By Andrea Cabrera

Whitney Johnson broke the glass ceiling. “I want more. I can do this,” she said. A fire lit inside her—she disrupted herself.

Whitney was terrified. She and her husband had moved to New York for him to get his PhD at Columbia University, and she needed to find a job. But there was a problem: Whitney had no career sense whatsoever. Living in the Big Apple was different than growing up in her hometown of San Jose, California. Whitney had never held a full-time position and had studied piano performance at Brigham Young University. At the time, no one wanted to hire a woman for anything more than a secretary.

As a guest on the Marriott Student Review podcast, Measuring Success Right, Whitney speaks about a fire that sparked from inside her. This fire motivated her to disrupt herself. She worked as an equity analyst, started the Disruptive Innovations Fund, coached senior executives from across the globe for Harvard Business School Executive Education programs, and more.

Whitney, a mother of two, currently contributes to the Harvard Business Review and hosts her own weekly podcast called Disrupt Yourself. “I love to . . . figure out new ways to inspire people to figure out how to change and how to live their best lives.”