Start With Yourself, But Do Not Stop There

Emma Grede’s Start With Yourself has clearly arrived at the right cultural moment. It speaks to ambition, discipline, money, motherhood, confidence, and success, all themes that continue to resonate deeply with women navigating professional spaces that were not necessarily designed with them in mind. 

There is real value in women speaking openly about ambition. Women are still too often expected to be successful without appearing too hungry for success, confident without being intimidating, direct without being difficult, and powerful without seeming to want power too much. So, there is something refreshing about a woman in business saying plainly that she wants more, worked hard for more, and believes other women should take themselves and their ambitions seriously. 

But that is also where the difficulty begins. 

The problem with the “start with yourself” message is not that it asks women to take responsibility for their own lives. There is nothing wrong with discipline, resilience, self-awareness, or ambition. Most successful women have had to develop all of those qualities, often in circumstances that demanded more of them than of their male counterparts. 

The problem is that this kind of message can too easily locate the solution within the individual woman while leaving the structure around her largely untouched. 

Women have been hearing versions of this advice for decades. Be more confident. Ask for more. Stop apologizing. Take up space. Manage your guilt. Manage your fear. Manage your time. Manage your ambition. Much of that advice is useful, and some of it is necessary. But it can also become exhausting because it places so much of the burden on women to adapt themselves to systems that remain fundamentally unchanged. 

At a certain point, the question cannot only be how women succeed within existing structures. The more important question is why those structures remain so difficult for women to succeed in. 

That is where Grede’s message becomes more complicated. She acknowledges that inequity exists and that the world is not fair, but the answer she appears to offer is still largely one of personal agency. Do not wait for equity. Build the life you want anyway. 

There is power in that idea, but there is also a limitation. Equity is not something individual women can simply manufacture for themselves through effort, mindset, or force of will. Equity requires changes to systems, incentives, assumptions, and power. It requires us to look at how work is designed, how leadership is measured, how caregiving is treated, how flexibility is perceived, and how organizations decide whose time and responsibilities matter. 

Telling women not to wait for equity may be motivating, but it can also let institutions off the hook too easily. The problem has never been that women are insufficiently resilient. The problem is that too many workplaces continue to depend on women being endlessly resilient. 

This is particularly important when we talk about work-life balance. Grede’s public comments on the subject appear to reflect a fairly hard-nosed view: business is business, and work-life balance is ultimately for the individual to manage. That may appeal to a certain kind of entrepreneurial culture, but it also reflects a very old assumption about work and who the “ideal worker” is supposed to be. 

For generations, the ideal worker has been imagined as endlessly available, unencumbered by caregiving, able to stay late, travel easily, respond immediately, and demonstrate commitment through constant visibility. Historically, that worker has been imagined as male, supported by someone else’s unpaid labour at home. When women are told that success requires them to become more like that worker, we have not actually redesigned leadership. We have simply admitted more women into an old model. 

Many women have had to survive that model. That is true. But surviving a system is not the same as transforming it. 

This is where the responsibility of leadership becomes more significant. A woman trying to advance in an unequal workplace may have no choice but to navigate the rules as they exist. But a woman who has reached a position of real authority is no longer only navigating the system. She is helping to shape it. 

That distinction matters. 

It is one thing to say, “This is what I had to do to get here.” It is another thing to suggest, implicitly or explicitly, that everyone else should have to make the same sacrifices. It is one thing to be honest about how demanding business can be. It is another thing to romanticize exhaustion as proof of seriousness or to treat flexibility as a lack of ambition. 

The contradiction becomes even sharper when workplaces describe themselves in the language of family, belonging, loyalty, and community. Many organizations want the emotional commitment that comes with being “like family.” They want people to care deeply, go the extra mile, identify with the mission, and treat the business’s success as personally meaningful. But when employees ask for flexibility, sustainability, accommodation, or a more humane pace of work, the language often changes. Suddenly, business is business. 

It cannot be both. 

If work is simply a commercial exchange, then employers should be cautious about asking for familial devotion. If work is truly a community, then the conditions of that community matter. Communities do not only extract from people. They sustain them. 

None of this is an argument against ambition, excellence, or hard work. It is not an argument that women should wait politely for institutions to change before pursuing power. Women should pursue power. They should pursue influence, success, money, and leadership. But power should do something once it is obtained. 

That is the part of the conversation that matters most. 

The goal cannot simply be to help more women endure workplaces built around outdated assumptions about availability, caregiving, and commitment. The goal has to be changing those assumptions. Once women reach positions of influence, the question should not only be how they got there. It should also be what they are changing now that they have arrived. 

Are they rewarding excellence, or are they rewarding overwork? Are they mistaking visibility for commitment? Are they treating flexibility as weakness? Are they building workplaces that quietly assume someone else is managing care at home? Are they asking women to be resilient in the face of conditions they have the authority to improve? 

These are not soft questions. They are leadership questions. They are retention questions. They are talent questions. They are business questions. 

The most serious critique of Start With Yourself is not that it celebrates ambition. Ambition should be celebrated. The concern is that the analysis risks ending too soon. It tells women how to win inside existing structures, but it seems to say less about what women should do when they have enough power to change those structures. 

Starting with yourself may be necessary. But it cannot be the end of the work. 

Because if the only lesson we pass on is how to succeed by adapting to systems that were never built for us, then we have not disrupted very much. We have merely learned to perform the old model more convincingly. 

The true measure of leadership is not simply whether we made it through. It is what we make different for those who come next.