A s kids, my sister and I enjoyed playing “grown-up.” We would take on roles like businessperson or teacher and set the stage for hours of elaborate make-believe. One of us would dress up in Dad’s sports coat or Mom’s skirt, and we would surround ourselves with stuffed animal co-workers or classmates, piles of paperwork and files, toy phones, chalkboards and cups of “really hot” pretend coffee. Our concept of work mirrored our parents’ career paths. In fact, entrepreneurship never even crossed our minds—it was seen as unstable and too risky. Our paths were clear and never questioned: graduate high school, attend a good college, get a degree or two, or maybe even three, and land a respectable job. And that’s exactly what I did… at first.

Within a couple of years of diving into my first real job, I hit my first real ceiling. I worked fast, was driven by my own creativity and regularly pushed the boundaries of my corporate role and title. But there were no opportunities for growth, my compensation was fixed and, worst of all, I felt utterly uninspired. One afternoon, overcome with boredom, I resorted to playing chess online just to pass the time. That was the breaking point—I refused to spend one more minute watching the time tick by. I wanted to do something with my life that was meaningful and filled with purpose that leveraged my skills and passion and would push me out of my comfort zone. I was determined to forge a path where personal growth and earnings potential knew no boundaries. I decided to go into business for myself.

As a young entrepreneur, I had grand visions and ambitious goals. I had no idea how I was going to make my business work. But I believed in myself. I tried and failed many times. I learned from those around me. I also experienced incredible successes, all of which shaped me into the leader I am today.

Over the years, I’ve worn multiple hats—switching between entrepreneur and employee—always guided by a singular mission: to make a meaningful impact on people’s lives. When I am tapping into my overarching purpose of leading, inspiring, providing value and empathizing, the way I file my taxes becomes inconsequential.

Through it all, I’ve come to realize that the path to success is anything but straightforward; it’s riddled with twists and turns, setbacks and triumphs. And now, as I watch my own children play “grown-up,” my heart is full. They create clever roles as entrepreneurs, inventors, artists and social influencers. Will they follow the traditional path of higher education and conventional careers? Who knows? What truly matters is that they dare to dream big, set their sights high, push boundaries and understand that with unwavering determination and perseverance, any goal is within reach.

Welcome to our Ambition issue—a celebration of the relentless drive and determination that propels individuals toward their goals and dreams. In a world brimming with possibilities and opportunities, ambition serves as the fuel that ignites innovation, fosters growth and transforms dreams into reality. Ambition is also a catalyst for positive change, both on an individual level and within society at large.

At SUCCESS magazine, we understand the profound impact that ambition has on the lives of entrepreneurs and aspiring leaders. It is the driving force behind every audacious idea, every bold decision and every breakthrough achievement. Whether you’re a seasoned entrepreneur charting new territories or a budding visionary taking your first steps toward success, embracing ambition is the key to unlocking your full potential.

In this issue, we delve deep into the essence of ambition and its transformative power. From insightful interviews with trailblazing entrepreneurs to practical tips for cultivating a success-driven mindset, each article is meticulously crafted to inspire, motivate and empower you on your journey. Our cover star Lilly Singh is an incredible inspiration for young entrepreneurs all over the world. Hailing from Scarborough, Ontario, Canada, she started her career on YouTube in 2010 and has quickly turned her comedic nature and unrivaled talents into acting, hosting and now directing. Due to her fearless pursuit of her passions, innovative use of digital media to build a successful brand and dedication to breaking barriers no matter who you are or where you come from, Lilly is a role model for ambitious youngsters everywhere—and we can’t wait for you to learn more about her story (see here).

That’s why tailoring our content to emerging entrepreneurs is more important than ever before. As the traditional boundaries of work and entrepreneurship continue to blur, a new generation of innovators and visionaries is emerging, armed with ambition and a relentless drive to make their mark on the world.

By providing aspiring entrepreneurs with the knowledge, insights and inspiration they need to succeed, we empower them to overcome obstacles, seize opportunities and turn their ambitious visions into reality. But ambition isn’t just about achieving individual success—it’s also about making a positive impact on the world around us. From tackling pressing social issues to driving innovation and economic growth, ambitious entrepreneurs have the power to effect meaningful change and leave a lasting legacy for future generations.

As you dive into the following pages, I encourage you to reflect on your own ambitions and aspirations. What drives you? What inspires you? And most importantly, what steps can you take today to turn your dreams into reality?

Remember, success is not a destination—it’s a journey. And the path to success is paved with ambition, determination and a relentless pursuit of excellence. So, dare to dream big, embrace the challenges and never lose sight of the incredible potential that lies within you. Here’s to ambitious dreams, bold aspirations and a future filled with limitless possibilities.

When it comes to the influencer world, Niké Ojekunle is no amateur. She built her career from the ground up creating videos, gaining a strong following and signing big brand deals. Until the rug was pulled out from under her by a talent agency that swindled her, owing her thousands of dollars. But that didn’t stop her. Unperturbed by the occurrence, she’s taking a new step in the influencer industry with her brand Specs and Blazers by teaching the up-and-coming about financial literacy.

Read more online at SUCCESS.com

Society has hotly debated the pros and cons of artificial intelligence (AI) since ChatGPT went mainstream last year. Although AI has been around for decades, the tech industry primarily understood what it was and how it worked. Now, after OpenAI debuted ChatGPT in November 2022 (swiftly followed by competitors like Google Bard, now known as Gemini, and Microsoft’s Bing Chat, now known as Copilot), everyone from real estate agents and lawyers to marketing pros and teachers tap its power to help them do their jobs.

Since its launch as a free tool, ChatGPT has gone viral as it continues to gain in popularity, according to Statista. In fact, the generative AI program garnered 1 million users in less than five days, setting a new benchmark for tech innovations. Tooltester notes that some OpenAI executives project revenue for ChatGPT (now with advanced paid versions) to reach $5 billion by the end of 2024.

Did you know that a whopping 38% of all food in the U.S. goes unsold or uneaten? According to the nonprofit ReFED, that amounts to roughly 145 billion meals wasted a year, generating the same climate footprint as the country’s entire airline industry. ReFED itself spearheads transformative initiatives, such as the Insights Engine (a hub for food waste data and solutions) launched in February 2021. In 2022, the nonprofit debuted the Catalytic Grant Fund, allocating up to $20 million in grants to support nonprofit and for-profit ventures aimed at mitigating risks and scaling impactful food waste solutions.

But many other innovators—such as Zero Hunger | Zero Waste Foundation—are stepping up to help build a more sustainable food system. As The Kroger Co.’s social and environmental impact plan, this foundation supports nonprofit organizations, social entrepreneurs and creative thinkers aiming to improve food security and abolish food waste. In particular, its Innovation Fund supports innovators who are disrupting the linear supply chain with solutions that tackle everything from imperfect produce lines to upcycled foods and meal kits. In 2022, the foundation provided $11.3 million in grants directed to organizations and initiatives across the U.S.

A chieving harmony within one’s personal and professional life can often seem like an elusive goal. However, Kristin Cavallari, best known for her role on reality television, is a shining example of how one can successfully navigate the complexities of being a well-rounded entrepreneur, mom and business owner. Today, she is the founder and CEO of the lifestyle brand Uncommon James and host of the popular podcast Let’s Be Honest with Kristin Cavallari.

And, if I’m being honest—there’s nothing she can’t do.

Cavallari’s journey into entrepreneurship began long before Uncommon James. Rising to fame through reality TV, she transitioned from being in the spotlight to building her own brand empire. While many may assume that her celebrity status paved an easy path to success, Cavallari’s entrepreneurial journey has been marked by resilience, determination and a commitment to staying true to herself.

One of the key lessons Cavallari emphasizes is the importance of embracing all facets of life, including motherhood, while pursuing entrepreneurial endeavors. Despite the demands of running a business, she prioritizes quality time with her children and strives to be a hands-on mom. By striking a balance between her professional and personal roles, Cavallari demonstrates that success is not measured solely by business achievements but also by the relationships nurtured and the memories created with loved ones.

As the CEO of Uncommon James, she has infused her brand with elements of her own lifestyle, creating a line of jewelry, skin care, apparel and home goods that reflect her chic yet accessible aesthetic. Her ability to connect with consumers on a personal level has been instrumental in the brand’s success, as she leverages her authenticity and relatability to resonate with her audience.

Beyond her entrepreneurial pursuits, Cavallari is also an advocate for self-care and mental well-being. She openly shares her journey of prioritizing her health and emphasizes the importance of carving out time for self-care amid the hustle and bustle of entrepreneurship and motherhood. By prioritizing her own well-being, Cavallari sets an example for others, demonstrating that self-care is not selfish but essential for long-term success and fulfillment.

SUCCESS: How do you balance being a mom and a business owner?

S: The success of your lifestyle business Uncommon James has grown tremendously. How did you get started?

S: What made you want to become an entrepreneur?

S: Are you still in the entertainment industry and what are your thoughts on switching careers and/or doing both?

S: When it comes to pushing the boundaries in business and focusing on family, what grounds you?

S: What is the hardest part about being an entrepreneur?

S: Describe a typical day for you.

S:  What makes you happy and how do you define well-being in your life?

S:  What is your purpose in regard to work-life, entrepreneurship and philanthropy?

S:  What advice would you give an emerging entrepreneur?

S:  What would you tell those who want to follow in your footsteps when it comes to overcoming obstacles and setbacks?

S:  With all that you have going on at home and work, what’s next for you?

S:  What does success mean to you?

A s a leader, you understand the importance of creating good habits; your habits can either help or hurt your success in life. Habits form good, regular routines that put you on track to accomplish your significant life and business goals. Highly successful leaders create healthy habits throughout the day, but what creates success are the habits they’ve developed in their nighttime routines. Some of the most successful leaders in the world focus intentionally on their nighttime habits. They set themselves up for success each night by creating routines that help them wake up energized, ready to accomplish their goals and clear on how they’ll spend each day.

“With so many things constantly bouncing around in our minds, having a nighttime routine is not optional; it’s required,” says Blake Nubar, co-founder and CEO of Laptop Freedom. “It’s important to wind down. Calming your mind is key to a restful night’s sleep—the type of sleep needed to enhance productivity, reduce stress and keep your health in check. Remember: The goal at night is to ready yourself to conquer the following day. Forfeit this, and you are setting yourself up for failure.”

Here are the nighttime habits of five successful leaders that you can incorporate into your own routine. End your night well-rested and, by extension, set yourself up for a successful start to your day. Borrow the success playbooks of these well-known leaders.

Business leaders are intentional about winding down and getting enough sleep. Their nighttime routines tend to be focused on planning, relaxing and self-care. These business leaders have built some of the largest companies in the world, but they’re not always “on.”

Toyin Crandell, founder and CEO of Money Mindset SHIFT. and host of The Millionaire Money Podcast believes in being intentional about creating successful habits.

“If we all could do the same thing and get the same outcomes, why do some business leaders scale businesses to multimil-lions in a few years and others aim for it but never get there even after 15-20 years?” she says. “It’s the nighttime habits that distinguish what success a business leader can accomplish. Be intentional about creating success habits.”

You deserve a life where every goal and dream becomes a reality. You’ll get there with hard work, starting with establishing nighttime habits and the routines you create.

She sees her nighttime as an opportunity to prioritize self-care and self-development. Her nighttime routine includes family game time (when her children are at home) and talking to former President Barack Obama about their happenings. She follows up these activities with a good night’s sleep.

After a full day, Blakely is intentional about her nighttime routine. She spends the evening with her children and then puts them to bed. Every night, she takes a bath and lights a candle as a way to power down from a hectic day—she sees value in turning off work mode.

Famous for being an advocate of getting good sleep, Bezos prioritizes eight hours of sleep. “I think better; I have more energy; my mood is better,” he says. Another surprising addition to his nighttime routine? Bezos likes to wash dishes. This mundane yet necessary task sets his nighttime routine in motion.

Since Cook is known to wake up between 4-5 a.m., he’s in bed by 8:45 p.m. He spends his evening powering down and doing so with Apple’s recently released Vision Pro mixed reality headset.

“S uccessful” doesn’t begin to describe Tim and Cindy Dodd, although they are. Definitively so. Their company, PEMA.io, has a 97% success rate with more than 700 online service providers, who they’ve helped close sales worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in a matter of months. But success—like a sale or a new client—is an end result, and the Dodds are just getting started.

“Ambitious” is a better adjective for PEMA’s founders and their small team. The company’s central value is, in fact, “resolved to win.” It’s the tenet that PEMA was founded upon, lives by and shares with its clients.

In the cold, cold world of outbound marketing, PEMA has broken from the pack saturated with self-proclaimed gurus who offer sales strategies and training courses. Tim and Cindy cut to the chase: acquiring clients rather than simply generating leads.

“Lead generation is pointless if you don’t have a really solid sales process to convert those leads into paying clients,” Cindy says. For example, PEMA can send a hundred really good leads—ideal targets, in fact—to one company, and they don’t close them. “And we can send a hundred leads to another company, and [they’re] their ideal target, and they’re able to close 20 or 30% of them. The difference between the two is a very dialed-in sales process that’s focused on client acquisition versus just lead generation,” Cindy explains.

PEMA is that dialed-in process focused on client acquisition. The system generates qualified, vetted sales meetings so you can be on calls and signing up clients within days of installation. It addresses the full sales cycle, from when someone says “yes” to a call till the day they ink the deal.

In the last six years, the Dodds have executed more than 100 million reach-outs to customers in every industry from fashion and banking to food and beverage. In that time, they’ve acquired a trove of data on human behavior principles, on what works and what doesn’t. That data is 90% of what PEMA’s outbound process is built on, they say.

“Persuasion techniques come and go. Human behavior principles are unchanging,” Tim says. “Scalability for customers is all about repeating the processes and the principles that are pretty unchanging.” PEMA installs those.

PEMA’s origins date back to Tim’s days right out of college when he was running a car detailing shop in Kansas City. He became so skilled at SEO that his shop was receiving 20 to 30 calls a day, but when he tried to transition this talent into the B2B space and launch his own SEO agency, he discovered that the move was harder than he thought.

“I was a little disillusioned about the sales cycle, lead generation and client acquisition in the B2B space,” he says. “[Great marketing agencies] might do a great job at getting customers for their customers, but a lot of them have an incredibly difficult challenge to get their own customers.”

Realizing he wasn’t alone in this disillusionment, that other B2B entrepreneurs didn’t understand the industry, Tim started building out a way to address that gap. The result was the foundation of PEMA—or, what he and Cindy call PEMA 1.0.

“We call it PEMA 1.0 because Tim grew PEMA really fast,” Cindy says. “He had employees and a team…. He was really good at marketing and sales. But the operations of the company, the culture of the team, just weren’t solid. And so, during our honeymoon in 2020, I found out that his company was crashing.”

Although Tim’s ambition had identified a gap in outbound, he had overlooked an internal gap: his company’s culture. He called working at PEMA 1.0 “bad and toxic” and held himself responsible for letting the workplace become so.

“When I first started PEMA 1.0, it grew fast, and I just thought I was, like, ‘The Internet Entrepreneur.’ I thought I had made it. But I did a bad job of building culture,” Tim says. “The business crashed because of my failure as a leader to build the right company and culture and operations.”

That’s where Cindy came in. Her expertise is in people: When she and Tim got married in 2020—in the final months of PEMA 1.0—she was running a successful career coaching business that was helping people land dream jobs, even in an economy crippled by pandemic-induced layoffs. By bringing her talents to the table at PEMA, she and Tim were able to repair the company’s missing link.

“We built it from the grave up,” Cindy says. “I was really good at hiring, recruiting, operations. That was my background. And Tim being really good at marketing and sales, we just had a perfect alignment in our skills. And that is how we got to running what we call PEMA 2.0 together.”

PEMA 2.0, the PEMA that’s breaking the mold of outbound marketing today, has left everything “toxic and bad” in its dust. Tim and Cindy established a set of company values and only recruit people who are perfectly aligned with those values—particularly those of personal ambition.

“Our mission and this journey that we’re on is to empower each other,” Cindy says. “It’s to empower our team to see them hit their goals. And, ultimately, it’s to win. We talk about that ‘resolve to win.’ We believe it. We don’t know the limits of our potential.”

Tim says that his own professional motivation was transformed along with PEMA. He and Cindy are focused on helping people succeed—financially and professionally—rather than simply “making a bunch of money and being a cool internet entrepreneur.”

“We have teammates in our tribe who are hitting five-year goals in six months. They’re buying rental properties to make passive income. They’re buying houses for their parents,” he says. “What drives me every single day is wanting to see these amazing people… hit their goals. There’s nothing more rewarding.”

Indeed, the Dodds are helping entrepreneurs achieve their goals beyond the PEMA tribe, too, from helping their paying clients secure new clients of their own to providing free marketing strategies on their podcast, The Takeover with Tim and Cindy, that gives entrepreneurs of every stage the tools to transform ambitions into realities.

A s the world becomes more and more data-driven and artificial intelligence increasingly permeates daily life, our power as human beings lies in our ability to make informed decisions. Cassie Kozyrkov is on a mission to increase the quality of those decisions. Kozyrkov was Google’s first chief decision scientist until she left the company to start Data Scientific. This decision intelligence agency helps world leaders and executives optimize their most important decisions.

Kozyrkov’s goal is to lead humanity toward better decision-making on a global scale. In her recent LinkedIn course, she presents 18 tried-and-true lessons that every business leader can implement to ensure their organizations thrive in a data-driven world full of complex decisions. Outside of that course, she’s also given countless talks and written numerous in-depth blogs on improving people’s decision-making skills.

She says you can’t answer that question without first knowing if your mind is set or not.

“If it isn’t, your procedure will be to go out, explore and go with whatever looks like the potential best option. This is true in the household decision-making sense. And it’s also true in the data science and statistical sense.

Kozyrkov has repeatedly said in her work that people need to “stand up to AI.” What she means by that is, society as a whole needs to stand up to the quality of the decision-making behind AI and ensure that good decision-makers are, at the very least, coaching those building the system. Because good decision-making isn’t about the outcomes but the technique used to reach those outcomes.

I magine if your yearly company retreat was a camping trip—in subzero temperatures.

For one Swedish company, it is. And while the prospect of trudging through the snow might not sound like a particularly cozy corporate bonding experience, Stockholm-based Fjällräven, which makes camping equipment and hiking apparel, says it’s a great way to build its employees’ confidence in the outdoors. That also helps them excel at their jobs, and, in turn, helps the company grow.

The weekend is aptly titled “Winter Education,” and it’s exactly what it sounds like. Every winter, the brand sends a few dozen of its Stockholm-based staff members into the forests of inland Sweden to hike, horseback ride, snowshoe, or ski and set up camp for two nights under the stars. While they hope for dry weather, they go rain or shine. Even when conditions are poor, people generally come back happy.

“The worry of being cold is probably worse than the actual risk of getting cold; I think you learn a lot from that,” says Carl Hård af Segerstad, the brand’s global events manager. Everyone also learns that their actions have consequences, he says. “I think you learn some kind of self-reliance in that, and I think that is probably the biggest outcome of this.”

About 30 to 40 people get to go every year, so the group is always changing. People are excited for the opportunity to go, and there’s a buzz around the office both before and after the trip each year. The team tries to organize the group so that employees get to spend time with other staff they don’t typically work with directly.

“The cohesiveness and the feeling of being a part of the group grows, of course,” Hård af Segerstad says. “I would say, both before and after, there is great energy in the office.”

Even if you’re not familiar with the name Fjällräven, you’ve almost definitely seen the brand around. The brand’s most recognizable product is its iconic Kånken backpack, which debuted in 1978 as an answer for Swedish school children whose bookbags were causing back problems. The square design has changed little since the product was first launched and is a testament to the brand’s commitment to timeless design that doesn’t need to be replaced every season when styles change. This year, the brand will celebrate the 50th anniversary of its Expedition Down Jacket, a cold-weather piece that has endured changing times with little need for evolution.

The Winter Education tradition started out informally with the brand’s founder, Åke Nordin, who launched the company in 1960 with a wooden-frame trekking backpack. Nordin often brought friends out into the wilderness, Hård af Segerstad says, and over time, his definition of “friends” expanded as the company grew. Of course, it was also natural for him to outfit those friends with his company’s gear as a way to do some informal product testing.

“It was an integrated part of his product development without being super commercial about it,” Hård af Segerstad says. That Expedition Jacket actually came out of one of these very trips, he added—Nordin spent a cold night outdoors and wanted to find a way to make his down jacket warmer. He experimented with sewing two jackets together so that the baffles overlapped, and boom, the Expedition was born.

In addition to extreme staff bonding, the Winter Education tradition also affords today’s staff members this same opportunity. For those who design the products, it’s a chance to tinker with new ideas and improve upon old designs. For those who engage with the products in a different way, it provides an opportunity to understand how their products work, who their customer is and how to connect with them.

Fjällräven now operates Classics, a handful of social trekking events across the globe, in locations including in Sweden, Chilean Patagonia, South Korea, Colorado and more. Those events, which are much bigger and which anyone can purchase a ticket to (as long as you can find one before they sell out), provide an additional opportunity for staff to bond with each other, meet customers and work toward the company mission to get the every-man outdoors. The only wintertime event the brand currently runs is the Fjällräven Polar, which is a long-distance dog sledding adventure through Arctic Sweden. It’s a bit harder to snag a spot on, but anyone can apply. It’s free if you win a spot through a juried social media competition.

Even though February is about as cold as it gets in Sweden, and temperatures at Winter Education destinations are often a balmy 14 degrees or colder, Hård af Segerstad says people usually jump at the opportunity to join for the adventure. Most staff members have never done winter camping before participating, and they’re excited to leave the office a little early to hoof it into the woods on a Friday afternoon. Throughout the weekend, the students learn how to manage their body temperature so they stay comfortable and don’t overheat or sweat, which can become a safety risk. They also learn how to cook outdoors and how to manage wet gear and condensation in the tent on frigid evenings.

Ultimately, it may sound like quite an odd company retreat, but it serves the same purpose, Hård af Segerstad says.

“[This] is a little bit more on brand, I would say,” he says, comparing Winter Education to corporate functions in other industries. “Knowing your product and knowing what we expect, or what users [who] buy our products actually expose themselves to—I think that is why we do it this way.”

Proactive team-building, either by company retreats or regular office events, is one way to foster community among your employees and facilitate growth and collaboration. Another way is to get to know yourself and your employees better through a DiSC assessment, which is sort of like a professional personality test. It stands for the four personality profiles it assesses: dominance, influence, steadiness and conscientiousness. The test can help identify individuals’ leadership styles and provide insight into how members of your team may work together best. It can also inform the best approach to team-building activities.

Learn more about the DiSC assessment here. 

A n employee who had been working in corporate and internal communications at a health care company for several years was ready for a promotion, but there was little opportunity to advance. Then, the company posted a job in its regulatory division. The position was at the same level as her current role but with a slightly lower salary. She decided to take a chance and try something new.

Her gamble paid off. Within a couple of years, she was promoted to vice president and earning the highest compensation of her career. That lateral move helped her develop new relationships and new expertise—not just in corporate communications but in regulatory work as well, says Maria R. Pellicione, managing director at Hechkoff Executive Search Inc. in New York City.

Career advancement is no longer limited to moving up a career ladder. Increasingly, employees are making lateral moves at work to gain additional skills and experience and establish new relationships and connections that will be helpful to their careers in the long term.

Traditionally, employees expect to go from associate to senior associate, or from assistant manager to manager, but that type of advancement isn’t happening as often as it has in the past, says Jody Fosnough, a training and development manager at Fort Financial Credit Union in Fort Wayne, Indiana. She describes today’s career advancement as more of a web than a ladder. “Where I see all organizations evolving is [employees] having a web of accumulated portable skills that are readily available to be used in a wide variety of different scenarios and situations,” she says.

Here’s how to take advantage of the career lattice at your organization.

Within her own industry, Fosnough sees the trend to hire people with broader skills. Credit unions want their frontline workers to have more than just expertise in operations but also sales and customer service, and maybe even loan serving. “Traditionally, these are all different departments, but what we’re looking for is somebody who has that web of knowledge, [who] is going to be able to make more holistic decisions,” she says.

There is a paradigm shift even happening within traditional organizations, Fosnough says. Rather than focusing on a specific role or area of expertise during an entire career, employees can expect to be engaged in shorter projects that are based on their knowledge and experience. Companies are looking for employees who are adaptable and teachable and have high energy to complete a task and then move on to the next thing, she says.

“If you’re taking a look at internal upskilling programs and internal mobility programs, you’re looking at shorter life cycles like project-based work, gig-based work or maybe some mentorship on a specific situation or scenario,” Fosnough says.

To prepare yourself for a lateral move, Fosnough recommends anticipating job function and industry trend changes by reading articles, attending industry events, listening to TED Talks and networking with colleagues. You need to be able to look at the market and decide if you might need the new certification Google offers, she says. Focus on portable skills you can get in a month rather than going back to school to learn business analytics, which could take years, she says. “We don’t have time for that because, by the time somebody graduates with those skills, we’re looking for something else,” she says.

Pellicione recommends exploring these four questions before accepting a lateral role:

• Is this a step backward from what you were doing three or four years ago?

• What could the opportunity bring you in terms of new contacts and new skills?

• Where can you make the biggest impact in the new role?

• How will the new role expand your skills beyond your current job?

For instance, if your current role doesn’t allow you to interact with finance and you really want to be more engaged in investor relations and communications, it would be a good idea to take a lateral role that offers more direct interaction with finance, Pellicione says. Then, you would be interacting with the CFO, heads of finance and other members of the financial community. That would make a difference in your career by opening the door to other relationships and business verticals, she says. “Ultimately, these are things that could really help build not only the skill set that you have but expand on it,” Pellicione says.

Making a lateral move internally is also a good way to show the company that you’re committed to them, Pellicione says. “Companies sometimes go through reorganizations and restructuring,” she adds. “But if they see someone is committed to what they’re doing…, that’s going to really help you… get to where [you] want to be, too.”

Ultimately, it is about embracing a growth mindset, Fosnough adds.

I f Mikayla Nogueira has a mission statement for her brand, it’s this: Be yourself. That’s the all-day-every-day mindset that guided her when she started her TikTok makeup artist empire four years ago.

In her social media bios, the Massachusetts resident defines herself as a MUA (makeup artist). But the way the world and her nearly 16 million TikTok followers see her is so much more than that. She’s an artist. She’s a comedian. She’s a straight shooter. All the qualities that have made this one-woman show into a household name for anyone who knows the difference between a lipstick and a lip stain.

Her initial viral moment—almost overnight—meant there was no time for creating any kind of manufactured identity. Hers was already cemented. “I came right out the gate and threw my whole personality out there. I was super honest, whether it was about beauty products or my personal life,” Nogueira says. “I think that has really helped me grow a community. I don’t just have followers—I have a community.” A self-described workaholic, she structures her days like an executive, from strategy to execution. “I never half-a-- anything,” she says. “That’s very important to me.”

So, to that end, her work week actually starts Sunday evening. That’s when she creates a filming schedule she can stick to, shooting five videos every day.

Here’s what a typical weekday might look like for Nogueira:

In Doin’ It, which she co-wrote with Neel Patel and Sara Zandieh, Singh stars as Maya, a 30-something, Indian-American virgin who gets a job teaching high school sex ed. Great premise! But not the most comfortable one to discuss with, for example, your Indian immigrant mother, someone who never gave you “the talk” and who you realize you might need to hop on a call with after you submit a script that’ll have you in a, um, compromising position on screen.

So when she asked her mom if she was going to be OK with it, she was surprised by the response she got.

“She said the sweetest words to me, she said—I’ve never heard my mom be so evolved—she said, ‘Are you OK with it?’ And I went, ‘I am.’ She goes, ‘Then I think it’s fine,’” Singh laughs. “And my mom actually helped me with some of the movie on set. She’s making sex jokes, and I’m like, ‘What’s happening? We’ve opened up the matrix!’”

If you’re not among the 14.4 million subscribers who followed Singh’s early career on YouTube (where her parents’ strictness was a fairly common theme), maybe you know her from her NBC late-night show, A Little Late with Lilly Singh, or from The Muppets Mayhem on Disney+ (she was the human).

Or maybe you don’t know her yet—though we’d wager you’re about to. 

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The silly sketches landed with an audience of young brown girls who saw themselves reflected in Singh’s humor, and she became one of the emerging video platform’s earliest stars. But she hasn’t posted new skits to that channel in years; she’s been busy writing and filming and producing. There’s Doin’ It; there are her two bestselling books; and there’s Unicorn Island, her combination production company and charitable fund.

Singh is a true multi-hyphenate… which is why being called a “YouTuber” today can sometimes be a source of frustration. “Sometimes, when I read a headline or read anything about myself, it’ll say ‘YouTuber,’ and I was trying to figure out why that unsettles me,” Singh says. It’s a perception she’s been battling since she stepped away from the platform to pursue new passions.

In December, for example, she was the subject of a Washington Post profile that asked, “Where does Lilly Singh go from here?” The piece was an in-depth and personal look at her career highs and lows following the cancellation of her NBC late-night show. Then, you get to the correction at the bottom of the piece: “A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that Singh still regularly produces content for her YouTube channel.”

“I think it unsettles me just because I think, naturally, everyone wants to grow. Everyone wants to evolve,” she continues. “And everyone wants to be described in a way that’s accurate to what they’re doing right now.”

YouTuber? It’s not that Singh resents or regrets that career—it was empowering to run and grow her own media company, and she was an inspiration to a legion of young women who followed her, including actress Iman Vellani, aka Ms. Marvel, who told Singh she grew up watching her videos.

It’s just that it feels reductive. No one these days, she quips, is calling Justin Bieber a YouTuber.

Doin’ It, for example, is the first feature film from Singh’s Unicorn Island Productions, which also produces an animated children’s series (The Mindful Adventures of Unicorn Island ) and has a drama (Arzu, starring Bridgerton’s Charithra Chandran) in the works. On the charitable side, the Unicorn Island Fund is empowering girls and women in India to overcome shame and unleash their full potential.

“Really, what I do is, I’m a storyteller,” Singh says, noting that it took her some time to figure that out. “I’ve used various mediums to tell stories, whether it’s a quick video on Instagram or a feature like Doin’ It, but I believe in the power of telling stories.”

That’s why the production company and the charitable fund exist under the same Unicorn Island umbrella; both are trying to change the world by telling stories.

“And I’m trying to tell stories that look like the real world,” she says.

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In How to Be a Bawse, Singh uses stories from her career as a how-to guide for becoming a strong and confident person who’s taking control of their own life. The chapter titles alone tell a story of inner turmoil—how did the titular “bawse” get so lost?

When I mention that Singh doesn’t strike me as a person who’d need to get her life in shape, she smiles and shakes her head. “I’m not shocked to hear you feel that way, because a lot of people were like, ‘You get your life in shape? You’re all about the hustle and the goal setting and the vision boards!’” But something happened in the years after her first book hit shelves: “Years later, I was like, ‘Oh, I think I’m sad.’”

Singh’s first book explained how to work really hard and get all the things—the accolades, the career, the respect—she’d been working toward in her own life. It didn’t explain what acquiring all that success and acclaim was supposed to mean. And that’s because, Singh says now, she frankly didn’t know.

When people would ask her about herself, she found she had a habit of rattling off career highlights: I was a YouTuber; now I act; I’ve been on late night; I’m starring in these shows. She realized she’d started to feel disconnected from her sense of self, from who she really was.

Was the work supposed to define her? Was she supposed to keep hustling more and harder? Having achieved so much of what she wanted to accomplish in life, what was she supposed to feel? What number or achievement would finally make her feel as if she’d made it?

“So, Be a Triangle was really a way for me to make sense of it all: make sense of the hustle, make sense of the success, make sense of the goals,” she explains.

“Even to this day, sometimes I stress—I have 14 million Instagram followers right now, and I’m like, ‘What if it goes to 13.9?’ And what if it goes to 13.9?” she laughs. “Then what? What’s gonna happen? Someone’s gonna come revoke my success card?”

Singh is quick to tell quips like this at her own expense; she’s affable and likable, a fast talker with an easy smile who makes you feel like you’ve known each other forever. The gregarious performer you see onstage or on camera—that’s Lilly to her core.

But Singh also has a quieter side. She plays Catan online every day, and she recently started making ice cream for her friends. She bakes; she keeps a journal. And if it’s not already obvious, she puts an intense amount of pressure on herself. Her drive to succeed is immense.

In the past, that’s been out of necessity. In 2010, she was proving to her parents that she could turn YouTube into a meaningful career as a way to avoid being forced into grad school. In 2015, she moved to LA, the first person in her family to move out of the house (let alone to a different country) for a reason that wasn’t marriage. She had no choice but to make it work, to make it worth it.

At 35, Singh says she’s driven by something less concrete but perhaps more meaningful: legacy. “Maybe that’s me getting older, maybe this is me seeing younger people coming up in the industry and being like, ‘Oh my goodness, I have such a soft spot for them,’” she says. These days, Singh finds herself wanting to do whatever she can to make it so that the young brown women who come after her might have a slightly easier time than she did.

“The truth is, all the headlines about me will disappear one day… I don’t know if people will watch my YouTube videos in 30 years,” she says, smiling in a wry way that suggests, in some ways, that might almost be a relief.

Singh is tremendously proud of the work Unicorn Island has done and continues to do, and that work—both on the production and charitable sides—will continue to occupy much of her time and energy over the coming years.

But legacy is only a part of it. There’s also a renewed search for joy.

In November, The Muppets Mayhem, the Disney+ series in which Singh played the human lead, was canceled after just one season, despite the fact that the show would go on to win an Emmy for Outstanding Children’s or Family Viewing Series one month later.

The show’s cancelation felt like a huge blow. But the more Singh thought about it, the more she realized why its cancelation hit her so hard.

“I was sad about it because it was so much fun,” she reflects. “I don’t get to talk to Muppets anymore! Do you know how awesome it is to not talk to humans and talk to Muppets?”

It wasn’t about the critical acclaim, and it wasn’t about the numbers. For the first time in her life, Singh realized that she was sad about the loss of a professional role because it brought her such a tremendous amount of joy.

“It won the Emmy, and I was like, ‘I would rather not have this, and I would rather just be able to have another fun season,’” Singh says. “That was a thing I never thought I would think in a billion years! If you told me 10 years ago, ‘You could win an Emmy,’ I’d say, ‘Give me the Emmy!’”

She admits that she’s still not sure exactly what compelled her next action—was it mania or a stroke of brilliance?

She called Brad Slater. The Rock’s agent.

“I said, ‘I want to do all of the things that little Lilly would just lose her mind over, all the things that bring me joy,’” she recounts. “So, I’m just letting you know that I’m going to have to work with Dwayne Johnson.”

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Moving forward, the indefatigable Singh says her goal is to spend as much time as humanly possible being creative. This year, she says, pulling out a handwritten list of her latest goals, she’s arranged her life so that she isn’t stuck doing any task that someone else on her team can do—a big step for someone who’s been personally approving every single social media post Unicorn Island has shared for as long as she can remember.

She’s already started writing her second feature, and on a personal level, she’s working to practice the kind of self-love that involves separating your worth from the success of your professional projects. (Stars: They really are just like us!)

And, you know, maybe soon she’ll be working with The Rock.

Singh knows that having a career in the industry necessitates grit and determination—but those are things she has in spades. She’s Type A; she’s focused; she’s driven. She’s a maker of vision boards, a setter of goals, a keeper of lists.

Now, she’s putting all that drive and effort into telling her own story.

A few months ago, Singh was driving around LA when she saw a billboard for a Mindy Kaling show she’s still thinking about. It read, “From the mind of Mindy Kaling.”

That phrasing has stuck with Singh, who, since making the move to more traditional media, has sometimes found herself second-guessing her own instincts or deferring to someone else in the room, assuming they must have more experience.

She’s come to realize that Hollywood has more than enough insiders—and Singh didn’t get into this business to do things someone else’s way.

“So, I actually have on here, ‘From the mind of Lilly Singh,’” she says grinning, holding up her handwritten list.

“That’s the mantra for 2024.”

She was just 24, earning $90,000 a year (“More money than I had ever seen in my life!”) as a government contractor in Washington, D.C., when she realized that she was making almost $25,000 less than the average salary for her position.

Williams had taken on more responsibilities at her job a few months prior. A colleague left the company, doubling her workload, and the company had no plans to replace him. Burned out and buried under work, she knew it was time to take action. She researched the market to discover what a job with her new scope of work would pay. Spoiler alert: Way more. When she brought her findings to her boss, he told her that she had to be with the company at least a year before she would even qualify for a raise. And, then, it couldn’t be more than a 3-5% increase. It was “a rude awakening” for Williams to discover that she was not being fairly compensated and that an accepted offer is often difficult, or impossible, to change.

Williams decided to look for a new job and negotiate her pay for the first time in her life. At her initial interview, a recruiter asked her what her salary requirements were. She was about to say $105,000. That’s when she took a breath and asked, “What is your budget?” When the recruiter answered “$115,000,” she realized that she had almost undercut herself by $10,000 dollars.

“That was the moment… I was very much impacted by pay transparency,” says Williams, now 27. Williams loved the job and felt well compensated. “But I just couldn’t shake the experience and couldn’t move on from it,” she says.

Williams decided she wanted to help others get paid what they deserved. She began creating videos on her own personal TikTok account, sharing her experience, her salary, her negotiation techniques and how she found her market rate. Her videos went viral.

She and her husband, James Daniels, filmed her first interview in Georgetown in northwest Washington, D.C., on April 16, 2022, and posted it later that night. By the next day, it had already gone viral. Three weeks later, she quit her job to pursue her new influencer career full time; her husband joined her one month later. Her channel, Salary Transparent Street, had 1.3 million followers at the time of publication, and she usually shares around five to six new videos a week.

Williams had tapped into an audience hungry for this shadowy information—knowledge that had been buried by corporate gatekeepers for ages: Just how much were people actually getting paid?

In fact, women and minorities are positioned to benefit from pay transparency most of all. If you identify with any group who is affected by bias in any form, “you are probably gonna be affected by pay secrecy,” Williams says. But, by openly discussing salaries, people become aware of pay gaps in their field based on gender, race, disability, age and other factors. This awareness can empower marginalized groups to better advocate for themselves and negotiate more effectively.

According to Williams, pay disparities on an institutional level are due to individuals deciding salaries, rather than companies establishing specific, predetermined pay structures that create a more even playing field. She believes that setting pay structures can provide more pay transparency and fairness. “I think a lot of corporations see [calculating salaries] as ‘Houdini Math,’” she says. “[But,] it’s really just making sure that you understand what the pay bands are for different roles in your organization, from a high end to a low end.”

Williams cites companies like the software company Buffer who are doing this well. A fully salary-transparent company since 2010, Buffer openly shares their formula for salaries and compensation directly on their website. However, for those companies who are slow to change, many local and state governments are passing laws to force them to adapt.

Williams sees salary transparency as a nonpartisan issue. “[It’s] not a left or right issue,” she says. “It’s a pro-worker issue.” Williams’ goal is to get as involved as possible with different legislation; she hopes to travel to some red states and lobby their representatives to see the value of legislation like this as a bilateral bill.

But, even if you live in a state without any pay transparency laws, Williams has created a valuable resource that can help you earn more. Together with her team, she launched a comprehensive salary database in July 2023, available for free on her Salary Transparent Street website, where you can search over 10,000 salaries—for positions ranging from nurse to IT director to accountant—in all 50 states.

Williams says the database is a way of taking their street interviews one step further, as they can “only be in so many places at once,” she says. “Our database is really cool because it builds in the contextual factors needed to do correct market research.” Data points include things such as years of experience, educational background, location, even industry and company size. All information is submitted completely anonymously to protect privacy.

“[The database] is our way of taking pay transparency to the next level and really turning our brand not just into a media platform,” she says. “But into a technology that helps people with their market research…. Having confidence [in negotiation] comes from doing that market research…. It makes the negotiation 10 times easier because it lets you spot a good offer and a bad offer. Once you know how much you’re worth, it’s easier to negotiate within that range.”

THE ENTREPRENEURIAL LANDSCAPE IS EVER-EVOLVING, and it takes a specific type of leader to ride the waves of disruption and innovation. These 10 notable entrepreneurs—ranging in expertise from nonprofit heroes to culinary connoisseurs—share resolve, creativity and ambition that inspires a deeper look into their journeys toward success.

Meet the aspirational entrepreneurs who are charting their own paths.

The model-turned-entrepreneur self-funded and launched an international handbag brand in 2020 as a 21-year-old exchange student in Milan. While in Europe, the ever-observant Vogel noticed that small, chic bags—casually, yet carefully, draped over the shoulders of Italian women—“were just starting to have their moment and become a style.” Using her background in marketing and finance, Vogel got to work creating Vogelle’s signature bags. The result was a series of sleek silhouettes made of timeless genuine Italian leather and accented with gold hardware that have massively appealed to buyers of all ages. Throughout the past four years, the native Coloradoan has harnessed the power of social media to grow her brand, both organically and with influencers.

One night, an 18-year-old Yang woke up choking on his own blood—the result of a fatally low platelet count. Doctors gave him hours to days to live. Yang surpassed that predetermined fate but ended up hospitalized for two years with a severe blood disorder, terrified that “even the smallest muscle movements” could kill him. To fight isolation, Yang started playing online games, logging more than 10,000 hours in games like League of Legends and making friends from around the world along the way, including a medical researcher who connected him with world-renowned hematologists. Yang wanted to embrace his revived sense of purpose and create video games that teach, inspire and “literally and metaphorically save lives.” Since its 2014 launch, video game development company Serenity Forge has had a string of successful releases, including Where the Water Tastes Like Wine and Doki Doki Literature Club Plus!—successes that landed Yang on Forbes 2020 30 Under 30 list. Yang sees video games changing our world over the next few years in a variety of areas, ranging from education to business operations to social impact. “Video games saved my life, and they just might save yours, too,” Yang says.

Growing up in Taiwan, Chen had access to some of the most delicious, vibrant street food in the world. It’s something she missed greatly as a college student in a small Canadian town with no Asian food. Chen was homesick, missing the flavors and aromas that connected her to family. So, Chen took matters into her own hands—and her basic student housing kitchen. She started making small, easy dishes like fried rice before leveling up to complicated delicacies like pho. An activity that started as a stress reliever has grown into a massive social media following, a cookbook and segments on shows like Good Morning America. Last November, Chen launched Asian foods company kai dong (Mandarin for “Let’s eat!”), bringing her beloved recipes straight to kitchens across the country with premium ingredients and easy-to-follow recipes.

The indie pop trio—brothers Jack, Ryan and Adam Met—started off busking in Washington Square Park. Now, they’re playing multiple nights at the famed Madison Square Garden. But the band hopes to make an impact beyond their music by practicing environmental sustainability while touring. They think about their environmental footprint before they even hit the road, considering everything from offsetting their carbon emissions to avoiding single-use plastics. AJR also considers who they partner with, like Planet Reimagined, a nonprofit that trains future climate leaders with tailored fellowships that teach researchers and advocates to work together for ultimate impact. (Bassist Adam, who has a Ph.D. in international human rights law and sustainable development, is the founder and executive director of the organization.) Recently, Planet Reimagined partnered with UK-based nonprofit Climate Outreach on a first-of-its-kind study designed to gauge fans’ perceptions of artists who use their platform for important issues.

After spending more than a decade in the music and film industries, the cousins had acquired a taste for premium whiskey while hanging out backstage and in countless bars and venues. When the pandemic halted the entertainment industry, Axster and von Schroder decided to turn grains into whiskey. They knew what flavor notes worked well from their time as amateur whiskey connoisseurs—but they also knew that whiskey is mostly served as a “man’s drink.” “So, we set out to craft our own and invite everyone to the party,” the founders say. With the launch of Lodestar Whiskey last year, the duo created a deliciously smooth spirit by blending straight high rye bourbon and American single malt whiskey—a whiskey so enviable that it’s the first backed by Diageo’s Distill Ventures award-winning Pre-Accelerator program that support beverage industry entrepreneurs from underrepresented backgrounds. “Building community is one of our guiding principles,” Axster says. “It was important to us that our whiskey is approachable…. We wanted it to be inclusive and inviting to those who are new to the whiskey community while also satisfying the palates of those who enjoy whiskey regularly.”

You’ve likely seen Renaud before, perhaps as a model in the pages of Vogue or as a host/correspondent on Extra. But, arguably, Renaud’s most important role has been founder of Buttah, a highly effective line of skin care products for melanin-rich skin. Buttah was inspired by Renaud’s own unique skin care journey, in which he searched for the right products for his skin while battling dark spots, pigmentation and irritation from consistent TV-ready makeup application. Renaud started working shea butter into his routine at the suggestion of a photographer. Now, it’s his line’s main ingredient, sourced from Ghana, West Africa. Along the way, Renaud has also inspired other men to take care of their skin. Bottom line: Common skin concerns like hyperpigmentation don’t have to be normal. “How you look is important; how you feel about yourself is important,” he says. Since Buttah launched in 2018, it’s cultivated a powerful following that has included celebrities such as Beyoncé, Keri Hilson and even 2 Chainz.

At 24, the former legislative fellow leads nonprofit Cactus Jack Foundation as managing director. The organization—founded by Webster’s brother, hip-hop artist Travis Scott—aims to extend youth access to educational opportunities, regardless of socioeconomic circumstances. Webster, a 2022 Howard University graduate, leads the foundation’s extensive education efforts and spearheaded the Waymon Webster Scholarship Fund, named for the siblings’ late grandfather Waymon T. Webster, who was dean of Prairie View A&M University’s graduate school. In 2022, the Waymon Webster Scholarship awarded $1,000,000 in scholarships to 100 graduating seniors from 38 historically Black colleges and universities in an effort to alleviate financial challenges in the students’ final semester. “It means the world to me to be able to work with my brother as he creates hope and makes a real difference for our peers and their families,” Jordan said in a statement.

As the visionary behind Charette Cosmetics, Charette has a keen eye for detail, a dedication to inclusion in beauty and a passion for quality—characteristics that have elevated his brand in the luxury cosmetics space. Charette’s extensive background as a medical aesthetician and cosmetic practitioner helps fine-tune the products and procedures offered at Charette Cosmetics Medical Spas in Atlanta, Dallas and Miami. Through Charette’s foresight and adaptability, the brand has set new standards in the ever-evolving beauty industry with a focus on inclusivity by creating products that are beneficial for all skin types. “I want people to be able to feel more beautiful, comfortable and confident in their own skin,” he says, “and making treatments available to everyone is the first step.” Others are noticing, too. Some of Charette’s key products have been featured on Bravo and in Women’s Health and Newsweek.

The Southern California teen began noticing a rise in homelessness a few years ago. It was something she couldn’t shake. Zappia was bothered by the lack of information about homelessness and the stigmas attached to drug addiction and mental illnesses, two issues that are often prevalent within the unhoused community. So, in 2022 at 14 years old, she fueled her interests in entrepreneurship and innovation into founding Project WHY (which stands for “We Hear You”). “I feel as though society has lacked empathy [toward] homelessness for a very long time,” she says. “It is time for a genuine change.” As CEO of the nonprofit, she partners with various organizations to interview her “unhoused neighbors” and share their stories, which are published on Project WHY’s website. “I realized that, in order for us to genuinely understand individuals experiencing homelessness and the overall experience of homelessness, we needed to learn it from those experiencing it,” she says.

For more than half her life, Clauson has modeled for some of the biggest fashion brands, including Versace, Gucci and Jean Paul Gaultier, and appeared in several Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issues. Now, she’s leveraging her range of experience and applying it to her role as co-owner and creative director of Margaux, a Los Angeles-based boutique modeling agency. In a way, this is a full-circle moment for Clauson, who started modeling at age 13. She’s tapping into her expansive network to give Margaux’s models the support and safety she longed for from agencies she worked with throughout her storied career. As creative director, she supports talent from a variety of backgrounds, ranging from age and body type to culture and gender.

Read more online at SUCCESS.com

I f you have a business or big career ambitions, you’ll likely desire a coach or mentor at some point throughout the journey. These individuals help you navigate setbacks, challenges, opportunities and even successes. They also become instrumental when that next level of success requires additional support.

However, not all coaches are the same. You want someone who’s qualified, but you also need a coach who will be the right mentor for your individual needs. Hiring a coach is an investment and a commitment, which means that due diligence is paramount. Jon Cheplak, coach, consultant and CEO of The Real Recruiter, offers insights to navigate this process. He explains that research, asking questions and self-assessment are key.

“[A good coach is] not constantly trying to validate themselves by overwhelming their client with information,” he says. They will empower their client to be in the driver’s seat and act as a guide who ideally operates from a place of contribution and empathy. “[A good coach] really holds the line on principle and doesn’t let personality blur the lines,” he says. They hold their clients accountable versus “just being a rah-rah cheerleader.”

In addition to wisdom and guidance, mentors bring objectivity. “The toughest thing on the planet to do is to be a third-party observer of self. I don’t mean to look down, to judge, but to observe the field of play,” Cheplak says. He explains that a good coach offers a different perspective and firsthand insights from having been where you are trying to go. “The ultimate shortcut and ultimate fast path to growth is avoiding the mistakes you don’t have to make,” he says, emphasizing that a good mentor already possesses the knowledge, lessons and proof of concept. These are invaluable on one’s path toward success.

Do you need a specific strategy and tactic? Then maybe you need someone who’s operational-focused. Or do you need someone who can support you with a bigger vision? Ask yourself, “Which of those do I need the most?” One might think they need business support, but, really, they need personal development. For example, they might need to address the root causes of any reluctance or accountability struggles.

Still, Cheplak says the most important thing is to find someone who genuinely believes in you, perhaps even more than you believe in yourself. “In business coaching, there’s the business side of it; there’s the personal side of it,” Cheplak says. “But many, many people come to a business coach for that human element more than anything.”

It’s also important to be on the lookout for red flags, such as inconsistent messaging. “What that tells me is that the coach is just looking for money,” he says. “They’re just trying to find where the money market is.” Essentially, a mentor should show consistency in their content and offer expertise versus jumping into the next trending niche. Similarly, Cheplak says transparency is critical, not just in the coaching relationship but during the exploration and discovery process.

“Everything going on privately shows up publicly,” he says. Look at their habits, family situation, path to health and wellness, ongoing personal development and whether or not they have a coach. Cheplak also says to look for credibility. This includes observing how public a coach is about their clientele, whether past clients talk about their work together or even talking to current or past clients. All of this helps demonstrate a coach’s value. It’s critical to avoid coaches who cannot and do not admit their flaws. Another red flag is a coach who claims, or appears, to have all the answers, Cheplak says, “because they don’t.”

T ake your vision of the future, multiply it a few light-years and you have a glimpse into the possibilities in Ariel Ekblaw’s mind and career. She’s the founding director of the MIT Space Exploration Initiative and co-founder and CEO of Aurelia Institute, a nonprofit education and research center and space architecture research and development lab. Ekblaw, Ph.D., works on multiple projects aimed at expanding humanity’s ability to thrive in space.

And this isn’t part of some far-off, futuristic vision. Some of her concepts are already underway, and others will benefit humanity in the next few years. Think: floating apartments and remote work environments circling our planet; diverse, microbiome-improving food options that are far from the “space food” in the movies; artificial retinas that cure blindness on Earth; and AstroAnt robots that function like tiny cars to diagnose and repair spacecraft.

Her team isn’t looking to leave Earth to visit other planets; they are looking to expand into the closest layer of space.

“Earth is the best home humanity will ever have. It’s the only place where our biology co-evolved with the planet, so we are always going to be better suited here,” Ekblaw says.

Here are a few innovations she’s working on.

Patients can’t just get a new retina. But in orbit, where gravity restrictions don’t apply, artificial retina scientists apply over 200 layers of a matrix to make an artificial retina. “What’s special about this is that it needs microgravity to happen—it can’t be done on Earth. The reason it can’t be done on Earth is because of sedimentation,” Ekblaw says, referencing a drink, where “stuff sinks down to the bottom.” Those particles would lead to lots of errors in the matrix, with those errors “amplified by every layer.”

“Microgravity gives you this beautiful floating environment, kind of like the womb, where eyes are originally grown,” Ekblaw says. “And it’s the perfect environment.” Those space-built retinas would be a welcome alternative to prosthetics that people have to wear over their eyes currently, Ekblaw says.

Wagner expects the project to be in clinical trials in three to four years. “There is a huge unmet need to help patients blinded by these diseases, and our goal is to [get] the artificial retina into patients in need as soon as possible,” Wagner adds.

“Right now, on the International Space Station, if there’s a micrometeorite impact, and it punctures the space habitat, you have to repair it…. It’s actually very hard to repair,” Ekblaw says. “But the idea with a reconfigurable habitat is that there’s all these different parts. If there’s damage to one, you just pop it off and replace it.”

Even more fun, you can swap out your window that previously had a view of Earth for a docking port where your friends might show up for a party at your building, she says. “It’s meant to be architecture in space that would finally scale access.”

Ekblaw estimates that, perhaps in the next decade, scientists and researchers might head to space, too, instead of just astronauts. Then, tourists might come later, in the 2040s.

Ekblaw’s team is planning its first test in 10 years. And if you ask Ekblaw how expensive a ticket to your remote workplace hangout in space might be, she compares it to probably “slightly fancy commercial aviation.”

Designers Sands Fish, Nicole L’Huillier and Thomas Sanchez Lengeling have already played this instrument on a “Zero-G flight,” at the top of which you get around 20 seconds of microgravity. “[Then] they turned that one Telemetron into a zero gravity orchestra—they had a series of other types of instruments that have been designed for the same environment,” she says. “Quirky, wacky, beautiful design.”

She wants to ensure that nonscientists can expand into space. “We need welders. We need plumbers. We need all kinds of tradespeople, so it will be a combination of traditional blue-collar work and white-collar opportunities,” Ekblaw says.

She’s a part of two flights per year, one with Aurelia and one with MIT, with an eye on equity. “We try to do it explicitly with communities that are not as often welcomed into aerospace,” she says, whether it’s due to their industry, like artists and musicians, or because they are from marginalized communities with less access to STEM education, she adds.

So, the next time you are shopping for apartments or your next best remote office, remember that one with a window facing planet Earth from space, no matter your industry, might not be far off.

B uilding your ambition is building your enterprising skills: To consistently create new opportunity, to consistently take advantage of the opportunity you’ve created, to be aware, to face life with your eyes and ears open to the possibilities that might be just around the corner. Self-enterprising people always see the future in the present. Selfenterprising people will always find a way to take advantage of a situation—not be burdened by it. Enterprise is always better than ease. Every time we choose to do less than we possibly can, it affects our self-confidence, our self-worth. If we keep doing a little less every day, we are also being a little less. If we don’t feel good about ourselves, we won’t feel good about our lives. And if we don’t feel good about our lives, we won’t be very interested in looking for opportunities.

You can reverse this process by using your self-direction, self-reliance and self-discipline. You alter your course by doing a little more each day. And pretty soon, you’ll develop a new habit of doing rather than neglecting.

Success isn’t in the having. Success is in the doing. It’s the process of doing that brings value. It’s the activity that transforms our dreams into reality, that converts ideas into actuality. Self-enterprise is found in the activity. For without activity, we’ll miss the opportunity.

Some people out there would have us believe that positive affirmation is more important than activity. Instead of doing something constructive to change our lives, they would have us repeating slogans, such as, “Every day and in every way, I’m getting better and better.”

Well, getting better doesn’t just happen from wishful thinking. Getting better only happens with the discipline of doing better. Discipline is the requirement for progress. And affirmations without discipline are—in all reality—delusions.

Now, don’t get me wrong here. There’s nothing wrong with affirming the good life, as long as we are disciplined enough to take action. Affirmations can be effective as long as we remember two very important rules:

1. We should never allow affirmation to replace action, activity or enterprise. Feeling better is no substitute for doing better.

2. Whatever we choose to affirm must be the truth. If the truth happens to be that we’re broke, simply say, “I’m broke.” By admitting you’re broke out loud, you’ll probably be disgusted enough to start the thinking process for how to change it.

* * *

Pick a problem out of your head and pull out a piece of paper. And then draw a line down the middle. On the left-hand side, jot down the problem. On the other side, you put the solutions. And I have three questions you must ask yourself to find the solutions:

• What can I do?

If you allow yourself to think without confinement, you might come up with a solution that seems totally inappropriate. But it also allows you to open up the process, which will eventually lead to appropriate solutions.

That’s right: Doodle. The thing you got in trouble for in middle school is actually quite stimulating to the brain. Because the way you think while doodling is quite different from the way you think while creating a flow chart or writing a formula.

Your doodles might end up looking like some symbol that will trigger your brain to think of an alternative solution. Doodling wakes up a different part of your brain. Try creating your flow chart to success. It doesn’t matter if it ends up being accurate or not. What matters is that it’s stimulating the creative thought process.

Once you awaken that creative part of you, you’ll be amazed at the opportunities that were always there, ones you never saw before. It’s all a matter of how you look at life and opportunities.

You need to start networking with people whom you’d otherwise never meet.

Feed your mind. Sharpen your interest in two major subjects: life and people. Learn how you can better interact with others. Learn more on how to get the most from life. Learn all that you can so you can become all that you can become.

Learning is the beginning of a life worth living.

Keep learning!

L ong before the rise of social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok, Coltrane Curtis and Lisa Chu were leveraging the power of influencers for global brands. But, to these early pioneers, influence has nothing to do with follower count or other benchmarks. Instead, it’s about the people and communities that drive culture forward—both online and in real life.

Curtis and Chu are the founders and co-managing partners of Team Epiphany, an award-winning marketing and creative agency with offices in New York, Miami and Los Angeles, that was acquired by Stagwell earlier this year. Over the last two decades, the husband-and-wife duo’s family business has worked with some of the biggest brands on the planet, including Nike, Coca-Cola, HBO, American Express, Netflix and Google. Team Epiphany specializes in experiential campaigns, live events, brand strategy, multicultural marketing, storytelling and public relations.

Because of their unique approach to influencer marketing—which is rooted in relationships and collaboration—the agency has grown from just a handful of employees to nearly 100. “We believe that influence is about trust and not about a paid metric,” says Curtis, who is 48. “The depth of our work, the cultural meaning of our work, is clearly a step ahead of where any agency is vibrating or working because of the fact that we are so trusted and connected to communities.”

“When you really think about how celebrities come to fruition, they’re generally engineered by a team, a community of people who are actually influential,” Curtis says. “This was really about the people who can move culture, the people who can predict culture and, more importantly, the people who can use that vision to then impact the careers of celebrities as we know them, whether they’re actors or musicians. Ultimately, what we saw is, we can leverage that network and empower that network to work for brands…. We use the same network that builds celebrities to build brands.”

That early vision continues to guide the company today. Curtis and Chu also credit the agency’s success to its employees, many of whom have been with Team Epiphany for more than 10 years. Team Epiphany staffers live and breathe culture—from fashion and music to sports and technology, and everything in between. The firm is also highly diverse—Team Epiphany is more than 70% minority and more than 70% women. Together, these facets help the company stay ahead of and drive trends, as well as connect deeply with the communities that brands are trying to reach. “[Employees] can start here, they can grow here and they can envision what their lives look like,” Curtis says. “We’re only as good as the folk that we have. And if your agency is a revolving door of talent, how can you possibly create greatness with a revolving cast of characters?”

That philosophy shines through in their work. For example, Team Epiphany worked with American Express to develop its “100 for 100” program, which gave $25,000 to 100 small businesses run by Black women. They also helped American Express execute its ByBlack Bazaar, a shoppable holiday pop-up experience highlighting Black-owned small businesses. And they worked with the brand to launch Built to Last, a podcast spotlighting Black entrepreneurs across the country. “We imbue a sense of positivity, a sense of belonging, a sense of responsibility when it comes to marketing to communities of color and, more importantly, communities of influence,” Curtis says. “These communities unlock the insights and, I would say, light the pathway to progressive marketing and responsible marketing.”

Team Epiphany also has a long-standing relationship with HBO. The firm has worked on more than 80 titles and helped launch HBO’s “Scene in Black” platform, which promotes storytelling from the Black perspective. Their work with HBO also fostered a relationship with actress and producer Issa Rae and, last September, Team Epiphany entered into a strategic partnership with Fête, the marketing arm of Rae’s company, HOORAE Media. “We saw alignment in our overall missions, which includes being true to who we are, caring about the culture and caring about people of color and elevating them and bringing them through,” says Chu, who is 46. “It became a really seamless partnership.”

On a more personal note, Curtis and Chu love that Team Epiphany allows them to work together daily—and that it gives them flexibility to put their young family first. They hope their work at Team Epiphany sets an example for their two sons, 12-year-old Ellington and 5-year-old Count, just like their parents did for them. “[We both] come from entrepreneurial households and…, in the future, our kids are going to grow up through this organization,” Curtis says. “They’re going to learn things and they’re going to benefit from the fact that they can see their parents work together, and hopefully, one day they will love agency life the way we did. And if not, they can go on and do what their callings are. The difference is, they’re going to understand the principles of entrepreneurship and how hard you have to work. We’re the next conduit in finishing our parents’ vision.”

G rowing up in the Maryland countryside, Sandy Colhoun was always drawn to the wilderness, more interested in exploring nearby valleys and forests than he was in pursuing organized sports that captivated many of his peers.

But it wasn’t until his teenage years that he would have the experience that really cemented his love of the great outdoors. That’s when he participated in one of the signature courses offered by NOLS, the National Outdoor Leadership School.

Colhoun completed the “Wind River Wilderness” mountaineering course in Wyoming, a 30-day backpacking trek that pushed him to his limits. “To be completely candid, it was really hard for me,” he says. He’d never had to navigate a nature course in such a way; he lost a lot of weight and had to push himself to get through. “But I learned all of these foundational skills—how to live and travel in remote, austere environments and to take others to do that.”

“It informed the rest of my life,” adds Colhoun, now in his 50s. That challenging early experience recently came full circle when he became the president of NOLS.

Founded in 1965 by mountaineer Paul Petzoldt, NOLS is a nonprofit outdoor education school that teaches leadership and technical outdoor skills at nine U.S. and four international campuses, with courses including topics like wilderness medicine, executive leadership and more. All NOLS courses, from “Alaska Backpacking” to “Yellowstone Wilderness,” are designed around learning by experience, with a goal of returning students to their day-to-day lives with a new arsenal of leadership tools and an increased self-awareness about their own leadership style.

“They can take that back with them and apply it universally to the businesses that they run, the schools that they attend, and the communities where they live,” Colhoun explains.

It’s been a long and winding road—not unlike the Rocky Mountain trails and canoeing routes that are foundational to so many of NOLS’s courses—that brought Colhoun back to the outdoor school at this point in his career. As a journalist, his work took him to some of the more far-flung reaches of the globe, including Antarctica, where he spent about a year as the editor of The Antarctic Sun, a newsletter produced by the United States Antarctic Program. Next came a long stint in advancement fundraising for higher education institutions, which he says taught him how to be “an institutionalist,” as well as how large organizations operate and are managed.

This latest chapter finds him back at NOLS, where he joined as a trustee about three years ago before becoming the nonprofit’s interim president and then its permanent president.

The role lets Colhoun use the skills he honed across his decades in journalism and higher ed. “The writing is a giant part of my job; fundraising is a really important part of my job; my love of the outdoors and wilderness across my entire career is a part of my job,” Colhoun explains, adding that NOLS’s leadership-focused mission also aligns with his interests.

NOLS provides field-based leadership skills to students at the United States Naval Academy and has trained NASA astronauts since the late ’90s, but its applications work for leaders of all kinds, not just astronauts and midshipmen.

“When you arrive at the International Space Station, it’s so disorienting with all the different things that you need to be able to do,” Colhoun explains. “In the same way, for a lot of our students, when you go into the field with a backpack full of gear, it’s disorienting. You may have never set up a tent, cooked on a cook stove—gone to the bathroom outside!”

Anyone can benefit, including those who lead in their business, in their family, in their church, in politics. With a catalog of hundreds of expedition courses, including programs specifically designed for young people and others for emerging business leaders, the curriculum is designed not only to develop each individual’s skills as a leader but to give attendees an opportunity to see how others lead.

For example, is your tentmate the person who gets up early and boils water so everyone can have coffee or tea before setting off for the day? Are they the one who’s quick with a joke to lift the cohort’s spirits during a particularly grueling trek?

“All of these pieces happen on a NOLS expedition. It’s not like we’re going to a classroom; we’re living together,” Colhoun says. Everyone gets a chance to learn by leading; everyone also gets a chance to learn by following others.

As the president of NOLS, Colhoun has his own ideas about what makes for an effective leader, wisdom he’s gleaned over the course of his varied, decades-long career. For one, “I believe that leaders need to be responsive to their people,” he says. “We need to understand what motivates them and how to empower them, to give them the opportunity to really own their own ideas.” He’s a big believer in both transparency and open communication, “because I want to hear bad news way, way sooner than later. I also want to hear good news!” he explains. “And I want people to tell me if there’s a better way to do something. We don’t need to be stuck in our ways, and we need to be innovative.”

But perhaps his strongest belief is that leaders need to be open to taking risks—and even to fail. (“If you haven’t failed, you’re not leading,” he quips.) At its core, NOLS is all about risk management; they’re sending students into remote and rigorous environments where challenges are real and consequences can be serious.

There are wilderness instructors there to guide you, sure, but when it comes to managing hard and unexpected circumstances—a rainstorm, a snowstorm, getting lost—it’s the students who have to work through those problem sets. And that’s where the magic happens, where the leadership capabilities are honed.

“At the end of the day, I believe that in wild, untamed and natural places, we find our best self,” Colhoun says.