I Shouldn't Be Telling You This: Success Secrets Every Gutsy Girl Should Know (3 page)

A small warning: when you go big, whether it’s early in your career or later, there will be people wishing you had gone home instead. Perhaps you’re pulling off a feat someone else wishes
she’d
thought of or you’re infringing on her turf—at least in her own mind. Or maybe one of your accomplishments has necessitated a change in someone else’s daily work MO and that person now has to take care of business each morning rather than spending an hour nibbling on his blueberry muffin. You may end up with a few haters.

Regardless, you can’t get caught up in worrying about whether everyone you work with likes you. Ultimately you want the respect of your coworkers, but you don’t need them to be your buddies. No one says this better than Mika Brzezinski, the cohost of MSNBC’s
Morning Joe
, whom I asked to write a work column for
Cosmo.
“Look, it took me twenty-five years in television news and writing two books to realize that it doesn’t matter if everyone adores me,” she says. “Being liked is what women strive for. But when you make that mistake, it diverts your attention from more important tasks at hand.”

So go big, love the thrill of it and the prizes it brings, but know that when you make a big move, it creates a big breeze, and that can sometimes ruffle feathers.

{
What Are You
Really
Lusting For?
}

O
ne day at
Cosmo
my art director, John, was driving to a photo shoot in a van with a bunch of twenty-something models. All of a sudden one of the male models noticed that the van was headed out of Manhattan, and when he asked for an explanation, he learned for the first time that the shoot was in the suburbs and the group wouldn’t be returning to the city until at least nine that evening. “Wait,” he told John. “I’ve got plans with a girl tonight. I can’t get back that late.”

“Sorry,” John told him. “Your booker should have explained the situation. There’s nothing I can do now.”

Ten minutes later, just as the van was approaching the entrance to the highway out of the city, the model clutched his abdomen and began to moan. “Can you pull over?” he muttered to the driver. “I feel sick.” Once the van stopped, the model stepped outside, leaned over for a moment as if he was about to hurl the contents of his stomach, and then, yup, stood up and took off down the street like a bat out of hell, never again to be seen by the
Cosmo
crew.

I burst out laughing when I heard the story the next day. “Well,” I said to John, “at least the guy knows what his priorities are.”

One thing almost all the successful women I know have in common: they’re doing something they really love and that matters to them. Your chances of being a success are much greater when you follow a course that you’re totally passionate about. Because passion energizes you, creates clarity about your choices, and makes you fearless. And it provides plenty of pleasure. Of course, it also has to be something that pays the bills—unless you’ve got a nice trust fund.

I was passionate about writing and editing from the time I was little. At about seven I started writing plays and stories, and also producing little newspapers and minimagazines. By the time I was in high school, I was fantasizing about moving to New York one day and becoming a magazine writer or editor or author.

But just because you might not have figured it all out before you’re twenty-one doesn’t mean you’re at a huge disadvantage. It often takes people a while to discover their true passion, and that’s fine. You don’t want to get stuck toiling for years at something that barely stirs your libido. It will be tough to ever feel satisfied or grab the success that could be yours elsewhere. Plus, the longer you stay on a career path you’re not excited about, the harder it will be to shift gears into an entirely new area. Why not start thinking now about where you really
should
be? If a bad economy makes it difficult to act on your idea, you will at least be poised to move when things improve.

Fortunately, there are a few tricks for figuring it out. Even if you’re pretty sure of the answer already, these are good to have up your sleeve. That’s because over time, you may feel an urge or need to try something brand new but may not be sure of the possibilities. Or you may have a general sense of what you want but haven’t nailed down the specifics. These strategies should help.

Be a glutton for unusual, even weird experiences.
From interviewing women for one of my previous career books, I made a fascinating discovery—though it didn’t occur to me until the book was actually published. Most of the women, I realized, had found a career they loved not by contemplating what would turn them on but by
bumping into it
someplace out in the world.

If you haven’t found your calling yet, the best thing to do is get your butt off your chair, fill your life with a wide array of unusual experiences, and allow yourself to bump into what will exhilarate you.

This advice may seem a bit contrary to what you’ve heard elsewhere. When you’re about to finish school (or are further along in your career but feeling restless), well-meaning family members and friends will often suggest that you “think about what you want” or grab a legal pad and list the pros and cons of a variety of fields. Or someone may direct you to a book such as
What Color Is Your Parachute?
, which suggests that you fill out pages of a workbook to determine your calling. That may do the trick for some people, but as I said, it’s not how many of the successful women I know figured it out. And the “bump-into-it” way is a hell of a lot more fun.

One of my former fashion editors described this serendipitous approach beautifully. I asked her one day how she had decided to become a fashion editor. My assumption was that she’d probably always loved clothes as a girl and had gone to some kind of fashion school. Her answer took me totally by surprise. She said that she’d actually been an art major in college and had graduated with no clue as to what she wanted to do. She and her boyfriend had decided to head to Africa, just for the adventure of it. They were traveling around Egypt by bus, and at one of the stops they came across a fashion shoot for a European magazine. As my fashion editor stared at the stylist who was dressing the models, she had a eureka moment. That, she realized, was what she wanted to do. “Sometimes,” she said, “you have to be on the bus to Cairo to know what you want.” I love that story.

You don’t have to take her advice literally by heading to Cairo, but you should hop on the bus metaphorically. Have lunch with people you’ve just met or haven’t seen in years. Wander down streets you’ve never been on before. Take one-night classes in surprising subjects that you might not automatically think to delve into. Go on an Earthwatch expedition (I did several trips of that nature during my twenties, restoring an old stone site on the South Pacific island of Rarotonga and tagging penguins in Patagonia, and they opened my eyes to all sorts of things). Visit people you know at their jobs and note how you respond to the vibe. Check out the websites of newspapers in cities you don’t live in. Go to art galleries, especially ones with the type of art you rarely look at. Visit friends in towns you’ve never traveled to. Stop at bookstores and breeze through books you wouldn’t normally bother with—or browse through books and DVDs online. Check out www.uroulette.com, which takes you to an evolving, random list of websites (the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra website might appear right next to one called All About Pumpkins), and you can then click on any one that catches your fancy. Read old letters people wrote you and/or journals you kept; be on the lookout for a passion you once had but abandoned. And actually
go
to Cairo—or Paris or San Francisco or Santa Fe.

You can also volunteer or freelance in certain fields to gain a feel for them and measure your response. Though I loved the idea of being a writer, other fields sometimes beckoned me and I wanted to be sure I’d made the right choice. During my mid-twenties I was the volunteer coordinator at night in a couple of different political campaigns and also worked as a model on my lunch hours and days off (when people in my office would see me in ads, I’d tell them it was my doppelgänger). During my late twenties, I volunteered at a tiny TV station and eventually anchored a newscast one night a week. These were all fascinating ways to test the waters.

When you’re exploring, look for moments when you feel your curiosity stir. Is there something about a certain experience that makes you inordinately satisfied or excited? Do you long to repeat it? Dr. Ellen Marmur, a fantastic dermatologist I met through
Cosmo
’s Practice Safe Sun campaign, left college unsure of what she wanted to do—maybe go into business, maybe study to be a rabbi, she just didn’t know. On the fence about what her next move should be, she signed up to help lead a camping trip that involved canoeing through the wilderness. One day one of the campers fell and broke her leg. The group was miles from nowhere, but, rather than feel frightened, Marmur moved into super-control mode. “I knew,” she said, “that the camper would have to be carried out on a makeshift stretcher and that somehow I needed to create a splint for the broken bone. I picked up one of the canoe paddles and snapped it in two over my knee. And there was something so incredibly satisfying about the crack it made. It was a defining moment for me. I began to sense then that what I really wanted to do was be a doctor, taking charge, helping people.”

By the way, your passion doesn’t have to be utterly precise. Perhaps, for starters, you just feel an urge to work with kids or
organize
things, or create a website. Start with an instinct, tease it into different directions (by researching, talking to people, etc.), and see which area not only fits well but also could pay off. Kate Spade and I worked at the same magazine and later, after she’d started her business, I asked her how she’d developed the idea. Her answer surprised me. I remember her saying that her initial inclination had been to simply be an entrepreneur, maybe even open a restaurant. Her then boyfriend, now husband, Andy, had said, “You know, you really like handbags—you have so many.” And things began to evolve from there.

Don’t believe everything you think.
Even if you have a sense of what you want, you need to challenge yourself about it. Is it definitely what
you
want or simply what other people—such as your parents—want for you? Or could it be what you’ve always told yourself you wanted but isn’t the case anymore (or perhaps never was). Are you thinking boldly enough? Is there something bigger waiting for you that you’ve been afraid to envision for yourself?

One Sunday afternoon in August 1998, my boss phoned me at my family’s weekend home, a little farmhouse in Pennsylvania. My knees immediately went wobbly because she
never
called me at home. She asked if I would drive into the city right then so she could talk to me about a special situation. I was the editor in chief of
Redbook
then, but I guessed that was about to change. Because hey, when your boss calls you on a weekend and asks you to cross a state line, you can bet that
something
big is afoot.

Leaving my family behind to wrap things up in Pennsylvania, I drove into New York and headed for my boss’s office. I was so nervous I was practically hyperventilating. Once I arrived, she asked me to sit down and then delivered this wallop of a line: “Kate, we’d like you to be the next editor of
Cosmopolitan
.” Bonnie Fuller, the editor in chief who had replaced Helen Gurley Brown for just eighteen issues, was defecting to
Glamour.

It’s not an exaggeration when I say I was speechless. Not only had there been no inkling that Bonnie was bolting, but I’d also never once imagined myself connected to
Cosmo.
I said yes, of course.
Cosmopolitan
was the Hearst Corporation’s most successful magazine, and being asked to run it was a major honor.

I was unable to reach my husband by phone, and when he burst into the house later that afternoon, he was dying to know what the deal was. As soon as I gave him the news, a big, mischievous grin spread across his face. “Wait,” he said, “you mean I’m going to bed tonight with the editor of
Cosmo
?” In his mind it was as though I’d managed to learn the entire Kama Sutra between the time I was given the job and when I arrived home.

But though he seemed happy as a pig in you-know-what, I was secretly miserable. Sure, it was an incredible job and I hadn’t even had to do a thirty-page proposal to land it, as you so often have to do with editor in chief jobs, but I just couldn’t see myself heading up
Cosmo.
I hadn’t read it much in my twenties and I had barely glanced at it in years. I couldn’t imagine how I was going to relate to the content. Plus, because it was such a huge cash cow for the company, I sensed that the pressure would be unbearable. I was 100 percent certain, in fact, that if the job had come up on the open market, I would not have even thrown my hat in the ring.

For the first few months I sucked it up and tried my best. I had terrible insomnia and often went to work having slept for only an hour or two. Tons of Bonnie’s new staff followed her to
Glamour
, so in addition to trying to get the magazine out the door every day, I had to focus on plugging the holes in the dike. I left the office at five thirty every day because my kids were young and I didn’t want to shortchange them, but after they went to bed I worked for hours more each night.

And then something funny began to happen: the newsstand sales numbers started coming in for my first issues, and it turned out I was selling tons of copies.
Cosmo
readers were gutsy and fun to talk to. The content was irreverent and over the top and wonderful to create. I soon realized that I actually loved what I was doing now. In many ways it was the job I’d been waiting for all my life.

Maybe I should have just smiled and accepted how fascinating fate is, but over the next year I was bugged by how blind I’d been. I kept wondering how a bunch of people in suits had known so clearly what I should be doing professionally and I had been so
dead wrong.