CHAPTER 13

Reinforcing Your Edge

You are always one decision away from a totally different life.

—Author unknown

When I was working in Philadelphia, I did a lot of walking, so I had distances timed down to the minute. The walk from my office to Trader Joe’s? Twelve minutes. The nearest coffee shop? Three minutes. My office to the Thirtieth Street train station? Eighteen minutes.

One day a speaker visited us. As he was heading out, he asked how long it would take him to get to the train station if he was going to walk rather than take a taxi. We told him that he should budget thirty minutes to be safe.

“What if I’m a fast walker?” he asked.

Almost in unison, three different people responded. One of my colleagues answered, “Twenty minutes,” another colleague answered, “Twenty-three minutes,” while I said, obviously, “Eighteen minutes.”

Much to the dismay of this speaker, anxious to get on his way, my colleagues and I started debating—the route we took, the shortcuts we used, where there were longer walk signals. Neither of them believed that I could make it in eighteen minutes.

Here’s what we discovered. First, yes, it was conceivable that I could make it in eighteen minutes based on the route I took and the specific approach I employed. “Approach” may sound like a funny way to describe my walk from the office to the train station, but that’s exactly what it was.

When I first started making that walk, it was my first time living in a big city, and I found myself having to travel quite a bit on the commuter line originating from the Thirtieth Street station. Not knowing my way around, and not having a handle on my schedule yet, I missed my train a number of times because I had budgeted only twenty minutes.

I started exploring shortcuts—taking one street that ran diagonally seemed to save me a bit of time, and going around the Drexel campus rather than cutting through it saved me more time than I expected because I didn’t have to dodge all the students milling around.

And perhaps the biggest time-saver was reading the lights and walk signals. This was how I ultimately cut the walk down to eighteen minutes, and I even got down to sixteen minutes one glorious day. Even with the same route and the same average speed, by reading the signals, I was able to make my commute that much more efficient.

I would look ahead to see what signal was showing on the pedestrian crossing. When it showed a stop signal, I would slow down and conserve my energy. When I saw that there were ten seconds left on the walk signal, I would speed up, walk briskly, and make damn sure that I made that crosswalk.

Explaining all this to my colleagues made me realize that having your hard work work for you is not unlike this approach of mine. Where you put in your effort makes a difference: identifying where you want to take the diagonal streets rather than the parallel streets, where you want to go around rather than pass through (even when passing through appears simpler at first glance), when to conserve and ease up on your pace, and when to dig in and make a surge.

ef fort /’efərt/

a vigorous or determined attempt

Throughout this book, I’ve been vague concerning my real views on effort and hard work. I’ve said that hard work is critical. And I stand by that. I’ve also alluded to my belief that hard work doesn’t speak for itself—we need hard work, plus.

I would never say that telling someone to work hard and put in effort is bad advice. But it just seems so obvious and basic. It doesn’t seem very helpful, particularly when it’s presented as the panacea for getting a job or receiving some accolade or reward. And yet, I keep hearing people giving this advice and explaining that hard work was the key to their own achievements. “Just keep working hard. Just keep chasing your dreams. The rewards will follow.”

We all know there’s actually a multitude of reasons why someone gets the desired outcome. Luck is one. Systemic privilege is another. And an edge is yet another. Enrich, Delight, Guide, and Effort—these are the components to creating your own edge.

It is my hope that reading this book has helped you see how you can create your own edge so that your hard work works harder for you—in spite of any apparent privilege, disadvantage, or bias that is out there and that you might experience.

When you are able to demonstrate how you enrich and provide value; when you open doors for yourself by delighting others; when you can guide the perceptions that others have of you—that’s when your hard work and effort work harder for you. There are instances in which you may seemingly be at a disadvantage according to conventional wisdom and based on things like gender, race, ethnicity, age, wealth, and class—but you can turn things around to create some sort of gain or reward for yourself regardless of any apparent advantage or privilege.

Effort should reinforce the edge that you create for yourself. That means putting your effort into the things that allow you to enrich, delight, and guide—and it necessitates relinquishing the bitterness and resentment that so many of us hold on to because of the obstacles, drawbacks, disadvantages, and adversity we’ve experienced. We’ve heard many people’s stories of and journeys through disadvantage, underestimation, and bias. They are incredible examples of creating an edge against all odds. I’ve also touched on some of my own, and in my journey from adversity to advantage, I’ve realized that creating an edge is never a once-and-for-all exercise. Mine, and yours, will continue to require a revisiting of all the nuances that provide us with our unique ability to enrich, delight, guide, and put forth effort.

When I said that being an engineer was my first career, I wasn’t being completely truthful. Sure, most people would consider engineering to be my first career, but only because I’ve rarely shared what, in my heart, I consider my first career.

It was nearly twenty years ago, and I had just finished a master’s degree in engineering, knowing I should probably do something with the degree that I had worked so hard for. In addition to working toward the degree, I’d had to work multiple jobs at the same time—twenty hours a week building servers at IBM, as well as working at the university housing office and the university library. And yet, as I graduated, I found myself hesitant to accept that full-time job that I was offered at IBM, which offered me more money than I had ever thought possible.

As you know by now, I had always felt a pull toward math. So imagine the horror of my mother—who was at this point a single mother trying to raise two children—when I told her I wanted to try out teaching math. I had a degree in engineering, not in education, she said. I had not done a day of teaching in my life—not as a student teacher, not even as a peer tutor, she said. I had no credentials, she said. She was correct on all counts.

And yet, as a testament to how strong and independent a woman she is, she supported me as I started sending out emails to every single school district on the Eastern Seaboard. I got a single positive response, from a public high school in Maryland, which had unexpectedly just had a teacher quit. They were in a bind and wanted to know if I would be willing to teach a course called Related Math. I soon understood this to be a euphemism for “remedial math”—a course designed for ninth and tenth graders who were earmarked as being in the danger zone because of their lack of basic math skills. And would I be able to start in two days?

I said yes. Two days later, I was a teacher at the school. Though it was technically part of a larger school district that was considered fairly well-to-do, the students in this particular school were anything but. The area that this school served was unique in that it had a huge influx of immigrants—who came because of the school district so that they could try to provide a great education for their children, but could only afford to live in this particular area of the district. In my classes, I had students from Panama, Gabon, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, Argentina, Liberia, Philippines, Nicaragua, Nigeria, and numerous other countries. Many of the families came seeking political asylum. The majority of the students were on the government free- or reduced-lunch program.

There is no big story here—I was not Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Minds, I was not Hilary Swank in Freedom Writers, I was not Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society—except that this is where this book began for me. Teaching those children made me burn to understand why some have an edge, and how we can compensate when we don’t. Because a piece of my heart was devoted to these kids (and always will be, as I realize between tears; never do I think of them without tears coming to my eyes), and there was nothing more that I wanted during that time in my life than for these kids to find their edge.

And yet, I abandoned them. That’s the ugly truth. After four months of teaching high school math, I resigned.

One of my students sent me this note shortly after:

hi miss huang just took the time to read ur leter and it is very touching, and very sad dat I wont have u as a teacher anymore boi o boi!

i want to give u props cause as I told u I use to get E’s and D’s in math but not no more u thought me that math is easy and really funn.

well i will miss u and hope u change ur mind about moving cause it realli sux da ur moving and all.

man its sux dat the last day we get to see u was on the final exams!

wellz fare well to u

peace and love,

jimmy

I loved my kids. But I was frustrated with what I was experiencing and with what my students were experiencing—we were promised that hard work would deliver rewards, but the reality proved otherwise. I had become jaded. I didn’t yet understand the power of creating an edge to protect, buffer, and even inoculate against frustration.

I didn’t yet know how to help them overcome their challenges, or even believe at that point that they could. As a twenty-two-year-old, I wasn’t ready yet. Perhaps it was because I wasn’t emotionally strong enough, and I selfishly felt the pressure to do something that others would consider more prestigious. It still tears me up thinking that I abandoned them. And that I probably left more than a few of them feeling bitter.

And then this past year, I had a student in my leadership class at Harvard Business School named Rishabh, who reminded me a lot of a student I’d had in my Related Math class.

Rishabh didn’t know about my prior high school teaching experience, nor about the bitterness that I had been carrying around for years—again, I rarely talk openly about either of these things—but he opened up for some reason and told me about how he had grown up in poverty, and how difficult school had been for him. He told me about the nights when his family would go out to a restaurant and share one meal for the entire family. And he admitted that he knew others consistently had low expectations of him. Because of this, always ingrained in the back of his mind was this feeling that it wasn’t fair. It made him angry, and this anger would come out at times, even when he didn’t realize it. “This bitterness, it colored the way I saw things,” he said.

But then he said: “At some point, I let it go. I just decided to let that feeling and that bitterness go. And it was freeing. And it changed everything.” And he saw the impact it had on his life, especially when he compared himself with his parents, who still held on to that bitterness; he didn’t know if they’d ever be able to let go. Wistful, he added, “It impacts them. It impacts the way that they’ve been able to live. And that pains me.”

I still think often of Jimmy, and of all of them: Somrit, Tiffaney, Queenstar, Joseph (JJ), Francisco (Franky), Lincoln, Carlos, and many others. I wonder where they are, and with a sense of regret in my heart, I hope with my entire being that they are doing well and that they are happy in life.

What I’ve finally realized, decades after leaving that high school classroom, is that effort is a double-edged sword. It’s necessary; it is the foundation of your edge. But focusing solely on effort to the exclusion of enriching, delighting, and guiding will make you bitter. It will frustrate you to work so hard and not reap proportional results. It will blind you to everything but bias and disadvantage, and it will paralyze you.

And so I end this with where it began for me. The final thought that I want to leave you with is that the optimal conditions for creating an edge are those in which bitterness and regret do not restrain you; they embolden you. Even if you are perfect, the world isn’t. Acknowledge and accept this, and you have already begun to create your edge. The secret is to know that the deck is stacked, and that life’s not fair. But you put in hard work plus, regardless. Don’t let success define you, but don’t let failure define you either. Play the long game, not the short one.

There will be drawbacks. There will be disappointments. You will see the good, the bad, and the ugly. We will all get screwed over.

There will also be haters. The more you do, the more successful you become, the more people will come out of the woodwork to capitalize on it. The more successful you become, the more some people will be biased against you, and the more some will be rooting for you to fail. The more impact, the more influence, the more of an edge you have, the more critics there will be, and the more some will try to bring you down.

We can either let it fester or we can leverage it to make us better.

A few years ago, I won an award for being one of the top forty professors under the age of forty, and I was asked, “What would you be if you weren’t a business school professor?” Without skipping a beat, I nonchalantly said, “I would start a school for underprivileged kids. Maybe I’ll still do that someday.”

Maybe I will. Maybe someday, I’ll return to the high school classroom and teach students like Jimmy and Somrit and Franky again. In the meantime, I see aspects of each of these former students of mine in each of my new students: toughness, strength, and confidence. In Rishabh. In Divinity, who said to me, “It ain’t what they call you, it’s what you answer to,” recounting advice from her grandmother, who was a Mississippi sharecropper’s daughter with a fourth-grade education but one of the wisest people she knows. Her sage advice guides the way many of us should show up in the world. And I see it in Cerelina, who I recently took out for a celebratory dinner after she received her GED. She plans to go back to school to study criminal justice. She brought her now two-year-old daughter with her to dinner—her daughter whose middle name is Rhodes.

Effort reinforces your edge. It is the mental toughness that underlies all of this, and that toughness provides an inoculation against the disappointments that we all will inevitably face because we remain at the mercy of the perceptions of others. It reminds us that at the end of the day, it’s not what others think; it’s what you think. You have to know how you enrich. You have to delight yourself and others. And you have to trust in yourself as your guide.

Enrich. Delight. Guide. Effort. Turn adversity into an advantage—turn adversity into your edge.