Full Transcript for What Does Ambition Actually Look Like?

professional endeavors. And I feel like so many ideas and so many endeavors. ⁓ it's almost like they were been bottled up all that time and they're just spilling out of me. And I have to remind myself, okay, your ambition has a limit. You have to be intentional about what you're giving your time and your attention to, because at the end of the day, your family and your loved ones still need you. And so I really think, you know. wearing multiple ambition hats throughout our lives is is so natural and yet something that we don't talk enough about. And then speaking more too to ambition and how things change, you know, there's something about wearing multiple hats and going through different points in your life that's really interesting. And, you know, I'm have gone through this change in Personally, and I really have come to this place of generous ambition. And it's this new ethos, this new mantra that I really try to live by every single day. And so, you know, outside of just knowing that your level of ambition intensity changes in different areas of your life throughout your life. And knowing that that is a beautiful thing and that we should never dim that ambitious light within us, I also feel like this traditional notion of ambition gets a bad rap where you know, ambition at at all costs and and ambitious people. ⁓ undermine others and are ruthless, right? Like we thought, you know, my mind, that's stereotypical like thing that we've I've always thought of with ambition. Ambition, it's, you know, grow winning at all costs. And yeah. And so you can kind of also feel like, well, that's not me. And so this idea of generous ambition is you can have this drive to succeed, to win, to be curious and dedicate yourself to something that feels greater than you. And you can also bring others up with you. And I think women are so especially equipped to be able to do this because we are very community-minded and we're bringing a different perspective to the business game and especially the founder game. And so who else can we bring up with us? Who can I connect you to? You know, how can I hire people that, you know, are going are going to do the best job. And might be out of the box that might not, you know, be somebody that might be somebody that's also changing, you know, their career and has changed their mind about something and giving them that chance. And so generous ambition is really something that I believe we should all adopt in in our lives, whether it's professionally or personally. How can I help others and and also do really well for myself? It reminds me of this, I believe it was a Dan Gilbert quote: you can do well by doing good. You know, at the end of the day, that's kind of very similar to generous ambition. You can be wildly ambitious. You want it can be wildly successful. And you can also give a shit about others and care and be community-minded and know that there's enough for everybody and know that the boat all rises, you know, together. ⁓ and so moving forward, we're going to be doing a lot more with the generous ambition focus. All right, something else that I'd love to talk about too is choosing active attention when it comes to ambition. You can't do it all in a day. I just watched a reel that was Emma Greed. I feel like I talk about Emma Greed in almost a lot of podcasts, but she is just somebody that I really admire. And she's out there ⁓ in the media lately. And so she's really become this figurehead for professional, successful women. And she showed her. you know, everyday routine, and she is up at five and she's doing this and she's doing that. And so and she goes through meetings every day. And I think she's the perfect example of choosing active attention. She is a founder and CEO of Good American. I think she's co-founder and CEO of Skims. She has her own podcast. ⁓ she's also an investor in multiple other things, right? She's doing doing the most. And yet she knows she can't do the most every single day. So, how is she dividing up her day and planning out her days and going through her days, giving active attention to the things that need to be dealt with and giving their attention to? So not everything gets equal attention, but it was really great that you could see, you know, her days are full of work and there's certain meetings for each, and then she's giving time to her family as well. And and you're not gonna be able to give all of your attention, full strength to every single person along your path throughout the day. That's just it's impossible. You're just not gonna do it. ⁓ but you know, that is something that speaks to the act of attention and choosing that specifically to better strategize how to get more done. Now, another thing that comes along with generous ambition is testing before committing. And I love this because if you're like me, you have a a million maybe not a million ideas, but you have ideas about certain things that inspire you or make you curious or that you want to try out or that you want to do. And I think every single one of us should give ourselves permission to explore ideas without immediately turning every interesting idea into another business or obligation. And I'll give you an example of this. Again, a personal example, because all of this is coming from my personal experience. And I feel like if I've experienced this, certainly there's other women that have experienced this too. So for example, in the evening hours, in trying to get my kids off their tablets and do more fun things, we signed my son up for guitar lessons. And I used to take guitar lessons and fiddle around with my guitar. I maybe could play you a smidgen of a handful of songs if gone to my head. and so I was like, it would be really fun to to practice the guitar again and to maybe do that. And so I was I went to Chat GPT as one does, and I was like, Chat, how do I like let's create a plan to ⁓ so I can play a song, a full song in and regale everybody

at Christmas with, you know, a bunch of songs that I can play on the guitar. And Flippin' ChatGPT called me out and was like, maybe we just get you started with practicing your guitar and learning some notes. And then maybe you can build yourself up to playing a whole song for family and friends. And I was like, yeah, that's a good idea. Why do I immediately get an idea and think it needs to be this larger than life thing? And it doesn't have to be. Right? Like I don't have to learn how to play the guitar in two months so I can play jingle bells at the family Christmas party, even though in my head, I'm like, how cool, how cool would that be? And listen, I'm not to say that I don't have that I'm not gonna play jingle bells at some point for my family or regale them with my songs and the guitar, like everybody of course loves, ⁓ at family gatherings. But we don't have to immediately jump to this big idea. And really I think that's When we s set ourselves up to fail, ⁓ because you can't get from here to there without putting the work in and not without putting the steps in. And so testing before committing, and then maybe it would I wouldn't like it, right? Like maybe you wouldn't like it. So that's my guitar example. But ⁓ let's say, for example, you want to become a content creator and you because That's a really great way to make additional income into, you know, a path, a creative path to to choose. Now you can say, I wanna be like Michaela and and then have my makeup line and I wanna drink creative fashion line, I wanna do this, and then but no, how the heck do I do that? I don't know. Now I'm overwhelmed and and I just don't think I could get there and and I feel so overwhelmed and And and how do I even start? And so we almost talk ourselves out of it sometimes if we don't allow ourselves the opportunity to go slower and like more strategic when it comes to testing before committing. And the third thing when it comes to generous ambition, so we've talked about choosing active attention, testing before committing, and now counting freedom as success. And that means recognizing that flexibility. Time with family and having room to enjoy your life are in fact legitimate measures of achievement. Period. End of. And again, we can fall into these ideas and traps of thinking, well, I'm not going to be successful or I won't have freedom until I am making seven figures a year. But maybe that seven-figure year would come at the cost of time spent with family and friends and may and maybe even your health. And so, you know, the freedom that we so seek or the achievement that we so seek, we can tie it to these false notions of success. But really, when it comes down to it, time is the one thing that we can't buy back. So, how do we realize that that flexibility is so important, that choosing where our attention goes is so important? And then also that we can do it, we can test and explore in really small and special ways before going all in on something.

So, again, three things that line up under generous ambition that I think are so important. And I would, you know, again have to say that a lot of these come from my experience. But again, if I'm experiencing it, I know that there are so many women out there who are experiencing this. And so moving on. I would like to do a little new segment. All right, next up, we have a new segment that I am been thinking about as well that has been just marinating in my brain for months. And this started when I, after the first year of Serious Lady Business, I was trying to figure out where we want to go next. How do I cultivate cultivate this great community further? How do we share ideas more? And I thought a serious lady business book club ⁓ was the best route. And so I created the group on LinkedIn for our serious lady book club, and we chose Start With Yourself by My Girl I'm Agreed as the first book. But what I realized about that, one, not only did I get insanely busy over the summer where I stepped into a new COO role and my kids were not in consistent summer camp, but also it got me thinking, I don't wanna have to be tied to another thing like a book club and a check-in, and everybody read chapter 15 because my schedule is crazy and life happens. And why would I want to do that with a book club? And so I'm pivoting now on that. And I'm going to make that a place where we can share book recommendations because if there's one thing I love, it's reading. And my husband will get so frustrated with me when yet another book from Amazon or an independent book. retailer arrives on our doorstep and he'll be like, why do you j just go to the library? And I'll say, They don't have this at the library, or the hold on this is like three months at the library and I just need it now. ⁓ and and I've just read so many great books and I really want to share it with, you know, fellow my fellow women out there because so much of them have given me inspiration, food for thought. And so again, I also want to call this out is we're going to start, I'm going to do a weekly shout out for Book recommendations in the LinkedIn group as well as just in the general LinkedIn. So, you know, make sure you're following me, Leslie Bailey Youngbud, and at serious lady business on LinkedIn outside of here. And we're gonna start with our first three book picks. And I'm gonna tell you what they are, and I'm gonna explain a little bit about why I think they're worth your time. So the first one, you're gonna laugh, but it's rich as fuck. More money than you know what to do with by Amanda Francis of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills fame. And yes, the show made me ever so curious about reading her book. And I love books on money, how to be better with money. I love books on manifestation. And and then outside of the fact that she was on The Real Housewives in a season that I always enjoy. That cast in those seasons. So I just had to get this book. And it surprised me. I have to say, you guys,

I really enjoyed reading this book. It's a pretty easy read. You can pick it up and put it down. ⁓ but there's a couple things that she says in here that I've booked marked that I want to share with you. And so why I think it's worth your time. And again, overall, the book is great. It's definitely worth your time. But here she talks about stop giving debt the power. And I think again, here's a very common trap that a lot of us can get caught up in is whether it's credit card debt, student loan debt, business debt. We can make it our personality and feel like a bad person for accumulating this debt. And you're giving that debt your power. And guess what? No, don't do that. And so I really think that. She, you talks about here is that when you stop making it means something other than you spent money on things that you will now pay off over time. You can take the pressure off of yourself, off of what this debt means and what it means about your future. And so it only has the power that we give it. And I just thought that was a really powerful section of the book because again, we hear it all the time: student loan debt, credit card debt, business debt. And we stress over that. How am I gonna pay this? I need to take this new job so I can and pay these things off. And and when you come at it from that perspective, you're still coming at it from a place of lack. So you'll probably, even if you pay off that current debt, you'll still find yourself in other debt in different ways down the road. And then she talks about imposter syndrome. And I'm somebody that really gets fired up about imposter syndrome. And ⁓ I feel like it's a ⁓ Patriarchal concept as well as the term cringe. I don't think anything's cringy. I think it's just something that we make up to keep ourselves from doing things. We have to get over it and ourselves. And so she talks about, you know, imposter syndrome in here. And then I really loved how she talks about it's safe to be rich and loved. It's safe to be rich and respected. It's safe to be rich and appreciated. It's safe to be rich and generous. It's safe to be rich and anything else you want to be. And again, latching onto guilt or fear around something you have or something you get were given or something you worked your ass off to achieve won't help you use that thing well. And again, so it's that energy of letting things go to better your life and to better yourself. So it's not just this money, you know, book. There's some really deep things in here. You know, she talks about being aware of her white privilege, which I was not expecting and and really found to be great. And then, you know, another passage that I thought was really great is again, this is something that I relate to so much. And she talks about, you know, it's okay to be rich and generous. It's okay to be rich and enjoy and be ⁓ proud of yourself for achieving these things. And she talks about how she had to do work to become comfortable with owning beautiful

things and to trust herself to take care of these things. And so in that passage, she really talks about designer shopping and in shopping at, you know, the the boutiques versus the re the resale shops and how she really felt in pastor syndrome and didn't feel comfortable walking into these boutiques, even though she more than had the money. And so sh it's because she had to, she felt like she was unworthy and couldn't trust herself with beautiful things. And so that was work that she had to do. And it reminded me of When I was in my twenties living in New York, and I had saved up enough money to buy a pair of Alexander Wang. That's who was like the jam in the early 2000s, Alexander Wang Anuk boots. And I had anxiety about buying them because it was like the most I ever spent on a pair of boots. But I knew I would wear the crap out of them. But I bought these boots, and let me tell you. They tore up my feet in a way that that was so painful. And I just just thought, I've just gotta break them in. And I did break them in, but the first couple of weeks, they tore up my feet. And I would always say, I'm being punished for spending this much money on boots. Which is such a silly thing. Why would I that was my money. I can choose to do what I want with that money. But I was young and insecure and and didn't think about it. And sure, maybe I could have invested that money, but Come on, those boots, the cost per wear on those boots was pennies. I do I still have those boots somewhere? ⁓ my gosh, I don't know. But again, I think it's also because I didn't trust myself or feel comfortable enough with something that nice with that designer. And so that comes from this place of self-worth that is like you know, executed and comes out in our finances. So again, just a couple of my f favorite phrases in. Places in Rich as Fuck. And I definitely recommend you guys read this book. Now, the next one is not a nonfiction book. If you're anything like me, you can read self-improvement, you know, ⁓ feel-good books on how to improve your business, your money, et cetera. But then I feel like I need a palette cleanser. And so my gosh, you guys, please read The Pirate Queen by Ariel Lahan. It is so good. It's historical fiction. It's based on a real woman who lived, Grace O'Malley. She is an Irish folk heroine who risked everything to defend her people. And it was just ⁓ just such a great, well-written book. It has everything, it has romance, it has action. And man, my favorite, favorite part of this is. She basically defends her ship against Algerian pirates while giving birth. And that is a b that's true. There are stories that she was giving birth to her baby, and her ship was being overrun by Algerian pirates, and she, her men were losing ground against the pirates. And she stepped up, and I'm not gonna tell you how, because it's a great part in the book, but she stepped up. And was able to defend her ship against the pirates. And that ship, the Algerian ship, then

became part of her fleet. Like just total badass. Like giving birth and defending your ship like people are just built different back then, right? Like I couldn't, you know, even pick up a gallon of milk, right? For you know, a couple weeks after I gave birth, or you know, w that's the minimum, let alone defend my ship against pirates. Just so, so, so cool. And So this, because it this is based on a true story, the author at the back explains some of the facts. And, you know, not everything in in here is is fact. That story, though, about the pirates is a true, true story. Obviously, the details are obviously we don't know really what went down back way like hundreds of years ago when she was alive. ⁓ but this woman lived and What is also so fascinating is that the only written record of her life is found in the English state papers. This woman is an Irish folk heroine, talked about in stories, passed from generation to generation, and is left out of history. Why? Why was this badass woman left out of the history books? ⁓ because men wrote them. Men wrote the history books. And how do I how do I know this? Because her children and her husbands are included in the history books. Well, where did the children come from? Not just the dudes, like they needed a mother. So her children, and then there's also historical factual evidence of her, you know, she made an appeal to Queen Elizabeth I in 1593. to plead for the lives of her brother and youngest son. And she went and met Queen Elizabeth I. And it's ⁓ documented. So this woman lived, and yet there's no historical account of her in the official ⁓ history of Ireland. And ⁓ and I just wanna read some of this because it's just crazy to me. so the definitive history of Ireland is called the Annals Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland by the four masters. From the earliest period to the year 1616. It was compiled by a Franciscan friar and three other collaborators. These four men used centuries worth of records written and assembled by a wide range of hereditary Gaelic historians, chroniclers, and monastic scribes. In the final version published, there is no mention of Grace whatsoever. It is worth noting that Grace's father, both of her husbands, and all of her sons were listed in this tome. So we don't really know the reason for her exclusion from the official iris history. But you darn better believe that she lived. And this book is such a really cool piece of historical fiction as to maybe why. Like, think about the badass women that we have in the culture today and how men hate her. And now they have to compile and they have to write about this person that they hate so much and they think is such like a discredit to the culture. And yeah, they're gonna leave her out. But she was not forgotten. And so the Pirate Queen. Again, if you're looking in love historical fiction or just looking for like a palette cleanser from the general self-help books, business books, this is such a good one. Loved it. And the

third book that I think you all should read is called Almost Reckless. And this is by Amy Smilevic. And she is the founder of Tibi, which is a Fashion house based in New York City. I'm actually wearing one of their t-shirts now. It's got this cool design on it, this original art piece. And Tibby is like my ride or die ⁓ brand. I just love them so much. And I think and the reason is because of Amy and her ethos and her way of dressing and her way of designing. She's based ⁓ she's all around cre ⁓ creative pragmatism. And so that means I want to dress creatively and look really cool. But I also need to be able to chase my kids on the playground. Or I also can't wear heels because, you know, because I'm just sick of wearing heels, but I still want to look cool. And the brand Tibby is known for being chill, modern, and classic. And so the pieces, all their pieces combine like those three elements. And when she came out with this book, I was so curious to read it. And I it makes me love her and the brand even more. And really the main reason for that, the book is great. ⁓ but she is an outsider in the fashion world. And never and always she talks in this book about how she felt like, ⁓ I thought as soon as I did this, they would accept me, or as soon as I ⁓ understood and got all these pieces in place, then I would understand. what it's is to be a fashion designer and and I would be accepted because she came into the fashion world almost by accident. By really not by you know accident, but also by need, where she couldn't find the type of clothing that she wanted. And so she made it. And she didn't go to fashion school. She was not, you know, ⁓ at the time at the time it was like Anna Went to her a Vogue, was like really into ⁓ male designers. And so male designers were really hot at the turn of the 2000s. And she always felt like she was an outsider and she couldn't get it right and she didn't know. And and talks about how when they would try to sell to department stores or try to get, you know, PR, people would say, but that's not how you're supposed to do it. That that's not how you do it. You're supposed to do it like this. Like in this industry, this is how we do it. And she was always like, Why? That's That's stupid. And they always, you know, treated her with chagrin because of she pushed back on that. And yet, no matter what she did, even when she played by those rules, she didn't get the feeling that she thought that she would have. And she only got that feeling that she was seeking when she trusted her gut and and took these like almost reckless decisions to get the brand to where they are today. And so I just think it's really great. I'm almost done with it. I haven't even finished reading it, but I really wanted to share it with you while we were having this today. And I also love so much in here that she talks about how our personal style is not just a way to feel good about ourselves. It's a way to to communicate who we are. ⁓ and you know, we communicate who we are through our words, through our actions, and also through our visual presentation. And your style is one third of your means of communication. And I think that again, as women, we can be scolded or, you know, it's style is frivolous, clothing is frivolous. And it's not. It's how we communicate who we are. It's it demonstrates how you feel. And and I so I love so much that she talks about that in that book. But again, if you sometimes are somebody that feels like an outsider in your industry or you're looking to disrupt an industry or you just want to learn About a really cool, unique, out-of-the-box, you know, designer's story. Almost Reckless by Amy Smilevich. Again, highly, highly recommend. So, you know, that's really going to wrap things up for us today. I talked about generous ambition. I talked to you about some books that I'm loving right now, and I cannot wait to continue these conversations with you on LinkedIn and otherwise. ⁓ Again, you can follow me and connect with me on LinkedIn, Leslie Bailey Youngblood. I would love to connect with you. And then make sure to follow at SiriusLady Business on LinkedIn as well. And you can visit seriousladybusiness.com. And I will also put a link to these books in the show notes as well as on the website and on LinkedIn. So thank you so much for joining me on this solo episode of Serious Lady Business. We'll kind of, you know, see what works from this and and continue on. And I will have some incredible guests for you. next week as well, moving forward. We certainly love to do that and highlight incredible female founder stories. And this season we also may have some male guests as well. So exciting stuff on the horizon. Thanks so much for tuning in.