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Successful CEOs use ‘the rule of 5’ to create and keep new habits, says the career coach to the Fortune 500

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I hear the same thing from many leaders: “From the outside in, it looks like I’m doing great, but the truth is I’m a bit miserable, frustrated with myself, and feeling stuck.” Surprisingly, to address our own situations, most of us already know a directional step we could take or stop taking, but we don’t do it. Why? And how can we solve that?

Hold up one hand. Count your fingers, out loud.

Do it again, and for five seconds, see if you can focus only on how incredible your fingers are. Wiggle them. Flash them. Say out loud with a smile, “Power of Five.”

Your hand is your prop to remind you. Five is your anchor.

Just start for five seconds and get a streak going

Mel Robbins’s The 5 Second Rule and James Clear’s Atomic Habits overlap beautifully: action before motivation.

If you want to run, commit to putting on your running shoes for five seconds every day. That’s it.

Sounds silly, right? But here’s what happens: Shoes go on, you think, “Hmm, might as well walk to the mailbox.” Halfway to the mailbox, you think, “I can make it to the corner.” At the corner, you keep going. Some days it’s a short walk, other days you run sprints. But it started with your five magic seconds.

Here’s the thing. We don’t need to put motivation into you. We need to let it out. Action releases emotion. Starting takes less than five seconds. Momentum does the rest.

Apply the Power of Five anywhere:

  • Better hydration: Start your day with five sips of water.
  • Healthier eating: Eat five spoonfuls of oatmeal or five forkfuls of salad, first. Oats release energy slowly, keeping you steady all day (it’s why they feed them to horses). The body reacts most to what the stomach lining senses first. If you’re going to have healthy and junk, get healthy in first.  
  • Learning: Study five new words of a language. (My friend Severin Hacker, cofounder of Duolingo, says 12 million people have a streak over 365 days!)
  • Finances: Save $5, €5, or ¥5 a day. It will shift how you think about finance.
  • Writing: Write five words a day for your book.
  • Patience: When someone cuts you off in traffic, count to five before “flipping.” No, wait! I mean five seconds before you sigh and say, “Maybe they’re just having a day.”
  • Work: Before even reading emails, put in five minutes on your toughest project. Eat the frog first.
  • Your idea: The best ideas come from you, not me. What’s yours for the Power of Five? 

Why it works

We humans adapt fast. Really fast. It’s kind of our superpower. But you must pledge to use your superpowers for good! It only takes five days to start getting in shape, and five to start losing it. There’s still so much we don’t know about the brain, but the latest research is that bodies and minds influence each other more than we realized. Physically doing something signals to your brain: This matters.

As Millard Fuller, cofounder of Habitat for Humanity, said: “It’s easier to act yourself into a new way of thinking than to think yourself into a new way of acting.”

The worst thing isn’t starting without a plan. The worst thing is never starting at all.

I’ll give you a little CEO secret from working with so many successful people. It looks like they planned it all out and never struggled, but the truth is very different. Everyone is a walking bundle of hopes, strengths, dreams, and insecurities. No exceptions.

The only way up the mountain is to stumble. To skin your knees. To feel a little lost. To be out of breath. If you’re not out of breath, you’re not climbing. You’re coasting. 

Ready to change?

Just … start.

Bill Hoogterp is an author, entrepreneur, and one of the top executive coaches worldwide. He has advised dozens of Fortune 500 CEOs, and last year his company LifeHikes offered trainings at more than 100 global companies in 47 countries and seven languages. To learn more about Bill, visit lifehikes.com. To ask Bill a question for a future column, email bill_hoogterp@lifehikes.com.

Introducing the 2025 Fortune Global 500, the definitive ranking of the biggest companies in the world. Explore this year’s list.



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Kimberly-Clark exec says old bosses would compare her to their daughters when she got promoted

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Women have their own unique set of challenges in the workforce; the “motherhood penalty” can set them back $500,000, their C-suite representation is waning, and the gender pay gap has widened again. One senior executive from $36 billion manufacturing giant Kimberly-Clark knows the tribulations all too well—after all, she’s one of few women in the Fortune 500 who holds the coveted role. 

Tamera Fenske is the chief supply chain officer (CSCO) for Kimberly-Clark, who oversees a massive global team of 22,665 employees—around 58% of the global CPG manufacturer’s workforce. She’s in charge of optimizing the company’s entire supply chain, from sourcing raw materials for Kimberly-Clark products including Kleenex and Huggies, to delivering the final product into customers’ shopping carts. 

It’s a job that’s essential to most top businesses operating at such a massive scale; around 422 of the Fortune 500 have chief supply chain officers, according to a 2025 Spencer Stuart analysis. However, most of these slots are awarded to white men; only about 18% of executives in this position are women, and 12% come from underrepresented racial and ethnic backgrounds. It’s one of the C-suite roles with the least female representation, right next to chief financial officers, chief operating officers, and CEOs. 

In fact, Fenske is one of just 76 Fortune 500 female executives who have “chief supply chain officer” on their resumes. However, the executive tells Fortune it’s an unfortunate fact she “doesn’t think about” too often—if anything, it motivates her further.

“Anytime someone tells me I can’t do something, it makes me want to work that much harder to prove them wrong,” Fenske says. 

The first time Fenske noticed she was one of few women in the room

Fenske has spent her entire life navigating subjects dominated by men—something she didn’t even consider until college. 

Her father, aunts, uncles, and grandfather all worked for Dow Chemical, so she grew up in a STEM-heavy household. Naturally, she leaned into math and science as well, eventually pursuing a bachelor’s in environmental chemical engineering at Michigan Technological University. It was there that her eyes first opened to the reality that she was one of few women in the room. 

“It definitely was going to Michigan Tech, where I first realized the disparity,” Fenske said, adding that there was around an eight-to-one male-to-female ratio. “As you continue through the higher levels and the grades, it becomes even more tighter, especially as you get into your specialized engineering.” 

Once joining the world of work, it wasn’t only Fenske who noticed the lack of women in senior roles—some bosses would even point it out. 

The Fortune 500 boss is paying it forward—for both men and women

After Fenske graduated from Michigan Tech, she got her start at $91 billion manufacturer 3M: a multinational conglomerate producing everything from pads of Post-It notes to rolls of Scotch tape. Fenske was first hired as an environmental engineer in 2000. Promotion after promotion came, but all people could seem to focus on was her gender.

“It would come to light when I moved relatively quickly through the ranks. Some of my bosses would say, ‘You’re the age of my daughter,’ and different things like that. ‘You’re the first woman that’s had this role at this plant or in this division,’” Fenske recalls. Over the course of 2 decades, she rose through the company’s ranks to the SVP of 3M’s U.S. and Canada manufacturing and supply chain. 

And anytime she was asked about her gender? She’d flip the questions back at them while standing her ground. “I would always try to spin it a little bit and ask them questions like, ‘Okay, so what is your daughter doing?’…I always try to seek to understand where they are coming from, but then also reinforce what brought me to where I am.”

Now, three years into her current stint as Kimberly-Clark’s CSCO, the 47-year-old is paying it back—but not just to the women following in her footsteps.

“I never saw myself as necessarily a big, ground-breaker pioneer, even though the statistics would tell you I was,” Fenske says. “I tried to give back to women and men, to be honest. Because I think men [are] one of the strongest advocates for women as well. So I think we have to teach both how to have that equal lens and diverse perspective.”



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SpaceX to offer insider shares at record-setting $800 billion valuation

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SpaceX is preparing to sell insider shares in a transaction that would value Elon Musk’s rocket and satellite maker at as much as $800 billion, people familiar with the matter said, reclaiming the title of the world’s most valuable private company. 

The details, discussed by SpaceX’s board of directors on Thursday at its Starbase hub in Texas, could change based on interest from insider sellers and buyers or other factors, said some of the people, who asked not to be identified as the information isn’t public. SpaceX is also exploring a possible initial public offering as soon as late next year, one of the people said. 

Another person briefed on the matter said that the price under discussion for the sale of some employees and investors’ shares is higher than $400 apiece, which would value SpaceX at between $750 billion and $800 billion. The company wouldn’t raise any funds though this planned sale, though a successful offering at such levels would catapult it past the record of $500 billion valuation achieved by OpenAI in October.

Elon Musk on Saturday denied that SpaceX is raising money at a $800 billion valuation without addressing Bloomberg’s reporting on the planned offering of insiders’ shares. 

“SpaceX has been cash flow positive for many years and does periodic stock buybacks twice a year to provide liquidity for employees and investors,” Musk said in a post on his social media platform X. 

The share sale price under discussion would be a substantial increase from the $212 a share set in July, when the company raised money and sold shares at a valuation of $400 billion. The Wall Street Journal and Financial Times earlier reported the $800 billion valuation target.

News of SpaceX’s valuation sent shares of EchoStar Corp., a satellite TV and wireless company, up as much as 18%. Last month, EchoStar had agreed to sell spectrum licenses to SpaceX for $2.6 billion, adding to an earlier agreement to sell about $17 billion in wireless spectrum to Musk’s company.

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The world’s most prolific rocket launcher, SpaceX dominates the space industry with its Falcon 9 rocket that lifts satellites and people to orbit.

SpaceX is also the industry leader in providing internet services from low-Earth orbit through Starlink, a system of more than 9,000 satellites that is far ahead of competitors including Amazon.com Inc.’s Amazon Leo.

Elite Group

SpaceX is among an elite group of companies that have the ability to raise funds at $100 billion-plus valuations while delaying or denying they have any plan to go public. 

An IPO of the company at an $800 billion value would vault SpaceX into another rarefied group — the 20 largest public companies, a few notches below Musk’s Tesla Inc. 

If SpaceX sold 5% of the company at that valuation, it would have to sell $40 billion of stock — making it the biggest IPO of all time, well above Saudi Aramco’s $29 billion listing in 2019. The firm sold just 1.5% of the company in that offering, a much smaller slice than the majority of publicly traded firms make available.

A listing would also subject SpaceX to the volatility of being a public company, versus private firms whose valuations are closely guarded secrets. Space and defense company IPOs have had a mixed reception in 2025. Karman Holdings Inc.’s stock has nearly tripled since its debut, while Firefly Aerospace Inc. and Voyager Technologies Inc. have plunged by double-digit percentages since their debuts.

SpaceX executives have repeatedly floated the idea of spinning off SpaceX’s Starlink business into a separate, publicly traded company — a concept President Gwynne Shotwell first suggested in 2020. 

However, Musk cast doubt on the prospect publicly over the years and Chief Financial Officer Bret Johnsen said in 2024 that a Starlink IPO would be something that would take place more likely “in the years to come.”

The Information, citing people familiar with the discussions, separately reported on Friday that SpaceX has told investors and financial institution representatives that it’s aiming for an IPO of the entire company in the second half of next year.

Read More: How to Buy SpaceX: A Guide for the Eager, Pre-IPO

A so-called tender or secondary offering, through which employees and some early shareholders can sell shares, provides investors in closely held companies such as SpaceX a way to generate liquidity.

SpaceX is working to develop its new Starship vehicle, advertised as the most powerful rocket ever developed to loft huge numbers of Starlink satellites as well as carry cargo and people to moon and, eventually, Mars.



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National Park Service drops free admission on MLK Day and Juneteenth while adding Trump’s birthday

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The National Park Service will offer free admission to U.S. residents on President Donald Trump’s birthday next year — which also happens to be Flag Day — but is eliminating the benefit for Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Juneteenth.

The new list of free admission days for Americans is the latest example of the Trump administration downplaying America’s civil rights history while also promoting the president’s image, name and legacy.

Last year, the list of free days included Martin Luther King Jr Day and Juneteenth — which is June 19 — but not June 14, Trump’s birthday.

The new free-admission policy takes effect Jan. 1 and was one of several changes announced by the Park Service late last month, including higher admission fees for international visitors.

The other days of free park admission in 2026 are Presidents Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Constitution Day, Veterans Day, President Theodore Roosevelt’s birthday (Oct. 27) and the anniversary of the creation of the Park Service (Aug. 25).

Eliminating Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Juneteenth, which commemorates the day in 1865 when the last enslaved Americans were emancipated, removes two of the nation’s most prominent civil rights holidays.

Some civil rights leaders voiced opposition to the change after news about it began spreading over the weekend.

“The raw & rank racism here stinks to high heaven,” Harvard Kennedy School professor Cornell William Brooks, a former president of the NAACP, wrote on social media about the new policy.

Kristen Brengel, a spokesperson for the National Parks Conservation Association, said that while presidential administrations have tweaked the free days in the past, the elimination of Martin Luther King Jr. Day is particularly concerning. For one, the day has become a popular day of service for community groups that use the free day to perform volunteer projects at parks.

That will now be much more expensive, said Brengel, whose organization is a nonprofit that advocates for the park system.

“Not only does it recognize an American hero, it’s also a day when people go into parks to clean them up,” Brengel said. “Martin Luther King Jr. deserves a day of recognition … For some reason, Black history has repeatedly been targeted by this administration, and it shouldn’t be.”

Some Democratic lawmakers also weighed in to object to the new policy.

“The President didn’t just add his own birthday to the list, he removed both of these holidays that mark Black Americans’ struggle for civil rights and freedom,” said Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada. “Our country deserves better.”

A spokesperson for the National Park Service did not immediately respond to questions on Saturday seeking information about the reasons behind the changes.

Since taking office, Trump has sought to eliminate programs seen as promoting diversity across the federal government, actions that have erased or downplayed America’s history of racism as well as the civil rights victories of Black Americans.

Self-promotion is an old habit of the president’s and one he has continued in his second term. He unsuccessfully put himself forwardfor the Nobel Peace Prize, renamed the U.S. Institute of Peace after himself, sought to put his name on the planned NFL stadium in the nation’s capital and had a new children’s savings program named after him.

Some Republican lawmakers have suggested putting his visage on Mount Rushmore and the $100 bill.



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