Born to Shine: Do Good, Find Your Joy, and Build a Life You Love

I'm an optimist to my core: my friends have joked that hanging out with me is like being around a Disney princess who has birds land on her fingertips to sing her a song. They're wrong about the princess part—I'm Midwestern born, and Texas has been my home for thirty years—but I am one of those people who wakes up happy, who sees the best in everything and everyone. I live in the same reality we all do—where bad things happen to good people, where dreams are deferred or crushed altogether, where climbing to a dizzying height means risking a painful fall—I just refuse to let the worst of reality become my entire reality. Toxic Positivity is forcing a silver lining and denying the reality of the storm: it's not just unhelpful, it's harmful. Optimism, to me, is believing that whatever is in this moment...is not forever. It's knowing that there is still possibility and promise in the future, even when the present is messy or painful or downright terrible.

Nature is the original optimist, and she gives us endless examples of promise and renewal and reinvention. My company—Kendra Scott—is known for creating beautiful and affordable jewelry, often with natural gemstones. Gemstones have an undeniable natural beauty that has captivated humanity for time immemorial; we've imbued them with meaning, with powers, we've valued them spiritually and materially.

One of our most popular stones is a form of quartz that dazzles like glitter, catching the light in a million different ways without ever being faceted. It can be cut to form earrings or pendants and dyed to nearly any color in the rainbow, and in any setting or shade, they would dazzle you even in a case filled with diamond. But quartz—like any other gemstone, like diamonds, even—does not start out beautiful. To create these quartz formations, mineralized water evaporates on the surface of a plain old rock, and with the right combination of ingredients, time, pressure, and space...get immense beauty.

Each gem is a product of its environment, a reflection on what came before it. Amethyst is formed in basalt, a rock created by volcanic lava. In the icy water of Lake Superior, quartz can appear in earth-toned agates, striped with the history of the glaciers that formed in old quarries and abandoned mines, a glittering reminder of the persistence of the natural world, who renews and reinvents herself over and over again.

Maybe this is what drew me to these elements in my work, that the stones I formed into necklaces and earrings for my friends, my neighbors, and now for millions of women worldwide reflect the same tenacity and perseverance as the people who treasure them. Often, the rarest of gems are more valued for what makes them different; an imperfection that cannot be replicated suddenly makes them even more special. What if we saw ourselves this way? Each other? What if we looked at our own lives and saw the flaws and cracks and imperfections as features wholly unique to us, assets that increased our value, that make us truly one of a kind.

Gemstones do not have to be rare to be beautiful or valued; quartz makes up a large percentage of our Earth's crust and still we marvel at the way it catches and refracts light, how something so luminous could grow in a place the light never touches. By the time they reach us, we see only the finished product; these naturally beautiful objects don't reveal the immense amount of effort it took to form something so effortlessly beautiful.

"You do not need to be perfect to be valued, you do not need to shine for anyone but yourself."

In 2002, I started Kendra Scott in the spare bedroom of my house during my baby's naptime. I started with the $500 I had to spare, and now I stand at helm of a company valued at over a billion dollars. When you create shiny, beautiful things for a living, the assumption is that your life is also shiny and beautiful. And while my life at times certainly has been shiny and beautiful, it has also been painful and sharp. There is no level of success that can smooth all the edges for you, and I have felt deep cuts over the years. Haven't we all? A guarantee of life is that the unpredictable pendulum can swing any which way, whenever its wants, that over and over again we will need to excavate our own selves and each other from the darkness.

Maybe that's where you are now, trying to make sense of the shadows and find the way up. And if you are, hear me: you do not need to be perfect to be valued, you do not need to shine for anyone but yourself. Gems and stones are formed by a series of seemingly improbable events: the right elements finding their way to each other in the exact right place, and given time, pressure, and space to make something new in the darkness. We live in a culture with plenty of pressure, but little time and space, and it's no wonder so many people feel as though they are imploding under the weight of the world. Pressure without time and space is just extra weight in an overburdened world. Time—patience, persistence—is a requirement for any kind of growth. These treasures grow in cracks and fissures, in spaces where beauty is hard to find. They don't do it for us—they're not sentient, for goodness' sake—but they form themselves into something beautiful, regardless of whether they'll ever be pulled from the darkness to catch the light.

Is this why we've worn them for millennia? Because they signal to us something that we hope to embody? Do they remind us that our own selves are worth developing and appreciating, even if there is nobody around to appreciate it but us? To live a full life, we must have all of the fundamental elements: joy, love, grief, despair, peace. Some of those are shinier and prettier than the others, but all of them are necessary elements for growing something beautiful, something meaningful. This possibility is within all of us—within everyone in our lives, even when we don't see it—and it's our job not just to shine ourselves but to find the shine in others, too.

Wherever you are, wherever you come from, I believe in my heart and soul that you are here for a reason, that you have immense and innate value, that you—a one-of-a-kind gem that could never be replicated—were born to shine.

To purchase Scott's book, click here.