Lani Lazzari of Simple Sugars
Image from bizjournals.com

A fellow entrepreneur friend of mine shared this article with me because he thought I would find it interesting – Sweet success: Simple Sugar scrubs have wowed skin care market, TV’s ‘Shark Tank’. As I was reading through it, my first thoughts were ‘yeah, this is a great story of a young woman who has just gotten out there and built her business, who identified a personal need and figured out how to solve it, and has been persistent – some of the normal things you hear and read in entrepreneurial stories. But then, towards the end of the story, I saw why he had sent it my way:

She said that desire first stirred in her when her mother was passed over for a promised promotion while on maternity leave with Miss Lazzari’s youngest brother, now 11.

“Watching her go through that … I was really discouraged about going into the corporate world one day, especially as a woman.”

WOW! Here is a girl who saw her mothers career be impacted by having a baby, and that pushed her to action as a teenager to do something to provide herself with a career and business that doesn’t require her to depend on others and whatever the corporate environment demands / deems to be OK. What she has learned and experienced is allowing her to write her own rules, and in that process, inspire others and open their eyes to what they can do to control their own careers. Now, what can be done to help others take those same steps, and create a life and career that is in their own hands?