May always makes me reflective. Maybe it’s the season of graduations, the endless photos of caps and gowns, or the way commencement speeches attempt to compress decades of wisdom into a few meaningful minutes.
This year, like many people, I found myself drawn to Harrison Ford’s commencement address at Arizona State University. What struck me wasn’t his success or celebrity status. It was his honesty. He talked openly about bad decisions, uncertainty, stumbling into purpose, and realizing that passion and purpose are not the same thing.
That made me think about my own graduation day in 1985 at Alliance College. Senator Frank Murkowski gave the commencement speech that afternoon. I honestly couldn’t tell you much about what he said.
But I’ve spent a lot of time lately thinking about what I would say if I could go back and speak to the girl sitting in that audience.
First, I’d tell her this: you do not need to have your life figured out.
Because you won’t.
Within months, you’ll take a reporting job at a startup publication called the Youngstown Business Journal while bartending on the side because you think learning how to talk comfortably with strangers might make you a better reporter. Oddly enough, it will. You’ll learn that people open up when they feel seen. That lesson will shape your entire career.
You’ll also learn something else from your editor, Andrea Wood: how to build something from nothing. Her startup mindset, determination, and refusal to think small will quietly plant seeds that follow you for decades.
Then you’ll get on a plane to Rapid City, SD, for a television reporting job at KOTA, which you are wildly underqualified for. You’ll tell them you know how to shoot and edit your own stories.
You do not.
So you’ll call your former internship mentors at WYTV and ask them to teach you in a week. Somehow, they will. Soon after arriving, you’ll become the weekend weather anchor – the only woman on the weekend team – enduring jokes and comments that would probably explode on social media today.
You’ll pass on opportunities that, on paper, seem bigger. Little Rock during Bill Clinton’s governorship. An interview with a start-up now known as CNN. Warsaw reporting gig right after the Berlin Wall fell. At the time, those decisions will feel complicated, emotional, and imperfect. Some will be about love. Some about timing. Some about fear. Some about instinct.
I spent years believing successful people had a master plan. Most of the meaningful moments in my life arrived without one.
And here’s what I would want 1985 Aundrea to understand most: Not every missed opportunity is a mistake.
Years later, after my second son was born, I made another decision I never imagined for myself:
I became a stay-at-home mother.
At the time, it felt enormous. Final, even. I genuinely believed I was turning my back on my career. Back then, women often felt they had to choose career or motherhood – and be prepared to defend whichever decision they made.
But what I understand now is that life is rarely that binary. I wasn’t abandoning ambition. I was redirecting it.
During those years, I volunteered constantly. I helped organize school activities, community events, fundraisers, and projects that, at the time, simply felt like “mom work.”
I didn’t realize then how much I was learning about leadership, logistics, storytelling, event creation, fundraising, and bringing people together around a shared purpose.
More importantly, motherhood itself awakened a part of me that my early career never could have reached on its own.
Full-time motherhood deepened my empathy. It expanded my patience. It sharpened my ability to anticipate needs, read emotions, manage chaos, and care deeply about how people feel and experience the world around them.
The experiences that shape us most are often the ones we underestimate while we’re living them. Looking back now, I can clearly see that MARQUEE was being built long before the company officially existed.
Because if you had taken every job, chased every title, and followed every ambitious path, you might have built a career…but not this life.
One of my favorite memories is from an interview with the Hartford Business Journal. After making it through the first round, I arranged a ride east for the final interview. The night before, the editor called and told me not to bother coming because I “didn’t have enough experience.”
I still remember my response: “I can do this job. I’ll see you at 1.”
Then I hung up on him.
Years later, he admitted that if I walked through the door after that conversation, I already had the job. Ironically, he eventually became my husband.
Life is strange like that.
At 22, I thought success meant chasing every opportunity.
At 62, I understand life is shaped just as much by the opportunities we choose not to take.
So if I could say one final thing to me as the college graduate sitting in the audience, it would be this: You do not build a meaningful life by making perfect decisions. You build it by staying curious enough, brave enough, and resilient enough to keep walking into the unknown anyway.