About Life’s Notebook
Life’s Notebook turns knowledge and lived experience into fresh perspectives on what matters and how to move forward with clarity and hope.
About Life's Notebook
Life’s Notebook is a weekly publication bringing together scientific evidence, business insight, leadership experience, and practical reflection to help readers make more thoughtful choices about their health, work, and lives.
Each Tuesday, I examine an important question, connecting research and experience to uncover what may be overlooked and make complex ideas useful. The essays are concise and research-informed, designed to be read in a few minutes and remembered long afterward.
About the author
I am a physician, business leader, and writer shaped by a life lived across cultures. Franco-American and raised in Europe, I spent more than half of my working life in the United States. Living and working in different countries has broadened my perspective and deepened my curiosity about the choices that shape our lives.
For more than 35 years, I worked in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry, leading international teams and helping bring more than a dozen innovative medicines to patients worldwide. I later founded my own consulting company. Medicine taught me to look for evidence, business taught me to make decisions in complex environments, and leadership taught me how much people matter.
Writing is the next chapter of that journey. Through Life’s Notebook, I bring together what I have learned from science, work, different cultures, and life’s unexpected turns. I do not write to prescribe how others should live, but to encourage reflection, offer practical insight, and share reasons for hope.
What are my goals ?
My goal is to share knowledge and experience in ways that spark reflection, clarify complexity, and help readers make more thoughtful choices about their health, work, and lives.
Life’s Notebook explores subjects that have long fascinated me:
- Science, health and well-being: using scientific knowledge to improve health and quality of life.
- Leadership: inspiring and empowering people to become the best version of themselves.
- Business: understanding complexity and making better decisions in a changing world.
- Economy and finance: making the forces that shape our financial lives easier to understand.
- American culture: exploring some of the most distinctive and fascinating aspects of American life.
My longer-term ambition is to build a foundation that promotes education and gives people practical knowledge for a better life.
The origin of Life's Notebook
Life’s Notebook grew out of conversations with close friends who shared a growing sense of confusion. Despite having access to more information than ever, they found it increasingly difficult to know what to trust, which reference points still mattered, and how to move forward when life became uncertain. Beneath those conversations was not only a search for clarity, but also a need for hope.
I created Life’s Notebook as a place to pause and reflect. It was never intended to prescribe how others should live or to offer easy answers, but to bring knowledge and experience together in ways that might illuminate a question or open a new perspective.
What began with conversations among friends has become a weekly exchange with readers across countries, connected by a shared desire to understand what matters and live with greater clarity.
My shared values
Value of Work
Your work is the expression of your creative power combined with your commitment to materialise a vision. Allow yourself to live by your dreams, steps by steps and bit by bit over the long run.
Respect
Respect covers three entwined entities : yourself, others and the ecosystem we are all living in. Cherish your singularity and the intrinsic value of others as a fertile ground for valuable relationships and impactful action.
Thoughfulness
Our world is sophisticated and rich of reliefs and nuances. Seek to understand and appreciate them from a macro as well as a micro point of view. This, in business as well as in your daily life.
Integrity
Strong ethics and strong values aligned with your conduct in all circumstances.
“Malou has the unique ability to discern what matters and turn a challenge into an opportunity. She communicates directly, provides clear direction, and empowers her team to perform at its best. Her extraordinary energy is infectious and inspires everyone to rise to the challenge.”
Former chief of staff
“I have been fortunate to know and work with Malou for many years. We met at a finance meeting at New York University and immediately connected. Since then, Malou has become a committed and highly respected volunteer with our nonprofit organization, which provides financial education and college and career readiness programs to students nationally. She is passionate about education and devotes significant time and energy to mentoring students. She views writing as another expression of her commitment to education, guided by her belief that there is no happiness without knowledge and that knowledge should be shared without limits.”
CEO W!SE
“When I first met Malou in medical school, I immediately loved her original thinking and distinctive view of the world. It helped us navigate the ocean of life with serenity. Today, reading her reflections is a true pleasure. Her style is direct, clear, and precise. She writes as she is and about life as it is. It is her nature to be forthright, without fuss. With or without a pen, she is animated by the same generosity of heart and the same desire to ease the pain of others and offer comfort and hope to those who seek it.”
Husband
“Malou shared her life journey with me, and I listened with great emotion. A childhood marked by the repeated loss of loved ones, a life often disrupted by unexpected events, and the challenges common to us all did not prevent her from pursuing a distinguished international career. Today, she shares her thoughtful reflections and encourages us to discover what Paulo Coelho calls the ‘warrior of light’ within each of us.”
Brother-in-law
