(Photo by David Becker/Getty Images) Giada De Laurentiis can take the heat – literally. After years of working in other people’s restaurants, she opened her own, GIADA, in a prime location on the Las Vegas Strip. Two years into its successful tenure, GIADA is not only one of the few female-branded restaurants in Vegas – but in the country.

Alan was a clever guy who came to a job-search workshop we presented. He told jokes and cracked everyone up. He said “Working at my former employer was like being a prairie dog living in a prairie dog village where life was happy and gay. The only problem for the prairie dogs was that right next door to the prairie dog village lived an erratic and violent farmer with a shotgun who every so often would lean over the fence, take some shots and pick off a bunch of prairie dogs.

This is Mentoring Moments (#25), a series of wow-you-need-to-know-these stories from successful women of multiple generations. Mentoring Moments is now a podcast.  As 24-year-old Lizzie Velasquez walked on stage for her TEDxAustinWomen talk she told the producer, “Don’t freak out, but I’m going to throw my whole plan away and speak from my heart.” Lizzie’s talk went viral with over 10 million views. Lizzie Velasquez.

Startup ideas don’t appear on whiteboards. Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp didn’t come up with Uber in a brainstorming session; they came up with it when the frustration of trying to hail a cab in San Francisco hit a boiling point. Startup ideas come from going out into the world and learning first-hand about the problems that exist in it.

Dear Liz, I am in a sticky situation at work. I’ve worked for the company for three and a half years but I’ve only been a manager for one year. I enjoy my job. I supervise eleven configuration specialists who work closely with our customers and salespeople. We have a lot of fun and do a good job. The company’s sales go up and down quite a bit.

Dear Liz, I feel like an idiot but I also know that pain is a great teacher. I had a terrific job interview lined up for last Thursday. The interview was at noon. I’m not working right now so I had a lot of time in the morning to get ready. I spent three hours the night before reading the company’s website. I wrote a lot of notes. I laid out my clothes for the interview and I made a test drive out to the company’s facility just to make sure I knew how to get there.

By Emma Miller This story originally appeared on LearnVest. In our “Power Hack” series, we highlight quick things you can do to improve your personal, career or money life. Today, we outline six simple tricks that can help you cut through e-noise and send more effective email. There’s nothing like an overcrowded inbox to make you long for the days of smoke signals and carrier pigeons.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will donate $80 million over the next three years to close the “data gap” between genders and advance opportunities for girls and women around the world. Melinda Gates, who has given away more than $29 billion with her husband Bill in her lifetime, announced this during her keynote speech at the Women Deliver conference in Copenhagen on May 17.

I’ve been thinking about the nature of sales a lot lately. My company, BodeTree, is going through a period of rapid expansion, and we’ve been growing our sales team in recent months. In doing so, I’ve had to make decisions regarding just what kind of sales organization we want to be. The culture of a sales team, much like the culture of the organization as a whole, is determined by the expectations, decisions, and incentives put in place by leadership.

One of the hardest things I’ve come to realize recently is that sometimes, when I’m overbooked and stressed, I’m not the best friend or colleague. As I struggle to balance my hectic life, I find myself distant or half-listening when people are talking to me, cutting others off to discuss my own stresses or not showing up to meetings I’m expected to be at.