What I didn't realize then, that I know now, is that the ambition, fire, and creativity that I had (and still have) in spades and came from the most honest place any of us have - - - my own spirit - - - was being wielded and focused in a way and in a direction that wasn't fully of my own conscious choosing.

It wasn't wrong, but it was someone else's story and definition of success- - - one I was taught through exposure, repetition, and influence to duplicate and adopt.

Over time, through an amalgamation of articles, books, tv shows, interviews, magazine covers, soundbites, and social media campaigns, I was slowly and imperceptibly convinced that the most viable path to satisfying my burning desire to make something of myself, was to follow their lead. In other words, I was culturally coached to direct my ambition at paths that had already been walked, rather than to create my own story step by step.  

I see this now with the specific, compounding clarity that can only come from having followed the advice that told me success could (and should) be engineered, having recognized these narratives for what they are, and then being made to sit through yet another polished presentation of it.

Which, if I am being honest, looks and feels from where I stand a lot less like outrage and a lot more like deep boredom.

And now, on the other side of the first part of my adult life, career, and a path to “success” I pursued and sometimes endured, and of the rules I adopted and believed in and eventually realized were not my own to begin with, I can share something with a clarity that would otherwise be impossible to attain had I not traveled it and experienced it first-hand.

What I understand now is that the early and continuous encouragement of creativity and ambition - - - from every single source around me - - - was in service of achievement within the bounds of what others deemed success.

That the rule book for professional success and fulfillment as a woman was almost always presented as set in stone, written by women who walked some version of it before me. Guidance that, if I followed and learned well, would lead me to becoming great, just like them.

That my constant pull towards creative expression and the deep-rooted curiosity I childishly aimed at seemingly obscure, “illogical” topics was nurtured and encouraged by the world around me as lovely hobbies and quirky interests for spare time, but almost never as a life, a career, or things that could be sustaining and fulfilling in themselves. I very rarely heard stories, at least not often enough for them to embed, that taught me I could wield my gifts in service of truly designing my own life path, creating work that matters to me not just to others, and, in that way, to a version of success I actually agreed with. A path that turned the obvious and early pulls and natural, genuine creative expression that fulfilled me as a child into a livelihood that could sustain me as an adult.

I didn't realize that the stories of carving your own path, or of more general success, that managed to reach my corner of the universe and that I categorized as something to reproduce if I wanted to “be successful” were all the same, just dressed up differently. And I didn't recognize that where the roads those identical stories pointed to, helped me navigate, and encouraged me to walk with intensity, endurance, grit, and tenacity would always lead to the exact same place: not where I actually wanted to go if I wanted to be happy, fulfilled, well-rested AND well-paid rather than just the latter.

I don’t feel any resentment, guilt, shame, or sadness looking back on any of this. Instead, I feel peace and a deep sense of understanding. It’s the kind of feeling you get when the last few pieces of a puzzle you’ve been working on fall into place. It all makes sense.

This was, after all, inevitable.

Because human beings don't emerge in a vacuum.

Our identities, our perspectives, beliefs, and values - - - what we consider normal, admirable, necessary, or successful - - - are learned through families, institutions, culture, religion, economics, political systems, and more than ever . . .

media.

These frameworks and systems and the narratives they produce, amplify, and engrain, shape us in both conscious and unconscious ways that ultimately define and drive our choices. Identity is not just built through exposure, it is reflective and generative - - - it is developed, engrained, and reinforced constantly and over time, not just through our interaction with those around us, but through what is normalized and actively reflected to us by the culture and the values of the society we move through.

And after eons of hearing, seeing, and believing the same story told about what success is and how to reach it, it is no surprise that I (and so many of us) had defaulted to paths of external following instead of internal guidance. It is this - - - more than any individual failure of will or imagination - - - that is why so many of us inevitably wake up one day feeling stuck in a life that isn’t ours; with a feeling of never quite living up to what we sense is possible; of never quite matching the life we could feel waiting just beneath the surface of the one we were living.

Today, both women and men (but especially women) continue to internalize the same achievement-driven success narratives that have been running through our cultural bloodstream for decades and ultimately end up with just another version of the same story to tell. These narratives and guides to success are never new, they are merely dressed up in new costumes, presented by new faces, shaped into new brands, and delivered with slightly new talking points.

But they are ultimately the same old bargains dressed up as freedom.

And if you don’t believe me, I’ll show you exactly why this is true.

Abstract systems need concrete examples to become visible, and right now one has been making itself impossible to ignore. Not because the story is new - - - it isn't - - - but because the machinery amplifying it is louder, faster, and more precisely targeted than anything that came before it. The latest version of the same narrative has a name, a book, a PR squadron, and an algorithm working in its favor. And if you've spent any time on social media in recent months, it has almost certainly already found you.

I say certainly, because Emma Grede and her PR team are going to incredibly great lengths to become the new face of women’s career success advice. Secondly, because we’re in a moment in time, media, and culture where the speed and ubiquity at which this story has traveled has been unparalleled. Although to call it a story at all is inaccurate, when it is a clear narrative being spun by another small squadron of PRs tasked with establishing Grede as the new generation’s “Post-Girl Boss Meets Lean In for the influencer age” icon; the new feminine face of industrial leadership.

Before I go on, it's important to note here that Grede herself is not a villain, she is not a bad person (as far as I can tell), and she herself is not the point. What she represents is far more important than who she is and what she's done or even the specifics of her story.

At its core, this isn't about any one woman's well-polished mass media perspective, but rather the continued circulation of a narrative that shapes how millions of women understand ambition, success, and what's possible.

This is a narrative spun by a ruthless, increasingly empty PR machine that continues to chew women up and spit them out - - - whether they are targets of or vehicles for its perfectly crafted messaging. The simple truth is that if it wasn't Grede, it would eventually be someone else. She is merely the latest willing example of what happens when our modern media and PR machine - - - one whose scaffolding is now built by tech platforms, powered by an attention economy, and fueled by influencer culture - - - continues to sell yesterday's narrative as some kind of revolutionary liberation.

The "no sugarcoating," the opinions that teeter on the edge of provocative and are designed to split opinion, the doubling down when the comment sections didn't swing the way they thought they would, the masterful and swift reframe - - - "my intention was to start a conversation" - - - and the slight public exhale that came next.

It's a campaign straight from a PR playbook we've seen countless times before.

What makes this one different is the time we're living in - - - a time where media and social channels carry sound bites at the speed of light, where they take on a life of their own before you can swipe away, where one sound bite said with enough conviction and fed by enough media spend, whether authentic or true or accurate or not, can influence too much, too many, too quickly. This is a campaign running in a world where people's livelihoods - - - current and future - - - hang in a delicate balance, and the designed intensity of this rollout, and the number and cadence of the soundbites, is demanding we take what is being said very seriously.

And we should be paying attention, because it is very serious indeed.

The gap between something shared with personal conviction and a helpful universal truth can be miles wide - - - in this case, even wider given the PR machine behind it and the size of a platform like hers, built in large part by a demographic of women looking for direction in life at a time where nothing in the world feels certain, especially traditional career paths.

And when a clearly articulated worldview, so expertly narrowed for impact and provocation, is repeated with such deliberate focus and at such scaled cadence, it becomes less generous advice to leave or take and more weaponized marketing.

The kind that isn't just driving sales of a book or well-cut denim or podcast sponsorships (although, mostly that), but that can - - - and does - - - ultimately shape the perspectives, the worldview, the perceived possibilities of a generation of young women searching for their own unique path to success.

My exposure to Grede herself - - - like most people - - - comes almost exclusively by way of a ceaseless string of clips, short snippets of interviews she conducts and ones she gives, all of which are of course taken out of the larger context of who she is as a whole human being and even what she truly cares about most. I personally don't know Grede, I've never met her, I don't know her life story in detail, I don't listen to her podcast or watch her appearances on others', and I don't buy products from her companies. I haven't drunk her particular flavor of Kardashian orbit Kool-Aid - - - I've, in fact, never even thought to try it. Until recently, when against my own will, like many other unsuspecting social media perusers, I became the algorithmic target of an infinite slew of soundbites on success, career, and miscellaneous advice on how to make it as a woman in America, soundbites that just kept coming with no end in sight.

I will also say that I have not read her book and have no plan to. As someone who has lived a version of that life and a version of that story (not at the level she has, to be clear) I just don't feel I must to know what it all ultimately boils down to.

What is being amplified publicly - - - not just the messaging, but the worldview it was born from - - - is already consistent, repeated, and clear.

And this is just not a worldview I align with or a path I would encourage anyone to pursue - - - not anymore, and not with where the world is going - - - and that leads me to my first point of contention. Because the fact that someone like me has made a different choice means a different choice exists. And yet this is never mentioned with any weight in the countless interviews or through the well-delivered, sans-sugar talking points.

Instead, the interviews are riddled with statements like :

"Work from home is career suicide, specifically for women."

- - - a blanket generalization based on a perspective developed from her specific experience and her specific path. One that is, by all accounts, extraordinary thanks to proximity (not the kind she often speaks of), access to the highest echelons of celebrity and their reach, and a level of spousal financial netting that must be mentioned in this context. Is it possible to replicate her exact experience? Perhaps. But the truth is that most people will never have the levels of perfectly-timed support she had while on the road to her current level of “independence”. None of this makes her perspective untrue (at least, to her), her worldview completely wrong, or her advice useless, but it also doesn't make any of it universal truth, and yet it is being unquestionably and relentlessly positioned as such in almost every interview I've seen.

For example, to get closer to an actual universal truth that can be delivered with the conviction one such truth deserves, the above statement would need some adjustments.

If I may be so bold as to tap into a previous life and PR craft and offer up some suggestions:

For example, she could have said - - -

“Work from home can be a career killer for women who work in environments where in-person office time is the set standard.”

That would have been a truer statement to plant a flag with.

And if we want to be as close as possible to devastatingly truthful, and if this concept is something she actually believes (which I can only assume she does, given the number of times she has repeated it):

“Work from home is a career killer for women who work for me.”

There is no version of the original statement that doesn't need to become more honest to also become completely true. And the more honest it becomes, the more it becomes about her and not everyone else, and that type of advice is not good advice to serve up as universal at all.

I do see, however, why the PR squadron didn't go this route. Because the more honest that statement becomes, the more the narrative of empowering women starts to fall apart.

It opens the door to tough questions about why success in that model still involves replicating the same conditions that made (and continues to make) the path to success still so grueling for those coming next. All it would take is a few prods; a simple string of inquiries not a single podcast host, journalist, or talking head has yet thought or had the guts to ask.

Questions that would draw out some more truth, which could perhaps help us answer some bigger questions we should all be asking:

If women gaining power and resources changes nothing beneath them, what exactly has changed?

Call me crazy but in my worldview - - - admittedly one not as neatly packaged and designed for virality - - - the role of any true leader reaching new heights, woman or man, is not to put a new layer of pavement over the same potholed roads that got them there, but to build new ones that create more ability and access for others. The types of roads smoothed by new terms and new dynamics from the start, ones that make it easier and more possible to succeed both professionally and personally without having to play a never-ending Game of Thrones.

If leadership only reproduces harsher versions of old standards and the same advice to perpetuate them, who benefits?

Grede may have started this campaign to share career lessons and tell “the truth”, but the most important takeaway is very different from the one that has been packaged and designed for us to swallow. Because while attempting to dismantle the cultural norms that keep women small, this narrative has just blatantly and continuously reinforced them. It has accidentally - - - although inevitably - - -positioned her as an example of what happens when power, influence, and capital is acquired and used to perpetuate the status quo rather than to question it and change it when it finally becomes possible to do so. It is a lesson to us all that consciously defining the bigger why behind our ambitious chase of dreams to our version of “the top”, and remembering what we'll do with the power and resources we've earned once we get there, is the most important thing of all. Lest we end up blindly recreating with zeal the same dynamics, conditions, and bumpy roads for all, and inadvertently end up with only the same story in the same book we've all read so many times before to tell.

If this is called revolutionary, what word is left for actual reinvention?

This narrative (and the book, first self-described as a “revolutionary new framework”, a statement very quickly revised post-release to “game-changing” on almost all distribution channels and retail sites) is not revolutionary at all. None of it is anything new. It is a story we've heard many times before, from earlier generations of very smart, very hard-working women turned corporate or startup world success gurus (Sheryl Sandberg, Sophia Amoruso, et al) who spent their entire lifeforce navigating their way through an industrial, engineered model of success that depends on self-extraction, anxiety, and endurance, and who learned its rules well enough to play the game at a level that finally gave them access to a book deal and a microphone.

The message, no matter how many ways it's said and however well-intentioned it may be, is a perpetual hamster wheel dressed up to look like empowerment. It is merely a freshly varnished version of how to remain a cog in a wheel.

It may sound good, it may even inspire, but the real "tough love" truth of the matter

is thatno amount of power pointed in the same direction gets us anywhere new.

The latest one may be a story that tells you to "start with yourself" by designing your own vision, but if we're to follow its author's advice to actually reaching it, that vision still ends up sidelined while you fulfill your boss' demands for your butt in an office chair 5 days a week, weekends "as needed", and eventually to a level of burnout that no amount of consecutive vacation days can heal.

It is the inevitable conclusion.

It is inevitable simply because its guiding principles come from a woman who unfortunately, somewhere along the way, began to actually believe the story she was told about how expectations and standards are what they are and they must be worked around instead of challenged and changed.

It is inevitable because it teaches nothing new about how to operate outside of a system never designed by women or for women to thrive in to begin with, but rather how to better navigate it, better negotiate it, and hopefully, better survive it.

It is inevitable because it, like her, doesn't question whether the structure is one worth continuing to operate in or perpetuate - - -

it assumes it is the only viable one at all.

But while none of it is anything new, all of it is entirely expected, and making Grede the target of all our collective, intense emotion activated by being presented this same story yet again would be unfair. Simply because she, like every industrial leadership feminine icon before her, is a product of her environment. One first built by men, for men, that women have been able to adapt to enough - - - over time and through persistence, perseverance, and force - - - to find some version of their own achievement (sometimes, survival) fueled success within it. This paradigm has always and will always teach us to navigate it with military grit and extra, extra hard work rather than find new solutions or create environments where the highly valued working-world coldness and intensity someone like Grede was able to develop isn't necessary in such amounts to begin with.

Still, the ongoing avalanche of response to all of this has been intense and divided - - - there is bliss but also rage, frustration, confusion, the entire spectrum of feeling rippling across every platform. But beneath all the intensity and more easily recognizable emotions, I sense something more specific compounding: a bubbling exhaustion on the verge of boil. One that could only be caused by women having to repeatedly watch other women (and men) who reach a level of acquired influence, power, and capital where change is possible choose instead to write the same book and share the same 10x-your-way-through-life advice we've heard a million times before while actively reinforcing the conditions that made it more difficult than necessary for them on their way to "the top". I personally also feel a genuine concern that a new generation of young women are being told they can design their own vision for career and life, as long as they still play by the same old rules and promise to keep them in place when they're finally in charge.

Beyond that, and if I'm being honest, I am not angry, frustrated, or confused.

I am just bored to death.

My metaphorical head is hitting my metaphorical desk, as I'm being made to listen to an old script presented, yet again, as revelation. This same dull mass media narrative, the one that says career success for women means securing a corner office, is not just tired . . .

it's completely unimaginative.

Women in America, and in some other parts of the world (although not all, not yet, unfortunately), have more freedom than ever to pursue any path they want. There is more democratized access to tools, to information, to education, to technology, to audience, and thus to new ways of living and working that are sustaining rather than draining, than at any point in history. New generations of women have not just the inherent ability but now the increasing logistical possibility of pursuing anything they want - - - of becoming the first women in long family lines to do exactly that. It is a remarkable time, if only we would stop selling, telling, presenting, and accepting the same old story that keeps us stuck; a story that tries to make us believe that the path to prosperity, success, and living our vision (the true one, not the version we’ve been sold) has only one path that involves years of compromise and winds its way through a system that almost always pulls you in deeper before you ever have a chance to escape it.

The verifiable truth - - - the one conspicuously absent from the mass media interviews, the soundbites, the carefully delivered talking points - - - is that there are thousands, perhaps millions, of women globally who have adopted very different definitions of success, different paths to get there, and in many cases both. These women, full of a deep sense that there is just more out there than what we've been served up as options, are actively redefining what abundant success can look like and are, more importantly, demonstrating that the path there doesn't need to be so taxing, compromising, or templated. They are not the ones yet pedestaled through million-dollar PR campaigns and seven-figure book deals, but their stories are becoming more real, more visible, and more tangible every day.

They, the things they are building and creating, the paths they are carving, and the success they are finding are the product of internal guidance- - - of leaning into who they actually are and building their lives, careers, and their work from there, rather than from a narrative handed to them and optimized for someone else's benefit.

Engineered success, and the paths that are positioned as a requirement to reach any version of it, always end up feeling like a lie. A lie we end up living inside of because we believed and blindly followed the “advice”, the “game-changing frameworks”, and the same PR-fueled empowerment campaigns (ones almost always designed to direct you to something else, like a book for sale, for example) that have been recycled and regurgitated for decades without paying attention to who is delivering them, why they are delivering them, and what they stand to gain from our eager willingness to accept them as universal truths.

The most empowering thing we can do now, is to start posing some tougher questions. First to ourselves, then to those trying to make us believe another version of the same old book, the same narrative, the same story. About what success means, about how to achieve it, about whether being driven by achievement is the right thing at all. About what is "necessary” to get to “the top” and about whether “the top” we’ve been conditioned to believe in is a goal worth pursuing at all.

And then, to begin to write different stories of our own. Not better versions of the ones we've been handed - - - different ones entirely. And in being different, genuinely, finally, better. Stories about what success and fulfillment can look like when we design them ourselves rather than inherit someone else's definition or pre-packaged roadmap.

This --- carving a path that is not borrowed, pre-walked, or pre-destined for you while refusing to make the same choices for everyone beneath you once you reach your version of “the top” - - - is what being revolutionary actually looks like today.

x T