo hq. i couldn’t believe that these were the kind of environments that everyone had been existing in all this time. it was alarming.

God called me out and told me to quit my job in March 2022. immediately, i started hearing this phrase, change the culture of work. change the culture of work. i didn’t know why, but as the quest was beginning, i felt like i needed to talk to you about it. so when you responded and we had lunch in the fall of 2022, i felt like i was coming back to headquarters to give an update on what i saw in the field.

i had the data that showed how bad the problem was. i shared that the average person spends 70% of their lives at work. so whatever their work experience is what their life becomes. and right now, it is the most stressful, extractive and unfulfilling part of people’s lives. it doesn’t matter how much therapy or SuperSoul they watched, it is not possible for them to get into the highest fullest expression of their lives, which i know matters very deeply to you. the revelation was that the fastest way to help people get into expression was to stop trying to build solutions around work and attack the workplace. i had some initial ideas on where to begin.

you were so encouraging. you told me that you thought the idea was revolutionary and to pursue it with everything i had. with my whole heart. i needed to hear that. and i needed that permission because i truly had no idea what i was doing or what lay ahead. you also asked what i needed. in which i responded, your wisdom. your voice on the subject. and some capital. you said, stay close. and keep me updated on your progress.

i know i haven’t done a very good job of keeping you updated. watching your Keke interview felt like the culmination of a four year cycle since that lunch. It activated a reminder that after years of searching, we have strong hypotheses about how to solve it. so much of what you said confirmed the very revelations we’ve received about how to actually change the culture of work.

but instead of reaching for my phone to text or send a voice note, God told me to share this out loud. and you know it’s God, because this is the last thing i would want to do. but i am being, as you said in the Keke interview, obedient to the call. the substack’ers who see this know that God has told me that I need to be in practice of telling the truth of my story out loud, but i never saw this coming.

the last four years have felt like the most epic r&d phase. a constant cycle of testing, failing, rebuilding and testing again. 10,000+ hours, 25,000 pieces of user data, 150 facilitated coaching sessions, countless research from authors and experts, running cohorts, retreats + two failed tech startups.

here is what I finally know for sure about the intersection of getting into the highest expression of ourselves and the modern workplace:

we need the language for what our real work is.

90% of people don’t have language for their real work or their why. we are constantly being told, find your purpose, get into your purpose, but there is no common format for or resource at scale that actually helps people do this. not at work, in our schools or in our churches. everyone is telling us to find it without offering any tools.

one of the most consistent things i witnessed about you is that you always had the language. i don’t know how you got it. but you brought this up in the Keke interview when you talked about Maya Angelou saying right now you are in showbiz, but one day you’ll be about your Father’s business. you note that the real work is about honoring the dream that Creation has for you, rather than just chasing a paycheck or surface-level success.

and for you, that was helping people understand that they matter, help get people into the highest fullest expressions of themselves, raise consciousness. that has always been the mission you served. you said it out loud in the very first Oprah show and you never stopped saying it. it was what was the operating system underneath it all. it informed your decisions, kept you in hard times and it also attracted others who are aligned with that same mission to keep advancing the work. and it always kept you in the posture of service.

Viktor Frankl said in Man’s Search For Meaning, that if you know your why you can endure any how. this is one of the reasons we are in a crisis right now. times are extremely hard and most don’t have language for their why. and when we don’t have language, we don’t know what we’re holding onto, or what we’re holding on for. and it’s impossible to be in a real posture of service when you don’t know who you’re meant to serve and what you’re meant to give them.

we found a framework. and it’s from Genesis, when God states his original intention for humans for the first time. we call it becoming, the true story of your best work. it’s a foundational frame that moves beyond the surface to ask, what is this person’s life an answer to? at the heart of the framework is an excavation of the consistent thread of pain. pain is what produces purpose. when we understand that, it can be used productively to alleviate the suffering of others. when we don’t, our pain is used to punish each other.

we must know our area of domain.

connected to the language of our work, is the truth about our territory. you said in the interview, that when we start operating outside of our territory, we have no power. and it’s when we start to compare ourselves to others. and this is absolutely correct.

your domain is storytelling. and you’ve never really deviated from it. even in working with other brands like Starbucks and Weight Watchers, the goal has always been to tell a deeper story in the way only you are designed to tell stories. it’s why you always brought in your storytelling team to execute in those spaces.

i realized that my domain is also storytelling through non-fiction stories about our work. and it made sense why God would have sent me to your territory to study under one of the greatest storytellers in the history of the world.

we were taught to build careers. we are oriented towards jobs and titles. not domains. once people have the words for their real work, the next step is helping to look back through the tape of their life to see what domain they were actually designed for. because when our real work is lined up with the right domain, in your words, nobody can touch us.

we have to constantly be in practice of telling the truth of our story.

i LOVED that Keke asked you about how you managed to create an ecosystem around your ideas and make your philosophy a scalable business. your answer matched with everything we’ve seen in our research too. the people who are able to get into the highest expression of their work based their business off the truth of their lives. but more importantly they constantly had safe spaces to practice speaking their truth first. and the truth of their story is what actually connects and transcends in the work, not the things they do or sell.

today, there are not a lot of places where people are able to speak their truth. we are at the highest levels of distrust we’ve ever experienced in this generation across every level. specifically at work, people are punished for telling the truth. so we are deeply conditioned to say what we think we have to say to stay safe.

as we work with people, we hear n almost every single session, i’ve never said this out loud before.

in the environment you created, we were proactively asked, what is your truth? what are you not saying that you need to say? what’s on your heart? what does your gut say?

these are questions most people have never been asked by another. despite being “connected” to more people, we are the loneliest we’ve ever been, what the surgeon general declared a health epidemic. so we understand that we have to create, somatically safe relational environments where people can tell the truth of their story.

in a world where every piece of knowledge is at our fingertips, our stories become our most valuable assets and are the original ip that we can build our lives on. and we have to get good at speaking the truth of them, because they are the doorway to everything else we desire and are designed for.

we must have a personal system of remembrance.

in the interview with Keke, you spoke about your love for hikes. you said, don’t focus on the distance ahead. that if we look at how far we have left to go, we will feel discouraged. instead, you emphasize the importance of looking back to see how far we’ve come.

what we’ve learned is that a system of remembrance is critical in the process of becoming our best work. that most times we don’t have a faith problem, we have a remembrance problem. and remembering the is what increases our faith that who we’re becoming is real. and that increase of faith produces works to stay on the quest. practically that means building a consistent practice where we track evidence in all the micro and macro ways that you are in expression of your real work.

in the work environment you created, daily remembrance was built in. there were 600 real humans that came into the studio every week that mirrored the truth of what the work was becoming, it produced faith in all of us to do greater works and keep elevating in expression. that is the feeling of fulfillment. not just knowing what the work is, but knowing that the intention is being fulfilled in other people’s lives.

in the modern workplace, there is no positive system of remembrance or experience of fulfillment. not only do we not have language for what our real work is, we are constantly told what we were not doing, what more we need to do and given complaints on what we’ve done wrong.

but most importantly, we can’t live undivided lives if we are meant to be in expression.

our identity, faith and work cannot be separated. God is the Creator of each of us and we must seek Him diligently and constantly for answers to reveal the work. you shared in the interview how consistently you were asking, why am i here, why am i here? and that we are constantly in co-creation with Him.

in the interview, you said you really thought Jesus was your Father and you really believed that you could do all things through Christ who strengthens you. clear identity in God and then sunrise faith are the two foundational prerequisites for our highest expression. Identity without faith leads to a fear based life. faith without clear identity produces selfish ambition disguised as service.

your work environment was the living proof of this framework. faith wasn’t just welcomed, we were actively championed to seek God and create from our unique identity from our own level of understanding. we prayed, meditated, and spoke of God constantly, honoring every distinct expression of faith in the room. you deeply integrated the truth that what is impossible with man is possible with God. we operated with a genuine ‘God advantage’ and the result was fruit that went far beyond anything we could ever ask, think, or imagine. the fruits of the Spirit were present every day. and because we were in your atmosphere, we all became beneficiaries of that overflow, and we all were abundantly blessed.

but the modern workplace, where people spend 70% of their lives demands division. the design of work as we know it were inspired by plantation principles. the men who designed it owned slaves. the original intent, the roots, were to maximize production and create efficiency for profit. so in order to do that they had to homogenize, conform and strip people of their individuality and creative expression. it’s not efficient and gets in the way of the money. so as a result, everyone has to operate from a sustained state of suppression. and while an individual can be clear on identity and their faith, the collective body is not in alignment, creating a profound spiritual friction where people must choose between their livelihood and their soul.

since 2022, the data around the state of work has gotten much worse. the current crisis has seen hundreds of thousands of Black women systematically pushed out of the workforce, with even more choosing to leave on their own volition. a seismic breaking point is happening. as we grow more conscious as human beings, the weight of systemic suppression becomes heavier, sparking an earthquake-level shift. the contract we as a society once had with work is no longer valid. and it’s not sustainable, let alone feasible, for Black women to step into full expression or live out their true purpose within the architecture of the modern workplace. the current system is literally killing us.

we cannot depend on structures that do not want us and were never designed to work for us. we must build a new ecosystem. we must create an architecture where people can become creator-led brands, where their unique stories serve as the currency and entry points to products, services, experiences, and content. a system where we can remain whole and well in the process, step into our absolute highest expression, and finally experience the abundant promises God has for us and that you’ve shown us is possible.

we have to build more systems and environments like the one you built.

through this journey, i realized that this is the work i’ve been called to do. that i am a voice of restoration and an architect of stories. i’m here for a time such as this to create immersive environments of context and permission for those of us who unconsciously allowed ourselves to be abused and manipulated out of worth by the cultures and systems that were intentionally designed to suppress us.

i do that by telling the truth about what’s really going on, producing stories people can see themselves in and providing architecture to move us forward, so that the greatest among us, the servant visionary creatives, are clear, cared for and convicted to answer the call and keep becoming the best work of their lives.

i realized that i was created for a time such as this and you have been one of my key teachers, core helpers and my main workplace muse. God has revealed a generational vision, something we hope will out last us. and we are just beginning the lifelong journey of what it means to bring something like this forward and all the ways God will surprise and delight us in what he has in store.

so a few things i realized today:

1. the environment you created is one of our core blueprints for the future. and as an architect, i’m clear on plans and how to help replicate it for others. this interview was confirmation of what was revealed to us too. and it will become a canon in our library as we help others. thank you for answering the call and saying yes to your work.

2. i wasn’t crazy. that feeling i’ve had that our lives are deeply connected was and is real.

3. that moment on the mountain in Maui was a go be about your Father’s business moment. you have been one of the most influential and consistent voices in my life that has consciously and unconsciously always given me that permission.

and that permission was so poignantly on display in the Keke interview, to show us what’s possible when we are about our Father’s, i believe, is your best work.

sending u so much love,

m

this week marks exactly 4 weeks of my commitment to write the truth of my story out loud. to be completely honest, I needed a break from pulling from the deep well of my pain this week.

for those who are new here, we kicked this off 4 weeks ago with an essay called i’m so tired of being disappointed. since leaving corporate in 2022 to follow God, my path has been a cycle of building, putting myself out there, and watching ventures spin up and close down. i uncomfortably admitted that every time a project fails, it hurts immensely. the last project that broke my heart was writing the book.

God and I chatted and He encouraged me to use Substack as our personal “gym” to practice writing the truth of my journey. a space to practice radical honesty, build creative endurance, and process my journey in public.

ok, so what’s happened in the last 4 weeks…

1. literally everybody wants to talk about the truth of their story.

i have never received more text messages, calls, emails and dm’s in my life. it has been overwhelming. and these aren’t like hey, i see you writing, keep going girl. these are deep, vulnerable confessions, ok, your story reminded me of a time where…and i’m also struggling…and i can’t believe… and i’m so surprised… and i’m wondering if…

so thank you, thank you, thank you to every single person that has not only affirmed my own truth, but has shared their own back with me. i take days to respond to every single person. i sit with your words and respond as thoughtfully as i can. i am so inspired and deeply moved by your truth too.

2. something special is happening on substack.

this is becoming a place where we all practice out loud. i feel like we found the becoming side of the internet where everyone is processing what’s happened over our lives. we’ve been so inspired by the courage and bravery of people who are willing to tell their truth out loud and are willing to be seen ( , , , , , , , and so many more).

for the last 20 years, i’ve followed and built culturally relevant moments and movements on social platforms. from helping Oprah transition from the Oprah show to becoming one of the most followed people on the internet, or building a social first editorial machine inside Netflix, to working at the fastest growing social startup in history, Clubhouse. we have instincts for this space.

and there’s no other place on the internet that allows for depth of practice, voice and experience. every other platform is trying to get us to say it quick, shallow and rewards chaos, outrage and gossip. with maybe the exception of youtube. but i think for Black women, the most educated, creative and resilient people on earth, being able to have space to breathe and let our ideas have room to express is really great for us. it feels like a digital renaissance and it’s deeply refreshing.

3. the most awkward thing that happens when i share an essay is people reaching out asking me if i’m ok.

they’re like, hey girl, you alright? i see you writing these deep, painful stories on the internet. i have to remind them that i’m ok and these are stories from the past that i’m pulling forward now. and my ability to write the truth about them in this way is evidence that i’ve healed. i’m good everybody! truly in the best place i’ve ever been, at least today.

4. the editor-in-chief of one of my favorite publications reached out…

about potentially writing for them. we couldn’t believe it. it has not turned into anything concrete, but we didn’t even know she was reading and let alone that she would consider me to write for them. it was just a reminder that you never know who is reading or who your work might get shared with.

if said EIC is reading this, let’s continue the conversation pls.

5. there’s a better return on my time and investment here.

literacy is alive and well on Substack!

12,000+ words have flowed through. good writing is just good thinking (hey, ). these words have helped me make meaning of my life and experiences in new ways i never could have imagined. writing is so weird and interesting because i always think i’m going to write about one thing but it turns into something i never could have seen coming in delightful and unexpected way. i’m learning, growing and healing deeply through the practice writing.

added 200 new subscribers + 20,000 views in less than 28 days. and we’re not really promoting this stuff everywhere else. i’ve posted the links to a couple of the articles on threads and linkedin. i’m too tired to think about instagram right now.

with subscribers is you get to keep the emails. on every other platform, followers can go away or they can decide to stop letting your content be served up to people who opted in to you. it makes us not want to spend time anywhere else but here and use the other platforms to encourage people to be here.

we sold $1200 in products in the last month. in the grand scheme, this is not a big number, or maybe it is to you!, but it’s a signal for something. we aren’t marketing them either. maybe you all reading this didn’t even know that there are services we offer. but through the practice of telling the truth, people are reaching out asking if we have more for them and we do! these offerings aren’t really even packaged up to be distributed at scale yet, but we are amazed that people are asking for it without us having to say anything about it.

6. my favorite piece to write was the Cannes piece.

i had SO much fun writing this. the epic adventures at shiny sisterhood fest! i was laughing at myself and just how ridiculous the whole thing was. it was also the piece that traveled the most and i think people could feel the fun and intent behind it. i think it resonated with people because we are literally just over it. nothing is what it looks like and we’re moving into a new season and era that everyone knows it. i literally received a voice note from a prominent exec who said they had the exact same experience this year.

7. i’m learning what my creative process is through this practice.

in coming into agreement with being a storyteller and a writer, i’m excited to take more classes and study under greats. * was so thoughtful and encouraged me to take ’s developing a writing process & practice. she’s the brilliant writer behind some of your favorite shows and highly anticipated A Different World sequel. she broke down the difference between a creative practice, a creative process and a creative career. i highly encourage anyone who writes to take it! it was a free webinar with the option for more depth.

these essays take me a whole week to produce every week. it starts with thinking about someone who we personally know or have heard from that has shared the truth of their pain and what they’re going through. then we create space to find an experience i’ve had that is connected to that pain. there are bunch of other steps, but essentially we’re always writing to only one person. in my drafts, i actually use their names to make it even more personal in the essay and then i remove at the end. i don’t know if this is a real writing practice, but it’s working for me.

*i will always be referencing Kevin. he is the co-pilot and co-founder of follow the leader. he’s being so gracious and letting me take lead with my creative practice right now.

8. i’m struggling with how to write about the truth of the journey without dishonoring the people in it.

i’m still learning how to navigate this. especially in this friendship massacre piece, we thought about what would happen the person i’m referencing saw this piece. could we defend it? in telling the truth, am i throwing them under the bus? it’s really important to us to not make these things about the people in it, but instead our experience in it. but it’s tricky. our lives are so intertwined with others, that we feel like this is something to master and learn how to do gracefully.

any advice on how to do this well?!

9. practice is the only thing that matters and the pre-requisite for everything else we desire.

practice is the doorway into everything we want but it’s the thing we resist the most. we want things to be done. we want to get to outcomes. but there’s something so freeing about it just being practice. like who cares! it’s just practice! what i love about it being a practice is the feeling of completing the practice. it’s not about is it good. or is it great. the metric that only matters is did you show up to practice today?

all of the weight of responsibility or worrying about getting things right have fallen off me. i’m having more fun than i’ve had in a really long time. it’s becoming the thing i’m fiercely defending and organizing everything else around.

so! my new goal is to stay in practice writing and releasing an essay every week for a year. or almost every week. giving myself 6 weeks of grace, like this week where we’re telling you what happened. so somewhere around 40+ essays to see what happens to me, to our work, what shows up as a result.

our promise is to keep you posted every 6 weeks or so. idk, it feels like we’re building a cool community of people who are in practice of telling the truth of their stories.

thank u for being here. and keep us accountable!

sending u so much love,

m

p.s. what else do you want to know? and what are you learning about your own writing practice? or being here on substack?

it feels like everyone, everywhere all at once is having the realization that work isn’t working anymore. it’s both beautiful and brutal. the beauty in new possibilities, the brutality of the practical reality of what it costs to get there. and the deep grief that the path we were told to follow didn’t work out the way we thought.

i wasn’t prepared for the massacre that would take place in some of my longest running friendships.

we work with corporate athletes who are transforming into visionary creators. one of our primary assignments is to build a safe space where they can finally stop performing and tell the truth about their exhaustion, their pain, their grief, their desires, and their wild and wonderful dreams.

these are people who checked every box. they went to the good schools, collected the advanced degrees, and climbed the corporate ladder, chasing a title and a salary they were promised would bring fulfillment. instead, they are waking up to a crushing reality that the game isn’t working.

what makes this shift so brutal is the isolation. they are surrounded by family, lifelong best friends, and massive professional networks, yet they confess they’ve never whispered these truths to anyone. not even to their therapists. it is a profound, heavy loneliness. they feel entirely unknown, locked away by the terrifying awareness that sharing their evolution usually means being misunderstood by the people who claim to love them most.

a feeling i know a little too well…

day one since day one

it was election night November 2020, where the idea of moving to Atlanta first entered my awareness. i was sitting inside my deafening hollow Sherman Oaks house. my ex-husband and i had split a few months prior. we had purchased this roomy 5 bedroom house in 2019 in the hopes that our family would expand and grow into it. i never considered that i would be locked inside as a single mom again in the midst of a ravaging pandemic. i was grateful for the space because we couldn’t go anywhere. and i resented the space because it reminded me that all the things i had fought to acquire left me feeling more empty than before I acquired them.

another Black woman swooped in and carried America on her back. Stacey Abrams had just done the unthinkable and led the Georgia electorate into turning blue for the first time in 28 years. two of my older brothers had just moved near Atlanta. and one of my lifelong best friends, Day One, had relocated there with her family. we were the grew up together, traveled together, talk on the phone for hours, in each other weddings, know where the bodies are buried kind of friends. we were always there for each other through everything. she stayed on my recent call log in the midst of the divorce.

we met when we were young. we were both raised with a similar tape. climb the corporate ladder and hustle to build successful lives. from childhood, we were told that our execution had to be excellent, that whatever we were called to do, we had to perform at the highest levels possible. we were standing on the shoulders of giants. work wasn’t merely a matter of personal ambition, it was a debt of gratitude. it was responsibility in action for the people who had broken through doors so we could inherit unprecedented access and opportunity.

we had choice and agency, but within a specific, curated perimeter of what was defined as success. between the two of us, we possessed a literal collection of infinity stones: the Ivy League pedigree, the corporate accolades, the prestigious titles, and the soaring salaries. we were reminded that we are the sum of the people you spend the most time with, and we needed friends who mirrored the high-achieving lives we were destined for. in each other, we found the realest, most authentic version of that vision.

won the game, lost myself

in the midst of my marriage falling apart and broader disillusionment with life, one of the homies had hooked me up with the opportunity to go to Usher’s first residency show in Vegas. it was the perfect feeling of thrilling nostalgia. i reminisced back to times when me and Day One used to listen to U Don’t Have to Call on repeat when it first came out in 2002. screaming our 17-year-old hormone induced brains out on our family vacations. going to the concert reminded me of a simpler time when we were young, wild and free. hopeful about what was ahead for our lives.

i went to the show with some of my new coworkers from my new CMO gig i had just started. i was 3 rows back, wearing a Covid mask and shaking a** as a newly single woman. i loved how Usher created this immersive world and celebrated the culture of Atlanta. that night, in my drunken haze, i took a call from my divorce attorney who told me i was going to have to sell the house in the settlement. i had less than a month to decide if i was going to stay in LA or move cities. that sobered me up real quick.

i knew i wanted to get out of LA, a city engineered around appearances, and the transactional question of what do you do so i can see if who you are can benefit me?’ i had checked every single box on that tape we were handed: the good schools, the executive titles, the money, the marriage and the five-bedroom house. i had achieved everything everyone taught me to want, and yet, sitting in that hollow house, I was utterly miserable. i had won the game, but I had lost myself.

Atlanta felt like hope and possibility. i wanted to be around more Black people and around people who really knew me and who were my safe places. me and Day One hadn’t lived in the same city since we were young, and the idea of moving to ATL and being down the street from her like exactly what i needed. at this point i was hanging on to God for dear life and i was praying about everything. and i got confirmation that it was time to head South. Ursher, baby, here i come.

the city in the forest

as soon as i got to the city in the forest i felt like i could breathe. the fresh air pumping out of all the trees produced an exhale i needed badly. the warmth and sunshine made room for new visions. new possibilities and new imaginations about what life could like. it’s when i first started to hear the whisper that maybe it was time to leave corporate and explore something else. i was starting to get clear about the problems i saw in the world and what could be done about them. my broken heart was starting to slowly soften to receive the new revelation of what could come next and i felt a hope and excitement for the first time in a long time. i was grateful to be closer to my family and i felt calm knowing that one of my Day Ones was a 20 min drive away.

one hot, sticky Atlanta day, me and Day One were talking on the phone. after a couple months of being there, we still hadn’t seen each other in person. i chalked it up to our busy schedules. life was lif’ing. but that day, we were in our groove. in our pocket. talking about everything. laughing about nothing. having a this isn’t what i thought life would be like kind of conversation.

because she held all my history, my guard was entirely down. i felt the rare freedom of being fully seen, so i let down the dam of my secrets. i naturally just started sharing what i was feeling and what i was experiencing. i said something like:

this isn’t it. i can’t keep living like this. it’s like nothing is working anymore. i feel like i’m being called into something new. i see something. i see how broken our workplaces are and how it’s impacting us. and how everything is out of context…i think my life is falling apart for a reason. all of this is for a greater purpose… i can see a company that changes the culture of work…and i believe God is calling me to go see what this could be and i think i’m seriously gonna do it. i think it’s time. i think i’m gonna go for it…

she went silent. and there was a long pause that felt uncomfortable.

then she said, are you sure about this? are you being serious right now?

i understood her line of questions because as much as we talked on the phone there were so many times when i brought up my life kind of ideas to her and then just kept going like nothing happened.

i replied with deeper conviction, no, i’m really serious this time. i can’t keep living like this anymore. i don’t think i have it in me to keep going. and i really think it’s time.

and then she said, you’ve worked so hard to get to the place you’ve gotten to. are you really just going to leave all that money on the table? i mean, entrepreneurship isn’t a sure thing.

and with that question, doubt masquerading as concern, my heart started racing. i felt a pit in my stomach. it instantly made me pull back, protect myself and shrink. the very thing that i was fighting so hard to escape everywhere else.

oh. i’m not safe here either.

we got off the phone and i looked out at the thick, green Atlanta canopy. i had moved across the country to find a safe harbor, to be down the street from Day One, to finally catch my breath in a city surrounded by people that felt like home. but as the sticky southern heat pressed against the window, the silence in my tiny apartment felt familiarly deafening. the realization settled in: you can change your zip code, but you cannot outrun the devastating friction of your own evolution.

the inevitable friction of becoming

it’s been my experience that when you are in the radically vulnerable act of sharing a vision of your future, a piece of your raw, unfiltered hope, and you are met with questions that evoke doubt, your brain processes it as a deep emotional betrayal. because it is.

what makes these moments so devastating right now is that we are all starting to unravel from the tapes we were given at the exact same time. deconstructing from that conditioning is already terrifying. but when u are called to step off the ledge first and the people closest to you panic, it’s damn near unbearable.

when you are on the journey of transforming into a visionary creator, some people will still be your people. they will recognize what’s happening in you and honor it, even if they don’t fully understand it. but some won’t. your transformation threatens the old agreement you had with them. they knew how to relate to the smaller, compliant, performing version of you, the high-achieving corporate athlete who needed their approval because you were both chasing the same infinity stones.

when you stop performing, you break the mirror. your freedom becomes an unintended accusation against their continued endurance. they don’t know how to relate or hold you in that moment because celebrating your exit would mean admitting that the tape they are still running is a lie. so instead, the tape gets weaponized to dismantle your confidence and have you questioning your own judgement and what you heard from God.

this is the true weight of the Day One friendship massacre. the collateral damage of a collective awakening.

so if you’re standing at this ledge terrified of what it might cost to say it out loud...

1. we are all on different timelines. when you leave a prestigious job to pursue your assignment, they may not understand. when you take a pay cut to align with your calling, some will think you’re being irresponsible. when you walk away from opportunities that look good on paper, they’ll question it. your life won’t make sense to them because you’re operating from a logic they haven’t been given access to yet.

2. your job is not to convince them. your job is to keep walking, to stay in relationship where you can, and to trust that over time, your life will become the explanation your words couldn’t be. don’t slow down for the friends around you. pray that they catch up and their eyes be opened.

3. grieve what the calling costs. because it does cost something. following the calling doesn’t just cost you your job, or your stability. it costs you people you love… and often the people you loved most. the isolation is real. feeling misunderstood is real. the loneliness of knowing that the people who love you can’t always see what you see is one of the hardest parts of the ride. you can hold that grief while still walking. both are allowed.

but the only way to know if the Day Ones can make it to the other side is to speak your truth. what i now know is that everything has to be broken down to be rebuilt. you’ve got to say it out loud and know that whatever the outcome, you will be ok. if it doesn’t work out, trust new and amazing relationships will show up. and if it does work out, how fortunate and blessed you are to get to hold on to each other on the other side of the ride.

releasing of agreements

there were a series of events after that moment that ultimately led to us releasing ourselves from each other. the seasons changed. we changed. we both had to go on our own journeys of becoming away from each other. seeing her happy and free on her Instagram made me realize she jumped off the ledge too and is building a life that’s hers. i’m happy for both of us.

i’m positive that i wasn’t a true safe space for her either. there was something unspoken and unexpressed in her that she couldn’t say to me. or maybe i met her with doubt too. i didn’t have language for what was happening to me. it’s only in hindsight that i recognize that i didn’t have the capacity to steward that season well with us. i wish i had the tools and the language i have now back then. but who knows if we would’ve survived it.

maybe we one day we will find our way back to each other as the truer version of ourselves.

maybe not.

sending u so much love,

m

p.s. i would love to hear your thoughts…what relational friction are you experiencing as a result of your own evolution right now? don’t leave me out here in this vulnerability hangover pls 😩

i’m in deep practice of honoring it when my body — she — tells me i’m not safe anymore, because for years she was silenced, neglected, and sacrificed. i didn’t really want to do it. but she wasn’t feeling it. she said, am i leading in this season, or nah?

i said okay, girl. i’ll handle it.

we’re still learning how to get along and be on one accord.

every day, we work with leaders to help them understand that we as humans are made up of three parts — spirit, soul, and body — and all three hold a key to the expression of your best work. each one needs to be healthy, whole, aligned, and free to operate at its highest potential. so we do a deep dive to understand which part of you is out of alignment, and we help restore it. we need strong, embodied leaders at the helm — not ones who haven’t processed their pain and use it to punish everyone around them, but ones who know how to take their pain and put it to work relieving someone else’s.

our best work was never about how much money we make. i’ve made millions, and nearly killed myself doing it. our best work can never come at the expense of our health and well-being. and for me, in the process of doing my own work — my spirit and soul are strong. but my body, she’s taking longer than ever to catch up. she’s been clear with me: bitch, we’re not doing it like that again. so we’ll go as slow as we need to, so i can hold what God has for you without you having to sacrifice me for it again.

i hear it so often in the people we serve and in the messages i get from you all, i’m not going to make it if i keep going like this. this way is not sustainable. and she — my body — wanted the mic today, to speak to the other bodies who are speaking up too.

so, moving forward — this is her essay.

i was tired

in December 2021, i was tired. like bone tired. and i had to get Maya’s attention because she wasn’t listening. she’s so hardheaded and stubborn. she was doing that thing where she just kept pushing through even though we weren’t okay. Maya was the CMO at Clubhouse at the time. maybe y’all remember that flop, and if not, you can google it. i tried to warn her i might not make it if we took that job, back when the offer came in at the beginning of that year. but she didn’t listen.

Maya did listen to me when i said it was time to leave Netflix, at the top of 2021. she loved it there. she did great work, and it was one of the most formative seasons we had together. but that thing started happening — the thing that happens when people who look like us start getting successful and visible. the suppression kicks in. Maya was told she was on track for the highest levels of leadership, but it kept getting deferred. and one of the things i love most about her is that my girl will always speak truth to power. but in that environment, the more truth she spoke, the more blows i was the one absorbing. we were under attack — cortisol up, guard up, sleep shallow, always scanning the room before she even walked in.

and honestly, i’m tired of being on high alert. being in this body, in this country — happy independence day, my ass — requires a different kind of strength just to feel regulated, just to feel safe enough to come down out of fight-or-flight. but Maya’s been in survival mode since college. we had a baby at 19. we started hustling immediately, no time to recover from anything before the next thing came. we ended up in a marriage with a bum where i had to stay on defense, especially when he came for us in the divorce. she climbed the corporate ladder so fast she stopped paying attention to me — wasn’t honoring my rhythms, wasn’t honoring my cycle. i just got dragged along, no safe place to actually exhale.

and after almost eighteen years of that, i needed a break. so i was relieved when she finally left Netflix. i thought that meant rest, real rest, the kind where the nervous system actually gets to reset. but no. this bitch walked straight into the most stressful environment she could find because she needed to prove to those people she could lead at that level too.

and i get it. i get the particular kind of heartbreak underneath all of it. she followed every instruction, did everything the right way. she kept her head down. we worked hard, and we believed it would pay off. she thought that if she finally got the title, the salary, the recognition, the seat at the table — she’d feel unleashed. powerful. purposeful. fully expressed. and she was good to people the entire time. we did our best to be a safe space for everyone else. she gave generously, often at my expense.

burn it down to the ground

so in December 2021, after about a year of Clubhouse, i had to light her ass on fire to say enough was enough. i started with panic attacks. i hadn’t pulled that one out before, so it caught her completely off guard, heart racing for no reason she could name, chest tight in meetings, her body screaming emergency when nothing around her had changed. then i started breaking out in hives. had to set that histamine thing off like an alarm system. her immune system so overloaded it started reacting to nothing at all. and Maya actually said it out loud one time, i didn’t even know Black people could get hives.

then i turned up the volume on her headaches until they became full-blown migraines — the vision-blurring, light-sensitive, can’t-lift-your-head-off-the-pillow kind. i made them so intense she couldn’t get out of bed. but my girl is stubborn, i told y’all. she kept. pushing. through. so she just started drinking more and numbing more just to turn the volume down on all of it.

so i said, okay bet. let’s start with the lymphatic system. make it sluggish, backed up, no drainage, so everything she’s not processing emotionally, she can’t process physically either. then digestion. i made food an enemy, and bloated her after every meal. i’m gonna turn her gut into a battlefield so she can’t trust her own body to just work. let’s flood her with cortisol until she’s retaining water like she’s storing up for a famine. fifty pounds weight gain in a few months, and none of it makes sense to her because she’s barely eating differently. i needed her exhausted in a way sleep doesn’t fix, the kind of tired that scares you.

to really set things off, i increased the intensity of the migraines where she had to lay on the bathroom floor in the dark. i made her eyes bloodshot, like she’d been crying for days even when she hadn’t. i let her skin break out along her jaw and hairline, the stress pattern, the kind estheticians ask about your hormones over. and her hair, i let it come out in the shower, in the brush, on the pillow, because i needed her to see the evidence in her hands. add in some depression and she was down for for the count.

and Maya was pissed. she was furious. which i loved, honestly, because it meant she was finally starting to feel something again instead of disassociating from me. she’d always thought she was the strong one mentally, emotionally, spiritually. resilience was the story. it was the brand. she thought she could pray through anything, push through anything, solve her way out of anything. but not this time. none of her usual coping mechanisms were working, and that terrified her more than the symptoms did. i remember hearing her in prayer, begging God — and begging me — not to break down. not now. not after all these years of grind and sacrifice and fighting to get to this exact moment.

but she didn’t realize until later that me shutting her down was God answering her prayer. me and God are on the same team. that’s the homie. and He cares deeply about my well-being, because He can’t accomplish His purpose without me.

my plan worked

my efforts worked. by March 2022, Maya finally gave her notice. and i could finally stop bracing and start breathing for the first time in a long time. in those first few weeks, i was sleeping fifteen hours at a stretch, like our nervous system finally got the memo that the threat was over and it was safe to power down. recovery could actually start.

every now and then, i’d catch Maya on LinkedIn, scrolling messages from recruiters. she actually considered interviewing for that TikTok CMO job a couple months after we left, and i said bitch, don’t you even dare.

it’s taken us four years to get to the place where Maya understands me, takes care of me, and is letting me lead. it’s still uncomfortable for her. she’s still learning to trust me. but i know things will never be the same.

still, the conditioning doesn’t go away overnight. the world’s conditioning is embedded deep in my molecular structure, wired into my neural pathways. decades of “push through it” and “rest is for later” laid down like scar tissue. it shows up in every micro-moment: in the way i still have to communicate the truth of what i need, over and over. and in a way she’s having to learn how to care for me like i’m a newborn — patient, unhurried, paying attention to signals that have no words yet.

don’t listen to them. listen to us.

so while i have your attention, there’s a few things i want to get off my chest.

we will spend 70 percent of our lives at work. and the workplace we exist in was not designed for me to thrive. it was designed to homogenize me, conform me, suppress me, shut me down. the average Black woman experiences 8.7 microaggressions a day. if i’m doing the math for Maya, that’s nearly 60,000 attacks on me over the last eighteen years alone. that’s not counting the macroaggressions. not counting everything else surrounding work: society, relationships, politics. not counting what’s already in my bloodline, passed down from generations before i was even born.

the irony is, we betray our bodies to make money and survive, and we call that success — without ever considering what kind of wealth is waiting on the other side of properly stewarding this precious resource instead. we don’t have many examples of that. Maya and i are working together to become one of those examples.

what we do have are examples of people who look like us trying to convince us that beating the system is the way. it’s not. the ones who say that are often the ones who had to dissociate completely just to survive it — they had to become like the system to beat it, which means somewhere along the way they picked up the identity, the voice, the advice of our abusers. and it’s not entirely their fault. they did what they had to do to survive.

but anyone advising you to beat the system without telling you the truth of how dark it gets, without preparing you for the actual battle, is committing reckless endangerment at best, and something closer to a slow murder at worst. asking Black women in particular to succeed inside the modern system of work is asking them to continually betray themselves. handing someone that assignment without also giving them the tools to regulate their own body isn’t mentorship. it’s malpractice.

our bodies cannot heal inside the environment that is designed to destroy us. and i know a lot of us are proactively leaving. others have been asked to leave. regardless of how you got out — we, your bodies, thank you. we know it’s scary. we know there are real worries, real burdens. but for those of us with faith, we have to believe that God is not going to let us fail. it’s hard to believe that, because our bodies have been in survival mode for so long that safety feels foreign. healing takes time.

Maya moved home. yes. at her big age, she moved back home. (i realize how blessed we are to even have that option.) i needed a safe place, a sanctuary to retreat to and come down out of survival mode. i needed to lower the bills. share the load. these days i barely brush my hair, wear no makeup, live in comfortable clothes, and keep interaction minimal — except with the people i actually trust. Maya sold pretty much everything she owned. (a lot of that kicked off after shiny sisterhood fest).

and honestly it’s so nice to just be. it feels good. it feels liberating. we’re surrounded by incredible people — Kevin, her other friends — people we can tell the true story of our survival to, so i can finally, properly process all the trauma i carried.

we’re still learning what this feels like — spirit, soul, and body actually aligned, actually well, all pulling in the same direction for once. we don’t have it all the way figured out yet. we’re building back up. and this time i know we’ll be able to keep it. we’ll keep you posted.

but thank you for listening to me. and I pray you keep listening to your own body too — honoring her, not just managing her. check in on her. ask her what she’s been trying to tell you. and when she answers — and she will — don’t you dare go silent on her again.

sending u so much love,

maya’s body

between events like Cannes, Essencefest, Martha’s Vineyards and things of the like this summer, we are upon i’m on social watching my peers in rooms i wish were in and wishing i was in the rooms season.

i spend a lot of time with visionary leaders at every level who are on the long, wild, treacherous journey of discovering what their life is truly an answer to. our job is to help them get clear and then be in practice with them as they build the capacity and courage to live in sustained expression of it.

some of the leaders we serve step toward it willingly. others get thrown and pushed onto the path by a life event that knocks them off their axis—a layoff, a divorce, a disappointment they never saw coming. we tend to show up when people’s lives feel hollow, isolating, and quietly soul-crushing. in the seasons they whisper, is this it? and for sure when they are most burned out, anxious and feeling more disconnected than ever.

and for anyone feeling these things, watching everyone wear their south of France white, these are the worst weeks to be online.

desperate to get to shiny sisterhood fest

a couple years ago, i was in the thick of my disorienting wilderness season. for the most part, i kept to myself with a very small crew of people i trusted. the truth is, once i left all the shiny stuff – the big titles, the culturally relevant companies, the industry and the scene – my phone went dry.

and normally, i’m pretty good about monitoring my content consumption. i don’t really desire to be outside like that. i love my bed and i love living in pajamas. and i’ve been in plenty of rooms, with plenty of interesting people and plenty of places to really know what’s good and what happens there.

but i was weak and in a season where I didn’t know who i was. and there were some weeks where i would sink into self-pity, indulging in the world and in everyone else’s lives. it was a quiet way of wounding myself. scrolling, going to their pages, taking in all the things they had and I didn’t.

there was this one invitation-only event that i saw everyone (4 people) talking about they were going to. let’s call it shiny sisterhood fest. and it was this combination of people posting photos about speaking there, or how the last year was life-changing, or that thing that people do where they comment under each other’s photos…omg, slay. love your outfit. can’t wait to hug you at shiny sisterhood fest next week.

and suddenly i became obsessed with wanting to be there. i need to be at shiny sisterhood fest! i need to know that i matter be in that room. i remember lamenting to Kevin. i don’t understand why i don’t invited to stuff like this. and even making snide comments about the people who did get invited. i can’t believe so and so got invited, she hasn’t even… she doesn’t even…whew chile, the pride popped out quick!

i even talked to God about it in my prayer time. Lord, if it’s in Your will. please open doors for me to be at shiny sisterhood fest. and y’all, He answered my prayer. i got invited at the last minute by an unexpected guest, all expenses paid.

shiny sisterhood fest, here i come!

so i started to feverishly preparing. first, i booked a first-class ticket. i studied the speakers’ site and knew there were a few people coming from atlanta i might know i couldn’t possibly walk past them to coach. then, i gathered all of my shiny things because there’s no way i can show up to shiny sisterhood fest looking raggedy, tired and beat up from the wilderness. hair appointment, new nails, pack the louis carry on bag, the chanel classic flap, the ysl crossbody, my gucci slides, my diamond encrusted Michele watch, my gold doorknockers and birkenstocks to look luxurious but relatable. and just in case, let me order 4 new outfits just in case and pay next day delivery so i can try them on inside my walk-in closet full of clothes.

exhales. it felt good to be back.

as i sipped champagne on the flight looking out the window, i started to panic a bit. what am i going to stay when people ask me what i’ve been up to. i didn’t have the titles that mattered for the shiny sisterhood fest. there was no more CMO, SVP, EVP, Director of anything. i was a founder of a startup that had barely raised any capital and had no idea what we were doing. i started role playing in my head.

it was time to take the leap into entrepreneurship. it’s crazy over here, isn’t it?

i wanted to be a more present mom before my daughter graduated and went off into the world.

i’m exploring my options right now. taking a beat to recalibrate.

i just needed a minute for me. i’m seeing it as my sabbatical before i really dive into what’s next.

when i pulled up to the hotel in my Uber Black SUV, i could immediately feel the distance between where i was in my life and the energy in this room. the first instance i felt it was when i was checking in and said hi to a wolf pack group of women who were standing nearby. and before they said hi back to me they scanned me up and down like a TSA wand to see if my outfit and demeanor was worthy of hello. oof. let me go up to my room, get ready, drink some more wine to take the edge off so i can be fresh, ready and on for the welcome reception.

as i was walking through the long hotel corridor to dinner, I spotted someone who I thought was a friendly. and my face lit up. she was someone who i spent a lot of time with. we came up in the industry together. i helped get her access to Oprah world back in the day. put her on lists. made introductions that proved very fruitful for her career. i wanted to see her win. this is just who i always was. if i had the access, so did you. and i naively thought she also wanted to see me win.

when i approached her, she turned away from me. and walked toward someone else. genuinely confused, i walked up behind her and said, hey! and she said half-way looked at me and said hey. and then turned to the group she was with and kept talking.

ohhhhhhhhh. it’s like that.

i felt humiliated. discarded. and irrelevant in less than 4 hours of being on site.

over the next couple of days, i did more observing than talking. there were a few people I knew who were genuinely kind to me and they became my places of safety in the abyss of perfectly curated images. but more often than not, i kept bearing witness to the performative rituals that tend to fill these rooms.

the prioritizing of selfies and content, of strategically gathering the right group of people for maximum impact and everyone angling to gain access to each other’s audience.

the smiling, nodding, and laughing together, immediately followed by the whispers and eye-rolling: i can’t stand her.

the rooms built on the promise of sharing answers, only to host a q&q with speakers who offer nothing tangible, nothing that actually moves you forward and speakers who somehow make you feel stupid for even asking the question.

the rooms that pride themselves on being come as you are, except every single person is dripped up and draped down, wearing every piece of jewelry they own.

shiny sisterhood fest was supposed to be four days, and i left early in the morning on day 3 because i had had enough. and as I traveled back wondering why i spent so much time and energy caring about being in that room, God whispered, do u now see why i answered your prayer?

lessons from shiny sisterhood fest

it’s been my experience that the rooms we so wish to be in are never the rooms that actually change our life. the desire to be in them really uncovers the deeper pain of feeling unseen and that sensation becoming indistinguishable from feeling worthless.

when u are on the journey of becoming your best work, there will be seasons where you feel like you have nothing to show for the work you’ve put in. you might not have the content to post that shows you’re making progress. you might not get the invites for awhile. you might not be relevant right now. you might not have the means to even show up if you do get invited. and none of those things are connected to inherent worth.

so some words of advice to those who may be in the thick of it…

1. hurry up and get in the room so you can learn it for yourself. this may be unexpected advice, but if you’re feeling like why can’t it be me too in those rooms, then work harder and get yourself in the room. it’s easy for someone like me to say it doesn’t matter, it’s another thing for you to learn it for yourself.

2. don’t give up and don’t stop caring…but get offline. social media is the devil! there is nothing good about it and it will ruin your life, having you wanting things and pursuing things that are not yours. it will make you feel worse in a season that’s already difficult. i literally spent thousands of dollars to get humiliated at shiny sisterhood fest because i was scrolling in a vulnerable season.

3. trust that being unseen for a season is not the same as being unworthy. just because you aren’t seeing the physical manifestation of how much you put in doesn’t mean you are behind. you are not forgotten. you are being made into someone who can finally hold what’s coming without losing yourself to it. let the season do its work. the longer you resist it, the longer you’ll be in it.

4. love the people who show up for you in this season hard. i quickly learned in my wilderness that most of the people who celebrated and loved me in my old life didn’t really love me, they loved what i could do for them. they loved my gifts when they could access them for their benefit. they loved my presence when it served them. but they were not interested in supporting me through my season of transformation. but the ones who did are my people for life.

the rooms that changed my life were never the big rooms. they were micro rooms, intimate dinners, serendipitous encounters that you can’t plan for. they showed up when i wasn’t worried about how things looked. they showed up when i was in practice and in service of the work i was created to do.

so this summer, log off. connect with the people who love you. focus on your becoming. and get into practice of what your work is. and prioritize the rooms who actually want the truest version of you.

sending u so much love,

m

p.s. i apologize for all the ways i knowingly and unknowingly contributed to performative culture that just ruins us. if you are someone who is in a wilderness season and not sure what your work is, email me or dm me… we can help you!

it feels really awkward to say this, but we (me and Kevin) wrote a book. and i can’t believe that the first time we’re talking about the book is to tell you we’re not going to release it.

how we got here

Kevin and I have been working on a book for the last year. personally, i’ve been writing this book since 2022. i always knew i’d write one. i didn’t know when, but back in november 2022, in my quiet time, a desire for a book got planted in me. i didn’t go looking for it. it got added to me, the same way every assignment on this journey has.

2022 was the year i quit corporate. i had climbed to the proverbial mountaintop in my career, and i was miserable up there – the money, the titles, the failed marriage. none of it satisfied me. so i said to God: you win. i’ve done it my way long enough. i’m ready to do this your way, forreal. He said bet, and burned the rest of my life to the ground.

since then i’ve been on this quest — not just to live and work according to His design, but to align my whole life with His plans for it – i got clear that my assignment is to change the culture of work.

on this journey to change the culture of work, i’ve gone everywhere i’ve been sent. first into a coaching and leadership company called Waking Hours. we started consulting, advising and hosting retreats in Mexico with some of the greatest people i’ve ever sat with. they were sold out, beautiful, and then the demand quietly slowed.

then, that morphed into a tech company that helps people understand each other at work. we raised seven figures in the hardest year in VC history, and it came with an ease that felt like confirmation. While we had some success, we learned that the workplace wasn’t really ready for what we built. shutting it down was hard to make sense of, because i never asked to be a tech founder. i was placed there.

and now, I am on the third iteration of this journey, what Kevin and I are building now: bestworks, a company and community designed to get individuals, leaders and founders into practice and sustained expression of their best work.

i’ve learned so much from each venture. they have shaped me into a version of myself i didn’t know was possible. the amount of wisdom i’ve acquired is staggering. and it’s true you learn more from the things that don’t work than the things that do. but every single time, i’ve had to put myself out there and say, hey, here’s a new thing, come look, what do you think? and every single time there’s a moment where i’ve prayed, ok God, you’ve got me out here looking crazy. i’m not going anywhere. but your girl could really use a win.

and every time it doesn’t work, it hurts like hell. and the wisdom from experience never feels like enough. and i sometimes wonder if i’m getting this following God thing right.

you’re a writer, maya

in 2023, i decided to go with a hybrid publisher. i convinced myself that I could help model a new way and that this is the future of publishing. and it probably is. but the truth is i was afraid of being rejected by a traditional publisher. so instead of giving them the chance to say we’re not interested, i bypassed them all together and went the non-traditional route.

the good thing about hybrid is that you own the work and you can set your own timelines. i didn’t consider myself a writer, so we brought on a collaborative writer named Liz (a literal angel). I had no shame about admitting that i needed help.

we spent about a year mapping and drafting. we essentially wrote two books over two years. each time we finished one, i’d read it back and go, no. we haven’t nailed it. and somewhere in there liz said something nobody had ever said to me: maya, you’re a writer. i find myself editing you, not writing for you. if you ever do this again, don’t hire someone like me. just write it yourself. i held onto that. coming from a publishing veteran, it felt like being handed something.

so for this third one, kevin and i decided to co-author a book about what we’ve learned and how to change the culture of work. the book would be the doorway into our new company. it would be the vehicle that got us on stages, in front of clients, into people’s hands. it would be this generation’s purpose driven life, but through work instead of ministry.

and this time, without liz, i decided to write. and it was the most excruciating project of my life. but we did it. the manuscript was done in february of this year. i sobbed when i finished the last chapter. it felt like crossing a finish line i wasn’t sure i’d reach. we sent it to our editor for line edits and i told kevin i have to put the book down, and got back to building bestworks.

we were so close

while it was being edited, kevin and i did what we do best: we started building the campaign. we broke it into three lanes: book industry, influencers, cultural conversation. we started taking calls with publicists and creatives. we got quotes. we mapped who our readers were, where they live and how we were going to get in front of them.

and we were excited. we finally were going to have something to show for this crazy quest we’ve been on. we finally had a good answer when people asked what we’d been up to: we’ve been writing a book, it’s out this fall. and you could see the hope jump into their eyes for us.

then the editor’s notes came back. i held my breath and to my surprise the feedback was amazing:

This is a compelling manuscript with an original framework that feels relevant and actionable. Your (Maya’s) voice is warm, relatable, authoritative and emotionally honest. This will make the book land hard for the right reader and is the manuscripts greatest asset. The Carl conversation in the prologue is genuinely cinematic and one of the strongest openings I’ve encountered in this genre. The Becoming Statement framework is the book’s intellectual contribution, and it’s original enough to distinguish this from the crowded purpose/calling shelf.

If I were positioning this, I'd probably say it sits on the shelf between Glennon Doyle and Brene Brown, with Myle's Munroe's theology underneath and Steven Pressfield's creative philosophy woven through. The audience is the person who has read all of those authors and is still hungry—still searching for something that integrates the personal, the professional, the spiritual, and the practical into a single coherent invitation.

It’s written for the person who has done everything right by the world’s standards and still feels like something fundamental is missing.

i thought, ok, wow. this is really happening.

and then something happened. we lost all momentum.

things weren’t flowing like they were when we were in the process of writing the book. i felt this wall of resistance — to editing, to greenlighting the publicist, to talking about any of it. i’d sit down to work and just... couldn’t. and i’ve learned on this journey there’s a resistance you’re meant to push through and a divine resistance that simply won’t let you. this was the second kind.

there was a quiet feeling that i had…the book isn’t done. it’s still being written. but i wasn’t going to say it out loud because then it would be real. but a couple weeks later, in one of our meetings Kevin said… friend, i think there’s a new version of the book coming through. i don’t think the book is done. he said it like a truth passing through him, something to consider. i knew he was right, which is why i broke down and completely lost it. i do not have another book in me. and i can’t believe this is happening again.

the truth about disappointment

i’ve dedicated most of my life to be in service to others and making the world a better place. i’m not perfect, but i think i’m genuinely pretty decent for society. i’ve let go of pretty much everything – the life, the house, the cars, the money, the drinking, the smoking and the sex. i’m out here experiencing life raw. i have said yes to God with my whole heart and whole life. and i keep waiting for the part where it pays off. where are the wins? where is the abundance? where is the overflow?

i know many of us who are trying to do life a different way are feeling it, wondering when are our efforts going to add up. maybe you haven’t spoken your disappointment out loud… maybe it’s kept you from asking for what you really want… maybe it has you wondering if you’re enough, if you’re hearing correctly or your questioning if you’re on the right path.

i told Kevin we have to figure out this disappointment thing. i won’t make it if i don’t really get this. my heart can’t take it anymore.

so i asked and prayed, what am I’m not understanding about disappointment? and in the same intimate space that I’ve heard Him my whole life, He kindly whispered: it’s not Me, it’s you.

here’s what i heard:

1. we’re new to this. we’ve got to give ourselves time to learn this new way. we’ve spent decades living life the world’s way. and it takes time to understand how it works on this side. we have to learn to be more patient with ourselves and give ourselves some grace. as long as we’re learning and growing, we’re on the right path.

2. we have to become the people who can handle what we ask for. God is going to give you the desire of your heart and there is an expectation that you are going to put together a plan and get to work. this is evidence of your faith. but you can also be sure that if you’ve mapped out how it’s going to happen, it’s for sure not going to happen according to your plan. the plan is not the point. the plan is the pathway to get you into the practice of becoming who you need to be in order to carry everything He wants to give to you and it not break you. every year you have to believe you’re going to win the championship, go to practice and also never know when it’s going to happen. the how is on Him.

3. we have to be more honest about what we really want. sometimes our desire to serve makes us shrink down, play it small and downplay our true desires. It compromises our authority and our conviction. and the truth is we need more servant visionary leaders in power, with influence, with the mic. it’s ok to say you want those things. we actually need to get louder. and our job is to keep humility in the process. we must always remember that the God given vision you were given cannot be fulfilled with a self-serving spirit. you gotta want it for the betterment of us, not just for you.

so where did i miss the mark?

i wrote a book. but I didn’t become a writer and storyteller. when the book was done, the practice didn’t continue. i attached myself to the outcome instead of falling in love with the practice.

i wasn’t honest about what i really wanted. i convinced myself that i just wanted the book to get in the right hands. but that’s not true. so i’m speaking out loud, what I really want and what i wrote in my private journal in November 2022… i desire and pray that we have a NYT bestselling book. i pray it’s the bestselling leadership book in business in the history of the Earth. i pray that every company and every leader and every team read it and it helps them be better to each other.

the book isn’t done yet. i wanted to release it so i could finally be seen for the work i had put in. it was impatience.

but the book not coming out is a blessing because it wouldn’t have achieved the true desire of my heart and the job it was created to do. and i would have been disappointed, again.

i’m learning to stop being my own abuser and stop becoming the weapon formed against me. i’m learning to be honest about what i want instead of pretending i’m above wanting. i’m learning that my work is to become the person who can carry the desires of my heart. and i’m learning to take my hands off the wheel. because the whole benefit of doing it His way is that He opens the doors and arranges the timing.

until then, i’ll be in the gym writing and falling in love with the practice itself.

so happy to be back.

sending u so much love,

m

but there was a part of that story I left out.

maybe I blocked it out because, ultimately, it worked. but this week, as I’ve been watching what’s unfolding with the Sinners campaign, and someone on threads brought the painful moment back to my remembrance, I realize i had to tell you the rest.

the part I didn't tell you

after we had spent months pulling together the Strong Black Lead debut with 60+ talent, multiple shoots, press lined up, daily standups and all the internal resistance fought and survived. we were days away from airing our big moment at the BET Awards. and then I got a call.

my boss said: Netflix’s Chief Communications Officer had been fired for saying the N-word. on multiple occasions to staff and the news was about to hit the press.

in addition to the internal uproar, executives started calling me. maybe we should pull the campaign, they said.

what?!

here’s why: there was prominent Black talent involved in our campaign who had heard the news and they were appalled. there were concerns that people would think we’d put this campaign together to get ahead of the controversy. and there was worry that consumers wouldn’t understand production lead times and would assume this was a reactive PR move.

I was devastated. how could this happen? after everything we’d been through?

not only did we end up calling nearly every single Black talent involved personally to explain what happened and ask for their support. but now, as one of the few Black executives, I was dealing with the fallout internally, comforting Black employees and navigating the implications of what had just happened.

and ironically, the campaign that executives were skeptical about became the thing they used to show how much we cared about the Black audience and experience. we got through it and the good news is that the CEO at the time moved quickly.

but why did it have to be all of that?

what’s happening with the Sinners campaign

Sinners is a generational film and historic moment for the entertainment industry.

Ryan Coogler negotiated a deal most filmmakers could only dream of — first-dollar gross, final cut, and ownership of the film 25 years after its release. the film grossed $368 million worldwide on a $90 million budget. it received 16 Academy Award nominations — the most of any film in history. critics and audiences, for once, in complete agreement. a once in a lifetime moment.

And like wrote for us in December, in an industry designed to make Black creatives feel like there can only be one, where you’re not expected to walk through the door with anyone else, they keep showing up together — and Ryan has modeled two incredible collaborations, his wife by his side and Michael B. Jordan.

the combination of what he’s been able to accomplish has never happened, disrupts our beliefs about what’s possible and the system is big mad.

which is why it feels like at every turn, there’s an attack…

1. Variety ran a headline framing the film’s $61 million opening weekend — the biggest for an original film since 2019 — around the fact that “profitability remains a ways away.” Ben Stiller, Patrick Schwarzenegger, and Joe Russo all publicly called it out. Franklin Leonard pointed out that Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood made less on its opening weekend and Variety celebrated it.

2. Rolling Stone left Sinners off its top 20 films of the year entirely. so did Variety’s critics. for a film with a 97% Rotten Tomatoes score and $368 million in gross. even Simu Liu called it out publicly.

3. the Golden Globes. seven nominations. two wins — one for score that wasn’t even televised, handed out during a commercial break, and one for “Cinematic and Box Office Achievement,” a category that many interpreted as a consolation prize. shut out of every major category. Best Picture. Best Director. Best Actor. all of it.

4. this Sunday, at the BAFTAs — what should have been a night of historic celebration as Sinners set records — a man in the audience shouted the N-word while Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo were on stage presenting an award. it was broadcast on the BBC’s tape delay without being edited out. Delroy Lindo told Vanity Fair afterwards that he and Jordan “did what we had to do.” gut wrenching.

@a.jarrodjenkinsIf you think Variety is problematic, wait until you meet Jay Penske who owns it and almost all entertainment media #variety #rollingstone #jaypenske #deepdive #goldenglobes

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for visionary leaders, the blessing and the battle always arrive at the same time

for me, the pain of what happened during the SBL launch wasn’t the N-word incident itself. it wasn’t the executive calls. it wasn’t even the possibility that we’d have to pull a campaign we’d poured our souls into.

the deepest pain was that I didn’t see it coming.

if you are a visionary leader, a founder, a creative building something extraordinary — you have felt this. you have had the moment where the breakthrough is right there. you can see it. you can taste it. and then something devastating, confusing, enraging shows up at the last possible second, in addition to everything you’ve already endured.

and you may ask the same question I asked — why does it have to be like this? but that question is the trap. that misinterpretation will destroy you.

I’m not sure know where I was taught this, but I had a belief that blessings were supposed to come with ease. That if God called me to something, the path will clear. That if you’re in alignment, things will flow. That resistance means you’re off course. Chaos means something is wrong. Pain means you missed a turn.

this is simply not true.

you are a visionary leader. by definition, vision is the ability to see what should exist, what could exist and what must exist — and feel personally responsible for bringing it into reality. and the vision you received is not of your own when you’re doing it right.

In the same heavenly space that the vision came down to you to birth the project, there is an equal and opposing force that doesn’t want it to come to pass. it is going to fight like hell to do everything in its power to keep it from coming through and try and torture you in the process. and the resistance intensifies the closer you get to the breakthrough — not because something is going wrong, but because something is about to go very right. it’s vicious and it loves to hit where it hurts.

one of my favorite authors Steven Pressfield writes about this in The War of Art. He says: The danger is greatest when the finish line is in sight. At this point, Resistance knows we're about to beat it. It hits the panic button. It marshals one last assault and slams us with everything it's got.

My favorite book says it plainly in 1 Peter 4: dear friends, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal that has come on you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you.

this: do not be surprised.

Neither are saying ignore the pain of it. It hurts deeply. it’s offensive. and tbh, I wish it never had to happen. i wish life wasn’t designed this way, but it is. and as as visionary leaders, we have to stopped being surprised by the warfare that’s inevitably going to come when you bring that great work forward. i’ve learned to expect it now.

congratulations Ryan Coogler & the Sinners cast and crew

i’m not outraged by the injustices on this campaign…

instead, congratulations are in order.

Ryan Coogler, congratulations on a historic moment. for this breakthrough. for seeing the vision all the way through. i can’t imagine what you’ve had to endure to bring to this life. the late nights. the questions, the doubts, all of the problems you had to solve to get to this moment. thank you for your perseverance, grit and tenacity to show us a new way. congratulations Michael B. Jordan, Delroy Lindo, Wunmi Mosaku, Hannah Beachler and every person who made Sinners what it is. i see the as an indication that the intention of the work you visualized is disrupting exactly what it was meant to disrupt. can’t wait to watch you all make history at the Oscars 🤍

and for the rest of us visionary leaders who are called to bring forth things that move us forward, transform systems and disrupt the status quo:

expect it. prepare for it. armor up. and get to battle.

the vision outlives the resistance. it outlives the doubt. it outlives the people who tried to stop it. every single time.

sending you so much love,

m

last week while I was napping (rest ethic is strong!), I woke up to a text from a former direct report at Netflix — someone still on the editorial team we built together. he sent me an image: Happy Birthday, Strong Black Lead. One of the many editorial channels we launched while I was there. eight years later and almost 7 million people strong.

I sat there staring at my phone thinking, wow. look at it still going!

it brought me back to 2018, when we were trying to bring it to life. Most people would never know that almost everyone thought we were crazy — and nearly everyone, including the CEO, tried to stop it from happening.

bringing the unseen to the seen

When I was brought into Netflix in 2017, the mandate was clear: help us figure out how to market all these original titles coming down the pipeline. When I arrived, we had about 20 originals. That number was going to grow to 1,500 in four or five years, which was insane to think about.

early on, they asked: how are we going to market all these titles?

I said: you can’t. not in a traditional sense. there’s not enough capacity to promote each one individually. you’re going to need to build channels of distribution that aren’t based on titles — they need to be based on audiences, interests, and tastes. We’re going to have to build a media company inside Netflix to “cover” ourselves the way the press would. Think Buzzfeed meets Condé Nast, but built natively for social.

They said: you want to try and build it? Of course, I said yes.

when you’re building something new, I believe deeply in the power of a proof of concept. Us visionaries — we can see the great, grand promised land. but it requires a radical restraint to start small and go slow. You need one thing that represents what you’re ultimately trying to build. one thing to prove it’s possible.

for us, that one thing was Strong Black Lead.

we had a vision for so much more — channels for geeks, family, comedy, film connoisseurs, the hispanic community. But we had to start somewhere. I remember in a meeting, someone asked: Why the Black audience? Why not something else?

I said: Because I’m Black. I needed to start with something I knew instinctively, not just analytically.

here was the challenge and the insight: the Black audience at the time didn’t perceive Netflix to be a home for their stories. BET, OWN (Oprah — where I was before Netflix), ABC (Shondaland), FOX (Empire) — they were all beating us. But Netflix actually had more films, shows, and Black talent than everyone combined. Netflix was essentially the largest distributor of Black images on earth, but the audience didn’t feel that.

So our goal was simple: build an editorial channel that showed — in one place — the breadth and depth of our library, celebrated the talent inside our walls, kept you up to date on what’s new and Black on Netflix, and entertained the hell out of you through internet-first storytelling.

easy enough…except — audience-first storytelling had never happened at Netflix. everyone was mandated with promoting individual titles. One at a time. Start with the title, then market it to the world. We were doing the inverse: start with the audience, then think about the titles.

We soft-launched on February 18, 2018 to test our voice, try content ideas, and get the hang of things. Then we decided we needed a big coming-out moment to announce we were here.

thankfully, my two immediate bosses — Eric and Shauna — backed me (thank God for good leaders). They said: We’ll find the budget.

I said: Great. We’re going for a big :60 spot in the BET Awards, and I need something like a million dollars.

That was the great thing about Netflix — they wanted you to experiment and swing big. the team started jamming. we came up with this idea that gave us all chills. We started executing. everything was going well. And then it showed up.

Resistance. Ah. There you are.

you can see what they can’t see

First, the CMO: Hey, I heard you’re working on this brand-slash-audience-first idea. I know we say take bets, but we are a title-first marketing org. We don’t do audience work like this. It’s not a priority.

I said: I hear you. But I think this is going to be important for our future, so I’m going to keep moving forward with it.

Then, the Chief Content Officer: Hey, I heard you’re asking a lot of talent to get together for this campaign. I think it’s great, but I’m not sure it’s the right time — and even if it were, I’m not sure we have the right combination of talent.

I said: There are some people we want to get involved. Will you help me get them to a yes? He still didn’t believe it was the right thing to do.

After that, I bumped into the CEO in the cafeteria (he had no office). He said: Hey! I hear you’re spending millions of dollars on something that’s not going to work.

I said: Well… I think it’s going to work, or I wouldn’t be doing it.

He said: It’s not going to work.

Over the next few days, I couldn’t sleep. My stomach was in a knot. Netflix had said they offered freedom and responsibility for us to take our bets, but this felt like a trap. The next day, I ran into one of my bosses and told her: the top three C-level executives have told me this week to shut it down. Am I about to be fired?

She said: If it doesn’t work, you might be. But let me ask you this — are you willing to be fired for this? she wasn’t being dramatic.

And this is the moment every visionary leader has to come to terms with. there’s a moment when you know you saw something. You can see the thing that no one else can see. It doesn’t exist yet, and the reason it doesn’t exist is because you are the one meant to bring it forward.

As a visionary builder, you were created to be an answer to a problem. This is the heartbeat of visionary leadership — seeing what should exist, what’s trying to exist, and bringing it into reality. The more the resistance, the bigger the transformation.

And this moment of truth feels like torture because only you know. No one else has the vision. And you have to fight like hell not to let doubt touch it, or it becomes tainted and diminished. It can’t get into the foundation of what’s being planted.

3 things you have to understand as a visionary leader, creative or founder

if you are called to something, you have a supernatural operational capacity tied to bringing that vision forward. There’s an internal transformation and fortitude that activates in that moment — one that makes the impossible feel possible. But calling doesn’t come without cost. here’s what I’ve learned:

1. fall in love with being misunderstood.

you’re going to be misunderstood. Questioned. Doubted. And so much more. This is the nature of being a visionary — you were given a vision, not them. So you have to release the need to be understood. it’s sometimes lonely. Isolating. Unfair. You will look and seem crazy to pretty much everyone. But it’s only crazy until it happens.

2. change your relationship with resistance.

recognize resistance as confirmation, not contradiction. Increased pressure is actually evidence that the breakthrough has been activated. Resistance often intensifies right at the point of transition — not because something is going wrong, but because something is about to go very right. when it shows up, say: Hey. Welcome. I am building something extraordinary, and you can’t stop it.

At one point, I didn’t have a healthy relationship with resistance. It was something I worried about. Something I questioned. Now I know — the more resistance I experience when building something, the more it confirms I’m on the right path. That what I see is true.

3. Write the vision and make it plain — for yourself.

because no one else can really see what you see, you have to write down the vision and track your own evidence of becoming. All the time. even the strongest among us will doubt ourselves. Get confused. Sometimes say, “Why are we doing this again?” And no one will be able to confirm it except for you. so build in a practice of tracking how the vision is coming along. Big and small. Become your own witness.

it’s only crazy until it happens

Long story short? We crushed it. Strong Black Lead became one of the most successful brand campaigns in the history of Netflix and the catalyst for us to build out an entire global editorial function around the world that changed how Hollywood and entertainment marketed it’s shows forever.

I don’t think I would’ve actually gotten fired if it didn’t work. But it wasn’t really about that. It was about our belief. Did we really believe what we saw?

At the time, I never told our team that the executives were questioning it. I didn’t want it to impact their creative ideas. I didn’t want them creating from a place of striving or proving themselves. I wanted them to keep it pure.

Eight years later, almost 7 million people later, the team I no longer manage is still building what we started.

That’s the thing about something that’s real. It outlives the resistance. It outlives the doubt. It outlives the people who said it wouldn’t work. And that might be the greatest proof of a vision fulfilled — not that it worked, but that it kept going without you.

happy birthday, SBL!

sending you so much love,

m

P.S. you can watch our iconic BET Awards spot here. it STILL gives me chills.

This week we found out that our CEO was mentioned in the Epstein files. He’s made a public statement but there has been no internal communication about it—it’s like they’re pretending it’s not happening. I work with a lot of outside vendors and I’m embarrassed to be attached to the company. It’s on my LinkedIn. I’m not sure what to say if someone asks me about it and I feel like our leaders should address it? Should I leave? I don’t want to be associated with something like this. Am I crazy?

dear “my CEO is in the Epstein files,“

whew! ok. first, you’re totally not crazy. our leaders have completely lost the plot and unfortunately a lot of our CEOs are compromised in ways we couldn’t have imagined. it also bothered me SO much when companies addressed things externally before they talked to us internally. like hello, I literally represent you every day—talk to me!

but unfortunately, they care way more about managing external perception these days. the chief comms officer and CEO are working to mitigate anything internal to “not cause distractions.”

I can imagine the conversation right now...

Epstein CEO: Are people saying anything? What’s going on? What are people saying? (Because of course he’s paranoid and embarrassed. As he should be. also assuming “he” because duh).

Chief Comms Officer: We checked in with leaders across different levels. We did an audit of Slack and employee socials—internal conversation around this is low and increased by 2% in the last 24 hours. Best move is to not say anything and draw attention to it.

they’re hoping it blows over.

this is how a fear-based leader acts who is not sorry at all. one who doesn’t care about y’all and is only concerned with how things look and mad he got caught.

a good leader would address it. apologize for their actions. acknowledge how it’s affected you. recognize that you represent the company every day and that their goal should be for it to be something you’re proud of—and that he failed you. maybe even take some time away to reflect and to not create more distractions for the work that you all have to get done as you make him more money!

but that’s not what you’re getting. so here’s what you can do…

1. you can say something to your direct leader.

something like:

“I’m really disappointed that this isn’t being addressed internally. The actions of the CEO reflect on us and our ability to do business and build trust with our partners. I would appreciate him saying something to us—or leadership providing language that we can use if someone asks.”

part of the goal here is for you to always feel like you’re in integrity. don’t come into agreement with the corporate BS. You want to walk away knowing you did your part.

and the truth is—if enough of you say something internally, they’ll have no choice but to respond. because now it is the distraction they were hoping wouldn’t happen.

2. reminder — this job is not who you are.

it’s what you’re currently doing. it’s your current destination—not your identity. he does not represent you. you being there is not an indictment on your character.

most of our leaders are compromised these days, and we’re always going to find creeps wherever we work. that doesn’t mean you have to leave. if you have a strong value system, you feel confident in your ability to line something else up, and you want to bounce—by all means, go. but the next company probably has a compromised CEO too.

so it’s less about loyalty to the company and more about you doing great work, getting what you need from this place, and keeping it moving. this won’t be the last place you work.

unfortunately, we are in a time where it’s pretty dark. sometimes our job is to be the light in the darkness.

3. if your vendors bring it up...

say something like:

“His actions don’t represent me, and I [insert how you actually feel]. But I’m here to do a job and make sure you have what you need.”

and keep it moving.

every person you work with is a future collaborator, a future reference, a future opportunity. your reputation is built on how you do the work and the integrity you carry, not the name on the building.

hope that helps. and I’m really sorry that this yet another thing that you’re having to navigate at this time.

sending you so much love wherever u are,

m

p.s. have a question? submit it anonymously maya@ourbestwork.co.

other posts from Follow the Leader:

• 4 things you can to do tomorrow to not be a tone deaf leader

• I’m sorry you had to lay people off. Now here’s what to say (that you’re company doesn’t want you to say)

• Why does everything feel like it’s falling apart?

Follow The Leader is created for the people leaders who care about the people doing the work. If these insights resonate with you and you’re interested in bringing our expertise into your organization for speaking, workshops, or facilitation, reach out to maya@ourbestwork.co.