That’s the thought that kept swirling in my head as I browsed through the Cornell course catalog. This doesn’t work for me. I was a college freshman planning out my next four years. But there was a problem: None of the available majors appealed to me. There were a few …
Decision Making
How to (really, truly, deeply) trust yourself
To send or not to send? That was the question swirling through my mind as I sat in front of my computer as a 17-year-old high school senior in Istanbul. The cursor was blinking at the end of an email I had just typed up to a professor at Cornell, …
Take the unsafe path
After graduating first in her class from Georgetown, Brit Marling got her dream job as an investment analyst at Goldman Sachs. She had an eye-popping salary and a safe path to a safe future. She knew exactly where she’d live for the rest of her life, how much money she’d …
The myth of “shameless self-promotion”
I never got the concept of “shameless self-promotion.” The phrase presumes that self-promotion is normally shameful. And that if you’re promoting yourself—if you’re putting your ideas and your work into the world—you must be shameless. But if you don’t promote your creations, no one else will. Life isn’t Field of …