Things People Don't Tell You About Success
Publication: Fast Company
When Laura Gassner Otting’s first “big idea” book, Limitless: How to Ignore Everybody, Carve Your Own Path, and Live Your Best Life, came out in 2019, it debuted at No. 2 on The Washington Post best seller list, right behind Michelle Obama’s book Becoming. The success was greater than she expected, and it led to lots of speaking invitations.
“I had done a keynote where I was an opener for [Nobel Peace Prize laureate] Malala [Yousafzai],” she recalls. “I was on the plane home and thought, ‘This is amazing. It’s exciting. It’s humbling. What else can I do?’”
The visions of what could be suddenly gave way to anxiety, stress, and impostor syndrome. “All those things that happen when you imagine a version of yourself that you didn’t know was quite possible,” she says. “It was wonderful, but it was also kind of hell. It was ‘wonderhell.’”
