Hana Schank and Elizabeth Wallace never would've guessed that they would write a book together. When they met in college as freshmen, Hana didn’t even think Liz was someone she was likely to be friends with (for reasons she can no longer remember). Through their sorority, they quickly became partners in crime, and even ended up living together for their senior year. Deep conversations spent philosophizing about the world took up much of their time—where talk about feminism, and discussion on what it meant to be a woman were common occurrences.

A superb duo comprised of bachelor degrees in American culture, nonfiction writing, journalism, and women’s studies, it’s no surprise that Hana and Liz found themselves contemplating how women’s lives have transformed significantly over the past 60 years. They originally envisioned a book that focused on the concept of a "flex life", but the whole thing fell through. They knew that the material they gathered was still something important to get out to the world, but they weren’t entirely sure how to pull it off.

Hana and Liz wrote The Ambition Decisions with the intent to guide women of all ages to find their purpose and passion—in work and in life. They certainly have their fingers on the pulse of what's what, so keep reading to soak in their knowledge:

On Bringing an Idea to Fruition

Hana: Liz and I were both having a mid-life crisis of sorts—trying to figure out how we felt about where we were in our careers, our marriages, our parenting, and where we wanted to go next. And probably the strongest driver was this feeling that everything was so much harder than we’d ever anticipated it being. So we wanted to know if it was just us—like if we were just totally incapable of leading satisfying, happy lives, or if other people were struggling as well. That was the impetus to start interviewing.

On the Interviews Themselves

I think the project would have died off if our early interviews hadn’t been so illuminating and compelling. It was almost like a drug. We felt a very strong pull to keep doing them; as we heard one person’s story it would just make us want to hear the next person’s. So that was why we kept going.

A few people were less emotionally honest than others, particularly about setbacks in their personal or work lives. As journalists, we’re like, "Ask me anything! I’ll tell you all about my uterine evolution and my marital shortcomings and all of my career self-doubt", but we realized that not everyone is like that—[and] that can make a very personal interview more challenging. Also, we, of course, wanted to interview more women—a larger, more diverse group than just those who graduated along with us from Northwestern, but we started with this group because we imagined it was a yes, limited, but also finite, and therefore, possible, group to complete interviewing in our lifetimes.

On What Surprised Them

Liz: That 100 percent of our subjects who have children make the pediatrician appointments! And that our friends found turning 40 not to be a dead end morass of gray hair and wrinkles, but a time of renaissance, of new opportunity, of excitement—a time to say F it, I’m getting a tattoo or a new job or a divorce, and that that will be OK.

On What’s Missing From Society’s Conversations About Women

Hana: One of the reasons we wanted to write this book was to bring to light a lot of the things women struggle with that we don’t really talk about. So our hope is that the book will be a starting point for bringing these struggles out into the open. We hear vague hand-wavy things about how hard work-life balance is, but by talking about the details behind those stories we’re giving people the tools to change things.

Women need to sit down with their partners and clearly articulate who does what in the household. They need to talk about money with their bosses and their friends and their colleagues. And finally, men need to be a part of these conversations. They can’t just be bitch sessions between women. If we want to achieve true equality in our society, we need to include everyone in the conversation.

On Shifting Perspectives

Liz: Writing this book made both of us realize that the choices we have made over the last 25 years are OK—more than OK. That we weren’t alone in the challenges of how to see our ambitions to their fruition, and that we should all give ourselves permission to challenge the things we think can’t be challenged in the institutional setups of our lives.

On Advice for the Less Ambitious

Hana: One of our big findings is that career ambition can wax and wane over the course of a lifetime. The corollary to that is that ambition isn’t always something that can be neatly contained in a box labeled “career.” Some years you may feel like you want to go for the corner office, but other years you may decide that you want to direct your ambition into training for a marathon or brewing your own beer or hiking or making beautiful lunches for your kids.

That doesn’t make you not ambitious, it just makes you a person who has discovered that there are other ways to channel ambition. So for someone who doesn’t feel career ambition burning at this very moment, don’t beat yourself up over it. Take a look at how you spend your time and you will probably find that you’re directing your ambition into other parts of your life. That may change later in life, it may not, but it’s not something to feel guilty about.

On What They've Learned

Both: Our biggest takeaway is that women have agency. Women who wanted to change up their lives typically found ways to do just that. It often meant rearranging a lot of the pieces of their lives, especially rearranging how the division of labor worked in their households, but they did it.

On Their Favorite Things About Each Other

Liz: Oh Lord, how much space do we have? Oh, it’s online, it doesn’t matter! [Hana's] work ethic and commitment to excellence in her writing and other professions. Her sense of humor, which is as dry as my gin martinis. Her refusal to adhere to compulsory bullshit niceness. Her candor, which is sometimes hard to hear, and usually very helpful. The way she can consume and then synthesize information in her brain and come to an analytical solution in about 8 minutes. Her loyalty and protective instinct as a friend (and a mother). She makes me want to be a better [pick any noun identity identifier and it probably fits], and in more than one category, she’s helped me achieve it.

Hana: Where do I start? I love that Liz can walk into a room full of strangers and leave with ten new friends, that she is immediately fascinated by people’s lives, that she gets really, really excited by the most seemingly mundane things, that she sees the best in everyone. When she asks how you are you know that she really means it, she’s not just being polite. And I love that she challenges me to think harder. We’ve spent endless hours dissecting everything from Marxist feminism to the clothing selection at Century 21. Not a lot of people will find those details interesting enough to take up an entire afternoon, but together we can take any topic and turn it into a dissertation.

On What's Next

Both: We’re still working on that one! We’re interested in exploring how women’s unpaid labor makes the world go round. That’s something we’ve both personally experienced, and we’d like to dig into it a bit more. And we’re also looking at other ways to share the important things we learned in researching this book with women. We feel really passionate about these findings and want as many people as possible to benefit from them.