“She was doing everything as a single parent and making it look easy,” says Cheng. Years later, after the kids left the nest, her mother downsized to a small apartment. “We realized she had to do that to get out of debt,” says Cheng, now an intellectual property partner at Fasken Martineau. “She had to make some lifestyle adjustments to pay back the burden of what she had allowed us to maintain when we were growing up.”
“It’s really written for professional women,” says Cheng. “A lot of it presumes that you are in a professional position, that there’s room for advancement and that you should go after the promotions.”
“The underlying premise of the book that’s a little bit faulty is that everybody wants that corner office. Not everybody does, and that shouldn’t define whether you’re successful or not.”