On March 4th, 2020, I had the pleasure of delivering some nuggets of inspiration to 80 amazing high school girls.
"My job is literally to invent things. Namely myself from time to time but mostly processes and things. I have always been an inventor, even when I did not know what the art of invention actually was. I went to school in South Memphis and my elementary school is still standing, Alton Elementary right across the street from the fire station. I remember during third grade Mrs. Anderson gave us an assignment: Create a drawing and write a paper on a new invention. I was so excited because this was my kind of assignment. All of the boys drew pictures of cars and wrote about fast their cars would be, some of the girls drew pictures of toys but I drew a box where you would go inside and the teacher would on the screen. You would be taught from the screen in the box, you would talk into the box to the teacher and the machine would type your responses to the teacher. My theory was, I didn’t have to go to school anymore and I could learn without ever leaving my house. See, I had wild thoughts based on my life experiences and Mrs. Anderson didn’t know that I had been playing on word processors and had access to a computer. I remember that look she gave me with those eyes and said to me “it’s cute”. You know that face your mother gives you when she’s thinking that’s crazy but she’s trying to let you down easy?
What I had imagined was the predecessor to “online classes”, it was talk to text dictation, it could have been an app and I could have been a billionaire right now. Every once and a while I think, what if she had never been so dismissive? I never thought she was mean or condescending, she just could not see the vision in the way I saw it. It was 1987 and I was telling my teacher that in the future people will learn anything they want from home people will say words and they will appear on a screen. It was crazy at the time. It’s the same thing with a lot of the dreams and aspirations, your vision isn’t for everyone and it is not for everyone to understand. To be an inventor or innovator means you have to be just a tad bit crazy and to imagine things or solutions that don’t exist which is hard for people to digest. It can be discouraging to you. You have to have those wild thoughts and the willingness to be just that bold to believe yourself. I have this trick “Imagine the headline and put it away”, it’s a tech company’s tip that Eric Mathews told me about. We I have a vision, goal or thought and I put it on a post-it note that I keep in the back of my notebook and leave it, I don’t talk about it I just start working towards the goal. When the headline comes true, because they do, I sometimes celebrate but I toss them and write new ones. They come true because in my mind I have already visualized these things happening already, it’s muscle memory. The same way you train your body to perform task, your brain is a muscle and I train it with thoughts so when the headline happens, I’m already prepared and it’s scary but it drives me to write even bolder headlines. Start with the little things “I’m going to make my bed every day this week”, “I’m go into get an A in Math”, “I’m going to get accepted to 10 colleges” and then work your way up.
It’s called being a visionary. You must own your own visions.
One of my favorite things to do is play video games; yes, even still. I have played them since there were Atari’s on floor model TV. Honestly, I just love games I played a lot of Solitaire, Othello, checkers and chess, both sides of the board, of you know how hard it is to beat yourself?
What’s the common thing about all of those things? Yes, it is symptomatic play of an introvert but more specifically they are all games that I played by myself.
All my life I have been teaching myself how to be my best competitor and not that I planned to, it started out as a result of being the only child in the house. See my parents were teenagers were only 16 when I was born, mom had a drug addiction and dad was just too young at the time so I was the only child in the house I was raised in and I am eternally grateful for that intervention because it was preparing me for the amazing things happening in my life I was not interested in playing with my Granny. As women and girls sometimes we fall subject to comparing ourselves to other women. The beautiful thing about each one of us is that there is something amazing that resides inside of us that just cannot be replicated. The only person you need to over compare yourself to is the person you were yesterday.
First thing I do when I wake up is read. I read: tech news, women’s news, data news, local news. When I get to work, I’m the first person there and I’m in my “learning box” 30 minutes to an hour every morning learning something, from some of the finest institutions and educators from all over the world crafting myself. Yes, I got the job but I never stop learning about it. I never stop learning but most importantly, I never stop listening.
I look at my “sisters”, I see them on Facebook living their most beautiful and best lives and I admire them for the amazing gifts they have, that excites me and I adore their talents. I look at them as motivation and not competition. Every one of us has a very particular place and job on this planet. I like talking to people about my ideas but I love hearing other people’s ideas. Listening changes perspectives and helps us see things through the lens of others. Listening and seeing other people succeed should not be the driver of your desires and aspirations. Your success is timed differently from everyone else’s and that is for a divine reason.
The only person I compete with is me, I have to keep myself working hard and no outside force can do that for me. No one is pulling me out of bed to read, I drive that.
Competing against others is easy and short sighted because you are forced to validate yourself based on someone else’s life and actions. You are too special to diminish all of the beautiful skills and talents you have trying to compete or compare yourself to someone else. Far too many young people and adults become disheartened and they stop believing in themselves based on the opinion of others. As the saying goes, when you make the opinions of others your business, you are bound to experience disappoints in your own personal growth.
Run your own race, own you and know what you deserve.
Take up space and never apologize about it, never apologize for shinning.
You are smart. Own it.
Stop saying you are sorry; I never say I’m sorry. I hate the word. It feels gross now.
When I’m wrong and I say “I apologize, that was an over sight” or “let me make it right” but I will never say I’m sorry. I would find myself apologizing for things that were out of my control, if something falls “I’m sorry”, if someone else did something, there I would go apologizing. If I had an idea, I’d try and soften myself and say “I’m sorry but I don’t think that was a good idea”.
Saying “I’m sorry” unnecessarily takes away some of your authority. Commit to yourself to apologize when you have made a mistake and learn from it, grow from it.
This means you have to be bold.
This means you take up space and own it. I’m not perfect and I catch myself in need of inspiration sometimes. I suffer from impostor syndrome from time to time. That’s why I’m glad I have a tribe of women that are confident in their own gifts to check me. For those that don’t know what impostor syndrome is, it is the feeling of being inadequate even though you are obviously qualified. Just recently I got really excited because I’m going to be working on a team with someone I thought was going to be able to teach me a lot. I saw his LinkedIn profile and was looking at all of his awards and the people he knew, I was excited because sometimes networking and knowing the right person becomes very important. So I telling another woman on the team about my excitement of how I was going to learn so much from this guy and she looked at me with the eyes of a true “sister” and said “No he will be learning from you” and started reminding me of “my shine”.
So because of my “sister’s” validation, it caused be to walk into the room differently and this is why it is important that we must constantly motivate each other. We have to be each other’s hype team sometimes. It’s hard being in tech period but it’s even more difficult being a woman and sometimes the fight gets distracting.
Reinvent yourself, often and don’t be afraid to do so.
I have changed, I am not the same person I was 20 years ago, I am not the same person I was last year… I have changed since yesterday. Change is inevitable, those that embrace it become the most successful. Careers in data did not exist the way they do today, less than 5 years ago I was a part of a team starting a data team for a large company. Starting. That means we invented new jobs, new procedures, policies and governance. That meant I had to mentally be in a place that I was agile to learn something new and charter a new path. Now data is actually more valuable than oil.
Reinvention is scary, it’s new and staying the same is comfortable. People may call you out for trying new things. Reinvention is nothing you should ever apologize for, you must take ownership of your destiny and if you want to change your current path you have all of the power under the sun to change it.
Technology is changing every single day. When my grandmother was my age, phone numbers started with letters and there was a phone operator on the opposite of the phone actually connecting physical lines to boards to connect calls. When I was younger, if you called someone and they were on the phone they never knew. You would have to call and call and call until someone got off of the phone. Then we got “call waiting”. Now I can literally create a new phone number within seconds, call people from all over the world and see them.
We reinvented the phone and we never went back to using it the old way ever again. Think of yourself in the same way. Make small changes, something little here and there: hang out with people you typically wouldn’t, learn about something new, volunteer in someone else’s neighborhood just explores places. What you will find is just like that phone, you have changed and become so much better over the years that you never want to go back to the old way of doing things.
You have to take small steps to go great distances."
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