The rules Clare de Boer lives by.

One minute you’re starting a fun new venture, and all of a sudden, you’re up to your eyes in to-do list, you’re responsible for about eleventy billion extra decisions that need to be made every week, you don’t have a team to soundboard against, you’re worrying about how to replace your old income

Doing all of this—curating an exceptional milieu, providing dedicated tutoring and opportunities for apprenticeship—is hard work. You could pull it off if you put your mind to it, I trust. Though, like everything pursued to excellence, it would demand serious sacrifices. Particularly of time. It is ok not to want that.

A lot of it does not require s

The right question is not “Can I do it all?” but “Can I do what’s most important for me and my family?”

Livingston: Was there ever a time when a competitor did something that made you fearful? Currier: iVillage started copying us, and I was very worried about it for probably a year, and then it all just faded away. Probably because it's hard to get the engineers, the psychologists, and the writers to talk to one another. You've got to build a culture

It’s an immense privilege to consider work as anything beyond basic survival. A life dedicated to creating art of any kind is, for most of us, precarious and unsustainable. A modern-day marriage of two artists is as financially sturdy as sand. I knew intellectually that I wanted to be a mother more than I needed to be a writer. I just hadn’t calcul