Career Advice: 7 Things Tory Burch Wants You to Know About Ambition

Encourage she has. Through the Tory Burch Foundation, the designer started the Embrace Ambition summit last year to connect female entrepreneurs for professional development and personal growth in an honest and meaningful way. Now in its second year, the event has grown beyond a one-day gathering in New York City into a weeklong series in Tory Burch stores across the country. (It’s free to attend, but you have to apply for a ticket. “They had to write an essay about why they should come,” Burch says. “In the first 24 hours, we had 1,200 applicants with 1,200 essays that were heart-wrenching and beautiful and inspiring.”) The series kicks off in Philadelphia, but if you can’t make it in person, you can catch the conversation on a live stream. (There are also guidebooks, articles, and more to keep the conversation going all year.)

Founding a company and being a creative director, CEO, philanthropist, mentor, and mother doesn’t come without its bumps in the road. “I’ve been through a fair amount in 14 years,” she says. “Being a very private person, going through things in a very public way is not always easy. Protecting my family, building a business, [running a] business in 2008, when markets changed overnight, bringing a team along that believes in you—it’s not always easy.” But harnessing her ambition made things less difficult. Soak up some of her wisdom here.

Throw out any preconceptions about the word ambition. “In retrospect, I’ve always been a bit ambitious in various ways,” says Burch. But she never really thought of herself that way until she was called "ambitious" by The New York Times. “I remember the exact moment when [the journalist] said, ‘Wow, you’re ambitious.’ And I was like, ‘Wow, that’s such a rude thing to say.’ It was the first article written on our company, and it seemed like a negative,” she recalls. A friend helped change her thinking. “She called and said, ‘You know, I love the article, but you shied away from the word ambition.’ I was a bit taken aback. But I realized that she was absolutely right. It really struck a chord and really set the trajectory for the next years to come on how I felt about the word, what it meant to me, what I felt it should mean.” The change in how people think of the word may not happen overnight; it can be a process, as it was for Burch. “Over time I made this shift of, when someone called me ambitious, I took it as a compliment,” she says. “I redefined my relationship with the word. It’s still something that I think about to this day, and I describe myself as ambitious. I’m proud of that.”

Your personal ambition might not be obvious—but that shouldn’t stop you from trying to find it. “I have always been ambitious—starting a company is not for the unambitious—but it has manifested in different ways throughout my life,” Burch says. “I started a sorority as a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania. I became an entrepreneur before entrepreneurship was talked about. And of course, being a mom was one of my greatest ambitions. Identifying and prioritizing your ambitions can be tricky. Mine came at a crossroads when I found out I was pregnant with my third son. I had just been offered the position as president of a big fashion company, but I knew I couldn’t take the job and be the kind of mom I wanted to be to three boys under the age of four.” After a lot of thinking, she decided to jump. “It was one of the toughest decisions I’ve ever had to make,” she says. “When I left, I had no idea that I would begin conceptualizing our company. Taking a step back gave me a new perspective, and a new ambition began to emerge. Ambitions evolve with time.”