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This month we celebrate seven years! As I both reflect and look forward I hit a bit of a low moment as I consider how I arrived here. This has been a professional journey. One of my considerations as I have gone through the years has been whether or not to turn down how much energy I put towards being a professional. When I started writing for this website it was for personal reasons. It was an idea from corporate that turned into a personal outlet. I wanted and needed the people in my life to put some respect on my name.
At the top of 2018 I had finished my first year of graduate school. I had gotten into a bad car accident I wasn’t at fault for. I was in school studying for my master’s and working as a graduate assistant. I worked part-time at Panera and I was a contract driver with Uber and Lyft. Frankly, up until the accident, that year, fall 2017-spring 2018 wasn’t that bad. The first domino to fall… actually I don’t know which one came first or who it was-whether it be me or the people I was connected with at the time, but there was pride in the camp.
Whether it was true or not I had the pleasure at that time of working with people who were at the top in their field/lane/local area of expertise, and to a certain degree it did feel as though I was playing with house money. Yes, I was working hard, no I wasn’t being over indulgent, but I also may have certainly taken some things for granted and or not fully understood the significance of what was happening. Nevertheless, I don’t think that diminished my impact as an employee, leader, and professional (not too much if at all). That said, after that pride came the inevitable actual fall where I lost some access to what I had in that season…
Even now though when I fully reflect on that-it’s like I got my Master’s degree, I did some good work in the positions I held, my time in that season later paid for the next one, and I got to go to Asia for the first time. So, that’s what i’m saying, it was a tough season 2017-2018, but it laid a foundation for me.I wanted a decent job. You can have so many motivating factors growing up. I wanted to be independent and I wanted to be there for and with the people I cared about. That was and to an extent still is who I am and what I want. There were more than a couple of disillusioning realities I faced in academia. I care about school and learning but there is some truth that it isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be.
I got the credentials but I didn’t get the career. Not having a career has been a haunting sentiment. I ultimately don’t think it’s true-it’s evidently not now, but it used to and sometimes still does lurk in shadowy corners. When I graduated from graduate school I changed my major and therefore my career trajectory. It was a bit of a faustian bargain where my advisor said to me that I can graduate with a master’s degree, but a career may be hard to come by. She said I would be successful but I would have to hustle for it. I don’t like speaking of the dead period but so that I can have peace, I recall around this same time that a family member who was on their death bed laughed and scoffed at me when they heard of my career aspirations.
I was young so that hurt me. The enemy knows how to hit you when you’re vulnerable. At that time I was visiting a mother, a daughter and her husband. The daughter’s husband wanted me to join a pyramid scheme with him. I was already doing that same pyramid scheme at a larger scale in New York CIty at the time. Objectively it didn’t benefit me to leave the company I was with to join him. Just from a market size perspective I can run the streets of New York for hours, in New Jersey there are densely populated areas, the whole landscape isn’t densely populated. Then there was structure. I would go into Manhattan to get hyped up to work like a slave in the dog days of summer but I’m around more like-minded people, I have a more objective manager, I can be coached so on and so forth. How is a family member going to run me up on some game that he is getting from someone else who when I met obviously didn’t have the juice?
I’m all for a healthy dose of nepotism, I have nothing against family, but put me on to the family business. Family, get a business. You brothers will have all these kids, cousins, aunts, uncles, moms, dads, and grandparents, but none of you have an idea in the house? None of you can fund an idea in the house? Are none of you kin talented at all? You’re three to four generations in, certainly one of you has a profitable gift. If you’re family and you want to come to me with some shit come to me with your own shit. I want to support you, not some person that none of us know and who by the way doesn’t give a you know what about you or us.
And I’m not saying this side of my family is evil, I don’t think that. But, also when you’re around someone and or people real close to death’s door you have to give them some extra grace. Like any good story there are a couple of plot holes or unfinished side stories, but all in all, all’s well that ends well I guess. My journey here has been a compounding one. None of the challenges or setbacks I’ve discussed so far have held me back, if anything they have propelled me forward. They were certainly difficult to me in some capacity, but I made it through, and when I look back at those moments there is in general more good there than bad; even if in the play-by-play it seems the opposite.
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