No One Saw This Coming (Least of All, Me)

Part 2 of my “How I got here” story

In case you’re just joining, Part 1 of the story is here.

I went to business school a startup CEO and graduated a writer. What happened in between?

TLDR: A psychic.

But here’s the long form….

During my last weekend as a Columbia Business School student, I went down to the main campus at 116th Street. After a stop at the bookstore, I was drawn towards an event happening on the main quad. Eventually I had to get going, and on my way back to the subway, I wandered by the Journalism school. I had a bit of a funny feeling as I laughed at how I might have picked the wrong subject to go to grad school for.

I was on my way to my very final class of my Executive MBA program, and I was scheduled to deliver a two-minute presentation about my next act. I was permitted three slides. The first one had a picture of Martha Stewart and a quote: “The more you adapt, the more interesting you become.”

The second one posed the question, “What are my identities?” and had a summary of my background.

And the third one said “The consumer editorial angle” and had a circle and three logos. The circle noted the intersection of business analysis, product reviews and authentic voice for all things consumer, pointing out that sizable, successful businesses operate in each of these categories already, but not at the juncture.

The two-minute speech was my first time going public with my plan to debut a new media venture focused on consumers. But this was all coming together in real-time. I had just introduced the idea to my investors on the previous Monday. As in, 5 days before. But this journey started long before then.

There are so many things that I am good at. But two things that I am decidedly very bad at are indulging my intuition and having self-confidence. Confidentially, this has caused a lot of pain and suffering for me. I tend to overrule “gut feeling” with whatever my brain asserts as “logical” because for me, that’s always been a surer and safer flight path. The spillover effect of prioritizing analysis over instinct has been an implied dissociation between head and heart.

Almost exactly ten years ago, I began a major career transition from healthcare venture capital investor to consumer-retail entrepreneur. That was certainly a heart decision. I wanted to spend the end of my twenties aligning my energy and output with a category that inspired me. I’ve long been fascinated by how people spend time and money. The world is becoming more and more stratified with new products. By many measures, we have way too much choice. And preferences sure seem to be shifting at warp speed as social media allows us to close knowledge gaps in record time. The hip new menu item in Santa Monica will be in St. Louis next week whereas it used to take months if not years for someone from St. Louis to import the cool factor.

The last business I built worked with over 300 consumer brands. We put their products in our San Francisco and New York City showrooms. I got to see what was selling and what was creating buzz. Then I flipped the retail model on its head by turning homes for-sale into temporary showroom space by staging spaces with our best-selling items. It was a clever business model with limitless potential. Unfortunately it required a lot more capital to continue operating and after five years, I was still shouldering too much of the day to day operations. Though the business had the potential to scale, I didn’t. We found a buyer for most of our physical assets and ended operations during my first semester of business school.

In early 2021, I was participating in an executive coaching program called reemerge. One of our exercises was to seek the guidance of an oracle. I deferred the task for seven months. Eventually I ponied up $150 for a 60-minute phone conversation with a very gifted clairvoyant. The experience floored me. Within the first few minutes of our conversation, Pat picked up on the energy of “studying for a midterm.” I was in fact, scheduled to take a statistics midterm that very week. He correctly identified that my dad had suffered from a head injury (it was a softball injury) and he seemed to correctly pinpoint the thematic issues that were coming up in my business. This exchange convinced me that it’s possible for other humans to sense our energetic realities. More than that, he helped me understand things about myself which were implicitly true, but that I hadn’t yet begun to consciously integrate into my future plans.

Thirteen minutes into our first conversation, Pat said,

“One thing I’m curious about, have you not tried your hand at writing at all?” He continued, “Ultimately, I think you're gonna serve as a teacher, coach or mentor of some kind, world in general, but I don't know that you're going to be getting up there doing it from a podium. So writing makes more sense. It's kind of a safer semi anonymous way to do it.”

Seventeen minutes into our first conversation, Pat said,

“And I think you should write when you can with whatever subject matter, suits you.

One aspect of what I think you're doing here is to be bringing message to people frame things. You're not really a product of the mainstream of your own culture, [you] kind of stepped off to the side and did things your own way. And it's when you have an outside perspective like that it can be can help people who are caught up in the mass, you know, caught up in patterns, they don't even know they're caught in to be able to take another look at things and kind of give people a fresh perspective on it. Subject matter, something that's cultural or work within work culture, I think you might be well equipped to comment on that kind of thing.” He said next, “But finding your voice is I think going to be gratifying to you, regardless of where you end up, employing and you never hurt yourself by publishing those writing skills, never.”

So I’m here to tell you that I’m taking career advice from a psychic. In our most recent conversation, he told me that he owns 7 houses. After two degrees from UC Berkeley and fifty yeas as a psychic, I’d say that he has more than made it. Would I rather listen to a career counselor in the Columbia Business School Career Management Center who might administer a standardized assessment and walk me through the results, or would it be better to trust someone who can actually see what’s happening with me on a universal wavelength? TBH, I’m going with the latter.

I have to tell you something kind of weird. I spoke with Pat again on May 4th. It had been ten months since I had consulted with him. I revealed my intent to begin writing about emerging consumer brands and products. He told me that this suited me well and then he went on to blow me away again by saying,

“You know who is really really good at this stuff? I can’t stand her but she is one of the best branding examples ever was Martha Stewart.” He went on, “As much as her personality and elitism and other sorts of elements of her personality - dishonesty for that matter, she did go to jail - are unpleasant, nobody had really done a lifestyle brand like that before. Every middle class young woman in America was buying her products and gravitating towards some sort of style that she represented. You have the potential to do something like that except that it’s going to be a little more updated and cosmopolitan than Martha Stewart, I think.”

I was pretty flummoxed. Martha was my muse. Just one more reason to lean into psychic wisdom as a proxy for finally trusting my own intuition.

My inner skeptic wonders if weekly sessions with the psychic would have been higher ROI than a mid-career MBA. If I hadn’t gone to business school, I certainly wouldn’t have made the slides or given the speech, or even been framing my “what’s next” in the way that led me here. So in a small way, this recent investment in another credential did help me arrive at this moment. I do wish I had studied journalism, but as media companies are cratering and AI threatens the livelihood of professional writers, I’m optimistic that my MBA will help me maneuver through the inevitable twists and turns.

As for that confidence gap of mine, this time the decision to do something authentically me has helped me feel better about this decision. I think that’s how it’s actually supposed to work. Betraying our intuition cuts down our confidence level. But honoring intuition helps build confidence. And this time, I’m not starting from a deficit.