Who retires from a career because of burnout, then, in the same year, sells the home she lived in for 30 years (talk about purging), moves to a different city where she knows no one, starts a company, hosts a 100-person leadership event, launches a real estate school, works out 90 minutes a day, keeps date night with her husband, and writes a book about how not to burn out?

Hi, I’m Robyne Roveccio. Nice to meet you.

I can’t help it. I’m driven. It started the day I left home at 16 with fifty cents in my pocket and the clothes on my back. That day wired me with a survive-or-starve mentality I’ve never completely shaken.

Later, I called it ambition: working two jobs and going to college so I could have a stable income, retirement, and health insurance. Good plan.

Now? From the outside, it probably looks like lunacy.

I once asked Jena, the owner of Blush Cactus—the branding and website agency I was working with—whether all their clients took almost a year to launch a website. I immediately regretted asking, because I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear the answer. We went through more versions than I’d like to admit, and through every one of them, Jena kept me in my lane. She was the bumpers that kept my bowling ball out of the gutter and rolling toward the pins.

I had a lot of pins.

Jena, bless her, told me I was a visionary. I’m fairly sure she had a different word in mind. But I’m going with visionary, mostly because it sounds pretty cool.

Am I okay?

It’s a fair question, and the honest answer is yes. That headline isn’t a typo. This has been the busiest year of my life. But it’s also been the most sustainable. Stick with me, because both of those things are true.

I’ve carried this vision for years, long before this website or the book existed. I knew I was meant to do something that mattered for women, but as a real estate agent, I couldn’t build a thriving business and pursue a calling at the same time. Something had to give.

So I chose wealth over worth.

The price of the Ring

When you leave home with fifty cents and then start cashing ridiculous commission checks, money starts to feel like the Ring in The Lord of the Rings. It’s precious. It’s powerful. And it quietly leads you somewhere dark.

I paid for that choice. I was horrible at relationships. I couldn’t relax, even as I lay on the beaches of Turks and Caicos, serenity staring me in the face.

Don’t get me wrong. I love building wealth and all the things it allowed me to do. It made my life and other people’s lives easier. But I didn’t need easy. I needed meaning. Wealth means nothing when your internal bank account is struggling.

That internal account didn’t care how many deals I closed. It kept asking questions I couldn’t answer before I even knew the word existential: What will I leave behind? What’s my legacy? What meaningful thing will I have done on this planet?

But the same conditioning that fueled my financial ambition kept me from acting on those questions.

I was the black sheep of the family. The skunk, as my mom would put it. I didn’t believe someone like me could create something meaningful. I wasn’t Eleanor Roosevelt, who led the committee that wrote the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I wasn’t Marie Curie, who discovered two new elements and won two Nobel Prizes. I was a girl who left home with fifty cents.

What I didn’t understand back then was that burnout isn’t only about working too much. Christina Maslach and Michael Leiter, the researchers who essentially wrote the book on burnout, identified a values mismatch as a major driver: the gap between how you spend your days and what matters most to you. I was living in that gap.

Learning to stand on it

After decades of proving my worth to everyone but myself, I finally learned how to stand on it. I’m a slow learner.

Then the math got simple.

If I could go from homeless to six figures, I could build a business.

If I could go from high school dropout to doctorate, I could write a book.

If I could have an idea, I could change the world.

And if I could do it, I could teach other women to do it, too.

That survive-or-starve drive never fully left me. The difference is that now it’s pointed at something that matters. My days finally match my worth, and that alignment is why this pace energizes me instead of crushing me.

What I want for you

I want you to claim what you want for yourself without apologizing for it.

I want you to say no more often, and to mean it wholeheartedly when you say yes.

I want you to understand yourself so deeply that people who don’t understand you can’t move you.

I want you to start the business, fail spectacularly, laugh about it a year later, and then launch the next one smarter.

I want you to surround yourself with a circle of people who see all of you, cheer loudly for you, and tell you the truth.

It’s a worth issue.

Why this matters to me

Remember those existential questions I couldn’t answer? Here’s my answer.

I may never meet most of the women who read this, and I may never see how any of it turns out. That’s okay. If my work helps even a few women live longer, with more meaning, then my life meant something.

Because when a woman knows her worth, she teaches it without even trying. Her children, her nieces, her nephews, her grandchildren are watching. They learn what worth looks like from her, not from how many likes they collect.

What’s next

This blog is where I’ll share the stories behind the research: the science translated into plain English, honest lessons from my own life, and the occasional terrible joke.

And tell me in the comments: What’s on your plate this year that you swear is fine?

And now, as promised, a terrible joke:

What’s a realtor’s favorite kind of music?

House.

You’re welcome. See you next time.