Why antifragile women succeed with Design Sponge CEO Grace Bonney

I don’t know about you when I was growing up, I had a super-skewed perspective on what business and working was all about. Everywhere I looked were articles about entrepreneurs raising tons of money or celebrities in the business world reinventing everything. Or it was my parents that pushed specific occupations— be a doctor, a lawyer, get to work and sit in an office— but that’s a super limited and incredibly unrealistic view of the working world. The professional options that you’re exposed to are incredibly limited. So many of us end up finding a safe place pretty early and staying there because it’s safe. Imagine if you actually had the power of seeing a spectrum of choices in front of you. That power of visibility would be incredible. You’d have the ability to see what other people were doing, what options you were attracted to and various paths you could go. It would totally open the world up to you. Especially if you had the deck stacked against you as a woman.  I talk about that very thing, along with  the importance of being “antifragile,” with this week’s guest, Design Sponge CEO Grace Bonney. She started Design Sponge as a blog and it turned into a new media brand with over a million readers a day. It’s even been called a “Martha Stewart Living for the Millennials” by the New York Times. While building Design Sponge, Grace has dedicated herself to helping creative female entrepreneurs with national meet-ups, a column and now her new book (which she created in just two months), called “In the Company of Women.” It tops the NY Times Best Seller list already and features 1x1s with a hundred women small business owners, especially in creative fields. Grace was nice enough to stop by during her book tour and we had a super fun, content packed conversation covering everything from whether softness is a weakness, the power of seeing the spectrum of options in front of you and how to use life’s challenges as an advantage. 

I don’t know about you, but when I was growing up, I had a super-skewed perspective on what business and working was all about. Everywhere I looked were articles about entrepreneurs raising tons of money or celebrities in the business world reinventing everything. Or it was my parents who pushed specific occupations— be a doctor, a lawyer, sit in an office— but that’s a super limited and incredibly unrealistic view of the working world. The professional options that we're exposed to are incredibly limited. So many of us end up finding a safe place pretty early and staying there because it’s safe. 

Imagine if you actually had the power of seeing a spectrum of choices in front of you. That power of visibility would be incredible. You’d have the ability to see what other people were doing, what options you were attracted to and various paths you could go. It would totally open the world up to you. Especially if you had the deck stacked against you as a woman.  

I talk about that very thing, along with  the importance of being “antifragile,” with this week’s guest, Design Sponge CEO Grace Bonney. She started Design Sponge as a blog and it turned into a huge new media brand with over a million readers a day. It’s even been called a “Martha Stewart Living for the Millennials” by the New York Times. While building Design Sponge, Grace has dedicated herself to helping creative female entrepreneurs with national meet-ups, a column and now her new book (which she created in just two months), called “In the Company of Women.” It tops the NY Times best seller list already and features 1x1s with a hundred women small business owners, especially in creative fields. 

Grace was nice enough to stop by during her book tour and we had a super fun, content packed conversation covering everything from whether softness is a weakness, the power of seeing the spectrum of options in front of you and how to use life’s challenges as an advantage.