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BONUS EPISODE: Nora McInerny on her non-profit, Still Kickin

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BONUS EPISODE: Nora McInerny on her non-profit, Still Kickin

Watch a video from this interview here!

Nora: Still Kickin is a retail-based nonprofit, which means we primarily are a retail company. We sell these shirts and many other items. Most of them say Still Kickin, which is a shirt that you're holding, this kelly green shirt with weathered-looking letters that's a tracing of Aaron’s favorite shirt. He was wearing that the day that he had a seizure, which is the day that we found out that he had a brain tumor. We thought that was so funny. I remember walking into the ER. He was like, “Hey,” pointing at his shirt. I'm like, “What a shirt. What a great shirt. Let's bust you out of here.” It turns out it was really serious, what was happening to him. We didn't know. We were so oblivious. This was Aaron’s idea. All of it was Aaron’s idea. Almost right away when he found out he had cancer, he was like, “I want to recreate this shirt. I want to sell it. I want to give the money to people who really need it.”

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Sheri Salata, THE BEAUTIFUL NO

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Sheri Salata, THE BEAUTIFUL NO

Sheri: I had a front-row seat to all the most prolific wisdom-keepers of our time. I had the ride of my life. I found myself at fifty-six realizing that, with a rough, rocky start in my twenties, but by thirty-five I had finally manifested the beginnings of the career of my dreams. At fifty-six, the reckoning I had to do was that I hadn’t manifested the life of my dreams. One area, being someone else's something, someone's mother, someone's employee, someone's spouse or partner, that does not a full life make. I had to have a real moment with myself. I had to say, listen, I deserve to live the life of my dreams. Nobody knows more about making dreams come true than me.

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Biz Ellis, YOU'RE DOING A GREAT JOB

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Biz Ellis, YOU'RE DOING A GREAT JOB

Biz: I really felt like a lot of the books I read with my first child made me feel not necessarily comforted or confident about what was about to happen. A lot of books also made me feel like if you were nervous about it, then you were probably doing it wrong. I felt like I kept running into all these situations that were never spoken about in a book. Theresa, who cohosts the show with me, she and I would come in and start talking about something. More than once we'd say, “Why is this not in a book?” We wanted to make a book that reminded you no matter how you were doing it, if it was working, good job. [laughs] You’ve done it. You've discovered how to parent. That's basically why we made the book.

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Katie Arnold, RUNNING HOME: A MEMOIR

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Katie Arnold, RUNNING HOME: A MEMOIR

Katie: Running Home, it’s about a lot of things. Predominantly, it’s about my relationship with running and with my father and how the two converged after he died in 2010. I was beset by this really crippling anxiety. I’d just had a new baby. I had a toddler and an infant. After he died, I became convinced that I was dying too. I didn't realize at the time that that's not uncommon. It’s not an uncommon way to grieve. It was terrifying to me. The book is really a story about how I grieve my father and how running healed me and the wilderness healed me.

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Lydia Fenet, THE MOST POWERFUL WOMAN IN THE ROOM IS YOU

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Lydia Fenet, THE MOST POWERFUL WOMAN IN THE ROOM IS YOU

Lydia: The Most Powerful Woman in the Room is You is a story about my twenty-year career at Christie’s Auction House. It’s more than a story. It’s really a lot of stories about life lessons learned through being on stage for almost sixteen years as an auctioneer. As I realized as I was writing this book, a lot of the stories really apply to things that I've learned over the course of my career. They were things that I wish someone had told me very early on in my career.

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Julie Satow, THE PLAZA

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Julie Satow, THE PLAZA

Julie: It’s the story of money, the story of wealth. In some ways, wealth has changed. Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt was the first guest. He was one of the country’s wealthiest men. There were more than 1,600 chandeliers at The Plaza and two men whose only job was to dust the chandeliers. The opulence was just amazing. Now we

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Brian Solis, LIFESCALE: HOW TO LIVE A MORE CREATIVE, PRODUCTIVE AND HAPPY LIFE

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Brian Solis, LIFESCALE: HOW TO LIVE A MORE CREATIVE, PRODUCTIVE AND HAPPY LIFE

I found myself applying my parent’s definition of success, so university, great job, marriage, house, a lot of assets. The way that we’re sold stuff as becoming milestones for who we are and how we’re defined and how we’re perceived, that was my common definition of success. Then I realized that success and happiness and even creativity -- that's one of the reasons why creativity’s a pillar of this book -- were actually more intertwined. Success and happiness were linked in that happiness wasn’t tied to “When I have this,” or “When I do this,” or “When this happens, then I’ll be happy,” which is what -- I call it the happiness trap -- a lot of us can get caught up in.

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Darcy Lockman, ALL THE RAGE: Mothers, Fathers, and the Myth of Equal Partnership

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Darcy Lockman, ALL THE RAGE: Mothers, Fathers, and the Myth of Equal Partnership

Darcy: My advice would be find a gripping question. You really live with a book for the time that you're working on it. I was really immersed in this stuff. To maintain your enthusiasm and your ability to push ahead, you really have to be fascinated with what you're doing and what you're learning about. That's my advice.

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Virginia Sole-Smith, THE EATING INSTINCT: Food Culture, Body Image, and Guilt in America

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Virginia Sole-Smith, THE EATING INSTINCT: Food Culture, Body Image, and Guilt in America

Virginia: Writing as much as you can and reading as much as you can are really the cores of how to learn to be a writer. The reading piece of it sometimes gets forgotten. I see a lot of people blogging and putting a lot of content out there. That's great, but you really learn to be a good writer by reading a ton.

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Marisa Bardach Ramel & Sally Bardach, THE GOODBYE DIARIES

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Marisa Bardach Ramel & Sally Bardach, THE GOODBYE DIARIES

Marisa: Ever since having children and now especially also with publishing the book, I really do feel her presence more than I have in a very long time and more than I ever thought I would. I do think she knows the book is coming out. I’m torn between whether she thinks, “Of course Missy finished this book because she's so sentimental and family-oriented. We were so close that of course she had to, in a way,” -- she was very sarcastic and funny. I also hear her saying, “Missy, seriously? You worked on this book for twenty years? You wrote this book and you're getting it published? Seriously?” I can't tell which. She definitely knows. I'm not sure yet what exactly she's saying about it. Maybe both.

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Cathy Guisewite, FIFTY THINGS THAT AREN'T MY FAULT

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Cathy Guisewite, FIFTY THINGS THAT AREN'T MY FAULT

Cathy: There's an essay called “My Meaningless Midlife Six-Minute Fling.” I write about the experience I've had, sadly way more than one time, where I'm in the grocery store and realize that the single-serving snack bag that I picked up and ate while I was shopping, intending of course to pay for it but I ate it during the course of the shopping, realizing that it didn't contain one serving. It contained six servings and realizing that in my first few minutes of shopping, I've now eaten more calories than I'm supposed to eat in an entire day just because I didn't squint harder enough at the label.

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Gretchen Rubin, OUTER ORDER INNER CALM

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Gretchen Rubin, OUTER ORDER INNER CALM

Gretchen: what research shows, and I think it’s obvious from everyday life, is that when people feel happier, more energized, more focused, then they're actually more willing to engage in the world and in the problems of other people. It’s not like being happy and calm makes you want to drink margaritas on the beach. It makes you want to go register people to vote. People who are less happy and more stressed tend to get isolated and defensive. They're just dealing with their own problems. The idea that it’s a waste of your time to clean out your coat closet, I get it. It sounds trivial. I totally get that. Yet there is a connection where if somebody feels like their household is really what they want it to be and very calm, that would actually allow them to turn outward into the world more effectively.

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Carolyn Murnick, THE HOT ONE: A MEMOIR OF FRIENDSHIP, SEX AND MURDER

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Carolyn Murnick, THE HOT ONE: A MEMOIR OF FRIENDSHIP, SEX AND MURDER

Carolyn: Ashley and I as kids used to take all these pictures of each other all the time. We had these cheap cameras. My parents would develop the film every week. One night we decided to pretend to be Playboy models. We had pictures of each other topless and swinging on bars. It was proto-erotic. We were nine years old. There wasn’t exactly sexual energy. It was just exploration. We didn't know what was happening. It was girlhood.

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Sharon Rowe, Eco-Pioneer, THE MAGIC OF TINY BUSINESS: YOU DON'T HAVE TO GO BIG TO MAKE A GREAT LIVING

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Sharon Rowe, Eco-Pioneer, THE MAGIC OF TINY BUSINESS: YOU DON'T HAVE TO GO BIG TO MAKE A GREAT LIVING

Sharon: Part of our life is our work. Our work is business. It’s also family. Family is work. It depends how you want to look at it. It’s all basically a practice. It’s how you want to set it up. Because you're in charge, you can change your rules, which is nice. That's a huge freedom.

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