SECTION I

CIVIL RIGHTS

SLEEP IN, DONT BRUSH OTHER PEOPLES TEETH AND FIND YOUR OWN WAY

Dont let the noise of others opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.
Steve Jobs, cofounder and CEO of Apple1

I was en route to Uncle Andys house. There was a trafc jam on I-285, the highway that encircles Atlanta. Luckily my mom was driving. She knows the shortcuts youll never hear from a GPS, the ones that send you zooming through a BP gas station parking lot and pufng for air. Even though Im perfectly capable of driving, she always insists on taking the wheel. Whenever I visit my folks in Atlanta, I try to swing by Uncle Andys. Make sure to ask him about his parents and how he learned to respect them, my mom grinned as she drove. I rolled my eyes. As if the commandment to honor our father and mother wasnt enough, I thought.

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WALK IN MY SHOES

We pulled into Uncle Andys narrow driveway. The cracked, dark gray pavement was kissed by the weeds in his front lawn which was browning in the middle. Eight Japanese maples surrounded his house. Andy planted them after spending time in Japan to court the International Olympic Committee in the late 1980s. He used to have several bonsai trees which he bought in Korea during the 1988 Olympics. He took the trees to a monastery during the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta because he couldnt devote the almost daily care needed to maintain them. The ninety-year-old monk who was looking after them died, and then torrential rain destroyed the trees. The camellia bush he brought from the home of his late wife, Jean, in Marion, Alabama, has grown more than ten feet since it was moved. Hes lived in the same house since December 1966, when he bought it for $32,500 on a plot fty feet wide and four hundred feet deep. Hes installed ramps and rails in his backyard and jokes he is building his own retirement village. Its a small house with a main oor and basement. He had to expand it because his mother moved in after his father passed away, and because of his blossoming collection of African art and odd gifts from his extensive travels. Even his artwork is humble. Well, besides the statues of naked African women. One might easily think that Andy didnt have much money or he had simple tastes. Both are true. Better to have wealthy friends, hes always advised me. I waved good-bye to mom and was greeted by booming barks from Andys two tall and tan Rhodesian Ridgebacks. He named one Nzingha after the seventeenth-century Angolan warrior queen who fought the Portuguese. The other he named Simba after the protagonist in The Lion King and because Rhodesian Ridgebacks were used to chase lions. If we had smaller dogs, then my wife would want them to sleep in our bed, he once explained to me. Whatcha know? Andy called out. That is Uncle Andy-speak for Hows it going? The front door swung open. I heard the hiss of the tel-

SLEEP IN, DONT BRUSH PEOPLES TEETH AND FIND YOUR OWN WAY

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evision in the background. Since when do you watch Fox News? I asked. Got to listen to everybody, he smiled. While speaking about the upcoming Atlanta Falcons season, he ushered me into his living room, poured pink fruit juice over crackling ice for me, muted the forty-two-inch Panasonic television and sat down. The glass table was covered with unorganized newspapers and memos. I counted two glass gures he had recently been awarded. One of them read, Award Presented to Andrew Young for His Distinguished Career in Public Service. He saw me eyeing it. Do you want it? he asked. He was serious. Andy always gives. The lyrics from one of his favorite hymns are, You cant beat God giving, no matter how you try. . . . The more you give, the more he gives to you. At rst I joked with him, Maybe we could sell it on eBay. But I thought better of it. No thanks, just checking out your latest trophies, I replied. Whats on your mind? he asked, while craning his neck to see why Simba was still barking. I sat back in the couch. Ive been thinking a lot about my next career move. Im in the same place as many of my friendsrecently graduated from college, working a decent job, wanting to make a difference in the world but not sure how to do it. It seems like everyone else has an idea on what I should be doing though. Hows that? he asked. He always asks questions rst. Though hes very much a conceptual and thematic thinker and speaker, he likes to get down into the weeds. He likes facts. They help him tell better stories. A colleague thinks I should apply to business school or take the chartered nancial analyst exam. Another thinks I must try my hand at management consulting. You knowGoldman, McKinsey and Harvard Business School, the trinity of overachieving conformity. When you make a little success, people expect you to succeed. Ive even started to put pressure on myself, as if my next career move must place me closer to

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WALK IN MY SHOES

the mountaintop. The problem is that Im not sure what I want to do or which mountain to climb. I asked, How do you escape these great expectations? How did you deal with other peoples expectations of you? Your question reminds me of some advice I gave to a bright young man in the tenth grade at the North Atlanta High School, he responded. Uncle Andy advises by anecdotes, like Jesus, who instructed with parables. There always seems to be a tting story in his museum of a mind. Everyone was putting pressure on him. Hes tall, articulate and good looking. And hes a leader in the school. But there was so much pressure on him that he was breaking out in hives. The doctors couldnt nd anything wrong with him, he said. His classmates were teasing him about not picking a sexy topic like robotics or information technology for his science project. He had chosen biodegradation and composting. Andy urged the kid to stick with the project, especially since much of our future fuel may come from composting. I took him aside and said, Look, you are letting people put too much pressure on you. I chose my words very deliberately. I said, When people begin to bug you, you cant say it out loud, but you can say deep in the back of your mindgo fuck yourself. I said it that way because that is a very masculine rejection. And you dont need to be wishy-washy about it. If something doesnt seem right to you, dont let it pressure you. Go on about your business. You told a tenth grader what? I asked. I cant say I was shocked. Ive come to expect jarring honesty from Uncle Andy, but I wanted to make sure Id heard him right. Remember, if you say it aloud, youll turn people off. You have to say it to yourself. It will actually empower you when you say it in your head, he said. Ill practice that at work, I interrupted. Actually, the tough part isnt saying fuck you while working on a trading oor, its saying it in your head.