You made men rich. Time to make yourself rich.

June 19, 2026

🔗 Daily Rivets 🔗

🔨 Build: The Worth List. Write down three things people have paid you to do — or begged you to do for free. That's the raw material of an offer that's yours. Name the three today.

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This is an email for Sheryl Sandberg. (But if you're not Sheryl, you can keep reading. It might resonate with you, too.)

Sheryl, we need to talk.

You told us to lean in. We did. God, did we ever — through the 6 a.m. emails and the pumping in airport bathrooms and the reviews that praised our “executive presence” while a man with half our work took the promotion. We leaned in until our spines bent.

I was such a devotee that you were the very first speaker at my very first Riveter back in 2017.

And here's what I know now, all of these years later, from the other side: it doesn't work.

I don't mean it doesn't work sometimes. I mean the whole premise is broken. We were handed a map to a country that no longer exists.

There was a point where, if I'd leaned in any harder, I would have snapped clean in half. Like a wishbone. So I stopped. I stopped showing up for a party nobody really wanted me at anyway.

I didn't coin “lean out.” Marissa Orr did.

She wrote a whole book called Lean Out after she got chewed up and spit out of Facebook — the actual birthplace of Lean In, which is a level of irony you cannot make up. Her argument landed like a slap: the problem was never that women needed fixing. We were told to be more assertive, more demanding, more male — and to call that “success.” She named the lie. The system isn't broken because we're broken. It was built for a world that never planned on us being in the room.

Read her. Buy the book. She tells the truth about the building.

I want to talk about the door — the one I walked through when I built something on my own terms.

If I could go back and tell myself anything, it would be this: Plan for the drought while it's still raining.

It is a whole lot easier to plan for a drought when the rain is still falling and the crops are still coming in.

Right now, a lot of you reading this still have stable footing. A paycheck. A title. A team. Good. That is exactly when you build. Not when the layoff email lands. Not when the aging parent needs you three states away. Not when the marriage cracks or the diagnosis comes. You build the arsenal now, while you don't need it, so it's already in your hands when lightning strikes.

(You can do it then, too. I did. Multiple times. I'm here for you if you're there. It's just ... harder.)

And make no mistake about the weather coming. Last year, U.S. layoffs topped 744,000 — nearly double the prior pace — while the same companies posted record profits and blamed the robots. Read that again. Record. Profits. They're not cutting you because they have to. They're cutting you because they can, and “the AI did it” is the most convenient cover story in the history of cover stories.

Half of highly qualified women with children off-ramp from corporate America at some point. Half of us will lose our jobs in our fifties — the exact decade with kids heading to college, parents who need us, and a mortgage that does not care. Ageism is coming for a whole generation of brilliant, seasoned women under the cover of “innovation.”

So no. I'm not waiting around to find out if I'm one of the lucky ones they keep.

And if you decide to get ready? Remember this.

Nobody has to know you're doing this.

You don't announce it. You don't post about it. You don't update your LinkedIn to “open to opportunities” and light a flare over your own head. You don't tell your boss, your team, or the woman who'd happily take your seat.

You just get ready. Quietly. On a Tuesday night after the kids are down.

Because leaning out was never the dramatic walkout. That's the lie the internet tells about it. Leaning out is the quiet, unglamorous, deeply strategic work of building your own thing before you need it — income you control, skills that are yours, relationships and a name that don't belong to a company that would replace you with a prompt by Friday.

You stay exactly where you are. You keep the paycheck. And underneath it, where no one can see, you build the floor you'll stand on when the other one tilts.

​This a challenge — the most ambitious one we've ever run.

So I'm not throwing a party this time. I'm throwing down a challenge.

For three weeks this July, a small army of us is going to build our exit-ready arsenal together — quietly, seriously, side by side. Not someday. Not “when things calm down” (they won't). Now, while the rain's still falling.

By the end, you'll have done the things most women never get to before they're forced to.

• An honest audit of what you've actually got — the expertise people will pay for and the network that's worth more than you think.
• A real offer, with a price and a position.
• The boring infrastructure nobody explains until it's too late.
• The story only you can tell.
• And the exact first email you send the day you decide to go — to the people who already know you.

Quietly. On your terms. With an army of women doing it right beside you.

Before you commit to anything, come talk to me.

This Thursday, June 25, at 1 PM ET / 10 AM PT, I'm hosting an AMA — just me, your questions, no script. Leaning out, the fear, the money, the how. Bring the question you've been too polite to ask out loud.

Do it, and I'll also send you the recording and slides from the workshop Kristina Flynn and I ran. (What a day that was. Kristina is the real thing.) In it, I asked the room one question — how's climbing the corporate ladder going? — and nobody held back:

"It was going well for a while… then I turned 50. :)"​
​"Burnout."​
​"Waste of time."​
​"I made men rich."

And then we landed on the line I haven't stopped thinking about since:

Only you will ever pay you what you're worth. No one else is going to do it for you.

That's the whole ballgame. It's why I built this.

So when you're ready to go from thinking about it to building it — not someday, but in a room with women doing the exact same thing — that's the Lean Out Challenge. Three weeks. The hard skills, not the pep talk.

One honest note, because I refuse to make this look free or easy. You have to invest in yourself to do this. I didn't get here from the sidelines — I stood up, learned, connected, failed, repeated. Sometimes it cost money. Sometimes it cost a lot of pride. Worth every cent and every faceplant.

The rain is still falling. The crops are still in. Build now.

I'll be on the other side — and on Thursday, I'll see you live.

Amy

P.S. One favor that's actually for you: take this 2-minute survey. It's anonymous, it'll sharpen your own thinking, and it tells me exactly how to build this for women like you. I read every one.

P.P.S. If this hit something, forward it to the woman you're picturing right now. The one leaning in so hard she's about to snap. Tell her there's a door. Tell her no one has to know she's walking through it. Tell her I'm holding it open.