I’ve been doing this since I was 10, it’s been a lot of fun. I remember my mother telling me to put her clothes in the hamper, and I was like, “I have to put my clothes in the hamper?” No one had ever done that before, so I felt like a bit of an idiot. My mom always used to say, “If you can’t do it now, you will never do it.
It was a great lesson in self-awareness and self-reliance. You only have so many hours in the day, and you can’t go out there and go get a job, have kids, and be a husband and a parent. I mean, you can’t. The average American spends 20 hours a week on work. So if you want to have kids, work is the best you can do at that point.
In a world where you can get a job, have kids, and still earn a good salary, it’s time to do the unthinkable and take a job that you love. If you like what you do, and you have the means, then you are a slave to your job. In fact, most people don’t work for something for more than a year. It’s a good idea to start getting paid well and working with your own hours.
Here is how I came up with the idea for this article. I was a young executive in the technology industry before I went into retail. The first company I worked for was a start-up called NetApp. NetApp was a company that had the best product in the world. Yet they had a really tough time finding a big enough market. The market was not ready for it and the sales were not enough to make up for the losses.
NetApp was a company that did not have any women in their leadership team. In fact, they had a manager who was pretty sexist. NetApp’s CEO, Joe Battaglia was a guy who would tell you, “If you want to be successful, you need women in your leadership team”. This is a pretty accurate description of Joe.
Joe’s sexist behavior is what put NetApp into trouble. They had a hard time getting their product to market and were having trouble attracting women to their leadership team. However, Joe was no longer around to hold them accountable.
The women who were at NetApp for the last two years were pretty pissed off. I’m sure it is a pretty accurate description of the situation. At NetApp, women were not given a lot of power. They were given very little decision-making power and never had the proper training they needed to make the right decisions. They were only tasked with making sure that the company was running smoothly.
NetApp is a pretty large company and NetApp’s women were probably the most powerful women on the team. However, Joe was just a contractor. He wasn’t supposed to have power. So he was not really qualified to hold anyone accountable. The company’s leaders were all men. And what Joe did to hold them accountable was to use his position to do the right thing. NetApp’s leadership was the only reason NetApp was in any shape for being profitable.
I am a contractor, a small business owner, and a woman. I am in the position where I am responsible for my company’s success and accountability. I have a job to do. I have a mission. And to me, those are the most important responsibilities. I have been in this role since I was in college and have learned everything I could from my peers in my industry. I am not the most powerful person, even though I am a woman.
I may not be the most powerful person, but I am the first woman in my company to have a direct say on my company’s success. In fact I’m also the first woman CEO. I have been in that position for almost 15 years now and have seen the company evolve from a group of people who created a game that was good to being what it is today.