The Four Things No One Tells You About Fame

The Four Things No One Tells You About Fame

From Becoming You with Suzy Welch by NYU Stern Professor Suzy Welch

August 11, 2026 · 1h 1m

About this episode

Suzy Welch explores the complexities of fame and its impact on personal values through stories and research.

This week on Becoming You, your host Suzy Welch takes on fame, or what the Becoming You methodology calls Luminance, one of the 16 values measured by The Values Bridge, Suzy's psychometric tool for figuring out what actually matters to you. And of all 16, this is the one people are least willing to own. Only 3% rank it in their top 5. Most people bury it near the very bottom. Suzy thinks that's not because so few of us feel it, it's because it's the one value you're not supposed to say out loud. Suzy opens with a story she's never quite gotten over: a college friend whose hunger for fame she once dismissed, judged, and didn't understand, and the friendship it cost her, for good, decades later. She goes back 3,000 years to Achilles, who's given a choice between a long forgotten life and a short one with undying glory, and picks glory, and nobody in the Iliad thinks he's a narcissist for it. Then she gets into the actual research on why people want to be known: for status, for a platform to do good, as the byproduct of doing great work, or simply so they're not forgotten. Plus: actress Paloma Garcia-Lee talks with real candor about what it's like to hold this value and live it out…

People in this episode

Host: Suzy Welch

Guests: Paloma Garcia-Lee, Sophia Welch

Topics covered

  • fame
  • Luminance
  • values
  • psychometrics
  • self-awareness
  • celebrity culture

Keywords

  • fame
  • Luminance
  • values
  • psychometric tool
  • self-improvement
  • celebrity
  • Achilles
  • Iliad

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: Iliad

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