Elizabeth Segran is a senior staff writer at Fast Company, and her work has appeared in a broad range of publications, including The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Salon.
We focus the bulk of our conversation on her fantastic book, The Rocket Years, which explores the impact that choices we make in our 20s have through the rest of our life. Having grown up traveling around the world with parents from different cultural backgrounds, Liz stands for what's possible when we begin to relate to culture as a fluid, dynamic, movable thing. In the same way, our identity can be fluid, dynamic, and movable. At the same time, by paying attention to where and how that fluidity moves and shapes us, we can discover things that are foundational, true, and consistent across our lives.
By conventional measures, Liz’s journey has not been a “sensible” one. But if you look deeper, it makes beautiful sense. For instance, her studies of traditional Indian poetry during her Ph.D. program mirrors the cultural investigations that enabled her to write The Rocket Years and now, in her current work as a journalist, make her uniquely attuned to the questions that other people miss. She embodies the power of following the threads - the through lines - that point us towards something essential about ourselves and our unique gifts.
Show Notes:
instagram.com/lizsegran
linkedin.com/in/elizabethsegran
twitter.com/LizSegran
Find more of Liz's work at ElizabethSegran.com
Read The Rocket Years: therocketyears.com
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#69 The Rocket Years (with Elizabeth Segran)