In this interview segment, Chelsea Clinton outlines her career strategy, describing her 20s as a period dedicated to building skills and her 30s as the time to apply those skills toward causes she cares about—global health, health equity, and empowering young leaders. She emphasizes the importance of staying open to new possibilities, maintaining curiosity and humility, and choosing collaborators who foster learning. Clinton attributes much of her outlook to family wisdom: her late grandmother’s mantra that "life’s not about what happens to you, it’s about what you do with what happens to you," and her parents’ belief that it’s better to be caught trying than to never try. These personal anecdotes shape her professional ethos and drive her to continually challenge herself both personally and professionally.
Chapters
For me, I really have thought about kind of my career in different segments. So I thought about my 20s as really a time to build skills, and I wanted to kind of invest my time, my energy, my work ethic in building skills to complement what I had learned in school. I really am grateful that I was able to kind of have opportunities and work hard so that kind of at the end of my 20s I felt like I'd learned a lot. My 30s is then hopefully putting that into action and being able to work on areas that I've long really cared about, whether that's global health or health equity here at home or connecting to and empowering young leaders. I don't really like to think of young people as the next generation of leaders. I think young people are clearly demonstrating their leadership in their own right and, and to all of us. So that's sort of how I've thought about my life, and knock on wood, thankfully that seems to be working out. And I don't know kind of what the next decade will bring, but I think we always have to be open to new possibilities, whether that's new kind of issues that inspire us or new opportunities that call to us. It's important that we always have a plan, but that we're also kind of not so striated into that that we miss kind of the serendipity of what life often, often brings to us and the opportunities that our own hard work really can create for us. I've found that whenever I've made choices based on kind of who I'll be working with and really who I'll be learning from, those experiences have always been tremendously valuable, even if what resulted wasn't quite what I had anticipated. So I would say kind of we should always Keep ourselves open, always kind of maintain our curiosity, always maintain our humility, kind of in line with that curiosity of being kind of willing and wanting to learn, and look for the people that we want to work and learn alongside. The best career advice I've received really is just the best life advice that I've received, and I think about my grandmother a lot. She passed away a few years ago, and I miss her every day, and I think I miss her every day because While she was alive, I spoke to her every day. She lived with my parents, and thankfully I got to see her a lot. And although she didn't meet my daughter, she thankfully lived long enough to see me get married and sort of see me at least make it into my 30s, and I'm so grateful for that. And she had a few adages, but, you know, one of her big adages is that life's not about what happens to you, it's about what you do with what happens to you. And she had a life full of hardship and challenge that I couldn't even imagine, and that she maintained this sort of dogged optimism is a real, I think, testament to her, but has always been a real challenge in the best sense to me. And then my parents have always had this kind of mantra that it's always better to get caught trying, that it's always better to have tried even if you don't succeed than to have never kind of entered the arena of whatever opportunity in life we might be talking about. So I think about those a lot, and I try to— To challenge myself kind of against those standards, you know, really every day, professionally and also personally.
