Laura Holson, of The New York Times, is a brilliant and award-winning feature writer and visual editor who has written extensively about Hollywood, Silicon Valley, as well as powerful figures in finance and politics.

Our conversation covered a lot of areas. Her love of and approach to writing compelling stories. Why and how she created The Box Session salons which pull together extraordinarily creative people from all areas of the creative industries. Her firsthand and up-close insights into the leadership of Steve Jobs at Pixar, and Michael Eisner and Bob Iger at Disney. And her own views of the priorities and challenges faced by today’s leaders.

At the heart of all of it is Laura’s own journey, one that included a bout of long COVID that she wrote about in the Times earlier this year.

Like a lot of us, Laura has had time to reflect about life.

Creativity is a human attribute. It also scares a lot of people.

But then so does life.

We spend so much time tying to find our place in the world, so much time trying to adapt, to adjust and to fit in. We care so much about what other people think of us. Of what we do. Or how we behave.

Then suddenly life is over, and in the process of fitting into other people’s definitions of who we are, we suddenly discover that we never found out who we could have been.

Or we can choose another path. One that we design ourselves. One in which we show up as the full version of who we are.

And then watch people follow your leadership.

How do you do that? Perhaps, Mark Twain said it best.

“Sing like no one is listening, love like you never been hurt, dance like no one is watching and live like it is heaven on earth.”

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