Hasta La Gadget!

Leura Fine

Featured on Forbes’ 2016 30 Under 30 list, Leura Fine is the founder and CEO of leading online interior design service Laurel & Wolf. Driven by the desire to connect clients and designers through a digital platform, Leura launched Laurel & Wolf from her home dining room in 2014. Two years later, she has a rapidly growing team of more than 60 employees and a marketplace of more than 1,000 interior designers.

Born and raised in Alabama, Leura grew up with a passion for design;; she began her career at a top design firm and then started her own company, Leura Fine Interiors, before ultimately launching Laurel & Wolf.

Named one of Business Insider’s “25 Hot Los Angeles Startups to Watch” and featured in notable publications such as Forbes, TechCrunch, Inc., Refinery29, and Elle Décor, Laurel & Wolf has disrupted the traditional model of the interior design industry. As the company’s hands-on leader, Leura transforms the way thousands of people live, work, and love through the power of great design.

How has your life experience made you the leader you are today?
My path has been one rich with diverse experiences and, although it has certainly not been traditional, it has led me to where I am today. I am a Jewish southern girl who grew up in Alabama and moved to Montreal to study at McGill University. After graduating early, I then moved to Los Angeles where I worked for a world famous Burlesque dancer, built a career as an interior designer and continued to then launch a tech company, of course now known as L​aurel & Wolf.​

I was also born blessed as I have exceptional parents who taught me with enough hard work and dedication I could do anything. They supported my every endeavor and helped me not only believe that the world was mine for the taking, but also that “normal” was “only a setting on a washing machine.” There was no value placed on being like everyone else and I think this belief that unique is beautiful is what helped me through so many transitions in my life and makes me a stronger leader today.

How has your previous employment experience aided your tenure at Laurel & Wolf?
My previous career as an interior designer is what inspired the idea for Laurel & Wolf. More importantly,

I learned from my previous experiences that in life and in business you must evolve or die and most people inevitably follow the status quo. They are structured the same way, they have the same office environment, they think about growth in the same manner, and they are ultimately afraid to rock the boat. For me, it is truly exhilarating creating a business that looks to the future while simultaneously changing the future for so many people. The passion and drive I have for the design industry and for life finally has the opportunity to thrive through Laurel & Wolf.

What have the highlights and challenges been during your tenure at Laurel & Wolf?
A major highlight is definitely my team! I love coming to work everyday and feel beyond blessed that I get to work with such incredibly creative, intelligent, and dedicated individuals. As far as a greatest challenge goes, when leading a startup, you are faced with obstacles on a daily basis. No matter what the challenge may be, I believe the most valuable takeaway is learning from these experiences in order to evolve and grow as a leader.

What advice can you offer to women who want a career in your industry?
Oscar Wilde said: “Be yourself. Everyone else is taken.” I love this quote because I believe that staying true to who you are is incredibly important as a woman in any industry. In your career, it is critical to embrace your strengths and your weaknesses and learn how to leverage them to the best of your ability as opposed to trying to conform to what you think someone in your field should act or look like.

What is the most important lesson you’ve learned in your career to date?
Determination, focus, and hard work matter more than anything. You can have the best idea in the world but if you don’t know how to execute, then you don’t have anything. You have to always be pushing forward if you want to win.

How do you maintain a work/life balance?
I certainly aim for work/life balance although I don’t know I would say I’ve fully achieved it. More than anything, having friends and family who are understanding and supportive of your endeavor is critical when you start a company. I do try and make time to be active, enjoy the outdoors, cook, travel and have days where I only check my email once (or twice). I think aspiring to have a balance is more than half the battle! Just like any other goal, there are times when it is easier to accomplish than others.

What do you think is the biggest issue for women in the workplace?
I have no idea to be honest. I think every individual has different challenges (either personal, societal or both) faced at work and some of our greatest challenges can simply exist in our head. It is possible certain insecurities arise as a result of what we’ve been exposed to or perhaps our upbringing; however, this doesn’t mean we should allow them to surface and it definitely doesn’t mean they cannot be overcome.

My perspective is definitely skewed as I’ve gone to work in an era where space was already created for me to thrive as a female professional. I appreciate the hard work and tremendous challenges faced by women who came before me and my hope is to continue to expand the conversation until we no longer need to address this question or deal with sexism or any type of prejudice in the workplace. I’m incredibly proud of Laurel & Wolf and fellow founders as we have successfully created empowering, diverse, and equal opportunity places of employment.

How has mentorship made a difference in your professional and personal life?
I don’t know that I’ve ever had one specific mentor but there are many people I’ve admired greatly and gotten to spend time with. More than formal mentorship, I believe listening to people’s stories can dramatically impact your career and your decisions. The best stories are the ones that tell the story of failure. It is fascinating to see how people not only overcome obstacles but also rise above and succeed.

Which other female leaders do you admire and why?
Historically, I have always greatly admired Golda Meir. She was brilliant, dedicated, tough, and not afraid to go after what she wanted and what she knew was right. She was a revolutionary and a visionary. Contemporary females I admire are Martha Stewart and Shonda Rhimes. They have both taken traditionally female traits and interests and created empires out of them. They are also both self­m​ade women, which makes me respect and admire them even more.

What do you want Laurel & Wolf to accomplish in the next year?
Our long term goal is to create a global design brand. While we can’t accomplish that in the next year, we are focused on continuing our rapid growth in North America and continuing to transform people’s lives through the power of great design.

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In a few weeks, athletes from around the world will perform almost super-human feats of strength and agility at the 2016 Rio Olympics and Paralympics. When they win, their shiny faces will beam with joy and pride as the flags are lowered and their national anthems blare on the loudspeakers.

And they’ll owe a lot of their success not to past victories, but to past failures.

While it may seem counterintuitive, failing to reach the goals you set for yourself may actually set the stage for future success ― provided you have a perspective that helps you view your past losses as lessons, not as omens of more failure to come.

Failure could help you face your fears.

We all know what it feels like to fail. If we set a goal and don’t achieve it, we feel sad, embarrassed, dejected and discouraged. We may even feel paralyzed by the loss or try to convince ourselves that the goal isn’t worth achieving.

But research on resilience suggests that grit and perseverance in the face of obstacles may be just as strong a predictor of success as intelligence, and that the most successful people are those who pursue their goals with stamina. Related research on a growth mindset similarly claims that children who believe intelligence is not solely innate and can be developed tend to succeed more in class. 

In both cases, a person’s approach to mistakes and failure is a crucial part of how these traits play out in the real world. If one has a growth mindset, hardships are an opportunity to learn. If one is resilient, mistakes and failures are lessons that can be improved upon. And this seems to be the case for elite athletes, too.

Lex Gillette, 31, is a highly decorated long jumper who will represent the U.S. in this year’s Paralympics. He’s won a silver medal in each of the three past Paralympic events in which he’s competed, and won gold in the 2013 and 2015 IPC Athletics World Championships. He’s also completely blind, having lost his eyesight around 8 years old. He’s no stranger to obstacles, which is perhaps why believes so strongly that the best athletes build from their failures.

“Failing at something is essential, in my eyes,” Gillette said at a recent event sponsored by 24 Hour Fitness gyms, for which he helped design a “Team USA Bootcamp” program. “You go through some sort of hardship or something, and it helps catapult you to a higher level.”

Case in point: last year’s IPC Athletics World Championships. In order to sprint hundreds of feet and catapult himself into a pit of sand, Gillette first walks with his coach and guide around the area and the boundaries of the sand pit, to give him a chance to mentally visualize the space. It almost always works, but for some reason that year in Doha, it just didn’t. Instead of landing in the middle of the sand pit like he usually does, Gillette landed, hard, on one of the concrete sides.

“For me I would consider that a moment of failure,” Gillette recalled. “I was definitely confused because it’s something that doesn’t happen to me often.”

“But it was one of those things where I told myself that I’ve had a number of failures in my life, and I’ve been able to tap into that inner strength in order to come back and be resilient,” he continued.

He did so with flying colors. Just 15 minutes later,  Gillette achieved his best jump at the competition, and he ended up taking the gold.

“I can’t see anything, but it doesn’t scare me at all,” he said. “I have this vision of me going to the Paralympics and winning the gold. And I see those [failures] as stepping stones and things that I’ve had to do to get to my destination.”

Michelle Segar, a motivation scientist and director of the Sport, Health, and Activity Research and Police Center at the University of Michigan, noted that Gillette’s story may be an example of an athlete facing his worst fear: landing on the side of the sand pit instead of in it. Indeed, in describing what happened, Gillette said that landing on the concrete might have given doubters a reason to believe that visually impaired people can’t excel at the long jump, a high-velocity event that requires athletes to hit two targets: the jumping board and the sand pit.

But once that fear actually came true, Gillette may have been unburdened by the fear and anxiety he normally has about his events, Segar guessed.

“Research shows that when people are in an achievement mindset, it can create stress, which really detracts from focus,” she said. “Once you don’t have that fear over your head anymore, then you can really focus.” 

Failure can fuel motivation.

A qualitative 2015 study interviewed 10 Olympic gold medalists across a variety of sports about setbacks like repeatedly failing to be selected for a team, serious injury and even the death of a family member. It found that these elite athletes considered the failures as essential factors that contributed directly to winning their gold medals.

“Interestingly, the majority of participants stated that if they had not underperformed at a previous Olympics, they would not have won their gold medals,” the researchers wrote in their study. They hypothesized that learning from previous failure happened in two ways: the athletes focused on why they were feeling distressing emotions, not the emotions themselves, and they also distanced themselves psychologically from the negative experience.

“Both of these mental processes enabled a ‘cool’ reflective processing of negative emotions whereby individuals could make sense of their experience without reactivating excessive ‘hot’ negative affect,” they concluded.  

Cortney Jordan, 25, can certainly relate. Jordan, a Paralympic swimmer who was born with cerebral palsy, claims to not “believe” in failure. But it also has a special place in her heart, because it helped her win her only gold Paralympic medal so far — the 50 meter freestyle in Beijing in 2008.

After placing fourth in the 100 meter backstroke in Beijing and ninth in the 50 meter butterfly, Jordan was dejected. She had missed medaling in backstroke by three one-hundredths of a second. And placing ninth in the 50 meter butterfly meant she didn’t even qualify for the final swim in that event.

But the next day, she swam the 50 meter freestyle race and won gold. She said she owed the medal to her two losses from the day before.

“I was so motivated by my failure that I was able to use it to fuel my desire to win,” she recalled.

“Failure is a perception, and it’s not permanent,” she continued. “Every time I haven’t achieved a goal I’ve set out to do, I just kind of use that as an opportunity to think about what went wrong and use it to propel myself toward success and the future.”

Mark Aoyagi, a director of sport and performance psychology at the University of Denver who specializes in working with professional and Olympic athletes, works with his clients to reframe failure in the same way that Jordan does.

“We actually do a lot of work around reconceptualizing failure: investing in your sport, putting yourself out there in competition and giving it your all is necessary for growth and development,” he said. “Thus, if you do this process and happen to not get the results, that is not failure ― that is learning.”

According to this definition of “failure,” the only way to truly fail would be to not do anything at all — whether it be fail to properly prepare, fail to put it all out there on competition day or fail to learn from past experiences, he said.

“[Failure] has nothing to do with whether or not you happen to get the result you are looking for on a particular day,” Aoyagi concluded. “ Use that information to go back and practice and improve and put it on the line again in the next competition.”

Failure is what you make of it.

Examples of failure that lead to even greater heights are exciting and easily understood when it comes to the world of athletics. But these ideas have resonance in science, business, education and other arenas as well.

Famous examples of mistakes and initial failures that led to breakthroughs include the invention of penicillin, which Sir Alexander Fleming discovered in a discarded lab dish from an old experiment, and the development of the pacemaker, which Wilson Greatbatch developed when trying to make a heart rhythm recording device. 

“There is often the notion that ‘failure’ (as defined by not getting the promotion, not getting into your top school, etc.) means you ‘don’t have what it takes’ to be successful in whatever arena the failure occurred,” Aoyagi said.

But what this conception of failure misses is that mistakes or missteps are what you make of them.

“Failure and success are quite relative, and what seems to be a failure in the short run can often lead to success,” he concluded. “Moreover, it is often an essential ingredient to success, as these [Paralympians] talked about.”

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

John Oliver is steamed.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump recently reached a new low when he attacked Gold Star parents Khizr and Ghazala Khan, the host of HBO’s “Last Week Tonight” said on Sunday.

(Note: strong language below and in the clip above.)

The couple lost a son in Iraq and spoke out against Trump during the Democratic National Convention last week. In response, Trump insulted the family and implied that Ghazala Khan wasn’t even allowed to speak.

“She chose not to speak because she gets too upset when she sees images of her dead son’s face, you fucking asshole,” Oliver said.  

During an ABC News interview, Trump was asked to name some of the sacrifices he has made. He ticked off a list of his own accomplishments. That left Oliver, the husband of an Iraq War veteran, fuming. 

“They are half-truths from a self-serving half-man who has somehow convinced half the country that sacrifice is the same thing as success,” Oliver said, adding: 

“Honestly, the main takeaway from these two weeks is that, incredibly, we may be on the brink of electing such a damaged, sociopathic narcissist, that the simple presidential duty of comforting the families of fallen soldiers may actually be beyond his capabilities ― and I genuinely did not think that was a part of the job that someone could be bad at.”

See Oliver’s recap of the Democratic National Convention and his full takedown of Trump in the clip above. 

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

Zucchini overwhelms us in the summer months. After grilling it a few times while it’s in season, we’re ready for new ways to prepare this summer squash. Zucchini bread is always a good choice. Zucchini pickles are a revelation. And then there’s zucchini pizza. All we can say is yum. 

Zucchini pizza is a nice way to make one of our favorite foods a little healthier and gluten free, because zucchini replaces bread.  Plus, there’s still lots of gooey cheese and tiny pepperoni to make it taste delicious. Watch the video above to see how it’s done.

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Mornings can be rough, but one way to make them a little smoother is by starting your day with some peanut butter. The sticky spread is usually called on for lunch, paired with jelly in a sandwich, or for dessert alongside chocolate, but breakfast is where we really need this nut butter. It’s protein-packed and just the fuel we need to tackle the day ahead. 

We found 15 ways to sneak peanut butter into your morning meal. Some of them healthy (like smoothies and acai bowls) and some of them a little more indulgent (think French toast or jelly donuts) but all of them a great way to start the day.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.