You Get One Shot, One Opportunity
Big fan of the song Lose Yourself, by Eminem. The lyrics certainly could hit right between a founder’s eyes.
Look
If you had
One shot
Or one opportunity
To seize everything you ever wanted
In one moment
Would you capture
Or just let it slip?
Over the past year, Path Forward has grown rapidly while learning a lot along the way. I am the co-chair of this organization that empowers women and men (but we have found mostly women) to restart their career after taking time off from their careers to raise their children, take care of a sick parent or both. We have helped over hundreds of women restart their careers.
I love meeting them and hearing their stories. Like most women, when you get off that career train, there comes a point where you almost lose your sense of self and your confidence making it really hard to return to the work world. HR people look at this person’s resume and see a gap which makes it even more difficult to get back in the game. Path Forward runs a program that gets these women over those hurdles including the hurdles on the company side of hiring these amazing people.
We just announced that we are working with Apple and Campbells Soup in 2018 adding solid companies to the ever-expanding list of other places such as Oracle, Intuit, Cloudflare and DataStax to name a few in NYC, California, and Colorado. We have built a foundation that we can now leverage to more companies by hearing from the people that went through the program and the companies experiences and what more they want going forward.
As a chair, one of my roles is definitely to help the company connect with people who can help us grow. I learned a long time ago that there is a time and place to make those connections work. This applies to anything. I see founders get in front of investors too early and then they have a hard time getting back in the door. I see founders to get advice from someone who could be really helpful but they get their too early and that conversation ends up providing no value and of course they can’t get back in the door here either.
We had a meeting this past week with someone who you should only go see when your idea is flushed out and the foundation is built and being used. The timing was perfect for all of us and that makes for a great meeting. Matt, my co-chair wrote about the importance of timing here.
I am extremely excited about what Path Forward will do in 2018 and also very happy that we took our one chance for a particular meeting at the right time. By grabbing that opportunity at the right time, we didn’t squander the meeting.
Comments (Archived):
https://www.thesun.co.uk/fa…;)
If we as a society could prioritize both child-rearing and giving women [and men] opportunities vs. penalties as they step back into the workplace, we’d go a long way to utilizing talent which we currently ignore. So- a long way of saying, this is God’s work you’re doing, love it, thank you! On a completely different tangential note, did you ever notice how the song from “Hamilton” musical “My Shot” is so much like this Eminem song? I mean, I don’t care, they’re both great songs but the resemblance is clearly there.
Love that Hamilton song!!
this is a great idea (pathforward). hope they make it. Had this idea back in 2006. but, i am an ideas guy not an executor which is why i invest! : )
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