The Question Everyone Asks
My favorite Gwyneth advice, plus the goop products I still throw down for
My almost-decade at goop was full of ups and downs, as all jobs are. The question that I got almost daily remained the same, however: “Does she ever come into the office?” People imagine a celebrity involved with a brand might breeze into a high-level “creative” meeting once a quarter or so. Or perhaps they’d make an appearance at a dinner, so important board members could then say to their friends: “Gwyneth said a funny thing at dinner the other night … ”.
The reality is that Gwyneth was in it. Every day, every decision. There wasn’t anything on goop—no product, nor any article—that she hadn’t actively said yes to. When things went wrong, she was there trying to figure it out, and when things went right, she was there jumping up and down and screaming like the rest of us.
I learned a lot from her. The most important is one I’m still working on (and will be forever working on): People will love you and people will hate you. Accept it, and keep moving.
This is a critical concept for the ladies, because the culture insists that people liking us is the end goal of our existence. It further insists that if we engineer ourselves correctly, people will not only like us but treat us well: the most cursory look at even the most banal Epstein file would quickly cure even the seriously deluded of that notion.
Accepting that people will love you and hate you and that there’s nothing you can do about it allows a freedom and an honesty in moving through life that I still only experience in glancing bits. It’s hard to accept, hard to believe, and hard to act on. But watching Gwyneth react (or not) to the ever-undulating gasps of the internet made a lasting, very helpful impression on my highly-resistant brain.
She’d say “vagina” and the world would kvell and boil and snipe. She’d keep moving; she didn’t dwell on people’s reactions. Invariably, even the most negative boiling added up to more traffic and higher sales on goop; especially instructive was the fact that we’d get precisely the same result when the boiling was positive. People love you and they hate you and really, it’s their ugly or beautiful thing.
I still persist in thinking that if I were prettier, or smarter, or funnier, or kinder, or less intimidating (the one that tortures me the most) or even just less irritating, that people wouldn’t hurt me. But having worked with Gwyneth—not to mention with my brilliant direct boss at goop, Elise Loehnen, who wrote the FANTASTIC On Our Best Behavior: The Price Women Pay to Be Good on this very topic—I think it less.
