A dozen women. One identical piece of advice.

Over three years, I interviewed at least a dozen accomplished women on this podcast — physicians, founders, lawyers, executives. They worked in different fields, came up in different decades, and led completely different lives.

And every single one of them had been handed the same advice early in her career: work twice as hard, prove yourself, earn your seat at the table, and figure out the rest of your life on the side.

The advice was so universal it had become invisible. Nobody questioned it, because nobody had a name for it. We just called it being a hard worker. Paying your dues. Earning your stripes.

I call it the compliant strategy. And we all paid the same price for it — burnout, exhaustion, strained health and relationships, and no guarantee that career success was even waiting at the end.

I know, because I'm one of them.

I've spent 15 years becoming a double board certified trauma surgeon — as a hijabi Muslim woman, while raising six children. I navigated racism, sexism, and Islamophobia the entire way up. I followed every rule of the compliant strategy. I worked twice as hard. I proved myself at every level. I earned every seat.

Then I became an attending — the destination I'd been promised was worth all the sacrifice. And in my first year, I walked into a hostile workplace that compromised my ability to care for my patients. I came within reach of walking away from a career I'd spent 15 years building, because it was breaking me physically, psychologically, and mentally.

That's when my understanding of hard work changed. If working twice as hard only leads to burnout and the urge to quit, the strategy is wrong.

The lie at the center of it

The biggest problem with the compliant strategy isn't that it demands too much labor. It's that it forces you to split yourself in two — to treat your career as one problem and your life, your partnership, your family, your faith, your health as a separate problem you handle on your own time.

But every major life decision is a career decision, and every major career decision is a life decision. Who you partner with shapes how much risk you can take at work. When and whether you have children, and how caregiving gets shared, shapes every promotion and every salary for decades. How you protect your health determines whether you're still in your career in ten years.

The compliant strategy pretends those choices are personal and separate. So women navigate them in silence — and pay for them in their careers anyway. That split is the lie. And it's the lie that breaks women.

The receipts were always there

We just weren't counting them. The colleague who reached leadership and stopped seeing her kids. The senior surgeon who made it to the top and lost her marriage. The lawyer who made partner and stopped having a life. The brilliant resident who burned out and left medicine entirely. The pandemic showed the receipts at scale — women left the workforce in numbers we hadn't seen in a generation — but they were there all along.

These aren't outliers. They're the expected outcome. The compliant strategy works exactly as designed. It just isn't designed for you to win.

You are not the problem

We've been told that if we work hard and stay disciplined, we'll get the career we want and the flexibility we need. So we worked hard. We stayed disciplined. We got the career — and not the flexibility. And then we burned out and concluded that we were the problem.

You are not the problem. The strategy you were given is. And once you can see the strategy, you can stop blaming yourself for outcomes it was always going to produce.

The opposite of compliance isn't rebellion, or burnout recovery, or leaning in harder. It's defiance — not loud or angry, but strategic. I had to build it out of necessity, the year I nearly quit. I now teach it inside Defiance Academy, and it's the strategy this show is built around. I'm calling it the Defiant Career Strategy.

Start here

If any of this landed somewhere uncomfortable, that recognition is the beginning.

• Take the 2-minute quiz to see what the compliant strategy is costing you → TAKE THE QUIZ
• Join the monthly workshop inside Defiance Academy → WORKSHOP

Listen to the full relaunch episode of The Defiant Career wherever you get your podcasts.