Open any workforce report this year and you’ll find some version of the same conclusion: the skills that matter most in an economy being reshaped by AI – organization, adaptability, resiliency, collaboration – are the ones no college transcript can measure. Ana Homayoun has been saying this for twenty-five years, long before “executive functioning” entered the cultural lexicon, before social media as we know it existed.

Homayoun is the founder of Green Ivy Educational Consulting, a Silicon Valley-based academic advising firm that helps students, parents, and educators build executive function and life-management ski8ls, as well as the founder and executive director of Luminaria Learning Solutions, a nonprofit that prepares students for success in and outside the classroom. She’s also the author of four bestselling books, including her latest, Getting In Is Not Enough, which argues that adaptability, self-awareness, and authentic social capital matter more to long-term success than any credential.

Homayoun was last on the M Dash nine years ago. We sat down with her to mark her book's paperback release, where we talked about what's changed in her work with students since then, her own relationship to ambition, and why she's never believed in a “finish line” to success.

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Walk me through the journey to writing Getting In Is Not Enough. What was the moment you knew this book had to exist?

The real impetus was an email from a parent whose child appeared in my first book, That Crumpled Paper Was Due Last Week. He was now in his late twenties, thriving in the workforce, and his mom told me it was based on things he still did daily that he’d learned in my office. I’d always heard our work was helpful in the moment, but I’d never thought about its longevity into adulthood.

So I went back and interviewed former students in what began as a love letter to 25 years of my firm, Green Ivy Educational Consulting. What surprised me was how clearly they could each pinpoint the moment of purpose that led to where they were. At the same time, I was hearing from families who hadn’t worked with us, whose cognitively intelligent kids were getting into great colleges, but were having trouble with day to day functioning at school: forgetting to eat, do laundry, landing on academic probation. Getting into college has become such an overarching marker of success, both for students who feel they’ve arrived and parents who feel they’ve parented well. But this book exists because it’s time to name what’s actually missing from that reality: that getting in should be one step in a much longer life journey, and that there are so many ways to thrive at any stage of life. There’s no one right answer.

You’ve spent 25 years arguing that the old markers of success don’t predict what actually matters. We’re at a moment where that feels truer than ever, with AI reshaping stable career paths and the job market brutal for new grads. What was it like writing this book against that backdrop?

I grew up in Silicon Valley, and my office is here, so I’ve watched this whole transformation up close. The skills I’ve quietly championed for 25 years – executive functioning, adaptability, authentic connection, self-awareness – are now showing up in every workforce report and AI conversation as the things that can’t be automated. It’s gratifying and a little bittersweet, because these skills were always essential; we just weren’t focused on them.

I work with students who did everything right and are still graduating into a lot of uncertainty, but I didn’t want this book to add to their anxiety. Instead, I want to spark a conversation that reframes how we’re navigating this moment, because our young people deserve a better path forward. If we can help students focus on executive functioning, building authentic connections that are non-transactional, and embracing a wider set of perspectives so they are better prepared to accept themselves and others, we will set them up with the foundation to define their own version of success in today’s rapidly changing world.

Adaptability and resilience are two of the skills you say actually predict long-term success. How do you tell the difference between someone who’s resilient and someone who’s just gotten very good at hiding that they’re running on empty?

This is one of the questions I care about most, because masking exhaustion often looks completely fine on the outside. I work with high schoolers near Palo Alto, where high output and compliance can seem to be rewarded and asking for help can feel risky.

First, I watch for a narrowing of interests, a loss of curiosity, and a rigidity when things don’t go as planned. I also ask people directly about restoration. Everyone’s energy profile – that is, what drains them and energizes them – looks different. This is often an “Aha!” moment for a lot of adult women, actually; they realize their partner has an entirely different energy profile, which can make planning a vacation together difficult if you’re not intentional about it, for example.

Resilient people can name something concrete they do regularly to manage stress, not just when they’ve hit a wall. They have what I call an emotional toolkit, whether it is something like a walk, music, a bath, or the ability to welcome five to fifteen minutes of quiet. True resiliency comes from proactive recovery, not crisis management, and it has a flexibility built in.

Here’s how this works in real life: I run a business and can’t take a wholesale break when I’m burnt out, so I try to build in regular routines and habits that I find rejuvenating - it is definitely a process, though, and what works right now might not work next month or year. There is a relationship between resilience and buoyancy: how do we make it so that you need less time and energy to bounce back?

Building authentic social capital, a real network, is a big theme in the book. What does that look like for a woman fifteen years into her career who realizes her network is wide but mostly transactional? What’s one real step she could take?

First, don’t waste any time feeling bad about this. It’s a huge step to acknowledge there is an issue and begin to define a path forward. The Harvard Study of Adult Development, one of the longest-running studies on human flourishing, found that the quality of our relationships is the single strongest predictor of long-term well-being: not credentials, income, or status.

The framework I use, which works equally well with both teens and adults, centers on Supporters and Clarifiers. Supporters are genuinely excited when something good happens to you, and Clarifiers are those who – like the name suggests – provide clarity. Ideally, we would be surrounded with Clarifiers of all ages, not just those who are senior to us. Multi-generational friendships are so important and often overlooked; some of my best Clarifiers are twenty years younger than me and they will certainly tell it to me like it is.

Here’s one concrete step you can take if you find yourself in this position: Reach out to someone in your existing network, on the phone instead of by text, without an ask – just curiosity about how they’re doing, and what they’re working on. It’s critical that this outreach be non-transactional. The head of policy at a big social media company once told me over lunch that she never goes into any conversation, however informal, without a full agenda of what she wanted to get out of it. I was floored, and honestly a little exhausted just hearing that. Yes, agendas are important when you have a formal meeting, but when it comes to building relationships, you really never know where something’s going to lead, right?

Many of my deepest friendships and connections, including with people who have pulled a lever for me that really changed my life, are people that I met with zero expectations. A truly authentic network is not about reciprocation.

We spend a lot of time on the M Dash interrogating what ambition actually looks and feels like. How does that show up in your work, and has it changed your own relationship to ambition?

I aim to make my own relationship to ambition grounded in servant leadership: how can my work be of service to others? Having had an office in Silicon Valley for 25 years, it’s easy to assume bigger, bolder, more is always the way to go. But I’ve watched people build very big things and stay deeply unfulfilled, and I’ve seen students whose ambition has little to no anchor underneath it: one real setback and the whole structure falls apart.

I try to help students see the difference between achievement-driven ambition, accumulating accolades, and purpose-driven ambition, building something that intrinsically matters to you. Purpose-driven ambition tends to hold up better under pressure, and to generate more generosity toward others and grace towards ourselves.

For me, that purpose is grounded in my nonprofit initiative, Luminaria Learning Solutions, which I founded in 2018 to help scale the work I do to reach more kids, not just the ones who come into my office. It all started when received seed funding from the Foundation for the Carolinas to conduct research and examine the relationship between educational opportunity, academic outcomes, and long-term economic mobility; over the course of nearly 100 interviews, it became clear that something foundational was missing: the concrete executive functioning and life-management skills that allow students to translate their education into lasting success. The students who could organize their time, recover from a setback, and ask for help when they needed it weren’t necessarily the most naturally talented kids. They were just better equipped.

From that research, we developed what has become our signature Life Navigator program, an advisory curriculum that teaches executive functioning and life-management skills from kindergarten through twelfth grade, and piloted it in two public middle schools in Charlotte. In the long-term, we aim to expand to schools nationwide, and early results are promising, suggesting increased student engagement, reduced faculty burnout, and meaningful school-wide culture shifts around proactive planning and focused learning.

I still work directly with students and families alongside running Luminaria and writing books. To me, ambition is about what we can build together.

A lot of our readers are managing their own careers and a teenager’s path through this system at the same time. What’s the most useful thing you’ve seen a parent take from watching their kid navigate uncertainty, and apply it to their own work?

The parents who grow the most alongside their kids get curious rather than controlling. Watching a teenager change course, quit something, find their own footing, can be disorienting and powerful at once. I moved from rural New England to Silicon Valley at twelve, and socially it was the hardest stretch of my life, but it taught me there’s no one community that’s the be-all and end-all. Kids tend to be more resilient about setbacks than their parents are; if a high school senior doesn’t get into a particular college, two days or a week later they’re usually fine. More often than not, it is the parent or caregiver who is still processing.

The most powerful shift happens when a parent taps into their own emotional regulation and asks, okay, what does plan B look like? They actively embrace alternative pathways. I credit my own parents for instilling this in me; they’re immigrants who worked hard and had a lot go their way, and they never sat in the deep end of pity when something didn’t. To me, navigating uncertainty well is one of the most transferable skills there is.

Looking back at our conversation nine years ago, is there anything you told us then that you wouldn’t tell us now?

Probably the implicit suggestion that helping a student find the right path meant things would largely sort themselves out. I was gentler about the college credential question back then. I’m more direct now: getting in is not enough, and that’s not just the title of my book. A college credential without the underlying skills needed to navigate adulthood is fragile, and after 25 years I’m more confident saying so.

The core of what I believe hasn’t changed, but there’s more urgency now.

If you could get one idea from this book to every working woman what would it be?

So many of us have been measuring ourselves against metrics that were never designed for what makes us flourish. In good news, the skills that predict long-term satisfaction, meaningful relationships, resilience, executive functioning, self-awareness, the ability to adapt without losing yourself, are learnable at any age.

I would want every working woman to know that they don’t have to start over. I’ve found it powerful to start asking different questions, as simple as: what energizes me, what drains me, where do I want to spend my time? What you wanted in your twenties might be totally different from your forties or your sixties and beyond, and that’s allowed. Get comfortable with asking yourself these questions constantly, and give yourself permission to change and adapt as your situations and your feelings change.

What you thought you might do when you were twenty may not even exist as a path anymore, and new paths are always unfolding. When we shift our definition of success from what it looks like on the outside to what it feels like from the inside, we tend to move closer to an experience of happiness that is much more real, and far more lasting.

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Getting In Is Not Enough is available wherever books are sold. Learn more and pick up a copy by visiting your local bookseller, or find it on Amazon, Target, or Barnes and Noble.

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