Unlike most Americans, Marsai Martin started working a steady job — as a child actor — at age 9.

Martin, now 21, co-starred in ABC’s television show “Black-ish” from ages 9 to 18. The experience of joining a workforce so young warped her perception of what success looked and felt like, she tells CNBC Make It. She only recently started to include her own health and happiness as part of the equation, she adds.

“I thought that success was one of those things where you’re always running … and you get no sleep, and that’s success because you’re working all the time,” says Martin, who partnered with fintech company Chime’s “Mama I Made It” YouTube series on August 27 for financial awareness. “You’re busy and you can’t eat because you’re always moving around.”

She spent her teenage years trying to emulate the behavior of the ultra-busy adults around her, she says. She made sure her planner was always full, blocking out time for practicing her lines, staying up-to-date on the entertainment business’ news and journaling everything that came to mind — anything to make sure she was staying busy, a spokesperson says.

Martin even added activities like brushing her teeth or taking her daily vitamins to her calendar, so she could feel like she had a schedule to manage, the spokesperson added.

But Martin didn’t feel successful, she says. Rather, she felt drained and unfulfilled. “I was like, I don’t like this at all. I’m not happy,” she says, adding that she was “constantly questioning: ‘Is this my life? Is this what I have to do?’”

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There’s a difference between occupying your time with projects you love, or work that challenges you, and over-packing your schedule to the point of burnout. Plenty of seemingly successful people have learned this the hard way, from Bill Gates to Beyoncé.

As Martin grew out of her teenage years, her definition of success expanded to include finding happiness, learning new skills and nurturing her financial and mental health, she says. That’s a generally healthy evolution, some experts say: You should always balance your career ambitions with your health and happiness, Peloton vice president of fitness programming Robin Arzón said on a March 2024 episode of Wharton psychologist Adam Grant’s “ReThinking” podcast.

“Hustle requires the confidence to define what the ladder looks like, what the definition of success looks like,” said Arzón. “And my definition of success includes my own self-care practices … I’ve long understood my own energy to be a currency, and I think about how I’m spending it or saving it very much how somebody might think about their finances.”

If you work a standard 9-to-5 job, try treating your weekends like a vacation, author and happiness researcher Cassie Holmes advised the “Everyday Better with Leah Smart” podcast in a November 2024 episode.

Take a pottery class, relax on the beach, go on a nature walk — do whatever relaxes and recharges you that you usually don’t have time for. “Some people are like, well [the weekend] is when I get my chores done,” said Holmes. “Why don’t you carve out Saturday? And then Sunday, you can do all the stuff that you have to do.”

When your career dictates how successful you think you are, your identity and self-worth can become reliant on your job, entrepreneur and bestselling author Tim Ferriss told CNBC Make It in June. Finding new interests that you can practice regularly can give you a renewed sense of purpose and boost your mental health, he said.

“It just needs to be consistent. Like, a couple times a week — one time a week, even — so that you have some type of way to make progress in an area that is not your primary lane,” said Ferriss.

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It can be hard to see other couples’ fancy vacations, expensive gifts for each other, and Michelin star dinner dates without feeling as though you aren’t doing enough to keep the spark alive in your own relationship. 

Yet, as both a psychologist who studies couples and as a husband, I always encourage people to inject novelty into their relationship. Thankfully, fun comes in a variety of shapes, sizes, and price-points. And often, the most meaningful forms cost $0.

Here’s what the happiest, most successful couples do for fun — that most others neglect.

Not every couple has the time or budget to hop on a plane whenever they feel like shaking things up. But that doesn’t stop happy couples from finding adventure. They just do it locally.

Research shows that “micro-adventures” (think: staycations, day trips, or even discovering a new coffee shop across town) can bring just as much joy as big vacations.

They explore their city like tourists. They hit the trails, visit bookstores, museums, or check out that weird roadside attraction. The idea is to make the ordinary feel novel.

You love reading. Your partner is into video games. It might not seem like a match made in heaven — until you realize you can do them together, separately.

Psychologists call this “parallel play”: when couples do their own thing, but in the same space. Instead of forcing shared interests, you’re just creating shared presence.

As a result, couples can easily stay bonded without burning themselves out. Low-pressure, comfortable companionship supports deeper intimacy just as much as active socialization can. 

Yes, doing your own thing is important. But research shows that shared hobbies and rituals are strongly linked to relationship satisfaction.

This doesn’t mean starting a couple’s podcast or training for a marathon (unless you want to). For most couples, it’s as simple as a standing game night, a Sunday morning walk, or a favorite TV show they only watch together.

The point is consistency. These small shared rituals become something to look forward to, no matter how busy life gets.

Errands. Laundry. Dishes. Not exactly romantic. For working couples or couples with kids, it can be especially hard to find time for fun. This is why researchers agree that intentional playfulness should be a priority.

The happiest couples I know are good at “hijacking” the mundane. If they’re stuck with a boring chore or task, they’ll find a playlist or a show to put on in the background to spice it up. And if they’re out of the house running errands, they’ll turn it into an opportunity for a little game or competition.

They ensure that laughter and silliness is always on the agenda, even if it happens to overlap with their other tasks.

Remember your first date? That inside joke you used to have? That song that used to be “yours”?

So many people look back nostalgically at the early days of their relationship and think about how easy and simple it was to have fun. But happy couples know that the thrill of the honeymoon phase never has to end if they continue to honor it.

Research shows that rituals play an integral part of relationship satisfaction, quality, and intimacy. Happy couples leverage this by giving the activities that once brought them together a cherished place in their relationship.

Make it a point to talk, dream, and joke with your partner in the same playful, coy ways you did when you first met. It will keep things fun while simultaneously honoring the many ways your relationship came to be.

Mark Travers, PhD, is a psychologist who specializes in relationships. He holds degrees from Cornell University and the University of Colorado Boulder. He is the lead psychologist at Awake Therapy, a telehealth company that provides online psychotherapy, counseling, and coaching. He is also the curator of the popular mental health and wellness website, Therapytips.org.

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Parents are constantly searching for ways to get their kids to listen. But a lot of us focus too much on trying to get them to obey in the moment, rather than building genuine long-term cooperation.

I’ve studied over 200 parent-child relationships, and I’m a mother myself. I’ve learned that kids listen best when they feel connected. A big part of that is emotional safety: knowing they are respected and have the freedom to express their feelings.

Here are six magic phrases that calm a child’s nervous system and make cooperation feel natural, which is the real secret to getting them to listen.

The moment kids feel doubted (“Did you really mean to do that?”), their defenses go up. They shift from connection into self-protection.

Belief defuses shame and creates safety. When a child feels safe, they can actually hear you.

Example:

Child: “I didn’t spill the juice on purpose!”

Parent: “I believe you. Let’s clean it up together.”

You’re addressing the behavior without getting into an argument.

The situation often turns into a standoff when there’s a parent just barking orders. But when kids help solve the problem, they’re more likely to stick to the solution.

Example:

Child refuses to clean up toys.

Parent: “I see you don’t want to clean everything now. Let’s figure this out together. What’s the first step?”

You’re still holding the boundary while preventing power struggles.

When kids are overwhelmed, they’re in survival mode and logic doesn’t land. Their nervous system is in fight-or-flight, and they need help regulating their emotions. This phrase validates their feelings and assures them they’re not alone, which helps them reset.

Example:

Preschooler has a meltdown when their tower of blocks fall. Instead of “Stop crying, you’re overreacting,” say: “You can feel this. I’m right here.”

You’re letting the wave of emotions pass until they’re ready to re-engage.

Before a child will listen to you, they need to feel heard. This simple shift of giving attention before demanding it dissolves resistance. When kids feel understood, they stop trying to push back.

Example:

Child: “I’m never playing with my brother again!”

Parent: “I’m listening. Tell me what’s going on.”

Now you’re uncovering the deeper hurt behind the anger, and that’s the part you can address to help repair both the relationship and the behavior.

Many meltdowns escalate because kids feel misunderstood or in conflict with the very person they need most. This phrase instantly shifts you from adversary to ally, lowering defenses and opening the door to problem-solving.

Example:

Child: “This homework is stupid! I’m not doing it.”

Parent: “I hear you. I’m on your side. Let’s find a way to make this easier.”

Knowing you’re there to help changes the tone entirely. They’ll be far more likely to meet you halfway.

Mistakes can trigger shame. But when kids hear this phrase, they learn that love isn’t conditional on performance or perfection.

Example:

Your child breaks a classmate’s project and calls you in tears.

Instead of lecturing, you say: “I’ve got you, no matter what. We’ll make it right together.”

That’s the difference between fear-based compliance and real accountability.  

I always tell parents that if their default is yelling or threatening, then no “magic phrase” will undo the deeper pattern. But when you regularly protect your child’s dignity, make them feel safe, and follow through on boundaries, listening becomes the natural outcome.

Reem Raouda is a leading voice in conscious parenting and the creator of FOUNDATIONS, a step-by-step guide that helps parents heal and become emotionally safe. She is widely recognized for her expertise in children’s emotional safety and for redefining what it means to raise emotionally healthy kids. Connect with her on Instagram.

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As with many of her fans, Taylor Swift and her discography has long been an important part of my personal story. She even became an unexpected source of inspiration during a moment of career transition. 

I left my job as an aerospace engineer and human spaceflight designer at NASA to pursue an MBA at Harvard University, a shift that ultimately led to my current path as an economist and investor.

At Harvard, I started to think about Swift’s journey through a professional lens. I was driven by one key question: How do seemingly normal people do extraordinary things? How do they become these ultra-successful unicorns?

After reading an excellent book by legal scholar and documentarian Paul Davis, “Dedicated: The Case for Commitment in an Age of Infinite Browsing,” I began to recognize a number of characteristics that these highly successful people have in common. 

There are seven traits in particular that Swift regularly demonstrates.

1. Imagination

We’re all born with imagination, but as we get older, we often put constraints between our minds and the creative stimuli in the world around us.

Not Swift. She turns small sparks such as a phrase, a feeling, an overheard line into entire worlds. A great way to do the same is by starting to take greater notice of the fragments that catch your eye. Ask yourself why, and then record them.

Swift understands that imagination begins not with invention, but with curiosity. She’s great at paying attention to the smallest, most resonant details and building universes from them.

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2. Synthesis 

This is the ability to connect new and old ideas and thoughts through creativity. Creating synthesis requires bravery, because reimagining the world or doing things in ways that others haven’t is not easy.

Swift’s track record for synthesis speaks for itself. Her iconic song “Death by a Thousand Cuts” was actually inspired by the female protagonist’s relationship failure in the romantic comedy “Someone Great.” 

But the most famous example of Swift’s skill for synthesis is “Love Story.” She reincarnated and reinterpreted the romantic Shakespearian tragedy of “Romeo and Juliet” into a story with a vibrant, happy ending.

3. Focus

Focus is about making your goal a part of your very being. Swift has not released a makeup line or a fashion brand. You don’t see her dabbling in things that aren’t important to her. Performing and songwriting have been her top priorities since she was teenager.

And she has been entirely focused on being the best at those things.

To sharpen your focus, ask yourself: Does this move me closer to my core goal, or is it just noise? Saying no to distractions isn’t a loss; it’s a way of assigning and protecting the energy needed to go deep where it matters most.

4. Doggedness 

Doggedness is the ability to keep doing something or to keep fighting for it in the face of difficulty.

Think back to those moments on a stage when Swift was sick, exhausted, and heartbroken. The times during the Eras Tour when she was visibly crying during a song, when torrential rain made it look like she was swimming, and when she was performing the same set for the millionth time. 

Yet she still acted as if it were the best, most monumental night of her life. Even if unicorns feel like they don’t have doggedness and passion all the time, they are usually pretty good at pretending they have it, until they can get it back again.

5. Passion

Passion is having continued enthusiasm, even when you’ve been doing something for a while or after it has lost its shine. Passion and doggedness often seem to overlap in that they both require endurance and resilience.

To reignite your own passion, reconnect with the “why” behind what you’re doing. Ask yourself what first drew you in, and find small ways to rediscover that joy, whether it’s through experimentation, reinvention, or persistence.

6. Reverence 

This is the ability to be awed by and have deep respect for something. 

It’s usually difficult to remain passionate, unless the object of your passion gives you a sense of internal happiness and wonder, a feeling that there is something bigger in the world than just you and whatever is right in front of you.

Reverence fuels your purpose, which then fuels your passion, and thus allows you to give your full dedication to something.

7. Commitment 

The final trait is commitment, specifically in the context of forgoing all optionality in pursuit of this one thing over everything else. It is the commitment to recording music and touring, over going to university or any other career path for Swift. 

Real commitment often requires sacrifice. Ask yourself: What am I willing to give up so this goal can live? When something is optional, it feels safe. But greatness is built by those who are willing to bet on the thing they love most.

This commitment is evident in Swift’s ability to, always and forever, put music first.

Sinéad O’Sullivan has an MBA from Harvard Business School, where she formerly served as the chief strategist of the HBS Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness. She has also worked at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management and was a professor at Illinois Institute of Technology’s Stuart School of Business. She is the author of ”Good Ideas and Power Moves: Ten Lessons for Success from Taylor Swift.”

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This is an adapted excerpt from the book ”Good Ideas and Power Moves: Ten Lessons for Success from Taylor Swift″ by Sinéad O’Sullivan. Copyright © 2025 by Sinéad O’Sullivan. Published with permission of Viking.

Like millions of fellow 18-year-olds across the U.S., Zach Yadegari spent his summer preparing for college.

Unlike most other freshmen, Yadegari doubts he’ll linger in academia for very long. He’s the co-founder and CEO of Cal AI, a calorie-tracking mobile app he launched from his parents’ home in Roslyn, New York, in May 2024 — and the app’s success to date makes him think he’ll take it full-time well before his class’ graduation date, he says.

Cal AI’s users upload a photo of their food, and the app’s artificial intelligence-based software gives them an estimate of the total calories. The app, which Yadegari says has a 90% accuracy rate, launched in May 2024. It’s free to download in the Apple and Google Play app stores, and a subscription costs $2.49 per month or $29.99 per year.

Cal AI has 30 employees, and brings in roughly $1.4 million in gross profit per month — after the Apple and Google Play app stores take their respective cuts — according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It. That includes nearly $274,000 in monthly net operating income, a measurement of profit before accounting for taxes and interest.

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Yadegari started undergraduate classes at the University of Miami’s business school in August, but doesn’t plan to stay for more than a year, he says. On social media, he touts living a lavish startup CEO lifestyle: He parties “almost every night” in an off-campus mansion he shares “with all my friends,” he said in an Instagram video posted on August 23.

In the video, an advertisement for a mobile app development online course that Yadegari co-launched, he then drives off — purportedly to class — in a Lamborghini with a “CAL AI” license plate. The rest of the video features one man floating in a pool, another doing pushups and a third smoking a cigar while promising that “society lied to you, and money does buy happiness.”

After college, Yadegari dreams of a career in serial entrepreneurship, he says. Technically, he’s already achieved the moniker: As a high school freshman, he built a gaming website called Totally Science that helped students play online games on their schools’ WiFi networks, bypassing internet blocking protocols. He sold the website for roughly $100,000 to gaming company Freeze Nova in February 2024, documents show.

“I think that entrepreneurship is really cool because at the end of the day, age doesn’t really matter much,” says Yadegari. “You’re either good or not good at what you do, and then the market will decide [the] results.”

Inspired by his love of online games like Minecraft, Yadegari’s mother sent him to a summer camp to learn software coding at age 7. From there, Yadegari “started binge-watching YouTube” for tutorials on coding different types of programs, direct messaging other coders and content creators he saw online to ask for tips, he says.

After launching Totally Science, Yadegari tried to create a viral mobile app “because everyone has a phone in their pocket,” he says. His ideas kept flopping, until he focused on a personal problem: He’d started working out “to impress the girls at my school,” and every calorie-tracking app he downloaded made him manually input all his food, which he found tedious, he says.

He talked about it with his friend Henry Langmack, who he’d known since coding camp, and two friends he met on social media platform X — Blake Anderson, 24, and Jake Castillo, 30. The group decided to try building an AI model that could analyze photos of food and “do all of the work for you,” says Yadegari.

Yadegari and Langmack coded the app, and the group spent $2,000 on a social media marketing test run, says Yadegari. The response was positive enough for Yadegari and Anderson, a serial entrepreneur in his own right, to fund Cal AI’s operating and marketing costs for six months until the app stores’ delayed payment schedules caught up.

Cal AI brought in more than $28,000 in revenue for its first month, and then $115,000 for the next month. The co-founders started hiring employees, with Yadegari and Langmack conducting interviews while staying in a San Francisco “hacker house” for the month of July 2024.

Once the summer ended, Yadegari worked 40 hours per week on the app — writing code and brainstorming potential new features with Cal AI’s designers and developers — while managing his schoolwork at Roslyn High School, he says. His parents were supportive of his efforts, and he maintained a 4.0 GPA, he says.

“My parents are really happy with everything with Cal AI, especially my mom. She actually uses the app,” Yadegari says. “Overall, they’re really proud.”

A mobile app may seem like a relatively low-upkeep business idea, but Cal AI’s expenses nearly match its revenue.

The company spends almost $770,000 per month on advertising and marketing alone, for example. Other costs include payroll, software costs, and legal and accounting services. The co-founders do pay themselves some dividends from the app’s proceeds, including one recent $100,000 payment to Yadegari.

The company must also maintain a good reputation in the Apple and Google Play app stores. Cal AI may save users some time compared to its more traditional counterparts, but it’s not magic. Customer reviews show numerous complaints about the app’s accuracy: Users still need to manually input any information the app can’t detect, and correct anything it gets wrong.

Some customers have “misconceptions about Cal AI and what AI can do,” says Yadegari, adding: “Some of our users expect it to have X-ray vision, where if you take a picture of a bowl of food and you hit things at the bottom of the bowl, it’s going to pick it up. It won’t.”

Yadegari hopes to make Cal AI “the biggest calorie-tracking app,” which would likely mean topping industry leader MyFitnessPal’s self-reported 270-plus million users. The startup’s app has 8.3 million downloads as of July, according to a spokesperson, and Cal AI plans to close the gap with more hiring, marketing spend and rollout of new features, Yadegari says.

For the first time, he’s the CEO of a company with adult employees whose families rely on their paychecks — a responsibility he tries to not take for granted, he notes. “I can’t just go away for a few months and neglect things, like I could have with previous projects,” he says.

Yet for all of his long-term goals, Yadegari only plans to run Cal AI for two more years: After that, he’d like to sell it or hand the reins to another CEO so he can start a new company, he says. He’s “not entirely sure” what his next venture will entail, beyond involving AI — but he hopes to “dedicate most of the rest of my life” to it, he adds.

“Ideally, it really shapes the future and is part of my legacy,” says Yadegari.

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