Reading: Reinventing Yourself After a Big Giant Hairy Public Failure

Failing on the front page of The Wall Street Journal is a whole other level of grief. But Sallie Krawcheck not only survived it, she thrived, going on to found the Ellevate Network and co-found Ellevest investments. On this episode of the Reinvent Yourself podcast, Sallie talks about how being the girl no one wanted to sit with in the seventh grade lunchroom taught her to overcome adversity, and shaped her into a leader who believes in the power of money and women.

Sallie’s Top 3 Reinvention Tips

1. Give yourself time to really get to know yourself.
You can’t reinvent if you don’t know which direction you’re reinventing in. The hardest part of my reinvention was figuring out what I wanted to do. So I’ve got two ways that I get to know myself. One way is I wake up early in the morning, and write down everything in my head. And the other is I sort of do the same thing over wine at night. What I’m trying to do is take away all the societal expectations and the reasons why not, and start off. I hit it all kinds of ways: When I’m on my deathbed, what do I want to look back at? What do I love? What do I hate? How do I see myself? Because sometimes so many years have past, that we’ve just forgotten who we really are underneath.

2. Having a lot of loose connections is more useful than having a few close ones.
Your next opportunity is going to come from someone you don’t expect it to come from. It’s gonna be somebody that you met at XYZ conference who knows things you just don’t know and has connections you just don’t have. So you’ve got to get out there and get to know people. And just be giving to your network. Do favors for your them all the time, and they’ll bring favors back to you.

3. There are 100 opportunities that flow by you every day.
You just don’t see them. So once you really know what you want to do, once you’ve got the connections ,you’ve got to be the alert, because there are 100 opportunities to be successful. You’ve got to grab them, and you’ve got to be ready to see them for what they are.

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