Start With Yourself: A New Vision for Work & Life by Emma Grede - 10

There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.

—Thomas Sowell

I’m convinced that a key part of my success is my ability to both anticipate and accept trade-offs. I call these the “unavoidable choices” we all make. I’m a gifted operator, but I can’t be in two places at once. I recognize there are limits to my time, energy, and power, and more importantly, I allow this to be the reality without constantly beating myself up about it. It’s one thing to not make it to your kid’s basketball game because you have a big meeting; it’s another to miss the game and then spend hours feeling guilty and looking to your child to reassure you that they won’t be seeking therapy for your absence when they’re an adult. You must make the choice, accept the trade-off, and move forward—or better yet, the other way around: Predetermine what the trade-off will be. You can do all the things—you just can’t do them all at the same time. As Michelle Obama said to me, “It’s impossible to have it all, so stop with that. You can have it all over a period of time, but the impatience of like, ‘I’ve got to have the exact job at the top of the game, and I want to be the best mum. I want to be there, be at all the stuff, and I want to look my best and be in my best shape and be emotionally in tune, la, la, la, la, la. And my marriage has got to be on point.’ You can’t do all of that. There are trade-offs and it’s okay. If we’re blessed, we can take care of ourselves emotionally and physically. Life is long and you can have chapters, and you don’t lose out because you didn’t read the whole book in one sitting.” 1 As someone who also thinks about her life in chapters, this really resonates.

It’s a type of insanity that women are convinced they’ll pull this having-it-all ruse off. Practically, what does “having it all” even mean? Life is not a to-do list; you’re not going to tick all the boxes every day. You must find a way to give yourself grace and accept that perfection here is not only impossible, its pursuit will limit the joy you find in your life. It’s time to cut yourself some slack and prepare to pace yourself through life.

1. Old Thought: It’s either/or…

We don’t have to be smarter than the rest. We have to be more disciplined than the rest.

—Warren Buffett

A few weeks ago, I took my twins to school—every Friday there’s an all-school gathering in the chapel, and I try to make it occasionally. I felt like I was winning that morning until a fellow mum asked me if I had made my twins, Lake and Raffi, birthday crowns. I immediately panicked. First, what the fuck is a birthday crown? And second, was I supposed to make one?

She asked me if I had seen the school email, and my panic subsided. Easy answer: I hadn’t. “I don’t read any school emails.”

“What?” She looked at me like I was nuts.

“They go into the same pile as the Aritzia or Gap emails. I don’t really read any of them.”

She looked at me again quizzically and then turned her attention to her son and his birthday crown, and I realized the source of her question: Apparently, when it’s the twins’ birthday, I’m supposed to jazz up some paper crowns so they can be celebrated. And if I miss the email alert? Should I feel terrible and beat myself up, or can they use their imaginations to summon a crown for their heads? I’m thinking the latter. They certainly won’t die of disappointment. One of my least favorite things about the culture is this expectation that mums are supposed to be some sort of superhero for everyone except themselves. Jens definitely isn’t losing sleep over school emails and birthday crowns.

Women ask me all the time whether they can have kids, or whether it will derail their careers. Can you have kids and be successful? My answer is always the same: Yes, so long as you refuse to let the culture get to you. You need to resist a culture that insists you perform perfectly in both spheres simultaneously.

A lot of life comes down to timing and questioning the presumption that there’s a right way to do things, and the only “right way” is to throw yourself full throttle at everything that presents in your life— especially when it comes to your kids. There’s an idea that, yes, you can have a job, but only so much as this career requires no pull on the attention that should otherwise go to your children. For this reason, there are a lot of women who are overextended and exhausted— and loaded with guilt because they’re not living up to some sort of cultural ideal—and a lot of women who don’t think it’s worth the fight to even consider doing both. There aren’t many of us who are easily wearing a successful and vibrant career while feeling like we are also a good mother—and there also aren’t many of us who don’t have to work, whether we have a partner or not. I’m the product of a single mum—we were already poor, and we would have been homeless if she hadn’t worked. A “good mother” is one of those really tough concepts: Who exactly counts? When have you done enough for your children to make it into these hallowed mother-of-the-year halls? When have you done too much and limited your child’s ability to figure out life for themselves? Who gets to decide if your child is a success story, and along which factors? The whole concept is flimsy. If someone offered me a catalogue of mother archetypes as a kid, I probably would have picked Clair Huxtable over mine, and yet I look at where I am in my life and I have to tip my hat to my mum. Either I forged myself out of my environment or perfect parenting might not be as essential as we’ve been led to believe. I watched my mum leave the house every day and not return until after dinner. This was tough but perhaps not damaging—it was certainly an inspiration of sorts.

I believe that our kids don’t need us as much as we’ve either been conditioned, or sometimes wanted, to believe. I really think that mothering need not be so intense. I have four kids—that’s a lot of drop-offs, playdates, and needs to meet—and I am wise to pick my battles. I also married a Swedish man and fully drank the Kool-Aid of being with someone who comes from a country with far better standards of gender equity. I never once assumed that I would be a better parent than Jens—and as a result, neither does he. This balances our parenting and marriage in a way that has given me a lot more space than many of my other married friends enjoy—this is space I then don’t beat myself up for taking. I do myself the service of not feeling bad about seemingly having more freedom than other mums, who let the lead parent role default to them.

The maintenance of this balance—particularly in an American culture that bends so insistently toward the idea that a woman’s primary job needs to be in the home (#tradwife)—requires me to check my own masculine energy at the door when I come home at night. And I have a lot of masculine energy. I give direction and tell people what to do for most of the day. By the time I get home, not only do I want a break, but I need a reprieve. I do not parent my husband. I once watched my dearest friend explain how to make a sandwich, step-by-step, to her husband. I have never done that shit, and I never will.

The other day, I was scrolling through Instagram and I encountered a post from a mum influencer explaining her child’s perfectly Bento-boxed school lunch. Veggies were cut into elaborate shapes, the macros were balanced, and there was nothing “fun” in sight. Everything was gluten-free, sugar-free, and so on. (I’m guessing that this perfectly architected lunch was not consumed by her kid.) There was so much anxiety in her voice. The whole thing is bananas when you think about it, except that this guilt-based, fear-fomenting content is like catnip for mums. When I was living in London, a friend’s four-year-old daughter went into anaphylactic shock the first time she went to a birthday party because she had a piece of cake—a regular old cake from Marks & Spencer—but she had never had sugar like that before. Her system freaked out. Is this the best use of this family’s energy? If I take my kids trick-or-treating, or get them to a birthday party, I feel like I’ve won the day—and making them fork over the candy they’ve dressed up in costume for is not a good use of my time. This level of over-parenting is not good for kids either. Who is it good for? It’s killing women, who already feel so overburdened by all the things they’re supposed to think about: the ingredients in their kids’ snacks, the way they speak to their children, how they put them to bed, the lotion they put on their skin… we are now being sold scripts on Instagram for engaging with our own offspring. It’s a type of madness. Honestly, parenting is not that deep. It’s just not that deep. What your kids need: a lot of love, someone who sees them, someone they can depend on no matter what, moments of repair after big upsets, and guardrails. I don’t think my kids need me to hover over them in anxiety, worrying about every meal and every after-school enrichment opportunity. That’s not what my kids need from me, and I’m not a bad mum because I feel that way. I’ve come to believe that my kids have fewer “real” needs than other mums feel their kids do. I’m comfortable with this.

It can feel very countercultural to not participate in mum guilt. Many of my friends make a sport of this, lamenting everything they miss while simultaneously resenting how much of their own lives they’ve thrown on the sacrificial pyre for their kids. This is a cop-out—it’s fun to be friends with me, I promise!—and too many of us use the cultural pressure of being an ever-present mother as a reason not to pursue our own dreams. Don’t misunderstand me though. I’m deeply indebted to all the people whose mission in life is working with kids. This is a calling for many, whether it’s as a parent, a teacher, a child carer, or a coach. This is simply not where I feel called to serve. And because of this, I’m very clear about controlling expectations and communicating clearly so that I don’t embark on an impossible balancing act where I’m under-delivering all over the place—and making others help me carry the guilt that results.

I do this by being incredibly clear about the trajectory of my life and my own nonnegotiables. I think clearly about my goals—including my goals around the time I spend with my kids, and the other things that give my life deep meaning—and say no to everything that doesn’t get me closer to them. Sometimes this also means saying no to things that I really want to do. And it makes it easier to say no to things I don’t want to do, too. For example, I don’t do anything at my kids’ school that doesn’t involve them. It isn’t meaningful to them that I volunteer for the mums’ coffee or go to the school gala; it is meaningful to them that I’m at their school play if they are taking part. As I mentioned, every September around my birthday, I spend a few weeks working on my annual plan, my own New Year’s resolutions, which involves carefully planning out my year. I do this so that when trade-offs inevitably present themselves, I’m prepared to meet them and better able to manage the pressure. These resolutions become my blueprint for the year ahead. As part of the visioning process for my career, I also ask myself the following questions as it relates to my family—and I reassess every few months.

Once I’ve committed this to paper, I start the time-consuming task of working my way backward, step-by-step, in chronological order, until I arrive at today. I use this master blueprint to make to-do lists, and I keep the bullet points on my home screen to hold myself accountable throughout the year. Not only does this blueprint help me architect business success, it helps me to ensure that my kids take priority in the year, too, and that I’m buttressing intense work periods with opportunities to spend deep time with them as well. This allows me to be fully present wherever I happen to be, rather than feeling like I’m being pulled in multiple directions.

This clarity of intent is important because we can often feel that we are never enough, and that whatever we do, we should really be doing something else. Planning allows me to create a shield against these pressures, and it gives me the time in advance to get comfortable with the inevitable trade-offs that are coming my way. And there are many: You cannot be a mum with perfect attendance and have a demanding career. You cannot be a leader and a people pleaser. You can’t please your children all the time. You will miss out on things. Feelings of guilt are to be expected, but these feelings are not a good reason to put off going after what you want.

While balancing between career and family certainly puts pressure on trade-offs, I’ve been noticing a cultural trend among younger women I encounter who don’t yet have families, a trend that worries me as well. It’s the insistence on prioritizing self-care and a soft life over career. Listen, I do a lot of self-care—it counters the amount of energy I expend in my career. But I see it as part of a balance: energy in, energy out. It can’t just be energy in. While I understand all the impulses that make this generation want to push back against hustle culture, I don’t think this is the right trade-off. I worked my ass off in my twenties—yes, I got an early start because I didn’t go to college, and I still made time for fun, especially in my teens, I but I was mostly pedal to the metal. By the time I hit thirty I had built and scaled my own agency. I didn’t yet have kids. I didn’t have a mortgage or other looming responsibilities or concerns, so I applied all my energy to my career.

This story might make you groan, but when I had my agency ITB, I used to wake myself up in the middle of the night to see if I needed to respond to any lawyers’ questions or comments on a celebrity’s contract. I couldn’t bear a long turnaround time when I was trying to close a deal and keep a client happy, so given the time difference between London and LA, I’d wake myself up to make sure it all got done. While I’m not advocating unhealthy work habits, I’d be lying if I didn’t say that there will be moments in your career where it will make sense to push it beyond typical expectations.

Looking back, it’s easy to put my friends in two buckets: those who worked hard in their twenties and those who were unfocused. When I look at how successful they are now, the difference in the two buckets is very, very clear. When I was in my twenties, I very much recognized that this was my time to make considerable headway in setting myself up for a career that would give me a shot at financial freedom. I intuitively understood that I had outsize ambition, and I was never going to make it with a low work ethic. As I tell members of my team, you’re never going to be able to do what you say you want to do working three days a week. You can’t do Pilates, walk your dog, go surfing, work three days a week, and then come to me for a pay raise.

For anyone saying, I don’t want to give my life to work, I’d say don’t. But if you’re an ambitious little monster like me, then I’d tell you that you’re thinking about it completely wrong if you’re not planning on applying yourself fully for a decent period of time—like ten years minimum. I would think of devotion in the earliest years of your career as being an investment in yourself. When you’re evaluating any opportunity, you need to assess compensation (salary, bonus, potential equity), the value of the brand on your résumé, and most importantly, what you can learn and gain for yourself. When you’re young, this last part should be of primary importance—go where you can learn and grow. You probably won’t make much cash, but take that as an acceptable, often necessary, trade-off. Money will come. Go where you can get the most leverage to use your experience as a stepping-stone to your future. Recognize that throwing yourself into your career in your twenties when you’re relatively unbound by responsibility will be good for you later. I can’t compare because I didn’t graduate from college, but it feels like a master’s degree. My twenties were a grind, and I didn’t make much money, but I set myself up for my thirties and forties. While there are certain moves that led to failures, fundamentally I would have done it the same way again with no regrets.

The other thing I’ve observed on my teams is that many women are overly concerned with other people. They’re worried that this person isn’t getting paid enough. They’re worried that that person isn’t getting enough rest. They’re worried that this person isn’t fulfilled. It strikes me as a uniquely female trait. I recognize that nurturing might be conditioned into us, or perhaps it comes more naturally to women, but I also believe the tendency can be attributed to the fact that putting yourself first—and surging forward in your career regardless of everything else—is simply hard. And we don’t have enough models in the culture of women doing it without misgivings. Instead of focusing on what you want, and how you want to distinguish yourself, it becomes easier to look around and find other places to spend your energy. Ultimately, rather than focusing on meeting our own needs, we feel pressured to look around and try to meet the needs of other people instead. I so understand this urge—and it’s a beautiful thing—but I’m not sure we can afford it. I want us to stop doing that. I want women to stop caring for other people in a way that they aren’t caring for themselves. Start with yourself. Putting yourself first is self-care, self-care that is not about a spa day. It’s nailing down your career, your financial future, and the freedom to find your own way, whatever your choices. This pays off considerably down the line and creates all sorts of options and possibilities that then let you take care of people in an even more powerful way.

It sounds like a stereotype, but in my experience, men have a much easier time sticking to the mission and keeping their eyes on the prize. I wonder sometimes if it goes back to vision and whether we are willing to dream big dreams and commit them to paper. It sometimes feels like we don’t have a plan for ourselves. Yes, we want a promotion. Yes, we want to make more money. But we don’t necessarily have a bigger vision for our lives. When I push women to tell me what they ultimately want, I tend to point out that if that’s what they really want, they don’t seem to be trying to achieve it. “Have you thought about the necessary steps it’s going to take to get there?” Often, the answer is no. It’s not that they’re without ambition, but they are often operating without a clear strategy.

We partly get tripped up in our visioning for the future because we aren’t prepared for trade-offs. Culture conditions us to believe that you shouldn’t have to sacrifice anything to achieve your dreams, that you shouldn’t be forced to compromise at all. This is one of the most unpopular things I say, and I get a lot of grief for it—in fact, get ready to throw this book across the room—but things in your life will have to give, and you’re not going to get what you want quickly. Nobody wants to hear this part, but it’s the truth: They’re called trade-offs for a reason. To win, you will often feel like you’re losing—and sometimes losing a lot. And it’s not easy. If it were easy, everyone would be doing it. Really throwing yourself into your career and life doesn’t always taste nice—and it’s definitely not always fun. But if this is what you want, it is worth it. What are you willing to give to get what you want? You need to get very clear about that answer. Many women look to me thinking I’ve found a magical way to make packed lunches for my kids really quickly, or that I must have found a secret portal to get home for bedtime every night, regardless of where I am in the world. I haven’t found any shortcuts that you can’t figure out for yourself. I don’t make packed lunches. I’m often not there for a goodnight kiss. It looks like I “have it all,” but I’ve traded off a lot—and I continue to do so every single day.

I get that there’s a tremendous amount of disillusionment in the culture. We’re at a moment where it’s hard to imagine an end goal. We can’t buy a house. We can’t find a good guy. And we feel really far away from having a kid. I hate that this is stopping so many of us; we can’t let it. Find your nonnegotiables, write them down, and prepare yourself to trade off the rest. This will give you peace. I hope my legacy helps change the thinking about this and encourages more women to focus on themselves in the context of business to make the rest of the vision more accessible. If you circumscribe your ambition at the beginning of your career, you will leave your life partially unfulfilled, thinking about what could have been. This is one thing I cannot accept for my own life—or for yours.

New Thought: It’s both/and, which requires anticipating trade-offs and planning for them.

2. Old Thought: Not only is there a right decision, but the “rightness” of your decisions should be apparent right away.

Things turn out best for the people who make the best of the way things turn out.

—John Wooden

A few weeks ago, a fellow school mum called me to rage about an issue at our kids’ school—I let her go on for a bit and then told her I had no idea what she was talking about.

“Ah, it must be so nice to never really be tapped into what’s happening.”

It was passive-aggressive, yes, but it’s also her loss. I’m very comfortable paying for a service and then letting the people I’ve hired get on with it. I don’t need to be in my kids’ school curriculum. I’ve trusted them to do their job, and I don’t need to check their work.

Early on in my career, I learned the power of delegation; I hire people I trust to make decisions on behalf of the business—or in the example above, in my kids’ education. One of my mantras is no small details . Don’t ask me what time my flight is or what day we’re meeting. I don’t know, and this is a superpower. I trust other people to manage the small details, and I see no upside in trying to micromanage or control people or spaces where I have little expertise. Granted, I have a lot of support and people I can delegate small details to, but I learned this mindset from my mum, who had no support and no people. She accepted help wherever she could find it: My aunt would babysit; the local grocer would sub my mum milk and eggs until she got paid. Find a way to make your life easier. There are so many tech-enabled tools to outsource to now: auto-pay settings, shared calendars, food and grocery delivery services, WhatsApp parent chats if you need someone to pick up your kid from school because you’re running late—and there’s a lot of energy to be regained by not obsessing over the minutiae of daily decision-making. Where can you find help or outsource part of your to-do list? What are you willing to give up to make your day less frantic?

We need to shed the idea that we’re the only ones who can and should do it all. To that end, I’m realistic about outcomes. I know how to form the right questions, when to get more information, and when to seek help. I might have a lot of ease with this because of my early anxiety about my credentials or the fact that I lack a formal education, but whatever its cause, it has served me well. I’m confident about my ability to find excellent people to whom I can outsource what I don’t know. My role is to hold the bigger vision for companies—and mostly, this doesn’t even require me to be the CEO. I’m an excellent people picker. For the big decisions I do take on myself, I make my choice and then I move on.

Ellen Langer, a famous Harvard professor and psychologist, has done most of the mindfulness research that’s made it into the mainstream. When she says “mindfulness,” she’s not talking about meditation; she’s describing the power of attention and the impact of the mind on the body. In many ways, she is describing mindset. Langer asserts that there is no such thing as the “right decision.” In fact, people who are effective in their lives are so simply because they make decisions—and then they make those decisions right. 2 There are very few circumstances in our everyday lives when we get to run an A/B test, i.e., try two paths (or two headlines, or two web designs, or two variations of a product) simultaneously and see which option rates best. Instead, we’re stuck with our choice, which involves cutting off the other option. You can’t live in two places, or take two jobs, or maintain two fully committed relationships simultaneously. You must make a decision and move on. Langer’s advice is to act without ruminating about what might have been. There’s even a term for the goal here, which is to make a choice that’s good enough: It’s called “satisfice.” 3 Ruminating is a waste of time because we’ll never know what might have been— there’s no rewind button on real life. Langer also points to evidence from other researchers that thinking too deeply about what to do is bad for mental health. As she writes in The Mindful Body , “Barry Schwartz and his colleagues found that considering more options and taking in a good deal of information results in a decrease in happiness, self-esteem, satisfaction with one’s life, and optimism. It was also correlated with an increase in depression, perfectionism, and regret.” 4 No thanks to that.

Psychiatrist Phil Stutz works with a lot of industry titans, and he explains that the most exceptional leaders in his practice are not those who make the “best” decisions, but those who make the most decisions. By taking action repeatedly and quickly, these leaders develop confidence. They come to trust their guts. This absolutely checks out with my own lived experience. As Stutz explains, you never have enough information to be certain about the right action to take, and to wait until you have enough confirming information means you’d be dead—or at least highly ineffective—as a leader. As Stutz writes, “An ability to tolerate consequences and recover is the only certainty you can have.” In True and False Magic , he writes about a tool he calls the Instinct Cycle, which develops your intuition and trains your unconscious to work with reality: “It is an exercise that requires a committed and proactive willingness to be wrong. It’s not the person who is right the most times who is the most confident, or who trusts the universe more completely—it’s the person who works the cycle the most times.” 5 While Stutz is not the sort of person who looks for proof (and neither am I), for the scientists among us, Professor Sunita Sah offers some: While she resists the idea of “trusting your gut,” there is a concept called “expert intuition.” In Defy , she explains that this is “an accelerated cognitive process, borne of a high level of experience and knowledge, many thousands of repetitions, and a stable environment that provides immediate feedback.” 6

There’s another word for feeling the right thing to do, which is super scientific —it’s “vibe.” It may sound like a light word, but I drive many of my decisions—specifically ones that involve people—off vibe. It’s very important for me to get into a room with someone to determine whether we’ll be a good fit, whether I’m considering an investment or looking to add someone to my team. I wouldn’t be able to tell you all the bits of information that I’m picking up subconsciously, but I can tell immediately and intuitively whether it will work with someone—and while I sometimes mess up, I’m rarely wrong. It’s an energy, a sense of someone’s perspective and point of view on life, that feels like magic.

When it comes to object-based decision-making, it’s not all vibe—I refer back to my list of goals to see whether the opportunity in front of me ladders up to what I’m hoping to achieve. It can be hard to let go of opportunities that seem fun or exciting, but when it’s not clearly aligned, I say no. I’ve watched many other founders and business leaders get distracted and pulled into side alleys and cul-de-sacs that seem far from their stated values or concern—I know I don’t have the time or energy to pursue everything that comes across my transom. I continually work through my fear of missing out—which has largely come through experience—because I trust that great opportunities and business ideas will continue to arrive at my door.

This isn’t to say that I’ve managed to avoid regret, or there aren’t do-overs that I wish for, though in some ways, I believe the universe always gives you another chance. In my experience, if you mess something up, or more specifically, fail to learn the lesson, you’ll get another crack at doing it differently down the line. I think this is why so many of us have repeating patterns: Sometimes this is from trauma and re-creating situations that feel familiar until you heal the core wound, but it’s worth holding it as a prompt to do something differently this time and get on the right path. One example of regret is when I quit the fashion production company early in my career after they refused to give me a decent pay raise. Not only was I furious, but I couldn’t afford to stay. It had been six years, I’d paid my dues and learned a lot, and needed to make a livable wage. When I left, I went to Saturday Group, which my now-husband, Jens, ran with his business partner Erik Torstensson, to start my own business. In response, the fashion production company threatened to take legal action if I continued to do my job offering any services that they deemed competitive. It scared the shit out of me, as I didn’t know the law and didn’t have any resources to fight back. Jens was unfazed though, and I got behind him as his legal team took my old company on and told them where to go. I regret this though, as I had never not stood up for myself. Because I didn’t face them head-on and skirted the confrontation, I found myself dodging these women at parties for a long time. This was a huge waste of energy, and it was a pattern I found myself repeating in the years to come until I learned the lesson of direct and immediate confrontation. That’s always the decision I make now: I go straight into it and never around it.

New Thought: You make decisions, and then you make those decisions “right.” Life requires constant iteration—you see everything as a learning opportunity to inform what you choose to do next.

3. Old Thought: Perfection is the right goal.

Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.

—Oscar Wilde

During my childhood, on any given Saturday, you’d find me or my sisters with a giant wrapping-paper roll covered in adhesive tape—my mum had fashioned this strange contraption so we could lint roll the navy blue carpet. My family called my mum “Bleach”—and not because of her bleach-blonde hair. She earned the nickname because she’s obsessive about cleanliness and compulsively fastidious. Vacuuming the floors wasn’t enough for her—she wanted the whole operation to be finished off by hand. If you wore white socks on that carpet that left any lint behind, she would murder you.

At the time, I knew this wasn’t totally normal, but I went along with it because where I come from you don’t argue with your mum, and it was a relatively easy give. She was a perfectionist in this way. But it wasn’t lost on me that she focused an awful lot of her attention and energy on the appearance of being tidy and put together, while as a family unit we didn’t quite match up. I don’t ever remember her asking me about my homework, but she did insist on dressing me, Charlotte, and Rachelle in coordinating outfits—with perfect, tight French braids that matched. (Luckily, my sister Katie, who is ten years my junior, never experienced the coordinated outfitting.) We didn’t leave the house unless we looked perfect—while we were not well-off kids, you could have taken us to Buckingham Palace any day of the week. She felt we had to “present” well. This was about living in East London, and also perhaps about race. “Emma, you are a little Black girl, and people are going to judge you—you’re going to have to stand up for yourself and have thick skin.” I think she felt that looking perfect would help. That, and she loved the affirmation she’d receive about our appearance. “Your girls are so beautiful, Jenny. Your girls are so polite.” This was the stamp of approval and only validation she needed when it came to her parenting. To be fair, my mum also loved clothing and had an unexpressed creative part to her—she even worked as a store window dresser for a bit, and I sometimes wonder if my interest in fashion came from her.

This is pretty typical—and it’s definitely similar to the social media maneuvers that we all pull off to some degree. We are all engaged in showing our best angles, and sometimes to an extreme, whether it’s stories of abuse like with the Franke family in Utah or that friend of yours down the street who puts out a perfectly manicured feed while crying into her hands after school drop-off. So many of us are hard at work cultivating an image of perfection to project to the world—images that are often quite far from reality. Or even if they’re true, they are momentary snapshots of a much more complex life, a life that has many more moments that aren’t exciting or glamorous. The end effect though is that we’re stuck in a cycle of comparison, where we’re convinced perfection is both achievable and an admirable goal, that our image is what makes us interesting.

I’m not immune from this. I put out my share of aspirational content and want to share tidbits from my life, especially as attention on my life has grown. It’s a natural inclination when you have a face full of glam for an event, or you’re loving your outfit, or you’re doing something interesting in the world. I see it as part of my job, too. Personal brand, unfortunately or not, is inextricably linked right now with professional success— particularly for women. This is even truer when you’re in the business of image, which anything in fashion and beauty and lifestyle invariably is. I want to see this change, and yet I also understand that there’s a fair amount of fascination with women who seem to have a fair amount figured out. With this comes scrutiny and pressure to make it all look good, to glamorize the pursuit to tempt other women to follow you down the path. I don’t think this is an entirely bad thing, so long as it feels joyful and connected to the truth.

What’s deeply unhelpful though is putting out an idea that perfection is possible—or the ultimate goal. In this relentless pursuit of perfection, we often lose what it means to live our own success story, primarily because we’re so busy trying to please everyone else and keep up with an impossible ideal. The bigger headache is when we sell women the idea of effortless perfection. This is the reason I post so much behind-the-scenes work and glam rather than pretending like I roll out of bed with my face fully done—or pretending like I don’t wear makeup at all. (It takes a team.)

The pursuit of perfection really doesn’t work in business because you must take risks, stumble, and fall on your face. The ascent to greatness is rarely pretty, and you will learn the most from failure. If you’re not failing, you’re not learning or getting stronger, and your ambition probably isn’t big enough. What is this here to teach me? is the most important question I ask myself every day—if you’re doing life “perfectly,” there’s no opportunity for growth. In fact, to achieve perfection, you would need to circumscribe your life and ambition to ever-smaller goals. You would be self-restricting to a zone of things over which you have direct control. (A small number of things, truly.)

Now, I also understand that we live in an incredibly lookist society. There’s no getting around the fact that women are penalized in both directions in a type of Goldilocks impossibility. We’re damned if we’re considered attractive, and we’re damned if we’re not, whereas this really doesn’t matter for men. For one, there’s something called a “perfection bias,” where studies suggest that men are evaluated on one criterion for jobs (competence), while women are rated on the perception of three criteria (competence, morality, and sociability). And it actually gets much worse, as research suggests that we’re still attached to the idea that external beauty reflects internal goodness. Several studies support the idea that people who are universally rated as attractive are more socially desirable and receive better treatment across the board. People go out of their way to please hot people. That said, this can backfire on women in the workplace, as studies show that the perception of beauty indicates a lack of competence. Yep, it’s difficult for people to compute that a woman can be smart and hot. It’s the age-old beauty versus brain conundrum. Attractive women are desirable for entry-level jobs and then perceived as too pretty to lead in any job considered to be the dominion of men. 7

I’m generally rated as an attractive woman, and I recognize this is a privilege that benefits me in significant ways— and , throughout my life, I’ve been continually underestimated because of the way I look. This still happens, despite my success. Many men still think I’m just the “face” of the business, while my husband must be the brains. Recently, I was doing a deal with a man known for being difficult and domineering. At one point in our negotiations, I kept pushing him to accept terms he wanted to reject. He looked at me perplexed and completely confused, unsure of what to do, before he ultimately gave in.

“You’re like a beautiful rottweiler.” I took it as a compliment, though it underlines the idea that somehow toughness and acuity in business and attractiveness are incongruous, at least to men. He didn’t seem to know what had hit him in the face. Just last week, a man called me a “little darling.” If he only knew. For my part, I’ve tried not to dwell on this while continuing to push forward, but I’m conscious of the fact that it is a thing, and I wish it wasn’t, since I’m convinced that the way I look is the least interesting thing about me. I believe this is true of every woman I’ve ever met.

Every day, I ask myself what it would look like to meaningfully support other women in a way that does not enforce standards for women that are unachievable. One of the ways to resist our dominant culture is to ask yourself—deeply—whether something is important to you or truly aligns with your values. Sometimes you have to stand back and say, “Does this matter to me based on my principles and what I think is right? Is this the right use of energy?” I often stop myself from simply going with the flow of cultural pressure—especially when it comes to wellness or beauty trends—when I realize that I simply don’t care enough to spend any time on it. I’m convinced that a giant slice of why men seem to be more successful in business is that they don’t spend an inordinate part of their days on the way they look. This is a huge advantage.

My husband, Jens, never suffers from an outfit crisis. He’s never concerned about whether he’s having a bad hair day. Meanwhile, I often find myself with girlfriends falling into a pattern where we bitch about ourselves because it’s a socially accepted thing to do. (There’s research to suggest that if you don’t bitch about yourself, you’ll be perceived poorly by your peers—in fact, there’s an entire Sex and the City episode where Samantha refuses to speak poorly about herself and chaos ensues.) It’s an autopilot form of conversation, and as women, we need to consciously shift it. I’d love to have all that time back. Can you imagine if at the end of your life, you had the opportunity to reclaim the 10 percent of your life spent on body dysmorphia? I’ve been thinner in my life, and I certainly wasn’t happier. Whenever I find my mind wandering in this direction, I quickly leash it back.

Now, again, I am not perfect at this. I have plenty of days where I feel less good about myself. Sometimes I stand in front of the mirror in the morning and bitch about my hair. But I have made a lot of progress with my body. I love clothing and I love getting dressed, so putting together outfits feels like a pleasure—and I truly dress for myself. At times, members of my team will tell me that I’m wearing something that’s not flattering, which really drives me nuts. Because guess what? I don’t care! Am I supposed to go around showing you how narrow my ankles are? I think not. Clothing brings me joy. If clothing brings you joy, or makeup, or doing your hair, so be it—you don’t need to deprive yourself of this time indulgence if it truly feels good and self-expressive. But when you find yourself wasting your time and precious energy on something that is making you miserable to maintain, pull back. Not only is this better for you, but it’s better for other women as well—the less time we spend enforcing a culture that insists women maintain a certain level of perfection, the less energy we’ll all need to spend upholding it.

Research suggests the antidote to body anxiety, eating disorders, and all the ways in which women belittle our own appearance is not positive self-talk. Nope, you read that right. In fact, complimenting a woman’s body will make her feel worse, as it creates self-consciousness. It sounds crazy, but research underlines that this is true. We need to stop talking about women’s bodies and their beauty, even when we think we’re being kind. The antidote for us is to not talk about the way we look at all, and to instead think about our bodies and brains in the context of all they can do. 8 Wouldn’t that be hugely liberating? Imagine how the world might change if women everywhere unhooked from self-consciousness and spent their energy flexing their big brains instead. I can’t wait for the day when we pay far more attention to what women achieve in the world than how they look doing it.

New Thought: Perfection is both futile and boring—the process is much more interesting.