Suleika Jaouad on Living Well Through Uncertainty and the Healing Power of Creativity

Hello Monday with Jessi Hempel

Careers, Business

4.8 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 5 May 2025

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

How do you live well when life falls apart? Suleika Jaouad has a powerful answer. In this deeply moving episode of Hello Monday, host Jessi Hempel sits down with Suleika Jaouad, bestselling author, speaker, and cancer survivor, to uncover what it truly means to live well in the face of uncertainty. From her fight with leukemia to her remarkable creative journey, Suleika has learned to turn adversity into art, and pain into purpose. Her latest work, The Book of Alchemy, is a soulful invitation to embrace creative practices that help build resilience, joy, and connection, even in our darkest moments. Jessi and Suleika dive into topics that challenge conventional ideas of success and encourage listeners to live more intentionally. They discuss: Why curiosity and play can be powerful daily rituals How a 100-day journaling challenge sparked a creative breakthrough What it means to redefine productivity through values like kindness and bravery The healing power of deep friendships and chosen family How creativity helps us process adversity and transform it Continue the conversation with us at Hello Monday Office Hours! Join us here, on the LinkedIn News page, this Wednesday at 3 PM EST.

Transcript

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0:00.0	LinkedIn News
0:02.0	After almost a decade in remission, I learned three years ago that my leukemia was back.
0:13.0	What people often say in circumstances like these is you have to live every day as if it's your last.
0:20.3	I have come to believe that this is terrible advice.
0:24.8	It's a lot of pressure to try to make everything meaningful to carpe diem the crap out of
0:31.2	every single moment.
0:33.7	So I've had to shift to a gentler mindset, which is trying to live every day as if it's my first.
0:44.1	From the news team at LinkedIn, I'm Jesse Hempel, and this is Hello Monday.
0:48.2	It's our show about work on our own terms.
0:54.0	Today's episode is for anyone who is wrestling with the question that is so central to me
0:59.0	this spring.
1:00.0	How do we live well with all of this uncertainty?
1:04.2	And not just well, but with creativity, with curiosity, with care.
1:10.7	Our guest is Sulaka Juwad, and you may know of Suleka's work from her best-selling memoir
1:15.8	Between Two Kingdoms, which came out during the pandemic.
1:19.4	Or you might have seen the Oscar-nominated documentary, American Symphony.
1:24.6	It chronicled the incredible loving relationship between Suleka and her husband,
1:29.9	the musician John Batiste. But me, I've been around a while, and so I remember back in 2012
1:36.3	when Suleka began a column for the New York Times. She was so young then, really just out of college,
1:43.0	and she was grappling with her first leukemia diagnosis.
1:47.4	And yet, this column, it was called Life Interrupted, and it was so universal.
1:53.0	She wrote with such clear eyes and such wisdom about uncertainty and how to live well with it.
	...

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