Brielle Lubin on why lucky isn't random

What this conversation is about

Teens UnEdited exists for a reason Glenn Llopis states plainly at the start of its first webinar:

"We help teenagers claim who they are before anyone edits it out of them." — Glenn Llopis · 00:09:19

After nearly twenty years helping adults reclaim identities they traded for their jobs, Glenn realized almost all of them could point to where the editing began, and it was rarely at work. It started at home, at school, with a counselor, a coach or an application. The old advice to check every box, he argues, produced young people who were merely capable enough to qualify:

"yesterday's advice taught young people to become capable enough to qualify." — Glenn Llopis · 00:10:56

Co-hosted with Jan Kerchner, founder of the educational consultancy The College Blueprint, the session works through the four practices of Lucky Isn’t Random, the first book in Act One, Agency, of the Unmistakably You Method, Glenn’s translation of Leadership in the Age of Personalization for teenagers: see wider; start small, start now; grow what’s working; and share the win. The guest is Brielle Lubin, 21, a philosophy student at New York University whom Glenn has known since she was born. At fourteen she spoke to a room of senior executives at one of Glenn’s summits. In high school, Glenn recounts, a counselor urged her to rewrite her college essay around a hardship she had never experienced, because that was the story the counselor thought would sell.

See wider: open the door to yourself

The first practice starts from a simple claim:

"Openings almost never announce themselves." — Glenn Llopis · 00:13:54

They arrive looking small and skippable. But what you notice depends on what you have trained yourself not to see. Lubin describes being in high school while coming to understand herself as queer and working out her gender identity, and feeling pressure, socially and at a competitive college-prep school, to keep her distance from the queer classmates most like her. She was told, in effect, that it could count against her with colleges. When she reconnected with one of them years later, the friend drew her back into music and changed the direction she is heading now. Her lesson:

"being open to yourself opens the other doors around you. All these people around you can be open doors to you when you're an open door to yourself." — Brielle Lubin · 00:17:28

Start small, and stop curating

The second practice is about moving before doubt or perfection closes the window. Glenn’s book suggests making the smallest real move within 72 hours of spotting something worth pursuing. Lubin names what gets in the way for her generation: a life treated like a Pinterest board, where activities, friendships and even family experiences are funneled toward one image.

"everything is curated for this one image of who you are but then ends up not actually being who you are." — Brielle Lubin · 00:24:53

She connects it directly to the fear her peers have about AI:

"Of course, we're going to be easily replaced because we are just emulating a formula of a person" — Brielle Lubin · 00:27:09

Her own turning point came in her first semester of college. She had played classical piano for more than a decade, and it had become her identity:

"I never asked myself, you know, am I doing this for me or am I doing this for something else?" — Brielle Lubin · 00:29:04

Grow what’s working

The third practice, Glenn says, is the one people get backwards: they pour energy into the eight things that failed instead of the two that worked, and they forget that quitting is a skill too. Lubin stopped playing for a while and spent a year feeling lost. Music came back in a new form, through experimental and electronic music, after a friend told her she was the best pianist he had heard and she realized an audience could be listening for joy rather than waiting for her to fail. Glenn’s point is that the skill never left her; it grew sideways.

Asked what she would tell a fifteen-year-old who is good at something but no longer enjoys it, she gave the answer at the top of this page, and explained why it matters:

"we're told to whittle ourselves down and to make ourselves smaller for other people." — Brielle Lubin · 00:41:30

Share the win, and don’t write their story

The fourth practice is sharing credit, and Glenn is careful to say the performed version fails:

"we're not exhausted from working too hard. We're exhausted because we're performing so much." — Glenn Llopis · 00:43:48

Lubin’s example is her senior thesis film. When no classmate wanted to help, she called a young filmmaker she had barely spoken to at a summer camp, who understood the vision and made it better. The screening led to work on film sets, and Lubin credits the collaborator for it. Jan Kerchner pointed out that the break was not a miracle: Lubin created it by taking the risk.

For the adults in the room, Lubin was direct. To parents, ask the question her own parents asked:

"Ask them, "What are you doing this for?"" — Brielle Lubin · 00:56:15

To counselors:

"stop writing the student story." — Brielle Lubin · 00:56:27

To educators, she described the one teacher who mattered most:

"They saw me. They saw me for who I am." — Brielle Lubin · 00:57:24

And to a fifteen-year-old being told right now to shrink:

"it is painful, okay, to have to recover from whittling yourself down, making yourself smaller." — Brielle Lubin · 00:58:22

It is not something you have to go through, she added. Glenn closed on why this matters now:

"There is a lot of power in AI but it's dangerous if you don't know who you are." — Glenn Llopis · 01:03:20