Below, Laura Mayer shares five key insights from her new book, Tryhard: A Cautionary Tale of Clocking In and Spinning Out.
Laura is a podcast executive, producer, and host who has spent nearly two decades shaping the audio industry. She has developed more than 100 podcasts, including Revisionist History, The Dream, and Happier with Gretchen Rubin.
What’s the Big Idea?
Trying is embarrassing. Caring is embarrassing. Speaking up is embarrassing. But the things that actually move your life and career forward usually require all three. The trick isn’t becoming fearless or perfectly polished. It’s realizing you already belong in the room and acting like it.
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1. Trying to do anything is embarrassing.
I have bad news. Trying to do anything is embarrassing. Posting on LinkedIn? Embarrassing. Starting a company? Embarrassing. Writing a book? Embarrassing. Promoting the book in any manner, even on my beloved medium of audio? Fatal. In fact, I am currently potentially dead.
And yet, we’re often inspired when we see someone else trying, but when we ourselves try, we’re convinced everyone is pointing and yelling, “Look at this idiot. She made a spreadsheet with color coding?” Which, first of all, how dare you? My spreadsheets are gorgeous.
For much of my work life, I confused embarrassment with danger. I thought if I felt exposed, that meant I should stop. But embarrassment is just the price of admission toward success.
Think about small children. Children are humiliated every 15 minutes, at least. They sing badly. They dance badly. They tell jokes with no punchline. They literally pee their pants, and yet they just continue. Embarrassment doesn’t stick to them. It rolls right off, and that’s part of how they grow. Meanwhile, adults think, “I don’t know. I posted a video on Instagram Stories, and only 23 people viewed it. I guess I’ll just delete the video and disappear forever.”
“Embarrassment is just the price of admission toward success.”
I once spent a year making a podcast about the podcast industry—a sentence that sounds fake—and one day, I realized I had become professionally recognizable as myself, as a host. Someone recognized my voice in line at Duane Reade when I was picking up my anti-anxiety medication. A star was born. That was embarrassing, but also good.
Trying is embarrassing because it reveals desire, and desire is fundamentally vulnerable. Cool people observe from afar. Tryhards make things and put them out there. Trying hard is how I accidentally wrote a memoir while working a demanding executive job and raising a toddler.
2. Burnout and trying hard are not the same thing.
People love diagnosing burnout, especially people who are not yourself. People who haven’t seen you in six months will run into you, and you’re carrying two iced coffees, and they’ll say, “You know, Laura, I worry you’re burning out.” Thank you, Catherine. I worry you’re projecting. And it was a buy-one-get-one coffee deal, so who’s not carpe-ing their diem here?
Burnout is real, and there are multiple industries dedicated to selling people things to fix their burnout. There’s a clear market need. But not every tired person is burned out. Sometimes you’re just 40. Sometimes you have a child. Sometimes your child wakes up at 4:58 AM because she needs to discuss how exactly the pyramids in Egypt were built. Sometimes you’re making dinner while answering Slack messages while Googling, “Is this a normal rash or a not normal rash?” Sometimes you’re tired just because you’re alive.
We confuse burnout with trying hard because, culturally, we’re suspicious of enthusiasm. We’re comfortable with cynicism. We’re comfortable with irony. We’re comfortable saying, “Nothing matters.” As a society, we like the protection that distance creates, but a person saying, “I care deeply and hope this works,” out loud? That’s embarrassing because it might fail, and that’s just very cringe, as the kids would say.
See? We’re back to embarrassment. But burnout isn’t about caring too much either. Burnout is when caring becomes disconnected from hope and purpose. It’s when work stops feeling meaningful and starts feeling compulsory. Burnout is when distance creeps in between the trying and the reason for trying. This is why burnout and trying hard are different things. Sadly, burnout is not solved by buying face masks and using them in a regimented fashion. I know this personally, and in fact, I have a normal rash on my face as a result.
3. Do not pour water at the meeting if it isn’t your job to pour water at the meeting.
I need young people entering the workforce to hear me. Do not pour water in the conference room before the meeting if that’s not your job. Literally, I mean this, yes, but mostly metaphorically.
Early in my career, I thought advancement worked like preschool. You help, you clean up, you ask everyone if they need anything, you learn the rules, you become useful. Time passes, someone notices, and says, “Aha, a leader.” And then you get to graduate to big-kid school—corporate kindergarten.
Instead, if you exclusively make yourself useful in your early career, you’ll always and only be asked some version of the question, “Could you grab some more water?” Because people believe you when you show them what you can do. And if you only make yourself useful in these small ways to other people, that’s all you can do. In my early career, I taught everyone I was available for hydration. I was everyone’s emotional support Stanley mug.
“If you only make yourself useful in these small ways to other people, that’s all you can do.”
When I wasn’t asked, I compulsively arranged, fixed, made decks, made backup decks, and made decks explaining the decks. I handed over all these documents to someone else to make the case I planned for them. And through that, eventually I realized something devastating. Nobody gets promoted because they refill the water pitcher. They get promoted because they prove they can decide what goes in the metaphorical water pitcher. It’s brutal, especially for women and people of color, especially for people who pride themselves on being helpful, because helpfulness feels morally whole. But organizations reward knowledge and leverage, not goodness, which leads us to perhaps the greatest trap of all: the corporate mommy.
4. How not to become a corporate mommy.
A corporate mommy is a person who accidentally adopts 15 to 40 adults within a company’s organizational chart, and they tend to have the word “director” in their title. The corporate mommy is charged with calming an undulating mass of employees who don’t understand what they should be doing. And due to poor management in the past, instead of fixing the strategic or structural issue that led to the team’s misunderstanding and problems at work, a corporate mommy middle manager is hired. This position is brought in to fix the problems.
Yet this position doesn’t have any real authority to effect change. Instead, the corporate mommy must check in, mediate unending conflicts, write the nice email after the terrible meeting, know whose mother is sick, and know whose dog has died. She’s a listening ear who falls on deaf ones when she identifies and attempts to fix the structural problems her position is meant to patch.
And yet everyone says, “We couldn’t do this without you,” which sounds wonderful. Until you realize they’re right. They can’t do it without you because you’re not a person anymore; you’re infrastructure. The corporate mommy receives gratitude instead of authority, and eventually she wakes up and thinks, “Why am I emotionally managing below me and above me, and yet I’m not able to fix anything or get any meaningful work done despite how hard I try?”
It’s hard to leave any job at mid-career with a title that, on paper, suggests you’re doing meaningful work. That’s how you get stuck as this corporate mommy. Your options there are to give in and get on, leading to the true definition of burnout that I mentioned in one of the previous insights, or you get out. Emotion will build, but as the de facto emotional support animal of a business unit, no one will be interested in hearing your concerns. Corporate mommies aren’t brought on for that type of visibility.
5. Executive presence and why I got hypnotized out of buying blazers on the internet.
For years, I thought executive presence was corporate nonsense. To be clear, part of it is, but part of it isn’t—particularly the “presence” part of “executive presence.” Being seen in the workplace as someone capable and present is the only way to work your way up. True story, a promotion once happened to me because I was the team member who had happened to most recently walk by the office of someone who was making hiring decisions that day. No joke.
When I was 22, I read many books written in the 1960s and 1970s that were aimed at businessmen. These books talked about ways male executives could hasten their advancement up the corporate ladder. The thesis of most of these books was to take up a lot of space—like literally put a bunch of bookcases in your office, deepen your voice, and never talk about your personal life. My favorite book of this era is called Games Mother Never Taught You. It was written by a woman, Betty Lehan Harragan. Betty repeatedly warns women not to bring their purses to meetings.
As my career and my Instagram algorithm have grown together, my explore page has exploded with items that are relevant to my cookie’s interests, namely corporate clothing. Outfits are the commodifiable portion of executive presence. This part, I could control. There was a period when Instagram understood me better than I understood myself. It knew I was tired. It knew I was ambitious. It knew I wanted to be taken seriously, and it said, “Perhaps what stands between you and greatness is a blazer.” And I said, “Interesting.”
“Being seen in the workplace as someone capable and present is the only way to work your way up.”
Soon I was in a kind of trance. Every morning I’d wake up and think, “Today is the day I will be taken seriously as an executive woman.” I’d spend 20 to 25 minutes of rare, precious, quiet time examining $348 blazers, because all of these blazers cost $348 for some reason. I would think, “Who could I be with this blazer? What could I earn by spending $358?” Thankfully, my daughter would blast awake and snap me out of my reverie before I bought any of these top-shelf blazers.
But every night, after a long day of toil, I turned back to the scroll. I’d look at my targeted ads featuring women with low buns and cheekbones sharp enough to approve budgets on their own, and I’d think, “That’s it. That’s what’s missing. Not confidence, not boundaries, not strategic thinking. Silk blend blazers, that’s what’s missing.” Eventually, I owned enough knockoff blazers that I looked like I was preparing to litigate against myself.
Eventually, I learned that executive presence does matter, unfortunately. People don’t promote potential. They promote the most visible, most confident, and most capable-seeming workers. They promote people who seem calm in the face of chaos, people who solve problems. They promote people who don’t apologize before speaking. They promote people who don’t refill the water pitcher before making their point to a client. They don’t promote corporate mommies.
At its core, executive presence signals, “I can carry responsibility without panicking everybody around me.” That’s it. It’s not charisma, though that helps. It’s emotional regulation. It’s speaking like your ideas belong in the room. It’s understanding that you don’t need to earn the right to have an opinion by pouring the water first. But it took me a long time to understand this. I thought executive presence could be bought, so I bought blazers.
I don’t look good in a blazer. I look like I’m about to audit you, and yet I persisted until one day I had to ask myself, “What exactly am I doing? How many fitted jackets does one woman need to feel confident enough in herself to run a multimillion-dollar P&L without constantly apologizing for herself?” And this question bothered me enough that I did something that only a deeply committed tryhard would do: I got hypnotized to stop buying blazers on the internet.
“You don’t need to earn the right to have an opinion by pouring the water first.”
Somewhere inside my brain, I had become convinced that if I just assembled the right outfit, then I’d finally become a successful woman: the executive, the grownup, the woman who implicitly understood EBITDA. The woman whose LinkedIn headshot says, “Look at this upwardly mobile executive woman with that handsome jaw.” But hypnosis and the creeping of middle age taught me something strange. The women I most admired weren’t impressive because of what they wore. They were impressive because they seemed unhurried. They weren’t constantly trying to prove they belonged. They already assumed they did, and they weren’t browsing and buying aspirational blazers at 11:30 PM while stuffing Pirate’s Booty in their mouth over the sink. No, they simply acted like adults, which I have discovered is annoying. I’ve never been an actor.
I kept hoping adulthood was hidden inside a blazer. Turns out adulthood is hidden inside saying, “No,” or “I disagree,” and not losing your mind over aptly asserting yourself. If you perform this way in front of the right audience, that’s executive presence, even if you do it in the same sad desk cardigan you’ve been wearing for three days in a row.
By the way, if you ever see me wearing a double-breasted blazer and a look of sheer panic, please take away my phone, sit me down, and find my hypnotic meditation recording. It’s somewhere in my files. I’ll need to relearn the lesson I taught myself.
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