I spoke to IBM and the most remarkable thing happened. While the audience was majority male, the people on stage were majority female.
They brought a woman client to tell her story — Neeli Bendapudi, the president of Penn State — and they had a panel where three of the four panelists were women, and they had me as their keynote speaker.
And, what was even more remarkable is that no one said a word about it. They didn’t congratulate themselves, nor did they wave a flag of performative allyship. They simply brought the best people to the stage for the event they wanted to create. They simply put these women on the stage because those are the people in senior leadership roles in their company, and the people with whom they’ve partnered.
It’s not an accident that IBM’s stock is soaring today.
So, that’s a brag about IBM.
And here’s a brag about me: when I got off the stage, their event manager looked at me and said, “Wow, that was the best motivational keynote we’ve ever had.”
And, to think, I was minutes away from quitting the business that morning before I even went on stage.
Busy is Bullsh*t
After I got off stage, I jumped on a train and raced up to Providence to have dinner with my son, then grab his 4WD Subaru, to leave the next morning for a weekend in Vermont with my husband. Today (Monday), as I write this newsletter, I’m 30,000 feet in the air heading to Vegas to deliver a keynote to TransUnion on Wednesday. And the next morning? I’ll be waking up in Scottsdale to run 20 miles with my training buddy as one of our last long runs before the Tokyo Marathon on March 2. (Fun fact: I’m on a 12:15pm flight to Tokyo on Feb 26, but giving a local keynote that morning at 8:30am before I leave.)
“I’m too busy! How do you fit it all in? How do you do it all?”
If you’re thinking that, you aren’t alone. I am told that a lot. And here’s the truth:
We wear busy like a badge of honor, but really, it’s just a shield we use to avoid making hard choices. We’re not too busy—we just haven’t decided what matters enough to fight for. And whenever anyone tells me, “I’m too busy,” I hear them say, “It’s simply not that important to me.”
I have to run these 20 miles. It’s the “you did hard sh*t run so you can finish the race run.” My running buddy has a place in Scottsdale where she happens to be this week. So, it’s either run early with her in the Arizona warmth, or run by myself in the Boston snow this weekend. Easy decision, so it gets prioritized.
We all have never-ending to-do lists, back-to-back meetings, and inboxes that just won’t quit. We convince ourselves that being busy means we’re important, successful, thriving. But busy isn’t the same as productive. And busy distracts us from the prioritization.
Busy isn’t the same as fulfilled. Busy is just noise. And worse—it’s an excuse. An excuse to avoid the hard, messy, meaningful work of figuring out what actually matters.
So no, I’m not “too busy” to train for a marathon while flying across the country to keynote for thousands of people. I’ve just made a choice. A choice to prioritize what makes me better, stronger, and more aligned with the life I want. Because when we strip away the busyness, what’s left? Just the work. The real work. The work that matters.
Here’s what I know to be true: we all prioritize and, therefore, make time for what really matters to us.
