I quantum leaped into Vogue. Nobody saw how I got there.

What the manifestation courses get right, and the part they can't sell you.

“I’ve reached out to everyone I can think of. I’ve spent twice the time I should have spent on this client. Nobody cares about this person. I don’t want to work on this any longer.”

The PR consultant I had hired meant to send that to her business partner. She sent it to me in a group chat instead.

A few weeks earlier, I had paid this PR team $2,500 that my pre-seed company did not have to spare to announce to the world that I was taking over a women’s health startup as CEO. I had high hopes. It did not seem hard. My LinkedIn feed is full of these announcements. Apparently, for someone who “nobody cares about,” it was a Sisyphean task.

I wasn’t exactly a nobody. I had just wrapped up almost a decade in various leadership roles at Google, eBay, and Airbnb, but in the startup land that I was entering, that did not make me unique. I began to feel shame about wasting our limited resources, and worse, I started to believe the PR consultant.

Which explains why I opened the email that arrived in my inbox titled “Quantum Leaping Course: Manifest the timeline where you’ve already arrived.” I bought it. Not just because I’m a believer, but because I was in a place where I was desperate, and skipping the timeline from a “nobody” to a somebody was an attractive marketing promise. It cost $111, of course, because the people who sell these types of things price everything in angel numbers.

I was drawn to the course because the promise was instant and compelling. But, I am both a Spreadsheet and a Shaman. I have no shame in believing in something I cannot explain, but I still need the science to hold up. Quantum leaping is attractive to me, specifically, because it is a concept rooted in science. When it comes to atoms, an electron moves from one orbit to a higher one. It does not cross the space in between, because there is no in between. It goes from the low orbit to the high orbit.

To outsiders, this looks like magic. It looks like skipping levels of the game in Super Mario Bros. Tell me I wasn’t the only one willing to find the cheat codes for skipping levels. This desire is exactly why there is now an entire cottage industry of people selling guides to quantum leaping. We are all dying to get from the low orbit to the high orbit without the grueling work in between.

But the Shamanic version of quantum leaping often leaves out the science. When you investigate the science behind the why, it’s apparent that the electron does not skip the work. It just skips the visible middle. It jumps because it absorbed exactly enough energy to make the jump. Not enough energy? No jump.

Which brings me back to this course I bought. The underlying message the Shaman sold: You have to see yourself where you are going before you get there. The missing message from science: You can’t skip the middle. It’s just not visible.

So here is the story of my atom’s quantum leap. It’s the version nobody is selling on Instagram.

It was 2020. I was thirty-five, a brand-new mom, freshly out of big tech, and I decided that I could take over and run an early-stage startup. I was looking for the Nintendo cheat code, the quantum leap course to take me from 1 of 50,000 employees in a big tech company to being the number one at a startup. And I mistakenly believed that the PR team could do this heavy lifting for me.

The PR team had failed, so I decided to make the announcement myself. An investor friend suggested I write a Medium essay on my why. At this point, I had no more money left to outsource my story, so I did it myself. It went viral, at least viral for me. And it did so much more than any press release could have done. Prospective investors read it. Potential partners read it. Telling my own story in my own words was the most powerful tool I had. It still is, and I think it is one of the most powerful tools any of us has.

Then I did something just for me. I hired a photographer and we did a photo shoot.

I think about the corporate headshots I had been in up until this moment: in a conference room, wearing a suit, barely smiling, hands folded neatly. No, not anymore. This was not who I was becoming. This was a shoot inspired by the CEO shoots I had admired. Think Vanity Fair, Vogue Business, not the WSJ. This was the visualization the quantum leap guides preached.

I called the photographer who had taken my newborn shots earlier in the year. It was September 2020. Neither one of us had been around other people in months, and she had not shot anything like this in ages. We were giddy to be in each other’s company. I brought six outfit changes: the good stuff that had been sitting in my closet while I had only worn sweats for the last several months. We went up to my roof deck and shot against the San Francisco skyline, in dresses and puff sleeve tops. There were shots of me taking up the space of an entire Eames chair. Nineties hip hop was playing the entire session. We brought me to life.

Was I getting ahead of myself? Maybe. But in my heart, I knew I would need those photos, and this type-A Spreadsheet person is never one to show up unprepared. When the photos came back, I looked at them, and I both thought it and felt it: I’m here, and these belong in Vogue.

Back to the science. As it’s been explained to me, electrons cannot learn how to jump. The transition from a low state to a high state is either available to that atom, or it is not. The state is a prerequisite. A photon does not teach an electron to jump. It arrives, and the electron is either ready or it is not.

My photos did not change the trajectory of my atom. I was already in the state. I already knew where I was going. The photos were visual proof, a vision board for a journey I had decided on. The vision work came from the Shaman. Then came the science. I got to work in the non-visible middle stage.

And work, I did. The first day I went out to fundraise for the future of the company was Election Day 2020. The single worst day in American history to ask anyone for money. Peak pandemic. I did not have a home office. I sat at a makeshift desk in my bedroom with my infant napping in the next room. I took dozens and dozens of calls that way, keeping my voice down so I would not wake him, asking strangers for millions of dollars.

By Thanksgiving, twenty-three days later, I had a term sheet in hand.

Signed and closed within my first ninety days on the job. $4.2M in venture capital.

This past June, a project called The First 200 published the first index of US-based Black women founders who have ever raised a million dollars or more in venture capital. Two hundred names. Not two hundred a year. Two hundred in the entire history of the asset class.

My name is on that list.

The electron was moving. This was the leap. From the outside, no one watched it happen, but the work took place on Airtable, on Zoom, on 11PM calls to Asia and 5AM calls to Europe in the same day, and with the support of some incredible backers. All while waking up in the middle of the night, every night, to change a diaper.

This work happened in the middle. It was the missing piece. When I outsourced my quantum leap into startup leadership to the PR team, I was unproven. When I took my power back, I knew exactly what to do. The only time I was at risk was when I tried to outsource my own agency. They couldn’t have succeeded because I was asking them to tell a story that had yet to be authored.

The startup world lauds raising venture capital above almost everything else, so the moment the round closed, I was worthy. I reached out to a reporter at TechCrunch. This time, I did the pitching. I had my Medium essay for the why and the round for the proof, the photos came off my laptop, and boom, I was somebody (in this world, anyway). Magic.

I found a better publicist, and she took the TechCrunch piece and turned it into Vogue. Vogue became a calling card. Then Forbes. Fortune. Entrepreneur. The Financial Times. The person who nobody cared about was now featured in nearly every publication you can name. Magic again.

Photo from Vogue: Before Bed Series 3/17/2021

People like to call these kinds of transitions quantum leaps, as if they happen all of a sudden.

It was not sudden. My atom was in a state to make the leap, and it had been for a long time. An unshakable belief in myself was the state. Everything after that was energy.

Money spent on photos nobody had asked for. An essay I wrote myself after the professionals gave up on me. Fourteen-hour days of relentless pitching and practicing and knowing my numbers cold, so that when I got up to bat, I was unstoppable.

A quantum leap is not delivered to you. It happens where no one is looking, and it moves so cleanly that everyone who missed it calls it luck.

The Shaman says: You need to visualize where you are going. Yes. (Here is where the photo shoot helps, in case you need a nudge.) But visualization alone falls short. Here is what the science gets right: It is all about the middle, and the middle is invisible from the outside.

I have yet to see that version of the course for sale, for good reason. Who is going to buy a guide that says the quantum leap requires sitting through 2AM pitch practice for the forty-fifth time, only to wake up two hours later to change a blowout diaper? It is completely unglamorous, which is why you won’t see this version of a course conveniently listed for $111 on your Instagram feed.

Thirty days to your quantum leap is a marketing lie, and it gets sold to us in our most desperate moments. Right after we have wasted $2,500 on a PR team that quit.

If you want to quantum leap, here is the unglamorous version: Get clear on where you are going. Then figure out what your middle actually is, and do it, because nobody is going to do it for you. Write your own damn story.

The atom is capable of quantum leaping. To some, that looks like magic. It is, and I am proof.

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The Practice

Here is what the quantum leaping courses miss.

Start with the vision board version of the thing you want. Maybe it’s a title. Maybe it’s a number. Maybe it’s a room. Which magazines would you clip the photos out of? That’s the Shamanic visioning work, and it’s something you can do in a sitting.

Now the science. Do the middle audit. Write down everything you have to do to get from where you are today, the lower orbit, to the higher orbit. Be explicit.

Drill this down to the place where you start to hate the list. That’s where you begin to get a semblance of that dreaded middle, and what it’s going to take you to quantum leap.

The Shelf

Peak, Anders Ericsson. His hot take: one specific kind of targeted, uncomfortable practice is what gets you to the peak. Nothing else does.

The Invitation

What’s your middle right now? Not the vision. That unglamorous part you could never put on Instagram.

Mine is writing this newsletter on a Friday at 9:04 pm. Not glamorous. It gives me joy anyway.

Tell me in the comments or hit reply. I read every one.

Made it this far? Tap the ❤️ so I know it landed. And forward this to someone still looking for the cheat code.