I Shouldn't Be Telling You This: Success Secrets Every Gutsy Girl Should Know

W
e haven’t met (unless you’re a friend of mine who was nice enough to buy this book!), but I know something about you. The very fact that you’ve started reading a book about the secrets of success says that you’re clearly interested in and even committed to the idea of getting ahead in a career you love, supersizing that success, and then being able to relish the rewards that come along with it.

This book will offer you plenty of ways to do all that. It includes smart, gutsy advice from some of the incredible women I’ve met professionally over the years and also plenty of strategies from my own delicious career in the magazine business and as the author of a dozen books, both fiction and nonfiction. Why am I so eager to share my favorite secrets? Because I’m at a point in my career where it costs me nothing to do so—and I’m grateful for all the advice that’s been offered to
me
. I hope you’ll find the book not only useful but also very fresh and candid. From years spent writing cover lines for
Cosmopolitan
, I’ve learned to be pretty frank!

This isn’t my first career book, by the way. In the late 1990s I wrote a best-selling book called
Why Good Girls Don’t Get Ahead . . . but Gutsy Girls Do
that many women have told me made a major impact on how they approached their work and their careers. I’ve always been intrigued by how people move ahead and achieve what they long for, and I love sharing what I’ve learned with younger women. This book is based on many of the things I’ve discovered since I wrote
Gutsy Girls
, particularly from being the editor in chief of
Cosmopolitan
magazine for fourteen years. From the moment I arrived at
Cosmo
I realized that overseeing such a big, iconic brand meant that I would have to simultaneously do the job and teach myself everything I could.

There’s something fairly ironic about the fact that I ended up running
Cosmo.
When I was seventeen, my mother handed me a copy of
Sex and the Single Girl
, the classic 1962 best seller by Helen Gurley Brown, and encouraged me to read it. I felt briefly flustered by the idea that my mother was giving me a book of sex tips (at that age you’re still not convinced your parents have ever
had
sex), but it was soon clear that she had another motive: she wanted me to use Helen Gurley Brown as a role model.

My fabulous mother knew, you see, that I yearned to be a writer and maybe a magazine editor one day, and I think she assumed that Helen’s career could be a kind of blueprint for me. After writing her best seller, Helen, as many women know, went on to brilliantly reinvent
Cosmopolitan
magazine, starting in 1965. Of course, I don’t think my mom ever expected that I’d take her advice quite so literally and one day become the editor in chief of
Cosmo
myself.

It would be nice if I could tell you that from reading the book I absorbed a bunch of helpful strategies, and then, following college, strode boldly into Manhattan and shot up the ladder of success.
Not.

Though the book helped fuel my passion to head to New York City one day, it unfortunately offered no specific tips for breaking into the magazine business. When I left college, in fact, I felt pretty clueless. The Internet didn’t exist yet, so it was tough to research a career field, and internships hadn’t come into vogue either, so there was no easy way to scout out opportunities. I also had a lot of good-girl tendencies then, which meant I wasn’t going to burst onto the scene, bidding for attention. Therefore, like a lot of other young women in the 1970s, I just kind of stumbled into Manhattan, hoping for the best.

Though my arrival wasn’t very glamorous, it did grab a little attention. The night I left upstate New York for good, my brother Jim accompanied me to the train station, and much to my annoyance, asked an older man on the platform to watch out for me. The guy ended up sticking to me like a Velcro hair roller for the entire ride, even sitting in the seat next to me. I noticed after a while that people had begun to gawk at us, though I had no idea why. It wasn’t until I made my way back from the restroom that I understood the reason. Coming down the aisle, I saw for the first time that the man had an emblem on the lapel of his blazer. It said
GREEN HAVEN CORRECTIONAL FACILITY
. Good God, I thought in horror. People clearly assume that I’m a convicted criminal being transported to a downstate prison.

Things thankfully improved a tiny bit from there. I had won
Glamour
magazine’s Top 10 College Women contest and appeared on the cover during my senior year, and Ruth Whitney, the legendary editor in chief of
Glamour
, had promised to help me find a job at the magazine. But because I felt too timid and self-conscious to say I wanted to be a writer, I ended up accepting a job on the business side—in the merchandising department. It involved running the slide carousels for breakfast presentations and doing the dishes afterward. I was utterly miserable.

But at least I was smart enough to see I’d made a dumb move and needed to correct it. I started volunteering to write for a section of the magazine that featured short items on relationships, health, and self-improvement. Over time Ruth seemed to note my enthusiasm for writing. When Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus asked the magazine if it wanted to send someone to be a guest clown for a day and write an article about it, I was chosen. Oy. That idea held no appeal for me, but I decided that if donning a red rubber nose and performing in Madison Square Garden would help jump-start my career, I would have to throw myself into it. After I handed in my story, Ruth summoned me into her office and told me that she not only really liked my piece and was paying me extra for it but she was also making me a writer in the articles department. That was one case where fortune favored not the bold but the buffoon!

From there I moved up fairly steadily—though I encountered my fair share of bumps in the road. After
Glamour
I became a senior editor, and later the executive editor, at the Sunday newspaper supplement
Family Weekly
(which eventually became
USA Weekend
magazine) and then the executive editor in charge of articles at
Mademoiselle.
After being promoted to the number two position at
Mademoiselle
, I went on to run four different magazines:
Child
,
Working Woman
,
McCall’s
, and
Redbook.
On a Sunday afternoon during my fourth year at
Redbook
, my boss at the Hearst Corporation called me at my family’s weekend home and asked me to come to her office, where she announced that she wanted me to take over
Cosmopolitan
, the most successful young woman’s magazine in the world.

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