Make things change: 9 moods for 2019
These nine lessons from women entrepreneurs, authors, and activists will get you hyped for 2019—and keep you feeling steady, no matter what the year throws at you.
Two years ago, I was finishing the first draft of my first mainstream book. I was terrified: Would anyone read it? Would it get me doxxed? Would people realize I was a fake, a know-nothing, an imposter who somehow scammed her way into a book contract?
One year ago, I was sitting with Katel and Jenn recording the first episode of our podcast. I was terrified of that, too: Would anyone listen? Would anyone care? Would we get 10,000 emails complaining about upspeak or vocal fry?
This year, I’m working with Katel on building a new business. I have no idea how it’s going to turn out. But I’m choosing not to be terrified today. Because as I interviewed amazing person after amazing person for our podcast last year — activists, authors, entrepreneurs, designers, political candidates — I realized something: The people making art and creating communities and building interesting, non-soul-crushing businesses? They’ve looked their fears in the face and said nah. They’re not waiting for permission to build the world they want. They’re doing it now.
I can do that, too — and I have to remind myself that really, I already have. I wrote the book! I launched the podcast! I did tons of stuff that used to scare the shit out of me.
But self-doubt is a motherfucker. Every new opportunity that comes around triggers the same old feelings, evidence be damned. That’s probably normal, but I don’t want to wallow in that space—I have way too much I want to do. So I went back to some of those amazing people I learned from last year, and thought about what they’d said. And I found plenty I wanted to remember as I start this new year.
Here’s the energy I’m bringing with me into 2019. I bet it’ll help you, too.
1. Stop waiting for things to change. Make them change.
When you have a truly world-changing startup, you have to change the world to fit it, not the other way around… if reality tells me that I cannot grow Make Love Not Porn the way I want to, then I am going to change reality.
— Cindy Gallop, founder of Make Love Not Porn
► Listen to Season 3, Episode 8
When we asked entrepreneur Cindy Gallop whether she thought the world was waking up to the idea that there’s a market for sex tech, she turned our question on its head: “I don’t wait for things to change. I make them change,” she told us. “So you bet they’re going to change, because I’m going to make those companies change their minds, and I’m going to make them be positively gagging to partner with me one day.” In Cindy’s world, there’s simply no time to be passive — whether she’s trying to get funding for a startup that makes the white-guy investor crowd nervous or fighting against ageism in business.
Change is hard, of course — and not every change I want to see will happen on my timetable. But Cindy reminds me that the work is worth it, and the alternative is far worse: feeling helpless. So for 2019, I’m going to pause every time I feel like change is too hard, like progress is too hopeless. And I’m going to ask myself: what’s the work that needs to be done, and where am I going to start?
2. Your voice matters. Find people who value it.
Sometime around late spring in 2017, I had a bilateral pulmonary embolism, the same thing that Serena Williams had… I realized that I really needed to stop wasting my time in spaces where my voice wasn’t being elevated and it wasn’t being heard… So, I just made a hard pivot.
— Jenn Taylor-Skinner, host of The Electorette
► Listen to Season 3, Episode 12
Jenn Taylor-Skinner had a tech career before starting The Electorette, her feminist political podcast. But when a health scare put her in the hospital, she realized she was done with male-dominated teams where “women’s voices and their opinions aren’t heard.” So she decided to make her dream happen: to build “a space where women could speak without being interrupted.” She resigned from her job as soon as she got out of the hospital, and she hasn’t looked back.
It doesn’t take a medical emergency for this to be true: none of us gains a thing by sticking around in places that don’t value our time or our voices. And so for 2019, I am going to keep investing in professional relationships with people who take me seriously from the jump — and spend as little time possible worrying about the rest.
3. Make things for underserved audiences.
I started thinking of all the movies I had ever watched and everything that was available to me and I was like, “where are my friendships? Where are the women I admire?” And they were nowhere to be found. And so that summer we started toying with the idea of making a movie that would represent female friendships the way that we understood them. And I didn’t know that this was a radical idea.
— Emily Best, founder of Seed & Spark
► Listen to Season 3, Episode 13
When Emily Best made her first film — Like the Water, a drama about women’s friendships — she realized how Hollywood’s system of endless middlemen made it almost impossible for women’s stories to be told. “None of the middlemen actually know how to reach women, and so they assume they’re not a valuable audience,” she told us.
We can see the same thing in tech, media, and most everywhere else: a system where old white guys with power and pursestrings decide which audiences are worth serving and which stories are worth telling. The results are boring as hell. So in 2019 I want to keep bucking that system by making more things for people who aren’t being served.
4. Let your ideas evolve — even the ones you love the most.
You at some point have to decide whether you are more attached to running a successful business or more attached to realizing the vision that you had for your business… At some point I decided that I wanted the business to survive and I was going to figure out what it would take for it to survive and do that.
— Adda Birnir, founder of Skillcrush
► Listen to Season 2, Episode 3
I love how Adda Birnir doesn’t gloss over all the messy parts of building Skillcrush, the “online coding school with a heart.” At one point, she recalls, “we were like, ‘Oh $5,000, that’s awesome. Next month it’ll be $10,000, and then $15,000!’ And instead it was like $5,000, then it was like $4,000, then it was like $3,000, and then we were like, ‘Oh no! This is a disaster.’” But what Adda learned was that the only way past those fits and starts was to let go of her initial idea of the business, and let it evolve.
It’s always hard to accept that an idea you’ve invested in isn’t working — like when you’re deep in a writing project and have to rip up your draft and rework. It feels counterproductive, like you’re taking backwards steps. But if I know anything from my time as an author, it’s that the end product is always much better if you stop trying to force something that’s not working, even if that something sounded perfect in your head. Kill your darlings, as they say. I want to remember that in business, too.
5. Be clear about your values. And then stick to them.
I wanted it to be very clear the type of behavior that’s expected. Like very, very clear. There’s no question of who we are, what we’re about, and what we will put up with… If you’re like, “Everyone’s amazing all the time!!!,” that can be annoying for assholes. So I think what I found is that by being aggressively positive and kind of over the top with displaying these values and these qualities, we’ve given people an opportunity to self-select.
— Saron Yitbarek, founder of CodeNewbie
► Listen to Season 2, Episode 8
CodeNewbie is a community with three simple rules: be helpful, be supportive, and be nice. Those might seem like things you could take for granted, but in an industry where programmers are often condescending and online harassment is widespread, they’re actually what set the organization apart. What founder Saron Yitbarek realized is that it wasn’t enough to just state those values. She also needed to actively model them for others. And it’s worked: “If you are mean, you don’t believe these things, I think you just don’t want to sit with us,” she told us.
Being nice isn’t my top goal, but being inclusive — and challenging my assumptions about what inclusivity even means — is. And so this year I’ll be focused on making sure I live that value, even when it’s hard. That means not getting defensive when I get called out, talking about topics that make me feel out uncomfortable, and continuing to unlearn all the white supremacy, ableism, sexism, and more I’ve internalized.
6. Ask for help. It’s ok not to know.
I constantly struggle with imposter syndrome and feeling like I’m not doing my job well, but I think that that sort of insecurity is definitely what keeps me working really hard… the reason we have been successful thus far is because I’ve sort of adopted this mentality of being completely unafraid to ask for help, Google questions, and admit when I really don’t know what I’m doing.
— Nadya Okamoto, executive director of PERIOD
► Listen to Season 3, Episode 5
Nadya Okamoto co-founded PERIOD, a nonprofit that advocates for menstrual care as a basic right, when she was in high school. I mean, damn. But having a great idea doesn’t mean you’ll magically know what to do when that idea starts to grow. For Nadya, that’s meant figuring out how to tackle new challenges like fundraising — something she had no idea how to do. So she did something I’ve always found hard: she asked for help.
I sure as hell didn’t know what I was doing when we started this podcast. Whether it was struggling to develop show themes or fixing a mic that wouldn’t stop echoing, every week brought some new challenge. And while I learned a ton figuring things out as I went, Katel and I agreed that in 2019, we want to make way more friends in podcastland — so we can waste less time muddling through stuff alone, and learn from the super-smart communities that already exist instead. I’ve already joined the Lady Pod Squad, a group of women in podcasting, and am floored by how friendly and generous everyone there is.
7. Take a break before you burn out.
If you wait until you’re running on fumes before you do any sort of self-care… pretty much all you’re going to be able to do is sit on the couch and watch Netflix. Sitting on the couch and watching Netflix is a glorious joy… but if that’s the only thing you can do, it’s sort of not giving yourself a full range of nutrition of what it is your body needs, and your brain needs, to sort of heal and take care of itself.
— Eileen Webb, founder of webmeadow
► Listen to Season 1, Episode 2
Eileen’s a web strategist who spends as much of her time tending livestock and taking hikes as she does on conference calls or in sticky-note sessions. She’s also an old friend of mine, so I’ve had the benefit of hearing her wisdom many times. She’s always full of great reminders for taking care of yourself — really, truly taking care of yourself. She also told us how someone once asked her why she used her most productive weekday time to go hiking. “Why should my work get all of my best brain?” she replied.
Anyone who’s met me knows I’m not particularly laid-back. I like to be active, physically and mentally. Long breaks tend to leave me feeling antsy. But something I’ve had to learn (and relearn…and relearn…) is that enjoying lots of activity doesn’t mean I don’t need time off. So this year, I want to give myself more time away from Google docs and Slack notifications — more time to read, take long walks, and sit down with friends for coffee, even when my to-do list feels overwhelmingly long.
8. Remember: you don’t owe the shitheads a damn thing.
I don’t care about impressing little men. That’s not my job. I care about trying to reach the right people with the messages that I care about. I care about trying to make the web more inclusive, trying to make the web more ethical. And if people aren’t bothered about that, then I’m not bothered about them, quite honestly.
— Laura Kalbag, author, Accessibility for Everyone
► Listen to Season 3, Episode 14
I literally clapped when I heard this come out of Laura Kalbag’s mouth. Here’s what happened: a famous design guy had taken her excited tweet about writing a book, and told her that actually, she hadn’t written a book. She’d “written a text.” Yes, this is ludicrous. But the whole thing blew up, and it shook Laura’s confidence. What she realized, though, is that small-minded mansplainers aren’t her audience. The women who come talk to her after she speaks at a conference, the people sending emails thanking her for her work: that’s her audience.
I’ve gotten plenty of shitty comments about my work — it comes with the territory when you critique tech companies. But I still find it hard to keep it from ruining my day. I don’t know if I’ll ever be immune to assholery, but I still love this advice. Next time someone swings by to be a jerk, I’m going to remember who I really care about: people who’ve been marginalized, harassed, and systematically denied opportunities in this world. If the hater isn’t bothered about that, then I won’t be bothered by them.
9. Don’t wait for someone else to come along. We’re the ones.
So many of us are held back just by that feeling that like, “Hmm, maybe there’s someone else out there who is more qualified. Maybe there’s someone else who would be better at this.” And in some cases: sure, there is. In many cases, there is not. It’s us! We’re the ones.
— Elizabeth Fiedler, incoming state representative, PA 184
► Listen to Season 1, Episode 5
I first met Elizabeth Fiedler in August 2017, when she wasn’t even a candidate. She was a public radio reporter, a mom to a toddler and an infant, and a friend of a friend who happened to live down the street. But she was considering a run for state representative, and she’d invited a few people to her home to talk about issues like healthcare and school funding. Just yesterday, Lizz was sworn in for her first term in the PA Legislature. We talked with her back in February, when she was gearing up for a tough primary — and I’ll never forget what she said to us: “If you’re thinking about it, you should run.”
I don’t think I want to run for office (I’d have to swear less, for one), but I do want to do big things. And I’ve definitely talked myself out of many of them: I’m not qualified enough; I’m not credible enough; I’m not ready yet. And sure, there’s lots I’ll never be qualified to do — perform surgery, negotiate treaties, teach someone how to julienne veggies without slicing their own damn finger open. But much of the time, that’s not the case. There’s no one better waiting in the wings. So for 2019, I’m going to stop worrying whether I’m enough, and channel Lizz instead.
We’re the ones. Now that’s a note to start the year on.
Check out Strong Feelings, a weekly podcast about work, friendship, and feminism hosted by Katel LeDu and Sara Wachter-Boettcher — the best friends you didn’t know you were missing. New episodes every Thursday starting January 10.
