Beyond One Path: Celebrating Isabeau Miller's Inspiring TED Talk

Cori Sarni, Chief of Staff, here to tell you about my friend, Isabeau Miller, as she gives her first TED Talk today. Anyone who knows Beau knows she's no stranger to inspiration - our messages are filled with wisdom, motivation, and yes, TED Talks. While searching through Beckon Slack, I found her very first TED Talk reference in a post that brought back a vivid memory.

Thursday, December 30, 2021 - the day before New Year's Eve, arguably the busiest check in day of the year and our entire field ops team just got COVID. A nightmare scenario. Beau often quotes Lorne Michaels about SNL: "The show doesn't go on because it's ready; it goes on because it's 11:30." Never was that more true. We pulled everyone we could into the field and worked tirelessly while Isabeau herself jumped in to message guests.

The next morning, exhausted but resolute, she wrote to us that she'd searched for the perfect TED talk to inspire us through the chaos. But she couldn't find one. "Nothing was inspirational enough," she wrote, "nothing that didn't DULL in comparison to what I witness EVERY day."

The irony isn't lost on me that today, she's giving her own TED talk about "The Magic of a Multi-Hyphenate Life." Because that's exactly who Isabeau is - a CEO who rolls up her sleeves to help, a leader who builds others up while reinventing herself, a visionary who knows that "everything worth working for is worth working for together."

When people watch her talk today, they'll see the singer-songwriter, the Broadway producer, the professor, the mom, the wife, the CEO. But I'll see my friend who, on the hardest days, doesn't search for inspiration on a big stage - she creates it in the trenches with her team.

Beau, I'm so proud of you for giving the TED Talk you could never find - the one about showing up fully as yourself, in all your beautiful iterations. The one about building others up while continuously growing yourself. You're not just sharing your story today - you're sharing the story of every person who's ever been told they need to choose just one path.

​Your light has always been bright enough to illuminate the way for others. Today, it just gets a bigger stage. Go get 'em.