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Transcript

The Woman Who Never Stopped Becoming · Just Julia

0:00
SPEAKER_01: So imagine stepping into this rural Brazilian aerobics studio.
0:06
SPEAKER_00: OK.
0:06
SPEAKER_00: I'm picturing it.
0:07
SPEAKER_01: Right.
0:07
SPEAKER_01: So the music is pumping.
0:09
SPEAKER_01: The energy is just incredibly high in the room.
0:11
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
0:12
SPEAKER_01: And the instructor who is leading this class with all this boundless,
0:15
SPEAKER_01: contagious enthusiasm, well,
0:17
SPEAKER_01: she still faintly smells of the dairy farm that she was managing at 4 o'clock
0:21
SPEAKER_01: that morning.
0:22
SPEAKER_00: Oh, wow.
0:23
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
0:23
SPEAKER_00: That is a very specific, amazing visual.
0:25
SPEAKER_01: It really is.
0:26
SPEAKER_01: And have you ever felt Oh, absolutely.
0:33
SPEAKER_00: Like you have to have it all figured out.
0:34
SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
0:35
SPEAKER_01: Well, today's deep dive is on a mission to completely dismantle that pressure.
0:40
SPEAKER_01: We are looking at a deeply moving essay titled, She Just Kept Becoming.
0:45
SPEAKER_00: I love that title.
0:46
SPEAKER_01: Right.
0:46
SPEAKER_01: It was written by Julia Callas and published on her Just Julia Substack platform.
0:51
SPEAKER_01: And this isn't your typical sterile career guide.
0:54
SPEAKER_00: No, not at all.
0:55
SPEAKER_01: It is actually a daughter's really perceptive reflection on her mother's sprawling,
1:02
SPEAKER_01: category-defying life.
1:02
SPEAKER_00: Which is such a refreshing perspective.
1:04
SPEAKER_01: Okay, let's unpack this.
1:06
SPEAKER_01: Because instead of dissecting some rigid business book,
1:11
SPEAKER_01: we are looking at this deeply personal story.
1:14
SPEAKER_01: And it's really for any of you listening,
1:16
SPEAKER_01: especially women, who might be questioning who you are becoming at 40 or 50 or 60.
1:21
SPEAKER_00: Or even beyond that,
1:23
SPEAKER_00: honestly,
1:23
SPEAKER_00: if we connect this to the bigger picture,
1:25
SPEAKER_00: we live in an era that is just obsessed with personal brands.
1:29
SPEAKER_01: Totally.
1:29
SPEAKER_01: The elevator pitch.
1:30
SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
1:31
SPEAKER_00: You're supposed to have this perfectly linear career trajectory.
1:34
SPEAKER_00: But this essay presents this radical alternative.
1:38
SPEAKER_01: Which is what?
1:39
SPEAKER_00: The idea of building a career around a life rather than shrinking your life to fit a career.
1:43
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
1:43
SPEAKER_01: I love how you phrased that.
1:45
SPEAKER_01: Let us actually look at the timeline of Julia's mother
1:48
SPEAKER_01: because it totally dismantles this pressure to pick one lane.
1:51
SPEAKER_00: It really does.
1:52
SPEAKER_01: So she starts out by graduating as a civil engineer in a small Brazilian town.
1:57
SPEAKER_00: And we have to put that into historical context, you know.
1:59
SPEAKER_01: Right.
1:59
SPEAKER_01: Because we were talking about a time when women were largely absent from that field.
2:04
SPEAKER_00: Completely absent.
2:04
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
2:05
SPEAKER_00: Which tells us something crucial about her baseline character.
2:08
SPEAKER_00: How so?
2:09
SPEAKER_00: Well,
2:09
SPEAKER_00: taking on civil engineering in that setting means she already had this framework
2:14
SPEAKER_00: for ignoring societal friction.
2:16
SPEAKER_01: Oh, like she was used to walking into rooms that weren't built for her.
2:19
SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
2:20
SPEAKER_00: She was accustomed to being the anomaly.
2:22
SPEAKER_00: And that specific muscle,
2:24
SPEAKER_00: that ability to occupy those spaces,
2:27
SPEAKER_00: it becomes the central engine for everything she does later.
2:30
SPEAKER_01: And she really flexes that muscle when her grandfather passes away.
2:34
SPEAKER_00: Right.
2:34
SPEAKER_00: The farm.
2:35
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
2:35
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
2:36
SPEAKER_01: She doesn't just like hire an estate manager.
2:38
SPEAKER_01: She personally takes over the family farm.
2:41
SPEAKER_00: Which is a massive undertaking.
2:43
SPEAKER_01: I really want to be clear about the mechanics here because this was not a ceremonial title.
2:47
SPEAKER_00: No, she was doing the heavy lifting.
2:49
SPEAKER_01: Literally.
2:49
SPEAKER_01: She was waking up at four in the morning to drive out and physically collect
2:53
SPEAKER_01: the workers before the town was even awake.
2:55
SPEAKER_01: Wow.
2:56
SPEAKER_01: Managing the coffee crops,
2:57
SPEAKER_01: dealing with the cows, overseeing milk sales, and driving everyone back.
3:01
SPEAKER_00: The logistics of that alone,
3:03
SPEAKER_00: I mean, that requires a massive degree of operational intelligence.
3:06
SPEAKER_00: You're dealing with volatile commodities, weather dependency, manual labor.
3:10
SPEAKER_00: And she's doing this while still holding on to her identity as an engineer.
3:14
SPEAKER_01: But wait, she doesn't stop there.
3:16
SPEAKER_00: Of course not.
3:17
SPEAKER_01: In the afternoons, she shifts gears entirely and runs a women's gym called Equilibrio.
3:22
SPEAKER_00: Which was underneath her grandmother's house, right?
3:24
SPEAKER_01: Yes, right in the center of town.
3:26
SPEAKER_01: And Julia notes this wasn't some highly curated boutique studio
3:30
SPEAKER_01: with expensive Pilates reformers.
3:32
SPEAKER_00: No matcha lattes at the front desk.
3:34
SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
3:36
SPEAKER_01: It was this utilitarian space for women of all ages to just come
3:41
SPEAKER_01: and move their bodies, aerobic, stretching, community building.
3:46
SPEAKER_01: And her mother was the one teaching the classes.
3:48
SPEAKER_00: Which brings us right back to that lingering smell of the farm during the aerobics class.
3:53
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, going straight from the dirt to the gym.
3:55
SPEAKER_00: There is this raw emotional intelligence in allowing those worlds to bleed
3:59
SPEAKER_00: into each other without any apology.
4:01
SPEAKER_01: Oh, absolutely.
4:02
SPEAKER_01: We are taught to treat our careers like a perfectly curated Instagram feed,
4:06
SPEAKER_01: but her life is more like a vibrant, messy mosaic.
4:09
SPEAKER_00: That's a great way to put it.
4:10
SPEAKER_00: Today, if someone held those two jobs,
4:13
SPEAKER_00: they would feel this intense cultural pressure to invent a unified theory
4:18
SPEAKER_00: for it all.
4:18
SPEAKER_01: Oh, you mean like finding a way to brand it?
4:20
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, exactly.
4:21
SPEAKER_00: They try to market an earth-grounded wellness brand
4:25
SPEAKER_00: to justify how agricultural management seamlessly connects to women's fitness.
4:29
SPEAKER_01: I see that all the time online.
4:30
SPEAKER_01: People contorting themselves to make their totally disparate hobbies look like
4:34
SPEAKER_01: a cohesive master plan for their LinkedIn bio.
4:37
SPEAKER_00: It is an exhausting performance.
4:39
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
4:39
SPEAKER_00: But Julia's mother didn't waste energy trying to justify her life to an audience.
4:44
SPEAKER_00: There's no brand strategy here.
4:46
SPEAKER_01: Just a woman doing what needs to be done.
4:47
SPEAKER_00: Right.
4:48
SPEAKER_00: She didn't need her engineering background to validate the farm or the farm to explain the gym.
4:52
SPEAKER_00: She treated her career more like crop rotation.
4:56
SPEAKER_01: Oh, crop rotation.
4:57
SPEAKER_01: Say more about that.
4:58
SPEAKER_00: Well, when you rotate crops, you don't force the corn to act like the soybeans.
5:02
SPEAKER_01: Right.
5:03
SPEAKER_00: You just recognize that planting different things at different times keeps
5:06
SPEAKER_00: the entire ecosystem, the soil alive and nutrient dense.
5:10
SPEAKER_00: She simply allowed all those distinct roles to be hers.
5:13
SPEAKER_01: Without packaging them for outside consumption,
5:16
SPEAKER_01: that analogy makes perfect sense when you look at
5:18
SPEAKER_01: where her farm management eventually led her.
5:21
SPEAKER_00: Into politics, right.
5:22
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, because she wasn't just managing soil and cows.
5:25
SPEAKER_01: She was managing rural laborers.
5:27
SPEAKER_01: And that proximity naturally pulled her into a totally different arena.
5:31
SPEAKER_01: She gets involved with the Rural Workers Union.
5:33
SPEAKER_00: Which is another space overwhelmingly populated by men.
5:37
SPEAKER_01: Very much so.
5:38
SPEAKER_01: She walked onto construction sites as a feminine woman,
5:40
SPEAKER_01: and now she is navigating union politics.
5:43
SPEAKER_00: But notice the causality here.
5:45
SPEAKER_00: She didn't just parachute into a political role out of thin air.
5:48
SPEAKER_01: Right.
5:48
SPEAKER_01: It was grounded in her daily life.
5:50
SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
5:51
SPEAKER_00: Her authority was localized.
5:52
SPEAKER_00: The laborers knew her.
5:54
SPEAKER_00: She actually had the vocabulary and the practical experience to sit at that table.
5:58
SPEAKER_01: So she works closely with the president of the union.
6:01
SPEAKER_01: And when he suddenly passes away, she steps up into the presidency.
6:05
SPEAKER_00: Taking on yet another massive responsibility.
6:07
SPEAKER_01: She becomes the first woman to lead that union in decades.
6:11
SPEAKER_01: Julia writes about this photograph hanging in the gallery of former presidents.
6:15
SPEAKER_00: Let me guess.
6:16
SPEAKER_00: A wall of older men.
6:18
SPEAKER_01: A wall of older men.
6:20
SPEAKER_01: And then her mother.
6:21
SPEAKER_00: That is such a powerful image.
6:23
SPEAKER_01: It is.
6:23
SPEAKER_01: But, you know, the tenure doesn't last forever.
6:25
SPEAKER_01: She eventually runs in an election to keep the seat and she loses.
6:29
SPEAKER_01: The men elect another man.
6:31
SPEAKER_00: And Julia handles that moment in the essay with this brilliant touch of realism.
6:36
SPEAKER_00: She just writes, of course they did.
6:38
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that line hits hard, but let me push back on this a little bit, though.
6:41
SPEAKER_00: Okay, go for it.
6:42
SPEAKER_01: We can look at this from a distance and call it inspiring that she took
6:46
SPEAKER_01: on these roles,
6:46
SPEAKER_01: but realistically, isn't it also incredibly exhausting to constantly be the anomaly?
6:53
SPEAKER_00: It has to be.
6:54
SPEAKER_01: If you are the first female president in decades,
6:57
SPEAKER_01: putting in the actual work,
6:58
SPEAKER_01: and then the old boys club essentially snaps the status quo back into place
7:02
SPEAKER_01: and hands the seat to a man,
7:05
SPEAKER_01: Does society only allow women to hold these spaces temporarily?
7:09
SPEAKER_00: That is the core friction of her story right there.
7:11
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
7:12
SPEAKER_00: And it's a vital question for any woman trying to claim space.
7:15
SPEAKER_01: Did the essay give any indication of how she survived that rejection?
7:19
SPEAKER_00: Well, what's fascinating here is how she processed it.
7:22
SPEAKER_00: The essay doesn't pretend she was an unfeeling robot.
7:25
SPEAKER_00: It absolutely must have stung.
7:27
SPEAKER_01: Right.
7:27
SPEAKER_01: She's human.
7:28
SPEAKER_00: But her survival,
7:30
SPEAKER_00: her refusal to collapse into an identity crisis,
7:33
SPEAKER_00: really comes down to how she diversified her identity.
7:35
SPEAKER_01: Because she had the farm and the gym.
7:37
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
7:38
SPEAKER_00: Because she was running a gym, managing a farm, raising a family.
7:42
SPEAKER_00: Her self-worth wasn't heavily leveraged on that single union title.
7:45
SPEAKER_01: So if one crop fails, the whole farm doesn't go bankrupt.
7:49
SPEAKER_00: In a sense, yeah.
7:50
SPEAKER_00: If she had introduced herself at dinner parties strictly as the union president,
7:54
SPEAKER_00: losing that election would have been a total destruction of the self.
7:57
SPEAKER_01: That makes so much sense.
7:59
SPEAKER_00: Her identity was never tethered to the chair she sat in.
8:02
SPEAKER_00: She just kept moving.
8:03
SPEAKER_01: Which speaks volumes to the listener about detaching our own value
8:07
SPEAKER_01: from external validation and occupational titles.
8:10
SPEAKER_00: It's a huge lesson.
8:11
SPEAKER_01: And she proves that resilience again by doing something that requires,
8:15
SPEAKER_01: frankly, a massive amount of humility.
8:17
SPEAKER_00: Returning to school.
8:18
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
8:19
SPEAKER_01: At age 41,
8:21
SPEAKER_01: while still running the farm in the gym,
8:23
SPEAKER_01: she decides she needs to go back to university for five years.
8:28
SPEAKER_01: To study agronomy.
8:29
SPEAKER_00: Just think about the mechanism behind that decision.
8:32
SPEAKER_00: She already had a civil engineering degree.
8:33
SPEAKER_01: Right.
8:33
SPEAKER_01: She was already educated.
8:35
SPEAKER_00: But the farm presented specific agricultural challenges.
8:38
SPEAKER_00: She didn't just rely on her past credentials or assume she knew enough.
8:42
SPEAKER_00: She saw a gap in her knowledge about the very soils she was managing,
8:46
SPEAKER_00: and she took the steps to fill it.
8:47
SPEAKER_01: But returning to a university classroom at 41,
8:50
SPEAKER_01: Julia admits she almost forgot how extraordinary that was until she started writing
8:55
SPEAKER_01: the piece.
8:56
SPEAKER_00: It is extraordinary.
8:57
SPEAKER_01: To be in the middle of a life packed to the brim with adult responsibilities and
9:01
SPEAKER_01: to willingly strip away the armor of being the boss just to become
9:05
SPEAKER_01: a vulnerable student again.
9:06
SPEAKER_00: Well, society heavily pushes this narrative that your 40s are supposed to be
9:10
SPEAKER_00: the curanding phase.
9:11
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the learning phase is supposed to be over.
9:14
SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
9:15
SPEAKER_00: You are expected to be the undisputed expert in the room by then.
9:18
SPEAKER_00: So to willingly sit at a desk as a beginner,
9:21
SPEAKER_00: taking exams alongside people half your age,
9:24
SPEAKER_00: that is a radical rejection of the timeline we are all sold.
9:27
SPEAKER_01: Completely.
9:28
SPEAKER_01: And she needed every ounce of that adaptability
9:30
SPEAKER_01: because life eventually forced another massive pivot.
9:33
SPEAKER_00: Oh, the gym closing?
9:35
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
9:35
SPEAKER_01: Here's where it gets really interesting.
9:38
SPEAKER_01: Fast forward a few decades.
9:40
SPEAKER_01: She has been running the Equilibrio gym for 32 years.
9:44
SPEAKER_01: That
9:45
SPEAKER_00: is a legacy.
9:46
SPEAKER_01: It is.
9:47
SPEAKER_01: But then COVID hits.
9:48
SPEAKER_01: The rules of public gathering change overnight.
9:51
SPEAKER_01: That physical space underneath her grandmother's house can't safely accommodate people anymore.
9:55
SPEAKER_00: Which is a moment that would break so many people.
9:57
SPEAKER_01: Most people view a 32-year business closing as a tragic finale.
10:02
SPEAKER_01: But she treated it like an operating system update.
10:04
SPEAKER_00: An operating system update.
10:06
SPEAKER_00: I love that.
10:06
SPEAKER_01: She didn't decide that just because the room was gone, her identity as an instructor was gone.
10:11
SPEAKER_01: At nearly 70 years old,
10:13
SPEAKER_01: she opened her laptop, learned Google Meet, and pivoted to teaching online.
10:17
SPEAKER_00: And she's still doing it, right?
10:18
SPEAKER_01: Five years later, yes.
10:19
SPEAKER_00: The adaptation there is remarkable.
10:22
SPEAKER_00: But the resulting shift in her lifestyle is even more profound, I think.
10:26
SPEAKER_01: Because she gained all that freedom.
10:28
SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
10:29
SPEAKER_00: By severing the business from a physical location,
10:32
SPEAKER_00: she inadvertently harvested a completely new crop.
10:35
SPEAKER_01: Total autonomy.
10:36
SPEAKER_01: Julia describes how her mother now arranges her classes around her actual life.
10:41
SPEAKER_01: She travels, she visits Julia.
10:43
SPEAKER_01: On Fridays,
10:44
SPEAKER_01: she teaches her morning classes and then spends the entire afternoon having drinks
10:48
SPEAKER_01: with her friends.
10:49
SPEAKER_00: Which is so deserved.
10:50
SPEAKER_01: Right.
10:51
SPEAKER_01: After decades of four in the morning wake-ups for the farm,
10:54
SPEAKER_01: she claims this beautiful, ordinary freedom.
10:57
SPEAKER_00: We also have to talk about the physical and emotional payoff of this long game she plays.
11:01
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, tell me about that.
11:03
SPEAKER_00: Well, Julia is very careful not to romanticize a lack of wealth in the essay.
11:07
SPEAKER_00: Financial independence matters,
11:09
SPEAKER_00: and her mother's career did not make her rich in the traditional monetary sense.
11:13
SPEAKER_01: Right, she wasn't a billionaire CEO.
11:15
SPEAKER_00: But the work compounded in a different currency.
11:19
SPEAKER_00: As she approaches 70, her mother possesses a body that is immensely capable.
11:24
SPEAKER_01: Oh, wow, yes.
11:25
SPEAKER_00: She spent decades teaching other women how to maintain their strength and mobility,
11:29
SPEAKER_00: and that physical practice took care of her in return.
11:31
SPEAKER_01: Vitality as a currency.
11:33
SPEAKER_01: I think a lot of people chasing massive corporate payouts at the expense
11:37
SPEAKER_01: of their health might pause at that.
11:39
SPEAKER_00: It forces a reevaluation of what a career is actually supposed to yield.
11:45
SPEAKER_00: The emotional payoff is what Julia identifies as her greatest inheritance,
11:49
SPEAKER_00: which she calls the permission to reinvent.
11:52
SPEAKER_01: Permission to reinvent.
11:53
SPEAKER_01: That phrase brings us to the emotional core of this whole deep dive.
11:57
SPEAKER_00: Because Julia pivots the essay to her own present reality.
12:00
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
12:01
SPEAKER_01: And she gets remarkably vulnerable.
12:03
SPEAKER_01: She confesses that she is currently agonizing over finding, quote, the thing.
12:08
SPEAKER_00: Ah, the modern plague of the singular purpose.
12:10
SPEAKER_01: She is obsessed with finding her definitive expertise, her core company.
12:15
SPEAKER_01: She is desperately searching for that one flawless sentence
12:18
SPEAKER_01: that will explain exactly what she does to the world.
12:20
SPEAKER_00: Which is so relatable.
12:21
SPEAKER_01: It really is.
12:22
SPEAKER_01: She feels torn between choosing business or wellness, pure ambition or deeper meaning.
12:27
SPEAKER_00: She is wrestling with the exact friction her mother just ignored.
12:31
SPEAKER_00: Her mother never found the thing because she allowed her life to contain many things.
12:35
SPEAKER_01: And her mother's approach to business was the polar opposite of modern networking.
12:40
SPEAKER_01: Julia tells this great story about her mother's marketing strategy for the gym.
12:45
SPEAKER_00: Oh, this part is amazing.
12:46
SPEAKER_01: It consisted entirely of stopping strangers on the street.
12:50
SPEAKER_01: They'd be walking through town and her mother would strike up a conversation
12:53
SPEAKER_01: with someone laughing, acting like they'd known each other for years.
12:56
SPEAKER_00: And Julia would be confused.
12:58
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
12:58
SPEAKER_01: Julia would ask, Mom, who was that?
13:01
SPEAKER_01: And her mom would laugh and say, I have no idea.
13:04
SPEAKER_00: That is incredible.
13:05
SPEAKER_01: She would just talk to people, hand them a flyer, and invite them to come to the gym.
13:09
SPEAKER_01: That was the entire marketing apparatus for a business that survived 32 years.
13:14
SPEAKER_00: It sounds quaint,
13:16
SPEAKER_00: but if you analyze the mechanism behind it,
13:18
SPEAKER_00: she was utilizing sheer human connection and charisma.
13:22
SPEAKER_00: The through line of the business wasn't a sleek branding package.
13:26
SPEAKER_00: The through line was her.
13:27
SPEAKER_01: The woman herself.
13:28
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
13:29
SPEAKER_00: Her courage, her work ethic, her resilience, her genuine interest in other people.
13:34
SPEAKER_01: So what does this all mean?
13:35
SPEAKER_01: I want to challenge you on this because we need to ground this in
13:39
SPEAKER_01: the reality our listeners are facing today.
13:41
SPEAKER_00: OK, lay it on me.
13:42
SPEAKER_01: It is a beautiful revelation for Julia to realize her mother's continuity was
13:47
SPEAKER_01: in her character, not her job title.
13:50
SPEAKER_01: But when you are in the middle of it, isn't it terrifying to not have a clear label?
13:55
SPEAKER_00: Oh, absolutely terrifying.
13:56
SPEAKER_01: Today we call them portfolio careers or career pivots.
14:00
SPEAKER_01: But how does a listener actually find comfort in being undefined,
14:04
SPEAKER_01: especially when the modern corporate world heavily punishes a fragmented resume?
14:09
SPEAKER_00: This raises an important question because
14:11
SPEAKER_00: the reality is applicant tracking systems do not care about your vibrant mosaic.
14:15
SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
14:16
SPEAKER_01: An HR algorithm is going to throw that resume in the trash.
14:19
SPEAKER_00: But the comfort comes from recognizing that you don't need a single title
14:23
SPEAKER_00: to qualify you for your own life.
14:25
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
14:25
SPEAKER_00: You are looking for continuity in the wrong place.
14:27
SPEAKER_01: So where should we look?
14:29
SPEAKER_00: The continuity shouldn't be on your LinkedIn profile.
14:31
SPEAKER_00: It should be in your character.
14:33
SPEAKER_00: Your ability to learn rapidly, to manage diverse groups of people, to operate under pressure.
14:38
SPEAKER_01: You change the framing from I am scattered to I am highly adaptable.
14:43
SPEAKER_00: Precisely.
14:44
SPEAKER_00: You don't sell the chaos to an employer.
14:46
SPEAKER_00: You sell the underlying mechanics of how you solve problems.
14:49
SPEAKER_00: But internally,
14:51
SPEAKER_00: for your own sanity,
14:53
SPEAKER_00: you must stop looking for your self-worth in the continuity of a job title.
14:57
SPEAKER_01: Julia writes this line,
14:59
SPEAKER_01: looking for continuity in the title is when I should be looking for continuity in
15:02
SPEAKER_01: the woman.
15:03
SPEAKER_00: It is a total gut punch.
15:04
SPEAKER_01: It really is because it exposes how much power we give away.
15:07
SPEAKER_00: Julia's mother came from a generation where a profession literally became part
15:12
SPEAKER_00: of your name in some cultures, the engineer, the teacher.
15:16
SPEAKER_00: But she quietly rejected that entirely.
15:18
SPEAKER_01: She proved that a career should serve the life you want to live at any given decade.
15:22
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
15:23
SPEAKER_00: If the physical gym doesn't make sense for your energy at 70, you close it.
15:27
SPEAKER_01: The career serves the life, not the other way around.
15:29
SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
15:30
SPEAKER_01: That is the perfect place to land this discussion because it completely flips
15:33
SPEAKER_01: the script on how we measure success.
15:36
SPEAKER_01: We want to leave you with a final thought to mull over,
15:38
SPEAKER_01: building directly on Julia's closing realization.
15:41
SPEAKER_00: Which is such a liberating thought.
15:43
SPEAKER_01: The idea that you need to know what you are going to do for the rest of your life is a myth.
15:47
SPEAKER_01: And worse, it is a myth that is keeping you paralyzed.
15:51
SPEAKER_00: You don't need a 50-year roadmap.
15:53
SPEAKER_00: You just need to know what you want to build now.
15:55
SPEAKER_01: So ask yourself this.
15:57
SPEAKER_01: If 20 years from now,
15:58
SPEAKER_01: the pieces of your life look completely unrelated on paper but feel unmistakably,
16:03
SPEAKER_01: undeniably yours, would you see that as a failure to find a single path?
16:09
SPEAKER_01: Or would you recognize it as the ultimate success?
16:12
SPEAKER_00: A life built on a rich, rotated soil.
16:14
SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
16:15
SPEAKER_01: If this conversation resonated with you,
16:17
SPEAKER_01: if you are navigating that messy middle of figuring out who you are becoming,
16:21
SPEAKER_01: I cannot recommend this essay enough.
16:23
SPEAKER_00: It is a must read.
16:24
SPEAKER_01: It really is.
16:25
SPEAKER_01: Please go read.
16:26
SPEAKER_01: She just kept becoming on the Just Julia Substack platform.
16:29
SPEAKER_00: It goes so far beyond a simple career retrospective.
16:31
SPEAKER_01: And for those of you who prefer audio,
16:33
SPEAKER_01: the Just Julia podcast is also available to listen to on Spotify and Apple podcasts.
16:38
SPEAKER_01: Go check out her work,
16:39
SPEAKER_01: give yourself permission to be a beginner again,
16:41
SPEAKER_01: and we will catch you next time on the Deep Dive.