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Plus: the top 5 habits of wealthy women

The founders of organization company The Home Edit, Joanna Teplin and Clea Shearer, have a catchphrase that I think a lot of us have been able to relate to over the last six months: “surviving, not thriving.”

However, as a brand new Forbes list demonstrated this week, it is possible to do both. This list—aptly called Survivors and Thrivers—highlights 25 small businesses that have shown strength, diversity and adaptability, and give us all hope for what American entrepreneurs can achieve.  

As part of the package, I spoke to Jen Young, the cofounder and CMO of RV peer-to-peer marketplace Outdoorsy. Jen told me that April 1st marked the company’s lowest day of bookings on record. But as Americans grew stir crazy and began realizing that RVs could solve the conundrum of socially-distanced travel, the nightmare turned into an opportunity. Outdoorsy’s 2020 sales are on track to hit $62 million, up from $38 million last year.

“I definitely did not ever forecast, ‘You know what we really need here, guys, is a global pandemic to drive our growth rate,’” Young said. “Never, ever, did I think that or surmise that.”

Cheers to surviving and thriving!

Maggie

P.S.: My favorite advice on the site this week is don’t believe what you might see on Twitter; Covid-19 is not just like the flu (and here are five reasons why).

ICYMI: Stories From The Week

Senator Kamala Harris and Vice President Mike Pence took the stage on Wednesday night in a wide-ranging vice presidential debate that touched on legal challenges to abortion rights and the killing of Black Americans at the hands of law enforcement.

Ark Investment Management founder Cathie Wood has built a $29 billion-in-assets firm and a personal net worth of $250 million. She’s accomplished this (and beating Wall Street) by betting that Tesla is worth more than $1 trillion.

In September alone, 865,000 women over the age of 20 dropped out of the workforce, compared to 216,000 men. This dire situation is the focus of the sixth annual Women in the Workplace report, produced jointly by McKinsey and Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In Foundation. "What we are seeing in this report should terrify all of us," Sandberg said. 

At the U.N. General Assembly’s recent commemoration of the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women, world leaders including Switzerland’s Simonetta Sommaruga and Iranian vice president for women and family affairs, Masoumeh Ebtekar, drew a grim picture of women’s political and economic situation around the world.

In related news, some U.S. states, like New Jersey, are moving to codify Roe v. Wade into state law should Amy Coney Barrett get confirmed to the Supreme Court and swing its political lean to the right.

A new study provides further evidence that toxic masculinity is bad for all genders: University of Chicago researchers found that more men suffer from sleep deprivation in part because getting less sleep is perceived as manly, as if real men don’t need sleep. (Fact-check: We all need sleep.)

Check List

#1: Set a timeline. Want to take a career pivot or make the jump to your dream job? Make a list of what you will need to do to be successful, and give yourself a deadline for getting it done.

#2: Do something that rebuilds your sense of mastery. If you get passed over for a promotion, you might feel the need to over-work in order to prove yourself. Don’t do that. Instead, keep boundaries with work and hike, cook, craft—anything that shows you how capable you are.

#3: Forget about your passion. In this ultimate guide to starting a side-hustle, the number one piece of advice is to build a side gig around what you’re good at, what the market needs, and what is feasible.

Across Forbes