Modern Meditations: Claire Hughes Johnson

The Stripe executive on leadership, linguistics, and literature.

Illustration by Eleanor Taylor

To write an average business book, an author requires: a reliable laptop, a willing publisher, a decent, celebratory social media audience, a sense of great import, and a twenty-page conceit stretched to a two-hundred-page length. 

We have all read this book. In all likelihood, we have read many versions of it: on the life-c…