Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Key Takeaways
- You can have every tool, every plan, every intention. When you are wearing this many hats the gap between setup and follow through is enormous.
- You finally got there. The feeling you worked toward did not show up. And someone told you to be grateful.
- Whatever got you to the finish line has no idea what to do once you cross it. And neither do you.
Last weekend, I sat in a chair for 10 hours a day and wrote four articles. I did not eat properly. I did not stretch. I did not drink enough water. I did not take my vitamins. I was completely lit up and completely destroying myself at the same time. By Monday, I had a scratchy throat and could barely move. I knew it was coming. I watched myself keep pushing anyway.
Four years of research, and I still did that.
On Aug. 26, 1920, the 19th Amendment was certified, and American women won the right to vote. It had taken more than 70 years of organizing, marching, arrests, hunger strikes and suffragettes being force-fed in prison cells to get there. Women’s Equality Day marks that win. What it does not mark is what it cost the women who got there. What the fight left in the body long after the battle was over.
One hundred years later, women are building businesses at record rates. Female entrepreneurship rose 69% from 2019 to 2024; 83% of female founders experience high stress; and 54% face burnout. The conversation about why always points to the system. The funding gap. The invisible labor. The double standard. All of it is real, and none of it is the whole story.
I know exactly what to do, but I don’t always do it
I am a founder in a mission-forward company, partner in a global company, mother of two teenagers, spouse and friend who surfaces like a groundhog every so often.
I know I should exercise. I have a dedicated corner of my home with kettlebells, a skipping rope, stretching tools and an iPad loaded with Pilates videos. I wake up and put my workout clothes on first thing so nothing can get in the way. And more often than not, I sit in them all day at my computer and never work out.
Most people would call that laziness. It is not. It is what happens when everything you are already doing has consumed every resource you had available. The account is overdrawn before the workout ever had a chance.
And we are not talking about small things. Every company decision. Every school pickup. Every conversation that needed more of you than you had left. Every night you stayed up finishing something because there was no other time. We start wearing our shoulders like bloody earrings and calling it ambition.
Neuroscientist Bruce McEwen called it allostatic load. The crash that follows was always coming. The workout clothes are just the most honest evidence of it.
What nobody tells you about finally getting there
We fight so hard to get there. The goal. The milestone. The number. The thing we told ourselves would finally feel like enough. And when we cross it, when we actually get there, a lot of us feel absolutely nothing. Or worse, we feel flat. Lost. Empty. Like something is wrong with us for not celebrating the thing we just spent years building toward.
Harvard psychologist Tal Ben-Shahar has a name for it. The arrival fallacy. Here is what it means in plain language. While you are chasing something, your brain is already rehearsing what it will feel like to get there. It plays the moment over and over in anticipation. By the time you actually arrive, the brain has already lived it 100 times. The real moment lands flat because your brain already moved on.
And then someone tells you to be grateful. I am calling bullshit on that.
For women carrying everything we carry, this hits harder and faster. The recovery window between milestones is shorter because the invisible labor fills every gap. The body barely processes one finish before the next thing is already waiting. And the culture that celebrated you crossing the line has already moved on to asking what you are going to do next. You were never taught how to finish. Only how to chase.
Women’s Equality Day is supposed to celebrate how far we have come. I think it should also be an honest conversation about what getting here actually cost us.
We were taught to fight for the right to show up. We were never taught what to do when the thing we fought for finally arrives and feels like nothing. Nobody built anything for the moment after the finish line. Not for the flatness. Not for the crash. Not for the woman standing at the top of what she built wondering why it does not feel the way she thought it would.
Nobody taught us how to land. Until now.
That is the conversation I have dedicated my work to starting. Because ambitious women deserve more than the win. They deserve to actually feel it when they get there.
The next time someone tells you to be grateful for what you built, ask yourself this instead. What did it actually cost me? Not the business cost. The personal one. That is the question nobody is asking. And it is the only one worth answering.
Key Takeaways
- You can have every tool, every plan, every intention. When you are wearing this many hats the gap between setup and follow through is enormous.
- You finally got there. The feeling you worked toward did not show up. And someone told you to be grateful.
- Whatever got you to the finish line has no idea what to do once you cross it. And neither do you.
Last weekend, I sat in a chair for 10 hours a day and wrote four articles. I did not eat properly. I did not stretch. I did not drink enough water. I did not take my vitamins. I was completely lit up and completely destroying myself at the same time. By Monday, I had a scratchy throat and could barely move. I knew it was coming. I watched myself keep pushing anyway.
Four years of research, and I still did that.
On Aug. 26, 1920, the 19th Amendment was certified, and American women won the right to vote. It had taken more than 70 years of organizing, marching, arrests, hunger strikes and suffragettes being force-fed in prison cells to get there. Women’s Equality Day marks that win. What it does not mark is what it cost the women who got there. What the fight left in the body long after the battle was over.