Tiffany Moon - Anesthesiologist & Author | A Doctor's Prescription for Joy & Fulfillment

Heart of my drive to succeed comes from knowing what it's like to be on the bottom. As long as you're working for someone else, you're just switching your time for money. Dr. Tiffany Moon is redefining success by blending science, style, and substance. As a board-certified anesthesiologist and associate professor, she excels in medicine. Beyond the hospital, she's an entrepreneur, founding Aromas Thesia Candles, three moons wine, and the led her summit, a women's leadership conference. You broke out of this good Asian daughter script. How did you break out of it? The breakaway came at the age of 15. Because of my academic achievement, I was selected to go to this early college entrance program. That was my break. How do you define joy? I would define joy as being wholly present, not worrying about the future, just having a feeling of not just happiness, but being content. Through her memoir, joy prescriptions in her public presence, Dr. Moon champions authenticity, encouraging others to embrace their multifaceted identities and pursue purpose-driven lives. When you're open to it, life presents so many opportunities to you if you're just receptive. Be a good person. So at the end of the day, if you're a good person and you can go to sleep at night knowing that you did the best you could, everything else will fall into place. Let's talk about this. So you arrived in America at the age six, not speaking any English. So how did that shape your drive for perfection, for drive for trying to do more, to be more, to build an incredible career? Those early days, what was that inflection point moment that pushed you? Back then, I don't even think I was trying to do more, push more, be more. I was just in survival mode, because you think about it. Like six-year-old little Chinese girl, I get put on this plane. I landed JFK. I meet my parents whom I haven't seen in three years, so I don't know these people. There's no FaceTime. It's like 1989. And it was literally just survival. I mean, I started first grade in the middle of the school year. It wasn't a great neighborhood. I got called all the names, all the Ching Chong things, playground, bullying. I mean, kids are mean. It's first grade. So it was not great. And I think part of my drive to succeed comes from knowing what it's like to be on the bottom, and watching my parents struggle, and watching my mom have to clip coupons so that our groceries could last the whole week. And just thinking, when I grow up, I want to be so successful that I never have to worry about putting groceries on the table for my kids. Your parents worked hard, though. They worked very hard. They worked their ruts off. Yeah. So when you look at like hard work, it doesn't always equate to success. It's true. So what do you think drove you to think differently about just a hard work? Because a lot of people, they just try and emulate what their parents do, and they emulate just, I want to put more hours in. Eventually, I'll make it. But you sort of operate a little bit differently. I see that anyways. I see you. You're very strategic. You look for opportunities for leverage. You look for opportunities to have like outsized exponential results. You've done that again and again and again. So what sort of shaped your, I guess, your worldview around how you work? I think I just have an entrepreneurial spirit. I think as long as you're working for someone else, and it's just a JOB and you're just switching your time for money. And I did that. I did that for over 10 years, trading my time for money, clocking in at the hospital, putting people to sleep, taking care of patients. And it wasn't until I had children. And that was sort of like the straw that broke the camel's back. You know, that I'm like, wait a second. I can't take vacation days when my kids are off school because my PTO got denied. And if I don't go to work, I don't earn money. And I thought, well, this not good. I can't, you know what I mean? But you have that realization one day. And I'm like, I need to do something where I don't need to clock in every day in order to make money. And also what happens if I get hurt? I got a really bad car accident. I broke my wrist. I can't intubate with a broken wrist, you know what I mean? And it's just all these things started flooding with me. And I said, I got to figure out something else. It's like diversifying your portfolio. You can't all your money in one stock. I've had this conversation with a lot of people because I don't have kids yet, but like hopefully very soon. And I'm always stressed because I work so much now. I'm always on. And I'm like, okay, so then if I have kids, where do I find the time for them if you're always on? But a lot of my really good friends, people that I really look up to that are very successful. They keep telling me, well, when you have kids, you find time. You start prioritizing things. And actually, ironically, when you have kids, kind of like what you just mentioned, you start to realize what's important. So then you don't do all the other bullshit. Yep. You really like you're like, I can't afford to anymore. Right. Yeah. Everything becomes a is this better than being with my children right now. And if you already have a normal job, all this bullshitting weekend, three hour brunches, I used to go with my girlfriends, bottomless memoses, you know, I'd be on my like sixth memosa 2 p.m. on a Sunday, you know, and just sitting around, shooting the shit, gossiping. And yeah, that was fun. But after you have kids, your priorities really get aligned very quickly. You broke out of this good Asian daughter script. So what is the good Asian daughter script? And that's what I was alluding to before. Like I always find it interesting how your parents are such a big impression on you. But then also there's a point where you have to break out of their model of who you are, their version of who you are. So was their version of who you are, this good Asian daughter? What does that mean? And how did you break out of it? Or why? Oh, I was the perfect Asian daughter. I never talked back to my parents. I made straight A's. I always did the extra credit assignment. I was teacher's pet. I never got into any trouble. I never had a boyfriend. I helped with the dishes at home. I actually swept and vacuumed the floors on the weekends. I just like if you could have a model child that was just one level above robot, that was the kind of child that I was. I just I did everything my parents wanted me to because I felt so beholden to them that they had sacrificed their life in China to bring me to America so that I could have a better life. And they told me this. This was not insinuated. They said to me, if it were not for you, we would have just stayed in China. We came to America so that you could have the opportunity for a better life. And look at us. We don't know the language here. We speak with an accent. People make fun of us. We have lesser jobs here than we do in China. I mean, my dad was the manager of a factory in China that employed over 200 workers. So he was like, you know, head honcho like floor boss. And then here in America, you know, his his English skills are very poor. He speaks with a heavy accent. And he's a computer programmer. He actually came to America to study business management. But because his English was so bad, he changed his major to computer science so that he wouldn't have to talk to people. That's not fair for them to put that on you. But I didn't know that that wasn't fair. I internalized, you know, the words that they said. And to me, in my, you know, six-year-old, eight-year-old, 12-year-old mind, I was beholden to them. Wow, look at everything. Mommy and daddy sacrificed so that I could have a better life. I should be better. I should not make a B. I should help clean the dishes after dinner. I should vacuum the floor. I should never talk back. Like I just, I, I was in constant fear of disappointing my parents. My dad, especially, he is just very difficult to please would be putting it nicely. Talk to me about sort of early career separating a little bit from your parents, how that impacted you, how it impacted life decisions, any of that. Yeah, I think the thing, the next thing that my dad was really upset with was when I brought home a Korean boyfriend. I'm Chinese. So he's very strict. Yes. And Korean, you know, like Asians are the most racist against other Asians. Like Koreans, Japanese, Chinese, like to American people, it's all like, oh yeah, they're the same. They eat lots of rice, have strict parents, right? Like it's all the same. No, like Chinese people don't like Koreans in Japanese, Japanese people don't like anybody, but Japanese Koreans think they're at the top of the total. Everyone thinks they're at the top. It's crazy. It's crazy. And I don't understand where this comes from. But all I know is that when I brought home a Korean boyfriend to my Chinese dad, he was pissed. What age was this? This was 2324. Okay. It was the year I graduated from medical school that I met my now husband. And I was 23 when I graduated from medical school. So it must have been around that time. And it's not like I'm some like, you know, 16-year-old prom date. Like Daddy, this is, you know, Brad. I'm a freaking doctor. I'm 23 years old. I have an MD behind my name. And I'm like, Dad, I want to tell you something like I kind of been seeing this guy. And then they were super pissed because he had been previously married with two kids from that marriage and was a decade older than me. And my dad just lost it. You know, what do you think? Okay. So all these all these interactions with your family. And I think they cause like all these like little traumas. I think they I think they cause little traumas like carry through your life. You have to be super careful. If you if you don't address them, then it can impact everything and impact relationship with your husband with your with your wife with your kids. So I don't love that he keeps pushing you like your dad keeps pushing you farther and farther away. But you're not going to change your life. You're going to keep building your life regardless. But what's the point when you sort of reconcile those differences or in the meantime, when your dad pushes you away, how does that impact your relationship? How does that impact your career? Does it all career? Not so much because I'm doing exactly what he wanted me to do. You know, he wants to brag with all his friends that I'm a successful anesthesiologist. He's always pimping me out to his friends kids who want to go into medical school. So now I'm taking phone calls with like 18 year olds that want to know how to apply to go to medical school. And I'm like, don't you have a guidance counselor? Like, why are you calling me? And then all his friends like not long ago, his friend got diagnosed with liver cancer. So then he text me asking for a same day appointment with an oncologist that I know the week of Christmas. And I'm like, this is an unreasonable request father. And he's like, well, he's got cancer and you know, liver cancer grows quickly. And I was like, Oh, it does. I didn't know that. Thank you for educating me about cancer father. I didn't learn that in medical school. And he's like, you better call and get him an appointment. And I'm like, it's not, I don't even know this, this your friend. Why don't you call and get an appointment. So he always like leverages my relationships and expertise to help his friends, which I'm happy to do. But it comes with a side of like, you better do this for me. It's it's not what he's asking necessarily, but the way in which he does it, like I owe him something. So does that still go on to this day? Yeah, you know, I've done a lot. I keep asking you if you're if you fix the relationship, but it still sounds like it's not fixed. It's not fixed. And I just had lunch recently with my mother. And I kind of told her I said, you know, I went on a women's retreat not too long ago. And we did a lot of work on boundary setting, like boundaries is like a very, you know, in thing right now. And I was like, you know, why have no boundaries? Because they were never modeled to me as a child. My parents, they have no boundaries. They work all the time. And they don't have boundaries with each other. They don't have social boundaries. And I'm like, I'm really going to work this year on on setting some boundaries. And one of them is distancing myself from him a little bit. Because every time we interact, I leave the interaction feeling not good enough, pissed off, emotionally drained. And all those childhood traumas just flood me again. In spite of that, how do you find joy? How did you find joy? How did you overcome these traumas? How did you not let it impact your relationship with your husband and your your relationship with people in your life? You know, I think I'm good at compartmentalizing. You know, I'm able to put things in salads, which is also great for work because I work at a level one trauma hospital. I see people shoot and stab each other all the time. And you know, if if I wasn't able to compartmentalize that, I would probably come home and sobbing mess every day. So I think I've compartmentalized my relationship with my father and put it here so that it doesn't affect my relationship with my husband or with my mother even because she's still with him. And I have a close relationship with her. And I'll tell her things like, you know, it hurts my feelings when he says this or he's constantly comparing my twins. And I don't like it when he compares them in front of them that, you know, one runs faster than the other. And my mom will be like, Oh, you know how daddy is? And you know, she makes excuses for him or whatever. So I've decided to just put that relationship in a little bucket over here so that the fumes from it don't, you know, see through like carbon monoxide and poison everything else. You know, it's interesting, though, because so I think that that relationship, it turned you into like a high performance individual in everything in your life because that's sort of what was that was model. It was like work, work, work, work, work, work, right? So throughout sort of your life, you've realized a certain point that even high performance isn't always the best path forward. I think that now you have more balance in your life. I mean, there was one point where you were sleeping in your car between your shifts and you realized things like that weren't sustainable. So talk to me about sort of your attitude towards work, about high performance, about accomplishment because you were, you know, you're going to, you graduated med school at 24 and mostly for only finishing their undergrad. So obviously, like you keep pushing yourself, but there's a time when that doesn't serve you anymore. Yeah, that, that was a hard pill to swallow. So I moved to America when I was six years old, I learned English. I went to the early college entrance program when I was 15, graduated from Cornell when I was 19, graduated from medical school at the top of my class at the age of 23 and then proceeded on to the best anesthesia residency program in the country at UCSF. Then got married and had twins by the time I was 30. And so I just felt like my whole life, it's like these boxes had been, like a to-do list. And I was like, check, go to college early, check Ivy League, check, you know, and my mom was like, there's no way you're going to be able to get married and have kids by the time you're 30 and for whatever reason, you know, in the Chinese anti-folk lore, if you're not, that's the expiration date, you know, if you're not married by 30, it's like, oh, what's wrong with her? And then I got married and had twins. So I was like, clocked in right at 30. So I felt like I completed the checklist. Yeah. And then I sat down one day, and I was like, shit, I'm tired. Also, what am I doing? Like I've done everything the people told me to. But why do I feel unfulfilled? I have no creativity in my life. All I do is work. I have very little laughter in my life and very little joy. And at that time, I was like, what is joy? You know, there's happiness, there's joy. I'm like, I like shopping. That brings me joy. You know, but does it? Do your, do your material possessions bring me joy? You know, does this Birkin keep me warm at night? No, it does not. So that's when I had my midlife crisis, as my husband likes to call it. And I started going to therapy, listened to so many self-help podcasts. I have a Kindle library full of self-help books. Like if you name a top self-help happiness book, I have it in my Kindle library. And what I kind of figured out is that like, you can't live life by a checklist. And then joy is not like a destination. It's not like something you're going to get to. Like the joy is in the journey. 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So you're going to join over 10,000 global companies like Atlassian, Korra, and Factory, who use Vanta to manage risk and prove security in real time. And don't miss this. For a limited time only, my listeners can get a thousand dollars off Vanta. That's real money back in your pocket. Visit Vanta.com slash Scott right now before the software expires. That is V-A-N-T-A.com slash Scott. So, so then what you don't want to do though in that case is have a midlife crisis. Then like swing the whole lot of the grass. That's also not good. People do that. I know people do. That's what real housewives came in. That's what Bravo TV knocked on my dorm. Was like, are you having a midlife crisis? We would like to document that. So, I mean, let's talk about how you find it. Because at this point you realize that life's good haven't particularly found how to live life with joy. You don't want to go to the other end of the spectrum as much as Bravo would love you to go to the other end of the spectrum. So what's your first version of finding joy? Like there's a lot of high performing people that listen to this show that I think do exactly what you do. And they don't focus on living day by day. They focus on some future outcome that never comes. And they realize that their whole life. They're trying to keep up with some. They ironically, they achieve what they wanted to achieve two years ago. Then it doesn't even, it doesn't even in their mind, they don't even realize that where they are now would have been a dream for them two, three years ago. And they've already set future goals. And then now they're upset that they haven't hit those future goals. And this is a very classic. I mean, I know, I know you're entrepreneurial at the time you were a doctor, but it's a very classic entrepreneur problem, high performing person problem. Okay, so what are the steps we can talk about real housewives if you want and what that meant for you and then why you even did it. But what were the steps to find joy? I don't think real housewives was you finding joy. I think there's a lot. No, it wasn't. But it actually pushed me to do the introspection to find joy because there's nothing like going on a reality TV show to make you take a hard look at yourself. You have any problems that reality TV show is going to expose them. That's why people say there's this curse from reality TV that you're going to get a divorce. There's no reality TV curse of divorce. It means you already had cracks in your marriage. And then the camera started rolling in it magnifies. It's whatever problems you had, alcoholism, cracks in your marriage, you know, fragile friendships. It's just magnifies that. There's a couple that expose their business problems too. Oh yeah, and they're unpaid taxes. I'm like, what the hell were you thinking going on a reality TV show when you have, you know, some shady business dealings unpaid taxes? Like, did you think we weren't going to find out? This is like, this is like the IRS now has like a magnifying glass on your whole life. Right. Yeah. No, it's wild to me. Why do you do that? Is it like stupidity? I think it's narcissism or narcissism. Yeah. I think it's narcissism that like you're so high that you like, it won't happen to me. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. So I am grateful to Bravo TV because it really made me take a good hard look at my life. And I was like, God, what am I doing? First of all, why am I trying to impress these women who I don't even like, but like I want so badly for them to accept me and be a cool girl because I've never ever been the cool girl ever in my life. I know it must be hard for you to imagine, but I'm like, oh, my God, I'm finally sitting at the cool girl's table. I need to like do shots with them and be crude and crass and all that I was just trying so hard to fit in on the show. Like when I watch early episodes of Real Housewives now, it's so cringe to me because I was just trying so hard to be liked and accepted by people whom I didn't even like. It's it's so wild to me that everybody does everybody. Everybody. This is what people live on Instagram for. Oh my God. I mean, we're in Miami right now. You see it every city. The filter. Miami. It's wild. It's wild. I know people that like their whole lifestyle is rented. Everything's rented. Their whole life saw. I saw this. I saw this real where it was like four guys lived in a condo and they guess they they together pooled their money to rent at a Lamborghini and they all they split up the days of the week that they could use it like rent rent share a Lambo. That's a new one. Yeah. So this is an interesting city. Everybody is trying to show off all the time. Different than like I find like a New York where money's quiet. Yes, wealth whispers. Yes, yes. But this is the epitome. It's like Miami. Listen, I do love this city, but I find that Miami is like if Instagram was a city. It would be my it would be Miami. Complete with plastic surgery on the rented Lamborghini. So this is what everybody deals with all the time. You just dealt with it on a show for the world to watch. But everybody has these insecurities. Yeah, you're right. So this show really it made me examine my work life balance because I was working like 60 hours a week. Even while filming I was working full time as an academic anesthesiologist, you know, and then filming on nights and weekends. I barely saw my kids or husband, but filming is only 12 weeks. And I was like, you know what? I can do anything for 12 weeks, right? Like it's not that long. So really, it made me finally get the balls to ask my boss if I could go part time at work, which I did. And it freed up some time for me to explore some philanthropy that I wanted to do. And it actually freed up enough time and energy that I finally started working on my book in 2022 is when I first started working on joy prescriptions. Now it's coming out in 2025. Yeah. That's how long it took. It's a lot. It's a lot to work on a book, by the way, because I know a lot of authors. It's not easy. But I think that it's interesting that you started working on the, you know, joy prescriptions, the prescription for having joy in your life when at that moment you were trying to find it yourself, which I think is actually the most compelling content when you are literally quite literally documenting the journey that you're on. So you working 60 hours a week forced you to reevaluate your life. Do you even know what you wanted out of real housewives versus what you got? I wanted to make new friends and have fun. And this was when I agreed to join it, there was no such thing as the pandemic yet. And so I thought that Bravo was going to pay for us to go on a cast trip. The year before they had gone to Thailand, the year before maybe Denmark or something like that. And I love traveling. And I love, you know, meeting new people and eating new foods. So I was like, well, Bravo wants to pay for me to go on a vacation. Who am I to say no? You know, my cast trip mid pandemic was to Oklahoma. I was like, this is not what I signed up for. Like get me the hell out of here. It wasn't it was not at all. And it sounds so naive now. But I honestly thought that I would go on the show and make new friends and go to parties. And it would be fabulous. And I just, it sounds so naive now. What is the first sort of thought or idea around joy? Like, where how did you want to structure life? So there's joy. How do you define joy? Let's start there. I would define joy as being wholly present, not worrying about the future. And just having a feeling of not just happiness, but being content and not wanting for anything, longing for any, like I have everything I need right now. I feel whole that when I feel joy, like that's how I feel. That's tough. That's very tough. It's very tough. Yeah. And I'm not joyful every day. You know, people always say as an entrepreneur, you create the product you need. Maybe that's what I was doing with the book. And when I first started writing, it wasn't called joy prescriptions. It wasn't meant to be prescriptive. I didn't know at the end of each chapter. I was actually going to write a joy prescription for the reader. I just started writing. I mean, I wrote so much. I wrote basically my first memories of being in China living with my grandparents, because my parents moved to America when I was three, but I didn't come till I was six. So my first formidable memories, you know, around like four or five are like hanging out with my grandparents in China going to the market, like that sort of thing. And I just wrote. I wrote down everything. I wrote what it felt like to come to America. I wrote about what it felt like to be teased. I wrote about thinking that I hate my parents. And I just want to move back to China. You know, I just wrote. And then after I wrote, then I started, you know, what kind of book is this? There has to be a theme. And that's why it took three years to come to completion. Yeah. What did you find out about yourself when you started to do this like deep, introspective work? Writing a book is like therapy. It's like self. I know doubt. Yeah. But also while I was writing it, a lot of the repressed feelings and memories I had, especially in those early chapters around my childhood, came flowing out. And I would be like sobbing and writing. I had extra therapy appointments with my therapist during writing. I would call her and she's like, we got to have an extra session this week because all the, I, you know, the Asian way. And I don't want to speak for all Asians, but at least in my family was not to talk about feelings. We swept them under the rug. We were conflict diverse. My mother and father would fight. There would be shouting. Sometimes it would get physical. And then for the next several days, I would see my mother and father not speak to one another. And there would be this thick tension in the house. And I'm just a kid, you know, so I'm like tiptoeing, mocking on eggshells. It was a tough environment. All, and when I wrote about it, all those feelings came flooding backs. I don't normally ever think or talk about these kind of things. It's, it's not, you mentioned it's like a thing that was in like your culture and your family. I think a lot of people just suppress a lot of shit. Yeah. And I think that, and I'm curious what your advice is for people to like first go on this journey of discovering joy in your own life. But it sounds like the first part of it is to, to document, to journal, to write shit down, to, to take a look inside. Yeah. And, and, and don't be scared to unpack your childhood. And what happened to you then and how it impacts you now because these child, all traumas, they just, it's stuck in your subconscious. They say the body keeps the score, you know, and, and, and I felt, I, I learned that you have to feel the feelings because for so long, I tried to not feel the feelings on purpose. Sweep the feelings under the rug, go into anesthesia that doesn't deal with feelings. Just, you know, very conflict diverse personality. And then finally, when I was writing all this, like all the feelings came back up. And for the first time, maybe ever, I felt all the feelings. And it was a lot. Is, is when you, like some of these prescriptions that you, that you tell people to, is part of it journaling, writing down, like is that where you start? Yeah. Reflecting. Reflecting. Yeah. And is there, is there, when you start to go through this process, this is like a prerequisite defining joy in your life. I think it's very hard. If you haven't done the, the pre-work to live with joy, with happiness, with fulfillment, because I think that even if you try and fix your life, you, you always regress because you have these like past traumas pulling you back to your old habits. Out of all the different sort of personality traits that we spoke about, work hallism, perfectionism, what do you think is the most damaging to living a life of joy? Perfectionism. And it is the antithesis of living a life with joy because you are always worried about what other people think, how you may appear, you don't want to say the wrong thing. And what perfectionism really does is hold you back from taking opportunities because you might look stupid and you might not know the thing. So you just don't do anything. Yeah. You don't write the book. You don't start the business. You don't start the podcast. You don't post the picture on Instagram because everything has to be so damn perfect that you are paralyzed by perfection and you do nothing. How do you get over that? You just start doing things. You just start, there's no like 12-step program to beating perfectionism. It's like therapy, just invasion therapy, like you just do it. You take imperfect action. And then you realize, shit, nothing bad happened. And guess what? Most of the time when you're so hell-bent on seeming perfect, 99% of people aren't even noticing because you're so self-absorbed with it, they didn't even notice. Like that, you know, this picture, you spent like two hours photoshopping, like a Kardashian, it scrolled across someone's feed for 2.5 seconds. You know what it is? Less. Less. Exactly. You're so self-absorbed with the idea to be perfect when you should have just done the imperfect thing and you would have gotten a lot farther. Prolon is a success story partner. Now, long weeks and busy weekends can leave everybody feeling depressed and tired. We work nonstop. And that's why I love Prolon's 5-day fasting mimicking diet. I absolutely love this company. Let me explain how it works. Basically, they have a fasting mimicking diet that rejuvenates you from the inside out. They deliver plant-based soups, snacks, and drinks to keep your body in a fasting state while giving you the nutrition you need. And when your body's in a fasting state, this triggers cellular renewal and it actually works. This is why I've loved intermittent fasting for so many years. This is the magic of Prolon. And the exciting news is they just launched their next Gen 5-day program. 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That is net suite dot com slash Scott clary. What happens in your life after you go through this transformation? Talk to me about how you approach like new idea. Now you're very entrepreneurial. Now you've launched a whole bunch of. Yeah, because I'm like, why not? If it fails, I'll try something else. Nothing of the world. No, at least no one's dying. You know, I just when you're an anesthesiologist, you know, the bar is low. Because I'm like, well, at least no one died today. Yeah. I mean, that's a valid bar. You understand? You understand? None of this shit is that serious? Yeah. None of this shit is that serious. So so now I mean, so tell me tell me what you've launched just in terms of like what you've put your energy into. What's work? What has and I want to use it as like, I don't know, as an example for people that are sort of hesitant to do the thing. Yeah. My husband and I started a wine label called Three Moons Wine. We make a wine out of Napa and Sonoma. I have a luxury candle company called Aroma Sisija, which is introduced to Luxe collection. I have lead her summit, which is a women's empowerment conference that we had for the first time in 2024, but we're doing again in November of 2025. So I'm currently trying to put that together and call for speakers. We have joy prescriptions that's coming out very near in the future. And I feel like this book is the culmination of my whole life story and all the lessons that I've learned, distilled into 12 distinct chapters. You know, people are like, oh, what kind of book is it? I'm telling people it's part memoir, part self-help or personal development, whatever that term is now. What do you think out of all the lessons that you've learned sort of over your life that you've put into the book? What would be the one that you think was the hardest for you to learn? Taking a leap of faith, just putting yourself out there. You know, I think if it weren't for housewives that kind of, you know, was like exposure therapy, that I wouldn't have done a lot of things. I mean, I've done a few stand-up gigs. I know you're in comedy too. Yeah, like it just, I feel like when you're open to it, life presents so many opportunities to you. If you're just receptive and you meet wonderful people and get to have such deep conversations with them. But if you're closed off or trying to maintain this like veil of perfectionism or you're so worried about what other people might think, it holds you back from like truly living your life. And now I feel like I'm living, like I'm doing the damn thing. Whereas when I was 30, like this was not me. I was a completely different person a decade ago than I am today. I don't know how else to say it. Like, this is an idea he's coming up, like you have to just jump into it. You just have to take the leap. And it's so funny because even, even for people that are, I would say, the people that are sitting on the sidelines are very similar to you before you discovered what joy and fulfillment is. Because they're all high performing people. They're not like lazy. They're killing it in their careers. But I think there was a point in your life. You missed, you missed Chloe's first steps. So when I think about what are you, what are you trading your life for by working, no issue with the job. No issue to W2. But if you're, if you're doing it to the extent where you're missing out on life, I think that's a problem. And I think that taking action, which ironically seems risky, is actually less risky in the long term because now you have control of your own life. So now if you ever got forbid, couldn't practice medicine anymore, you have a million other things that can make you money. So it's not stressful. Right. Yeah. Whereas before, you know, if I had gotten injured and couldn't practice medicine, I kind of screwed. You know what I mean? I mean, yeah, you have disability insurance, but it pays like, you know, 40%. That's not it. That's not right. Yeah. And the fact of the matter is, I'm having fun. You know, I'm a CEO. For the wine company, I take a trip to Napa. That's a business expense. I'm tasting wine, but I am doing work. I get to meet amazing people and learn about their journeys and their failures. I hosted a women's conference and women came up to me crying after the conference, saying how meaningful it was to them. And I was like, oh my god, really? It just the impact that you have on other people's life, like that brings me meaning. And now with the book, I'm hoping that that's impactful for people's life that maybe they'll read it and be like, you know what? I'm going to take take the leap of faith. I'm going to do the thing. Yeah. And then I mean, that's sort of the goal of this podcast. I mean, it was so funny because when I started this show, so this show is called success story. And you know, people ask like, you know, what is success? And it's and the funny thing is when I talk about people's success stories, the whole point is to show how success is not just financial. Once you make your money, if you do not have joy, happiness, fulfillment across all other areas of your life, you are not living a good life. You do not feel fulfilled. You can make a dollar amount. A lot of people on this show have sold companies for 50, 100 million who've had several billionaires on this show. And if their family relationships, if their health has all deteriorated, yes, we're looking in like people are like, wow, they've done incredible things. But like three wives later, very sad, very depressed. And not a lot of people will talk about this openly, mostly because they'll get shit on. If they've made any amount of money, if you say like, I'm not happy if you're like, go fuck yourself. Right. Oh, you feel so sorry for the poor rich guy. That's not the lesson. No. The lesson is that somebody who hasn't made the money or is earlier on in their career, they're optimizing for the wrong thing. They're optimizing for this big outcome that's never going to fulfill you. So like to your point, you have to enjoy the journey. You have to enjoy the journey. And the point is that joy is not the destination. It is the journey. And I'm so glad that I figured that out when I was 40 and not when I was 80 because I'm currently making a documentary about how we die in America. It's happier than that sounds. But die before you die. Celebrate your life. While you're alive before you're on your deathbed telling me and the hospice nurse, all the things you regret. And you know what I always hear? I regret that I didn't do this. I regret that I didn't do that. Nobody ever says I regret taking that leap of faith and funding the company or taking three months off and sailing or what nobody ever talks about regretting things that they did. I always hear people regret things that they didn't do. Have you ever like had these conversations about like, I know your parents are old, but have you ever had conversations about? Absolutely not. With my parents. Yeah. Absolutely not. Why not? I don't even know where we would start. I mean, we try to keep it pretty surface level. How are the kids? Because I think they're an example of somebody who does regret a lot. It would be an enlightening conversation for sure. I'm not sure how to get there. Yeah, it's tough because you know, the second you you are a little bit successful, you want to sort of share that success and some of the things that you've learned along the journey with people that you love. I think about a lot with my parents too. Like they don't regret. But I wish they would like, they're retired obviously. And I still think they could live more. Yeah. I mean, it could travel more. I mean, it could do more. Yeah. Money's not a concern for them. Right. But they don't. And it's frustrating. Same thing with my parents. I said, you know, travel more, but they're going to Europe. I said, by first class tickets, they can't. My mom said, it's only eight hours. If it's China, she'll sit in first class because it's like a 15 hour flight to Shanghai. Yeah, we're going to break your legs. Right. She's going to get a pulmonary embolism. I'm worried, you know, but, but they're just, she can't. And I, I'm just like live life a little mom, you know, go on that trip, splurge at dinner, get the lobster. And it's like, they can't. I don't get it. I don't understand where that comes from. I've tried to figure this out. It comes. It comes. I'll tell you exactly where it comes from. It comes from growing up with scarcity. They cannot get out of that mindset when that they were young. They did not have enough. And now they have enough. But but they're still in the scarcity mindset. Is there a way that you found you can almost like get out of that scarcity mindset or is it just something like a journey that people have to go on on their own? I can't change someone's mindset for them, you know, and I mean, they're well taken care of, you know, they live in a nice house. I bought my mom a brand new car. Like that's, it's not a money thing. I know. But it's, it's a mindset thing and you cannot change someone's mindset for them. I for Christmas bought my mom a cashmere sweater, you know, she unwraps it, holds it up, kind of feels the yarn and whatever. And she's like, ah, how much you pay? And it was like 300 maybe, but I like lied. And I was like, oh, it was on sale, mom. It was only like 150, you know. And she's like, yeah, quality not so good return. I was like, this is, you know, like forget looking a gift horse in the mouth. I mean, you know, she's like, uh, 150. No, I go to Coles have better. I'm like, it's just, you know what I mean? I'm trying to like buy her nice things. And I bought her a Birkin once, you know, yeah, yeah. She, this, she told me it was too heavy. The Birkin was too heavy. So she gave it back to me. I don't like, it's too heavy. I cannot wear on my shoulder. So she just makes things up. I mean, look, I was like, give it back, mom. Just give it back. Yeah, I mean, like, give it back. Yeah. There I was trying to be nice to her. Yeah. So I bought her a Chanel medium flat bag instead. But that's, I mean, this is like six years ago. But, but, you know, it's just, she can't like live in the joy. But maybe she is joyful. You know, I've never actually sent to her like, mom, are you joyful? Like, we don't have these enlightened conversations. It's very like, what's for dinner? I want to talk about just a little bit about like, how you think about what you jump into, what gives you passion, what gives you joy, because you, you started so much stuff as, as businesses and as an entrepreneur. So what are some ideas about? Okay, I found joy in my own life. Now I want to find joy in my career. So wine, candles, leaders, summit, by the way, events are incredibly difficult to put together. So congratulations. I tried. It's very difficult. But obviously you, you follow joy in everything in your life. So I think that step one is due introspection. Step two is to architect your life so that you're enjoying every single day. You find joy in every single day. And then I think step three is like, tie joy into your vocation, into your job. I think it's very important. And that's where I think a little bit of entrepreneurship comes into it and feel, feeling safe, taking risk and taking a chance because on the other side of that chance and that risk, that's where joy in your work comes. So how do you choose what lights you up? I mean, I mean, this is going to sound trite, but I love helping people. I feel good when I make someone else's day better. And so as far as the summit went, as far as writing the book, if a woman reads that book and it makes her laugh a little and she learns a lesson or she learns to set boundaries, or there's some ideas she's been sitting on and she's like, you know what, I'm going to do it. I'm going to launch my podcast. I'm going to write my own book. I'm going to be an influencer, whatever it is, then I feel good. Like I don't want to say that my whole worth is is wrapped up in what I do for others, but it makes me feel good when I'm able to help other people. And everything I mean, the wine, the candles, it's all self-care. Lead her summit is a women's empowerment conference. Joy prescriptions largely is a book for professional women who want that elusive work life balance who always feel like whatever they're doing is not good enough. You know, and the point of all this is really just to help other people. Do you think that's a good North Star from both people? I think it is. I think if that's your North Star, that if you wake up in the morning and you think what can I do that would help other people, the world would be a better place. And I'm not I help myself plenty. You know, in in my quest to help other people, I help myself. It all goes around. You know, I'm not mother Teresa. I'm not like, you know, taking the clothes off my back and giving them to someone, you know, like you're building business. Yes, it's like a it's like a it's centered on making someone else's life better. Correct. And that's sort of like the that's the barometer for success. Yes. And not every day is joyful. You know, I don't want to create a culture of toxic joy where I'm like, oh, I'm so joyful. So if you don't have joy, then something's wrong with you. You know what I mean? Some days I want to throw my hands up in there and people are acting crazy and just, you know, conducting business, right? Like something's always going on. I always feel like there's some fire I have to put out. And I'm just like, I told my assistant the other day, I was like, if there could just be one day, one day where I don't have to put some freaking fire out, that would be a lovely day. And she was like, good, I'm gonna go with that. But it's it's just having an overall umbrella of joy. Like this is my north star and I know I'm moving towards the right place because when I hit the pillow at night, like I generally feel like I did a good job that day. I love that. It's just so I think that this is an idea that we've sort of danced around this, but it's it's finding joy in every single day you have to find joy. You can't just find joy in big moments. Right. That's very important. Right. And I think that part of that is understanding that finding little bits of joy in your day to day, it could be it could be, you know, going outside, moving around, speaking to somebody who you care about, solving good problems, it sort of progressed you forward. It's not about there will never be hard work or there will never be things that go wrong. It's about understanding that you have to find bits of joy in every single day and not sort of postpone it. Yes. Exactly. I think a lot of people do that. Yeah. Because you mentioned toxic joy, which is it's almost like your naive, which is also not good. Right. Yeah, you have to find joy in everything, but not be naive. Right. And that's I think that that's the best message. Yeah. What would be one more idea from your book that I didn't ask you about that you think is useful for for the audience to share? There's there's a chapter on comparison and I just think comparison is the thief of joy. It truly is. And in an era where everyone is on social media, we cannot help but compare ourselves to other people. And I always say you cannot compare your every day with someone else's greatest hits. It's not a fair comparison. And I made this up when I my kids were little this happened when they were maybe three or four and it was their birthday because their twins. And I gave them each a slice of cake. And I don't remember which one it was, but she said, Mommy, her slice is bigger than mine. And I said, Oh, my God, I said sit down a second. We're about to have a lesson. I said, you just got cake plenty. In fact, and there's more cake. You need to stop focusing on how big someone else's slice of cake is and just enjoy your own damn cake. And that metaphor goes for so many things in life. You see people buy new houses, going on vacations, wearing new outfits. And it's a constant game of comparison. And you simply just have to stop and enjoy your own cake because you'll never win the comparison. There'll always be Joneses to keep up with. And how do you know that these Joneses aren't in massive debt? There was like some New York socialite or something in the guy in it up like, you know, and they were like in massive debt. And her whole thing was like vacations and luxury or whatever. And I was like, and look what that, you know what I mean? That's an extreme. It is an extreme. But you have to stop the car. It was like tens of millions. It was not a amount that like you could get out of with the little hard work. And yeah, it was like, and how did you get to that point? Well, he was, he was, so I think it was a few things. I think that, well, I think he was like borrowing from friends or he was like raising money against like business ideas, but then using it for lifestyle expenses. I think it was just like, he was just embezzling money. I think that he was a developer. He was a developer. Yeah. And I don't want to get, I don't want to get the story wrong. Right. Because I don't have all the details in front of me. But I'm pretty sure like he was taking money for like business and investment. And I think that that's what he was using to fund lifestyle. Right. And and for what? Because they're in this game of compare, they need to keep up a peer. And all it was was like bougie Instagram posts. Right. Eat for what? For, for light. No, no, not Instagram cares about you anyway. You know what I mean? Like if your Instagram got shut down and or somebody hacked it or whatever, you know, half the people wouldn't even notice you were gone. It's very sad. It's very, this comparison game is very sad. Social media, there's a lot of benefits of social media with a lot of a lot of negatives. And this comparison game, we were talking about how Miami's like Instagram basically, this is what causes people to basically ruin their life, trying to keep up with everyone. But to your point, there's never, there's never an end. So most people look at real housewives and they'll be like, well, they're all very successful. But I can guarantee you, first of all, this is assuming that everything they, they show is real and owned and not rented or whatever. But then if you look at the next level up, right, there's going to be somebody worth a hundred million. It's going to be worth somebody worth a billion. There's like, there's no end. Right. That's so instead of just, you know, having one nice house and like two cars, there's going to have, you know, a guy who has a 737 and like 20 homes. Right. There's never an end to it. Right. So why do you play this game? It's a zero-sum game. You cannot win and people figuratively and literally kill themselves trying. And you must learn that you should only compare yourself to yourself. That's it. And your past, your past version of yourself. Yes. So you're always, yeah. So where do you want people to go? Where do you want people to go? By the way, are you still going to do more real housewives? No. I don't know. I'm not as involved. I'm not as into this. Did I, did I sound like I felt the experience? No, no, no, not at all. Not at all. You know, they asked me again. I had a terrible experience and they're like, so you want to do it again. And I'm like, no, no, I don't. Thank you. Now you're done with that. I wish there was a show about women building their businesses. And even when I was planning lead her summit and think, you know, a speaker pulled out last minute, there was a tornado. One of my speakers couldn't come in. Just it's an in-person event, right? Like shit's going to happen. And I was like, where are the cameras now? Because this would be a good show. You know, there's an element of drama. There's sort of, you know, something that they want to see to completion, like all the good makings of a reality show, but not enough women fighting. Yeah. You know, nobody was cussing anybody out. It's just, it's not enough. I mean, there's enough drama because something's going wrong all the time. I mean, I can yell at my assistant if you want me to. Yeah. I think I do believe that I do believe that the future of business, well, you know, like Alex and Layla Hermosi, like you know the Hermosi, excuse me. And they have a videographer follow them around everywhere. I know. And they turn their life into like a TV show. Reality, yeah, like a YouTube theories. Yeah. So I think that that's the future. Yeah. And I think that, listen, if they had a TV deal, if they weren't, you know, I don't need to care about that. They had a TV deal. You could take the stuff straight off their YouTube channel and just throw it on any network. And that would be your reality TV show. So I think that the future of business and influence, not just business, the future of influence is somebody who's building something incredible. And they have somebody that documents the journey. And I think that like you should do that for the next summit. You know any videographers for hire. Well, yeah, yeah. No, but I think that that's a great way. And you know, when people think about entrepreneurship, usually the conversation turns into, okay, well, how do I build a brand online and how do I build a personal brand? That's how you do it. Yeah. You just document the journey. Right. That's it. And speak about what you're doing. Speak about the real experiences. And not only the good ones, the bad ones, it's like my relatable stuff that gets the most clicks. You know, when I post a picture and it's like, you know, everything's beautiful and I'm on vacation. I mean, it's fine. But when I post my like, I'm so tired, I want to, you know, kill my kids and my husband and that stuff, you know, like that's the the relatable stuff is what gets that's to be care about. Yeah. People, people are starved for realness. They're starving for realness because of all the bullshit on Instagram. They want, they don't want curated, edited, refined. They want. Who's this person? What are they dealing with? Because your problems are someone else's problem for sure. And outside of just being great content, but you know, you talked about you wanting to help people when you put yourself out there, it's super scary. I mean, not for you because you've done it at scale. But for most people, it's very scary to put themselves out there and be an influencer and put out, you know, content and build a personal brand. I know you, you got everybody, everybody who goes on real housewives gets hate and comments and everything, right? But you get over it. And then you realize that yeah, there's some loud haters in the crowd. But ultimately, if you do put yourself out there and talk about your problems, you're actually helping way more, you're helping way more. And those people, it's tough because those people aren't going to go and say, hey, thank you so much for, you know, putting yourself out there. You just made me sort of normalize the stress and anxiety that I'm living with. But I think it's a, it's a good thing to do. Yeah. It's a very good thing to do. Um, where do you want to send people? So where can people connect with you? So first of all, the book is going to be available anywhere you can get books. We'll put it in the show notes as well. Um, obviously, Amazon everywhere else. Yep, you can order it off joyprescriptions.com. We have a bonus, a 30 days of joy PDF that's sort of like a journaling. Okay, cool exercise that they can get as a bonus if they pre-order the book. And then I'm across all social media platforms at Tiffany Moon MD. Okay, and joyprescriptions.com. If they want to, what's the best social for them? That is Instagram. I would say Instagram. Instagram. Yeah, it's probably the one I'm on the most. And the, the special for the, for the book, that's just joyprescriptions.com. Yeah, yes. Perfect. Um, last question I like to ask, uh, obviously you, you've learned a lot over the course of your career life, all of that. If you had to pick all the lessons and all the wisdom and all the insight and you only could pass one lesson onto your kids, sort of the most important thing that you've learned could be about joy, it could be about just life in general, work, whatever. What do you think that most important lesson would be? Be a good person. Whenever I have a challenge in my business or at work, I just ask myself like, what would a good person do? What is the right decision to make? You know, if there's a short cut I can take and if I do this or in this business, if I kind of fudge this a little bit, it's not worth it. Cutting the corners, fiving a little, working with people whom you don't like for financial gain, it's not worth it. So at the end of the day, I feel like if you're a good person and you make decisions that are rooted in integrity and you can go to sleep at night knowing that you did the best you could, everything also fall into place.