Hey, I’m Kelly, the creator of YouBrik. I’ve spent the last 16+ years teaching marketing, consumer psychology, and business strategy - from undergraduate classrooms and MBA seminars to international study abroad programs. I hold both an MBA and a PhD in marketing, and my work has focused in part on how brands stay profitable by keeping consumers perpetually dissatisfied with themselves.

That work gave me a front-row seat to a painful truth: if someone else is holding the carrot you’re chasing, they can (and will) keep moving the carrot. In all my years of teaching, I watched students from every background burn themselves out trying to reach goals that were always shifting, always conditional, always outside of themselves.

As it turns out, I wasn’t just seeing it in my students; I was living it too. For years, I pursued life goals given to me by other people. They handed me a rubric and said: meet these criteria and you’ll lead a successful life. The usual suspects were all included: job titles, salary, family, beauty and anti-aging. And I did hit a few impressive milestones. But it never felt like enough. There was always a need to keep proving myself.

So I built something different.

YouBrik was born out of the belief that success should be personal, values-driven, and rooted in self-trust. In the stories of our lives, what counts is not how happily the plot plays out. Honestly, no one would ever watch a movie where the hero never faced a challenge. And further, so many forces outside our control influence the plot anyway. What counts is character. How authentically can we show up as the plot does what it’s going to do? Is embodying the values most important to us enough to consider ourselves successful?

I believe it is.

YouBrik was built to provide a framework for identifying our core values, defining for ourselves how we want to embrace and express those values, and assessing how well we’re staying aligned with those values. It’s a tool for anyone who’s ready to focus on character over plot.

I can promise you don’t need to do more to be enough. You just need a better way to track your growth. That’s what YouBrik is here for.