10. Erin
Erin
It was just before five in the morning, and Erin—not wanting to wake her roommate—had crept downstairs.
A few of Stanford’s dorms were open in the summer for students who were staying in the area for internships, and Erin and Colette had been lucky enough to snag a room in one of them.
Now, Erin sat in the dorm’s common area, taking deep, meditative breaths as she focused on the social media self-care coach’s video.
“It’s only morning,” the woman (known as @HigherVibesOnly_) said, “but I know that each decision I make affects the outcome of my day.”
“It’s only morning,” Erin repeated, “but I know that each decision I make affects the outcome of my day.”
A freshly brewed cappuccino appeared on the screen. The self-care coach’s hand entered the shot, picking it up from the pristine counter and taking the mug out to her balcony. There, @HigherVibesOnly_ stared off into the distance, watching the sun rise.
Erin hadn’t always been into self-actualization.
She hadn’t even realized she needed to improve herself.
When she was in high school, it had been effortless to get straight A’s, and she had been on the soccer team, the choir, and the youth chapter of the Red Cross, so it had never occurred to her that she wouldn’t get to continue doing all those things when she was in college.
But then she arrived at Stanford, and suddenly, she wasn’t always the smartest in the room.
In fact, freshman year, she was at the bottom of almost all her classes.
The intramural soccer league was full of students who weren’t quite Major League Soccer caliber (those players were on Stanford’s actual NCAA Division I soccer team), but nevertheless, the intramural players were echelons better than Erin, and she couldn’t keep up.
She auditioned for five a cappella groups and didn’t get a call back from a single one.
And even the volunteer organizations were intimidating, because the students there were launching international efforts rather than just teaching people how to perform basic CPR.
Impostor syndrome hovered over her, threatening. It had settled deep into some of the other freshmen’s bones, and it wanted Erin, too.
Yet even though she wasn’t the smartest anymore, she hadn’t gotten where she was by quitting. Erin was a doer.
So she’d swallowed what little pride she had left and went to the student tutoring center, where she asked for help in every single subject on her schedule.
She attended every evening session with her classes’ teaching assistants.
Erin pushed herself hard at the intellectual blockades in her brain, past limits that impostor syndrome told her she wouldn’t be able to breach.
Midway through her sophomore year, she was pulling a B-plus average, with A’s in her computer science courses.
And then she read an interview of Talia in Palo Alto Weekly, and Erin knew she’d found her role model—a fellow doer, who was a female tech founder to boot.
She researched and read everything she could about Talia, then emailed her directly and asked for a summer internship, even though Ideal Life wasn’t offering one.
She professed her loyalty to Talia’s philosophy of always trying to improve yourself, offering up the anecdotes of her freshman and sophomore years as evidence.
Erin also included a passionate essay she wrote just for this purpose, which focused on Ideal Life’s mission (including footnotes to research papers that backed up the underlying neuroscience) and her desire to be a part of Talia’s vision to make the world a better place, one person at a time.
Erin got the job.
Now she watched the video on her phone as @HigherVibesOnly_ began a yoga routine under the soft pink light of the sky.
Then the wellness coach sat at her desk and set a timer for ten minutes to journal.
Finally, after she showered, she went through her skin-care routine, applying plumping serums and moisturizers, with a luxurious, slow lymphatic massage before she ended with sunscreen.
@HigherVibesOnly_ smiled serenely at the camera. “Now I ask you, What have you done to better your morning?”
Erin nodded. She had started the dorm lounge’s coffee machine (she was always the first one up; most college students were not known for waking more than ten minutes before the class or summer job they had to get to), and she’d had a cup already.
It wasn’t a beautifully composed cappuccino like in the video, because they didn’t have a milk foamer in the dorm, but Erin would be sure to make a nicer cup for herself later in Ideal Life’s office, because they were proper adults there and did have a high-end coffee machine.
Erin took several more meditative breaths.
A message chimed on her Omni 3Ds, breaking the spell.
It was her Ideal Life Friend, whom Erin had customized as an animated avatar of the Greek goddess Athena, because she represented wisdom, strategic thinking, personal growth, and achievement.
Even the goddess’s voice in the tiny speakers of the Omni 3Ds sounded regal.
Ideal Life Athena: Erin, I’ve sensed that your morning coffee has hit your bloodstream and is ramping up the adrenaline in your brain and body. Now would be an optimal time for your run.
Erin stood without questioning Ideal Life Athena; in fact, she’d been waiting for that notification.
Some studies showed that exercising hard on caffeine and an empty stomach burned the maximum amount of calories while also pushing your muscles harder than without caffeine, so she wanted to optimize for that.
What did people do before Ideal Life? she thought. Their lives must have been so inefficient.
Of course, Erin had experienced her high school years without Ideal Life’s help, because the app had been in beta then and she hadn’t known it existed.
Erin sighed. If she’d had it back then, maybe she wouldn’t have struggled as much on arrival at Stanford, because Ideal Life Athena would have helped her prep better, like taught her how to get into “deep work” so she could dive further into advanced online computer science courses before she got to college, as well as pushed her harder in her fitness regimen for soccer.
“Doesn’t matter,” Erin said aloud to herself, shaking off the past.
She was a better version of herself now, and tomorrow, she would be even better than today.
The sky outside was sunrise pink, nearly identical to the @HigherVibesOnly_ video that Erin had just watched. Maybe she could squeeze in some yoga, too, before her run. And afterward, she could also stop by Happy Donuts and pick up a baker’s dozen to bring in to work.
How lucky she was to exist at a time when women really could have it all!