Love of the Week

Everyone tells you to live your purpose. But here’s the thing. No one tells you how to find your purpose. It’s like you’re supposed to know it by osmosis, or it falls from the sky into your head one happy day, like, surprise, here I am. But we all know that rarely happens.

That’s where Becoming You comes in…

I have said some version of those words roughly 23 billion times in the past five years, criss-crossing the galaxy, explaining this thing I do. This methodology I teach. Indeed, I said them this past weekend at a convening of hundreds of high school students at a conference called Beyond Now in New York City.

In the front row of the auditorium, a young woman — maybe 15 or 16 — looked up at me with yearning eyes and mouthed the words, “Thank you.”

Such moments are what I think about when jet lag finds me in a Los Angeles hotel room at 3 a.m., writing this newsletter. Hi.

Look, finding your purpose is not for the faint of heart. I am in the middle of a three-part podcast series on the brute force required to overcome the fear it takes. For it is true, as the great psychologist Carl Jung once said, “People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own soul.”

And yet, soul-searching is exactly what Becoming You asks of us.

But as your fellow traveler, living her purpose at last, I will keep inviting you along on that journey. From the stage, and in the dark of my hotel room, waiting for another day to break open so I may say those words back — thank you.

Hate of the Week

For this part of the newsletter this week, I made a video. I think you will understand why when you see it. The Values Bridge value of Place is obviously very real for me! How about you? Also, don’t forget to come right back!

Hmm of the Week

When I was young, nobody said “I want to be an entrepreneur when I grow up.” Nobody. Today, it’s practically a rite of passage — building your own thing, being your own boss, the whole deal. It’s gone from fringe to default career dream in about twenty years.

But here’s what I keep turning over: can anybody actually become an entrepreneur? Or is there something wired into certain people — some specific cocktail of grit, risk tolerance, and maybe a touch of useful delusion — that makes them built for it?

That question was front and center for me this week when I moderated a conversation at NYU Stern with Neil Blumenthal, co-CEO of Warby Parker. After graduating from Tufts, before business school, before any of the fame, Neil moved to El Salvador to train low-income women in rural communities to give vision tests and sell affordable glasses — then spent five years expanding that program across the world. Then went to Wharton, met three classmates who all wore glasses and thought they were too expensive, and built Warby Parker.

The guy was building businesses before he even knew that’s what he was doing. The conversation was one of the most uplifting I’ve had in a long time — he left me genuinely inspired and, honestly, encouraged about my own path.

Which brings me back to that path. Some days, entrepreneurship feels like the only thing I was ever supposed to do — I just found it embarrassingly late. Other days, it feels more like something I learned by making every possible mistake in the book.

So help me think this through, would ya? Are you an entrepreneur? How did you know? Or are you wondering, “Is an entrepreneur who I would become if I could?”

Because we are all stories of becoming. What’s yours?

With love,

What's coming?

→ 92NY Secrets of Leadership Series with Suzy Welch tickets here

→ May 2026 Three-Day Becoming You Intensive here

Be Not Afraid (Part I): “I Took a Sabbatical. Should I Hide That From Employers?”

Fear of the unknown gets a lot of attention. But the deeper fear — the one that quietly shapes our careers and lives — is something else entirely. The fear of knowing ourselves. In this first episode of a three-part series on fear and self-discovery, I tackle a question from podcast listener Katie, who took a brave step after decades of professional success: a sabbatical to reassess her life and career. Now she faces a dilemma many people share — should she admit that she took a sabbatical on her resume, or hide it from potential employers?

Tune in Here!