When I was around 13 or 14 years old, I was playing baseball with my male cousins in my grandparent's backyard in New Jersey and my uncle said, "You can't play. Girls don't play baseball. You'll get hurt." My uncle was a former professional baseball player and I grew up believing he was the center of my universe. They called me "chicle" which means "gum" in Spanish because I was like a piece of gum that was stuck to him. That day changed my life forever. I declared war on anyone who would tell me what I could and could not do. Rejection became my main source of motivation.
From that moment onward, I became motivated by what I could not do. In high school, I started training with the all-male baseball team. I practiced pitching and batting. I was determined to prove to my uncle that girls could in fact play baseball. I became very fast at pitching, clocking fastballs around the same speed as my male counterparts. The guys would ask me to come practice with them because I was an even playing field for them. I joined the baseball team as a statistician, sitting in the dugout with the guys and calculating their batting averages. Later, the baseball coach strongly considered adding me to the JV Baseball team as a pitcher. My school was rather conservative and for this to even be a consideration I would need to find a female coach who could accompany me to all the games and supervise me in the female locker room. I never joined the team but the simple fact that I knew I was good enough to join the team if I wanted was good enough for me. I proved my point. Girls can play baseball.
Every goal I have made since has been to prove something to someone else. I went to Wall Street to prove that a journalism major could handle a highly quantitative environment. When I was given the opportunity to join a major technology firm as a Manager at age 24, I leaped and took the job knowing very well I had no clue what I was doing.
I was unstoppable.
Then I got to Harvard. For a year, I listened to professors and researchers tell me why women will have an uphill battle if they want to reach the top of their fields. I was bombarded with statistics of inequality, disparate income levels, and the importance of playing the game of office politics in order to gain promotions and reach your goals. One professor even said to me, "You most likely will never reach the level of success you envision for yourself, but you can pave the way for other women who will follow in your footsteps."
I started to believe them. And they were right. The numbers were all there to prove they were right.
I felt myself begin to change. My focus shifted to creating a dialogue within myself that listed all the reasons why something would not work. These types of people are valuable in society as they are what I call "risk managers" but I had lived most of my life taking risks and not looking before leaping and suddenly I became the cautious one in the room. The fire in my soul began to die slowly. A once very alive, feisty, tomboy, became the 'team player', the 'consensus person'. I could not make a decision without getting the approval and praise from others. Who was this person?
It took me years of fighting back to undo the psychological damage that comes when someone tells you, "You know, you just don't have what it takes...." or worse, "You know...society is just not ready for you."
Maybe being fueled by rejection is unhealthy in a lot of ways but I do have some general words of advice for young women in college and those embarking in their careers:
- Attempt everything your heart desires and let the chips fall where they may. Do not stay focused on one career because that is what you studied in college. I applied to consulting, investment banking, public relations and broadcast journalism jobs. When people ask me "How did a journalism major end up on Wall Street?" I always say, "I did not choose Wall Street, Wall Street choose me." I believe in destiny. I think that your job in life is to try everything and the universe will tell you which path to take by opening the right doors. Your job is to try everything that delights you, even those things which make you uncomfortable, and you are totally unprepared to do. You can worry about specializations later.