Well this is unusual.....

I don’t usually write or send newsletters on the weekend but this one has been bubbling inside of me for about 4 weeks.

I tried to ignore it.

But that’s the funny thing with ideas, the more you ignore them, the more they inhabit your mind.

The intended audience for this is the ambitious women who read my newsletter but I hope the following sparks something inside of everyone.

On April 18, 2020 Marc Andreessen wrote a blog post titled "It's Time to Build" that went viral and felt like a call to arms in the startup community.

It was the beginning of COVID and he was motivated by the lack of supplies, vaccines and ability to manufacture what the world needed. He posed the question: Why do we not have these things? Andreessen went on to also underline the need for innovation in housing, education, manufacturing, transportation and more.

I want to call attention to this paragraph in particular:

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It’s now 2025.

5 years later.

As a woman it feels like we're not only “not moving forward” but rather in hyperspeed going backward to the 1950s.

I’m watching a lot of IRL friends and para social friends find themselves in a functional freeze state.

Functional freeze is different from the “fight” or “flight” responses you might have due to stress. With those responses, you take action. You’re alert and ready to either confront a threat or escape from it.

With freezing, you feel overwhelmed and don’t respond. You feel paralyzed or stuck, physically or mentally. You might have trouble making decisions, moving forward on tasks or taking part in everyday activities. You may find work, relationships and life challenging and feel helpless, numb or disconnected. You know you need to act but it’s just not possible for you.

Real talk….the world and news cycle is fucking overwhelming.

And so many of us are frozen in a constant doom scroll throughout the day.

We are ingesting more information than ever before.

And it’s affecting our ability to focus.

To build.

To be able to change what is happening around us.

I’m currently reading “Stolen Focus” by Johann Hari and he shares that in 1986 if you added up all the information being blasted to the average human being - TV, radio, reading - it amounted to 40 newspapers worth of information every day.

Fast forward to 2017 and that number had risen to the equivalent of 174 newspapers a day.

And I bet it's even more now, 8 years later .

How TF are we supposed to do anything if information is a one way street.

We need to find space right now.

Space to think.
Space to ideate.
Space to motivate.
Space to create.
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Space to keep pushing for the change we want to see in the world.
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I’m going to step on a soap box if you allow me.
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This is what they want.
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The polarization of the uber wealth upper class to everyone else is widening and if we succumb to the firehose of information coming at us, we won’t have any space to do anything about it.

So this is my Andreessen moment.

It’s time to thaw.

It's time to set boundaries on how much news you ingest at the moment.
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It's time to switch from a consumer mindset to a creator mindset.
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Allow social media to be a tool for us to motivate and inspire, not suck us into doom scrolling terror.

Change has to start somewhere.

Now seems like as good of time as ever.

It was only 1991 when Bernadine Healy, MD, is appointed the first female director of the NIH and it was only 1993 when the U.S. Congress passes a law requiring inclusion of women in NIH-sponsored clinical trials.

If you don’t know where to start, might I suggest the book Stolen Focus.

If you struggled to read this 800 word post without your mind wandering, then you will want to understand how all of the inputs of the world are affecting your focus, intelligence, and (ultimately) impact.

Awareness is the greatest agent of change.

But so many confuse awareness with ingestion.

I implore you to become aware of what’s happening in the world but become boundaried in the amount of information you actually consume.

It’s time to build.

Write that blog post.
Plan that meetup.
Start that support group at work.
Start that side hustle.
Learn that new skill.
Know where your money is.
Hold people accountable for supporting women and minorities.
Read more books.
Take that class.
Ask for that opportunity, speaking engagement, promotion.
Support your friends in their businesses.
Ask more questions.

In a world that feels like it wants us to sit back and let a few white rich men tell us what we are going to do with our lives, careers and bodies - we owe it to ourselves, our children and our grandchildren to thaw out of our functional freeze and get spicy.

I'd love to hear how you are feeling right now and how I can best support you in your goals.

Have a great weekend,

A
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