On ambition, vitality, and staying in the game without burning out
I built my entire career by saying yes before I knew how.
Security agent in Israeli airlines. A retail entrepreneur selling Victoria’s Secret stock out of a warehouse in Kyiv. Then a representative for Malaysian timber for Eastern Europe. Then Shanghai on a tourist visa, one month to find a job, twenty-something years old, no plan. I found the job. I always found the job.
Twenty years later, I am a Director at Cisco in Singapore, where I have lived for thirteen years and call home. I have run sales teams across Asia Pacific, led cloud transformation at Microsoft, VMware, Broadcom, and now Cisco. I sat in rooms where the decisions are made.
And I am tired of the version of “high performance” that those rooms sell.
The Graceful Edge is a weekly publication for ambitious leaders in their 30s and 40s, especially women, who are still building, just differently than they did in their 20s: smarter about where the energy goes, clearer about who they are outside the job, and more interested in actually having competence than performing it.
Why I Write
I started writing this in May 2025, after being made redundant from my previous role at Broadcom. I was hiking at MacRitchie Reservoir in Singapore with a friend who practices BaZi, an ancient Chinese metaphysical system that provides a personalised, energetic blueprint based on your date and time of birth. She told me the activity that would bring me the most joy, money, and connection for the next twenty years was writing.
I told her she was wrong.
Writing had been a source of anxiety since childhood. I grew up in Soviet-era Ukraine where essays had to be perfect, and mine never were. I wrote five drafts of one assignment while my mother tore each one out. She eventually wrote it for me. I got a good grade. I decided writing was not for me.
Until that one day in May, when I sat down at my desk at 1pm and wrote for the rest of the day. By midnight I had a publication: the name, the logo, the template, the first manifesto. I didn’t get up, because I knew if I waited until the next day the energy would be gone.
Clarity never comes before you start. It comes in the process.
What I Write About
The biology of sustained performance. What actually happens in your body when you’ve been leading at high intensity for a decade: the cortisol, the depletion, the recovery cycles most executives never track. I came to this through necessity, not aspiration.
The psychology of ambition: identity, reinvention, and what it quietly takes to be the person who holds it together. What happens to you when the title disappears. Who you are outside the org chart.
Leadership from the inside: what it actually feels like, not what it looks like on a slide. Lessons from two decades across China, Singapore, Japan, India, and the rest of Asia Pacific that no business school taught me.
The future of work and self: what actually changes about leadership and judgment as AI takes on more of the job, and what doesn’t. I don’t have a tidy answer. I’m working it out in public, every week.
Who reads this
Ambitious professionals who are still building but asking harder questions about what they’re building toward.
Women in leadership who are navigating their career and transitions in biology at the same time, in ways no one around them talks about openly.
And, it turns out, a lot of men, who send private messages saying they’ve never read anything that made them feel seen quite like this. I didn’t expect that. I’m glad for it.
About me
I am Ukrainian, raised in Zaporizhzhya, and have lived in the USA for a year and then in Asia for the last two decades, in China and Singapore, and counting. I have a Master’s in Finance and no technology degree. I built my entire career in Tech by learning on the job, asking right questions and building competencies for the future of work.
Outside work I am a Latin dancer (one and a half years in, still not great, completely committed), a Chinese tea ceremony practitioner, and a person who asks my GPT assistants questions she probably should be asking herself.
My son is seven. He doesn’t know what AI is yet. I’m not in a hurry to tell him.
