Order my USA TODAY Bestselling book: toxicgrit.com TOXIC GRIT: How to have it all and (actually) love what you have. It will help you create a new approach to ambition and find space for all the diverse parts of yourself. Join 75K+ others who read my newsletter 🧩 Life's a Game at amandagoetz.com. It’s full of free tips to play the game of life at a whole new level. In 2018 I found myself at the height of my marketing career with 3 kids under the age of 4 and filing for divorce. In a world telling me to find alignment......I realized that was impossible. The work version of me didn't want to leave early to go be with the kiddos. The mom version of me didn't want to miss a moment with them. I wanted to be fiercely independent and yet also wanted to find love again. Other versions of me didn't want to feel responsible for anything or anyone. This diversity within me led to the creation of my Character Theory Framework. This framework helped me to create space for the 10 characters that make up the movie of your life:  The CEO → wants to pursue big goalsThe Partner → desires companionship  The Soloist → cares about personal growth and development The Caregiver → deep desire to take care of others and show up for themThe Goddess → wants to be desired and pursue pleasure  The Lazy One → loves to couch rot, no goals whatsoever The Socialite → values connection The Creative → desires creation and creativity The Doctor → your inner health &amp; wellness character The Explorer → craves novelty And it helped me. I was able to let go of the idea of balance and give permission for hierarchy, boundaries and the transition sequences necessary to embody these diverse characters. So I put it all in a book and it was an instant best seller!! I'm so excited for you to create space for all parts of you and to see ambition as multi-dimensional. Follow me here for advice as I build a multi-hyphenate life as a CMO, Author, Mom of 3 and getting married again. 

Amanda Goetz

Placing top overseas operators with pearltalent.com

Monty Ngan

Uber's CEO set a tough rule for his team: if they don't respond to his Saturday email, they should expect a follow-up on Sunday demanding an explanation.

Dara Khosrowshahi made waves recently on The Diary Of A CEO podcast when he laid out his leadership philosophy pretty bluntly. To him, it's work hard or get out- and part of that is responding on weekends if you don't want to be flagged.

On paper, you'd think his philosophy checks out: Uber turned around from burning $2.5B a year into generating over $9.8B in free cash flow.

At first it looks hard to argue with those numbers. And even I get his conviction - grit compounds and output follows obsession. I've lived that firsthand -- during our early days Isaac and I were deep in the trenches fighting for a mission to close the global opportunity gap with no VC safety net in sight. 

But where I disagree with Dara's approach is how his company builds a culture where his team never really gets to switch off.

There's a version of "work hard" that's about personal drive, internal fire, and the desire to build something real. Dara has that, and most founders I know also have that. And I do genuinely think it's non-negotiable.

But once you turn hard work into a system that expects you to be on all the time, that's when it turns into an unsustainable work ethic. Instead of building great teams, it creates burned-out ones who eventually perform worse and stop caring about the mission altogether.

I protect my team's weekends - not because I'm soft on standards, but because I've seen what happens when someone comes into Monday rested and fired up vs someone who spent Sunday anxious about an unanswered email. The latter rarely does their best thinking.

If your team needs a Sunday check-in to stay engaged, that's not an accountability system - it's a sign the people running it built the wrong culture to begin with. True accountability comes when your people are motivated to put their best every single day.

Co-Founder @ Pearl Talent | Helping US founders hire AI-trained global operators

Claude can now generate the kind of market analysis people pay McKinsey & Company $5k+ for in about 10 minutes.

I spent 10 months at McKinsey before leaving. Long enough to understand how work is done - and long enough to realize that a lot of what people pay consulting firms for is structured thinking under pressure.

When I look at what these prompts are producing - TAM analyses, competitive landscapes, unit economics built out in a single session - I recognize the scaffolding. Define the market, segment the customers, estimate growth, layer in assumptions. It somehow maps closely to how consulting work is done. 

But here’s the part that doesn’t show up in the prompts.

At McKinsey, the first draft is rarely the final answer. Teams spend a lot of time pressure-testing assumptions - questioning the market definition, the growth projections, and the logic behind the model. The clean slide a client sees usually comes after many rounds of debate and refinement.
That’s the part AI can’t really replicate yet: judgment. In high-stakes decisions, it can’t tell when assumptions are shaky or when the model is pointing the wrong way.

Part of why I ended up leaving was realizing that the frameworks are powerful, but the real fun for me was building things with them in the real world.

It’s also something I think about a lot while building Pearl Talent. We see founders using AI to generate first-pass strategy docs or research all the time now. The bottleneck isn’t the thinking anymore - it’s execution. Someone still needs to turn that strategy into outreach, systems, customer ops, recruiting, product work, all the messy real stuff.

AI is making structured thinking cheaper and faster. But turning thinking into reality? That part is still very human.

Curious how others are seeing this shift. How are other founders here using AI for early-stage strategy or research?

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Monty Ngan

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Monty Ngan

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