Week 4 – MBA6101 – Ascend Your Start-up

In chapter 4 of Ascend Your Start-Up, Yu says four things that really jump out at me,

1. "After coming all this way, I feel inadequate."
2. "You know you have achieved a certain level of success, yet you do not embrace the milestone."
3. "We don't know what we don't know in life. We just keep going."
4. "Have the courage and grit to stay the course."

I'll take them one at a time.

"After coming all this way, I feel inadequate." There are many days, when I look around the table and see some fierce leaders and think to myself, "Am I a player at this level?" I admire how some of them ask questions before providing their opinion, or provide their opinion last in order to let others, often more junior, have a voice. What is my voice? Why does anyone care to hear what I have to say? And if called upon, do I have a POV I want or should share? I am reminded that, yes, if I am at the table, I am a player. Gone away is the "fake it til you make it" approach and in its place is, "everything you've done has allowed you a seat at the table."

This leads me to the second quote: "You know you have achieved a certain level of success, yet you do not embrace the milestone." Awareness of having a seat at the table is the first thing to note. I have. The next thing is to have the confidence to relax and celebrate within, the achievement of having reached this milestone. I am getting there. I guess I had thought there'd be some kind of clear sign, "you are here!"

Yu is spot-on when she states, "We don't know what we don't know in life. We just keep going." I have been in survival mode for most of my life. It's made me lean and mean, efficient with the steps because it feels like time is speeding up, not slowing down, and I want to slow it down. I have taken a long road, unbeknownst to me, 'cause, "We don't know what we don't know in life. We just keep going." Like the Energizer bunny.

Lastly, I've always had "the courage and grit to stay the course." I was raised by parents who said, "Figure it out." They didn't hand me the solution and back then I wondered, like a naive child, if that was because they didn't know. No, that wasn't the reason. It was because they wanted me to learn things for myself. That gave me a sense of ownership. I didn't immediately know my way and my 20s were a blur, bouncing from one thing to another, until I got my shit together and said, "Finish that bachelor's degree. It's an entree into the job you want." I didn't do things the linear way, i.e., graduate from HS, then go to college and get a bachelor's degree in four years, get in the workforce and start climbing the corporate ladder. It was quite circuitous, expensive, inefficient, but eventually I created my own roadmap, tweaking it along the way, to have the seat at a table that I have earned the right to sit at.