There was a season when my life was an extraordinary business résumé— and painfully ordinary everywhere else.
I could launch the next exciting offer in my sleep.
Negotiate a pivotal deal on a walk.
Turn an idea into six figures in a weekend.
I’d checked the boxes: summa cum laude, head of Biz Dev at a startup that scaled by $100M during my tenure there, right hand to a Forbes 30 Under 30 founder, self-made millionaire by thirty.
On paper, it was flawless.
In practice, it was… hollow.
My marriage was more checklists and pickup schedules than deep romance.
My children got my presence in fragments.
My home was a to-do list, not a sanctuary.
Even in moments of intimacy, my mind was elsewhere– spinning with team timelines, client deliverables, or the next growth target.
I had become remarkable in business… and a ghost in my own life.
I was running a podcast literally titled Ascension through Entrepreneurship—ranked in the top 5% globally on Spotify.
And yet, even as I spoke about potential, I could feel how lopsided I had become.
That’s when I encountered the ancient concept of Arete—the Greek philosophy of the highest expression, the highest potential, of something.
And it struck me with startling clarity:
I was extraordinary in business… and just barely “good” in most other areas of my life.
A knife’s Arete is sharpness.
A horse’s Arete is speed.
But a woman’s Arete?
Her brilliance has never been singular.
It is inherently multifaceted– an orchestra of power and softness, intellect and eros, vision and devotion.
Then came the shift.
History remembers her.
She is carved in marble. Painted in oil. Sung about in poems and operas.
Helen, whose beauty launched a thousand ships.
Aspasia, whose wit reshaped politics in the Greek empire.
The geisha, the courtesan, the muse– women who carried that ineffable quality that turned life itself into art.
And yet for the modern woman– so many of us– were told that our Arete should look like burnout disguised as achievement.
We inherited two distorted models:
The dutiful wife of the 1950s, bound by duty and stripped of her fire.
Or the high-achieving modern woman, fueled by caffeine, spreadsheets, and brittle masculine-coded drive.
Neither is Arete.
Both are very hollow fragments of a woman’s true potential.
And when I realized I had lost that pulse, I didn’t burn it all down.
I refined.
I softened.
I let myself become more art than engine.
I still love wealth. But now money is not a measuring stick of my worth, a hollow number to keep up with an invisible race only I am running.
It is a medium that makes life more exquisite. My multimillion dollar portfolio multiplies quietly in the background while I sip rosé in Provence, or dance barefoot in the kitchen with my sons, or stretch a long lunch with friends until it becomes dinner.
Because holistic wealth is not only what grows in your bank account.
It’s what grows in a body.
A marriage.
A home.
A legacy.
This is what Arete demands: not excellence in one narrow dimension, but the fullest expression of all we are meant to be.
THIS
is ARETE:
Guiding women who have already built success to embody their full potential as women across their entire lives.
For some, it means creating financial overflow:
Reworking business models so their company runs without their constant touch.
Turning high cashflow into enduring net worth and genuine financial sovereignty.
Letting their business and their money hold them, instead of it being one more thing they need to constantly take care of.
For others, it’s life artistry.
Learning to exhale and create instead of optimizing.
Letting intimacy and play be spontaneous again.
Designing homes, mornings, and calendars that feel like sanctuaries.
Remembering that wealth is not only capital– it is rhythm, beauty, and aliveness woven through every day.
This is not the path from burnout to baseline.
This is the passage from good to breathtakingly exquisite.
From rich to truly wealthy.
From a life of tasks to a life of texture and magic.
This is the return of the archetype our culture erased.
The woman who does not live in fragments, but in full spectrum.
This is the reclamation of the feminine in her wholeness—
not the flattened wife of the 1950s,
not the brittle, masculine coded, overextended achiever of career women today,
but the woman whose brilliance has captivated poets and sculptors for centuries.
Arete is the woman who lives whole.
Eros in her body. Wisdom in her mind.
Love in her marriage. Wealth in her hands.
Art and beauty in every room she enters.
Not a life of performance.
A life of pulse, power, and poetry.
This is Arete: the restoration of a woman made whole.
This is you.
Welcome home.
