Sustainable Ambition: How To Grow Without Burning Out With Kathy Oneto

What does it take to stay ambitious without burning out? In this warm and insightful conversation, Kathy Oneto—author of Sustainable Ambition and host of the podcast of the same name—joins Tony Martignetti to explore the flashpoints that shaped her journey and her philosophy. From swimming the length of a pool as a kid to working in high-powered roles in New York, Kathy shares how her curiosity, courage, and conscious risk-taking led her to redefine success on her own terms. Together, they dive into what sustainable ambition really means, how to honor different life stages, and why ambition doesn’t have to be all-consuming to be meaningful.

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Sustainable Ambition: How To Grow Without Burning Out With Kathy Oneto

Flashpoints And The Journey Of Sustainable Ambition

It is my honor to introduce you to my guest, Kathy Oneto. Kathy is the founder and podcast host of Sustainable Ambition. She's the author of the recently released book, Sustainable Ambition: How to Prioritize What Matters to Thrive in Life and Work. She is a consultant, facilitator, and coach who's passionate about helping ambitious individuals, organizations, and teams explore how to live and work differently for more success, satisfaction, and sustainability.

She helps people get more from work and life without sacrificing their joy or ease. I say yes to that. She lives in San Francisco with her husband and the ever-present fog that always rolls in. I am so glad that we have a fire lit so we can have some intimate time together by the virtual campfire. Welcome to the Virtual Campfire, Kathy.

Thank you, Tony. I appreciate you having me, and I can feel that warmth. I need it lately. It's been quite foggy here in San Francisco. I'll appreciate this.

I'm so glad that we had this chance to come by and come together. This conversation is going to be a lot of fun. I'm looking forward to learning about all the flashpoint moments that have brought you to where you're making such an impact. I've enjoyed getting to know you over the past few months. This is going to be a great chance for us to go a little deeper. We are going to share your journey through flashpoints, as we said. These are the moments in your journey that have ignited your gifts into the world. When I turn it over to you, we'll pause along the way and see what themes are showing up as you share your flashpoints. Are you ready?

I am ready.

Take it away, my friend.

Even as you're saying that, I was like, “How far back do I go to these flashpoints?” It's interesting because I'm the youngest of five kids. There's a part of me that all of a sudden, as you said that, I'm like, “Do I go back to this time in childhood?” There I'm going. I'm going to go ahead and go there. When I was four years old, I remember running home. We had a Cabana Club in our neighborhood where all the kids gathered. I had swum across the length of the pool, which is what you needed to do to be able to then swim in the deep end.

I was so proud of this accomplishment that I had to run home and share the news. I guess what I'm speaking of there, or I feel like it's indicative of being the youngest of five kids, was that I was always trying to keep up with my older siblings. They inspired me a lot to always be striving and growing, and trying to do new and different things. That's something that stuck with me.

Keeping Up With Siblings: Early Ambition And Growth

I love that you share that. First of all, it's a beautiful memory that you think back on. You say you have this big family, and you're trying to stand out. It's also this element of seeing how your siblings motivate you to move forward. I'm sure there were a lot of hard times they gave you along the way, saying like, “She's a little one. She's going to be tagging along,” and what have you. It's great to have siblings because they do motivate you by seeing what they do.

For sure. They were my role models. I think that they helped me strive. They showed me the way of “That's possible,” or “I should try something like that.” I think it led to some of my other later goals, aspirations, and ambitions that I held. The next one that I'll share, just to go there, is I think I know the spark of where this came from. Coming out of high school, I wanted to go to college on the East Coast.

I grew up on the West Coast, and it wasn't typical for many kids at that time to travel across the country to go off to school. I wasn't able to afford to go to the first school that I went to. I ended up transferring to the University of Virginia and went in my second year. That was somewhat more affordable, if you can believe it. It was a critical turning point for me from a standpoint of stretching myself to put myself into an uncomfortable environment, and allow myself to find my way through that experience and come out the other side.

Honestly, I think it's indicative of part of how I've navigated my life over time, which is sometimes I have this instinctive sense of what I want to pursue, what I want to go after, or the experience that I want to have. I go ahead and I pursue it without necessarily fully thinking through, “What is this experience going to be like?” You get yourself there, and it's extremely challenging and it's uncomfortable. You have to find your way through.

It's interesting because I never would have characterized myself this way, but others have said to me, after certain experiences that I've put myself in, “You were courageous.” I think about it, and I was like, “I didn't think about it that way. It was something I was curious to do and wanted to do.” Honestly, thinking back on it again, knowing what that experience was and how challenging it was, I wouldn't change a thing.

What was great about that experience, too, was putting yourself into a different world that you've never experienced before. I had not traveled to visit the school before I went. Being plopped into an environment and going with it and learning along the way, it was just that. It was a tremendous learning experience, and it opened my eyes to a lot of opportunities and possibilities that I wouldn't have necessarily had exposure to if I had stayed in my comfortable territory.

There's something about what you shared, which is that the sense of uncertainty is a gift. You see that uncertainty as almost a motivation to put yourself in it and allow that to evolve in whatever way it may look like. The courage that you have to put yourself in those places is also the starting point for you to be able to say, “Whatever is going to happen is going to allow me to learn from this experience.” Uncertainty is what allows you to say, “I'm going to see what happens and learn from this experience, even if it's not going to be perfectly scripted.” If it was perfectly scripted, it's probably not for you.

I appreciate you pulling that thread through. I was listening back to your conversation. I believe it's with Maggie Jackson, who wrote the book Uncertain. I was listening back to that episode with Maggie Jackson, who wrote Uncertain, because I love that book, and I have been fascinated by this topic of uncertainty of late. I appreciate you pulling that through because I don't know if I would have seen that. I don't know if I was conscious of allowing myself to step into this uncertainty. Yet there is probably something quite true about that because I continue to do it to myself over time, over my lifetime. I'm going to reflect on that a bit to embrace what that means for me.

Immerse yourself in a world you've never experienced before.

There's something about this idea of your book, which is that once you put yourself in these situations, then you need to have that ability to sustain yourself through those challenging moments. What did I get myself into? Now, how do I make sure that I have what it takes to motivate myself through this process, or maybe know when it's not the right choice?

I think there are some instincts and intuition that go along with that, and over time, you start to evolve into them. We'll get into that, but I don't want to steal your thunder. I want to get back to what the next flashpoint moment is that you'd like to share? Here you are seeing yourself through this process of evolving, and seeing that you do like putting yourself into these risky situations, or situations you don't know about. What's the next situation that you find yourself in?

The Entrepreneurial Spark: Building Businesses And Learning

The next situation was that I moved to New York City after undergrad. That was a conscious choice because I knew that if I moved back to California, I would likely get stuck here, which is not a bad place to get stuck. I wanted to experience more of the country. Honestly, I wish I had lived in other parts of the country more before I moved back here, just because I do appreciate being in different environments and being able to learn from different cultures and being around different environments.

New York was certainly that. I was also very thoughtful when I went to New York and chose my job in the sense that, honestly, it could have been a career-limiting move, but this was part of my sustainability move. I don't know that I knew it at the time, perhaps, although I did. I consciously chose a job in a corporation as opposed to doing consulting or investment banking because I wanted to be able to have a life. I wanted to be able to enjoy my time in New York City. I was able to do that. That experience was not easy. I didn't join an organization that had an incoming class where you all of a sudden had an existing friend group that you could be a part of.

Navigating New York on my own, and figuring it out. I was a little bit of a crazy person who went to New York City and lived right in Manhattan and was like, “I'm going to take up triathlons during this time.” I had a good friend who was doing it. He shipped me a bike, and I swam up at Columbia, got myself up there early in the morning, and swam before work. Rode by myself on the weekends, did running in the park. I stretched myself out when I was there, and it was a great opportunity to continue to explore my curiosities and my interests and wholly take advantage of the city and all it had to offer.

Speaking of stretching people, New York is a city that stretches you in so many ways, taking risks every day. Not to say it's a super risky place, but everything seems like an adventure.

It does. Yet I grew up in a suburb in the Bay Area, and honestly, I didn't love the suburbs. I had this instinctive feel of, “This isn't quite my environment.” When I landed in cities, I realized, “This is where I meant to be.” New York was overwhelming, but it was also much more comfortable in many respects for me.

That's wonderful. Just taking on those challenges of being in a triathlon, it's like you didn't have enough going on. You had to do more and more, so that's wild. What were you doing for work at the time?

I worked for Young & Rubicam, which is one of the largest advertising agencies. I was working for the CFO there, and then also another gentleman. I ended up working for that person who became the CFO of Burson-Marsteller, which is the largest PR firm in the world, and ended up directly working for him as a financial analyst during the time that I was there. I had a great exposure to senior leaders and was able to help them implement various programs within the organization.

It’s very interesting that you're in that field. Most people would say, “This is a great field to be in. I want to stay in this field forever because it is exciting, a lot is happening.” Some things on the surface are not always what they seem when you dig under the surface, if you know what I mean. Tell me more about what brought you to say, “There's something that I need to do differently?”

In undergrad, I had studied finance and management information systems, which dates me. I don't even know if MIS is around anymore as a major, but I combined both of those things. When I was working at Y&R and Burson-Marsteller, I was in the finance organization. What I was finding was that I didn't want to continue to do finance. That wasn't the path that I wanted to take. I have always had some interest in marketing, and finding the right niche within marketing has always been important for me.

Ultimately, that's where my career went. What was brilliant about my opportunity at Y&R was that I was able to participate in other parts of the organization and do special projects with other parts of the organization, participate on the marketing side, and be able to test things out. I think my time in New York City ended up continuing to be an exploration for me of, like, “What am I interested in? What do I want to do?”

I was able to take advantage of exploring things like design, which I loved. I was just exploring. I took a class at the new school on how to open a coffee bar. At that time, coffee shops weren't all ubiquitous. I was curious about entrepreneurship and interested in that. I also swam with the ladies who founded Levain Bakery in New York City. Now they have other establishments. I was lucky enough to work with them in their first months of opening their first bakery on the Upper West Side and be able to experience it. I was like, “I like baking. What would it be like to open a bakery?”

I was using that time in addition to my day-to-day job to experience a lot of different things. Honestly, that's how I'm wired. I think I've always done that. I ran into an old boss or got together with an old boss about 3 or 4 years ago. I was telling her what I was up to, and even my current work was a sustainable ambition. She said, “You were always doing something outside of work. This is how you're wired.” I think that's true. I appreciate having ambitions that are not solely professional.

Igniting Your Fire: Discovering Sustainable Ambition

As you share this, I keep on seeing myself in what you share. There's an element of like, “What else is there to be experienced?” You started with one C, courage. Now we're leaning into curiosity, which is the other C. I think it's such a powerful one for you. Your curiosity is unbounded. It has led you into turning over all these different leaves and saying, “What else could I be doing? That's interesting. We follow that and see what happens.” I think that's a wonderful way to lead in your life because it allows you to have much more expansive experiences, and know that you're never quite complete, which is a good thing. That's awesome. Tell me what happens now.

I did finally come back to California, and I went to business school at Berkeley. After that, one thing that was important to me was getting foundational training. Yet I also had an entrepreneurial bug. I always felt like maybe someday I would start a business. Coming out of business school, I went into consulting, but ultimately landed at Clorox and consumer packaged goods marketing. It was a great fit for me from a standpoint of marrying a number of different hats and things that I appreciate, both bringing a general management mindset to it, and learning how to run a business.

That was important to me from a standpoint of, “If I do start my own business someday, it’s having that understanding and learning.” The way that they approach marketing is very much a mix of analytical and creative, that art and science combination. That appealed to me as well. It was a great place to be for over six years to ground myself and my career. Ultimately, though, I was like, “What is next?”

As you said, I am curious, and I'm very much driven by learning. I feel like each of my steps in my journey has been like, “What am I ready for next? What am I ready to learn next?” From there, I think the next flashpoint was joining an incubator, a startup where I was the first employee, one of four startups that ended up launching from this incubator. That was an interesting experience to be able to take all that foundational experience and apply it in a startup setting.

That must have felt like coming home because you're in a place where you can now bring all that multi-passion of what you do, where you can play in many of the sandboxes. That’s cool. That's wonderful that you're able to get into that. What would make you want to move on from something like that?

From a startup experience?

Yeah.

A couple of things. One, overstretching myself. Getting a little burned out. That's part of what's led me on my journey, and learning that as a hard worker, I'm not always the best at managing myself. How do I better manage myself to not get myself in those situations, or honor how I'm wired and how I might work? If that's the case, how do I keep myself sustained through those moments?

Honestly, I am also somebody who is wired. I enjoy the upfront creation part of projects. I appreciate that as opposed to being an operator. I like the strategy. I like the upfront creation. Frankly, once it starts to get into operating mode, I start to get a little bored. By the third time, you're starting to be like, “Let's relook at the brand again and let's revisit the website.” It's like, “No, I think you can find somebody else to probably do that a little bit better than me at this stage.”

As I said, each step in my journey, as I reflect back now, I can recognize that it was driven by what I am curious about next, what I want to learn next, and what I want to deepen. Recognizing that, “I love strategy. I'd love this opportunity.” Because I had worked at Young & Rubicam, I had had an opportunity to work with Landor, which is one of the preeminent design agencies, and had a lot of familiarity with them. I had also thought, “Maybe that's something I might want to do in the future.”

I didn't work at Landor, but I worked at another global design firm and a branch strategy firm. Even though I could play in multiple sandboxes, I hadn't ever connected those dots either. You're giving me a lot of insight. It's interesting because other people ask me, “How did you go to a startup?” Many people ask me that, like, “How could you go from a large organization, and how did you transition into a startup?” It wasn't difficult for me. I think maybe it is because of what you're saying. I am multidisciplinary. I like a lot of different things. I am curious. It gave me that opportunity.

Cultivating Future Growth: The Power Of Planting Seeds

I think this is where we're leading into your book, which is this idea of it's great to have those interests. Much like me, there's an element of getting yourself too overstretched. Now, how do you bring it in so you can allow yourself to be sustained over a period of time? It is great to be ambitious. I guess I'm intentionally using your words, but I also want to make sure that it's in your own way. This idea of how do you keep the fire going while also doing work that lights you up?

This was probably the core of what started to get me interested in this topic and exploration. It was the initial thread, even though sustainable ambition is a complex topic, and it has a lot of different tentacles. This notion of “How do you stay engaged over time and how do you keep that fire lit?” It's something that I think about quite a bit. This has been a learning experience over time. It continues to be a learning experience.

I'm sure with the topics you explore, too, it's not like it stops with the book being written. You continue to learn and you continue to experience. I'm learning along the way with everybody else in terms of my own experience. More and more, I'm starting to see our navigation of ambitions over time as following a creative process. I've always thought, and I believe that ambition ebbs and flows over time. What often happens is we're going through these cycles of what might be next and exploring what might be next, and trying to get more clarity around that.

Oftentimes, we don't give ourselves enough space and time to allow that to gestate, to take shape, and to take form. Once it's clear, then we get into execution mode, and then we have to recognize that as we get into execution mode, that's still going to be a learning process. We can also get to that idea of an S curve of learning or growth. We can get to that point where “I'm done with this. I'm ready to move on to something new.”

I borrow from Peter Drucker, why I say, “We need to plant seeds sooner than we think.” Peter Drucker had talked about, especially, the second stage of our careers. I think this is true anytime, especially now, which is why I think it's important for all of us to remain curious. We need to plant seeds sooner than we think. Oftentimes, most of us want that clarity that comes in the middle.

We need to plant seeds sooner than we think.

“What am I doing next? Where's that clarity so that I can get into execution mode?” I think we ignore the fact that we need this upfront exploration time, gestation time, and getting to clarity to figure out what might be next. I think that's part of how you keep things lit over time. There's a lot of nuance within that, but that's one idea.

I love that. I want to propose a provocative question. How does that change, or how does the ability to plant seeds evolve as we age? When you were younger, maybe there was an element of planting tons of seeds or not knowing what seeds to plant, and you just scatter-shot. As you get on in years, maybe you're taking more intentional shots, I don't know. Maybe we're just complex, and we do it all the time. What are your thoughts?

A few thoughts. One of the seminal books for me is Herminia Ibarra's book, Working Identity, which I read years ago, and it stuck with me. It’s this notion of you're not going to know unless you try something and get into action. There are different ways to get into action. At any stage of life, I think it's important to be paying attention as much as we can to what sparks us in these moments, and then going and trying things on, as well as getting into action.

I do think paying attention to where there are residents, and also being deliberate about exposing ourselves to things. I think that's important in our younger years. What happens over time in adult stages of development is that we do use external cues to guide us, because we're getting to know ourselves. We can look for those moments that we do spark, and it takes intentionality, paying attention to yourself, and honoring those moments, too, to find as much congruence as we can with the external world in terms of, “What aligns for me?”

This is one of the things that I thought was interesting that I've explored over time with sustainable ambition. It is how our ambitions change over time from stage to stage. What our life stages or what's important at different moments in our lives can potentially impact what our ambitions are or the pace at which we want to be operating. It’s my personal feeling. I've come to this over time, and I borrow from a good friend of mine who is on my podcast. He said, “Take good risks.”

I say, “Take good risks always.” For him, how he articulated good risk was being in alignment with who you are. If it's an alignment with your values or what's important to you or your curiosity, then that's likely a good risk, or it's in alignment with your vision that you have for yourself. I talked about taking good risks is almost like the notion of planting seeds. I think that most of us want to get into it and leave it alone and not look at it. Yet I think getting into autopilot is the danger zone because it will catch up with us at some point. I do think it's a balancing act. This is one of the things I'm going to be exploring next, which is how do we give ourselves some degree of stability as we are always curious and exploring what might be next, and stepping into uncertainty?

That's so wonderfully said. I'm so resonating with this idea that autopilot can happen so quickly, where we put ourselves on this path, where we're doing these things that are happening. Isn't that great? The problem is that we need to step back on occasion and say, “What is working? What's not working? What do I need to be experimenting with? If I continue to do things as I am right now, I'll be getting the same results. Is that what I want?”

That’s a great question. Is that what I want? Exactly.

Redefining Ambition: It's A State, Not Just A Trait

We need to sometimes step up, step back, and challenge ourselves from time to time and say, “I've got a system in place, but is this system the system that I want?” Let's get into more about the book. It's such a wonderful thing that you've put in place, but I want to share some concepts and thoughts. What are people going to expect when they pick up your book?

Let me frame first what Sustainable Ambition is about. You've framed it up, but it's about pursuing goals and dreams in a way that's fulfilling, focused, and manageable both in the short term and the long term, rather than being all-consuming and leading to us sacrificing ourselves or our lives in the process of pursuing what we want for ourselves. What I present in the book is that, oftentimes, we think that what we're searching for is work-life balance when we end up feeling discomfort with what we have.

I don't think that term serves us, and I don't think it helps us navigate what we're challenged by, which is how we navigate the conflicts around all we want to do in our life and in our work. I present a method in the book around this idea of directing our ambitions consciously and wisely by aligning the right ambitions at the right time with the right effort. The book offers a mindset and a method, which I hope people can come back to again and again, because I do think it's a practice.

It's not something we get right at one time. It takes discernment and adjustment, and adaptation over time. The method can help us define goals at any life stage, prioritize across life and work, and focus on what we want to and what matters now, while achieving success and personal success with more resilience and sustaining ourselves over time.

I love that you share that because it's such a wonderful way of thinking. First of all, work-life balance is almost like here's the thing, but it doesn't say much about what to do to get there. What you've done is give a language that allows people to see how to make what you want happen. The one thing that I come back to is this idea that ambition is a bad word because it has gotten a bad reputation. Let's be honest, whenever someone says, “You're ambitious,” that almost feels like you're saying something bad about me. I know that you probably approach that in the book as well, the badness of the ambition.

What I say is that ambition is good. If we weren't ambitious, we wouldn't have many things in our lives, and we wouldn't have the drive to create and have the agency to create what we want for ourselves. We wouldn't have these amazing things that happen in the world. I say ambition is good. It's about dialing it in to get it right so that it is sustainable. I think that you can have too little ambition.

Ambition is good. If we weren't ambitious, we wouldn't have many things in our lives. We wouldn't have the drive to create, nor the agency to create what we want for ourselves.

One of the things I talk about in the book is this idea of a U-curve of ambition. You can have too little ambition, where you start to feel stagnant, or you can start to lean in and have a little bit of dialing the ambition, where it starts to get into what I call the severe zone. It’s that danger zone of, “Now I'm on this achievement treadmill, or constantly striving, and I'm not attached to it. I'm also ignoring other parts of my life that are important to me, and I'm burning myself out.” That's not the great side of ambition.

How do you get it dialed in just right to make it sustainable for yourself? I like this idea of reclaiming the term ambition to make it good, but also to reclaim it from the sense that it is not just about work. It's about life ambitions as well. It’s anything that you want that ebbs and flows over time. It's not just this constant trait. I think about it as a state. It doesn't have to mean that we're driving hard all the time.

Yes, an ambition is something that you want, that you desire, and that you're willing to put hard work into going after, but that doesn't mean that you drive so hard that you drive yourself into burnout. I think that by reclaiming the term, it allows for some of this rethinking of it. Sometimes, using this term, “You're ambitious,” comes across to people as a negative thing.

Also, when somebody thinks of themselves as being ambitious and sees it as part of their identity, and something shifts in them, it also starts to make them feel bad. It’s like, “Wait, if I'm not ambitious anymore, what does that mean?” It's not perhaps that you aren't ambitious. It's just that you're in a different state right now.

That's going to stay with me, this idea that it's a state, not a trait. I think it's a very freeing thing to do because when we define ourselves based on this idea that we're ambitious and therefore we have to always be ambitious, that is not helpful. Instead, it has this element of like, “This is the state that I'm going through. At this point, this is how my ambition is showing up, and that's okay.”

I think that can be freeing for people.

The Literary Landscape: Books Shaping Sustainable Ambition

We've covered a lot of ground, and I feel like the time is flying by. I do want to lean into some things that you've learned about yourself through this journey to explore this topic, particularly. I think this is something that you wrote about, because this is something that you know is very much like a journey that you had been on. Tell me something that you've learned about yourself, not only in writing the book, but in exploring this topic and getting to where you are now. I know it's a tough question.

I'm trying to think about what's coming to mind. Yes, I've explored these topics because this has been my own journey, and I've been on my own curiosity journey across these different elements all my adult life. Honestly, even just writing the book has been a learning experience for me. Part of what it's helping to sharpen is what does matter to me and what elements of even this process around the book are where it fits for me in terms of my own ambitions, and the sense of honoring a creative ambition as opposed to feeling this need to turn everything into a business or monetizing it.

I've said in the past, sometimes to some people, that I'm an artist who creates art through left-brain thinking. It's partly because I think art is art, and you don't have to commercialize it. One of the things that I'm learning about myself is this discernment. It's still a process to honor, like, “What do I want to have for myself as a creative endeavor, as opposed to needing to make it a business per se.”

That discernment takes space. I think that's why oftentimes when we're going so fast, it's hard for us to know what it is that we're doing in order to give us that space to say, “This is not something that I need to commercialize or that I need to put out into the world. This is for me. It's for my own expansiveness, my own curiosity,” or whatever it is that you want to make of it. Kathy, this has been wonderful. I have one last question that I have to ask you before we run out of time. That is, what are 1 or 2 books or more that had an impact on you and why?

This is such a hard question because I love books, and I read probably too much. I'm going to mention a couple of different books. One book that relates back to sustainable ambition was by Paul Arden, which is It's Not How Good You Are, It's How Good You Want to Be. The reason that stuck with me is because it is an opening page in his book that made me question or think about like, “Am I even thinking about my ambition? How good do I want to be at certain things? What are my aspirations?” It is a little bit of an origin story for the journey that I've taken as well.

A more recent book series that I loved that I read, I think it might have been last year, was the Monk & Robot series by Becky Chambers. This is a collection of books. It's interesting. It's a number of different themes that relate to sustainable ambition, but it's about exploring both. It's a science fiction book, and it explores what our needs are, what our wants are, and what our desires are. It explores burnout. It made me even think about this notion. One of the key insights was about this idea that we can be content and still have a longing for something new and more at the same time, which I love.

The final book I'll mention is a friend's book, The Golden Ticket: A Life in College Admissions Essays, by my friend, Irena Smith. The reason I love Irena's book is that it's a memoir, but she was a college admissions advisor and worked with kids on preparing for college and applying to college. What I love is the combination of her storytelling, but also stuck with me how these college essay prompts, and what we ask of kids, and how powerful they are. Both how she could weave her story, but she also explores the idea of success and ambition in the concepts of what she's sharing in her own personal life, her family life, and their kids, which I think is powerful and helpful, especially for high school-age kids who might be applying to college. I'd mentioned that one as well.

Kathy, you blew my mind. Those are such amazing breadcrumbs that you left us, especially the fiction books. It's interesting. People always think, “Fiction, it's for play or whatever.” It is, but there are so many great things that we learn from a well-crafted fiction book because it's a story. It doesn't have to have a grounding in real life, but there are so many things that are applicable that we can take away.

Wrapping Up The Sustainable Ambition Conversation

I think that's one of the things I always seem to see. Good thought leaders have good fiction that they read, and a lot of sci-fi. I don't know why that is, but it seems to be the case. Interesting. Thank you for sharing that. Kathy, I've got to start to wrap this up because I want to be respectful of your time. I'll start by saying, thank you so much for joining us. This has been a wonderful episode packed with amazing insights and stories. Thank you.

Thank you. I'm happy to be here, and thank you for the opportunity to share and have some reflection back to me so I can learn more about myself through this conversation.

That's the best gift that I could hear from you. Thank you so much for that. Before I let you go, I want to make sure people know where they can learn more about you. They need to check out your podcast, which is amazing, and your books.

Thank you. They can find me on my website, SustainableAmbition.com. They can also find the podcast on any podcast player that they prefer. They can also find me on LinkedIn.

Thank you so much for that. We're going to share that so people can reach out to you and go pick up your book. It's amazing. I'm so grateful that we had this opportunity to connect. Thanks to the readers for coming on the journey. I know you're leaving truly inspired. Kathy has been a font of inspiration here. Thank you.

Important Links

• Kathy Oneto
• Kathy Oneto on LinkedIn
• Sustainable Ambition
• Sustainable Ambition on Instagram
• Sustainable Ambition podcast on Apple Podcasts
• Sustainable Ambition: How to Prioritize What Matters to Thrive in Life and Work
• Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure
• Working Identity
• It's Not How Good You Are, It's How Good You Want to Be
• Monk & Robot
• The Golden Ticket: A Life in College Admissions Essays

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