The optimizer who couldn't optimize herself.
Tara could engineer almost anything. Her career was built on understanding, at the atomic scale, why batteries hold their charge and why they fail. What she couldn't engineer was a way to stop running on empty.
A decade of high-pressure R&D in US corporate life and Silicon Valley taught her one thing about the system everyone was living inside:
"Everyone is under pressure and everyone is okay with it, because it's normalized. You work 8-to-5, come home tired, reset for the night, and do it again."
After a layoff and a stretch of real burnout, she had the opening to step back — and the gut sense that the way she'd been working wasn't sustainable, even when everything looked fine on paper.
The usual answers missed the point entirely:
"No one teaches us how to connect to ourselves — to understand what we need, what makes us happy, and the best way to do something. And our way is the most efficient way."
So she did what an engineer does. She went back to first principles, spent two years rebuilding from Bali, and distilled what actually worked into a method — and then a workshop and an app.