Highways, Not Ladders (Prologue)

5. Marisa Sweeney: "I Was Terrible at Faking It"

Marisa Sweeney is a registered dietitian, founder of Be Well Integrative Health Services, and an Assemblywoman for New Jersey's 25th legislative district I talk to Marisa about what it felt like to sign her first private practice lease after her business partner backed out at the eleventh hour, how a vegan food festival that started with a chance encounter on a street corner landed a hundred thousand square feet of free event space in Atlantic City, and what made her decide to run for a seat that hadn't gone Democratic in nearly fifty years.

4. Paul Gottsegen: "I never used the programming skills I spent three long years learning"

Paul Gottsegen is a technology marketing executive who spent more than three decades at companies including Compaq, Dell, HP, and Infosys, and recently published his first book, Do the Opposite, Sort Of. In this conversation, we talk about how a single comment from his father set his entire career in motion, how Paul learned to enter new organizations at a high level without losing credibility, and what it took for him to finally put forty years of hard-won lessons into a book.

3. Jonathan Fisher: "I was always worried that I wasn't going to be good enough"

Dr. Jonathan Fisher is a cardiologist, founder of MindHeart Now, and author of Just One Heart, who spent decades training at some of the most prestigious institutions in medicine before arriving at a crossroads inside the career he'd spent his whole life building. In this episode, we talk about the forces that drove him toward medicine, what he discovered once he got there, and how he rebuilt his professional identity from the inside out.

2. A.J. Baime: "At One Point He Fired Me, But Nobody Told Me"

AJ Baime has spent 30 years in magazines and written seven books, two of them New York Times bestsellers. He decided he wanted to write books when he was seven, wrapped his first one in wallpaper from his childhood home, and spent his twenties taking on jobs he wasn't ready for. I talk to AJ about quitting his NYU PhD before finishing the program, getting fired from an early magazine job without anyone bothering to tell him, and how he survived the collapse of print magazines.

1. Tim McGhee: "I Thought People Who Said They Loved Their Job Were Either Crazy or Lying"

Tim McGhee has spent 25 years at the center of sports marketing. He started on Wall Street, hated it, and briefly tried stand-up comedy before figuring out what he actually wanted to do. I talk to Tim about leaving finance for business school, the dumb luck of standing in the right hotel check-in line, and why he twice turned down jobs rather than uproot his family — a decision he has never second-guessed.