The Question I'm Asked The Most

June 4, 2026

🔗 Daily Rivets 🔗

From here on, every issue opens the same way: three small Rivets to do today — because you get ready for the big pivot in tiny, doable pieces. Here are yours:

• Build: Write one sentence — "I want to pivot because ______." The real reason. Not the version you'd say in an interview.
• Leverage (AI): Put a sticky note on your laptop that says "Can AI help with this?" Use it once today, on anything.
• Learn: Grab a free seat at this month's workshop on naming your own expertise (details at the bottom — it's the perfect first step)

When I was sixteen, my father lost his career overnight.

I grew up in the middle of Ohio. Irish Catholic, big warm chaotic family, a white Christmas tree with pink lights every year. My dad was a lawyer. My mom taught public school. The floor under us felt like granite.

And then it just… wasn't there anymore.

I watched my mother — the strongest, hardest working person I knew — struggle to get out of bed. At sixteen, I started helping her get dressed for work in the morning. I didn't have a word for what was happening. I just understood, at a bone-deep level, something most people get to ignore for a lot longer than I did:

The floor can disappear. The people you love can be taken down by forces no one saw coming.

I'm telling you this because of something that's been happening to me for a few years now. Women ask me about this constantly — at every stage of a career, in every season of a life. In my DMs, in my inbox, on calls that open with "can I ask you something off the record?" The question arrives in a thousand different forms, but underneath, it is always the same one.

So I want to stop, take a step back, and just say the true thing out loud. And then give you a plan.

Here's the truth: you will need to pivot in your life. You will need to figure out, at some point, how to make money on your own. I don't know when, and I don't know how. Maybe you'll choose it. Maybe you'll have to do it in the middle of a hurricane you never saw coming. Maybe when you're so tired you're certain you can't. Maybe with a mortgage payment staring you down and no time to think it through.

But you are going to have to do this. Really. Almost all of us will.

So I want to spend the summer focused on exactly that. On this. On you. On all of it.

Why now? I guess because summer is a season of new beginnings. And I think your new beginning, starting right now, is this. Prepare to learn. Get prepared. Enroll yourself in the school of figuring this shit out.

Now, a word about who I'm writing this for. The Riveter membership, as it exists today, is built mostly for the women who've already answered that call — who went out on their own, by choice or by force, and are in the thick of doing it. I love them and I learn from them every single day. But I know most of you - dear readers - are somewhere else entirely. You're still in corporate America. Still taking home a paycheck. Still doing the job. And quietly, in the back of your mind, you're wondering: what's next? What happens if this goes away? What happens if I want it to go away? What would I even do?o let's just talk about it. Let's deal with it. And — most important of all — let's start the doing.

Because here's what's different right now, and why I'm sounding an alarm instead of handing you a pep talk.

The "safe" office careers a whole generation of women were sold — the ones a college degree was supposed to protect — are exactly the ones being dismantled. White-collar unemployment has jumped to 4.2%, up from 3.1% just a year earlier. AI is hollowing out administrative, coordinator, and analyst roles, and women hold a wildly disproportionate share of them. By one global measure, nearly 3x as many women's jobs as men's sit in the highest-risk category for automation.

And we should also be honest about the version of this most of us are actually living. The corporate ladder turned out to be a trap with the top rungs sawed off. A whole generation of us were told to lean in (thanks, Sheryl), take the extra project, the extra team, the extra everything — make yourself indispensable. So we did. Right up until "indispensable" became a line item that needed to be cut. Or you find yourself presenting to the leadership table you spent two decades earning a seat at and you realize that you don’t even want to be in that room anymore.

Staying put used to feel like the cautious choice. It isn't anymore. Staying put is now a bet that the employer who already decided you're a line item will keep paying you anyway.

But here's the other half of the story, because I won’t leave you in the doom. (I’m not your IG feed.)

This - right now - is the single biggest window for women building their own thing in American history. The number of solopreneurs earning six figures has nearly doubled since 2020. Self-employed workers in their fifties out-earn comparable employees by around 70%. Women now found roughly half of all new businesses in this country — the highest share ever recorded.

The women winning right now did not wait for certainty. They took the expertise they already had — the knowledge, the networks, the judgment built over years in corporate roles — and rebuilt it on their own terms.

That's the whole game. And it starts with one deceptively hard step: actually seeing the expertise you've stopped noticing.

Which is exactly what I want to help you do later this month. You're invited.

Here's the part that tells you everything: Kristina spent years as a story whisperer to NBA stars. She found the narrative buried inside some of the most famous athletes on earth and helped them tell it. If she can find the story in a superstar, trust me — she can find yours.

These days she does that exact work for women thinking about leaving the 9-to-5 to freelance or consult. Because the cruelest trick of the whole system is this: businesses bank on your fear. When they hand you a promotion with more work and no raise, that's the message — they're telling you the work isn't worth anything special. I don't believe that. And somewhere under the fear, neither do you.

In 60 minutes, Kristina will help you:

• Name the expertise you've stopped seeing — the stuff that feels like "nothing" because it's easy for you.
• Stress-test it with other women in the room who get it and will catch your blind spots.
• Walk out with something you can use today — or keep behind glass, labeled break in case of emergency.

You don't have to leap this week. This isn't me shoving you off the ledge. It's me helping you pack the go-bag, so you can leap when you're ready.

👉 Save your seat (free): Build Your Exit Plan workshop​

I'm writing all of this for four people. They're all me. The 36-year-old in a good, boring, six-figure job who knew she wanted to build and was too scared to leap. The 40-year-old who had to figure out how to earn more, fast, when everything fell apart. The 41-year-old who got fired on a Zoom on a random Thursday. And future me — who will absolutely have to do this again.

If you're any of them too, you're in the right place.

The floor can disappear. So this summer, we build a floor they can't seize. And on June 17, we start with the most important brick: your own expertise.

Rooting for all of us,

Amy

P.S. Which version of you is reading this? Hit reply and tell me. I read every one. And come June 17 — bring the part of you that's been daydreaming about walking out and getting paid for what you actually know.

P.P.S. This workshop helps you recognize and define your expertise. My upcoming program, Build Your Exit Plan, takes the next step: turning that expertise into a real offer and a clear plan to leave on your terms. Want to be first to hear when it opens? Get on the list here.​