Wonderhell

Wonderhell Plot Summary

Introduction

I'll never forget the moment I realized my long-sought success wasn't bringing the feelings I'd expected. There I was, sitting in a cramped airplane seat at 35,000 feet, exhausted from a whirlwind promotional tour for a project that had exceeded all expectations. Instead of pure elation, I felt a disorienting mix of excitement and anxiety, possibility and pressure. The achievement that should have been my destination had unexpectedly transformed into a doorway to something bigger – something both thrilling and terrifying. This paradoxical emotional state is what Laura Gassner Otting calls "Wonderhell" – that unique space where the wonder of new opportunities collides with the hell of uncertainty, self-doubt, and overwhelming expectations. It's the realization that success isn't a final destination but rather a portal to your next level of growth. Through interviews with nearly one hundred glass-ceiling breakers, Olympic medalists, entrepreneurs, and everyday people, the author reveals that we aren't alone in these mixed emotions. In fact, these uncomfortable feelings aren't just a necessary evil of achievement – they're invitations to expand our potential and discover who we truly are meant to be.

Chapter 1: Embracing Your Ambition: The First Step Into Wonderhell

Simon Tam wanted to play rock 'n' roll for as long as he could remember. Instead, he found himself at the Supreme Court with his identity at stake. Like every great story, Simon's started with Guns N' Roses. "I grew up in the eighties watching their music videos and thinking, 'That's what I want to do,'" Simon says. He spent several years floating in and out of makeshift bands until finally, in 2006, he formed the world's first all–Asian American dance rock band, The Slants. The Slants found huge success, played loads of concerts, and sold out big halls. They were living the dream—traveling from gig to gig with guitars and drums and amps and mics all packed into their rickety van—until they decided to trademark their name. The US Patent and Trademark Office denied the request, claiming that the band's name was racist and offensive. The band members had chosen the name as a way to reclaim a slur and pay homage to Asian American activists. The government disagreed, and the band was left with a choice: compromise part of their identity and find a new name, or fight the decision. Simon decided to play bigger. Into the van, along with the guitars and drums and amps and mics, now went legal briefs and law books. As he fought court case after court case, legal bills piled up next to broken-down van bills. He lost bandmates over it. But Simon recognized an opportunity to make a difference, and he couldn't go back. In 2017, the Slants won a unanimous, landmark case before the Supreme Court, helping expand civil liberties for marginalized populations. But Simon and the Slants haven't just rested their case. Leading this fight opened Simon's imagination to an even bigger purpose: starting The Slants Foundation, a nonprofit that supports arts and activism projects for underrepresented communities. When it comes to our own paths through Wonderhell, learning to play bigger means recognizing that small visions yield small results. The point isn't just to reach success but to use that success as a portal to something more meaningful. Like Simon, we can choose to see beyond our current achievements and embrace a greater purpose. By letting go of limiting beliefs and societal expectations, we open ourselves to possibilities that might have once seemed unthinkable.

Chapter 2: Making Your Own Luck: Finding Opportunity in Uncertainty

Cara Brookins expected that the muscle-bound man she married would protect her. What she didn't expect was that his severe paranoid schizophrenia would lead to years of abuse, fear, and stalking. Cara and her children pushed dressers in front of their doors at night, kept their heads down, and stopped relaxing, laughing, and communicating. "One morning, I was driving the kids to school and I saw my kids in the rearview mirror," she recalls. "I saw their slumped shoulders, their haunted eyes, and their small, small futures." Cara had to make a radical move, one that would change her family's entire trajectory. She and her children needed a safe place—a new, inexpensive home to live in. And she had just the "big, crazy idea" to do it: they would build their own house with their bare hands. The only thing Cara had ever built before was a bookcase. "I figured this would be the same, like a slightly larger IKEA project," she laughs. As they started to build, the family discovered what it was like to put in twenty-hour days of hard physical labor, but they also discovered something else: "the first hint that we could take physical action to literally build ourselves a better life." Each morning, Cara and her children would go to the construction site armed with plastic bags around their tennis shoes, pails and shovels, hobby-level tools, and the knowledge they had Googled and YouTubed the night before. They woke up every single day faced with uncertainty, doubt, and fear. But each day they made a little progress, pouring concrete, laying the foundation, framing walls. Each day they saw possibility grow before their eyes. They began to communicate with each other again, to laugh, and to dream. "My kids and I came out the other side of trauma thinking the most important thing we needed was this place to live," Cara says now. "But the story, our story—it was never about a house. It was this process of building a house together that taught us how our determined family can turn trauma into power and fear into courage." We often think of luck as something that happens to us, but those who navigate through Wonderhell understand that luck is something they create. Dr. Richard Wiseman's research reveals that "lucky" people share four key traits: they create and notice chance opportunities, listen to their intuition, maintain positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms setbacks into stepping stones. While these traits won't magically eliminate uncertainty, they prepare you to capitalize on the opportunities hidden within it. The journey through Wonderhell demands that we move beyond merely wishing for good fortune. Instead, we must intentionally cultivate awareness, flexibility, and optimism. By engaging with uncertainty rather than avoiding it, we transform what feels like chaos into a workshop for opportunity. Each challenge becomes a chance to build something new – not just in our external circumstances, but in who we are becoming.

Chapter 3: Figuring Out Who You Are: Discovering Your True Identity

Brandon Farbstein was born with metatropic dysplasia, an extremely rare form of dwarfism; there are fewer than a hundred known cases. Fully grown, at twenty-two years old, Brandon stands three foot nine inches. "When I was four years old, I looked in the mirror and asked my mom why I didn't look like the kids around me. She told me that I had special bones and that they didn't grow in a way that other kids' bones do," he remembers. "That was the first time I had an image of myself as different." The bullying began. Brandon would notice the way people reacted to him in public: the finger-pointing, the staring, the name-calling. By the time he was eleven, he had no sense of self—only an image created for him by others. He felt alone, invisible, and unlovable, forever stuck in his looking-glass self—the way cruel strangers and crueler classmates saw him. Then, at an airport one day when he was fifteen years old, everything changed. A woman approached him and asked about his Segway mobility device. As they waited to board the same flight, she asked about his story. Then she shared hers: she was Hayley Foster, one of the original organizers of TEDx talks. Brandon had spent the first decade and a half of his life hating that he was different from other people. But after talking to Hayley, he wanted to put himself out there, show people that everyone can feel alone or unlovable, and that the best thing we can all do is have empathy for one another. He soon signed on to do a TEDx talk. It was all of six minutes long, yet it changed the trajectory of his life. After years of accepting the reflection of his identity from the wrong people, Brandon finally began to see himself for who he was and the value that he could bring to the world. He became the driving force behind two new pieces of legislation signed into law in his home state, Virginia: one on bullying prevention and the other requiring classrooms to teach empathy and emotional intelligence. "Working on seeing myself for who I truly am reaffirms to me that every part of me that is different and one-of-a-kind is special," Brandon says. "We need to unlock ourselves and recognize who we actually are and the potential that lies inside." The Hall of Mirrors in Wonderhell shows us that identity isn't fixed but fluid. In this space between past accomplishments and future potential, we often feel like impostors because we're attempting to reconcile who we've been with who we're becoming. Rather than seeing impostor syndrome as a weakness to overcome, we can recognize it as evidence that we're growing. Each time we step into a larger arena, we're invited to expand our self-concept and embrace a more authentic expression of who we truly are.

Chapter 4: Renegotiating Your Response: Managing Mixed Emotions

Kara Goldin had a problem. Actually, she had several problems: post-baby weight gain, adult-onset acne, and inescapable exhaustion. So, she did what many of us would do to cut calories and fight sleep: she pounded caffeinated diet soda, often ten to twelve cans per day. But the more she drank, the worse she felt. One day Kara glimpsed the long list of unpronounceable ingredients and had a startling realization. "I was paying more attention to the liquid I was putting into my car than the liquid I was putting into my body," she remembers. She knew she needed to drink more water—but she hated water. Each flavored water she found had more unpronounceable ingredients than the last. If Kara wanted this magical product, she was going to have to make it herself. That afternoon, she broke the double-edged news to her husband: she was three months pregnant with their fourth child, and she'd decided to start a beverage company that would change the entire industry. "I told Theo that we had six months to get the business going until—surprise!—baby number four was born. He walked out of the room, and I wasn't sure if he was coming back." But he did come back, and it was Theo who, after many failed attempts, finally figured out how to make the drink shelf-stable. If Kara and Theo thought building the product was a challenge, they had no idea how much harder it would be to launch Hint Water and successfully scale it up to a $150 million beverage company. When mold became a problem, Theo opened a bottle and drank the whole thing while the store manager watched, to prove it was still healthy. When Starbucks decided to stop carrying Hint, Kara went to work finding new distributors. When the pandemic hit, Kara took over a distribution route herself, delivering Hint to retail outlets. "You've got to have options," Kara explains. "When you feel like someone has you by the throat, that's a huge indicator that you don't have enough choices." Here's what's clever about showing up hard when things get hard: it gives you knowledge, it gives you data, and it gives you options. The emotional roller coaster of Wonderhell often makes us want to retreat to safety. But what if these uncomfortable feelings aren't warning signs to stop but indicators that we're on the right track? The anxiety of uncertainty, the self-doubt of stretching beyond our comfort zone, the fear of failure – these are natural responses to growth. By renegotiating our relationship with these emotions, we can transform them from barriers into fuel.

Chapter 5: Going Farther Together: Building Your Support System

Alan Mulally showed up for his first day as the new CEO of Ford Motor Company looking dapper in his khaki pants and blue blazer. The only problem: the automobile industry was decidedly blue pinstripe suits. That should have been the first indication to the corporate brass that things were about to change. But that wasn't the only thing different about Alan. He was also the first person hired to run an American automobile company who didn't "grow up" in the industry. This might not have been such a big deal if the auto industry was humming along. But it was not humming along. It was, at best, on life support. At Ford, one of the first things Alan did was get rid of siloed management meetings, where mistakes were hidden and progress was inflated. Instead, he brought every senior leader into the Thunderbird Room, posted a chart that displayed each one of their tasks, and asked them to apply a color code. Green meant things were going well. Yellow meant things were off track. Red meant things were in the danger zone. At the first three meetings, everything on the board was green. "We are losing $17 billion per year," Alan said. "Everything can't be working perfectly." Finally, one senior leader raised his hand and admitted that he had a problem. Alan was excited. He praised the employee, appreciated his honesty, opened the floor to suggestions, and asked that particular leader to sit beside him at the next meeting as a sign that candor would be valued. At that next meeting, the chart was awash in yellows and reds. With his unique leadership approach to getting the job done through collective accountability, Alan had started to build a team of people who would believe in and trust each other. Eventually, he proved that the way to turn Ford around was fundamentally by working together. The Tunnel of Love in Wonderhell teaches us that we can go farther when we journey together. While ambition might feel like a solitary pursuit, the most successful navigators of Wonderhell understand that building the right support system is essential. These aren't just cheerleaders who tell us what we want to hear, but truth-tellers who see our potential and hold us accountable. Sometimes we need people outside our frame to reflect back to us what we can't see ourselves. They notice opportunities we miss, challenge our limiting beliefs, and remind us of our capacity when we forget. By carefully cultivating relationships with mentors, peers, and those we can guide, we create a network that helps us maintain perspective through the mixed emotions of achievement and growth.

Chapter 6: Quieting Perfectionism: Finding Grace in the Imperfect

Jonathan Fields discovered his grandfather's old set of paints when he was a teenager, and immediately built himself a workstation out of some old, stacked blocks and a door. He lost himself in each makeshift canvas, sometimes for days on end. It satisfied his impulse to create, and it felt good. He didn't have a name for this feeling at the time, but he now knows it as being "sparked." At the time of his discovery, "Freaky" Fields (an unfortunate nickname he picked up in the sixth grade) was experiencing the earliest throes of self-judgment and perfectionism. He would work for days painting album covers on jean jackets, and if the result wasn't exactly perfect—if it didn't match the vision he had in his mind—he would just trash it. Jonathan's creative impulse battled with his expectations of perfection. "I got brought to my knees a whole lot, knocked down a lot—plenty of moments where my standards have harmed me physically, emotionally, psychologically, and I think at some point you have to listen," he says. It would take decades for him to find peace. Meditation allowed Jonathan to balance his fascination for being sparked with a newfound understanding of grace: permission to let everything be as it needs to be, and acceptance of that as a temporary state, instead of thrashing and trashing what should be seen as a work in progress. This also allowed him to see himself as a work in progress, too. Jonathan's fourth book, Sparked, debuted as an instant USA Today best seller, but Jonathan doesn't focus much on that. "In a weird way," he says, "what's more important to me is that there are sentences in this book I couldn't have written quite that way five years ago." If it takes ten years to learn how to write a paragraph that really matches the vision in his head, he's okay with that. "It's not about perfectionism," he says, "but about showing up and being human. At the end of the day, I'm still Freaky Fields." The pursuit of perfection is one of the most common obstacles in Wonderhell. The higher we climb, the more we believe we can't afford to make mistakes. Yet research shows that perfectionism isn't linked to better performance – instead, it's associated with burnout, stress, and depression. By shifting from perfectionism to deliberate practice, we create space for growth without the crushing pressure of flawlessness.

Chapter 7: Standing Tall When the Floor Drops Out: Turning Crisis Into Clarity

Chris Plough was racing across the Gobi Desert in a secondhand ambulance when the engine blew out, just two hundred miles from the finish line in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. When the ambulance broke down, so did Chris. "I was thirty-three, and I had it all: the seven-figure business, the house, the car, the toys. And it didn't matter," he recollects. "I told everybody I was happy, but I wasn't." Just three years earlier, he had lost both of his parents in a murder-suicide. Unable to process this horrific tragedy, he balled it up and swallowed it down, focusing instead on growing his business, amassing more wealth, and buying more toys. Then the economy tanked. "My customers stopped paying, and I went bankrupt. I was going further and further into debt just to make payroll," he says. "My friends didn't know what was going on, because my ego wouldn't allow me to tell anyone that I was failing." So, when a friend proposed racing across Europe and Asia in a secondhand ambulance, Chris couldn't say no. But the adventure he got was not the one he expected. Forty days later, after nine thousand miles of broken brakes, broken headlights, broken doors, and now a broken engine, Chris was forced to stop running. He had to come to terms with the fact that he was going to fail—again. And this time everyone would know. "I just wept," he recalls. "I looked out into the desert, and it reminded me of New Mexico, the last place I lived with my parents." Finally ready to process what had happened, he took a framed picture of his parents given to him by his sister and buried it in a small grave in the desert. For the first time, he allowed himself to grieve. "I realized just how unhappy I'd been for so long," he explains. Driven by denial and fear and the trappings of success, Chris had found only isolation and depression. He was carrying around the heavy weight of never being good enough or worthy enough for his deceased father. "I sought more recognition, more money, more things, more awards, trying to fill that hole," he admits now, "and all it did was get emptier and emptier." When the floor drops out in Wonderhell, we have a choice: we can either view crisis as a devastating end or as an opportunity for a new beginning. These moments of breakdown often precede our greatest breakthroughs. By asking "what" questions instead of "why" questions – "What can I learn from this?" rather than "Why is this happening to me?" – we shift from victims of circumstance to architects of our future. Crisis also offers the gift of clarity. When everything we've built falls apart, we're forced to examine what truly matters. The facades fall away, revealing what's essential. This clarity becomes the foundation upon which we can build something more authentic and meaningful than before.

Summary

The journey through Wonderhell reveals a profound truth about success: it's not a destination but a portal to our next level of growth. Each achievement doesn't mark the end of our story but rather invites us to write the next chapter. When we embrace our ambition, make our own luck, discover our true identity, and build supportive relationships, we transform the discomfort of growth into the wonder of possibility. The most powerful insight from these stories isn't just that mixed emotions are normal in success, but that they're essential. The uncertainty, self-doubt, and fear we experience aren't signs that we're doing something wrong but evidence that we're stretching into new territory. By renegotiating our relationship with these feelings – seeing them as invitations rather than warnings – we access deeper reserves of creativity, resilience, and purpose. Whether you're climbing a career ladder, building a business, or simply becoming more authentically yourself, remember that you're not alone in this paradoxical experience. The wonder and the hell are both part of the journey, and learning to thrive in this space is perhaps life's greatest adventure.

About Author

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Laura Gassner Otting

I see the greatness in others and reflect it back on them in ways that help them get them unstuck. Because I am turned on by The Big Idea, I encourage people to think audaciously, motivating them to be dream boldly and then act decisively. I am an instigator and a motivator, and I’ve never met a revolution I didn’t like.

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