The Ambition Decisions with Hana Schank and Elizabeth Wallace

Do you ever feel like you’re facing impossible choices — tradeoffs between family and work, between money and passion, between pushing for a promotion and just wanting to take a damn nap? Well, our guests today have been there. And not only that, they’ve written about it.

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Those guests are Hana Schank and Elizabeth Wallace. A few years ago, they were both in their early forties and feeling stuck. So they set out to learn whether other women they knew were feeling the same — and what they could do about it.

Hana and Elizabeth interviewed forty-three women they had first met more than two decades ago, when they were members of the same sorority at Northwestern University. The results of those interviews is the new book The Ambition Decisions: What Women Know About Work, Family, and the Path to Building a Life, which came out in June.

Hana Schank and Elizabeth Wallace talking ambition decisions.

Ambition is not this entity that is contained in a box labeled “career.” …We wanted to kind of liberate the word ambition from this kind of office-boss-lady idea and let it live outside of those constraints.

We sat down with Hana and Elizabeth to talk about:

• How they started their project, and what they learned from the women they interviewed
• How ambition often changes over time, and how to embrace that change
• Stuff we often forget about when we’re on “rosé dates” — like figuring out whether your prospective partner supports your ambitions as much as their own

Links

• The Ambition Decisions from Penguin Random House
• Hana on Twitter and her website
• Elizabeth on Twitter and her website

Also in this episode

Jenn talks about her upcoming maternity leave, and why it sucks to have to “sell” your employer on taking more than three months off. We chat about:

• The FML of the FMLA (Family and Medical Leave Act)
• Using short-term disability insurance to get paid during maternity leave
• Ivanka Trump and Marco Rubio’s woefully inadequate proposed paid leave act
• What it’s like for Sara’s family taking parental leave in Germany

☞ And there’s always a full transcript.

This episode of NYG is brought to you by:

Shopify, a leading global commerce platform that’s building a diverse, intelligent, and motivated team — and they want to apply to you. Visit shopify.com/careers to see what they’re talking about.

Harvest, makers of awesome software to help you track your time, manage your projects, and get paid. Try it free, then use code NOYOUGO to get 50% off your first paid month.