Welcome to On Purpose 

Hi! Are you reading this while faking rapt attention during a zoom meeting? Nice — don't forget to smile and nod a few times so everyone thinks you’re super passionate about quarterly planning.

If you’re anything like me, you’ve got a nagging feeling that all of this work stuff is just a high-stakes LARP and you’re ready to get back to reality. A reality where you can like what you do without it becoming who you are. 

Same, friend. Same.

That’s why I started this project. I want to use my 20 years of experience as a researcher and storyteller to transform how you feel about success, help you connect with what you really want, and find the courage to live the life you long for, to hell with anyone who disagrees.

Why Join?

As free member, you’ll get:

• ✨ Engaging, funny, insightful essays that braid together personal stories, scientific research1 and insights from the On Purpose Research Project2 to de-claw the cultural beliefs that hold us back from being ourselves. 

• 😅 The assurance that you’re not crazy (or alone) delivered to your inbox once a month

As a paid member, you’ll get: 

• ✨ Monthly Essays (see above 🙃)

• 📚 Human Resources: No, not that kind — more like being in the group chat. Once a month, I’ll send a recommendation with something relevant to read, an artist to discover, music to listen to and of course, TikToks to watch.

• 🧘🏿 Purposeful Practices: A few light, playful experiments to strengthen your connection to yourself and what you really want out of life.

• ✌🏽 Quarterly Salons: An old-fashioned (but very much online) conversation about the Big Questions. I’ll share a thoughtful prompt for reflection and then we’ll break into small groups to discuss. 

• 👯‍♀️ A like-minded community: Join a group of people hell-bent on filling their days with more connection, fun, and inspiration who will support your choice to become a professional fortune-cookie writer if that’s where your heart is.

(as always, if you can’t pay but want to join us, please reach out and I can gift you a membership)

Why I write Stories, not How-To Guides

1. It’s way more fun.

It’s more fun for you, and it’s a lot more fun for me. I know I know — but contrary to popular belief, enjoying yourself isn’t the same thing as wasting time.

We’re way more driven by our desire than we like to admit, so I figure why fight it. I want you to feel excited when you see me in your inbox. Life is too short to go around assigning grown people homework. 

2. Our stories shape our reality

Throughout my career, I have spent thousands of hours talking to people about how they live, what they think and how they fit themselves into the world. In every project, with every person, there is one thing that is always true: we each live in a story of our own making.

No judgement, it’s just how our brains work. We knit together stories from our childhood, our life experiences and our culture to build a world that feels so real it's easy to confuse it with the truth. Breaking free of these stories is incredibly hard, and the only way I've seen it succeed is when we work together to start picking at the cracks.

I am absolutely not saying that systematic exploitation is in our heads. It is very real, and there are a lot of people very invested in keeping things the way they are. A lot of things are actually awful — I’m just ready to stop telling myself that there’s no way out.

I need new stories — new definitions for what success looks like and what it means to have enough. I need new frameworks and tactics for how to work — how hard should I try when our culture defines “good” as “more”? Even more difficult, how should I deal with the fact that what I’m paid to make is never really mine?

I need stories about the things I’ve left behind in the pursuit of professional success. Radical stories that celebrate our real work — the relationships we cultivate when we care for ourselves and for each other.

That’s what I hope On Purpose will bring. 

About Me

I am not an answer-haver. I am a question-asker.

It's what I'm best at, and I've used my gift for asking good questions (and more importantly, listening without knowing the answer) to help companies build products people actually want from brands that aren’t tone deaf. 

My research has covered a lot of ground — it’s been published as a medical paper to help doctors understand patients with chronic pain, patented as investment algorithms that align with how women think about money, and shaped publishing as the underpinning of the Vogue.com user experience.

Now I get to use it to get us out of this hole we’ve dug ourselves into.

My Story

I’ve been a Head of, a C-Suite, recognized by industry publications and even appeared on the cover of a magazine. I have also been laid off and fired twice. I’ve worked for some of the most renowned brands and people in the industry and some of the least and none of it ever filled me up.

At some point, the stress of always looking for that next milestone that would finally fix me almost caused me to crash my car into a median. I had just become a mom, and when I looked in the rearview mirror I could see Oscar’s car seat and I got a sour feeling in the pit of my stomach. If I didn’t get it together, I would be causing harm to more than just myself.

It’s been 3 years since that moment, and after a lot of therapy and a lot of research I’m determined to bring as many people with me as I can.