CMO Of Netflix: "Work Life Balance" Is BAD Advice! I Lost My Baby & My Husband!

If there's anything to know, it is that my world has burned a few times and that I have risen every time. Both of us thank God for B number.

I was a receptionist. I really did think I was getting fired that day, but intuition and creativity and following your gut made me successful. Oftentimes we're in situations that aren't serving us, and we're thinking about how the other person is going to feel. You are going to be unsatisfied with your life. That is the scariest thing. Be selfish in your life, in your career. I didn't want anything to stop me, but I was about five months pregnant when very quickly things descended into health. I had a condition for the pregnancy that was attacking you. The doctor says to my husband Peter, 'You save her or you save the baby. Which one is it?' She didn't survive. It was the beginning of the big fractures in our relationship. We were no longer a team. A few years later, he gets diagnosed with cancer after we separated. We had to make a choice to have the conversations which were about forgiveness. Anger and misunderstanding really did not matter. We're going to be together to the last heartbeat.

Oh gosh. Well, as a phoenix, there isn't just one rising. For me, if there's anything to know, it is that my world has burned a few times and that I have risen every time. Now, I wouldn't say that I rise right away. It's not that kind of miracle. It's the dusting off, it's the letting the feathers grow back, it is the 'Can I fly again? Let me try. Oh, this really hurts. Let me sit down. Try one more time.' And then I'm off. So that means everything from being five years old and living in Ghana, my father being in politics and the government being overthrown in a political coup, having to uproot ourselves out of Ghana. My whole world burned at that point. Or it is when I was 12 and we had lived in numerous places in Africa and then moved to Colorado Springs, Colorado. Again, the world shifted and burned, and I'd have to recreate myself those first 12 years.

Probably my ability to survive. Get to know people quickly, understand who is a friend and who's a foe quickly. Being able to read people almost immediately. I don't need a lot of proof. I can tell on the first question whether or not you have good intentions for me.

But that was survival. It wasn't a battle of nature versus nurture. I think I have some of it naturally, my curiosity about people and the things that surround me in pop culture, but it was certainly nurtured. It nurtured this idea of 'I have to understand everything that's happening in this society so I can talk to you, so I can seem normal to you.' That meant understanding American football inside and out. Friday Night Lights were a big deal in Colorado, so I need to understand what's happening in the fields. I don't annoy people with cheering at the wrong time. Or music, understanding what was happening at the time and being able to sing along to lyrics or argue with somebody in the hallway about my favorite pop star. Or fashion, making sure the crease on my jeans was perfect or the way I folded it over and doubled it up was right. All of those things are nurtured, and so it created a lifelong student of pop culture. It means that every time something new would happen, I'd be the first on it. I'd be the one who'd be like, 'Let me figure out what that is. I need to understand all of it because should I be in a situation where I'm in front of somebody who really likes that thing, I want to be able to talk to them. I want them to understand that I understand what they're talking about. I'm not so strange.' That explains in large part why you pursued creativity and marketing, or at least why you ended up there.

Yeah, I think so.

Left to my own devices, I probably wouldn't have. I probably would have turned out to be too much of a people pleaser. But thankfully, I had a mother, both my parents, but my mother in particular, who was very focused on making sure that all of us girls—I have three younger sisters—understood our worth and the way that we contribute. So imagine I'm 12, and I'm here trying to understand all the American things. I come home and I've finally broken through the inner circle of the cool girls, and they've now said they want to come over to my house. Here I am in front of my mother, my very Ghanaian, very proud mother, and I'm saying, 'I'm going to need you to buy some pizza, get some Fanta up in here, okay, like french fries, I don't know what it is, get all the American foods, chicken nuggets, the things they like.' And she's like, 'Absolutely not. They're going to eat fufu. They're going to have some pepper soup. They're going to eat with their hands because that's what we do in this house.' And I'm sitting there like, 'Oh, you've got to be kidding. You want to destroy me? I'm just learning how to get along with these people.' The lesson there—and by the way, she wasn't cryptic about it, she was very direct, very straightforward—she was like, 'When you go to their house, you do the things they want to do. When they come to your house, they do the things you want to do.' She did not mince words. At 12, she said that. Maybe I couldn't have articulated it then, but I certainly understand it very clearly now: I had to understand my own worth. What am I bringing to the table? Not just about what they have and what they're trying to do, but what is it that I'm bringing? The pride I have in my own culture, in my own skin, in my own uniqueness is as important as the things that they like, regardless of apparent consequence.

Absolutely.

Absolutely. Yes, I'm the boss, no question about it. But also, that was how our household ran. My dad made no small beans of saying, reminding me constantly, 'You're the oldest. You have to set the tone. You lead the example. Your sisters will follow you.' He says that today. I think he said that to me last week. Oh my God, Dad. He is the type of person who absorbs information and holds it and then can spit it back at you. He doesn't need a lot of time to understand concepts or things. He's a self-taught musician. He didn't go to high school, didn't go to middle school or high school, but has two PhDs. My dad has very, very high standards. So that is the person that I grew up with.

Success meant financial independence and financial success. You need to make a certain amount of money in order to have the nice things: the nice house, a nice car, the vacations, all the things. Success also meant big titles. Early on in my career, I remember wanting to take a job that had a lesser title than the one I was leaving, and my dad hated that. He was just like, 'But you're taking steps backwards.' My thought was, 'Well, it's not really because the responsibilities are different and better, and they're going to get me closer to the place I want to go. You don't understand that, but I understand that.' But to him, that was failure. That certainly changed the way that I think about my own upward mobility. For some time, I did chase titles. But the truth of the matter is that a title isn't going to give you power. The title doesn't actually give you anything. What I've learned about leadership is that you have to convince the people who are around you that you are right, that you have a good idea, and that they should input into that thing, and then they will follow you. You think just because you have a chief title that somebody is going to follow you or not think you're stupid? There are plenty of people out there who have that title and teams who don't respect them. Those early lessons had their good things and their bad things. The good thing was that my dad's understanding of what success looked like in terms of titles was not necessarily the only way.

Influence. Being well... it's a complicated question. Talent alone doesn't do it. I've met many talented people who couldn't lead anybody. And you have many leaders who have no talent. So it's an interesting combination of those two things. You have to be able to be on the ground and do the work. You also have to convince other people. That's where the influence comes in. The idea that you have or the way that you're saying we should go is the right thing, and then get them to follow you. And then you must execute. You actually have to be right. And then if you do that enough times, it becomes unquestionable. That's when the reputation precedes you. That's when, at least for me, I get into a new job and people expect a certain thing. It's like, 'Oh, I've seen you do that over there,' or 'I had a friend who worked for you at this place and they said you did...'

Spike Lee is blackity blackity black, first of all. No, but he is a film director, really. A filmmaker, let's call it that, because he certainly produces and does other things and writes. But he has an advertising agency in New York. When I was there, it was on Madison Avenue. Madison Avenue is like the place for advertising in the world. It's the place where the show Mad Men was made from. DDB is one of the biggest agencies, and Spike had a joint venture with them.

Curiosity. I graduated from Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, and it was just time to apply to med school, and I really didn't want to. New York was right there, an hour and a half from school, and I really didn't have a plan. I just went, trying to escape what I thought was my destiny. Like many people say, I think sometimes in this business I kind of fell into this, but I think my destiny actually came to find me. That's what it was. I opened up and allowed for something greater that I didn't even know was possible to find me instead.

Have you ever heard that statement, 'Let go and let God'? Have you heard that before? No? It's a very Christian thing. I feel like in the Black church there's a lot of that. 'Let go and let God,' as if God is just going to sprinkle magic dust over you. I don't necessarily believe that as a plain statement. I think the letting go is an action. It's not surrender. You just lay down and it's going to find you? You're not going to find your destiny sitting on the couch. The letting go for me is the letting go of preconceived ideas about what it is that you are going to do. Letting go of... sometimes you're trying to do something and keep hitting a wall. You're like, 'Oh, if I just hit it one more time, it's going to break.' Sometimes it's like, you know that's a cement wall. If you just move five feet to the right, it's actually plaster and you're going to go right through it. It's the letting go of this thought that you had, which is like, 'Oh, I'm going to do this thing right here is the magic.' And I'll tell you this: it didn't just happen at that stage in my life. It's happening right now. I'm like, 'Okay, well, I think I am done with my corporate CMO work. I believe I'm finished. So I'm going to let go of it. I'm not going to be actively looking for the next CMO job. I want whatever is coming for me. I'm going to allow space for it.' Now, that doesn't mean I'm just sitting around. I'm also trying to polish other skills. I'm trying to create, because perhaps the next thing that's coming is somewhere more in that space. I can feel it in my spirit. That understanding of your intuition, if you're listening to it, it's like a magnet. It's just going to draw you closer to the thing that you're supposed to do. It has happened every single time, without fail. Every job, every move I've made hasn't been because somebody said, 'Oh, this makes logical sense. One plus one equals two.' Sometimes I'm just like, 'But it's not math, though. It's physics.' Because it's not the addition. It's a subtraction. I'm just going to say, 'Here, I'm going to get up and I'm going to go talk to this person and I'm going to talk to that person. I'm going to sit back down again and I'm going to write this thing out.' And then, like magic, because I don't know how else to describe it, the destiny appears. I'm telling you, every time it has happened, even when people were like, 'Oh, that is never going to happen. You're wasting your time. I don't know why you'd go over there and do that.' I'm like, 'I don't know. Something inside is telling me that this is the way to go.' I'm going to go over there. Every time, it's worked.

No, no, no, no. This is going to start banging on the table. No, no, no. If I just chill here? No, no. Don't chill in here. Okay? I think you're probably talking about energy. I'm not one of those chilling here type people anyway. And I don't believe things are pre-written. For me, the idea of destiny isn't that something is already predetermined for you. I think you create your destiny. There was a movie in the late 90s called Sliding Doors, starring Gwyneth Paltrow. The concept is basically that if you're running for the train and you catch it, you jump inside, you have one destiny. If the door is closed and you still stand on the platform, then you have to catch the next train. It takes you to a different destiny. That's the concept. It is what I also believe: my destiny is not pre-written, but the movements that I make are what lead me to the thing that's actually for me. It's a constant evolution. So I don't believe that you have to sit and wait for it. I think your constant movement, your constant discovery, is actually what then brings the destiny to you. This isn't about predetermined anything or just 'let me just chill out.' Like I said, you can't sit on the couch and expect your destiny to come for you. So it's not reading my horoscope. No disrespect to the tarot card readers. We are constantly creating our destiny. This life that we're living, these experiences, the people we're meeting, the relationships we're in—it happens because there's a certain action that you take that leads you to that thing. Now it's your choice whether or not you take it. And then that's when the whole intuition thing comes up for me. You may have caused a lot of action and then you have a couple of choices in front of you. Where are you going? Which one is calling you? And then you know what people like to do? They want to write pro and con lists. They want to ask people for advice. 'Do you think I should do this or should I do that? Both of these look good.' Why are you asking other people? They don't know. They're not living your life. They don't have the whole destiny. They have their own thing. Why are you asking them? And if you got quiet for a second and heard your intuition... but then again, sometimes people are scared because it's telling you to do something that you probably don't want to do. You're a little scared of it, and then you're going to choose the wrong thing.

It's like any muscle. We all have biceps, but some people's biceps are enormous. Thank you. That was good. That was super smooth. That was really nice. But it is like any muscle. You gotta work it. You've got to listen to it. You have to make it brave to talk to you. I kind of feel like it's like that friend—now this is not about multiple personalities—but it's like that friend who's talking to you inside your head. If you keep dissing it and keep being like, 'Shut up, no, that's a bad idea,' if you keep doing that, that voice can get quieter and quieter. What makes you think it's going to ever be like, 'Listen, boss, I told you'? No. Look, my intuition is so loud. There's no way. I meet people and I'll be like, 'That person is not for me.' And by the way, somebody else will be like, 'Oh, that is a very powerful person. They'll introduce you to this other person. Oh, they're so smart. They've done this and that and that.' Not for me. Nah. So I'm not even going to engage. My intuition is that strong. I trust it a hundred percent.

Yes. I've had to allow it to lead me.

Yes, that's part of it for sure. I've had to listen to my intuition, allow it to lead me even when other people were like, 'No,' whether it was my dad or a friend or a mentor or a boss. When they've been like, 'No, that's not the thing you want to do. You should do this. This would be more successful for you.' And then my intuition was like, 'Actually, I don't think so. I think you need to go this way.' It is so hard. I'm not pretending like this is the easy thing where it's like, 'I'll just listen to my intuition and be fine.' This thing is dumb hard. Because sometimes the logic makes a lot more sense than your intuition. So I'm not saying that it's easy, but it is the only choice if you want to be successful. And successful to me these days means that I am happy and at peace and enjoying the thing I'm doing. It's no longer about the title or the house or the thing. Do I have freedom? Oh man. And freedom isn't just like I can do whatever the hell I want. Freedom is that I can be working on a campaign and not sleep for three days because I'm so excited about it. That's the kind of freedom I'm talking about. Really enjoying the things that I'm doing. And if I am listening to my intuition, it's going to lead me to those opportunities that allow me to have that kind of experience with people or with jobs or whoever.

Oh my God, yeah. It shows up there. We were having a conversation about this yesterday on Sunday. We're like, 'Yeah, isn't it strange that it's Monday tomorrow and none of us have it crossed our minds or freaked out about it?' Yeah. God, it's like, man, when I started recognizing that Sunday scaries were tied to my wrong turns, guess who jumped into the driver's seat real quick? Me. And again, we're not saying, 'Oh, this is so easy, just change direction.' But it's so helpful when you recognize it and then you're like, 'Okay, now I can do something about this.'

And it's a signal. And it's a very important signal. And it's screaming at you so loud. It's so loud. And the thing is, think about Sunday scaries in relationship to anything in your life. When you are in a relationship, let's say romantic, and you have to go hang out with that person and you're not feeling so cute about it, it might be time for you to reevaluate whether this relationship is good for you. You should be feeling like, 'Oh, I really want to go do this thing with this person.' And for me, it's not even about length of time because marriage is not something where it's like people tell you all the time it's so hard and you'll fall out of love with this person and then fall back in love with them. I'm not talking about the fickleness of your everyday feelings. I'm talking about the consistency of a mood that you are in when you are in the presence of that person. Do you feel great? Do you have ickiness when you're with them? That's a Sunday scary that you need to watch out for. So it's not just about, 'Am I going to wake up and go to work tomorrow at a job I hate?' I apply that to everything in my life. And that's the kind of freedom I want in my life: that I don't engage with people that I feel the ickiness with.

Yes. So interesting. It wasn't just that he put the script on a desk. He was walking by with a script under his arm. And as I shared, I love to read, and I know that Spike writes with a very Black point of view about the African American experience. I was fascinated by that. So as soon as I saw it, I was like, 'This must be something interesting that he's either writing or reading. I want to be part of it.'

I was the assistant. Actually, not even the assistant. I was answering the phone and I was a receptionist at his agency. A temporary receptionist. I didn't even have the job yet. I was only filling in. But there was a little bit of naivete in it. I don't know if 15 years ago, even if I saw Spike walking past my desk, I would have been like, 'Hey, what are you reading? Can I read that?' Because I would have used all my logic to say, 'Oh, he's so important. Whatever he's holding there, he needs it. He's not going to give it to you. So why even ask?' I probably would have explained it to myself that way. But by then, there was a little bit of that naivete, brashness, arrogance even, where I was just like, 'Oh, whatever he's reading, I want to read.' So that's what I asked him. I just said, 'What do you have?' And he said it was his script for Bamboozled. And I was like, 'Okay, what? Can I read it?' And he looked at me incredulously and he was like, 'Sure, here you go. Have it back to me in three days and let me know what you think.' And of course, he had a smirk on his face, and so did the office. Everybody who overheard the conversation. I really didn't understand what that meant, but of course in hindsight, I understood that it was such a complicated piece of writing that he probably didn't think I would finish it or have anything to add. And I took a red pen to it. A literal red pen. He likes to tell the story now that he gave this receptionist his script and I came back three days later with markups and notes in the margins. I said, 'I think that this dialogue here could be fleshed out a little bit. I didn't understand what happened between these two characters.' And he was just like, 'What? You marked up my script?' And I was just like, 'Oh God, I didn't know, man. I thought...' I really did think I was getting fired that day. And he went into his office, slammed the door. I sat there, man. I'm telling you, I have my purse with me and I was just sitting there waiting for him to open up the office so that he could tell me I was fired. Meanwhile, I'm thinking in the back of my head, 'My dad's going to kill me because I'm not even supposed to be in this job. I have a college degree and I'm a receptionist at this office.' Anyway, then he opened the door after what felt like 17 hours. It was probably just 30 minutes. And that's when I got the job. He was like, 'You made some good notes. You should stay.'

22.

Oh, it changed my entire life. That changed my entire life. I've had a few inflection points in my life. That is absolutely one of them. Without that moment, I don't know. Maybe at some other point I would have learned it. Maybe it would have come to me anyway. But I'm so glad it came to me then: that there is no one who knows more about anything than you do. It just doesn't exist. Look, I'm not saying you should go ahead and try to do open heart surgery. Maybe don't do that. But if you are the patient getting counseled by your doctor and they say, 'I think we're going to have to do open heart surgery,' but you feel like, 'Hey, look, I don't know that you understand all the symptoms that I'm trying to discuss with you, and you seem to just gloss over a bunch of these things that I've just said. I'm going to have to go for a second opinion.' That's the kind of belief I have in myself. I'm going to question you even though you're the expert and say, 'I don't know because you really didn't pay attention to what I was saying. So let me just go and try to talk to somebody else.' That moment when Spike said, 'Sure, go for it,' and I went for it, and then he said I have some good ideas... Come on. He's one of the most brilliant filmmakers of all time. He will be in the annals of history. And he thought as a 22-year-old I made some good points on a script that is one of his most difficult to read. You can't tell me anything. For anything or anyone, have that conviction. And the evidence he gave me in that moment.

There aren't people on my team that I dismiss for lack of tenure or understanding. There are so many people who can contribute to an idea, to a campaign, who can challenge your strategy without having more knowledge than you do of the thing. There are junior people on the team that you should ask their opinion because they're probably going to look at it from a different perspective than you ever would, and they might say something that changes the entire direction of the thing you're doing. And you should listen to them. Sometimes it's hard for those people to speak up. But that's why again, the lesson from that moment is that when he says, 'Sure,' as a leader, why would I not say 'Sure' to somebody or make the room for them to be able to speak up? I've been known in my teams to be like a teacher. I'll call on people, not to make them feel badly, but just to allow space. See somebody who looks like they're itching to jump in the conversation but they can't find a space because that knucklehead over there talks too much. We've all been in those meetings. And then just being like, 'Hey, did you have something to say? Did you want to contribute to this? You ever thought about this?' And then sometimes people get shy. They'll panic. I'm like, 'Okay, no problem. But if you do, just let me know.' Just give them a second to gather themselves. Sometimes they'll be like, 'Yes, actually, I just wanted to say...' and they'll contribute. Sometimes the contribution is great, and sometimes it's a bunch of crap. But you'll never know unless you ask.

That is God. And you go to... so there's the converse point. It means you do want to protect your contribution score. You don't want to just speak for the sake of speaking. If you're brainstorming a campaign and I go, 'What about a billboard?' and you look over and you get that look... that was a dumb idea. But that's the thing. It's also the same way that I look at failure of ideas. That can kill your creativity faster than anything else. It's not just your contribution score. It's like if we're in a meeting and maybe you spoke up, maybe I called on you, and you said the thing, and everybody in the room's like, 'Oh my God, that's actually really smart. Yes, we should do that.' And then we do the thing and it bombs. Oh man. This is when, as a leader, you gotta come in and protect the people's spirit and their confidence. That idea of failing fast, that's when it really comes into play. It's like, 'Oh no, no. Dust yourself off, everybody. Get up. We're going to try this again. We're going to try a different way. Thank you for contributing. Sit your ass down. Okay, who else has another idea?' But making sure that they're no longer a pariah. That's your job as a leader. We each have a value and a role to play in that context. As the person who came up with the bad idea or the stupid contribution, your job isn't to then dust yourself off and try to come again. You can do that, but that's really hard to do if you don't have somebody on the other end who's pulling you to do that. My job in that role is to make sure that you come back. That is my job. It's not just to pick the good ideas. It's to protect the people, protect the good ideas, protect the bad ideas. Make sure they keep rising every time something bombs, because it's going to bomb. You're not going to get a perfect score all the time.

That's right. That's right. That's right. And always, I love Monday morning quarterbacking. I love it. Some people think it's like a punishment. I really try not to make it feel like punishment where you review the thing that happened that went bad. And everybody wants to pile on. Now all of a sudden, this person who didn't say one word in the meeting was like, 'Well, I knew it was a bad idea from the start.' Oh, I cannot stand those type of people. If you look in a meeting with me, you'll understand that's a wrong thing to say. If you're going to be the one who says, 'Well, I knew it was going to be bad from the start,' well then you should have said that before we went and executed it. Otherwise, don't tell me now. So it's like picking apart the thing. 'Okay, what was the thing that went right? What was the thing that went wrong? What could we have done differently to get a different outcome?' And sometimes it's nothing. The conditions were right. The idea was right. It was executed right. It just didn't hit. And then sometimes you're just going to be like, 'Ah, just chalk it up. It sucks.' Or you do learn something. Or just like, 'It was such a great idea in the room, but then we went outside and we were all in love with it that we missed the huge red flag.' Everybody missed it. Nobody saw that actually it wasn't that funny. We laughed in the room, but it wasn't that funny. That has happened to me so many times. You just fall in love with the thing, and then you go outside and nobody thinks it's good except for the people who were in the room with you. It's like putting on a really great outfit at home. You look at yourself in the mirror and you're like, 'Oh, I am just too cute. I'm fine. I'm about to pull one tonight.' You go outside and not one person talks to you. You see pictures later and you're like, 'I did not look like that. I know I did. I swear to you, I looked better when I saw myself in the mirror.' I can't relate.

I think this is the part about when you think about things that you would do over, the ways that you would have reacted differently, and torture yourself about it. I do that now, still, even though I've been through a lot of therapy, even though I know that the outcome probably would have been the same at a different time. He suffered from a mental illness that I obviously couldn't diagnose well. We were in a romantic relationship that, of course looking back, was toxic. I didn't know how to help him. And eventually, he decided to end his life by suicide. And I blamed myself for a long time. To some degree, I still do. Wishing that I had said something different. Wishing that I had known better to ask for help. Wishing I'd just been a better friend or girlfriend. And even now, I remember writing a post on Instagram when someone famous died by suicide. There were all of the things that people say: 'Oh, you never know what somebody's dealing with,' or 'Call this line if you're thinking these thoughts.' And all I could think was, 'But the people who are around that person, the guilt you feel, the terrible burden you carry for the rest of your life... what do those people do? What hotline exists for them? How do you manage that feeling?' It is a sort of survivor's guilt, to some degree. I feel the same about people who are survivors of a loved one's terminal illness. I would never talk about those people. You always talk about the person who's suffering. I'm not saying we shouldn't. I'm just saying that we have to consider the entire circle of people. How do you give advice to help relieve the guilt, the sadness, the grief, the regret, all of those things? It is still something that I deal with in terms of many different types of grief I've had in my life.

Yes. I mean, he was on medication, so he knew he had challenges. And look, I was clinically depressed as well. I was on medication. We were both on medication. The challenge with having any mental illness is that sometimes you know how you're diagnosed and you know that you have to take medication for it, but maybe you don't feel like you're ill. And he was an artist, a musician. So sometimes as a creative, that gets confused because you're just like, 'Oh, but I need my angst in order to create. I pull from this deep dark well, and that's where my artistry comes from.' He would say stuff all the time. He would be impassioned about, 'Well, none of it is worth it. If this doesn't work, I don't know what I'm going to do.' Or he would be so dependent on me for his own happiness. The things I did would set him off or not. So then you are tied to that person's ups and downs even though it has nothing to do with you. And again, I've had a lot of therapy to talk about this, so I can articulate it. But it doesn't change the way that you really feel about it. I can academically talk about it and say, 'Well, he behaved this way, and therefore I behaved this way. We were like a tit-for-tat type situation.' But when you're in it, all you want to do is to protect that person. All I wanted to do was keep Ben up. That's all. By any means necessary. So if it meant that I had to stay on the phone for six hours, that's what I had to do. If I had to miss my own meetings and calls and friends and dinners, that's what I had to do.

Yes. He called me that day. He was having one of his episodes and was accusing me of cheating on him or whatever the thing was. And I was just so...

I was exhausted. It had been a number of days of this constant battery. He was living in Geneva and I was in New York, so we were on different time zones. He couldn't see anything I was doing but was accusing me of all kinds of things. I was just tired, so I said I needed to go out with my friends. I'm going to go to dinner. Of course, you can imagine the battery of insults he hit me with. I hung up the phone and just went. I could hear the phone ringing when I left my apartment, but I thought he's just going to have to cool off and I'll get back to him. When I got back, he had left me a series of increasingly panicked voicemails. The last one was where he said he was going to jump from a bridge. And that was it. He jumped from a bridge.

He was such a brilliant person, a brilliant creative. I wish I could have saved him and myself. I wish I had known to ask for help in that situation. I didn't know what to say. I didn't know how to articulate what he was doing or how I was reacting to it. I thought it was my fault, that if I just loved him harder or better, he wouldn't have jumped. I think about it all the time. What would have happened if I had answered the phone when I heard it ringing when I was leaving? Was that the moment he decided? Maybe if I had picked up the phone, he wouldn't have felt desolate and alone. I think about that all the time. I apply that and many other things that have happened in my life to current situations. If there is a situation with a friend who's going through something or telling me about some challenge they're having, and I feel powerless or like I don't have the answer, I consider whether or not I am their last call. I consider what else and who else I can pull into this to help because I don't know what to do. The trauma response to that is that sometimes it's not even like that. I'm not jumping to a conclusion that they're anywhere near that, but that's where I'm going because that's my experience. So I'm always considerate that if somebody's going through something tough, or a friend tells you they're checking in on your strong friends, I don't even know what that means. But if I have a friend who I haven't heard from or I know they're going through something tough, and I call them and they're not answering, or they sound funny to me, I'll be the first one to drive over there and be like, I just had to lay eyes on you. I had to see that you're all right. You good? Okay, you just need some ice cream, all right, I got you. But I'm very conscious of the fact that people are delicate, our lives are delicate. Even when somebody looks like they have everything together, there might be something really unsettled right underneath the surface. So how can I be more conscious as a friend? The difference what I've learned in 20 years though is that although I consider could I have changed the outcome of that night, maybe I could have changed the outcome of that night, but that doesn't mean that he would not have decided to end his life. I have also grown in understanding that it was his choice. It was his choice. It really didn't have anything to do with me. How a person decides to live their life or leave their life is their choice, and I have to respect it. That's what has changed in 20 years.

I found love in Peter, yes, at work.

If I had that answer, we could solve all of love's riddles. Earlier on when you talked about 'let go and let God,' it really struck me as a relationship metaphor as well. We go through life thinking I want a brunette with this size, this, and we have our blinkers on and we're too narrow for all the great people that might come along. You might have met your husband or wife already, but you were just so caught up in how they were supposed to look and how much money they were supposed to have.

But that is part of it. When you say 'let go and let God,' it's like yes, the letting go of these preconceptions, whether it's for job or love or friends or whatever, but it's also the action of being like, okay, let's go and see what this is. For me, when I met him, he was not my type. This white man who was a ginger, for God's sake. What was I going to do with that? He was wearing this big fat gold chain, two buttons open on his shirt. I think about it now and I'm just like, oh, how embarrassing. But he surprised me. The story is that he said he wanted to get to know me, wanted to take me to dinner, and I was like absolutely not, I'm way too fine for you. I said, look, if you want to get to know me, Mr. White Man, you're going to read Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison. He was like, I don't even know what that is. No one has ever even said that to me. I said, yeah, exactly. Go read Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison, and then we can have dinner and talk about it. Why that book? It was my favorite book, it still is my favorite book. Toni Morrison is an author who does not come down to your level. She is up here. She's not going to mince words or change metaphors or not let you stare at the uncomfortable realness of being Black. I'm going to hit you in the face with it. I wanted to see this very privileged white boy read this work and then come talk to me about it. That was my trick. He came back very quickly, by the way. I was like, oh, I'm going to call this bluff. First of all, he didn't read it, and even if he did, there's no way he has a great understanding of that story or that work than I do. I'm an African-American English Lit major from Wesleyan, and I'm Black. How would he know more? He surprised me. We went to dinner and he had such interesting insights. Love does that. I was struck by Cupid's arrow sitting there at that dinner. I swear it was like the first night, I fell in love instantly.

Oh yeah. That was November 9th, 2000. By January, I told him I loved him. Also because he had painted me his interpretation of Song of Solomon, oil on canvas. He had never picked up a paintbrush before. The painting now hangs in our daughter's room. He gave it to me for my birthday, and I was like, yep, he's the one. I want to marry him. That's it. My very Ghanaian father was not into it at all. He did not approve, especially when I said we're going to move in together. We moved in together after knowing each other for eight months, and we had already decided we're going to get married. At a year, he proposed, I said yes, and we were off to the races.

Oh, he hated it. Hated it. In fact, it was a terrible situation. My parents came to visit in February. My mom knew I was very much in love, my dad was not aware. They came to visit me in New York to see how I was doing. I orchestrated for Peter to come by for dinner. To set context, it wasn't like I introduced my dad to boyfriends. My dad had never met anyone. So for him to meet somebody was like, well, who is this and what does this mean? He tells it now that he just thought it was me finally coming into some early love, and he thought it would be something he could dismiss. But by August, when I called him and said, hey, I'm going to move in with my boyfriend, he was like absolutely not. First of all, this is shameful. You're not going to marry this white person. That's not going to work for us. You're the eldest. What is your sister going to think? You can't live in sin. He was on a business trip in China, and without telling me, he flew to New York straight away. He did not come to my office to talk to me about it. He went to Peter's office and showed up there. Peter called me, his voice sounding all funny and crazy. He said, your dad is here. I said, there's no way, I just talked to him yesterday, he's in Beijing. He said, no, he's sitting in my office. I said, I'm on my way. Then I heard my dad in the background saying, you will do no such thing, this is a conversation for men. I said, okay, I'll give you 15 minutes, and then I'm there. To this day, I don't know what they talked about while I was not in the room, but I know that when I got there, they had brokered some understanding between each other. Even though my father was still unhappy with the decision to move in with him, he did not stand in the way. When I eventually married Peter, he walked me down the aisle.

2003. So you got engaged in 2001, met in 2000. Yes, quickly, very quick.

No, no, no, no, no. I don't even think I wanted to be a mother ever. I wasn't sure that I did. I was in my career, which had just begun to climb in a way that was very visible to me. I was working at Pepsi and having really good success. I was influenced by all the societal pressures that women have in the workplace. If you have a baby, it's going to slow down your career. People look at you differently. Maybe your attentions are going to shift. You thought you were ambitious about your career, but let a baby come along and now all of a sudden you want the baby, you don't want the career. I didn't want anything to stop me from the ambition of getting to the top. Also, I was just having a good time. I just didn't want to be responsible for anybody else. I found out I was pregnant and I cried.

Yes. When I called my mom to tell her, she was like, stop crying. The tears that Peter didn't know how to react to because he was so excited. He was elated. I was thinking this is awful. I don't want to be pregnant. How do you actually say that when at that point we had been married for almost five years, coming up on our fifth anniversary? I had a great job, he had a great job, we had a beautiful apartment in Manhattan. Why wouldn't you? Everything seems perfect. No one could look at me and say, oh, you're in a tough situation, you shouldn't have a baby. It felt selfish to say I didn't want to be pregnant, to become a mother. I went into it under duress. I don't think women talk about that enough. The society's pressure of becoming a mother at a certain stage in life, or that if you become a mother and you don't want to be, even when things are perfect, that can also feel like failure or feel like a trap. Somehow you're supposed to get pregnant and then start glowing immediately, start feeling all the motherly feels. I didn't feel any of that. I didn't want it. To be totally candid and transparent, it wasn't until I was about five months pregnant when there was the first sign that something might be wrong with my pregnancy that all of a sudden, whatever that instinct was that I was supposed to kick in when I found out I was pregnant, it kicked in at that point. I went from being someone who was very cavalier about the pregnancy, thinking about how I'm going to get my six-pack back after this is done, to being like, what do you mean there's low amniotic fluid? What does that mean exactly? Is the baby okay? Is this little one growing? Let me hear the heartbeat again. It was really that moment that did it. Very quickly, things descended into hell. I discovered that I had a condition called preeclampsia. It's essentially when your blood pressure rises in your body because your body acts like the pregnancy is attacking you, so every cell begins to fight against the pregnancy. I was forced to deliver the baby early, and she didn't survive. For someone who had not wanted to be pregnant, it was extraordinarily devastating. I think it was a combination of things. I had begun to develop all the protectiveness of motherhood. Very much like I felt in Ben's death, I thought, how could I have been a better mother to this unborn person? What was my failure in taking care of myself so that I could have a healthy child? The similarities are parallel. There's nothing I could have done better.

I don't know how to articulate it. I don't know that there is a word to describe the combination of grief over something or someone lost that you never really had, with a combination of anger. Raw, fierce anger at God for this situation, at Peter for having made the choice in the moment of crisis when I'm sitting there in the bed, the blood pressure is going up, I'm delirious, and the doctor says there's only one choice here: you save her or you save the baby, which one is it? Peter says, we'll save my wife. I was pissed because whatever that thing that clicked in my head that said protect the life that is coming first, I was like, no, you should have chosen that one. I've already lived. You should have chosen her. I said that to him. Yes, it was the beginning of some of the big factors in our relationship, that moment. Also, feeling like an utter failure. Women since the beginning of time have had babies apparently easily. My mom had four. Stolen Africans were having babies in fields with no epidurals or child care. Here I was living a very lavish lifestyle, having an OB-GYN that worked out of the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and I couldn't even do that. All of those feelings were so raw and combined. Then on top of it, my almost debilitating drive to be successful at it. We go back to some childhood things that said, look, I've got to do the thing, I've got to be the best at the thing. So now this has happened, I have all these terrible, scary emotions going on, but I'm going to beat it. Clearly, that's what I set out to do. So three months after Eve died, I got pregnant. My doctor, Peter, everybody was like absolutely not. This is not a good idea. Not my therapist, everybody. I was like, I don't care, I'm going to do it. Not necessarily because I want to be a mother, and this is a difficult thing to say. I want to do it successfully. I want to prove to myself, to my body, that I could do it. I wanted to yell at God and be like, did you take this away because I said I didn't want it? Well, okay, now I want it, so let's do it. Even when I got sick again with my second pregnancy, I was like, look, I'm going to do everything. I consumed so many prenatal vitamins. I would take them by the palmful. I got a specialist. I was taking Lovenox, a blood thinner that I would have to inject into my belly every single day. I was the most obedient pregnant woman you've ever seen. I still got sick seven months into my pregnancy, still with all of that. So again, sometimes there are situations that you cannot control. Very much like Ben, he would have chosen to end his life at some point with or without my love, with or without me answering the phone. I was going to get ill with or without the prenatals, with or without a specialist. Those are not controllable by me, but I was still trying my best to be successful, to do it well. When Leo was born, she came out screaming. I took one look at that girl and I was like, yeah, you and I are going to make it. You came here by any means necessary, and I am going to love you fiercely, deeply, because it just took too much to get here.

Yes, connected to all of that. Traumas in our life, especially for a married couple. Peter really wanted to be a father. I wasn't sure I wanted to be a mother. We get pregnant, terrible things happen in the pregnancy, we lose Eve. I blame him entirely and God. He becomes obsessed with my health in my next pregnancy. He does not want me to get pregnant. I'm like, I'm going to do it with or without your consent. No, I'm kidding, but it became a battlefield in our home and in our relationship. We were no longer a team.

Probably empathy. A very shallow understanding of what the other person was going through. It's remarkable to me now to think about it. How do two people who love each other so desperately go through the same event and cannot grieve together, can't see the other one's grief? How is that even possible?

Peter was the type of person who never got sick. He would walk around Manhattan in wintertime with a windbreaker. He didn't get colds. He just didn't get sick. Even in our separation, and we had then agreed to get divorced, he was always very valiant. He just was not a person who fell. I don't know how else to describe it. He was just tall and big and barreled through life. For him to be diagnosed that way with Burkitt's lymphoma, which is a cancer that is not curable, but at the time the oncologists said, okay, you're going to do radiation, you're going to do chemo. There's no surgery really because it attacks the lymph nodes everywhere, and there's no way to get rid of all the tumors. The best thing to do is try to shrink them and hopefully they go away. We didn't know any better. By the time his cancer was deemed terminal, all of the anger and misunderstanding and battles over the different events in our life really did not matter. It did not matter. I realized that probably sounds so corny to say, and maybe feels like a throwaway thing, that when you're faced with the finality of life, you just realize you let go. No, it's not automatic like that. You have to make a choice. We had to make a choice. He had to ask me the question for us to reconcile. I had to decide that that is what we're going to do. We had to make a choice to have the conversations which were about forgiveness. We had to make the choice to look at every day and say, okay, what are we going to do today that is going to prepare us for the end?

Yes. It was unlike the first kiss. The first kiss is like the butterflies and you're not sure how much pressure to apply, should I open my mouth a little bit, should I give him a little tongue? No, it wasn't that kiss. It was the kiss of knowing. 13 years have gone by in a very complicated relationship full of the challenges of being an interracial couple, him understanding my experience or not, me understanding his experience and not, the challenges of health and our parents getting sick, all of the things, my ambition for my career, his lack of understanding of that. It was just all of the things. To be in that moment and then to say, okay, we're going to be together until the end because that's what we promised. To truly kiss and make up. I think that's another casual statement people say, kissing and making up. No, that Covenant of we are in this again to the end, and I won't leave.

No. To the end. To the last heartbeat.

I don't know that you do. I haven't. There is the physical loss, of course, and grief in that is complicated. I can't pick up the phone and call him. I can't see his wide smile at something I did or his scowl if I do something wrong. I have multiple griefs. I have grief that Leo will never know her dad in the way that I wish she knew him. He so desperately wanted to be a father and he loved her so deeply. I grieve for her in that not knowing. But there is also for me the understanding that he really is still around. This is where everybody's like, oh, people, I'm like, sort of, because I do believe in the signs and wonders of things. It's happened too many times for me not to. It feels very much like my intuition, where I'm just like, I know what he would have thought about X, Y, and Z thing. I know. To some degree, I still feel his presence because I am aware of how he would be if he were here.

Especially Peter's death made me impatient. Impatience is the wrong word, but it kind of feels like impatience with life. Urgent for sure. The origin of life. I just have a much better understanding of not wasting my time and my energy.

I get criticism of that all the time where people are just like, oh, she can't handle adversity. I'm like, me? Are you out of your mind? If there was a poster child, it would be me. No, it's not that I can't handle adversity. I just put myself first. Are you selfish? Yes, very much so. But that is not a bad thing. I am at the center of my life. No one is above me in my life. No one, not even my kid. She knows that, and I try to instill the same in her. No one should be above her in her life. The life that you're living is yours. I cannot be a great contributor to society, and this sounds a little counterintuitive, but I can't be a great contributor to society, I can't be a good friend, I can't even be a good mom if I am not living the life that I want to live, if I'm not wholly happy in it. So absolutely, I'm selfish. When you left, you were quoted as saying, 'You don't need to be the savior,' I think when referencing the state of the company because it was going through a very tumultuous time. You can save yourself too. Yes, and save yourself first. That's what I should have said. It's all of the ways in which we think about it now. You get on a plane, they're going through the safety demonstration. They tell you to put your mask on first before you help anybody else. In your life too, save yourself first.

Be selfish in your life, in your career. Think about yourself all of the time.

I could go tomorrow and I would be so satisfied with this life. Why? Because I've done the things I've wanted to do. Now look, I have goals. It doesn't mean I don't have ambition. It's not like I don't want to do the next thing. I do want to go to Antarctica at some point. I have not been yet. But if I went now, I've lived this life on my own terms. There's nothing that I did where I feel like, oh man, I should have made a different choice.

I'm good at seeing the forest, the whole picture. Sometimes in a forest, you know that you have to clear this area in order to make space for the little village, because then those villagers can take care of the rest of this part of the forest that is burning. But sometimes people are only down at the trees, and then they can't see the burning part, and they can't see that they should clear over there so that those people can get to the fire. I can see the forest. I can see the whole thing, and I can see like, okay, this needs to move there. It's helped me so much in my career for sure. It's like the change maker.

Never look at a problem. Uber, the problem was that there was a huge campaign that was like 'Delete Uber.' People were mad at the company because of lack of diversity in the C-suite, they treat women horribly, they're not paying the drivers, and it's unsafe even to get in the car. I went in and if I had just tried to go after one thing, it would have been whack-a-mole. You pop this one down and this one pops up, you hit that one and that one pops up. But I can see the forest. I can say, ah, this is not an issue about whether or not Travis Kalanick hates women or hates Black people. This is not about whether or not your driver is going to kidnap you. This is about trust. Do you trust the CEO of the company? Do you trust the driver when you get in the car? Do you trust anything about this whole situation? Self-driving cars, do you trust any of it? If you don't trust it, nothing I do is going to make you like the company. I could fix the issue of making half of the C-suite people of color and women, and you would still be like, yep, the guy will kidnap me.

They're great storytellers. They can make you believe anything. Those are great marketers. The ones who make you believe that you put on a pair of Nikes and somehow you're now LeBron James.

It's close enough to the truth for you to believe it. When I put on any pair of shoes, I'm no LeBron James, but you probably walk more confidently. It's true. So maybe you weren't LeBron, but you're a better version of yourself.

Be more curious about people. Ask a lot of questions about people. Why do they do the things they do? Why do they like the things they like? Keep asking the questions. You've got to be really curious about people in order to be a great marketer because you can't just rely on what you know and your experiences. Even though I do say that you should be a focus group of one, it's like if you like the thing, maybe somebody else will like the thing. If it makes you laugh, maybe somebody else will laugh. If it makes you scared, somebody else is going to get scared. If it inspires, somebody else will be inspired. I believe that. But you also have to be really curious about why people choose the things that they choose, why they like the things that they like. If you're not curious about people, you're going to suck at this job.

There is no path. If somebody tells you, 'Do these steps in order to get to where I've got,' they're lying to you. You're not going to get there based on the things I've done. The only way you're going to get there is by listening to yourself, by following your intuition, by doing the things that you're really good at, and leave the rest of that stuff that you're not good at that other people are trying to advise you. Leave that alone. So any advice: get to know yourself better. That's it. We often confuse configuration with admiration. I can advise someone without aspiring to walk that path. I remember reading a poem one day about the only great person you can be is the greatest version of yourself. It's super cliché, but it's completely true because I could not be Steve Jobs or Thomas Edison or Martin Luther King. No, it's not my greatness. Don't try to be me ever.

There's a closing tradition we have on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're leaving the question for. The question left for you is: what moment in your journey made you fight even harder to get to where you are right now?

We talked about it. It is Peter's last heartbeat. At that moment, it just changed the way I look at life. I just don't want to get there not having lived exactly the life that I want. It changed everything for me. So I refuse to succumb to anything that is not in my destiny for my greatness and my happiness. That's it.

Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.