A shared belief in what education could change.
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I was at a gathering recently when I struck up a conversation with the woman seated next to me. She had grown up in Zimbabwe. As we talked about our lives, she shared something that stopped me. She told me she refuses to wait in lines. I leaned in and asked her to tell me more.
Growing up in Zimbabwe, she explained, there were lines for everything — water, bread, gas. Waiting wasn’t an inconvenience. It was simply part of daily life. Then she said something I haven’t stopped thinking about: “There is nothing I need that badly.”
Later, she told me about arriving in the United States with just $100 to her name. Fifty dollars disappeared almost immediately on books. Within weeks, she found a job in the campus cafeteria because, as she explained it, she hadn’t come to the United States simply to attend college.
She came to finish. She came to win.
By the spring semester she had already been promoted into a supervisory role. Around that same time, many of her classmates decided it might be a good idea to get campus jobs. Some ended up doing the very dishes she had already spent months washing. A few complained to her that she was getting special treatment.
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What struck me wasn’t simply that they were wrong. It was that they had arrived after the invisible season. They met the supervisor. They hadn’t met the employee who had quietly done the work that made the promotion possible.
It made me realize how often people evaluate visible success without ever witnessing the invisible season that produced it.
Everyone sees the outcome. Few see the grind.
Entrepreneurs understand this instinctively. People see the successful company. They rarely see the years spent trying to make payroll. People see the keynote speaker. They don’t see the years spent saying yes to opportunities that barely paid.