Top Quotes: “Lead From The Outside” — Stacey Abrams
“On November 6, 2018, I received more votes than any Democrat in Georgia history, outpacing President Obama and Secretary Clinton. I learned later that our campaign tripled the turnout of Latinos and Asian Americans, more than doubled the youth participation rate. I received more votes from African Americans than the sum total of Democratic voters in 2014. My candidacy created a path to win a congressional seat and flip 16 legislative seats. I received the highest percentage of the white vote recorded in a generation. And I was within 1.4% of the man who had run the election and run against me — serving as both contestant and referee.”
“Conceding the election would not be right. I admit the playing field is never level, and the reality is that a number of us enjoy a degree of privilege over another at various points. Yet, knowing a truth does not make it correct. Right and wrong remain valid, real constructs, and the 2018 Georgia elections crossed the line. And I said so. On national TV.
I held myself accountable, as leaders must, even when the result would be snide comments, angry op-eds, and unreturned calls from former friends. This was a question of right and wrong. What’s not right is giving credence to bad actions, and thereby becoming complicit. That was true on November 16, and it will be the crucible for every challenge I will face in my life — and every challenge you will face in yours. There is right and there is wrong, and it’s important to distinguish between the two in every choice, in every hard moment of decision. Do we concede, do we compromise, or do we fight? These are the options.
Concession accepts an act as right or proper. And society’s existence necessitates the act of compromise — of bending our wants to the needs of others. Leadership is a constant search for the distinction between when compromise is an act of power and when concession masks submission — or when the fight is on. I know this election demanded a moment to be uncompromising — to build a future without conceding my principles. I refused to be gaslighted into throwing away my power, diminishing my voice. Because I don’t simply speak for myself.”
“My parents had followed the rules for advancement as they understood them: they finished high school, graduated from college. My mom, one of seven, not only defied family tradition by crossing her high school stage with a diploma, she excelled in college and went on to receive a master’s degree in library science. My father, the first man in his family to go on to college, did so despite an undiagnosed learning disability. They secured the degrees that should have guaranteed success.
My parents, who had marched for civil rights as teens, also knew intimately that the end of Jim Crow didn’t mean the rise of black prosperity. And they knew the advantages of education provided no security. They worked hard, did everything they were supposed to do — my mom as a librarian, my dad as a shipyard worker — and yet despite following the American prescription for prosperity, they sometimes barely kept their heads above water.
My mom never liked the descriptors of our economic status like ‘working class’ or ‘working poor,’ so she called us the ‘genteel poor’ — we had little money, but we read books and watched PBS. More important, our parents refused to believe that their lot meant their children could not do better than they had. Instead, they created their own prescription, known in our family as the Trinity for Success: go to church, go to school, and take care of one another.
We may not have had running water every day, and the power bill might go unpaid, but nothing interfered with my parents’ trinity of education, faith, and service — service to family, service to others. Inside our house, we three older girls each had personal responsibility for a younger sibling. On Saturday mornings, my younger brother Richard would creep into my room and over to my side of the bed I shared with my sister Leslie. He would shake my shoulder until I woke, and I’d follow him groggily into the living room where the TV sat mute until I pulled the knob to bring the cartoons. He knew to wake me because he was my charge. Often, later on Saturdays, we’d volunteer at a soup kitchen or in a youth detention center, where my parents reminded us that no matter how little we had, there was always someone with less, and it was our job to serve that person.
Our parents also taught us to learn for the sake of knowledge itself, and they made certain we understood no one could take knowledge from us. Circumstances could steal your house, your job, your car, but no one could take the contents of our minds. With learning, they believed, we could always find a way. And proof of our knowledge — a college degree — would be a tangible reminder to those who doubted us because of our skin color.”
“Small insults had also built a layer of resistance to risk in me. Once, in middle school, after I won a citywide essay contest, my dad drove me to pick up my prize. While he waited in the car, I ran inside to receive my ribbon and my $50 reward. But the woman in charge — white and grim-faced when I introduced myself — refused to give me the money. I couldn’t be the author of the winning essay, she declared to the others milling around the school lobby. When I protested, she demanded that I produce photo ID, an impossibility for an 8th grader. I demanded my prize, but inwardly granted her the validity of her doubts. Hers was not the first or last nick in my confidence. Again and again, throughout my childhood, teachers had challenged my right to be in advanced classes, to question their assumptions, to presume equal rights to my peers. Although I usually insisted on going forward, the repeated doubts took root. What if they were correct?”
“Finding the truth requires three simple questions, and they must be answered in any investigation: 1) What is the problem? 2) Why is it a problem 3) How do you solve it?”
“Early on, I had two experiences that helped me understand how to convert imaginings into ambition and realize that ‘too big’ isn’t a good reason not to try. The first occurred when my PSAT scores prompted an invite to apply for a program I’d never heard of before — nor had any of my teachers. Still, I completed the extensive application for the Telluride Foundation because it promised a summer program away from home, and I thought it would be exciting to go to the north. I applied, and they selected me to attend the Telluride Association Summer Program, a nerd summer camp for high achievers. I took the second plane ride of my life to Ithaca, New York, where i lived with 15 of the smartest teens I’d ever met. For the first few days, I studiously avoided conversation, baffled by how I’d been chosen to join them.
To a person, I couldn’t compete. I wrote poetry for our high school journal. A girl there had published a collection. One was a concert-level violinist, and the others sounded like college professors. In our classroom sessions, I was called upon to answer questions, and I got more answers wrong that I ever had in high school. The other students referenced books I’d never read and scholars I hadn’t heard of. Even casual conversation left me adrift, floundering to understand cultural references far beyond me.
At the end of the first week, I called home, begging my parents to let me leave. I was out of my depth among these brainiacs, embarrassing myself every day. My parents, cruelly it seemed, refused. They demanded that I stay and learn as much as I could from the experience. My dad told me to get comfortable with not being anywhere near the smartest person in the room. I had to accept that I simply didn’t have the background or education the others had, and it was up to me to decide if that mattered.
I had always been smart, but I needed to test myself against those who were smarter, more talented, and more accomplished. My ability to dream meant hearing about, and entering, worlds far different from my own. Ambition sharpens ambition. Dreams hone other dreams.
I stayed for the full summer, never once proving myself superior to anyone. Six weeks couldn’t erase the difference in upbringing and access. But I learned from them, in our classes and beyond. I learned to mimic their sense of self-confidence and certainty. I didn’t lie about what I knew, but I began to carry myself differently and speak with more authority.”
“When I was 8, I spent an evening in our college computer lab, the fluorescent lights crackling overhead reflecting off the near-green screen. While the few other students there on a weeknight likely toiled over papers, I’d been driven from my dorm room by what felt like an urgent project. In the lab that night, I created a spreadsheet. The Lotus 1–2–3 document laid out my life plans for the next forty years. Seriously.
As a teen, I’d read about John D. Rockefeller, who’d kept careful lists of each goal and painstakingly mapped every moment of his life. The idea of writing down my lofty goals struck me as the right approach. The act also allowed me to plan rather than act, to set future goals and avoid hard choices in the here and now. Whether scribbled into diaries or typed onto a computer, the act of writing down what I wanted became an ego’s Christmas list. Lots of stuff that you know Santa will never deliver.
I hadn’t come to the computer because of a sudden burst of inspiration. Quite the contrary — my heart had been broken because I hadn’t invested as much time into the actual work of our relationship between student government, the spring play, and classes. To be honest, I spared our relationship less attention because I didn’t know how to do it well. Extracurricular experiences seemed much easier than navigating the emotions of romance. As aggressive as I could be in secular pursuits, affairs of the heart perplexed me, and I focused on what I understood.
Still, when he broke up with me, my confidence shattered. My abject failure — and I believed at the time it was all mine — surely signaled only one truth: I should focus on my professional life. Fueled by sorrow and outrage, I decided to map out my life that night. A cold, comforting spreadsheet seemed to be the best way to focus on what I was good at, particularly by Chad’s estimation. The sheet contained four columns: year, age, job, and tasks. And they represented very different facets of myself. I was determined to embrace them all.
I intended at age 24 to write a best-selling spy novel. None of the characters on my beloved soaps looked like me, and precious few blockbuster thriller novels had black women on their covers. My mom, a librarian for most of my childhood, had taught us how books shaped our sense of the possible. For me, for other young black girls, I wanted to write books that showed them to be as adventurous and attractive as any white woman.
By 30, I’d be a millionaire running a corporation whose purpose I hadn’t yet figured out. Having grown up as working poor, I decided having money was next. With my new wealth, I’d help my parents buy their first house, a Kennedyesque compound on the shores of the Mississippi Gulf Coast. I dreamed big.
Fame and fortune had been put on the docket, and only power needed a slot. Lucky for me, I’d also decided I wanted to be the mayor of Atlanta by age 35. Of the dreams I had for myself, becoming mayor struck me as the most ambitious. I’d read a handful of prominent black suspense writers, and Oprah had already begun her path to great wealth, so the road to items 1 and 2 seemed doable, albeit incredibly challenging. Although Atlanta had a black mayor, no black woman had led a major city in the nation, so I allocated 15 years of prep time. All this while sitting in Spelman’s computer lab late into the night.
Though my list was exhaustive, and driven by grief and the need to reclaim my sense of self, the results were vitally important. I began to access what I wanted. I might not get there in all those arenas (though I have come close!), and my specific ambitions might not endure, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that I was letting myself experience the feeling of wanting itself: acknowledging in print that I could see myself thriving in the world, that I was allowed to dare to want.”
“For the next decade, I followed the plans on my spreadsheet. I failed miserably at becoming a millionaire by 30, but I met enough of my metrics to be in a pretty good position. According to my calculations and the plaudits of those who knew my goals, I was on track to achieve my life’s ambition: becoming mayor of Atlanta.
Turns out, I was wrong.
I don’t want to be the mayor — of anywhere. I focused on a job title and work that seemed to meet my dreams, but the job itself should never have been the dream. Ambition should be more than a title or a position. I’d focused on the what, not the why, and for more than a decade, I organized my life around the what. I understand now that knowing the real reason for your ambition allows you to figure out if a different path will get you there.
This is a distinction of immense difference. At its most complex, ambition should be an animation of soul. Not simply a job, but a disquiet that requires you to take action. For me, my ambition owed as much to my desire to serve communities isolated by poverty and racism as it did to my refusal to believe either had to be permanent fixtures in our lives. I latched on to the role of mayor as the clearest path to what I imagined could be accomplished. But realizing the why of my ambition allowed me to alter course and explore new roles that could accomplish the outcomes even more effectively.”
“Society sometimes chides us to be focused on one goal, one passion, one ambition. It starts in college when we’re told to pick a major. Or think about the suspicion we feel when an actor announces a Christmas album or a politician writes a romance novel. ‘Jack of all trades, master of none’ is the unkinest cut.
Benjamin Banneker, astronomer, clockmaker, and abolitionist, who laid out the plans for DC, also carried on a heated correspondence with Jefferson over the abolition of slavery. Math professor Dalip Singh Saund broke barriers as an Indian American who fought to secure the right for Indian immigrants to become U.S. citizens in 1949. Forced to be a farmer for much of his time in the U.S., he later became a U.S. congressman, the first Indian to serve. Think of Beyonce and Lin-Manuel Miranda, who master multiple arts, securing Grammys, Oscar nominations, and Tonys for their works. But also, consider the dedicated nurse who spends every weekend at the animal shelter, driven by an ambition to treat the suffering.”
“For minority leaders, we often operate first as representatives of our communities — both in success and in failure — and only tangentially as individuals. Stereotypes about how we behave will always dog us. How we adapt to those stereotypes varies in large and small ways. I have a black friend who always overtips at restaurants. I know a woman who insists on demonstrating her numerical prowess at every opportunity, determined to undercut the idea that women are bad at math. A Latino acquaintance who speaks fluent Spanish but won’t in front of white colleagues.A gay friend who refuses to engage in idle discussions about how cute some guy might be. These minor rebellions against perceptions all have an origin story, a stray comment there, or a long-held trope.”
“In the winter of 2013, Georgia had more than 800,000 unregistered people of color — a community the size of South Dakota who didn’t have the legal ability to vote despite being eligible. I sat in meeting after meeting where politicians discussed how distressed they were by the sheer number. Finally, I decided to launch a nonprofit voter registration effort to target those potential voters, whose decisions could shift the balance of power in the state if they participated en masse.”
“Between March and August 2014, I raised more than $3.5 million, and we submitted more than 86,000 applications to the state for processing. Which is when the New Georgia Project was placed under investigation by the secretary of state, who questioned how our org could have registered so many people of color in such a short span of time without some misconduct. Yet of the voter reg applications we submitted in 2014, an estimated 40,000 registrants were missing from the rolls on Election Day. For the next two years, my team and I would battle not only the accusations of the secretary of state, but also questions from our allies about what had transpired. Eventually, we proved the secretary of state had illegally cancelled nearly 35,000 registrations — including ours — and no wrongdoing had occurred on our side of the process. The secretary of state closed his investigation, admitting we’d done nothing illegal. Better still, we’ve already registered more than 200,000 of our voters on the way to the full 800,000.”
“As Mom and Dad and millions of folks learn in our country, a college degree is no guarantee of opportunity. Despite the prestige of their educations, the ‘-isms’ that stalk minorities don’t disappear when we cross the academic stage, and turning the tassel from right to left isn’t a magical ritual to open closed doors. Doing exactly what we’re told, amassing the education and the accolades and the experiences, guarantees absolutely nothing. A white family of median income sees a return of $56k from completing a four-year degree. A black family will earn an ROI of $5k, slightly more than a Latino family at $4k.
Mom got a job as a college librarian, where her paycheck rarely reflected her worth. For my father, his struggle with reading meant he took his bachelor’s degree in history to a local shipyard where he worked as a laborer for the next 15 years. Our family had made the familiar journey of working class to working poor and back again. Like the others who came before us and the millions to follow, college couldn’t protect against economic anxiety. Still, we made it much further than those who dropped out of high school or who graduated and yet were unable to go further.”
“At the end of the legislative session and summer tour, [my intern] Genny presented me with a brief on what she’d accomplished and an assessment of what was missing in our structure. More impressively, she laid out why she was the person for the newly created role she envisioned. I was sold. In that role, she became a key resource for every Democratic rep in the Georgia House, expanding her influence and building her reputation. She [later] developed a caucus internship program that has become a national model and graduated more than 350 interns. Every year now, we receive applications from across the county, and sometimes even international applicants jockey for spots.”
“I have a regular habit of asking a small group of trusted friends to perform an informal 360-degree evaluation of me. Because each knows me in a different way, I learn more about how I’m viewed in separate facets of my life.”
“Harriet Tubman once declared, ‘I freed a whole lot of slaves. I could have freed a whole lot more, if they’d only known that they were slaves.’”
“I’ve learned lots of ways to say ‘I don’t know.’ My favorites are ‘I have some ideas, but let me do a bit more digging’ and ‘Here’s what I think, but I could be wrong. I’ll check.’ Or I direct the person to the proper authority and I make the intro myself. The best way to admit you don’t know it is to always couple it with a way to find out.”
“My business partner told me once about the apocryphal origins of bottled water as a hot commodity in the beverage aisle. Coca-Cola, the purveyor of the eponymous soft drink, produced Coke by mixing its secret syrup with tap water it then carbonated. This meant the company possessed millions of gallons of water in bottles, waiting for an infusion of liquid wealth. But a smart employee realized that the water itself had value if properly packaged and sold. Thus, Dasani (and then others) was born, and millions of dollars have been generated from a simple decision to use what was already at hand.”
“Every so often, I reach out to the lowest-paid members of our teams to ask about interactions with me. Am I short-tempered, distant, or terse? Do my actions reflect the values I espouse in our work? I do the same with my siblings from time to time, as a check against becoming the jerk in the relationship.”
“To win at Work-Life Jenga, identify the priorities and concerns where you intend to focus your energy.
- Imagine you’re a reporter for a community newspaper. You have the job of creating headlines for the paper, and your life is the topic. Headlines should be no more than 10–15 words long and should give the reader a good sense of what the story would be about.
A. Write the headlines about you in 3–5 years: personally, professionally, and in the community.
B. Write the headlines about you in 7–10 years: personally, professionally, and in the community.”
“Use this ambition spreadsheet to remind you why you want what you want and what you need to get there.
Ambition: _______
Goal (What do you want?)
Rationale (Why do you want it?)
Strategies (What should you do?)
Resources (Whose help do you need…and what help do you need?)
Timeline (When should each step be done?)”
