Julia Holden can relate to the struggle of getting your baby to fall asleep.

In February 2024, she and her husband noticed that their newborn son Maxime fell asleep more quickly when his eyes were gently covered with a burp cloth or small towel, she says. As a new mom “in survival mode,” Holden quickly looked for a purchasable product — a comfortable eye covering that’d stay on his tiny face if he moved — but couldn’t find one she liked, she says.

As a younger adult, Holden had dreamed of entrepreneurship, so her near-instant thought was to make this product herself and sell it, she says. She designed a baby hat with an attached eye covering, named her side hustle Sleepy Hat and, over the course of the next year, spent nearly $16,000 from her personal savings to bootstrap the business, she says.

Since June 2025, the business has brought in five figures in revenue each month, including over $90,000 in December and more than $69,000 in January, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It. The company is profitable, says Holden, who initially launched it while working full-time as a senior relationship manager for an advertising company and taking care of her baby.

She found time for Sleepy Hat in 20-minute windows between breast-feedings at her home in Lawrence Township, New Jersey, she says. “I had no outside funding, no team and no child care beyond family help,” says Holden, 34.

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Holden quit her job — which paid her $95,000 a year, she says — in October to focus on Sleepy Hat full-time. Most of its profits have been reinvested back into the business, including payroll for two-part-time contractors who help with inventory and running ads on Google and Amazon, she says. “I also recently took on an advisor, [who has] a little bit of equity,” Holden says.

Holden paid herself $2,500 from the business in 2025, and has been living off her remaining personal savings and her husband’s income as an assistant director at Princeton University. She works anywhere from 30 to 60 hours per week, including weekends, she says.

Doing all of that while being a mom to a now-2-year-old is taxing, but since she sets her own schedule, she can at least take more time during daylight hours for herself and her family than she did at a 9-to-5, she says.

“I’m still stressed, but for a more meaningful reason,” says Holden. “It feels more important. It’s much more satisfying.”

Holden didn’t have “proof of market fit” when she decided to launch Sleepy Hat, she says. Rather, she brought the idea to other moms in her circle, who she says all called it “genius.”

She intended to spend about $10,000 launching the business, and surpassed her budget on “product development, creating patterns, creating prototypes and samples … and then all the tiny little things that add up, like purchasing a domain, a trademark [and] building a website,” she says.

She didn’t have a design background, so the first pattern she and her mom created together resulted in a hat that was “completely the wrong size,” she says. An entrepreneur friend referred her to a factory in China, which sent her prototypes. But her “tech pack” — a garment blueprint for manufacturers, essentially — initially wasn’t detailed enough, resulting in about $1,500 worth of defective products, she says.

After finalizing the product’s design and ordering 1,500 units, Holden “splurged” on a photographer to fill a website for Sleepy Hat with professional-looking images, she says. The website launched in September 2024, and didn’t receive many sales until around December, when Holden posted her product and website on online marketplace Grommet, she says.

Sleepy Hat ended the year with just under $2,000 in total sales. “My first sale from a stranger was life-changing,” says Holden. “I was so excited but also terrified to actually ship the product.”

Holden joined Amazon as a third-party seller in August 2025. Roughly around then, her posts on Sleepy Hat’s TikTok account started gaining traction, with some garnering hundreds of thousands of views and thousands of likes. Moms bonded in the comments over their “FOMO babies” who fought sleep while on walks, car rides or in restaurants, saying they “needed” the hat for their kids.

Most of Holden’s sales now come from paid online advertising, she says. She’s designing Sleepy Hats with new patterns and materials, improving her social media strategy and updating her packaging, she adds.

“The goal is to increase my own salary on a quarterly basis this year,” says Holden. “I hope to double what I pay myself in Q2 in April … I hope next year to be able to pay myself actually more than what I was making at my full-time job, so six-figures plus.”

Holden isn’t technically a first-time entrepreneur — she previously started a short-lived T-shirt brand and website for women runners — but she’s still working on her financial acumen and organizational skills, she says. She’s worked with an accountant, alongside her advisor, to help her cover that weakness, she says.

“You need to understand every dollar that’s coming out and every dollar that’s coming in,” she says. “And I’m not particularly finite. I just don’t gravitate towards spreadsheets … So it’s definitely been a learning curve to force myself to take the time and understand the balance sheet and where every dollar is going, and it’s still a work in progress.”

Holden has also learned the value of trusting her gut, she says. She recalls a moment when her sister, who owns a PowerPoint tutorial business, advised against launching a startup as a new mom.

“She was like, ‘I would not start a business right now. You’re [freshly] postpartum,’” Holden says. “And I was like, ‘OK, I hear you. I’m going to do it anyway.’”

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Reese Witherspoon has some career advice you might not want to hear.

The “Legally Blonde” and “Big Little lies” actress posted an Instagram video on Feb. 17 offering a tip in response to a young woman she’d spoken with who was unhappy in her job and looking to switch roles.

“Okay, well what are your talents?” Witherspoon said she asked the woman, who struggled to name her specific talents.

“Everybody has dreams. Doesn’t mean you’re going to be that thing. You are supposed to do what you’re talented at,” Witherspoon said. “It’s your job in life to figure out what your specific, unique talents are and go chase them. That’s what you’re going to do,” she added. “You don’t chase your dreams, you chase your talents.”

Witherspoon’s advice might sound unconventional — and she didn’t explain her reasoning. But leadership coach and “The Ambition Trap” author Amina AlTai likewise says it’s bad advice to follow your passion. “Passion by nature is fickle” and building your career around it “positions us to fizzle out fast,” she told CNBC Make It in December.

“Allow yourself to be passionate about things, and allow those passions to change without feeling the impulse to anchor it to your entire purpose, because it is so changeable,” AlTai said.

NYU Stern School of Business professor, researcher and author Suzy Welch says it’s important to identify your aptitudes, or “the inborn faculties that make us good or better at certain skills, competencies, and areas of expertise.”

The methodology she teaches and writes about in her book, “Becoming You: The Proven Method for Crafting Your Authentic Life and Career,” is all about finding your “area of transcendence” at the intersection of your values, aptitudes and economically viable interests.

Dreams — probably interests with a hint of values in Welch’s terms — aren’t enough. The right career path is also aligned with your values and financially feasible, according to Welch. And you need to know what you’re good at. Aptitudes “unlock the work we should be doing and the life we should be living so that we can thrive and flourish,” in Welch’s words.

Though you might think these would be obvious, “identifying your aptitudes almost always does take work,” Welch writes. Various tests exist that can help you identify yours so you can do work you’re well-suited to and avoid the “aptitude-misalignment-hellscape,” as she calls it. Because “an aptitude fit can make or break the deal, and your heart.”

Witherspoon’s fellow actress Tracee Ellis Ross has shared similar sentiments around pursuing your dreams, emphasizing that you need to consider the effort required in addition to the talents.

“People always say dream big, but what I learned in my childhood was dream big but know that you’re the one that’s gonna be doing the work,” Ross said on an episode of Emma Grede’s “Aspire” podcast in October. “Dream at a pace and in a way that you can actually maintain what it takes to do that.”

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More companies are leaning into “peanut butter” pay increases this year, according to Payscale’s Pay Increase Preview Report.

The term refers to across-the board raises “that are even and spread thinly, like peanut butter would be on a sandwich,” according to career coach Colleen Paulson.

About half — 48% — of surveyed organizations said that they will continue giving out pay increases based on performance, according to Payscale.

But the report found that plenty of companies are contemplating “peanut butter” raises: Along with the 9% of organizations that already practice across-the-board pay increases, 16% said they were newly planning to implement the approach this year and 18% said they were considering it.

“There’s always a tension in organizations of how to how to balance the needs of your high performers while taking care of the entire group,” says Scott Hoffhines, a compensation expert and the vice president of rewards and systems at SalesLoft, especially when companies have “limited resources.”

Still, in Hoffhines’ view, companies that implement “peanut butter” raises should be aware that they are “essentially giving up on their top talent,” he says — and that could lead to morale and retention problems down the line.

The concept of “peanut butter” pay raises isn’t new, Hoffhines says. Last year, for example, Starbucks made headlines when it gave 2% raises to all corporate employees in an effort to reduce costs, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Strained compensation budgets could be behind why some companies are implementing across-the-board raises, according to Paulson. “These companies are under so much pressure to cut costs, and this feels like an easy way to do it,” she says.

Fairness is also a concern: The Payscale report noted that “tying merit pay increases to performance ratings has come under criticism in recent years for being too subjective and prone to bias.”

Some companies may view across-the-board increases as a more “equitable” approach, according to leadership coach and talent development expert Sarah Eppink: They ensure that front-line employees who “don’t necessarily have the visibility of individuals in HQ offices” aren’t overlooked for pay raises, says Eppink, who is also an adjunct instructor at Bowling Green State University.

“Peanut butter” raises are also easier to execute from an administrative perspective, Eppink adds. In general, managers don’t want to “have to deliver bad news,” she says. Implementing across-the-board raises removes the need for “difficult conversations” about why certain employees will or won’t receive merit-based increases.

Across-the-board raises may seem “equitable on the surface,” but they can be discouraging for high-performing employees, according to Eppink.

When pay increases are no longer tied to performance, workers who are “hitting it out of the park” will question, “Why would I make exceptional contributions when the bare minimum is receiving the exact same reward that I did?” she says.

In the long term, these employees are likely to become “disengaged” and look for other jobs, Eppink says.

Companies may not see the impact of “peanut butter” raises on retention right now, according to Paulson. In light of the “challenging” job market and low hiring rates, she says, many workers are reluctant to leave their current roles — and employers are well aware of that.

“In a competitive job market, companies don’t really feel the need to increase compensation in the same ways that they would in another market,” she says.

However, employees who feel short-changed today are likely to look for other roles when the job market is more favorable, according to Eppink.

Cutting into compensation is “such a short-sighted strategy” for companies, Paulson says. Top performers will be “out the door as soon as they can” when they find employers that better compensate them for their skills, she says.

During the Great Resignation, for example, people voluntarily left their jobs at record rates — 47.8 million people quit in 2021 and 50.5 million people quit in 2022, compared to 42.1 million in 2019. More than a third (37%) of employees said that low pay was a major reason they moved on in 2021, according to a Pew Research Center study.

In the past, Paulson says she would advise employees who were disappointed with their pay raises to talk to their managers and make a case for a larger increase. But in today’s job market, she knows employees are nervous to “rock the boat,” she says.

“Everything feels a little bit more tenuous,” Paulson says. “It feels a little bit riskier to go in and have those kinds of conversations with your manager.” Still, it doesn’t hurt to ask your manager if you could be eligible for any other benefits, such as additional vacation time.

If you’re considering switching jobs, Paulson recommends updating your resume, optimizing your LinkedIn profile and setting up job alerts to “dip your toe in the water and see what’s out there.”

“You never know: You might find a great opportunity with people that really appreciate what you bring to the table and will pay you what you’re worth,” she says.

Still, Eppink recommends taking a step back to evaluate the “long game” before deciding to leave your job over compensation concerns. “I would not counsel anybody to use this one instance to make a life-altering decision as big as leaving an employer,” she says, “especially right now.”

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I served for nearly 15 years in the U.S. Navy Reserve, including nine as a Commander. I led SEAL teams in combat and have spent the past two decades helping high performers, from boardrooms to locker rooms, build unbeatable minds. 

SEALs aren’t naturally tougher than everyone else. We just understand that mental resilience is something that is built through specific, repeatable practices that can help us keep calm and focused under extreme pressure. 

Today, whether I’m training myself or working with Fortune 500 executives, I use the same principles that kept me alive in combat zones. Here are three daily habits that help me banish burnout, and maintain a sharper and more resilient mind. 

Where the body leads, the mind follows. I’ve learned that for me, burnout can flourish without consistent activity. You don’t necessarily need to do an intense workout either, just frequent and deliberate movement practices. And they can be as varied as you want.

Over the course of a day, I might do a set of bodyweight squats, burpees and pushups or sun salutations. Later, I might go for a 10-minute walk outside. Or just take a break to do some slow, nasal breathing while moving. 

This is about telling your nervous system, “I’m capable. I’m safe. I can act.”

Research has found that brief bouts of physical movement significantly improve mood, cognitive flexibility, and stress resilience, even more effectively than a prolonged exercise session later in the day. 

Studies also show that regular movement reduces the risk of depression by over 25%, regardless of intensity. Just five minutes of movement can help reset your nervous system.

Back in 2006, I coined the term “box breathing.” The practice was not original with me, but I found it to be incredibly useful when teaching Navy SEAL candidates. 

I do 20 minutes of box breathing in the morning and another 20 minutes in the afternoon or evening. Simply inhale through your nostrils for a five count, hold the breath for a five count, exhale for five, then hold again after the exhale for a final five count. 

Done first thing in the morning, it sets your physiological tone for the entire day. For me, 20 minutes is ideal, but even five minutes can help eliminate stress and improve focus and clarity.

Studies from the National Institutes of Health demonstrate that breath-focused mindfulness lowers cortisol levels and improves heart rate variability, which is a key marker of resilience and stress tolerance.

You cannot reason your way out of anxiety when your body is already panicked. Don’t wait until you’re stressed to breathe. Train yourself to be calm first, and then deploy it under pressure.

Every negative thought you let in, and repeatedly ruminate on, strengthens a neural pathway in your brain. I’ve found that you can weaken those thoughts by starving them of attention and feeding your courage instead. 

This is what I do every day to make that happen for myself:

• I notice fear-based thoughts (such as: “I can’t,” “I’m behind,” “This is too much.”)
• I intercept them with a firm mental command like (“Nope, not paying attention to you, fear!”)
• I replace that thought with a grounded, action-based truth (“I can do the next rep,” “I’ve handled harder,” “Action creates clarity.”)

Research shows that intentionally practicing positive cognitive reframing increases resilience, self-efficacy, and long-term well-being. 

Mark Divine is a Commander (Ret), U.S. Navy SEALs and the New York Times bestselling author of “The Way of the SEAL,” “Unbeatable Mind” and “Staring Down the Wolf.” He is the founder of SEALFIT and Unbeatable. Mark earned his Ph.D in Global Leadership and Change from Pepperdine University.  

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Engineering majors earn some of the highest salaries right after college — and they’re still near the top years later.

That’s according to the latest findings from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, based on 2024 U.S. Census data, the most recent available.

The analysis breaks down annual earnings for college graduates by major and reflects the income of full-time workers whose highest degree is a bachelor’s, excluding currently enrolled students. Various engineering degrees have consistently ranked among the top-paying fields in recent years.

The highest-paying majors for workers ages 22 to 27 are computer engineering, computer science and chemical engineering, with recent graduates earning median early-career salaries of $85,000 or more. That’s well above the U.S  median personal income of just over $45,000, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. 

However, engineering accounts for about 6% of bachelor’s degrees awarded nationwide, representing a relatively small share of all college graduates, according to the most recent data from the National Center for Education Statistics.

Here are the 16 majors that lead to the highest salaries for workers ages 22 to 27:

1. Computer engineering: $90,000
2. Computer science: $87,000
3. Chemical engineering: $85,000
4. Aerospace engineering: $85,000
5. Industrial engineering: $83,000
6. Electrical engineering: $82,000
7. Mechanical engineering: $80,000
8. Construction services: $75,000
9. Civil engineering: $75,000
10. General engineering: $75,000
11. Miscellaneous engineering: $75,000
12. Economics: $72,000
13. Business analytics: $72,000
14. Finance: $70,000
15. Mathematics: $70,000
16. Nursing: $70,000

Engineering graduates remain in strong demand for their mix of mathematical skills and technical expertise, which are valuable across a wide range of industries, data from the National Association of Colleges and Employers shows.

While artificial intelligence is reshaping how the technical work is done, employment in many engineering fields is still projected to grow over the next decade, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Engineering also tends to pay well over time. Among graduates ages 35 to 45, every engineering major reports median pay of at least $100,000. Here are all of the majors with mid-career median earnings of $100,000 or more, according to the New York Fed.

1. Chemical engineering: $135,000
2. Computer engineering: $131,000
3. Aerospace engineering: $130,000
4. Electrical engineering: $123,000
5. Computer science: $120,000
6. Mechanical engineering: $120,000
7. Construction services: $120,000
8. Civil engineering: $115,000
9. Economics: $115,000
10. Finance: $112,000
11. Business analytics: $109,000
12. General engineering: $105,000
13. Miscellaneous engineering: $105,000
14. Physics: $105,000
15. Engineering technologies: $104,000
16. Industrial engineering: $100,000
17. Mathematics: $100,000
18. Information systems: $100,000
19. Marketing: $100,000
20. Biochemistry: $100,000
21. Political science: $100,000

In contrast, education and arts majors tend to earn significantly less overall. By ages 35 to 45, six fields of education majors report median earnings below $60,000, placing them among the lower-paid fields in the study.

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