Car horns.
Children playing somewhere nearby.
The particular rhythm of a neighborhood that had shaped me long before any boardroom ever did.
I established a mentorship program shortly after that visit, working directly with teenagers from similar backgrounds, teaching practical business skills alongside the kind of patient, strategic thinking my own mother had modeled for me throughout my entire difficult childhood.
I didn’t simply fund the program from a comfortable distance.
I showed up personally, most Saturday mornings, working directly with a rotating group of ambitious teenagers navigating circumstances I understood intimately, having lived through nearly identical versions of their own current struggles.
“Patience isn’t passive,” I told them during one early session, echoing lessons my own mother had taught me decades earlier. “It’s the most active thing you can practice. It’s waiting until you understand exactly where to apply pressure, rather than striking randomly and hoping for the best.”
One student, a sharp sixteen-year-old named Destiny who reminded me considerably of my own younger self, asked once why I bothered showing up personally when I could easily afford to simply write checks and let professional staff handle direct mentorship instead.
“Because someone showed up for me,” I told her. “Not with money, necessarily. My mother showed up every single exhausting day, even when showing up cost her considerably more than she had left to give.”
