🔥 This Week at The After Party — What Success Looks Like Now

🍸 Opening Toast

Direct from the After Party VIP lounge — it’s your host, Robyn Cohen!

To the women who traded status for sanity, and still won.

Society loves to shove success in your face like a checklist you didn’t co-sign:
👰🏻 Married by 30.
🏠 House by 32.
👦🏼 Two kids by 35.
💰 Millionaire by 40.
👵🏽 Retire early.
And stay wrinkle-free and disease-free while you do it.

But what happens when your life doesn’t check all those boxes?
Or when you realize you never wanted some of them in the first place?

I never had the desire to get married. My parents had a turbulent relationship, and I remember thinking, “If this is it, I don’t want it.” But life had its own plans. I fell in love at 28, and while I still didn’t care about marriage as a “goal,” I cared deeply about building something solid, real, and joyful with my partner.

Then my mother got sick.
She was diagnosed with cancer, and in the middle of that heartbreak, I made a choice — we got engaged, not for tradition’s sake, but so I could share that moment with her before she passed. We didn’t rush down the aisle. We still took two more years to get married. We did it on our time.

And when we finally began thinking about starting a family, everything changed.

Since 2008, we’ve been on the kind of fertility journey no one warns you about. On and off for years, we tried everything, including IVF. But after a failed attempt in 2017, I found myself questioning something much deeper:
If I couldn’t become a mother, could I still call myself a successful woman?

That question took root.
It grew into another one:
What even makes me successful at all?

Sure, I had a loving marriage. But my career? It was messy, nonlinear, unpredictable, and for too long, I believed that made me a failure. Until one day, I wrote down every job, every win, every bold decision I’d made. And for the first time in a long time, I felt genuinely proud of myself.

That was my turning point.
The moment I realized:
Success was never supposed to look like anyone else’s life. It was always mine to define.

So here’s to the women rewriting the script:
To the ones who choose peace over pressure.
To the ones who know that status is hollow if it costs you your sanity.
To the ones who still win, even if it doesn’t look like winning to anyone else.

Cheers to defining success on your own terms. You’ve earned it.

💣 Truth Bomb

You can’t fail at someone else’s dream.

Let that sit for a second.
You weren’t put here to follow a playbook written by people who never knew your name, your story, or your values.
The blueprint — perfect house, perfect spouse, perfect job, perfect body, perfect timeline — wasn’t designed with you in mind.

Redefining success isn’t failure.
It’s freedom.

You can have a big title and still feel empty.
You can skip the title entirely and feel whole.
You can walk away from the “dream job” or the “perfect life” and be more successful for doing so.
Because real success. lasting, soul-aligned success, is a feeling, not a flex.

❓ ASK YOURSELF

• What version of success have I been chasing, and where did it come from?

• If no one else could see my accomplishments, what would I still feel proud of?

• What am I holding onto that no longer defines me, but still defines my worth in my own head?

• Where have I already redefined success without giving myself credit?

⚡️ CHALLENGE OF THE WEEK

Write Your New Definition of Success.
Pull out a journal, a notes app, a whiteboard, whatever works.
Then finish this sentence:

“Success, for me, looks and feels like…”

Write for at least 10 minutes.
No filters. No goals that aren’t yours.
Once it’s out of your head and in front of your eyes, it’ll become easier to live it, and spot what doesn’t align.

Want a little structure? Use the Treasure Mapping Exercise in the Party Favors section.

📚 WANT TO GO DEEPER?

Here are a few resources to help you question, dismantle, and rebuild your definition of success:

1. “The Power Of A Pivot: 4 Lessons On Redefining Success” — Forbes
   On redefining success on your own terms.

2. “Success: Why It’s Never Too Late” — Tepia
   Many people think it’s too late to become an entrepreneur after 30. These real-life success stories show that success can happen at any age.

3. “Success, failure and the drive to keep creating” — Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED Talk
   Gilbert reflects on why success can be as disorienting as failure and offers a simple, though hard, way to carry on, regardless of outcomes.

⚡ Your Move:

Put this where you can see it when the comparison creeps in.
Stick it on your mirror.
Text it to your favorite overachiever friend.
Screenshot and tag us @join.theafterparty with:
“My success doesn’t need an explanation.”

🪞 Mirror Talk

"Success isn’t a title. It’s a feeling."
You know the one, clarity, alignment, energy that’s yours again.
That's the new power suit.

👑 The Guest List

Mellody Hobson – Investor, Boundary‑Breaker, and Legacy Builder

Before she became one of the most respected executives in finance, running a multibillion-dollar investment firm, sitting on iconic boards like Starbucks and JPMorgan, Mellody Hobson was the youngest of six, raised by a single mom in a one-bedroom apartment in Chicago.

She grew up knowing what it meant to struggle. Eviction notices. Food insecurity. Living on the financial edge. And yet, from the beginning, Mellody never confused struggle with scarcity of potential. She was clear on one thing: her worth would never be tied to where she started.

At 22, she joined Ariel Investments, not some flashy Wall Street firm, but a company rooted in values, founded by a Black entrepreneur. She started as an intern. Three decades later, she’s the Co-CEO, helping grow Ariel into one of the largest Black-owned money managers in the country, with $14 billion+ in assets under management.

But Mellody never followed the traditional blueprint.
She didn’t chase job titles or play politics. She focused on substance. She built trust, took risks, and stayed committed to purpose over optics.
She wasn’t just working her way up, she was building a different model of success.

Mellody’s path has always been about legacy, not just leverage:

• She became co-founder Ariel Alternatives, a private equity firm aimed at scaling Black and Latinx-owned businesses.

• She became the first Black woman to chair an S&P 500 board (Starbucks).

• She serves on multiple boards and gives generously to causes centered on education, equity, and financial literacy — including After School Matters and the Hobson/Lucas Foundation.

But what makes Mellody Hobson a guest of honor in The After Party isn’t just her resume, it’s her refusal to shrink, play small, or let someone else define her worth.

She speaks candidly about being underestimated, about having to take tough feedback early in her career, and about the emotional weight of money trauma from childhood. And yet, she continues to rise, not by chasing the image of success, but by embodying its redefinition.

“You can’t be what you can’t see,” she once said.
So she made herself visible.
For every girl who grew up believing success was reserved for someone else.
She’s a living reminder that success isn’t a status, it’s a legacy of intention.

🎧 Watch: “Lessons From Business Hero” – Mellody’s fabulous interview on Emma Grede’s podcast Aspire
📖 Read: About Ariel Alternatives 
🌱 Learn: Mellody Hobson’s Masterclass on Strategic Decision-Making

🎁 Party Favors

Rewriting the rules takes more than courage, it takes clarity. Here’s what we’re loving to help you unlearn the old blueprint and design success on your own terms:

📚Read it! Distracted by Success by Brandon Buck – This book is a reminder that the term ‘success’ in life can mean different things to different people.

 👚 Buy it! Wear Grit T-shirts – Discover Wear Grit shirt collection, designed to empower your daily hustle and fuel a success-driven mindset. 

🧘‍♀️ Try It! Treasure Mapping – A treasure map is a physical representation of your goals. It's a collage of images and text that acts as a reminder of what you want to accomplish, and how you will do it. 

📣 Last Call…

Before we turn the lights up...

What if this next chapter isn’t your second act, but your real debut? Hit reply and share what your messy middle has taught you.

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Until next week,