Take a Lesson. Caroline V. Clarke
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the world a fairer, more just, more inclusive place.
Nobody tells you the things that you actually need to know to be successful. You kind of stumble into those over the course of time. And yet, technology has a massive role to play in demystifying that information, creating access, leveling the playing field, and helping to do those things at scale. That's part of what inspires me and how I approach things, especially now that I have a family of my own. I realize there are other ways to serve beyond the pulpit, and that gives you a different sense of purpose, and a different sense of hope.
Over the past 15 years, I've oriented my career from the perspective of, How can I be in the rooms that will help people who look like me progress? How can I make my otherness less of an outlier?
There's a weekly number of hours that I spend just being Black, as an executive. Every time a person of color—especially in a leadership position—is thinking about joining a company that I've worked at, I get a call. Every time someone's thinking about recruiting a person of color that is even several degrees removed from me, I get a call. As I've been in more and more fortunate positions, there are more inbounds for mentoring opportunities, coffee chats, making connections for folks to break into careers or be introduced to sponsors of mine, or get coached on how to interview or even give speeches to people of color in different forums and at different levels of openness and engagement, to share what's the real of what's happening. I've tried to be thoughtful about how I use those moments.
I've learned that, in spite of my discomfort at times, bringing my whole self to a position means that some of those [internal] barriers need to come down. In a prior role, I used to write a weekly Slack post, and one of the hardest posts I ever had to write was in the middle of the George Floyd protests. People [expressed] surprise that I was engaging on such a deeply personal level and sharing what it meant not only for me but the fears I had for my infant son.
Leading up to the pandemic, I had a string of losses and major life events. My mom passed very quickly from cancer in 2016. Then, between May 2019 and January 2020, I got married, my wife moved in, my role expanded at work, I joined the Smithsonian National Postal Advisory board, I bought a house, my role expanded a second time, we moved cities, we found out we were pregnant, and my dad passed away at the end of 2019. We were still estranged.
All those things help you feel a different sense of your own mortality and change your time horizons. Combined with all we went through during COVID, it made me think, every day we're writing a line in our obituary, and we think that we have much longer to write those lines than we might.
In my whole life, as the youngest, I've always been looking forward to the next achievement. I used to tell folks to wait 'til you get to the corner office before you don the dashiki. But you and I have a voice, we have real influence, right now. We have ways that we can help contribute to the tide of justice, today. I can't say that I'm ever going to be fully comfortable, because I can't change the fact I'm a private person in general. And yet I am picking my moments, more and more, to be more vocal, because I don't want to waste the platform that I have, even as I'm seeking to grow it.
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