Three wishes for the new year — Three years ago, I was deeply lost. The sale of my last company did not turn out the way I expected, then my husband was diagnosed with Stage IV cancer. I started my new company, Tokki, and Covid-19 immediately flattened us. Your narrative is probably not exactly the same as…

What I learned from Oliver Burkeman’s new book “Four Thousand Weeks” — Times are hard. We’ve screwed up the climate and democracy in ways that are too complex to untangle in any satisfying amount of time. The Supreme Court is not going to protect us—in fact, it’s grabbing its guns and coming after us, too. So it’s hard to remain hopeful, but…

A question that helps me see when I’m the one making myself needlessly busy — The old marketing adage that 50% of your money is wasted, you just don’t know which half, is doubly true about time. I know this because I used to flush half my time and energy down the toilet every day in the name of stressed-out entrepreneurship. I thought this was…

In this specific increment, I find my strongest self — It’s been about eighteen months since lockdown first started. A year and a half. Not quite enough to repeat a full rotation of annual holidays but enough to settle into the rhythm of a wall calendar. I love living in eighteen-month increments. It feels like I’ve finally landed on the…

After 20 years of raising children while working full-time, here’s what I’ve got — Parenting young children while entrepreneuring took everything I had, and then some. All my energy, love, creativity, intelligence, forgiveness, and friendship. Through trial and error and error, I managed to figure out a few things along the way, usually with the benefit of both sweat and tears. So here are…

What sets some candidates head and shoulders above the rest? — Job seekers and students often ask me, “What do you look for when you are interviewing someone for a position?” Over the course of my career, I’ve interviewed thousands of applicants for hundreds of roles. My favorite way to figure out if we’re going to be right to work together…

The promise of reentry is a dangerous lie — “You thinking I’m the liar?” my mother asked me as she showed me around her childhood home in Pangyo, South Korea on a hot and sticky July afternoon. “Somehow it shrinking!” she marveled, scanning the site where she grew up with her parents, seven siblings, and the many cousins and…

Making meaning out of the hardest things — This summer, I teamed up with eight women (most of whom I’d never met before) to help give an extraordinary thirteen-year-old girl as extraordinary a death as we could muster with all our creativity, love, and alpha-female energy. I didn’t know the full extent of what I was signing up…

When six Asian women were killed in Atlanta in March, the writer Jane Park felt an ache of concern that was all too familiar — Dear Mom, I’m surprised to find that, in my middle age, I feel like I am failing you more than ever. These days, I can’t protect you enough. I remember being five and wanting with every cell in my being to make you feel safe and seen. This was my…