“That’s when I learned that I had a lot more to offer than I had thought.”

The job Jasmine “JB” Badie thought she had prepared for never came. She had already worked with Beyoncé on a Super Bowl performance, the “Formation” video, and Lemonade. When auditions arrived for the Formation World Tour, Badie says she trained twice a day, lost weight after receiving blunt notes about the look the production wanted, and walked into the room believing she had done everything asked of her. Then she did not get the dancer job.

The rejection hurt, but what followed would change the way Badie understood her own usefulness. She was called back as a stand-in, an assignment that initially confused her. She was shorter than Beyoncé and did not resemble her. The point, Badie came to understand, was not resemblance. She was being asked to show what she would do in the artist’s position, to interpret the music and stage from the center rather than the background. “That’s when I learned that I had a lot more to offer than I had thought,” she says. Eventually she began learning artist development, choreography, movement coaching, and the mechanics of building a performer. “I’m not the one driving this car,” she remembers realizing.

For someone who had spent years trying to get onto the stage, Badie was discovering that some of her strongest work might involve shaping what happened on it.

That realization makes more sense in the context of a childhood that was never particularly specialized. Badie grew up in the Atlanta area and moved to McDonough, Georgia, during grade school. Her parents kept trying activities with Badie and her younger sister, looking for the thing that would stick. There was gymnastics, tap, karate, tennis, track, softball. She sang in chorus, learned to read music early, and gravitated toward theater. Dance increasingly consumed her attention, but she was not raised inside the competition circuit. Living far from Atlanta made consistent studio training harder to reach. Much of her education came from listening closely to music and catching performances whenever she could.

A flyer changed the scale of that ambition. Around 14 or 15, Badie auditioned for a dance company called Pop Stars, about an hour from home. There she met young dancers including JaQuel Knight and Sean Bankhead, friendships that would follow her into the professional dance world. They were teenagers imagining careers in music, choreography, production, and performance. Badie knew she wanted Los Angeles, but she did not get there immediately. She spent a year at Valdosta State studying English, imagined starting a magazine, worked ordinary jobs, and watched friends make the move first. “I was a bit of a late bloomer,” she says. Confidence took longer than ambition.

She finally relocated in 2013, taking small jobs, saving money, and sleeping on friends’ couches. Then Knight called. A spot had opened in Beyoncé’s Super Bowl production. “Pack your bags, you’re going to New Orleans,” he told her.

Badie’s first encounter with Beyoncé became its own lesson in how quickly an overlooked dancer could become essential. During rehearsal, Beyoncé was working through a Southern dance step Badie knew well and asked her to demonstrate it. Suddenly Badie, who remembers herself then as shy and overwhelmed by the scale of the room, was showing the movement to the group. Beyoncé insisted the step had to carry the quality Badie demonstrated. Badie returned to her place in formation. Years later, when they worked together again, Beyoncé remembered her: “Oh, that’s JB!”

The story captures something Badie still seems to value more than status: being ready when the room suddenly asks more of you than you expected to give. She brought the same attitude to Sabrina Carpenter. When Badie got the call for Carpenter’s 2023 MTV Video Music Awards pre-show, she did not treat the smaller stage as provisional. “I always take even the smallest things as if they were the biggest,” she says, because that is practice for the moment when they actually become big. Her work with Carpenter grew as Badie found the kind of artist-development relationship she had long wanted, one where choreography could be part of constructing a performer rather than simply supplying steps.

Yet for a person whose career has depended on constant readiness, Badie now talks just as seriously about becoming unavailable. After long projects, she may take several days away alone. She goes to movies, travels, bowls, hikes, rides her motorcycle, and sometimes does very little at all. “The real work is learning how to rest,” she says. More tellingly: “When you’re needed all the time, you forget how to not be needed.”

That tension, between relentless preparation and the discipline of stopping, runs through Badie’s story now. She is extending her storytelling beyond movement, returning to the writing she loved in college and finishing two children’s books, including This Little Light of Mine, built around affirmations and emotional guidance for young readers. The dancer who once thought the goal was simply to make it onto a tour has become more interested in what can be built around a performer, a story, or a child learning how to speak to herself. In the conversation that follows, Badie talks about rejection, reinvention, confidence, rest, faith, and what happens when the role you wanted turns out to be smaller than the work you were actually capable of doing.

JB, it’s a delight to meet you. Before we dive in and talk about your amazing work, our readers would love to learn about JBaddie’s personal origin story. Can you share with us the story of your childhood, how you grew up, and particularly the seeds of all the amazing work and creativity that has come since then?

JBaddie: Oh my goodness. Well, I’m from Atlanta, Georgia. I moved to McDonough, Georgia during grade school and lived there. I have a younger sister. We grew up, and I was really big in sports and just the arts in high school and middle school. I was very chorus-heavy; I learned how to read music at an early age. I took that even to college where I would compete in All-State, just singing and doing anything in the theatrics world. I was very interested in that.

I learned in about 10th grade that I really wanted to pursue dancing. I knew in my mind, Okay, this is what I want to do. But my parents were really into the concept of trying to find the niche for me and my sister. We tried out different things: I did gymnastics, I did tap for a while, I did karate, we did tennis, softball, and track. Softball was a big thing for me in high school.

I wasn’t your typical competition kid. I was never with a company because we lived so far away from the city, so it was a little bit more difficult to find those classes and get that training. My passion for dance and movement really came from just listening to music and watching my idols perform on stage and in videos. Because our technology was not the same as it is now, it was very much word-of-mouth — catch it if you can — and just becoming true fans of that artwork.

I grew up watching some of my favorite people that I actually work with and am really close with today. By 10th grade, I knew: Okay, I think this is what I want to do.

There was a flyer that came out — so random — for this company called Pop Stars, which was similar to Monsters of Hip Hop or Culture Shock, but it was an hour away from where I lived. I was with a friend at the time in school, and I was like, “Oh, we have to do this,” because there was only one other person that I knew who loved dance as much as I did in school.

We went to the audition, and that’s when I met some of my closest and dearest friends who are at the top of the industry today — JaQuel Knight, Sean Bankhead, and a few others. I was 14 or 15. We all grew up together; that’s when I met them. From there, that skyrocketed my passion and drive to really make it in LA and make it in general. We all had the dream of becoming something in the industry, whether in music, as directors, or producers. Dance was what brought us together, and that’s been almost 20-plus years of friendship since then.

In 10th grade, I got my niche, and since then I was like, “Okay, I want to move to LA.” But that took some time. Life happens, and the concept of going to college after high school was a thing. I had a lot of passions in all the different kinds of arts. I went to Valdosta State for about a year, majored in English, and I had a passion for writing — I wanted to start my own magazine, back when we actually read magazines that you flip.

Dance just really kept calling me. The older I got and through all the little nine-to-five jobs that I had, I knew I had to get to LA. My friends had already moved to LA, and I was a bit of a late bloomer. It took me a second to really tap into the confidence and know that this was something that I could do, but I knew that I always wanted to. I just had to figure out how and grow up a bit.

I finally made the move in 2013. I was going back and forth at first, but I finally moved, doing little small jobs here and there. I had this idea that I had to work, save money, and just hustle — sleeping on couches with friends and figuring it out.

In 2013, the first major job I got was with Beyoncé when we did her first Super Bowl. It’s so funny how it happened because they had already cast everyone for the job. I was maybe the last on the list to go in, and somebody called out or said they couldn’t do it. My friend JaQuel, who was choreographing at the time, called me and said, “Pack your bags, you’re going to New Orleans.”

After that, it skyrocketed. I grew up loving music and really just seeing a different language with how I hear things. It was so nice to watch people express themselves in that way, and really seeing the wave of music. For people to perform and actually feel — I can see someone’s ear, see how they interpret certain sounds, and then they make their own cadence to it. That’s always been a love of mine, that language. Ever since then, I was like, “I have to do this. I want to dance, I want to perform.” That stage was really calling me.

I definitely was not the competition girl or in a strict school. Even to this day, I feel like I’m still a student. I still train if I have time. Part of me wishes I had that experience with the whole ballet and techniques, that strict training, but no regrets. I’m here, and I love how it turned out.

JB, you’re an amazing storyteller. You really had me riveted. Speaking of stories, I’m sure you have some incredible stories from your career, all the amazing places you’ve been, the different people you’ve performed with, and I’m sure this is hard to single out. Can you share with our readers two stories that stand out in your mind from your amazing career? Take it anywhere you like.

JBaddie: Oh my goodness, wow. The first time that Beyoncé met me stands out. We were doing the Super Bowl — mind you, there were hundreds of girls — and we were going over this one step. Back then it was called the “onion booty”; it’s an old Southern dance. There was a moment where she was trying to figure out how to do it. JaQuel Knight was helping her, and then she saw me do it. She was like, “Wait, can she come up here?”

Mind you, I’m this little girl feeling like a small fish in this big pond, and I’m just like, Wow, okay. JaQuel is like my brother, so he goes, “Yeah, JB, come here real quick.” I’m like, Oh my God, this is happening. She was like, “Yeah, can we do it like this?” And I had to show all these girls how to do this step.

JaQuel turned on some of the music we used to listen to back in the day — I’ll never forget it, it was a song called “Going to the Moon” by Future. Such a ratchet song, but the move was very much in that pocket. I had to do it in front of everybody, standing right next to her. It was the first time that we had a moment.

It was crazy because I felt so comfortable, but I was also really shy at the time. My confidence hadn’t really grown until recently, not for nothing. But it was just cool to feel that validation. She said, “Okay, if we don’t do it like this, then we can’t do the step. It has to be like this.” And I was like, Okay, great. I went back into my little corner and got in my spot.

That was 2013 for her first Super Bowl. Cut to the next job we got on, which was Lemonade and starting to work on “Formation” for her second Super Bowl. I hadn’t seen her in a while, and I came in and she was like, “Oh, that’s JB!” She remembered me right off the rip. That started our ongoing conversation and understanding of who I was. That moment will definitely stick with me forever.

I was never just a Beyoncé fan in the traditional sense. I thought she was amazing because I saw a Black woman on camera who had hips and curves. It was like, It’s okay — I can be a thick girl from the South and still be amazing and beautiful in my own skin. That to me is what she represented. My taste in music at the time wasn’t R&B or ballads — I was a different girl — but I loved her because of how she related to a little girl at home who looks like her, has the same curves, and it being accepted. There was a fearlessness about her that I was truly a fan of. It was never in my plan that I had to dance for this woman; she was just someone I looked up to in Hollywood. That story will stick out for me forever as the beginning.

Another one: when I got the call to do the VMAs for Sabrina, but it was the pre-show, not the main stage. That was 2023. By this point, I’m further along in my career and used to things, but I met this artist who just felt like my artist. She has been doing this for so long, but when she came to me and we started working together and building, we really started manifesting a lot of the dreams that we both had. I’ve always wanted to have my own artist to develop and pour into as much as I can.

On my bucket list was to do an award show. When I got the call that we were doing the pre-show, I treated it like, Girl, we’re getting there. This is it. I always take even the smallest things as if they were the biggest, because treating it as the biggest thing is practice for when you actually get there.

I felt so excited: We are at MTV, we’re on the stage, and we’re going to get that main stage. The next year, she had Moonmen. The manifestation is real. When I got that pre-show and Coachella for her, it was the start of knowing we were getting there. It’s the mustard seed thing: if you have faith in this one little thing, you watch it grow. I speak things that be not as though they were, and I’m a true believer in that. That moment sticks out because I was just so happy.

There’s a saying that “no” is not rejection, but redirection. Do you have a story like that where you got a “no” to an opportunity, but that led to an even better opportunity?

JBaddie: Absolutely, 100%. When Beyoncé was having auditions for the Formation Tour, I had already gotten notes about having to lose weight. Back in those days, there was a very clear-cut, transparent honesty: “This is the look that I want.” That’s just what the industry was.

The tour was coming up, and I had just worked with her on the second Super Bowl, the “Formation” music video, and the whole Lemonade project. I had been working my ass off on two-a-days. Mind you, I’m 5'4", and at the time, Bey was around 5'7". The look was 5'5" and up; she hadn’t had a short dancer in years. I had been working my tail off trying to get in shape. I went to those auditions, lost a lot of weight, nailed it, did everything great — and I did not get the dancer job.

I was devastated. I felt like, Damn, okay. I didn’t know what was next or what I was supposed to do. I had worked so hard and done everything I was told to do for that role, and didn’t get it.

After that, they called me to come in and be her stand-in. When you hear “stand-in,” you think of someone who looks like her and is her same height. I’m thinking, Wait, I’m not her height. We look nothing alike. What I learned was she wanted to see what I would do if I were her in her position.

There was something there that she saw. There was a starness there, not to toot my own horn. For her to want to study me, see me, and understand what I would do in her position being her, I was like, Oh.

At the time, I didn’t know what that meant; I thought it was another chance to audition! I wanted to show that I could learn everything, just in case she wanted to bring me on, because she has been known to do that. But that was not the purpose at all.

That’s when I learned that I had a lot more to offer than I had thought. I had to break down what I felt a goal was, take myself out of it, and realize, I’m not the one driving this car. There was something more to my purpose that I had no idea about.

I’m so grateful for that time because it’s necessary to wear every hat that is given to you, whether it fits or not. Through that process, I learned how to do artist development. I learned how to train an artist in singing, how to be an artist on stage, how to choreograph, and how to teach movement. If I had my eyes so caught up on the goal of just wanting to be a background dancer, I would have never been able to receive that.

A few years after that, after our homecoming Coachella, I ended up going on tour with her anyway! The dreams still come; you just have to realize it’s on a higher purpose, not your own time.

No “no” is going to make me feel like I can’t. It’s all a redirection. If more kids in our industry received it that way and didn’t take it as personal rejection, they’d have a lot more fun, be less stressed, and learn they love something even more than they thought. It wasn’t until six or seven years ago when I realized, Oh, I can choreograph. I can do this.

A “no” is a moment to take a beat. The real work is in the rest — resting in what you know to be true, resting in what you’ve manifested, and trusting that the seed you planted is out there growing. You don’t have to keep checking on it; the words you water it with make it grow. The moments where it gets quiet are necessary. I’m grateful for the nos because clearly it was a “no” for a reason — I needed to hear something else.

Please share any exciting new projects you’re working on now — any new collaborations, new initiatives, or new albums. We’d love to hear about it. Please feel free to speak as elaborately as you’d like.

JBaddie: Well, I can’t say too much about what’s happening depending on when this comes out, but we’re gearing up for the VMAs soon. I can’t say who I’m working with, but you’ll see for sure.

This year, I finished two of my children’s books, which I’m so excited about! I’ve been wanting to get these out for so long. I finally had some downtime to lock in on it, put a period to the page, and everything is finished. We’re in drafts right now as far as illustrations, looking to have my first release for Christmas, if not New Year’s — fingers crossed.

I’m a big believer in giving back to our kids and spreading the right message. A lot of things these days can be misunderstood or miscommunicated, and it’s really not as complex as it needs to be. It’s very simple. I’m really excited to talk to the babies, give some affirmations, and release this book. It’s such a gift for me.

There are not so many stars who write children’s books. Where did that come from? What’s the story behind that?

JBaddie: Since college, I’ve been writing forever. I’m big on writing scripts and different kinds of character breakdowns. It’s a lot of what I use in my creation when it comes to certain dance numbers: What story are we trying to tell, and how can it be relayed to the audience or through the camera lens?

Writing is a way to escape for me. I can write something very positive for children, but then I can also write edgy fanfiction and make nice coffee table books if I want to spice it up a bit! I love to read and dive into people’s minds. It’s an art form that I’ve fallen in love with.

Children are our future. It sounds like “We Are the World,” but it’s just real. The book is called This Little Light of Mine. It’s full of little reminders for when you feel down or feel anxiety, with ways of releasing that explained as if you’re an eight-year-old.

I feel like it’s a reminder for parents, too — reminding myself that I’m great so my kid can know this too, instead of leaving them to figure it out on their own. We all need guidance.

My generation is very much the bridge that can close the gap between the communication of what needs to happen, what can happen, and how to listen to make things happen. If we embrace this younger generation with sensitivity, discipline, and understanding, we can close that gap. I’m all for communication, transparency, and just being happy. It’s not that deep!

I’ve been working with an illustrator named Brie Ritz. She’s awesome, and she’s been doing some really great drafts for me. We’re looking to have that out this Christmas for a little stocking stuffer.

Can you share some of the self-care routines that you do to help your body, mind, and heart to thrive?

JBaddie: My favorite one, especially after a job, is sitting still. Resting — that’s real work. I swear, I live by that mantra: the real work is learning how to rest. Turning my brain off, watching a nice rerun, going to the movies, and really doing R&R.

Normally, if a project takes five months back-to-back, once I’m done, I take at least a five-day trip somewhere by myself. I love to travel. I really love to sit still, turn everything off, binge-watch, binge-eat, and chill. That’s important for me.

I also love to be active when I’m not tired. I love to bowl, I love to skydive, and I love to go hiking when it’s not too hot outside. I have a new dog, and I’ve taught her how to use talking buttons, so she talks back to me now!

I’ve been enjoying doing normal things and not being so caught up in work. I’ve had to relearn that. When you’re needed all the time, you forget how to not be needed. Taking a summer off and being okay with not being necessary was an adjustment, but you have to relearn that when you’re always on the go.

Therapy is always great. I love going to the sauna and working out with my trainer in the mornings. Sometimes I will get a room at the Four Seasons for two days just because I don’t want to be in my house — treat yourself! Spoil yourself, because it’s already done.

Anything self-serving is crucial for repair and replenishment. My mom always said you can’t give 100% if you’re only at 50%. Refilling your cup is important because running on fumes isn’t fair to the people you’re giving to. Recognizing when it’s time to refill and actually doing it is so important to me.

Did I hear correctly that you said you like skydiving?

JBaddie: I do! I’ve been twice already. You have to go 10 times to learn how to go by yourself. I’ll probably do tandem jumping for a while because jumping alone takes a lot of trust, but I’ll jump with somebody else doing all the heavy lifting all day! It’s such a rush.

I also have a motorcycle. I’m obsessed with anime cartoons, and I have a cat-ear helmet that I wear on my motorcycle to be obnoxious on the street for no reason! It’s nice to take long rides in the hills and by the beach. Anything peaceful and chill, I’m all for.

JB, this is our final aspirational question. Because of your amazing work and the platform that you’ve built, you’re honestly a person of enormous influence. If you could spread an idea or inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? Because you never know what your idea can inspire. You could say in this video, in this article, “I believe in ABC,” and it can spread very far.

JBaddie: Wow, that’s heavy. I just keep thinking about communication. If everyone had a lot more grace in general with everything — grace meaning consideration, understanding, and taking a beat to pause before responding.

I’ve been in places where I had to learn not to take things personally and consider what someone else could be going through. If everyone had a little bit more grace and understanding, even for your worst enemy, it could change so much — not just with the world, but with self. You wouldn’t be so stressed out.

There are a lot of angry people out there, and if I didn’t practice grace, I could be a whole different person. But it’s a choice. It’s a choice to decide, I’m going to set the temperature today to be this, and nothing else is going to turn that thermostat down.

Give yourself a little space and a little grace to say, “It’s all right, I’m trying each day.” We’re blessed to have each day as another opportunity. Just grace. If there was a little bit more of that, we’d have a lot more smiles and hugs, and it would be okay.

That’s why I love music so much — it can change your aura, your spirit, and your whole vibration. Music connects us all in love. More love, more grace, and trusting each other as humans having a human experience.

I really love listening to that song “Happy” by Pharrell. I’m sure that song gets on everyone’s nerves because they played it everywhere, and I’ve worked with Pharrell too. But it’s such a great song! It pumps me up.

100%. It’s sad that the world’s so cynical. Who could be against a song about happiness?

JBaddie: Right? Meanwhile, you’re complaining that you aren’t happy! Turn the song on! There’s power in your tongue and power in manifesting. That’s why I pay attention to what I listen to. It can set your spirit. Listening to good lyrics sets your mindset.

So JB, how can our readers purchase your book? How can our readers watch any of your performances? How can they continue to follow you online, and how can they support you and your amazing work in any possible way?

JBaddie: My Instagram, @msjbaddie, has all the updates. My website, jasminebatie.com, should be done around October 15th with all my stories and the official book announcement. There will probably be a pre-order sale around December 1st. That’s where you can find all my updates!

JB, it’s been so amazing meeting you. I wish you continued success, good health, and only blessings. It was truly a pleasure, and I’m happy we didn’t have to wait until the end of October for this.

JBaddie: Me too! I’m so happy it worked out and our schedules permitted it. I’m looking forward to seeing it. It’s going to be great.

It’s going to be an amazing article. I’m so excited to share it with the world. I hope we can do this again in the future!

JBaddie: Absolutely! Let’s do it. I can come to Maryland — we have to grab some coffee. It was so lovely meeting you.

Jasmine Badie Turned A Beyoncé Tour Rejection Into A Career Redirection was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“Why do I need to read your book, Dara? I’ve lived it.”

I had the pleasure of talking with Dara Fleischer while she sat in her closet (a.k.a. cloffice), surrounded by the evidence of a love affair with fashion that had nearly destroyed her financial security and sense of self. Somewhere in that collection are more than 100 pairs of Golden Goose sneakers, she estimates, almost all of them unworn. There are also roughly 40 to 50 pairs of cowboy boots. For most fashion lovers, such a collection might represent the ultimate dream. For Fleischer, it has become a reminder of years spent chasing a satisfaction that never seemed to arrive. Now, at 54, the former fashion editor is confronting an uncomfortable truth: she spent much of her professional life immersed in the business of making people want things, while privately struggling to stop buying them herself.

Her fascination with clothes began innocently enough. Born in Montreal, Fleischer spent part of her childhood in Burlington, Vermont, where her mother owned a clothing store called Just Pants. By seven or eight, she was helping customers at the register and assembling outfits on the sales floor. She kept a diary as a child, eventually studied journalism at Ryerson University in Toronto, and developed an ambition to write about fashion. To Fleischer, clothing was never merely merchandise. It was “a wearable work of art,” an expression of individuality that she found endlessly fascinating.

After moving to New York in her early twenties, she began photographing herself in outfits from boutiques around the city and asking readers to choose their favorites. The project, called Total Fashion Junkie, emerged before social media had transformed fashion blogging into an industry. Fleischer remembers the attention it attracted from publications including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. She went on to build a career spanning fashion journalism, personal shopping, retail marketing, e-commerce, and brand partnerships, with editorial work that included LOULOU, FASHION, and InStyle. Fashion wasn’t simply something she enjoyed. It was her profession, her expertise, and a central part of her identity.

Yet behind that professional identity, another relationship with shopping was developing. Fleischer describes years of loneliness, frequent moves, and career dissatisfaction, even while landing jobs she had once dreamed of having. Buying something new offered a brief escape from those feelings. The excitement came from the search itself, whether she was hunting for cowboy boots or adding another pair of sneakers to her cart. Once the purchase was complete, the pleasure evaporated. She calls the aftermath “shopping aftershocks,” a combination of anxiety, guilt, shame, and buyer’s remorse. The cycle became increasingly difficult to interrupt.

The financial consequences were severe. Fleischer says she accumulated significant debt five separate times, with her most recent crisis leaving her $50,000 in debt while she was also dealing with job losses. Creditors were calling. Her income had disappeared. Eventually, she liquidated her retirement savings to address the mounting obligations. Meanwhile, the packages kept arriving. During her years in a New York apartment building, she had even instructed the doorman to disable package notifications so her husband would not see how frequently she was shopping. She describes the secrecy as financial infidelity, recognizing that her purchases had become inseparable from the lies required to conceal them.

Perhaps the most revealing detail concerns her husband’s reaction to her forthcoming memoir. They have been married for 21 years, and Fleischer says he knows what happened, including the debt she had concealed early in their relationship and the retirement savings she eventually depleted. But he has no intention of reading her book. As she recounts his response: “Why do I need to read your book, Dara? I’ve lived it.” There is a weary bluntness to that remark that captures something a financial statement cannot. Shopping had affected more than her bank account. It had damaged trust within her marriage and complicated her sense of responsibility to their teenage boy/girl twins.

Two years ago, Fleischer began writing about what had happened. She would wake at three in the morning and record the purchases, the debts, the behavior she regretted, and the feelings she had long avoided examining. What started as private journaling became At My Limit: How I Lost My Savings and Sanity Due to Compulsive Shopping Addiction, her debut memoir, scheduled for publication on November 17, 2026. The decision required an unusual kind of professional reversal. A woman whose livelihood had depended on understanding and encouraging consumer desire was now publicly documenting its destructive consequences in her own life.

Fleischer has pursued recovery through psychiatric care, Debtors Anonymous, and support communities for compulsive shoppers. She now helps lead a no-buy group through The Shopping Shift, encouraging participants to interrupt their purchasing habits and recognize the feelings behind them. Her approach emphasizes accountability without pretending that recovery is complete. She still shops, but says she now does it with intention, and tells her husband whenever a package is on its way. She is also selling much of her accumulated wardrobe through her website, darafleischer.com, turning years of excessive consumption into an ongoing exercise in letting go.

Her story arrives at a moment when shopping has become almost frictionless. Influencer hauls, targeted advertisements, limited-time drops, and Buy Now, Pay Later services make it easier than ever to turn a passing desire into a purchase. Fleischer understands those mechanisms from both sides of the transaction. Yet she is careful to acknowledge her own responsibility rather than place all the blame on retailers. The larger question running through her work is what happens when ordinary consumer temptation encounters a deeply personal need for emotional relief.

These days, Fleischer speaks less about the season’s essential fashion purchases and more about her efforts to find satisfaction in writing, walking her dog, spending time outdoors, and connecting with people. Her preferred mantra is “filling my heart, not my cart.” It is a striking change for someone who once built an identity around being a Fashion Junkie. The closet is still there, along with hundreds of reminders of who she used to be. What makes her story compelling is that she is still sorting through them, trying to understand what was worth keeping and what she was hoping to find in the first place.

Such a delight to meet you. So, before we dive in and talk about your great work and your book, our readers would love to learn about Dara Fleischer’s personal origin story. Can you share with us a story of your childhood and how you grew up, and particularly the seeds of all the amazing creativity that has come since then?

Dara Fleischer: That’s a really good question. I definitely write about a lot of that in my new book, At My Limit, which we’ll get into in a bit. But first, my childhood. I’m originally from Montreal, Canada. I love Montreal. It’s the best city ever. But I’ve moved around a lot, mostly just for school, initially university, and then career.

So after Montreal, I lived in Toronto for a while. I was the shopping editor of LOULOU magazine (Rogers Media), Canada’s now defunct shopping publication. And then I moved to New York for about 25 years, and now I’m in Austin.

As for my childhood, I lived in Montreal and then my family moved to Burlington, Vermont when I was about six years old. I always forget to talk about that. My mother at the time had a clothing store called Just Pants. And I remember being seven, eight years old and I would help people at the cash register. I loved it. I was in my element at that age. I would help people on the sales floor, put together outfits, what have you. And I honestly think that’s when my obsession with fashion began.

Okay. Amazing. So, please tell us the next chapter. Tell us how you became such a fashion expert.

Dara Fleischer: Well, I think, I hate saying this, but it kind of is true that fashion is in my DNA. My mother is a shopaholic. And Mom, if you’re listening, I love you. I mean that in the best way possible. I really wanted to be a fashion reporter when I studied journalism at Ryerson University, which has since changed its name. I think I forget what it’s called now. But anyway, I wanted to be a fashion reporter. I just always loved knowing about the latest fashion. I loved meeting designers. I loved touching products, fabric, and just writing about it. To me, fashion is just the most creative expression of art, you know, a wearable work of art, if you will. And I knew from a very early age that I wanted to write. I kept a diary from around the time that I was living in Vermont when I was seven or so.

Fast forward to my early 20s after I graduated from Ryerson, I moved to New York. And my very first job, I was actually interning for a publication called Total New York. And I started writing a blog. I didn’t even know it was a blog at the time. This was way before social media. I’m aging myself, but it was called Total Fashion Junkie. And the premise of the blog was me gallivanting the city streets of New York, going to all these different boutiques, shopping, and then posing like selfies, what we call selfies now, and then asking people what outfit they liked best.

And then that just kind of blew up, and I wasn’t even getting paid, and I realized that maybe I was onto something. And honestly, that was the impetus for my fashion career. I really just wanted to continue along that trajectory, and I did in pretty much every single area. I dipped my toe in every single area of fashion from marketing to business development to sales to e-commerce and obviously writing.

Wait, so the name “Fashion Junkie,” is that like a tongue-in-cheek allusion to a shopping addiction?

Dara Fleischer: It was, and I write about it in my book. Fashion Junkie was my blog. I was one of the first fashion bloggers, and I hate saying that. People look at me like I have two heads. I really was one of the first fashion bloggers because The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Time Out New York wrote about my blog when I was interning at Total Fashion Junkie. This was back in 1996.

And I just turned it into a blog before I knew what a blog was. And I grabbed the Instagram handle @fashionjunkienyc. At that time I was living in New York, and I never changed it because I felt like it was a part of who I am. My identity. But I am a recovered shopper. I am a former fashion junkie.

Some people can’t appreciate high fashion. You know, there’s even a cynical saying that high fashion is so unusual that it has to go out of style in two months. So what is it about the latest fashion? What is it that makes it fashionable, when so often it seems so strange?

Dara Fleischer: You know, it’s funny because if you asked me right now, what are the top trends, I would not know how to answer that. I used to be the person that was glued to magazines like Vogue magazine, at least when physical magazines were still a “thing.”. But now I would have to say I was always heavily influenced by what people were wearing on the street. And I think a lot of high fashion comes from that.

I lived in New York for many years, so it’s a great city for people-gazing, just watching people on the street, going to a museum. Inspiration comes from so many different places. But it’s so funny because I never understood how a luxury designer dictates trends and what’s the tipping point when a fringe jacket is super cool and when does that become really tacky? I don’t know. I live in Austin, so I feel like fringe is never going away.

Western wear is never going away. But I think at the end of the day, you just have to find your own true personal style and dress for yourself because no one really cares what you wear. And I always say: your appearance is the least important thing about you.

So, aside from your book, tell us about the exciting things you’re working on now.

Dara Fleischer: The book was definitely my baby. It took a long time because it’s my life story, and I am working on a number of things right now. I’m still in book launch mode because the memoir officially releases November 17th. Today is November 5th. So, I’m still really focused on the book. I’m also focusing on my website, which was recently released. It’s called darafleischer.com. And I’ve been busy “selling my sickness”, so to speak. I’ve been posting on Instagram pretty much daily about the different things that I’m selling to atone for all my sins.

As you can see, I’m in my closet right now (a.k.a. My “cloffice”), and it still looks like this after five or so closet cleanouts where I’m rummaging through my closet deciding what to donate, what to sell. And on my website, I’m going to be selling a lot of things. For example, I have over 100 pairs of Golden Goose sneakers, which I’m ashamed to admit. Ninety-nine percent of them I’ve never worn. So, I’m selling those on my website. If anyone’s listening and wears a size 36, you are going to be in heaven. Visit darafleischer.com/closet — not that I’m encouraging anyone to shop!

I’m spending a lot of time weeding through my stuff because the reality is, most of us wear maybe 10% of what we own. So, I’m focusing on that. And my Instagram is @fashionjunkienyc. And I’m also focusing on my Substack (https://substack.com/@darafleischer) and just a lot of other fun creative projects.

So, let’s jump into the book. Tell us what the premise of the book is.

Dara Fleischer: It’s basically my life’s work: At My Limit: How I Lost My Savings and Sanity Due to Compulsive Shopping Addiction. That is literally what the book is about. I started writing it as a cautionary tale because I suffered from a horrible case of shopping addiction throughout my entire life. I didn’t know that I was an addict at the time. Denial, denial, denial! And I started writing this book two years ago when I was 52. I’m now 54, because I had to write the truth.

I had to hold myself accountable for all the horrible things that I had done. And it was unbelievably cathartic. I wrote it as a cautionary tale because I want other compulsive shoppers to know that they’re not alone. If someone out there is listening to this and you’re suffering in silence, don’t think that you’re a bad person. You’re not a bad person. You can change. There is hope and I’m here for you. There are a lot of different avenues to get better.

And that’s honestly why I write about my journey, admitting that I am powerless over this addiction, and I really had to forgive myself. I wrote every single day at 3:00 in the morning about what was going on inside my brain, how much I was spending, what I was buying, and some of the terrible things I did. And I’m not going to give it all away because I’d like for you all to read the book!. But that’s really the premise of my book.

You said the word “terrible things” a few times. Now, I imagine the terrible things are that you’re saying you maybe are buying a lot of clothes, or am I misunderstanding? Do you mean something more egregious?

Dara Fleischer: Yeah. So, as I said, I don’t want to give everything away because I write about all those things in the book, but the thing with shopping addiction, at least for me, horrible things like being in debt five times. Sadly, my last implosion, I was $50,000 in debt and I got fired from a full-time job. So, I had no income coming in and I just didn’t know what to do. I had creditors calling me. I had to liquidate my 401(k), my retirement fund, to stop the bleeding. That’s a horrible thing, no matter what age you are.

I also have 16-year-old twins. I certainly was not being a very good role model to them. And I really was tired of just treating myself like this; living in fear, anxiety, depression, and I’m married. What kind of wife was I being when there were packages coming in every single day? And a lot of the time I was hiding those packages. I call it stealth shopping or financial infidelity. So I really wasn’t being honest. I was lying not only to everyone, but I was also lying to myself, being in denial that I had a major shopping problem.

I’m not an expert. You’re the expert. But what they say is that addictions generally are trying to mask some kind of pain. That people are trying to tape over so that they can escape their pain. Do you think it was a similar thing, that the thrill of shopping was trying to mask something over?

Dara Fleischer: One hundred percent for me, and generally the case with other compulsive shoppers. We shop, and I shop, because I’m trying to numb the pain. What pain? For me, a lot of things. Because I moved so many times throughout my life, I never really felt like I had a tight-knit community of friends. I have, a number of really good friends in different cities because no one lives in one place anymore. But I really felt lonely. I felt that emptiness, that deep hole.

I also was never satisfied throughout my career. Yes, I worked in fashion throughout my entire life, as a fashion editor, even a personal shopper, a blogger. I mean, every job that I wanted I pretty much landed, but I was miserable. And the more money I made, the more I spent, the more I bought, the more in debt I became, and the more miserable I was. So, I really just kept shopping to fill that void.

And it gave me a temporary feeling of happiness. Really, when I was adding to cart or looking for the perfect pair of cowboy boots, it was the thrill, the find, you know, the hunt. But it really wasn’t actually getting that package in front of my doorstep that gave me that happiness. It was so fleeting. And I always refer to that feeling immediately after you buy, as shopping aftershocks. Those feelings of anxiety, shame, guilt, buyer’s remorse, and it’s really difficult. It’s about getting to the root of the problem and understanding what is going on inside so you can stop doing something so damaging like shopping and repair that relationship you have with yourself with something good and honorable.

So you mentioned that you wore or used 10% of the clothing. So let’s say you got those exciting cowboy boots, you would put them in the closet, and generally you’d put them in the closet and not try them on either?

Dara Fleischer: Yes, sadly that is 100% true. I have worn one or two pairs and I probably own 40, 50 pairs of cowboy boots, mostly from the same brand. And I know anyone who’s listening to this is probably like, she’s crazy, why doesn’t she wear anything? I haven’t shown a lot of things the love and attention they deserve. I think a lot of it is because of the shame. I just feel like I don’t want a reminder of all the things that I’ve purchased.

I’m also scared to wear things in front of my husband because I’m worried about that inevitable question, “Dara, where did you get that? I’ve never seen those boots before.” And another big component of this: a lot of serial shoppers are hoarders. We constantly collect things because the second I order a pair of cowboy boots or Golden Goose sneakers, I’m already onto the next thing even before the next package arrives. So that’s a very big part of it. And there was something at the time that was very comforting about having all of these things, these inanimate objects that I was surrounded by yet never wearing. It gave me a false sense of security and comfort that I never had.

I really appreciate your bravery and your candor sharing all this. You said that you’re afraid for your husband to find out, but I mean, I’m sure by now he’s found out and he’s read your book, I’m sure.

Dara Fleischer: I definitely confronted my husband. Yes, he knew what he was getting into when he married me. He knew that I was a fashion editor, that I absolutely loved fashion trends, but he didn’t know that when we first met, I was $30,000 in debt. That was the first time, credit card debt. And over the years, we’ve been married now for 21 years. He certainly knew there were endless stream of packages coming in.

When I lived in New York, it was much easier because we lived in an apartment building where there was a doorman and they had a package room. So, I always just told my doorman, you know, turn off all those package notifications. I didn’t want my husband seeing emails like, “Oh, Dara, you have a package delivery from Bergdorf’s,” or “You have a package delivery from Neiman Marcus or Holt Renfrew,” whatever it was.

But eventually, very recently, when I was in debt for my fifth time, embarrassingly so, I had to tell my husband what happened because I wiped out my retirement fund, my Vanguard fund, which he generously set up for me several years ago. I just had to tell him, and I just couldn’t live with the lies anymore. It was eating away at me like a flesh-eating disease. So, now he knows everything and he obviously knows that I’ve written a book. He will not read my book. And his answer is, “Why do I need to read your book, Dara? I’ve lived it.” And that is the truth.

So, what advice would you give for other couples on how to, like you said, how to address the quote-unquote financial infidelity, to address the lack of transparency in the relationship?

Dara Fleischer: For me, I think lying and financial infidelity is the same thing as having an affair. To me, it’s not that different. You have to tell the truth. You have to start with being honest and communicating. Right now, I still buy, but I buy intentionally and, you know, I’m not compulsively shopping like I used to. But I’ll tell my husband, I’ll say, “You know, Michael, I have a package on the way. Just so you know, I ordered a pair of sneakers from Adidas,” because I don’t want him to freak out. I don’t want to lie.

And I also talked to him about what I’m doing to try to recover. For a large amount of time when I started my recovery journey two years ago, I started Debtors Anonymous. I was going to virtual Zoom meetings and I told him what I was doing, and I really think he respected me for telling the truth and obviously just for working on my disease, if you will. And I’m also part of a group that’s called The Shopping Shift. It’s an online virtual group founded by Hannah Blass, also for overshoppers. And I think without making an effort and being honest and doing all those things, it’s really damaging to a marriage and it’s damaging to yourself.

For many addictions, people have to engage professional help. Do you think a shopping addiction is the same way, where you have to go to rehab, or how does that happen here?

Dara Fleischer: Yes. I think honestly there’s no one-size-fits-all approach. For me, I knew when I hit rock bottom, and it wasn’t just one incident, it was a culmination of things that happened over the years, I knew I had to get professional help. I knew that my husband wanted to help me, but he just didn’t know how.

So I started seeing a psychiatrist, and I was very fortunate that I was able to do so because it can be very expensive. But there are so many different avenues where you can find professional help, and I definitely urge someone to seek professional help. In my case, OCD medication was also warranted, but there’s no magic pill that cures shopping addiction or addiction of any kind.

I really think it’s a combination of things, whether it’s cognitive therapy. You have to have support. You can’t fight this alone. I always say shame and secrecy thrive in isolation. So, you need to find somebody that you trust, whether that’s a therapist or a good friend or one of these virtual communities like Debtors Anonymous or The Shopping Shift. There are so many different ways to go about it.

So when did you decide that you had to write your book?

Dara Fleischer: I always knew I wanted to write a book. I just didn’t know what that book would be about. And it was two years ago when I was in debt $50,000, the last time I was fired from two jobs within the span of two months. One I had for three years, the other one probably like nine months. I was so focused on shopping that it definitely affected productivity. And I just couldn’t take it anymore. I couldn’t live with myself. I felt my self-esteem had just plummeted. And I needed to do something to dig myself out of the hole. Obviously, pay off my debt, but I needed to do something creative and cathartic.

I’m a very creative person. As I said, I love to write. And the words really just poured out of me. So I started writing. It started off with a diary. I started journaling every day. And then I said to myself, you know what? I’m just going to turn this into a book with a goal of trying to help myself and others.

If there’s just one person out there that’s listening that’s suffering in silence or maybe in denial that I can help, then I can say it’s money well spent. So that’s really how it started.

Wonderful. Can you share your favorite story, or favorite upbeat story, that you share in your book?

Dara Fleischer: I am so glad you asked because I have a passage that I flagged and I’m going to read this: “10 Things I’ve Learned as a Compulsive Shopper.”

Number one, acceptance. Admitting I have a problem was and continues to be a huge wake-up call.

Number two, compulsive shopping is a behavioral disease. It doesn’t magically get better without work. Be kind to yourself, seek help, and take it one day at a time.

Number three, therapy and meds help, but you can’t do it alone. Support from family, friends, and an accountability buddy is just as critical as professional treatment.

Number four, cold turkey might be the only way, at least for me. Buying one thing often opens the floodgates, quickly escalating into multiple impulsive purchases. And that’s easier said than done, right? It’s like an alcoholic going into a bar and saying, “Oh, I’m just going to have one drink.” I just can’t do that with shopping.

Number five, resale sites are your new best friends. Sell or donate what no longer serves you to recoup cash, free up space, the clutter you can see around me, and clear the cobwebs, literally and figuratively.

Number six, social media is pure kryptonite. It wastes time. It triggers FOMO. It makes you want everything you can’t afford. You have to unfollow influencers, retailers, delete all the apps, Brick your phone. It’s a device that you literally attach to your phone so you’re not tempted to buy anything, so you can, you know, stop that add-to-cart impulse. It dies before it starts. You have to bury the “buy now, pay later” button for good. Any pay-in-four plan is just kryptonite. Cash is king.

Number seven, you have to unsubscribe from retailer emails and texts. I know it sounds stupid, but if something’s out of sight, it’s out of mind. It really, really, really works.

Number eight, you have to record your spending every day. Sounds terrifying, but it’s necessary. And the only way to take control of your finances is to track what you buy, return whatever you can, and note whatever the triggers are.

Number nine, you need to find a new hobby. I call that your dopamine menu or your rewire rituals. So I like to work out. I have to find things that make me happy: tapping into my creativity, writing again, taking a walk in nature, taking my dog for a walk, going out with friends, very simple things.

And the last and most important thing is that you have to forgive yourself when you slip up, because you will. Recovery is not linear.

You mentioned getting an accountability partner. How does a person do that?

Dara Fleischer: That’s a really good question. One option is through Debtors Anonymous, which is a (free) fellowship available to anybody, and you can seek a sponsor. A sponsor is basically like an accountability buddy, someone who’s there for you 24/7.

I also have a section on my site called “Retail Therapy Reimagined” where I’m actually offering to help anyone out there who needs one-on-one support, whether that’s via text, phone, Zoom, because I understand how hard it is to find someone to connect with who understands exactly what you’re going through.

And then thirdly, The Shopping Shift, which is the program that I’m currently a part of and that I’m consulting for. I lead the no-buy group, which is basically a plan where you stop shopping for a period of time, whether it’s 30 days, 60 days, 90 days. You really need to lean on somebody for that support to hold yourself accountable.

So, Debtors Anonymous, what if a person is not in debt? A person just has a shopping compulsion, but they’re not in debt.

Dara Fleischer: Debtors Anonymous, or any Twelve Step fellowship does not discriminate. In my case, I was an overspender and debtor. You will meet a wide range of people that are suffering from the same compulsion, but some people aren’t in debt. Maybe they have a good handle on their finances, but they’re still impulse spending and they can’t get that under control. They’re not saving. So, it’s incredibly helpful.

Okay. So, this is our signature question. We focus more generally now. You’ve been blessed with a lot of success in your life and you must have learned a lot from your experiences. Looking back to the beginning of your fashion career, can you share five things that you’ve learned over the years that someone starting out in fashion can really benefit from? Five things you’ve learned over the years that someone starting out today can really benefit from.

Dara Fleischer: Those are really good questions. Those are hard questions to answer.

Number one, I would say don’t let anyone ever tell you that you can’t follow your dreams. You absolutely can. For me, my dream was writing this book, and it’s been just such an amazing and transformative time in my life.

Number two, don’t let failure beat you up. You have to accept that failure is about how you get up and lift yourself up and move on. That is so important. You know, talking about all of my failures and my struggles with shopping addiction, as I said, it is not linear. I’ve, literally fallen down many, many, many times. But you have to get up.

And I would say number three, you have to believe in yourself. You 100% have to believe in yourself.

And number four, you have to work really hard. Nothing is going to land on a silver platter. Nothing did for me. I’ve worked really hard to get every job. Everything that I’ve achieved was not handed to me.

And number five; trust your gut. Trust your intuition and just do things that make you happy. Those are, I think, some of the most important things.

Can you share some of the self-care routines that you do to help your body, mind, and heart to thrive?

Dara Fleischer: Love that. So, exercise is probably the most important thing for me. I have an addictive personality, I’ve exercised for years. I used to exercise three hours a day, which was probably too much. Now I’m dealing with so many injuries. But even if it’s just going for a walk and bird-watching. That’s something I love to do. It’s so important to be outdoors and connect with nature.

A lot of people meditate, even if it’s for a few minutes. I think it’s really important to connect to your mind, body, and soul. For me, writing is so therapeutic because it takes me out of my head. It calms the crazy. You really have to tap into your creative forces and just do whatever it is that makes you feel good, whether that’s exercising, or for someone else it could be cooking, it could be sewing or knitting. So, those are things I love to do. I also love to cook. I can make a pretty mean paella. And spending time with my mini Australian Labradoodle, Poppy.

This is our final aspirational question. Because of your great work and the platform that you’ve built, it’s not an exaggeration to say that you’re a person of great influence. If you could share an idea or inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? Because you never know what your idea might inspire.

Dara Fleischer: Well, for me, there are so many mantras. I would say for me, one of my mantras is “filling my heart, not my cart.” And I think it’s really important to stay true to yourself. I think just being authentic and following your true passion and not doing things because you think that’s what other people expect you to do. You have to do what you want to do, what makes you happy, not because it’s the right thing to do. I was always chasing those pie-in-the-sky jobs, and the more money I made, the more money I spent, and I was just so miserable and stressed.

Dara, it’s been a joy to meet you. How can our readers purchase or pre-purchase your book? How can they continue to follow your work? How can our readers get in touch with you to engage your services? How can our readers support your work in any possible way?

Dara Fleischer: Thank you so much for having me on your show. Visit my website darafleischer.com to order my book, At My Limit: Losing My Savings and Sanity Due to Compulsive Shopping Addiction, “shop” my closet and book 1:1 “Retail Therapy Reimagined” support. You can follow me on Instagram at @fashionjunkienyc, with an I-E. I definitely need to think about changing that handle, but it’s something I’ve had for so many years. So, my Instagram, my website, those are the best places to follow me. And you can buy my book right now. It’s available for pre-order (releases on November 17) on Amazon in Canada and the US, Barnes & Noble, Indigo Books, and Kindle.

Dara, it’s so good to meet you. I wish you continued success and good health and blessings, and I’d love to do this again next year.

Dara Fleischer: Thank you so much. I really enjoyed speaking to you and it was such a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.

Fashion Editor Dara Fleischer’s Secret Battle: How Shopping Addiction Wiped Out Her Retirement was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The time you put in on the front-end results in exponential returns on the back end. Taking the time to really work on standardizing those processes and making sure they’re in place is essential and 100% worth it.

As a part of this series, we had the pleasure to interview Sterling Carter and Stephen Carter.

Dr. Sterling L. Carter, DPT, co-author of “The Business of Healing: How to Build Profitable, Mission-Driven Healthcare Businesses,” is a licensed physical therapist with over 20 years of clinical experience and a decorated U.S. Army Major who served for more than 25 years. He co-founded Cartera Health, where he leads clinical operations and quality initiatives. Stephen Levi Carter, co-author of “The Business of Healing: How to Build Profitable, Mission-Driven Healthcare Businesses,” is co-founder of Cartera Health, where he oversees business strategy, acquisitions, and operational scaling across the company’s portfolio of healthcare ventures. Carter is also a U.S. Army veteran who served as a combat medic during Desert Storm. He holds a bachelor’s degree in business administration and an MBA in change management and finance.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you both got started in your careers?

Sure, let’s get started. We both went to college together at Langston University in Oklahoma. Sterling majored in pre-physical therapy and Stephen majored in accounting. We both graduated and went in completely different directions. Stephen went on to get his MBA and started working in corporate America. Stephen worked for a staffing company early on and then went into oil and gas.

Sterling went on to finish his physical therapy degree and eventually his master’s and doctorate in physical therapy. We were both working in our own lanes. Sterling was working for a major hospital in Houston, Texas, and Stephen was working at a major oil and gas firm.

In 2007 or 2008, Sterling decided that Sterling wanted to do more with physical therapy and provide a bigger impact to the community, so Sterling opened a private practice called Sterling Physical Therapy and Wellness. During that period, Sterling developed a pretty strong brand and started getting a lot of requests for contract work, along with many requests from home health agencies that needed therapy services delivered in the home environment. Sterling thought that opening a healthcare staffing company could be a viable opportunity for us.

Sterling talked to Stephen about it, his twin brother and business partner. We decided to go into business together and open a therapy staffing company. We called it Sterling Staffing Solutions simply because we already had a recognizable name that had been out in the market for four years, and we decided to capitalize on that.

Fast forward: we’ve started a lot of different companies and pursued a lot of different opportunities, but ultimately Stephen opened his own business, an in-home hospice company called White Orchid Hospice. In 2018, we started receiving several awards and were approached by Forbes Books, asking if we were interested in writing a book about our story. We wrote our first book, an Amazon bestseller titled “Double Your Success: Principles to Build a Multi-Million Dollar Business.”

We continued growing and building the brand. We have just launched our second book, titled “The Business of Healing: How to Build Mission- and Profit-Driven Healthcare Practices.” We are blessed to say that all three of our companies are currently on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing businesses. More importantly, we have made a huge impact and left a footprint on the community and in the world.

Can you each share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

Probably the funniest mistake Sterling made when he first opened was thinking that if he advertised and marketed to the community and to the consumer, we could fill our clinic up. Sterling started off with a shotgun approach to marketing the physical therapy practice. We had magazine ads, radio ads, postcard campaigns, email campaigns, and all these different things, all focused on the consumer. We were really focused on the wrong target audience.

Our target audience, at the end of the day, is doctors. So, we flipped our emphasis and started putting more emphasis on our referral sources, which are doctors, and everything changed. It was funny that Sterling was hitting his head against the wall trying to figure out why Sterling couldn’t get more patients in the door, when the biggest value was not in marketing directly to the consumer, but in marketing to our top referral sources.

What do you think makes your company, Cartera Health, stand out?

What makes Cartera Health stand out is that we have truly created an industry all its own. Our mission is to become the biggest player in the extended healthcare space, and what we define as extended healthcare is anything outside of primary medicine. We’re not focused on doctors; we’re focused more on allied health. We have physical therapy practices. We have a staffing company that provides staff, specifically: physical therapists, occupational therapists, speech-language pathologists, nurses, social workers, case managers, CNAs. We also do in-home hospice, where we’re providing end-of-life care, but we don’t focus on the medical doctor locum tenens space. That focus is really what makes us different from most of our competitors.

Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to both of your successes?

The three character traits that were most instrumental? Sterling would say the three are: strong work ethic, very driven, and committed.

Leadership often entails making difficult decisions or hard choices between two apparently good paths. Can you share a story with us about a hard decision or choice you had to make as a leader? I’m curious to understand how these challenges have shaped your leadership.

One of the hardest decisions Sterling had to make as a leader was to terminate his vice president of operations. She was really the second-in-command and was extremely loyal and dedicated to the company, but she was not the right fit for us to grow to the next level and scale.

It was really tough because Sterling knew that this person depended on our business. Her family depended on the business. She was a single mom, and she put everything into the company, but there were just things that did not line up with being able to scale. She didn’t have the skill set to do that, and often she spent too much time focused on the problem instead of moving us toward solutions.

It was probably the toughest and also the most important decision we ever made. Once that happened, we moved forward and never looked back. Things have been growing and scaling ever since.

What does Operational Scalability mean to you?

What it means to me is that to scale quickly and effectively, you must have the right operations in place. You must have strong standard operating procedures. You must have strong processes that are repeatable, that are going to provide a consistent, quality outcome, and that are going to produce results.

Which types of business can most benefit from investing in Operational Scalability?

I truly, truly believe that every business would benefit from investing in operational scalability. Sterling doesn’t think there is a single business out there that couldn’t improve if they invested more in operations and scaling.

Why is it so important for a business to invest time, energy, and resources into Operational Scalability?

It’s important to invest time, energy, and resources into operational scalability because it directly 10x’s your business. The time you put in on the front-end results in exponential returns on the back end. Taking the time to really work on standardizing those processes and making sure they’re in place is essential and 100% worth it.

In contrast, what happens to a business that does not invest time, energy, and resources into Operational Scalability?

Well, without operational scalability, you’re not going to be able to grow and you’re not going to be able to create a consistent, repeatable result. If you’re not growing, you’re dying. If you don’t invest in operational scalability, then Sterling really thinks eventually your business will fail.

Can you share a story from your experience about how a business grew dramatically when they worked on their Operational Scalability?

One of our own businesses, Sterling Physical Therapy and Wellness, is a good example. We spent a lot of time working on certain things in the business, like having effective job descriptions and hiring the right people. What we weren’t doing was focusing on the processes as much as we needed to in the very beginning. We then invested in outsourcing and in finding a business coach and mentor who had already built out the operational procedures that are standard for a physical therapy practice. We were able to take those outlines and create our own processes and our own operations, and that absolutely catapulted our ability and improved our outcomes.

Based on your experience and success, what are the “Five Most Important Things A Business Leader Should Do To Set Up Systems, Procedures, And People To Prepare A Business To Scale”? If you can, please share an example for each.

1. Document Every Day

The only way to create processes is to start by writing down the steps you do every day. Record them and put them into some type of note taker.

2. Refine Your Processes

Organize those processes and really hone in on them, making sure that they work, that they produce great results, and that they are clear.

3. Build A Manual

Put all that information into a manual and set it up by department.

4. Leverage Existing Systems

Don’t reinvent the wheel. There are procedures and processes already out there, and businesses all pretty much run the same way. You’re going to have key areas that every single business requires, so use what already exists and adapt it to your business.

5. Test and Reassess

Test those policies and procedures and make sure they work. Then you always must reassess, because you’re always going to be updating them time and time again.

What are some common misconceptions businesses have about scaling?

One of the common misconceptions businesses have about scaling is that it’s too hard, that you can’t do it, or that it’s going to add too much work and too much to your plate. Really, as you scale, it should get easier because you’re putting the right people in place, you’re empowering them, and you’re getting more into the strategy level. You’re not so stuck in the weeds with the meetings and all that kind of good stuff.

How do you keep your team motivated during periods of rapid growth or change?

This is a great question. You must continue to pour into your people, check on them, make sure that they’re okay, and provide them with the support that they need. Even when there is rapid growth and change, try to make sure that they’re part of the process, so they know that they matter in the whole growth process and that they’re being considered.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

You can find both of our books on Amazon.com. Just search “The Business of Healing” by Sterling Carter and Stephen Carter, or you can also search “Double Your Success” by Sterling Carter and Stephen Carter.

You can also find us on Instagram, Facebook, and our other social media handles. The handle is @thecarterbrothers. Our website is www.thecarterbrothers.com, or our master brand site is www.carterahealth.com.

Thank you so much for the time you spent with us. We wish you continued success!

Operational Scalability: Sterling Carter and Stephen Carter of Cartera Health On How To Set Up… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The unglamorous work is where AI creates the most value.

As a part of our series about the future of Artificial Intelligence, I had the pleasure of interviewing Steven Choi.

Steven Choi is an investor and builder of CoverPin, a technology company that helps businesses manage corporate entities, regulatory compliance, and international operations, and connects that data to downstream markets like commercial insurance. He believes the next wave of AI will go beyond chatbots and content generation to execute complex operational work.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Can you share with us the ‘backstory” of how you decided to pursue this career path in AI?

To be honest, I never set out to pursue “AI.” The term has been around since the 1960s, and it’s really a label the market puts on whatever is hot at the moment. A few years back everyone was an app developer, then when cloud was hot they all became cloud architects, and today AI is the banner that spans what used to be called machine learning. I started out as a perception engineer, a much smaller piece of ML where you were detecting objects and classifying them. From there the market kind of pulled me along, from cell detection to drone and satellite object detection to self-driving cars.

Over the years I kept running into the same unglamorous problem. Companies expand into new countries and the paperwork behind them turns into chaos: entity filings, registered agents, director changes, annual reports, tax and compliance deadlines. It’s tedious, high-stakes, and still runs on spreadsheets and email. That is how CoverPin came along. Work that is highly ineffective when humans carry it end to end can be handed to AI, with human reviewers checking the output, much like the data labeling industry did when it expanded the AI frontier.

What lessons can others learn from your story?

1. Pick a boring problem that is painful and universal. The unglamorous work is where AI creates the most value.

2. Speed beats consensus. Make the decision, ship, and learn.

3. Sell it yourself and use it, early. You learn more from your first 50 customer conversations than from any market report.

4. Don’t build until you’ve validated the market. Prove that people want it before you invest in building it.

5. In AI, data quality is the moat. Models are becoming commodities. Clean, well-labeled, domain-specific data is not.

Restructuring and hard decisions are part of leading. Doing them early and honestly is kinder than delaying them.

Tech first doesn’t make people pay. What makes people pay is the whole solution, and the technology needs to be built to support those functions.

Urgency helps the sale, but product value drives retention. Not every market buys out of urgency. Urgency can close the deal, but it’s the value of the product that keeps customers.

Can you tell our readers about the most interesting projects you are working on now?

We are building an Amazon for compliance. For any compliance requirement across entity, license, tax, and insurance, you can fulfill it globally in fewer than three clicks, with no emails and no phone calls. Agents can do this work more accurately than people, and by leveraging humans only on the edge cases, we can drive down both the cost and the time of compliance.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

It’s hard to name just one person, because this has been a team effort with a lot of people behind it. Connie Brenton and Jeff Franke at Legalops.com who paved the way in the company’s journey. Ginger Mutoza, Retired Corporate Paralegal for Broadcom and 8x8, helped us understand the market far better than we could have on our own. Sakal Heng, the General Counsel of Golftec, has consistently given us advice as a customer throughout the journey, and of course all the staff members who are building the company day in and day out.

Most importantly, I’m grateful to all of our partners and all of our 100+ customers, who help us build a better product on a daily basis. The product we have today is a product of their feedback.

What are the 5 things that most excite you about the AI industry? Why?

1. AI that executes, not just advises. The next wave goes beyond chatbots and content generation to completing multi-step operational work.

2. Compliance and back-office work becoming automated. Small companies will get the same quality of governance that only large enterprises could afford.

3. Lower barriers to global business. A startup can operate in ten countries from day one.

4. Structured data unlocking new markets. Accurate corporate data can make insurance, lending, and due diligence faster and fairer.

5. Small teams doing outsized things. A focused team can now compete with incumbents that have thousands of employees.

What are the 5 things that concern you about the AI industry? Why?

1. Privacy and security. AI increasingly touches sensitive corporate and personal records, so the cost of getting this wrong is high.

2. Control slipping away from the creators. More and more engineers don’t actually know what is happening inside the LLM solutions they build and ship.

3. Hype outrunning reliability. It leads to bad deployments and a loss of public trust.

4. The public not knowing that most use cases don’t need the most powerful model. Many everyday problems can be solved with far smaller, cheaper models.

5. Hyperscalers over-indexing and creating bubbles. Over-investment concentrated in a few players distorts the market and puts the whole industry at risk when it corrects.

As you know, there is an ongoing debate between prominent scientists, (personified as a debate between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg,) about whether advanced AI poses an existential danger to humanity. What is your position about this?

I’m somewhere in the middle, and I’d rather be useful than dramatic. I don’t think we can dismiss long-term risks, since powerful technologies deserve serious safety work. But I also see the nearer-term harms, such as misinformation, security failures, and misuse, that are already here and deserve just as much attention. I take the risk seriously without treating it as inevitable.

Historically, nearly every major technology started out without regulation and caused huge disruption: the automobile, the internet, social media, nuclear energy. It takes society recognizing that some form of regulation is needed, and AI will be no different.

What can be done to prevent such concerns from materializing? And what can be done to assure the public that there is nothing to be concerned about?

Prevention comes from keeping humans accountable in the loop for consequential decisions, independent testing and auditing, clear liability, and security standards that are verified rather than self-declared. On reassurance, I’d resist the instinct to simply tell the public there’s nothing to worry about. Trust comes from transparency about what systems can and can’t do, honest reporting of failures, and visible evidence that the people building AI are accountable for the results.

As you know, there are not that many women in your industry. Can you advise what is needed to engage more women into the AI industry?

It starts with the pipeline, through early exposure to technical education and visible role models. But retention matters as much as recruiting, so companies need fair pay and promotion practices, flexible and trusting cultures, and women in leadership and on boards. Hiring on demonstrated skill rather than pedigree opens doors too. In my own work I’ve seen that diverse teams catch blind spots that homogeneous ones miss, and that is a business advantage as well as a fairness issue.

But I also think it’s biased to segregate women from the broader AI workforce. AI is made up of engineering, ops, labeling, design, and product. If you combine these, the numbers actually match the percentage of graduates across the industry. The key question is what matters most to them. At CoverPin, our leadership has more women than men, so for us it’s not about gender but about capability.

What is your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share a story of how that had relevance to your own life?

My favorite quote is from Nelson Mandela: “There is no passion to be found playing small — in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living.”

It comes down to staying hungry and always staying in a position to learn. It also means surrounding yourself with people who are better than you. Only A-class players hire people who are better than them, because those people uplift you. And everything in business and tech comes down to talent plus timing.

How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world? Can you share a story?

One of the biggest inequalities in entrepreneurship isn’t talent or ambition. It’s access.

A founder in Silicon Valley can hire lawyers, accountants, and compliance experts to expand overseas. An equally talented founder in an emerging market often can’t, because the cost and complexity of doing business across borders are simply too high.

That’s why I started CoverPin.

I saw how fragmented and outdated legal and compliance work is. Forming a company, registering for taxes, or maintaining an entity can mean multiple providers, thousands of dollars, and weeks of back-and-forth. For a large corporation, that’s an annoyance. For a first-time founder, it can be the difference between pursuing an opportunity and giving up.

So why did we start with enterprise customers?

It sounds backwards. If the mission is to open up global business infrastructure, why begin with the biggest companies?

Because if you can solve the hardest problems for the largest enterprises, you can eventually give everyone else the same capabilities.

Enterprises operate across dozens of jurisdictions, manage hundreds of entities, and face the most demanding compliance requirements. Serving them forces us to build infrastructure that is sophisticated and scalable from day one. Once it exists, the marginal cost of serving a smaller business drops sharply. The same technology that manages hundreds of entities for a multinational can help a first-time founder set up and maintain their very first company.

We’re building for the most complex customers today so the benefits can reach the smallest businesses tomorrow.

Democratization doesn’t always start with the simplest or cheapest product. Sometimes it starts with solving the hardest problem, building the infrastructure, and then making it widely accessible.

AI accelerates this. Legal and compliance expertise has long been locked behind expensive services and fragmented systems. By structuring that knowledge and building it into software, we can offer it at a fraction of the traditional cost.

What excites me most isn’t helping a big company save on compliance. It’s the founder who will use that same technology to open their first international entity, hire their first employee overseas, or enter a market they thought was out of reach. And the impact doesn’t stop with that one founder. It means jobs, supported families, cross-border partnerships, and opportunity in communities that are often overlooked.

I don’t think making a positive impact always has to look like philanthropy. Sometimes the greatest contribution is building infrastructure that levels the playing field.

Our enterprise customers are helping us build that infrastructure. My hope is that one day, a founder starting a company with a few thousand dollars will have access to the same global capabilities as a Fortune 500 company.

That’s how I think business success becomes something meaningful for the world.

You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

Most of the benefit of AI is currently flowing to large companies with big budgets. I’d like to see tools, training, and fair access reach the shop owner, the first-time founder, and the startup in an emerging market, so AI widens opportunity instead of concentrating it.

I also believe most of the use cases we deal with every day can be handled by open source models running on-prem, without huge resources. Just as the internet brought more information to people, helping people truly understand how to use AI, not just LLMs, across their own industries can be enormously powerful. And I think the next big innovation won’t come only from engineers. It will come from the liberal arts, from people who understand human history and what people need and demand.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

Come check us out at www.coverpin.com, where we publish compliance articles as we learn more and expand our services.

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!

Steven Choi Of CoverPin On The Future Of Artificial Intelligence was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The problem with cloud AI was never about models becoming too powerful. It was that sending sensitive client data to cloud servers was a bad idea from day one.

As a part of this series, we had the pleasure to interview Austin Worrell.

Austin Worrell is the Co-Founder and CEO of Dialogica, following his work at Gunderson Dettmer, where he advised tech companies and venture capital firms through formations, financings, and over $1.2B in M&A. His entrepreneurial background includes co-founding KINO, an AI streaming platform backed by Cathie Wood’s ARK Venture Fund and Sequoia, and EG Global, a blockchain company that reached a $500M market cap and donated over $4M to charity. Previously, Austin competed in mock trial and moot court for over ten years, winning a National Championship against Yale.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Can you share with us the ‘backstory” of how you decided to pursue this career path in AI?

Growing up in Ohio, I was always fascinated by the law, but I think the turning point came right before I left for college. My parents’ business got wiped out after a long legal battle and my dad called to tell me I was on my own. I’d always thought of lawyers like superheroes, so seeing my family lose everything really hit me and I couldn’t help thinking that if I’d been a lawyer, maybe I could’ve saved them that day.

I ended up at Miami University, where our mock trial team won nationals against Yale. While I was there, I worked at a local law firm and started toying with ways to streamline the boring admin work just so I could focus on the real legal stuff.

After law school at USC, I joined Gunderson, working on everything from early startups to big M&A deals. I loved being a lawyer, but the administrative side was brutal. I was burning hours every day on calendaring, timekeeping, and redlines instead of actual legal work.

When I talked to other lawyers about AI, none of them wanted a generic chatbot trying to do their job. They just wanted something to handle the background grind so they could actually practice law. That was what made me leave my practice and build Dialogica.

What lessons can others learn from your story?

1. Find a way or make one. When I was suddenly on my own financially right before college, I was pretty much forced to tackle whatever is in front of me and just figure out how to get through it.
2. Build for true user needs. Instead of creating AI that tries to do a professional’s job for them, focus on empowering humans by taking away the administrative grunt work.
3. Frustration can drive innovation. Realizing that a job you love is badly designed in certain areas can be the exact thing you need to build something better.
4. Craftsmanship matters. I’m inspired by brands like Apple, Ferrari, Tudor, and Cartier because every part of a product experience should feel intentional and beautifully executed.

Can you tell our readers about the most interesting projects you are working on now?

Right now, I am fully focused on building within Dialogica. We are creating an enterprise AI secretary designed for professionals in highly regulated industries. It is built to be local and secure where the customer has complete control. Rather than trying to replace a lawyer’s expertise, Dialogica automates routine administrative burdens so attorneys can devote their time to the high-level legal work they actually enjoy.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

Matthew Rich — I wouldn’t be who I am today without Matt. He is one of the greatest lawyers I know, and someone who coached and pushed me to be my greatest self. He was my national championship mock trial coach, legal mentor, and on some of my toughest days in college, a true guardian angel. I will never forget the day we won the National Championship when he looked at me and said I needed a proper watch to wear. So he gave me his Tudor. And told me that when we win (not if), I could keep it, conditioned subsequently that I graduated law school and passed the Bar. I did all three. And I carried and wore that watch with me to every LSAT, law school final, the Bar exam, and now every law firm that we launch Dia at. A reminder that a simple yet powerful tool like my championship Tudor could carry me through to achieve my wildest dreams, just as we hope Dia carries every new lawyer or professional to their wildest dreams.

What are the 5 things that most excite you about the AI industry? Why?

1. Getting rid of the work around the work. I’m not excited about AI replacing humans. I’m excited about it killing busywork. So much time in law gets wasted on organizing files, tracking schedules, and logging hours. Clearing that clutter lets people focus on the actual work they went to school for.

2. Helping experts instead of trying to replace them. Everyone has been trying to build AI chatbots to do people’s jobs for them. What actually excites me is building tools that act like an extra set of hands. It’s about making real experts faster and better at what they do, not pushing them out of the profession.

3. Finally updating old-school industries. Fields like law and medicine have always been slow to change because standard software just couldn’t handle how complicated the work is. AI is finally giving old-school industries modern tools without cutting corners on quality or safety.

4. Leveling the playing field for smaller teams. When you strip away all the admin work, small teams can punch way above their weight. AI gives a two-person firm the kind of back-office horsepower that used to be reserved for giant corporate players only.

5. Moving past the hype to stuff that actually works. The first wave of flashy AI promises is settling down, and now we’re in the phase of actually building useful things. What fires me up is talking to real people, finding out what frustrates them day-to-day, and building practical fixes that solve those headaches.

What are the 5 things that concern you about the AI industry? Why?

1. Trusting AI to do expert thinking. AI is great for busywork, but not so great at high-stakes judgment and strategy. Believing the hype that software can replace human reasoning is a recipe for disaster.
2. Skipping the basics in career development. If junior professionals use AI to skip all the foundational work, they won’t build the core skills needed to handle complex issues later on.
3. Cutting corners on privacy and security. In industries like law or medicine, privacy is non-negotiable. Too many AI startups are moving fast and breaking things with sensitive data just to launch quickly.
4. Flashy hype instead of practical use. There’s a flood of “AI for the sake of AI” products. Slapping a generic chatbot onto a workflow usually adds more friction than it solves.
5. Hallucinations in high-precision work. When AI hallucinates a legal precedent or contract term, it can ruin a business. Standard AI models still lack the accuracy required for highly-regulated industry work.

As you know, there is an ongoing debate between prominent scientists, (personified as a debate between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg,) about whether advanced AI poses an existential danger to humanity. What is your position about this?

While Big Tech debates existential risks and government oversight, the real story for law firms is much simpler. The problem with cloud AI was never about models becoming too powerful. It was that sending sensitive client data to cloud servers was a bad idea from day one.

This isn’t a timeline debate or a regulatory debate, it’s an architecture problem. As tech leaders figure out how to safely govern their cloud models, Dia keeps things simple. We run locally on your hardware. Your client data stays on your device, reasoning happens on your desktop, and sensitive work never touches a cloud server. Local AI isn’t a policy debate, it’s just better engineering.

What can be done to prevent such concerns from materializing? And what can be done to assure the public that there is nothing to be concerned about?

We need better engineering. Safety should be built into the tech itself. By keeping data local on your own device, it never leaks to cloud servers in the first place. To reassure the public, tech companies need to deliver tools with clear boundaries. People trust AI when it works as a secure assistant that protects their privacy. People don’t want to use unpredictable products.

As you know, there are not that many women in your industry. Can you advise what is needed to engage more women into the AI industry?

I think it starts with treating women as equal to their peer male counterparts in our space. Technology still lags in the credibility it gives to female founders, and it is high time we abandoned antiquated biases. Dia would not be the technology or company we are today without our founding female members. Some of the world’s greatest technology and business leaders are women. Yet, the spotlight and benefit of the doubt tends towards the male. That is an active choice we can finally choose to leave behind. As a proud big brother of three women who inspire me every day, I think it is not just the right thing, but rather it is the necessary thing to foster a world that achieves its truest potential.

What is your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share a story of how that had relevance to your own life?

Inveniam Via Aut Faciam. I will find a way or make one. This one has too many personal stories to reduce to one, but I do encourage readers to search up the quote and read the incredible Hannibal story.

How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world? Can you share a story?

Ask me in a few years– I think I am really just getting started. I hope my companies, products, and client work as both founder and lawyer have left some positive impact. It is what fuels me. A better humanity and a better world is the end goal. The rest is just the ups and downs of a life well lived.

You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.

I think less time locked to our devices, and more time in humanity and the real world is a future worth realizing. I would like for my generation of technology founders to take the stand to chase not just shareholder value, but human value, and realize that those actually often are one in the same.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

You can follow my work and keep up with Dialogica here: Website: dialogicaai.com My LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/austinworrell Dialogica’s LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/dialogicaai

Thank you so much for the time. We wish you continued success!

Austin Worrell of Dialogica On The Future Of Artificial Intelligence was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

To scale anything, you have to have a workable system first. Let’s break it down to a particular department. Everyone has a job. They know their job, and they do their job. But not only that: they also understand what the department needs to do and how their own work fits into it.

As a part of this series, we had the pleasure to interview Gerard Collins.

Gerard Collins is the founder of Business Growth Assessment, an Ireland-based service that helps business owners identify the one area of their business that deserves attention first. He has more than 30 years of experience across management, marketing, public relations and business operations, including the mortgage industry. His approach is to identify underlying business constraints, ask better questions and help business owners focus on a practical next step.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Our readers would love to ‘get to know you’ a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?

I’ve spent over 30 years working in different areas of business, including management, marketing, public relations, business development and operations.

Over those years I’ve had the opportunity to see businesses from many different perspectives. One thing that has always interested me is what actually makes a business succeed. I’ve seen people working incredibly hard, putting in long hours and investing money, but not necessarily getting the results they want. Sometimes the problem isn’t a lack of effort or ambition. They’re concentrating on something that isn’t the real problem.

I’ve always been curious. If I wanted to do something, I enjoyed getting the knowledge and working it out. I’ve learned from my own mistakes and from other people’s mistakes, and I’ve always believed that knowledge is power. If a problem isn’t being fixed, I need to ask whether I’m trying to solve the right problem.

I’ve also believed that you need to understand where you are, where you want to go and what’s preventing you from getting there. Once you can see that clearly, you can start doing something about it. I often say, ‘If I can’t see it, I can’t do it.’

That thinking eventually led to Business Growth Assessment. Instead of giving owners another long list of things they should be doing, I wanted to help them identify the ONE area that deserves their attention first. Rome wasn’t built in a day. You deal with one important priority, build on it and then move to the next. What I find rewarding is seeing owners become more focused, recognise new possibilities and work towards the goals they want for their businesses.

It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

In my very first job, I wanted to be the boss. I saw the boss giving everyone orders and thought that was what being the boss was all about. So I started acting like the boss myself. And, of course, I fell flat on my face!

What I hadn’t understood was that behind those orders were knowledge and experience. There was a reason the boss knew what needed doing. It wasn’t something you learned in a single day, and it certainly wasn’t just about telling everyone what to do.

Falling on my face turned out to be a good thing because I learned so much from it. That experience taught me to respect knowledge, experience and what I still had to learn.

But the bigger lesson was about failure. You’re going to fail at things. The question is: will you get back up and try again, and again, until you succeed? Or will you say, ‘That didn’t work, so I won’t try again’? I believe you have to be willing to fail if you’re going to succeed. You learn from it, make changes and try again.

What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?

Even though I have over 30 years of experience in business, and I’ve made just about every mistake, I don’t approach a business owner as though I know best. I much prefer to challenge what they think they know, and sometimes what they don’t know.

If owners knew exactly what was wrong with their business, it probably wouldn’t still be a problem. My job is to ask the right questions so they can see something they haven’t seen before, or recognise that the thing they’ve been concentrating on isn’t necessarily the thing they should be concentrating on.

I remember one owner who believed a particular person in the business was their biggest asset. Through questioning the situation, the owner came to a very different conclusion: the person they had regarded as their greatest asset had actually become their biggest problem. The owner realised that the person running the business wasn’t really them.

That was an important realisation, and it came from the owner seeing the situation differently, not from me arriving and telling them I knew better. That’s the difference I want Business Growth Assessment to make. The first step isn’t another solution being sold to someone. It’s helping them see the real issue clearly enough that they can do something about it.

You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?

The three traits I’d choose are courage, drive and knowledge. I don’t see them as separate things. They reinforce each other.

Courage and drive take me back to an opportunity I had a long time ago to attend college abroad for a year. I wanted to go, but I had no money and no obvious way of getting it. So I walked into the bank where my mother banked and asked to meet the manager about a loan.

He asked me for my account number. I told him I didn’t have an account there. He asked how much money I had. I told him £5. Then he asked when I needed the money. I said, ‘Tomorrow.’

He looked at the situation: no account, virtually no money and no way at that moment of proving how I would repay the loan. I told him, ‘I’ll go to college tomorrow with or without your help, and I’ll pay off the loan, because I’m a good investment.’

I got the money that day, went to college the following day and paid off the loan. I think I made quite an impression on that bank manager! But I had already decided I was going. I was prepared to ask, even though the answer could have been no. That’s courage and drive to me.

Then there’s knowledge. Knowledge is power, and I’ve always believed that. I’ve always been curious. If I wanted to do something, I wanted to learn about it and work out how to do it. Knowledge can come from study, from doing things, from your own mistakes and from other people’s mistakes. You have to stay willing to learn. And if a problem isn’t being fixed, maybe the knowledge you still need is about whether you’re solving the right problem in the first place.

Leadership often entails making difficult decisions or hard choices between two apparently good paths. Can you share a story with us about a hard decision or choice you had to make as a leader? I’m curious to understand how these challenges have shaped your leadership.

Leadership isn’t about looking at everything from your own perspective. If you’re running a company, the question has to be what’s best for the company and its success, and what’s best for everyone concerned. You have an important role, but you can’t walk around with the idea that you’re the most important person.

Many years ago, I was due to receive a substantial bonus. I had worked very hard for it, and I genuinely felt I deserved it. Then a bill came in that had to be paid. If it wasn’t paid, the consequences for the business could have been catastrophic.

So I didn’t take the bonus, and the bill was paid. It was a difficult choice personally because I’d earned that money, but for me it was the right decision.

I don’t tell this story because I think I’m a hero. I wasn’t a hero then and I’m not a hero now. It’s about the responsibility that comes with being a leader. Sometimes you have to put the interests of the business, and the people who depend on it, ahead of your own.

A lot of people never see that part of leadership. Leaders don’t necessarily talk about those decisions, but they know what needs to be done. That experience reinforced for me that leadership isn’t a title or being the loudest person in the room. It’s about judgement, responsibility and doing what is best for the organisation.

Let’s now turn to the main focus of our discussion about Operational Scalability. In order to make sure that we are all on the same page, let’s begin with a simple definition. What does Operational Scalability mean to you?

To scale anything, you have to have a workable system first. Let’s break it down to a particular department. Everyone has a job. They know their job, and they do their job. But not only that: they also understand what the department needs to do and how their own work fits into it.

That’s a department you can build on. When someone new joins, they fit into a way of working that people understand. They become part of a group that knows what it’s trying to achieve.

For me, scalability is about building small groups into bigger groups, with groups working together to form an organisation. An organisation can grow to any size in principle, as long as it continues to be made up of smaller groups that know their jobs and work together for and with the organisation.

And it has to be planned. You don’t build it all in one go. You put one foot in front of the other. I sometimes think of it as walking: both feet have to know what they need to do for you to move forward.

That’s what operational scalability means to me. The organisation grows because the individual parts work, know their purpose and work together. Making an organisation bigger without those foundations doesn’t necessarily make it stronger.

Which types of business can most benefit from investing in Operational Scalability?

Every business can benefit, regardless of its size. The principle is the same whether you have a handful of people or hundreds.

As I said, you have to build the smaller groups. Think about building a house with blocks. If you want to build a house, you need blocks. The smaller groups within an organisation are those blocks.

Each block needs to do its job, and it needs to work with the blocks around it. Then you have something you can keep building on. That isn’t only for large businesses preparing to expand; it’s the foundation a small business needs if it wants to grow well in the first place.

Why is it so important for a business to invest time, energy, and resources into Operational Scalability?

To scale anything, you need a workable system first. People should know what they need to do, what their department needs to achieve, and how it contributes to the bigger goal.

The reason to invest time and resources in that is so you’re building something you can build on again. When a new person joins a department, they should be able to fit into a group that already knows its purpose. When the company adds another group, the organisation should still work together rather than become a collection of disconnected parts.

It comes back to planning ahead. If you can see where you want to go, you can build the structure to get there, one step at a time.

In contrast, what happens to a business that does not invest time, energy, and resources into Operational Scalability?

If you don’t put those systems and smaller groups in place, growth can mean more people and more activity without the organisation actually working better. People may know their individual tasks but not what the group needs to achieve together.

And if the real problem hasn’t been identified, it doesn’t disappear just because you make the business bigger. You can be very convincing about knowing what’s wrong, but until you identify what has to change and make that change, the same underlying problem remains.

That’s why I see operational scalability as something to build deliberately, not something you hope will happen as the business grows.

Can you please share a story from your experience about how a business grew dramatically when they worked on their Operational Scalability?

Many years ago I was working with a mortgage company that was facing receivership. It was in serious difficulty, and experts throughout the industry were criticising the business and the problems it was having.

I wrote a strategic plan that identified the main issues preventing the company from succeeding. But identifying the issues wasn’t enough. The plan also had to work out solutions and put them into practice. You can have everybody telling you what’s wrong, but if you don’t identify what actually needs to change and change it, nothing fundamentally improves.

One issue was our mortgage rates. The company was always the first to increase its rates and had some of the highest rates in the country. When rates went up, the company that moved first attracted the most criticism, and that was often us.

One part of the strategic plan was to stop being the first to increase rates. We also introduced what was, at the time, the best introductory mortgage rate in the country. Instead of everybody talking about us having the highest rates, the conversation changed. People were talking about the fact that we had the best introductory rate. We had given the market a different reason to talk about the business.

That was one element of a much broader strategic plan, but it showed what can happen when you identify a specific issue and actually change the way the business operates. The plan changed the position of the company and the way people in the industry perceived it.

Eighteen months later, instead of going into receivership, the company was sold for a substantial amount. The important point for me is that it was sold because of its success, not because of its failure, which had been the likely alternative.

The lesson was straightforward: recognising a problem isn’t the same as solving it. You have to identify the right thing to change, work out the solution and implement it. Otherwise, the problem can stay the same, however convincing the explanations about it might sound.

Based on your experience and success, what are the ‘Five Most Important Things A Business Leader Should Do To Set Up Systems, Procedures, And People To Prepare A Business To Scale’? If you can, please share a story or an example for each.

I would come back to five things that have shaped how I think about business and leadership:

1. See where you want to go. I’ve always said, ‘If I can’t see it, I can’t do it.’ You have to be able to envision the goal before you can work out how to get there. When I wanted to attend college abroad, I had £5 and no obvious route to paying for it. But I could see myself going, and I acted on that belief. I believe the same principle applies when you’re setting a direction for a business.

2. Identify the right problem. If you know a business has a problem but it isn’t being fixed, perhaps you’re not looking at the right problem. I like to challenge owners through questions that help them see something they haven’t seen. When I developed the strategic plan for the mortgage company, changing the way we operated began with identifying what was actually holding the business back.

3. Build a workable system. Within a department, everyone should know their job and understand what the department is trying to achieve. It’s something a new person can join and help build on. I think of small, effective groups as the building blocks of the wider organisation. If a block doesn’t work, making the whole structure bigger won’t make that block stronger.

4. Make the goal everybody’s goal. Leadership means looking ahead and communicating the dream so clearly that the people working with you make it their own. That’s where teamwork comes from. I never see myself as standing apart from the team. Even as a founder, whenever I work with someone, we’re working together towards a shared goal.

5. Build one step at a time. Rome wasn’t built in a day. You handle one major priority, get that working and move to the next. The house is built block by block. And like walking, you put one foot in front of the other, with both feet working together to move you forward. That’s how I believe you build a stronger organisation that can keep growing.

What are some common misconceptions businesses have about scaling? Can you please explain?

I think one common misconception is that scaling just means making a business bigger: more sales, more people, more activity. But if the smaller parts of an organisation aren’t working properly, simply adding to them doesn’t necessarily make the business stronger.

Another is thinking that leadership is about one person knowing everything or being the most important person. It isn’t. Everyone needs to know their job and understand how it fits with the team, the department and the organisation.

And there’s the assumption that naming a problem is the same as dealing with it. You can talk about the right things all day, but if you haven’t identified what needs to change, worked out how and then made that change, the business doesn’t move forward.

How do you keep your team motivated during periods of rapid growth or change?

I’ve always believed you have to plan into the future. You have to be able to sell the goal or dream to the staff so that it becomes their goal as well. That’s how real teamwork develops.

When people know not only what their job is but why the group is doing it, they’re all working towards something together. As a founder, I’m still part of a team. Whenever I work with someone, we’re working together towards a goal.

That becomes even more important during change or growth. The smaller groups need to understand how their efforts contribute to the whole organisation. Then everyone can see where they’re going and how they’re helping to get there.

Can you please give us your favorite ‘Life Lesson Quote’? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

‘You can’t win if you don’t play.’ To me, that means being brave enough to take a chance, even when there is a possibility of failure.

When I wanted to go to college abroad, I could have looked at my £5, decided the bank wouldn’t lend me anything and stayed at home. Instead, I went in, asked for the loan and told the manager I was a good investment. I got the loan, went to college the next day and paid it back.

I’ve always believed you have to be willing to fail. If you never take the shot, you never give yourself the chance to succeed.

You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

I’d like more people to believe that meaningful goals can be achieved by making progress one important step at a time. Rome wasn’t built in a day. I’ve always liked the idea of showing somebody what’s possible and helping them see a path they hadn’t seen before.

With business owners, that means asking the right questions rather than telling them I know best. I want them to be able to see what is preventing their business from succeeding, deal with that priority and build from there.

If that helps more people become focused, give themselves permission to try, and grow stronger businesses that support their goals, it’s a movement I’d be pleased to be part of.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

Readers can learn more about my work at Business Growth Assessment: https://businessgrowthassessment.com/ . The company is on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/company/business-growth-assessment/ and my personal profile is https://www.linkedin.com/in/gercollinsconsulting/ .

Thank you for these fantastic insights. We wish you continued success and good health!

Operational Scalability: Gerard Collins of Business Growth Assessment On How To Set Up Systems… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

People needed language, validation, and a roadmap for healing. That realization pushed me to bring my message to the greater world.

As a part of this series, we had the pleasure to interview Angelica Garcia.

Angelica Garcia, LCSW, couples therapist, author, and founder of Constitutional Psychology, a framework exploring how emotional safety, identity, attachment, and civic life shape our inner experience. With more than a decade of work in trauma, relational repair, and community mental health, she helps individuals and communities understand the emotional patterns that drive behavior, resilience, and belonging. Her writing helps translate complex psychological ideas into accessible, emotionally intelligent conversations about the hidden forces shaping modern life.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive into the main focus of our interview, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory?

Thank you for this opportunity, and hello to all the readers! I hope that after my responses you get to know me more intimately, as I believe it will give you a better understanding of the need for my new discipline: Constitutional Psychology.

I was born in California to Mexican parents. I identify as Mexican American, and this lens has emboldened me to take up space assertively. I have lived the experience of being first-generation, navigating the challenges of feeling excluded and “othered” by peers and systems I grew up in. I was not the typical idea of what an “American” is — i.e., I am not white. I grew up knowing real truths, like understanding that Native peoples were systematically genocided by colonists, and that Black Americans built this country through enslavement and exploitation. Cruelty that, to this day, is still experienced by Black Americans due to systemic racism and the rights and laws the current Supreme Court continues to overturn.

I come from anxious and insecure attachments because, at a very young age, I was exposed to instability and trauma while living with my parents. Due to severe abuse, I entered a guardianship where the physical and emotional abuse did not end. Those years — first with my parents and then in guardianship — left me with profound anxiety, trauma, and grief. I entered foster care at 16 and graduated high school as a foster child. I will always be grateful for my foster parents.

Being part of these three parental systems, and growing up in rural California, my Mexican American identity clashed with the white supremacist structures in the educational systems I interacted with. This shaped and harmed me in ways I continue to decipher, unlearn, and heal from to this day. I encountered many racist stereotypes about my culture and heritage, and I was exposed to racial stereotypes about other races, ethnicities, and cultures by all of these systems. I have been deeply and irrevocably harmed by the systems I encountered. These systems failed me. I have also been given love and supported by many — my siblings, my husband, those I consider parents, and friends. I am forever grateful for your love, generosity, kindness, and support. Thank you. I have continued to commit to anti-racism precisely because all of these systems failed me in one way or another. I am not suggesting I didn’t grow or heal — that work continues — and I am committed to understanding how to be a better person, showing compassion, care, and love. Still, I would be remiss if I didn’t express my upbringing in terms of having been failed by these systems.

The lesson I want to share most about my upbringing is that, because of my resiliency and the help of those who chose to support and love me through all of these hardships, I have been able to create autonomy and take control over internalizing the true history of this country — not the white-washed version of it. I have been able to read and absorb information as an active, lifelong knowledge-seeker, especially from books by Black authors and historians. Books like The 1619 Project and my African American studies courses at Berkeley and NYU helped me heal and repair the pain of growing up in educational systems that obscured and confused me.

I want to thank Black and Native Peoples for teaching me everything about this country. I am committed to uplifting and supporting Black and Native Peoples and all of us who have continued to feel “other” because of the original sins of this country. My discipline emerged as a result of the educational systems that failed me and contributed to my frustrations and ignorance. Growing up with those frustrations highlighted to me, as an adult and as I came to form my discipline, that the unprocessed and unresolved original sins of this country were the key to the powerlessness we all feel when our government fails us.

It helped me understand that because these harms and wounds remain unresolved, unrepaired, and unhealed, we are insecurely attached to our government. We have a relationship — a deep one — with a government that promises rights and then takes them away, despite those rights being enshrined in our Constitution. The 14th Amendment guarantees our rights, yet we have extreme abortion laws, racism has risen under Donald Trump, and ICE has killed citizens. We are told to trust our government to protect us, but that is a lie when white supremacy is embedded in our institutions. As a result, we are unable, as a society, to establish safety and security with our government.

My discipline highlights this, explains why it happens, and outlines what we can do to truly repair the original sins — allowing us, for the first time, to reach safety and security based on the ideals the Constitution promises us all. My upbringing shaped everything about how and why it became necessary to found an entirely new framework: a discipline to help us understand our relationship with our government and the need for true healing and repair in order to achieve earned security.

When you were younger, was there a book that you read that inspired you to take action or changed your life? Can you share a story about that?

There were many, many books that inspired me to take action or that helped change my life in introspective and impactful ways. But one of the books that sticks in my memory is The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros. I read it at such a young age, and the first time I read it, I knew it resonated with me. I, too, was feeling many of the same emotions that Esperanza felt and shared. I felt the attachment fears of being dismissed by the educational system I was part of, and by peers who poked fun at our cultural food, our music, our way of dressing, our complexion, and who exposed us to slurs like “wetbacks.” I have very painful memories of being told I was “white-washed” because I was speaking “white,” meaning I was assimilating into the dominant white culture in our educational systems.

This book validated so much of the pain of growing up in a system that wants you to assimilate, but also ostracizes you and does not protect you from supremacist views that, as a child, you are powerless to do anything about. The tension and hardship of not feeling protected, and having to be at the mercy of a system that tears at your identity before you are even a full adult, was devastating. It was painful to grow up in these systems without being able to form a healthy identity of self. I love my cultural food, both eating it and making it, singing to our Mexican pop songs and rancheras, speaking Spanish, playing loteria, all of my Mexicanness. This book helped me navigate these complicated feelings of grief — wanting to hold close to my ethnicity and still succeed.

I learned from this book how to create my own home of safety, freedom from stereotypes, the ability to make my own choices, and how to provide myself dignity when the systems I interact with do not offer it to me. Every winter we make Mexican hot chocolate, tamales, and posole. I make carne asada whenever I want. I make homemade Mexican salsas for scrambled eggs, any meat dish, or simply just because. When I shower, I listen to and sing music from Juan Gabriel, Belanova, Joan Sebastian, and Yuridia. I wake up from dreams in Spanish. I have created a safe identity that incorporates my heritage and honors my lived experience. I don’t want it any other way. The House on Mango Street saw me before I could see myself.

Can you describe how you aim to make a significant social impact with your book?

I am a Licensed Clinical Social Worker, and I have dedicated my entire career to helping people. I have only ever wanted to assist individuals in learning to regulate their emotions and improve their quality of life through the mental health services I can provide. I continue to learn and apply what I learn in my therapy sessions because I want to provide evidence-based therapy for everyone who enters my therapy room. I am committed to helping our society by reaching the couples and individuals who come to me for support. I am in service to society as my purpose. With my new discipline, I am extending this purpose to the larger public, as my book applies to the general population and to other global societies with constitutions. I want people to recognize that the relationship they maintain with their government functions similarly to attachment styles normally seen between individuals and their caretakers. This is based on the premise that the government asks us to engage in a relationship with it in which it will protect us and provide us with rights. When our government betrays us and violates this sacred relationship, we are unable to feel safe. That is the fundamental premise of my discipline.

Another significant contribution of my book is that it aims to advance civic emotional literacy. I help teach readers how their emotional responses to political events are not random or irrational, but instead are rooted in attachment dynamics with the government. When people can understand why they feel fear, betrayal, anger, or hopelessness, they can respond with clarity rather than reactivity. This helps strengthen civic engagement, improves public discourse, and empowers individuals to participate in democracy with emotional intelligence rather than with distress.

Additionally, I want people to know that beyond this, we can achieve repair and heal from this insecure relationship with our government. The framework offers collective healing and repair. I outline how society can move from insecure attachment to earned security with their government through acknowledgement, accountability, constitutional protections, and relational repair. This framework gives individuals, communities, and policymakers a roadmap for addressing the unresolved harms that continue to destabilize our civic life. My goal is to show that repair is possible — not just theoretically, but practically. I provide hope.

Can you share with us the most interesting story that you shared in your book?

One of the most interesting stories I share in my book is the one that was most important for developing my framework. It is the moment I realized that the relationships we keep with our government mirror the attachment styles we develop with our caregivers. This insight came from years of working with individuals and couples in therapy who discussed their fears, betrayals, hopes, and longings. These fears were emotional patterns that were also present in how people in my sessions talked about their rights, their safety, and their government.

For example, in the book, I describe a session where a client expressed feeling “abandoned” by their government after a policy change directly harmed their family. The language they used — feeling abandoned, betrayed, fearful — was identical to what I hear when someone is describing an attachment rupture with a parent. This showed me that the emotional injuries we experience at the civic level are not abstract; they are deeply personal and relational. This story helped me understand how our constitutional rights are not just legal protections — they are emotional promises. When these promises are broken, we experience real psychological harm. Sharing this story in the book helps readers understand why civic distress feels so intimate and why healing requires both constitutional repair and emotional repair.

What was the “aha moment” or series of events that made you decide to bring your message to the greater world? Can you share a story about that?

The series of events were directly tied to the rights being overturned by the Supreme Court, the racism and ongoing rise in racism since Donald Trump has continued in office. It is also due to the failure of the Democratic party to address the fears and failures during the Biden Presidency prior to Donald Trump taking power again. Other events include the brutality displayed by the ICE agents toward citizens and immigrants, the disregard and will of the people denouncing the genocide of Palestinians, and the ongoing atrocious war in Iran. The list does actually go on and on. All of these and more highlight keenly the need for a framework like mine to provide understanding and hope during a time of great harm to our society and societies around the world.

I observed people and communities struggle to make sense of these government failures, rights violations and political instability. Session after session, I saw how ordinary people were emotionally breaking under the weight of this civic harm. Clients who had never discussed politics in therapy were suddenly coming in with panic attacks after rights were being overturned, grief after witnessing the violence against other humans, and profound fear about the future of their families. I realized that people were experiencing constitutional trauma, not in an abstract political sense, but in a deeply personal psychological way. Their emotional language mirrored attachment ruptures: abandonment, betrayal, insecurity, fear, hopelessness.

Seeing this pattern across clients of different backgrounds made it clear that our society lacked a framework to explain this pain. That was the moment I understood that my discipline needed to exist beyond the therapy room. People needed language, validation, and a roadmap for healing. That realization pushed me to bring my message to the greater world.

Without sharing specific names, can you tell us a story about a particular individual who was impacted or helped by your cause?

In my therapy framework, I work through the lens of attachment theory, specifically utilizing Emotionally Focused Individual Therapy and Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy, as I also work with couples. This lens has allowed me to observe the attachment fears people discuss in our therapy sessions. There was one moment that has stayed with me over the years. In a therapy session, a client described feeling “constantly on edge” every time a new policy was announced. They shared that they felt like they were “waiting for a parent to explode,” even though the issue we were discussing was related to politics.

They were naturally describing attachment fear, but directed toward the government. They were talking about betrayal, abandonment, and insecurity in the same emotional language used when discussing ruptures with caregivers. This was long before I had named my discipline, but it was a moment when I realized that people were already living the framework. They were experiencing civic harm as relational harm. That client helped me see that the emotional reality existed even if the discipline did not yet have a name.

This experience affirmed that the world needed a language for this and that I needed to bring it forward.

Are there three things the community/society/politicians can do to help you address the root of the problem you are trying to solve?

One of the most important things society and our political institutions can do is commit to rituals of naming and rebuilding. My discipline shows that repair begins with the courage to name what was harmed. Communities need shared practices that acknowledge truth without denial, because naming is the first step toward integration and constitutional healing.

Second, we need rituals of witnessing and mourning. When harm goes unnamed or unseen, people experience constitutional abandonment. Collective witnessing restores visibility, and collective mourning transforms chaos into coherence. These rituals are not symbolic — they regulate our nervous systems, rebuild belonging, and help us metabolize civic trauma.

Finally, we need rituals of rebuilding, both locally and nationally. Local rituals restore community identity; national rituals restore constitutional identity. Without them, our democracy lacks emotional infrastructure. With them, we create the conditions for repair, coherence, and a future rooted in truth rather than reenacted wounds.

These three practices — naming, witnessing/mourning, and rebuilding — are essential for addressing the root problem my discipline identifies: a nation that has never emotionally processed its constitutional ruptures. Rituals give us a path forward.

How do you define “Leadership”? Can you explain what you mean or give an example?

I define leadership as the ability to lead others through vision, dignity, compassion, and humanity. For me, it requires a constant willingness to become introspective about what you don’t know, to be willing to unlearn your bias, to address your ignorance as it becomes known to you, and to be accountable to those you serve.

An example of leadership, from my perspective, is Ms. Angela Davis. I have often found myself thinking about her and being in awe of her life. She is an incredible human being whom I look up to, someone who has endured cruelty and injustice at the hands of this government. Despite all of the racism she has experienced, she continues to contribute to communities that are better served because of her. She continues to be an amazing professor, advocating for noble causes. She is an admirable and respectable person, and I feel so lucky to know she exists in this world at the same time that I do. When I think of her, I am reminded of the resiliency and leadership role she has taken on to teach the world — and the United States in particular — about itself. She is courageous and a thought leader I aspire one day to be like. I feel such debt to her for showing us how to lead by example.

What are your “5 things I wish someone told me when I first started” and why? Please share a story or example for each.

There are always wiser people than myself, and I am grateful that I have so many people to look up to who offer advice and meaningful support. Still, when I first started out, I wish I had been told the following.

1. Growing up can take longer than we think!

We are learning now that our brains are not fully in adult mode until our 30s, and throughout all of my 20s I believed I was fully grown and supposed to carry forward as if I were in control of my future. I wish I had been told that while it’s important to begin your professional education and start your career, it’s okay to not have everything figured out. Too much anxiety was created by feeling the pressure to grow up fast, especially now that science is catching up to the fact that we may need more support and grace as we grow into adulthood.

2. That I’m allowed to feel joy before my life feels stable.

I wish someone had told me that joy can be found in your day-to-day, even when you’re struggling to survive. For the majority of my 20s, my experience was that I would feel anxious when attempting to enjoy myself as I was building a stable life. It was often the case that I felt stressed trying to enjoy myself when so much of my future was uncertain. I wish someone had told me to slow down and breathe, and that I could still find joy in the ordinary parts of life.

3. That I don’t have to deserve rest.

I wish someone had told me that rest is not a reward. As a Social Worker, I find myself telling my clients a version of this. For someone with a traumatic childhood like mine, I find it difficult to practice. I struggle because I was conditioned to believe the opposite — that I must be constantly and incessantly productive to merit rest. It has taken so long to unlearn this, and I still struggle, but I know now that it is essential if I want to create the emotional capacity to engage with life.

4. That there is always time to grow into a better version of myself.

I wish someone had told me that there is always time to reinvent yourself, as I have in my 30s. I’m finding myself constantly learning how to slow down and how to grow in ways that are meaningful for becoming a better human. I had a false sense that by my 30s I should be fully realized and that my identity would be fixed. That has not been my experience. I am always astounded by my ability to expand and grow, not for the sake of improving or seeking perfection, but because it’s important that I learn to be a good human.

5. That finding my people can change everything.

I wish someone had told me that community is not optional. I am notoriously an introvert, but I come to life with the right people. I value my inner peace and harmony above chaos and dysfunction. I have had difficulty finding my people over the years, and as a result, I’ve struggled with loneliness. Still, I’m grateful I never gave up, because I’m only now beginning to forge a community that is nurturing and supportive. I feel more connected, less lonely, and invigorated to keep showing up for them as well. It makes all the difference to find your people — the ones with whom you can be yourself and feel loved and supported.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

Rupi Kaur, another influence in my life, has said, “What is stronger than the human heart which shatters over and over and still lives.” I love this quote so much because it embodies many of us. It is, at the heart — pun intended — my story. With all my childhood trauma that shapes who I am, my heart has never given up on me. More and more these days, I find myself feeling more hopeful about the rest of my life, feeling optimistic because there is so much more life to experience and to metabolize. I want to soak it all in; no matter what future challenges arise, I want to experience it all. I have better tools, a hearty support network, and a zeal for experiencing more than I ever had before. I have found, time and time again, a reason to repair and heal. And as Rupi Kaur also notes, “you do not just wake up and become a butterfly — growth is a process.” I’m in process.

Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. :-)

This is a very difficult question because I have a hard time choosing just one — there are many. An individual I look up to and am grateful to exist in the same timeline is Ibram X. Kendi. He is a remarkable human being and leader. His work on antiracism and founding the Center for Antiracist Research inspires me to keep doing the work I am doing. Someone like him, with all his life experiences — being a public intellectual, professor, writer, and founder — shows incredible leadership. Through his example, I am inspired to be accountable for offering my skills and knowledge to make this country and the world a better and safer place for humanity.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

Website: Constitutional Psychology

Email: constitutionalpsychology@gmail.com

Instagram: Angelica Garcia (@constitutionalpsychology)

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/angelica-garcia-18b62629a

This was very meaningful, thank you so much. We wish you only continued success on your great work!

Social Impact Authors: How & Why Author Angelica Garcia Is Helping To Change Our World was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Perfectionism and rigidity belong on the job, not in the creative process. Now, I keep things simple: I always back up the most recent version of my work strictly to both my hard drive and the cloud. More importantly, I’ve learned that making a mess of things is just part of finding your voice!

As a part of this series, we had the pleasure to interview P.J. McCoy.

Born in Liverpool and having served for over two decades in Merseyside Police, P.J. McCoy is an author and Master’s researcher whose lifelong passion for storytelling was sparked during his school days at Glan Alyn in North Wales. Having overcome life-altering health challenges and severe personal adversity, he channels his remarkable resilience into writing Young Adult historical fantasy rooted in Welsh folklore, local geography, and modern inclusivity. Driven by the core values of love and kindness, he now writes whenever his health allows, with his debut novel Torn Page marking the beginning of an exciting fantasy series.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Can you share a story about what brought you to this particular career path?

My fascination with medieval history goes right back to June 1981, during a summer school trip to Rhuddlan Castle just before moving up to senior school. My class teacher, Miss O’Shea, shared the castle’s history with me during that visit, completely capturing my imagination and — I believe — subconsciously planting the seed for Torn Page. The core concept for the book actually took root in May 1984, when I was a 14-year-old boarder at Glan Alyn in Colomendy. Inspired by a friend’s ghost story about a local legend named ‘Peg Leg’ and an overgrown, abandoned stone cottage opposite our dorms, I had a vivid dream that night about a spinning watch and Rhuddlan Castle. Later that day, a classroom lesson covering both levitation and Llywelyn ap Gruffudd sent my imagination completely down a rabbit hole, sparking the book’s premise. Although I scribbled down notes and chatted with a friend about writing a novel when I left school in 1986, the project ended up lying dormant for decades. The ultimate push finally arrived in July 2014 through a chance reunion with that exact same school friend, whom I hadn’t seen in over ten years. That encounter gave me the nudge I needed: I bought a MacBook and finally began drafting the story during my daily train commutes.

Can you share the most interesting story that occurred to you in the course of your career?

Much of my career was spent serving with Merseyside Police. I had always wanted to write a book, but for a long time, I lacked the time and confidence. That changed during a short spell of writing in 1998, following a chance conversation with Maurice Bessman in Allerton Tesco car park. He inspired me to finally pursue my passion, prompting me to buy a laptop and write a novel called The Seven Seasons. It followed a fiercely competitive family of five sisters and two brothers, all harbouring deep secrets. While I wasn’t entirely convinced by the final result — even if it did warrant a celebration party — I still have the physical paper copy today! My current writing journey properly kicked off in July 2014, covering everything from poetry to novels. Originally titled Adventure to The Soul Kingdom, the project demanded extensive research into medieval history, King Edward I, Chester Cathedral, Welsh witchcraft, astronomy, and underground mining networks. A real highlight was meeting an elderly couple in Maeshafn; John invited me into his home and talked for hours about the web of tunnels beneath the village — including one stretching all the way to the North Wales coastline — while plying me with loads of tea and biscuits! His stories sparked endless ideas and led me to uncover fascinating pieces of local history. I learned that Felix Mendelssohn stayed in the Flintshire village of Rhydymwyn in August 1829, hosted by mining engineer John Taylor’s family at Coed du Hall after bad weather ruined his trip to Ireland. I couldn’t resist weaving a version of this into my YA fantasy novel, where it turns out Mendelssohn was doing a bit more in the Leete than just seeking refuge from the rain, and his secret search for an ancient magical portal ended up inspiring one of his most haunting compositions… After finishing the first draft in 2019 and battling a heavy dose of imposter syndrome, invaluable mentorship from a friend and fellow author, Helen Aitchison, helped me completely modernise the narrative, weave in authentic LGBTQ+ representation, and retitle it Torn Page for the YA market.

What was the biggest challenge you faced in your journey to becoming an author? How did you overcome it? Can you share a story about that that other aspiring writers can learn from?

The biggest challenge I faced was carrying the invisible weight of imposter syndrome. Despite building a demanding career in the police and earning advanced degrees, I quietly struggled with self-doubt all the way until my retirement. Looking back, I can see how that environment slowly chipped away at my confidence, making my later creative achievements all the more hard-won and sweet. The turning point came when I learned to find strength in unexpected detours. If my younger self could see where I am now — writing novels, embracing history, and fully owning my voice — he would be astonished. It taught me that our most difficult chapters and longest detours are often quietly preparing us for the stories we were always meant to tell. For other aspiring writers battling similar doubts, my biggest piece of advice is simple: just write about what you love. Don’t overthink how the words form when you first put pen to paper, because you can always edit them afterwards. It was only when I finally pushed past that mental block, embraced my unique perspective, and sought out mentorship that Torn Page truly came to life.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

When I first started properly drafting, I was so eager to reach the finish line that I managed to turn my file management into a complete comedy of errors. I used to save new copies with each day’s date, which inevitably led to a massive headache. One day, I opened the wrong version, didn’t realise it until too late, and wound up rewriting entire sections while completely losing my most recent changes — not to mention the time I forgot to save altogether and watched hours of work vanish! Coming from a long career in the police, where you are trained to be razor-focused, serious, and utterly uncompromising about ‘doing things right,’ this was a humbling wake-up call. I’m quite a sensitive person, and I vividly remember sitting on the train the day I realised the scale of my file-saving blunder. I looked up, caught the eye of a woman sitting opposite me who could clearly see the sheer panic written all over my face, and my only choice was to break into a wry smile and chuckle. She gave me a kind, knowing look and said, ‘I make mistakes all the time.’ It felt straight out of a rom-com, and it taught me how to finally laugh at myself. Perfectionism and rigidity belong on the job, not in the creative process. Now, I keep things simple: I always back up the most recent version of my work strictly to both my hard drive and the cloud. More importantly, I’ve learned that making a mess of things is just part of finding your voice!

What are some of the most interesting or exciting projects you are working on now?

Aside from preparing for the launch of Torn Page and working on its sequel, I’ve got two very different stories bubbling away on the back burner. One is a standalone whodunit crime thriller about a former police officer down on his luck who takes a job as a chauffeur for a luxury cruise line. It’s a story about how easily kindness can be weaponised, and an old police rivalry makes things very personal. The other is a bittersweet rom-com about a man who bumps into his ex from twenty years ago at a motorway service station. After a harmless white lie about owning a gorgeous classic car spirals completely out of control, he finds himself trapped in a web of absurd deceptions, just to impress her. Both are in the early planning stages, but juggling a twisty crime puzzle alongside a heartfelt romantic comedy is keeping my writing desk very busy!

Can you share the most interesting story that you shared in your book?

This is a difficult choice, as there are several interesting stories within my book, but I need to share two of the best:

The Blossoming Romance Between Jac and Karen The tender, unspoken connection that develops between Jac and Karen as they navigate an extraordinary world together. From quiet moments on their college weekend away to a midnight trek through the snow under the supermoon, their bond deepens through subtle gestures and quiet vulnerability. Gazing up at a celestial meteor shower inside the planetary observatory — surrounded by glowing constellations and ancient magic — Karen squeezes Jac’s hand and whispers that if the moon were to come crashing down, Jac is the only person she would want by her side. It is a story of love and trust blooming right at the edge of cosmic chaos.

Victor’s Personal Breakthrough The quiet transformation of Victor from a timid scout into a confident young man discovering his own voice. Burdened by his father’s temper and stifling expectations, Victor has spent his life afraid to step out of line. However, as the group is drawn into the secrets of the subterranean library, his passion for history and celestial mapping comes alive. Warmly encouraged by his friends, Victor steps out from under his father’s shadow, realising he can break free, embrace his intellect, and forge a future of his own — starting with his dream of university.

What is the main empowering lesson you want your readers to take away after finishing your book?

If you truly want to, you can write a book. Everyone has a story to tell, and you don’t need to be a seasoned writer to tell it! Remember your favourite book and how that made you feel. As a child, I remember reading my favourite book, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe — that sent my imagination into a spin. I believed I could get to Narnia through my own wardrobe! I also remember reading The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on a coach trip to Greece and howling with laughter. These feelings should inspire us, because our feelings matter. My life journey provided many challenges, and honouring those feelings — along with having self-belief — is essential to enabling us to overcome them. Above all, I want my readers to walk away with that exact same power: unshakeable self-belief. In Torn Page, my characters are ordinary scouts thrust into extraordinary, terrifying circumstances — confronting dark history, ancient magic, and formidable enemies. They don’t start out with all the answers, but what carries them forward is their willingness to trust themselves and back each other up. You can see this moment of quiet self-belief take root early on in Chapter One, when Jac first spots the strange, impossible glowing lights coming from the abandoned school dormitory and decides to investigate: Sitting up, she pushed aside the gingham tweed, expecting to see moonlight on the snow. She blinked, startled. The school windows were glowing. She rubbed her eyes. That couldn’t be right; they’d all been told the place was empty… Jac tightened her fists, bracing herself. ‘I think we should go and take a look.’ She searched his face for hesitation, but JP simply gave a sharp nod… Victor looked from the glowing school windows back to Jac. A slow, steady light kindled in his eyes, and he squared his shoulders as if shaking off a weight. ‘I thought you’d never ask,’ he said, his voice surprisingly firm. Jac felt a surge of warmth towards him. I’m so glad he’s as curious as I am, she thought. It made her feel less alone in her restlessness. ‘This is our team,’ she realised. They dressed quickly, no words spoken, hearts thudding. All eyes turned to the school above, where lights flickered against the dark. Something was waiting. Just like Jac, JP, Karen, and Victor, we all face moments where we step into the unknown — whether that’s overcoming personal hurdles or sitting down to write our very first chapter. I hope my readers finish Torn Page remembering that no matter how daunting the journey looks, having belief in yourself is the first step to turning the impossible into reality.

Based on your experience, what are the “5 Things You Need to Know to Become a Great Author”? Please share a story or example for each.

I don’t necessarily consider myself a ‘great’ author — Torn Page is my debut release! However, I believe the qualities required to become an author are identical to those needed to become a great one. You don’t need to be a seasoned writer to start; you just need the willingness to learn and the commitment to see it through. Based on my journey from a twelve-year-old pupil with an idea to a published novelist, here are the five key qualities every author needs:

1. Unshakeable Self-Belief

Writing a book requires trusting your voice before anyone else does. You have to believe that your story matters, especially when doubt creeps in or when traditional routes feel closed off. My Experience: The concept for Torn Page was born back in May 1984 while I was at Glan Alyn Boarding School, sparked by a friend’s ghost story about an abandoned cottage, a vivid dream about Rhuddlan Castle, and a history lesson on Llywelyn ap Gruffudd. Although I made notes, the project lay dormant for decades. It wasn’t until a chance reunion with that same school friend thirty years later — where they urged me to write it — that I bought a laptop and started drafting on my daily train commutes. Believing in that original spark after thirty years was the first step to turning a dream into reality.

2. Deep Commitment to Research & Learning

A compelling story rests on a solid foundation. Whether you are building an entire fantasy realm or grounding your book in real geography, thorough research brings authenticity to the page and sharpens your craft. My Experience: To bring my YA historical fantasy to life, I immersed myself in extensive research. I devoured books on King Edward I (including A Great and Terrible King), Welsh witchcraft, astronomy, Chester Cathedral, and the real-world underground mining tunnels of Maeshafn in North Wales. I was not a trained writer when I started, but treating the craft as a continuous learning process — working with editors and completing a Master’s by Research — helped me grow into the writer my story needed.

3. Absolute Determination

Writing a novel is rarely a smooth, uninterrupted process. It requires the determination to carve out time for your craft alongside life’s heavy demands, high-pressure careers, and family commitments. My Experience: I wrote Torn Page over the course of a decade while serving full-time as a police officer in demanding roles, studying for postgraduate degrees, and raising my family. Finding time to write meant typing during train commutes and snatching moments whenever I could. Determination isn’t about having endless spare time; it’s about making the time because the story simply refuses to stay untold.

4. Fierce Resilience

Every author faces setbacks — rejection letters, difficult edits, imposter syndrome, or unexpected life crises. Resilience is the ability to keep writing through adversity and adapting when things don’t go to plan. My Experience: My path to publication was tested by severe personal trials, including navigating my youngest son’s critical illness in intensive care, losing both of my parents, and surviving a stroke in 2022 that resulted in the loss of sight in my right eye. Writing through ill health and personal tragedy proved to be my ultimate test. Channelling that resilience directly into my work not only saw Torn Page over the finish line, but also inspired my published poem, Goodbye from My Eye.

5. Openness to Humility & Evolution

A draft is never final on the first try. Being a great author means having the humility to listen to constructive feedback, accept guidance from mentors, and rewrite your story to make it the best it can possibly be. My Experience: After completing my first draft in 2019, I battled severe imposter syndrome and struggled with agent rejections. Everything changed when I connected with author Helen Aitchison. Her mentorship showed me that the book needed to evolve. I undertook a complete rewrite to modernise the narrative, sharpen the YA pacing, and introduce authentic LGBTQ+ representation. Letting go of my initial draft and remaining open to evolution transformed the manuscript into the book it was meant to be.

What is the one habit you believe contributed the most to you becoming a great writer? (i.e. perseverance, discipline, play, craft study). Can you share a story or example?

If I had to blend all the lessons, resilience, and research from my journey into a single defining habit, it would be unflinching creative adaptability — the habit of taking whatever life throws at you, whether it’s a high-pressure shift, a devastating health setback, or a draft that isn’t working, and reshaping it into fuel for your story. It’s easy to think that writing requires pristine conditions: a quiet room, endless free hours, and a clear mind. But my reality was a full-time career in the police service, postgraduate academic research, and raising a family. If I had waited for the ‘perfect’ time to write, Torn Page would still be a quiet dream sitting in a desk drawer. Instead, I made a habit of writing in the cracks of everyday life — snatching moments on daily train commutes, typing on a laptop whenever a spare twenty minutes presented itself. The ultimate test of this habit came in October 2022. Having already navigated the loss of both my parents and my youngest son’s critical illness in intensive care, I suffered a stroke that left me blind in my right eye. It was a life-altering moment that forced my ill-health retirement from the police. In that moment, adaptability wasn’t just a writing technique; it became a survival mechanism. Instead of letting sight loss close the door on my creative life, I adapted. I channelled that emotional turbulence and physical challenge directly onto the page — inspiring my published poem, Goodbye from My Eye, and giving me the ultimate focus to push Torn Page over the finish line. That same adaptability allowed me to look at my initial 2019 manuscript — a draft I’d spent years researching — and humbly accept mentor Helen Aitchison’s advice to tear it down and rebuild it. I completely rewrote the narrative to sharpen the YA pacing, strengthen character voices, and weave in authentic LGBTQ+ representation. Great writing isn’t born from having a smooth path; it’s born from the habit of constantly adapting — turning personal hardship into emotional depth on the page, and turning constructive criticism into a stronger story.

Which literature do you draw inspiration from? Why?

This is a wonderful question because it gives me a chance to pay homage to the authors whose work truly shaped Torn Page and inspired me to see my story through to the end. First and foremost, I draw huge inspiration from Joseph Delaney’s The Spook’s series and Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising sequence. Their mastery of atmospheric folklore, local mythology, and young protagonists facing dark, ancient forces profoundly influenced my own narrative. Reading them gave me the spark and momentum I needed to build my own world and finish my book. In contemporary fiction, Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London series is a massive favourite of mine. His main character, Peter Grant, is a police officer navigating supernatural mysteries, and given my background in policing, I felt an immediate, authentic connection to Peter’s voice, the procedural detail, and the way the plot unfolds. I also deeply admire Clare Pooley and her novels, The Authenticity Project and The People on Platform 5. Clare has a remarkable talent for character development. Her stories completely gripped me, bringing a sense of pure joy and excitement to the page. They served as a constant reminder of how powerful rich, relatable human relationships are in storytelling. Finally, I must highlight author Helen Aitchison. Reading her books and delving into her stories motivated me on a deeply personal level. Developing a professional relationship with Helen was a true turning point for my manuscript — her mentorship was instrumental in helping me find ‘my voice’ and properly understanding the narrative direction for Torn Page. Her work continues to inspire both my writing and my approach to storytelling.

You are a person of enormous influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

If I could start any movement, it would be a simple, grassroots revolution: The Habit of Everyday Kindness. I live my life by the values of love and kindness. I know it might sound like a cliché, but kindness truly is a gift. The beauty of it is that it flips the focus outward — it allows us to give rather than just receive. Throughout my life, through high-pressure shifts in the police service, personal health challenges, and family struggles, the moments that kept me going were almost always acts of quiet kindness from others. If my friends and colleagues were ever asked what they remembered me for, my single greatest hope is that they would simply say, ‘He was kind.’ Our world often measures success by achievements, status, or influence, but real impact is much simpler than that. My movement would encourage people to live by one straightforward rule: If you ever get the opportunity to help someone — especially someone who truly needs it — and you are in a position to do so, just do it. Whether that’s stepping up for a friend, mentoring an aspiring writer, or offering a helping hand to a complete stranger, small acts of kindness ripple outwards in ways we can never fully predict. You never know whose life you might change just by choosing to be kind.

How can our readers follow you on social media?

Instagram: @writerpjmccoy

TikTok: @writerpjmccoy

X/Twitter: @writerpjmccoy

Thank you so much for the time you spent with us today! We wish you continued success with your writing.

P J McCoy On The 5 Things You Need to Know to Become a Great Author was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The recurring hard part is noticing, early enough, that whatever had been working has stopped without announcing itself.

As a part of this series, we had the pleasure to interview Aaron Primero.

Aaron Primero is co-founder and CEO of The Type Founders, which launched in 2021 to give the world’s leading independent foundries a home to grow and prosper. At The Type Founders, Aaron pairs his financial and commercial expertise with a lifelong dedication to craft, tradition, and the creative arts. Aaron’s path to the type industry is an unusual one: a classically trained musician and student of the classics, he sang professionally before turning to economics and finance — first as a Fulbright Scholar, then earning a Master’s in Financial Economics from the University of Oxford, followed by several years at Goldman Sachs across investment banking and firmwide strategy. As CEO, Aaron focuses on building the platform and long-term business strategy that enable type designers to focus on their craft while their foundries thrive. He lives in New York City with his wife and young daughter.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

It was serendipitous. In late 2019 I left finance to go back to graduate school — I missed the atmosphere of libraries, critical, deep and iterative thinking, and writing in prose instead of bullet points. Then the pandemic arrived in 2020 and I deferred a year. During that deferral, someone put a question to me: how do you raise capital to build a business around exceptional foundries and their libraries they had spent their careers building? I had no idea, so I went and found out.

Type turned out to be a real business sitting inside a craft.

It’s a small world of artisans making work that everyone reads daily and very few notice. And the stakes are larger than the anonymity suggests. A typeface is working on the reader before a single word registers, setting whether a thing feels careful or cheap, official or friendly.

That gap was interesting enough to keep pulling at, and it turned out to be an unusual dovetail. Classics, classical music, finance — parts of my life that had always run on separate tracks. Type pulls on all at once, the intellectual and the creative and the professional, and that’s much of why I’m energized by it.

And I never did make it back to graduate school…

Can you tell us a story about the hard times that you faced when you first started your journey?

In some ways starting was the easy part.

I had partners who brought decades in the industry with them, so I was never the only person in the room having to figure things out. What I had to do was get fluent quickly, and build credibility on two fronts at once. To foundries, a finance background reads closer to a warning than a credential. To investors, type was an asset class almost nobody had invested in and there were very few analogs to point at. Two rooms, two lexicons, and the thing that made me useful in one made people wary in the other. Getting proficient enough took about a year before we started the company.

But the question maybe suggests a curve, where you really struggle at the outset and then things get easier. My experience is that they just change rather than ease up. I don’t worry about making payroll anymore. I worry about decisions that won’t reveal themselves for another five, ten years — ones where you find out you were wrong long after you could have fixed it cheaply.

It’s a little like parenting (which I say as the father of a two-year-old who has no idea what’s coming for either of us!). Toddler problems are exhausting; they’re also small, immediate, and resolved by bedtime (mostly). I’m told they grow up into teenagers who, I shudder to think, have teenage problems. So do companies.

I’m nostalgic for some of my old problems, which could be captured in a 2x2 matrix I thought through while in the shower. I can’t do that now, and getting comfortable with not being able to has been its own piece of work.

So it’s a journey of constant reinvention. The company that worked at five people doesn’t work at ten and so on, and the way I spent my day four years ago would be close to malpractice today. The recurring hard part is noticing, early enough, that whatever had been working has stopped without announcing itself.

Where did you get the drive to continue even though things were so hard?

A few places: wanting to create, and to build something that endures, hopefully outlasting me. Doing well by the people who signed up to do this alongside me. Taking care of my family and my partners, foundries among them. That’s most of it.

I work pretty hard, but I’m not grinding, and that’s by design. I chose the category deliberately: stable enough to survive my blunders, niche enough that we could have an impact in it, competitive enough to keep me on my toes and stimulated — but not so punishing that I’d be running on fumes and adrenaline every day, perennially in survival mode.

So, how are things going today? How did grit and resilience lead to your eventual success?

An entrepreneur I admire, congratulated on his success, called it “endlessly climbing the wall of worry”, which felt very relatable. I’m a worrier and always have been; though every so often I get reminded of what we’ve been able to do over the past five years, and for a second I see the broader arc of it and think: yes, we’re in a good place, on firm ground; we did what we said we were going to do. By some measure I suppose that’s success.

We have a very patient and long view of success, and celebrate both company milestones and those of our foundries. We have brought together around 40 inspiring, incredible foundries, supporting them with technical resources and commercial infrastructure. We have helped to preserve their integrity, their legacies. We have also created a business with like-minded investors to elevate the craft. Those are measures I’m proud of.

Grit and resilience may play a part (maybe a big part, though luck abounds and is responsible for a great deal), and perhaps it’s the recognition that success isn’t a binary, that you’re never out of the woods. You’re always refining, tinkering, adjusting, perennially replacing shingles and pipes.

So it really has to do with embracing the process, growing comfortable within it, and (if you’re lucky!) delighting in it.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

One of my rookie mistakes was probably assuming every problem needed a sophisticated solution. I came from banking and strategy, so my instinct when I encountered something I didn’t understand was basically: build a model, make a spreadsheet, create a framework.

I learned pretty quickly that type doesn’t always work that way. It’s a wonderfully idiosyncratic business, and a lot of the most important knowledge lives with the people who have been designing type, selling fonts, and working with customers for decades. Sometimes I’d spend hours trying to engineer the perfect answer to something and then talk to a foundry owner who would explain in five minutes how they made it work.

I think the lesson was to retain a little more beginner’s mind: ask the obvious question first, listen to the people who know the business, and only then decide whether you really need the spreadsheet. I still make plenty of spreadsheets, though.

What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?

Type design is a solitary craft in many ways. A typeface can take years to develop, drawn one stroke at a time, mostly by one person, and the reward is that millions of people read it without ever noticing it was designed at all. That solitude produces extraordinary work. It can also leave the people doing it exposed.

Spend any time in the field, though, and it turns out to be one of the least solitary I know. I had lunch a while back with my business partner Sam Berlow and the legendary Matthew Carter (Georgia and Verdana are his, to name two you’d recognize). Between them they’ve seen most of the modern history of this business, and they spent the whole meal on the old days — not on their own work, but on the people who taught them, most of them now gone.

Matthew learned to cut steel punches by hand in Haarlem in the 1950s, at the last commercial printer still doing it, from a man who had learned it from someone before him. Follow that chain back far enough and you reach Gutenberg. Not many fields let you do that.

But a chain like that is fragile in a specific way — every link is one person, working mostly alone, and when that person stops, the work tends to stop with them. Which is where we come in. We think of ourselves as a link, and the job is to keep the ones around us intact: champion the craft for the craftspeople, help it prosper, find its moment, find some semblance of permanence. Part of that is practical — taking the backstage legwork and rope-pulling off people’s plates so they get their time back for the thing they actually love.

Which tips would you recommend to your colleagues in your industry to help them to thrive and not “burn out”?

Find a creative outlet that has nothing to do with work. Make real time for nature — on the calendar, treated like a meeting, or it likely won’t happen! (I go fishing with my high school Latin teacher twice a year which keeps me balanced and reminds me of the wider world.) Keep up with your childhood friends; they knew you before any of this and (hopefully) will be entirely unimpressed by it!

The harder one to put on a to-do list: hold onto some cosmic perspective. This is type. It matters, yes, we take it seriously, yes, and it is also not a hostage negotiation or open heart surgery. Keeping those in view at once makes the work more enjoyable and, in my experience, the decisions sounder.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?

My wife, Cassidy. She keeps the equilibrium, and I mean that specifically rather than sentimentally.

I need to think across a few altitudes, at a high level and down to minutiae. In other words, I can worry a lot. A worrier running a company can very easily let the worry set the temperature of the whole household. She doesn’t allow it. She has an unusually good read on which of my concerns are real and which are the endless climb doing its thing, and she’ll tell me candidly which one she’s observing. That has saved me from a fair number of headaches and probably a few decisions I would have made badly at eleven at night.

Everything I’ve been able to build sits on top of that steadiness.

How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?

I’d be careful about claiming too much here (again, cosmic perspective!). We’re a boutique company that designs and licenses fonts.

What I will say is that there’s a real good in shining a light on people of exceptional craft and then giving them the support to keep making things. A great deal of the world’s best type was made by people who were undercapitalized, uncredited, and maybe one bad year from stopping. Some of them did stop. If we can make it so fewer of them have to (so the work continues, gets attributed, and gets paid for) that seems worth doing.

There’s a preservation piece alongside it. Typefaces are cultural artifacts, and plenty of important ones remain in dusty specimen books. Bringing those back into circulation and relevance is a small good, and I’m glad it’s part of the business rather than a side project.

What are your “5 things I wish someone told me before I started leading my company” and why. Please share a story or example for each.

1. Consistency is king. Most of the best business and life advice is out there and has been for a long time. The hard part is operationalizing it: making it part of the daily reps, and then continuing to improve it, tinker with it, and bastardize it into something that fits the need, every day, over a very long run. That takes a commitment to consistency and discipline. What that looks like for us is undramatic — this process gets shorter, that report gets crisper, do this every week or month and don’t skip it.

2. Trust but verify. This industry is very relationship oriented, and we’re fortunate to receive a lot of opportunities and talent through referrals — people vouching for each other. I like starting from trust and I don’t want to undercut that. But a referral is an anecdote, and anecdote only carries you so far. When someone tells me a person is terrific, they mean it, and they’re describing a handful of experiences rather than a pattern. So the real work is agreeing up front on what we’re going to measure and monitor — which few numbers actually matter, who owns them, how often we look at them, and what good and not good look like. Done well, that lets me extend more trust rather than less, because I’ll know early if something is drifting instead of finding out a year later. A mantra I come back to often: “Delegation without information is abdication.”

3. Find the right partners. Business partners, investors, advisors — everyone has to be aligned with the thesis, the vision, the timeline, the risk. If you can converge on all of that before you turn the lights on, it’ll save you a lot of headache. Timeline is the one that gets people. We’re becoming custodians of font libraries that are somebody’s life’s work, and the deals that go well tend to have long tail, royalties flowing back to the designer for years, commitments that run a decade, structures that only make sense if you plan on owning the thing forever. If your investor needs to be out in five years, none of that reads as a feature. Much better to find that out in the first couple conversations.

4. Stay healthy! These are my mother’s words ringing in my ears. Pretty self explanatory — and yet it’s something I have to remind myself about often. Part of it is just sustaining yourself for the long run, which is very important. The bigger part is that making sound and prudent decisions relies on having a certain degree of mental serenity and calm. Mine doesn’t get there on its own. It requires all the basics — sleep, nourishing food, sweating it out, taking in great music and literature, building and nurturing relationships. On a week where I’ve done those things, my decisions are better. On a week where I haven’t, I can feel it, and I’d guess the people around me can too.

5. Be a good friend and coach to yourself. I don’t love making mistakes and I tend to beat myself up. I know people in my own life who are similar, and as their friend I take a much healthier approach — I try to help them replenish rather than pile on. So sometimes I just have to remind myself to be a good friend and coach to myself, the way I try to be with other people. It helps.

Can you share a few ideas or stories from your experience about how to successfully ride the emotional highs & lows of being a founder?

Sleep, find a peer group, balance business with personal (I am a father of a 2 year old).

You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

I’d want people to notice the made world, to know that everything around them was drawn, decided, and argued over by somebody.

Type is the obvious example because it’s the most-read design on earth and the least-observed. You’ve read tens of thousands of words today set in something a person spent years drawing, and you almost certainly couldn’t name it. That anonymity is part of what makes type good; oftentimes, it’s supposed to get out of the way. It’s also why the people who make it are so easy to underpay, undercredit, and forget.

So if I had to name a movement it’s credit (not fame but credit). Knowing who made the thing. It’s the cheapest possible intervention and it compounds: attribution leads to attention, attention leads to work, and work lets somebody keep doing the thing they’re exceptional at.

You could start tonight. Next time something you read feels authoritative, warm, trustworthy, ask why. Someone made that choice on your behalf (and most of them would be delighted you asked).

How can our readers further follow your work online?

You can follow our journey on LinkedIn and Instagram, or explore our website, thetypefounders.com, where each of our foundries has its own corner to wander into. Some of the best type being made anywhere is in there, by people who have given their working lives to it. I’d recommend it over doomscrolling, though I concede I’m not impartial.

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!

Aaron Primero of The Type Founders: 5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Became A Founder was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We are in a position to lead in innovation, use data responsibly, maintain appropriate controls and evaluate whether solutions perform as intended over time. That balance between innovation and stewardship is what attracted me to Experian Health.

Artificial Intelligence is no longer the future; it is the present. It’s reshaping landscapes, altering industries, and transforming the way we live and work. With its rapid advancement, AI is causing disruption — for better or worse — in every field imaginable. While it promises efficiency and growth, it also brings challenges and uncertainties that professionals and businesses must navigate. What can one do to pivot if AI is disrupting their industry? As part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Nora Iluri.

Nora Iluri is the Chief Product Officer at Experian Health. She leads product strategy, innovation, and execution across the organization’s portfolio of healthcare technology solutions. A recognized digital health leader, Nora brings more than two decades of experience building and scaling products that improve healthcare operations, financial performance, and patient outcomes. Prior to joining Experian Health, Nora served as Vice President of Product Management at athenahealth, where she led athenaCollector, the company’s revenue cycle management and practice management business responsible for processing over 315 million claims a year. In this role, she directed strategy and product for an organization of more than 1,200 professionals and helped transform the business into one of athenahealth’s primary growth engines. Earlier in her career, Nora led product at Pieces Tech and served as a Product Manager at Google, leading key initiatives for AdWords reporting and performance analytics. She also founded and led two companies, Zoragen, a biotechnology startup focused on prenatal diagnostics and DeviceMatters, a healthcare technology company focused on medical device adverse event analytics. Nora began her career at McKinsey & Company, advising Fortune 100 healthcare, pharmaceutical, and medical device organizations on growth strategy, mergers and acquisitions, operations, and organizational transformation. Nora holds a Ph.D in Biological Engineering, M.Eng., and B.S. in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, and Biological Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), as well as an M.Phil. in Bioscience Enterprise from the University of Cambridge.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive into our discussion our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you share with us the backstory about what brought you to your specific career path?

I had an interest in healthcare technology from an early age which led me to earning my Ph.D in Biological Engineering from MIT. Continuing my education, I went to the University of Cambridge where I completed a MPhil in bioscience enterprise.

While I was at Cambridge, I started my first company, focused on detecting fetal genetic anomalies through maternal blood. I eventually sold the company and joined McKinsey & Company, where I spent six years advising healthcare, pharmaceutical and medical device organizations. I really started my career with two tracks, building a company and strategic consulting. Consulting gave me the opportunity to solve complex problems, but it made me realize that I wanted to do more than recommend a strategy. I wanted to stay with the work and see whether what we built actually solved the problem. That’s what ultimately pulled me into product management.

I launched a second startup focused on analyzing medical device adverse-event data. The vision was to create something akin to a safety-rating agency for medical devices. The venture ultimately did not succeed, but the experience reinforced my passion for building products and taught me valuable lessons about innovation, resilience and leadership.

I took a brief departure from healthcare when I went to work at Google and then returned to the industry as head of product at the AI healthcare startup PCCI, which later spun out as Pieces Technologies. Afterwards, I spent nine years at athenahealth, including nearly six years leading product for its revenue cycle management division. I realized product leadership was really the natural intersection of entrepreneurial execution and strategic problem-solving.

What brought me to Experian Health was the opportunity to pair product leadership with Experian’s distinctive data assets at such a pivotal moment for healthcare. As AI reshapes the industry, trusted, high-quality data is becoming an increasingly important strategic advantage. I want to help translate that advantage into products that make healthcare work better for providers and the people they serve simplifying healthcare for all.

What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?

Experian Health has some of the best and most unique data sets in the industry, has deep trust and is committed to managing sensitive information responsibly. Healthcare depends on accurate information about identity, demographics and financial circumstances to keep everything from patient access to reimbursement moving smoothly.

Not only does Experian Health have the data but also decades of experience securing and governing that information. That foundation is especially important right now as organizations move quickly to adopt AI. Many are understandably focused on immediate efficiency gains, but questions about data quality, security, model performance, bias and governance cannot be afterthoughts. We are in a position to lead in innovation, use data responsibly, maintain appropriate controls and evaluate whether solutions perform as intended over time. That balance between innovation and stewardship is what attracted me to Experian Health and what I believe makes it a leader in the industry.

You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?

The three traits that are instrumental are probably a focus on people, a focus on outcomes and a commitment to doing things the right way.

First, focus on people. I actually learned this one the hard way. Early in my career, I believed the most brilliant individual in the room would naturally produce the best result. Experience taught me otherwise. You can’t achieve what a collaborative group of people with different perspectives can achieve together. You need the productive push and pull within a team to strengthen ideas, expose blind spots and help people accomplish things that individual talent, and sometimes individual ego, cannot.

Second, focus on outcomes. This is a big reason I moved from strategic consulting into product management so I could carry ideas through execution and see whether they created meaningful results. That orientation still guides how I lead. I always begin with the problem and the outcome that matters, then align the product, people and process around achieving it.

Third, do the work the right way. The motivation needs to be right, the ethics need to be right, and you have to think about the implications of the decisions you’re making. Product decisions can affect sensitive data, financial performance and the patient experience, so integrity, responsible governance and the right motivations must be built into the work from the beginning.

Let’s now move to the main point of our discussion about AI. Can you explain how AI is disrupting your industry? Is this disruption hurting or helping your bottom line?

Well, we’ll know in 10 years. It’s complicated because AI is disrupting healthcare in several ways at once. At the most fundamental level, AI is automating a lot of repetitive, manual work that creates so much administrative burden, particularly in the revenue cycle. More broadly, I think it’s also going to change how we interact with healthcare technology. We are already beginning to see a shift in how clinicians interact with technology. Instead of spending so much time entering information into an electronic system, clinicians can focus on the patient while AI identifies and structures the relevant information from the conversation for clinical, billing and administrative use. So, there’s a huge opportunity to simplify the work and take the complexity out of healthcare.

At the same time, AI introduces new threats. It can make identity theft and fraud easier to execute at scale. People may become even more nervous about sharing their personal information. Industry consolidation around fewer technology platforms, which can be good when it gets rid of a long tail of subpar solutions, can also create systemic risk if everyone ends up depending on one or two systems.

Ultimately, whether the disruption helps or hurts the bottom line will depend on how organizations respond. Those that use AI to redesign work responsibly and deliver measurable value may perform exceptionally well. Others may be displaced. The opportunity is significant, but so is the need to move thoughtfully.

Which specific AI technology has had the most significant impact on your industry?

Without a doubt, generative AI, especially in healthcare has had the most impact. Machine learning has been around for decades and has improved many processes, but it hasn’t transformed how we work in the same way as GenAI. It is changing both how quickly we can develop software and how effectively we can use unstructured information.

That distinction is critical in healthcare, where so much valuable information lives in free-text clinical notes, conversations and other formats that traditional systems have struggled to interpret at scale. Generative AI can help turn that information into usable insights and actions in ways that were not previously possible. That makes GenAI especially powerful for our industry.

Can you share a pivotal moment when you recognized the profound impact AI would have on your sector?

A pivotal moment for me was seeing a self-healing, agentic AI bot move across multiple payer websites to find the information it needed and essentially adapt when things changed. The significance was not one particular outcome. It was the premise that software development had changed. Instead of building a tool to complete one narrowly prescribed task, we could give software an objective and allow it to determine how to achieve it across changing environments.

I thought of it as watching a toddler learn to walk. The moment the child begins moving independently, an entire house that once seemed static becomes a world to explore, and the adults suddenly recognize the need for outlet covers and corner guards. Agentic AI creates a similar realization. The potential was enormous, but so were the implications. You start thinking that some of those sci-fi stories are not quite as far away anymore.

Then I start thinking about what this means for healthcare. Work that is currently performed claim by claim could now be handled by agents. Electronic medical records could recede into the background, enabling physicians to focus more fully on patients rather than data entry. It also changed how I approached my own role. I had to learn quickly, not only how the technology works, but what it can and cannot do, where it is heading, and how to position my teams and product roadmaps so we can still hold the reins.

How are you preparing your workforce for the integration of AI, and what skills do you believe will be most valuable in an AI-enhanced future?

At Experian Health, we are emphasizing hands-on learning. We’re doing everything from holding workshops, centralizing resources and providing training materials to leveraging tools for responsible experimentation, and doing frequent demonstrations that help our employees see what’s possible. We are also looking at how teams are structured, reducing handoffs and creating smaller, more agile groups that can move from an idea to an outcome more quickly.

But the most valuable skill isn’t just learning the mechanics of a new AI tool. I see plenty of people willing to try the tools. The harder part is getting people to reimagine the work itself. Using a tool only to perform today’s process a little faster captures a fraction of its potential. People need to step outside the existing workflow and ask: If we designed this work today with AI available, how would we achieve the same, or a better, outcome differently? That combination of curiosity, and the ability to step outside the current process to rethink how you achieve the outcome is essential. Equally important is the ability to supervise AI effectively and recognize when human judgment is required.

What are the biggest challenges in upskilling your workforce for an AI-centric future?

One of the biggest challenges is moving people from incremental thinking to genuine reinvention. There is often enthusiasm for trying a new tool, but their natural tendency is to apply it to the same tasks and processes they already know. Upskilling therefore has to go beyond technical instruction. It must help employees question assumptions, redesign workflows and understand where AI changes the nature of the work rather than simply its speed.

Another challenge is developing sound oversight. Employees need to understand a system’s capabilities and limitations, evaluate the quality of its output and know when to intervene. That judgment cannot be learned through a single training session. It develops through hands-on use, shared examples and continuous learning as the technology evolves.

What ethical considerations does AI introduce into your industry, and how are you tackling these concerns?

First, AI should not operate without appropriate human supervision, especially in healthcare. The level of oversight must reflect the use case and the consequences of an error. It’s important that we balance the efficiency we can get from AI with the level of accuracy and quality that a particular use case requires. The right comparison is not AI versus an imaginary standard of 100% human accuracy. It is whether the new approach produces a better, safer and more reliable outcome with clear boundaries and accountability. Quality is still going to be king.

And then there’s bias and ethical concerns. AI amplifies patterns in the information it receives, and unfortunately no dataset is completely free of bias, errors or gaps. Feed the wrong information into a model and those biases and mistakes are magnified at scale. That means governance cannot be a one-time review at launch. Organizations must continually monitor data, outputs and model performance as new information enters the system and the technology evolves.

What are your “Five Things You Need To Do, If AI Is Disrupting Your Industry”?

1. Align and mobilize your workforce to adopt

Most people are super busy with their day-to-day work. You need to show them the art of the possible and create opportunities through offsites or other dedicated time where they can be hands on keyboard building with the new tools.

It is also super important that AI isn’t just used to accelerate or replace the repetitive tasks we do today. We need to think through how entire workflows and jobs are going to change.

For example, AI can accelerate gathering product requirements and writing Jira stories and acceptance criteria for engineers to develop new software. But the real opportunity is moving toward spec-driven development, where you can build prototypes from spec and potentially skip the entire story-writing process. That changes the product role. Product people need to spend less time in front of their computers, but the real differentiator becomes time spent with clients.

2. Think through how to enable tooling safely

Just getting people access to the AI tools and the permissions they need to use them effectively is often a challenge, especially when you have to make sure that the necessary data protections are in place. So, you have to move cautiously and quickly at the same time. Enabling AI tools to safely access PII and PHI is often one of the toughest hurdles that can delay adoption and usefulness.

3. Control and protect your data.

We all need to move quickly in this new AI age, but we also need to be extremely cautious about how we do it. Without the right controls and governance, some of the tools being used today can quickly expose proprietary data to public data sources. And if that happens, there is no putting the genie back in the bottle. In healthcare, where even relatively simple use cases can involve PII and PHI, safeguarding our clients and their patients’ data must come before everything else.

4. Think about bias and drift before they become a problem

Many organizations have figured out how to let their teams develop AI models safely and protect their data. Some have even built appropriate feedback loops so those models can keep learning and improving. Very few have taken the next step to think through how to maintain these models and monitor them to ensure bias doesn’t creep in or the performance does not drift into a dangerous area. Establishing governance before an AI tool enters production is nice, but having ways to monitor and control performance afterward is still pretty rare, and it’s extremely critical.

5. Watch for confirmation bias

The internet already started introducing confirmation bias into the way we think. Search results often help justify what we’re trying to research, not to critique it. AI can make that even more pronounced.

AI models are primarily designed to please the users so that those users keep coming back for more. This means that if you have an opinion, an AI model is unlikely to challenge it. And in fact, it’s going to be more likely to give you information to strengthen your conviction. We already see the impact of this as our society becomes more divided, but it is also seen in the AI models we build.

Confirmation bias is especially difficult to spot and slay because, generally speaking, we love being right. Challenging our own assumptions and “rightful position” goes against our natural instincts. The ability to challenge our own assumptions is a critical skill we’re going to need to deliberately build.

What are the most common misconceptions about AI within your industry, and how do you address them?

There are two that come to mind.

The first that I hear often is that AI hallucinations make it unfit to replace work done by humans. When humans do complex tasks, they can have meaningful error rates too, around 5–20%. AI can often beat that performance with a comfortable margin.

The issue often isn’t the error rate, but the types of errors AI makes. When we make mistakes, others can usually understand how they happened. When AI gets something wrong, the mistakes are often spectacular — as the errors are often ones humans are unlikely to make — creating an impression that “AI is dumb.”

Another misconception I think many of us often hear is that AI is going to replace all of us. It will definitely replace some repetitive work, but it won’t replace humans. It will create numerous new roles and dramatically increase the demand for many capabilities that were previously too expensive to do at scale.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Do you have a story about how that was relevant in your life?

My grandfather once gave me a piece of advice that has always stuck with me. He said, “It doesn’t matter what your job is. Whatever you do, make sure you do a great job and take pride in the work you deliver.” I’ve carried that with me throughout my career. Whatever the work is, take it seriously and be proud of what you put into the world.

Off-topic, but I’m curious. As someone steering the ship, what thoughts or concerns often keep you awake at night? How do those thoughts influence your daily decision-making process?

At night, I find myself constantly evaluating whether I’m driving AI transformation fast enough to ensure both my company and my people can succeed. Along with whether we’re balancing speed with the appropriate protections to keep our clients and patients most valuable data safe. Those thoughts shape my daily decisions, pushing us to move with urgency, but also with care and accountability.

You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

If I could start a movement, it would be about not postponing happiness.

We’re often conditioned to attach happiness to the next thing: when I get that job, when I make more money, when I find the right person, when I reach that goal, when life finally settles down…then I’ll be happy.

I’d love for people to reverse that equation and find meaning, gratitude, and happiness in where they are and what they’re doing today, while still striving for what comes next.

Ambition and contentment don’t have to be opposites. You can want more from life without making your happiness dependent on getting more.

So maybe the movement is simply: Don’t wait to arrive. Remember to live along the way.

How can our readers further follow you online?

The best way to follow my work is on our website, Experian Health, and they can connect with me on LinkedIn.

Thank you for the time you spent sharing these fantastic insights. We wish you only continued success in your great work!

Nora Iluri of Experian Health: How AI Is Disrupting Our Industry, and What We Can Do About It was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.