Ask for some dang help!
You cannot read the chapter on ambition and allow it to fire you up if you aren’t also going to figure out what resources you need to get you there. Deciding to take adult tap dancing lessons because they light your heart on fire doesn’t just require new patent leather metal-bottomed shoes and a selection of Yelp-recommended dance studios. It also requires someone to watch your kids while you go to class. Ask for help.
Attempting to grow to a new level in your multilevel marketing business doesn’t just require classes and webinars and a sick social media presence; it also requires someone to help you around the house since you will have less time for that. Ask for help.
I get it, girls, I do. I know that it feels awkward for the vast majority of us to ask for assistance. For one thing, we hate admitting to anyone—especially ourselves—that we need it. For another, we’ve somehow gotten this twisted idea that copping to the fact that we can’t successfully do it all means that we’re weak. Ha! Think about how ludicrous that is. The most powerful people in the world have whole teams that they delegate to. They’re getting help in every single direction, from cleaning their houses to expanding their businesses overseas. But you—you with your fledgling business, your loads of laundry, and your two kids under four—you’re the one who’s supposed to navigate this all alone? Dude. No way. You’ve got a twisted perception of what success in any area of life looks like. And it’s not even your fault either.
I blame the media.
Or, more specifically, I blame every perfectly styled, ultra-fabulous-looking woman who’s ever been on TV or the internet in the last fifty years who didn’t tell us how much assistance it takes to keep her at that level. I blame every magazine who showed us thirty-nine ways to brine a turkey for Thanksgiving but didn’t mention asking your sister to stay the night with you the day before so someone was there to help with the baby while you cook for the family. I blame every Nancy Meyers movie with those dreamy houses and all-white wardrobes. Oh, sure, she showed us the zany hardship of navigating a relationship, but she never once showed the staff of people required to keep those mansions clean or those organic gardens tended while our heroine was building up her catering empire.
You’ve likely only ever seen examples both in real life and on-screen of women doing it all. It seems to me that women either try and handle every single thing on their own and don’t admit how much they’re struggling, or, worse, they have help, all kinds of help, and won’t cop to it. Madeleine Albright once said, “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.”1 Well, I say, there’s a special place in hell for women who have the luxury of assistance but won’t admit to other women that they do.
I was watching a segment on the Today Show a couple of years back, and there was a famous celebrity there sharing her new product line. This woman had young children and a husband whose career was as lucrative and as demanding as her own. I really love this person. She’s so beautiful, and she seems like such a genuinely good mama and wife. She’s made a big name for herself in the lifestyle space. She has become the woman that many mamas and homemakers want to be. But when they asked her in the course of the questions how she “does it all”—as in, how did you build this multimillion-dollar business and manage to parent well and be a great wifey?—she looked right at the interviewer and said something like, “Oh, I’m just super organized.”
My jaw hit the floor, you guys. She went on to breezily explain how any mom can do just what she does if they apply themselves and work hard.
I was so disappointed in her response, I wanted to cry. Sincerely wanted to cry like a baby. Because here’s the deal: this woman has a massive platform, ten times bigger than my own, and on that particular morning I can’t imagine how many women were watching her, looking up to her, and hoping for some guidance or inspiration. And she evaded. She had the opportunity to tell all of us what it really takes to live life and have a business at this level while raising young children, and she didn’t take it.
There is a zero-percent chance—a ZERO-percent chance—that she doesn’t have help. Having spent years and years working with celebrities, I’d guess she’s got a housekeeper and at least one nanny, if not two. She’s got to have an assistant, and because of their level of celebrity, I bet she and her husband even have some of the higher-level domestic staff you might not have even heard of before. Things like “house managers” and “nutritionist chefs” and, you know what, good for them! I do not begrudge them a single second of their help. I just wish they’d talk about it. By not talking about it they run the risk that it won’t occur to you. If you see their perfectly prepared dinner on Instagram when you know she was at a photoshoot all day (because you watched it in her feed), it might make you feel bad because you struggle to get dinner on the table even when you’ve been home all day. It might not occur to you that a housekeeper or a chef helped her prepare that dinner, which perpetuates the myth that you could also “do it all and have it all” if only you’d work harder.
This is a lie from the pits of celebrity hell!
Friends, women operating at the levels you’d like to both personally and professionally are asking for help. Maybe that help comes from their partner. Maybe that help comes from their mama or their sister. Maybe that help comes in the form of a local college student who babysits or a local cleaning lady who scrubs their toilets once a month. There are tons of ways to get help, but to start we need to understand that it’s required in the first place before we can take the next step. Nobody does this alone. When I put it so plainly, it seems like common sense, doesn’t it? But then we come across terms like self-made and start to wonder whether that’s still what we should be shooting for.
I love the term self-made, particularly when it’s used in reference to my own success, because only I know how much work it took to get from there to here. I was the one who got up before the sun. I was the one who logged all the miles on business trips. I was the one who cried over the P&L and stressed about making payroll. Me, me, me. For years I held on to that title and the idea of doing it all on my own, because it fired me up and helped me keep going when it felt so lonely on this entrepreneurial journey. In the last few years I’ve realized something, though. I am self-made . . . and, also, not.
It’s only recently that I understood that no one is ever truly self-made, because it’s impossible to build big things entirely by yourself. A whole team of people helped me build my company over the last decade. A massive tribe (who started out as a handful of followers) told their friends about my work and are still the greatest hype squad I know. It took family and babysitters and nannies to help keep our family afloat during the times I had to put in extra hours. It took the world’s biggest cheerleader as a husband, celebrating my wins and covering my losses both financially and emotionally in those early years.
It took a village, and it still takes a village. It took me raising my hand and asking for help.
“Hey, hubby, can you help watch the kids this weekend so I can get some work done?”
“Hey, Instagram friends, can you share this in your social media feeds to let people know about this book I wrote called Party Girl?”
“Hey, manager at work, I can meet all of your priorities, but not without another team member or an extension on the due date. I’m only one person.”