Whitney Johnson left a seven figure Wall Street job in an effort to help women dream. Her BLOG, Dare to Dream, states: “women in the U.S. may be placated, even pampered, but because we aren’t dreaming, we are also desperate and depressed.” Whitney hopes to inspire other women to dream as big as she has. With a degree in music from Brigham Young University, Whitney moved, with her husband, to New York City, where she was promptly told she would be a good secretary. Whitney took the opportunity, but went back to school for accounting, and was soon placed on the administrative track on Wall Street.

Ten years later Whitney left Wall Street ranked among the best investors in the world. “Every time you make a big decision,” says Whitney, “there’s a push and a pull.” The push, she says, was reaching the ceiling of accomplishment in investing. The pull was turning forty, which she calls a “mid-life opportunity.”
Now, she counts blogging, publishing and managing a hedge fund among her pursuits. Organize Magizine, of which she is an investor and member of the advisory board, has a circulation of 100,000, and is available in many major retail outlets. Whitney’s advice for those pursuing their dreams is to simply “go out and try. Don’t be afraid. You have to be willing to take risks to dream.”

Whitney’s BLOG is found at: www.daretodream.typepad.com

It was time for Anita Malik to do a gut check. After another meeting with her newspaper employer in which her ideas were shook off a shoulder, Anita sat at her desk and looked at her gifts.

She had three college degrees, including the masters in journalism she had gone back to get at USC, along with finance and information technology degrees she had received at Arizona State. She had a desire to write about the stuff that she wanted to write about, but her thoughtful ideas were being neglected at meetings like the one that transpired a few moments ago.

Anita looked at her heritage. As an Indian-American woman, Anita had grown up in a gap between the Eastern Asian culture and American understanding. She began to think about that gap, and how she could bridge it.

Soon thereafter, the idea for East West Magazine was born. Anita decided that she would create an Asian-American magazine that tackles controversial issues while also discussing the newest beauty trends…but all in her own style.

She created a website to see if there was a market for her idea. While still working at her newspaper employer, she wrote content that addressed her needs and others like her. She began to watch as her site began to gain popularity. After getting a substantial amount of visitors to her site, she decided that it was time to transition her words to print.

Today East West Magazine thrives in a time where print media struggles. Anita continues to get recognition for her passion in publishing, recently named to Folio’s 40 list.

What I took away:

If you look at your gifts and gaps in the marketplace, you can find your niche and create something profitable and useful to people previously suffering from that gap.

Brandyn was our tour guide for a day which would prove to be the most eventful and memorable experience of our whole trip. Brandyn introduced us to a variety of people and took us to the Nike basketball gym, the Jordan building, and the infamous Nike Kitchen (not the place where you cook food, but the place where they make Nike shoes from scratch). We also saw Lebron James walking the Nike campus and even got to shop at the Nike employee store where everything was 50% with no sales tax, thanks to Oregon state tax law.

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Samantha Harris is from Orlando, Florida. She was discovered by Playboy while working as a Hawaiian Tropics model. She is now trying to pose for Playboy. We were fortunate enough to catch up with her during a lunch break.

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Stephen Wayda started off his career as a writer, and is ending his career as possibly one of the luckiest men in the world. He is a Playboy photographer, and not just any photographer. Stephen has the most published photographs in Playboy magazines and more of his shots have made the cover than any other Playboy photographer. Stephen has been with Playboy for over twenty years, and has photographed the likes of Pamela Anderson, Stacy Dash, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, among many others.

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