Ivanka Trump discusses how she has reached a point of deep self-knowledge after decades of varied experience, and how that clarity now drives everything she builds. She walks through her current work across real estate, investing, and mission-driven ventures, and reflects on the personal evolution that made it possible.
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Knowing yourself is the foundation of everything she does now
- She says she finally knows what she loves, what she’s good at, and what sustains her excitement over time — something that took years of trial, error, and self-reflection to develop.
- Her current work is entirely mission-driven: incubating companies, investing in founders working on AI, biotech, robotics, and space, and returning to real estate with a massive Mediterranean island project.
- She is drawn to people with huge imaginations and meaningful problems to solve, and finds energy in learning from them.
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The Sazan Island project is the culmination of her real estate experience
- She and her husband discovered a 1,400-hectare private island in the Mediterranean while on a friend’s boat, swam to it, hiked to the top barefoot, and were captivated.
- The project includes the island plus five miles of beachfront on a nearby peninsula with a lagoon on one side and ocean on the other.
- There is no existing power on the island — they are building everything from scratch.
- She describes it as more of a challenge than a business, requiring collaboration with some of the greatest living architects who refuse to compromise on integrity or functionality.
- She sees real estate as uniquely tangible in an increasingly intangible world, and loves that buildings outlive their creators — people will have milestone life moments in spaces she helped conceive.
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“Knowing who you are” is rare and takes real work
- She didn’t know herself at 22 when she started her first company; her instinct then was unrefined.
- She credits Dana White’s advice: if you know who you are and what you want, the rest of your life becomes straightforward.
- The world will tell you who you are if you don’t figure it out yourself, and it may not be an answer you want.
- Decisions that align with your core values always feel right even when they’re hard; decisions that don’t align are the ones you regret.
- She sees authenticity as increasingly rare and increasingly powerful — people are drawn to those who are genuinely themselves over time.
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Building self-knowledge requires stillness and discipline
- She is far more intentional about creating contemplative routines now than she was 20 years ago, because the demands on her time are greater.
- Her morning routine: wake up, cook breakfast with Jared for their three kids, drop them off at the bus, then sit by the ocean in Miami to meditate, pray, and reflect as the sun rises. She keeps that moment as an anchor for gratitude and clarity about her priorities.
- She then works out and begins her day with a clear definition of what she wants to accomplish, which makes her less reactive and more proactive.
- She believes creativity requires space to listen — to yourself and to what the universe is saying. Rick Rubin’s idea that creators are simply highly attuned to what the universe is telling them resonates deeply with her.
- She notes that people often have their best ideas in the shower precisely because it’s one of the few places they are alone with their thoughts, without their phone.
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Books are her way of finding mentors across time
- She is a voracious reader and sees books as a way to access the distilled wisdom of brilliant minds across fields and centuries.
- She finds it almost irresponsible not to read, given that someone can compress 80 years of experience into a 300-page book you can buy for $30.
- She recently reread Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning and shared it with her 14-year-old daughter. Frankl’s core idea — that meaning is often redeemed through struggle, and that between stimulus and response there is a space in which we retain the freedom to choose our reaction — she finds deeply empowering.
- She admires Phil Knight’s Shoe Dog for its vulnerability and honesty, noting that great books require the author to reveal themselves fully, including the painful parts.
- She sees writing a book as “an X-ray of the soul” and understands why even the most successful people are often more nervous about publishing a memoir than acquiring a major company.
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The hardest professional period: leaving her business to serve in government
- When her father won the presidency, she was at a peak moment: her fashion brand was doing over $800 million in annual sales, she was running real estate acquisitions and development for the Trump Organization, building the Old Post Office in Washington and Trump Doral in Miami simultaneously, and had three very young children.
- Her father had never spent a night in Washington before his first night in the White House and knew almost no one there. He asked her and Jared to come, trusting their judgment and honesty.
- She and Jared decided that the 80-year-old versions of themselves would not be proud if they said no.
- The transition required divesting from or putting into trust roughly 350 business interests through the Office of Government Ethics — a wild unbuilding of the life she had constructed.
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Leaving government was a second birth — a blank slate
- When she left, the slate was completely clean. She had enormous lived experience in both the private sector and government, but no predetermined path.
- She made a deliberate choice not to go back to the family business or restart her fashion brand, because she was a different person and wanted a new adventure.
- She took about six months to say no to all partners and opportunities, focusing instead on building a new life in Miami for her family — new routines, new habits, new after-school activities.
- She describes this as one of the smartest things she did, because it allowed her to set up her life intentionally.
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“Less and better” is her operating principle now
- The experience of detaching from everything she had built gave her perspective on which races she actually wanted to compete in.
- She now commits only to things she can be passionate about over the long term, because the opportunity cost is real — she has three children (14, 12, and 10) who need her in different ways.
- She thinks about what her 14-year-old daughter needs from her right now, knowing that in four years she’ll be out of the house.
- She quotes Alan Watts: “You are under no obligation to be who you were 2 minutes ago,” and believes that if you’re not a little embarrassed by who you were five years ago, you’re not growing enough.
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She sees everyone, even people who anger her, as teachers
- Her 99-year-old grandmother, who lives with her, taught her about love and nurturing devotion to another human being.
- She learns from her children, who are fully present in the moment in ways adults rarely are — her daughter with horses, her son Joseph in nature, her youngest son Theo when playing games.
- She watches her children in their “flow” states and uses those moments to decompress and be present herself.
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Planet Harvest: turning waste into an asset
- She co-founded Planet Harvest with Melissa Acriman to address the fact that 40% of fruits and vegetables grown in America never leave the field — they are plowed under because they don’t meet cosmetic specifications for size and shape, despite being perfectly nutritious.
- During COVID, she created the Farmers to Family Food Box program as part of the CARES Act, buying surplus produce and sending it to communities in need, keeping small and medium-sized farms alive.
- She realized there was no secondary market for imperfect produce and set out to create demand by working with large consumers.
- Chobani now sources all the fruit in its yogurt and smoothies from Planet Harvest’s network of small and medium farmers — produce that would have been 100% waste.
- The incremental revenue is often the difference between a third-generation farm becoming a fourth-generation farm or not.
- She loves solving problems that are obvious in hindsight — Jared’s phrase “contrarian by being obvious” captures the approach.
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Alexandria: democratizing the world’s great books through AI
- She is working with investor Elad Gil to use generative AI to create high-fidelity translations of public-domain literary works into most of the world’s commonly spoken languages, available for free.
- The project addresses the reality that many people globally cannot access great works of literature due to lack of libraries, inability to buy books, or absence of translations in their native language.
- The first 10,000 works will launch soon, with text and audio formats — 11 Labs is helping with audio production.
- She sees this as a form of leverage for future generations, similar to how Andrew Carnegie’s free libraries impacted Kelly Johnson, the legendary aircraft designer, who grew up in a poor rural community with no electricity and educated himself entirely through library books.
- She also connects this to Elon Musk’s early experience: when asked how he learned business coming from South Africa with no money and no mentors, he said he looked for mentors in historical context through biographies and autobiographies.
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How she decides what to work on and who to partner with
- She stays receptive to inputs from others and notices what sparks something in her, then goes deep — she explores many ideas but only commits to a few.
- She immerses herself in any subject she takes on, reading extensively to become what she calls “a PhD in that subject.”
- For the Sazan project, she is reading the best Albanian writers to understand the country through their eyes before imposing anything on the land.
- She prioritizes kind, good people above all — she believes no contract can protect you from a bad partner, and would rather do a handshake deal with a good person than have the most ironclad contract with a bad one.
- She surrounds herself with people who help her grow, whether as a mother, wife, or business leader, and believes you only learn when you’re listening and observing, not when you’re talking.
- In early-stage investing, she focuses on the founder as much as the idea — assessing whether they have the perseverance, vision, flexibility, and humility to build something transformational, often before there is any data to support the concept.
- She believes new ideas are fragile and need room to grow, and that the path from idea to outcome is rarely straight — Jeff Bezos’s analogy of an acorn becoming an oak tree captures this.
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On marriage and partnership
- She describes Jared as someone who is deeply present wherever he is, emotionally available even when physically absent, and able to drop anything for the people he cares about.
- He is a long-term thinker who is outcome-oriented and pragmatic but not transactional, building deep friendships based on trust because he is fundamentally a giver.
- She says he is almost without ego — criticism from strangers doesn’t affect him, and he only recalibrates when feedback from people he loves is warranted.
- She believes marrying the right person is key to life, and that Jared sees her in a way she aspires to see herself.