Many professionals struggle with chasing work-life balance—TIAA President and CEO Thasunda Brown Duckett was one of them, until a breakdown in a bus terminal over her intense schedule gave her an epiphany.
“Work-life balance is a lie. It never reconciles…so get rid of that,” Duckett recalled the wakeup moment in Fortune’s Titans and Disruptors of Industry podcast with Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell.
Her mindset shift came one night during her nearly nine-year tenure at JPMorgan Chase, where she rose to become CEO of Chase Consumer Banking. Her intense workdays were sandwiched between long commutes to New York City from New Jersey, leaving little time for family outside her office life.
Duckett was waiting for the last bus of the day at Port Authority, watching as stragglers headed to the casino and the janitor cleaned up for the night, when the pressure hit a breaking point.
In tears, she called her husband to vent about never seeing her kids before or after work. And her husband—a stay-at-home father, marine, and engineer—delivered a perspective-shifting response: “then quit.”
