Shannon Watts Wants You To Live On Fire—Here Is Her Formula For Finding Your Spark

Forbes

28-07-2025

WASHINGTON, DC — SEPTEMBER 25: Shannon Watts is the founder of the gun safety group, Moms Demand ... More Action, the nations largest grassroots organization fighting to end gun violence. For Just Asking Profile. (photo by Andre Chung for The Washington Post via Getty Images)
Why do some people take a stand against injustice while others simply stand by?
Shannon Watts, a former communications executive, remembers the moment when she could no longer stay silent. She was a mother of five in her 40s in December 2012, the day after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting that killed 26 children and teachers. She, like so many others, was heartbroken and angry. Yet when she went to her yoga teacher training class that day, the teacher never mentioned the tragedy. Instead, the class went on business as usual.
Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action and author of "Fired Up"
For Watts it might have been akin to feeling like you're living in an alternate reality, where you're witnessing something horrible happening that could be prevented in the future if only it was addressed, yet no one seems to be doing anything significant to stop it.
It was at that moment that Watts realized she could not possibly pretend to care about cat-cow poses—she was too enraged. Rather than stay in class to complete her teacher training certification, she walked out. 'I couldn't stand the thought of living in a world where gun industry profits were prioritized over children's safety. The only way to stay sane was to act,' she says.
But she wondered what exactly could she, a forty-something mom from the Midwest, do? She went home and made a list of all the ways she might be able to get involved in gun violence prevention, which ranged from donating to an organization to meeting with law makers to becoming an activist (which she said felt to her almost fringe).
What Watts really wanted to do was to join an army of moms working for change like the mainstream organization Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), but one that was demanding gun safety. So she Googled, 'organizations like MADD for gun control.' Nothing came up except for some think tanks mostly run by men in Washington, D.C.
'I had watched the shootings in Columbine, and Virginia Tech and Gabby Giffords and on and on, and no one had done anything,' says Watts. '[With Sandy Hook] I was already seeing pundits and politicians, mostly conservatives, saying, 'this has nothing to do with guns,' and 'gun laws won't do anything,' and I thought to myself, 'They aren't going to do anything again.''
The Facebook Post That Launched A Movement
Since a MADD for gun violence prevention didn't exist, Watts decided to create it herself. Though she had only 75 'friends' on Facebook at the time, she went home after leaving her yoga training and created a new Facebook page on a whim called 'One Million Moms For Gun Control,' urging mothers to march in Washington in 2013, demand common sense gun safety laws, and share the post to spread the message. That post went viral and was the first spark that helped Watts embolden millions of women to take a stand.
'I think the reason it went viral and the reason it resonated so much with other women is because we hold only about 25% of the 500,000 elected positions in this country and we're less than 5% of Fortune 1000 CEOs, which means we aren't making the policies that protect our families and communities,' says Watts. 'In that moment [of the Sandy Hook shooting]
we knew that we had to use our voices and our votes. We knew that if we mobilized, we could make a difference.'
Watts didn't have political or organizing experience and knew next to nothing about gun safety. She had a debilitating fear of public speaking and severe ADHD. Despite an inner voice telling her she wasn't qualified and outside critics telling her she would never succeed, Watts stepped up to found Moms Demand Action, the largest women-led non-profit in the nation. Moms Demand Action lit a fire under more than two million supporters to help drive legislation to prevent gun violence, stopped the industry's agenda in statehouses 90% of the time, and elected thousands of candidates who supported common sense gun reform legislation.
Despite the voices telling her that she wasn't the right person to ignite a fight against one of the most powerful special interest groups that ever existed, Watts says, 'Turns out, this neurodiverse, reserved, middle-aged mom in the Midwest was exactly the right person for the job.'
Creating Change From The Outside In
Shannon Watts, the founder of Moms Demand Action, is summoning the audacity of women in her new ... More book, "Fired Up."
Her activism in confronting injustice not only created change in the outside world, finding her courage and overcoming setbacks also transformed Watts on the inside—as it did for many of the volunteers in her growing community. Watts' experience in starting Moms Demand Action has taught her a few things about standing in your power, and she has a rallying cry for women everywhere: Rather than spending your time and energy trying to find your purpose, focus on living on purpose. Watts has created a formula for how to do this in her new book Fired Up: How To Turn Your Spark Into A Flame And Come Alive At Any Age.
'Living on fire means figuring out what's limiting you and what's calling you,' says Watts. 'What I have seen so often is that men are taught to fulfill their desires, and women are taught to fulfill their obligations. There's so many things that society tells us that we have to do instead of what we want to do. Women don't fear their fire because they're weak, it's because they are wise. We see all the obstacles set up in front of us, and we realize it's much easier to pursue our obligations.'
In Fired Up, she says she found three false fires, or things that we incorrectly believe will result in our fulfillment. One of them is finding your purpose. Watts doesn't think the goal is to find that one single purpose for your life that will make it meaningful, but rather it is about finding fulfillment in big and small ways to the very end of your life. Happiness is the second false fire, or the notion of chasing this feeling of being happy all the time, as if it's a constant state that we can achieve. Busyness is the third false fire, which makes women believe that being busy and productive is what leads to fulfillment.
Instead what we need right now in the world is for women to ask themselves what they truly want, regardless of what outside voices or society tells women they should want (Watts says your fire starts where all your shoulds end) and to come alive. 'The fire formula is to figure out what your desires, values, and abilities are, and to bring those back into alignment over and over again.'
Watts says that happier, more fulfilled women means a better country, a better democracy, stronger families, and a better government. 'There is data that shows that when women are elected to office instead of doing things that prop themselves up, they tend to make more policies that lift all people up,' says Watts. 'I'm not asking everyone to be an activist—although I do think we all have a role to play in helping democracy—but rather it is about finding your personal, political, professional fulfillment. For some women that might be having a hard conversation or going to therapy or asking for a promotion, and for others it might be as large as leaving a relationship or career or finally deciding to get involved as an activist.'
The book highlights some research that points out one of the biggest regrets people have on their deathbed is that they wished they'd had the courage to live a life true to themselves rather than the life others expected of them. The courage to do so calls for finding ways to liberate yourself from the inside out when pushing against external structures—whether that be pushback from friends or family who might criticize you for pursuing your desires to systems that weren't set up to support you to succeed.
If the fire you want to ignite does include going down the route of an activist, blow back is unavoidable and could be serious. Watts had to overcome some scary blow back from gun extremists, from threats of sexual violence to threats of death to herself and to her family. She recalls a time early on when she called her local police department after receiving a threat from an extremist. The officer who came to her house told her, 'Well ma'am, that's what you get when you mess with the second amendment.'
Summoning The Audacity Of Women
In that moment, Watts knew the point of the blow back was to silence and intimidate her, and she had to make a conscious choice to double back or double down. It wasn't easy in any way, but once she made the intentional decision to proceed, she says her family and community of volunteers at Moms Demand Action helped her have the strength to keep going. 'I didn't want to stay small; I wanted to be brave.'
Watts' hope for Fired Up is that it serves as a handbook for women to learn to handle blowback, which she believes is all predictable and is not at all personal. She says, 'The degree to which you can grow your fire is directly proportional to the amount of blow back you can withstand.'
The common thread that Watts has found is that her fulfillment comes from summoning the audacity of other women. 'I want you to get to the end of your life and feel like you burned and lived a life that's authentic to you,' says Watts. 'Some of the most amazing women I interviewed in this book are over 70 and still doing amazing things. They're living in a way that makes them feel alive, and I think we all deserve that.'
To help more women learn to do that, she has launched Firestarter University, a free online course for a year that starts in September to bring together an action-driven curriculum and a supportive community for people who want to prioritize their personal, professional, or political desires.
'Now more than ever we need to know our neighbors, we need to be having conversations—given the post-pandemic world, given polarization, given social media,' says Watts. 'If you look at the chasm—particularly among white women voters in the last election—college educated and non-college educated women are not having these vital conversations we need to be having about how to improve our lives and our communities together. I'm really hopeful that this spurs more of that dialogue."