I believe in role models. People who are worth watching and listening to and emulating. The ones who, regardless of who is paying attention, do more good than bad. Who help more than they hinder. Who turn our faces toward the light and inspire us to become.
The fact that we have so few public role models today is more a sign that we look for them in the wrong places than the fact they don't exist. They do exist. In fact I bet there's one standing near you right now.
This is the first of what I suspect will become a series of posts about the people who have made me what I am. The people, mostly women, who have made me become a better version of myself.
This woman was one the first:
I hadn't been working for very long when she showed up. Small of stature with giant glasses, she often wore purple. She was a smarty-pants from Carnegie Mellon. A card-carrying nerd. One of the first women nerds I'd ever met.
She had a way of looking at me that immediately made me stand up straighter. I can't remember our first conversation, I can only remember forming an opinion: don't mess with her. You are not ready to take on anything like her - she's way too smart and has this disconcerting tendency of always being right. And unlike other people I knew who were always right (working in high-tech I had already met a pile of people who were always right), she really was mostly right. She spoke with a quiet authority I'd never even heard from my parents. Calm, articulate, reasonable and indisputably right. It was annoying and awesome at the same time.
She's the person who taught me the meaning of pragmatism. Up to that point I'd always swung between optimism and pessimism. Granted, I was only 20 at the time and still pretty immature. She taught me that to look at a situation with anything but head-on realism was to live in a fairy tale that most of us couldn't afford. She told me stories of poverty that made my own impoverished childhood look more like an inconvenience. My shoes were small but I always had some. No one had ever tried to make me live anywhere else but with my parents. And I had two of them. Her stories made me feel privileged -- and naive. Which is funny because I've been jaded since I was 10.
In spite of her hardships, or perhaps because of them, she developed a spine of steel. She had zero tolerance for people who wouldn't accept responsibility for their actions and when she saw them she would shake in her head with a rueful half-smile and say "that's just pitiful."
And yet she was also very hopeful. I think this was the key to my lesson in pragmatism. I had previously felt that to be pragmatic was to accept the lowest common denominator. To cease to strive for something better. Literally I thought of it as "making do."
But it's not. At least not to her and, eventually, not to me either.
Pragmatism according to her model, which she never explained but always exemplified, was to be realistic about what you were working with and then to stretch that asset, be it money or human beings, to the fullest extent possible. If you worked for her, as I did later when she started her own company, you became Gumby. And by the time you were done, you knew you'd done more for her than you would ever have promised - more than you even thought you could do. She made you want to give it, whatever the "it" was. She made me want to be everything she thought I could be.
She placed the bar way over my head. And then insisted I could make it.
And that was the most wonderful part. If she asked me to do something, she made me believe I could do it. I might stress about how to do it, but in the end I would I would find a way, acquire a resource, do something differently than before. The mere fact that someone like her could believe in someone like me, made me work harder to be worthy of her faith.
This isn't to say that there weren't moments when I let her down or flat-out failed. I did. And she never sugar-coated the failure or ignored what had happened. But she would always help me to find the lesson, the thing I could learn and use the next time. And there would always be a next time when she would stretch the Karen Gumby past her previous limits.
Looking at her that first time, I had the feeling that something meaningful would come from knowing her, but I could never have predicted what a strong and inspiring influence she would turn out to be in my life.
And still is.
