with addiction and mental illness, I received no formal education after the age of eighteen, and I was divorced when I was twenty-three. But along the way, I’ve realized that the mark of success isn’t escaping life’s challenges and the suffering. Because suffering is a given, no matter who you are or what you have. It’s about working through the challenges and facing the suffering, knowing you have options. And that you’ll be okay.
DIRECT MESSAGE
Never underestimate the fact that you have options in almost every situation. No matter how hopeless something seems, there are always at least three solutions to every problem (more on this to come). The more options you allow yourself to see, the more empowered you’ll always be. That even rhymes.
We’re so used to falling for approval traps — big and small — that we don’t even know how much we’re holding back sometimes. But I know one thing for sure: provided that your intentions are good, you need zero permission in this world to do whatever you want. There’s no such thing as a good excuse. Because it’s still a dang excuse. You’re born with that permission slip we talked about in the introduction. You just lost it somewhere along the way on a day you probably don’t even remember. And I get why you dropped it. It can be really scary out there. And plenty of people will tell you what you can and cannot be, do, and have.
It’s okay even if your mom and dad were those people. They did their best for you. But now that you’re an adult, it’s time for you to do the best for yourself.
Check this:
No One Else Knows What They’re Doing, Either
Life, wrote a friend of mine, is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along.
E. M. FORSTER, A Room with a View
My friends joke that I’m the least-qualified person they know. I’m not originally from the United States, I didn’t graduate from college, and I certainly didn’t have any family “connections,” unless you count my dad’s well-known drug dealer “Lips” (everyone called him that because he had big lips). But I was able to do most of what I’ve wanted in my career because of just one thing I learned: everything you need to succeed is already within you.
When I was twenty-five, my now husband, Heath, and I moved to New York City. It was 2009, the job market was bad, and I needed a job, fast. Heath had one that paid him barely enough to cover our living expenses, so our credit card debt was on the up while our savings were going down. Often, whenever friends or family would check in to see how the job search was going, I couldn’t help but feel there was an undercurrent of “Gosh, I really hope you’re not screwed.”
I’d pound the pavement every single day, trying to get interviews, meetings, coffees with whoever would say yes. I was reaching out to second-, third-, and four-hundredth-degree connections on LinkedIn. My life was a string of meetings, coffees, more meetings, and phone calls. This process went on for what seemed like forever (in retrospect, it was really about three months). In that time, I received zero job offers. Nada!
Starting to feel a little deflated, on one particularly freezing day, I had coffee with a new person I’d been introduced to, Donnovan, a super connected media entrepreneur who knew the industry landscape. We met at an iconic NYC restaurant, Balthazar. At the end of the coffee/interview he said, “Look, I don’t have a job for you, but you’re gonna be just fine! I’ll see who else I know that’s looking to hire.”
It was a relief. His vote of approval was much appreciated. It meant I could relax for a second. But in reflecting on that moment now, I realize I didn’t really need it. A couple of weeks later, my persistence paid off: I received an offer from a tech start-up to do a job that I didn’t really know how to do. I didn’t care. I knew I’d be able to learn the ropes quickly, and I was happy to finally be making some money.
Winning at Politics
Fast-forward a few years, and I was at a new tech start-up, doing a new job that I was also “unqualified” for. My position involved getting video advertising dollars from big companies and helping them initiate advertising campaigns through our proprietary technology, which allowed them to run video ads online (yes, like those short video ads that interrupt your You-Tube viewing time. Don’t hate me!).
In 2012 one of the cofounders of the start-up I worked for called me out of the blue about an opportunity. He asked if I was interested in working in DC for the remainder of the year to see if I could generate some political advertising money to put on our platform. To this day, I am not sure why he asked me, but I like to think that he saw me as someone who got results and was open to new projects.
It was the Romney-Obama race, and it was extra harsh. The clients all joked, “New York is descending on DC for the dollars, and then we won’t see them for four more years.” That city is seriously cutthroat. And I was a brand-new-to-the-place foreigner, no less.
This was unlike anything I had ever done. As a native Brit, I had absolutely no understanding of the US political system. Zip. Zero. Zilch. All I knew at that point was that Obama was running again — I wasn’t even sure who the Republican candidate was! So to give myself a crash course in US politics, I watched CNN, MSNBC, and FOX like an addict and read hours of Politico to get myself up to speed and grasp who was who and what the heck what going on.
Then, between June and November, I spent the majority of my time in DC selling video advertising campaigns to political activation committees and advertising agencies. My new title was political sales director, and my second home became the W Hotel opposite the White House. The local taxi drivers even started to recognize me. “Back to the W?” one asked, as I dashed into his car, my ear glued to my phone. I was surprised he knew my destination, but his recognition helped me feel a ping of joy — they were getting to know me here!
I worked that unique, difficult-to-penetrate, and highly complex market like my life depended on it. One night I even had two steak dinners back to back — one at 6:30 and another at 9:00 — to accommodate two different client schedules.
My boss said he would be “thrilled” if I generated $500,000 in advertising. But by November 3, 2012, when the last voting polls closed on the West Coast, I’d generated almost $3,000,000. What’s the moral of this story? I should carve out my niche as a political expert? No. I had found my calling in Washington? Certainly not.
DIRECT MESSAGE
The moral of this story is this: you can do hard things when the word no means nothing (“no thing!”)