[Recorded and transcribed remarks from 2018]

This [was] the "Gospel of Empowerment," but I get on the be a podcast meant to discuss not lifting yourself up by your bootstraps, but also not asking for handouts. My name is Elliott […] I finished high school in 2001 where I did multiple activities […] I have worked in the C suite. I [was] a startup executive helping a business expand, reach out for its tech enabled future, and grow opportunity in my community, and that dedication comes from some of my work history. Now I've done the [urban] area thing with someone like my background. You might expect that I've done some consulting and I have, you might expect that I've been a project manager and a program manager, and I have for both the federal government and the local county government […] I've been a state government appointee […] and I've had a whole host of interactions with nonprofits, both on the consulting side and using them, because I was not born with the silver spoon in my mouth. I've also dealt with the for profit side of business and the public sector side and the private sector side. I won't sit here and lie to you and say that they're two sides of the same coin. They're very different beasts. They operate differently; part of empowerment is understanding not just the rules of the game, but how you should play, not just how you should behave, but what's expected of you. The best thing you can do is give the people what they're asking for, whether it's your boss or your client or your customer or your children. You give the people what they're looking for, and you are successful and part of the empowerment mentality is saying, I'm not going to just let things happen to me. I'm going to make them happen for me. I'm not just going to look out on on the city, on the world that I see, and allow it to remain in a state that is not acceptable to me. The "Gospel of Empowerment" is something that I was taught, not in the Ivy League, not in graduate school, not in elite management programs, not in junior executive training, not in the c-suite. It's something I learned from life experience. You see, I had an impact with the motor vehicle, which caused me great physical pain and temporary disability. It also led me down the far too familiar for many path to poverty. I lost my home to foreclosure. I lost my credit worthiness to bankruptcy and collections and debt and repossession my worldly belongings tossed on the ground in eviction. Yet here I stand, here I sit, not any worse for the wear, but wiser for knowing what I can bear and you can too, and sharing this message is God's mission for me on this earth, it is my vision that everyone become familiar with their vocation and not seek a vacation from this thing called life. Yes, it is hard, but pick yourself up and you will go far. These are the words that come from my heart. I share them with my children, and I hope to share some of this with you. There's no magic number that says you will be happy. People sometimes say $75,000 is the golden number for people to achieve level of economic comfort, and I push back on that marginal utility and opportunity costs are terms that most people don't grasp. When you show them a supply and demand chart, they either have flashbacks to Economics 101, or their eyes glaze over. Yet it's quite simple, when you think about it, quid pro quo. This for that, I have this many, and I want to give you as few of them to get as many or as much of what you have as possible, whether that's your time, your money, your physical resources, your talent, your ideas, anything along those lines and many people waste their talents, many people bury their talents. I can't say that I haven't been guilty of this myself. I have the knowledge, the education, the information and the interest level to talk to you, and I don't just want this to be a soliloquy. I don't envision my words being a one way street where I keep going and no one is traveling with me, where no one is going in a different direction, because there are permutations and there are deviations that people take, and that is where innovation takes root. That is where a positive spirit takes hold. That is where the soulful nature of all inventiveness, which has taken us from the ground to the clouds and beyond, from terra firma to Mars. That is the vision of human excellence. That is the space that we have both explored and innovated, that we have experienced, and know how much more there is to experience, but those who fear little, those who have nothing to lose, those who can pick themselves up and in a friendly way, say, Yes, I choose to start over. Those are the empowered, and those are the beloved by God which is not about attaining a great name. It's not about amassing great wealth. It isn't about evolving Beyond Good and Evil, as the Nietzschean term went, but to think of the philosophy that goes into a notion that I doubt do, be toe therefore I think, ergo, cogito, therefore I am ergo, soon it's reflecting on this and many other and you'll hear me do this quite a bit, the quotations of great men and women. I can't escape platitudes. No one can, and no one should, in fact, but the motivation to keep moving forward, to keep looking upward as a cathedral steeples point to the heaven, so do people reach out their hands and cry out for their breakthrough in some. One needs to hear this message, whether it's you or whether it's a friend or family member, whether it's someone who looks forlorn or you know that their dreams have been shattered and torn. I want to say that it does get better, and the best is yet to come, and I'm not an eternal optimist. Once again, I should note, I have taken formal quantitative courses throughout my years beyond the typical collegiate level. I understand that only the strong will survive. I espouse that in my daily living, both as an ascetic and as I'll just call it a spade a spade, a rather frugal guy, I spent $10 on my last pair of new shoes, and I didn't like that. I would have rather spent five, because I know that if you take apart the materials that went into that. What I'm really paying for is the overhead, what I'm really paying for is the labor, what I'm paying for is the transportation and logistics, the marketing and advertising, the liability, the risk, and that is the essential, or quintessential difference between those who become rich because risk leads to rich. It's not an impossibly difficult notion to grasp. It is just something that innately people fear and executives are no different. In fact, ambition and fear tend to be the top motivators in the C suite, they also tend to be the top motivators on political campaigns of candidates and of their management, the people who are in charge of things, the people who have attained or achieved they didn't reach that level by risking it all, and those who did tend to be rewarded exponentially more than those who did not. And so looking at the very notion of empowerment. I want to start with the human side and work towards the institutional there was a gentleman I observed in my old and first home. I got my first house when I was 25 or 26 years old, I was a single father with an eight month old child, and it was time for us to move. So I bought the house with help from my family, and I have to make sure I put that in there, not as an asterisk, not as a footnote, because, again, while I am a product of my generation, I also have the advantage of several generations of middle class and the educational attainment of terminal degrees of at least one or two previous generations, or if Not terminal degrees, of well paying and reliable government jobs that afford us a certain level of comfort. But as a black man, I'm here to say that that's never going to be enough. And I'm here to say that because we elected a black president not more than about 10 years ago, and yet I see drugs and incarceration, violence and yes, still segregation being critical and identifiable threats, credible challenges to the notion that this American experiment provides equal opportunity for all, and one can have all the best thoughts in the world, but power is the ability to choose to do what you want to do, and it's not the moral calculus of this is right or This is wrong, those binary things I'll touch upon when I discuss Information Technology at some point, but the idea that you can choose to be great if you only let go of your doubt, if you embrace your fate, if you chart out your Destiny and make it a course that is both heaven, ordained and anointed by whatever divine power you recognize, you yourself, personally, individually, cannot fail. It is not possible. But. We were all designed to move forward. We were all put on this earth to make progress. And so we shall together, and we will work through this together. I am not a psychologist, I am not a therapist, I'm not your mama, I'm not your friend, as I say to my children, I'm not any of that, but I will be your coach. I will be your cheerleader. I will be what it is that you need to help ignite your flame, to start an inferno, to make wildfire spread from your synapses to your cerebral cortexes, so that the connections fire up, so you're on all pistons and it's full steam ahead. Let's mix these metaphors and keep on opening doors. That's how I look at it. Empowerment is a creative notion. Let's break it down a little bit more and go back to the guy I mentioned. He was on drugs. He was, for the life of me, I would imagine, itinerant. He had no home, and he'd spent most of his mornings with a buddy headed to the liquor store and perhaps also getting whatever drugs he could afford to make his day pass because his day was so dismal, the prospect of his morning was so miserable, and his afternoon would never be in the annals of history. His evening not exceptional, and his night noxious. And I referred to him as crackhead Jim. God forgive me, I did in my head, I come up with nicknames. That's when I called the guy sue me. I've been sued before. Check the public record. I don't mind being sued. I don't, I don't really at all. You can't get anything from me. But back to the point this guy, he was basically your average itinerant ne'er do well. And as a younger man in my late 20s or mid 20s, I looked upon him with the same level of disgust. And I'm sure people look upon their neighbors every day. But you know what? More people than you might think, than you might imagine, and some of them look just like you and me. Some of them don't. Some of them went to all the right places. Are familiar with all the right faces, and yet they still experience poverty and failure, destitution. And why I posit that addiction is one of the reasons. I hypothesize that it's a matter of nature and nurture, but I also know that systemic and institutional change are necessary that if people are to expect a good life, not that, not that Epictetus was wrong, that very little it requires to have a good life, but the Quality of Life Beyond acknowledging and recognizing someone is alive, but that the quality of it can be great. Well, it requires a bit more. And so I haven't talked to this guy, but I'll tell you what, years after I first encountered him, and not too long ago, I saw him, and I would frequently see him at the 711 right near an urgent care facility that I went to with my children, and when I was recovering in my wheelchair, on my crutches, then my cane, then just a brace or two, and I remember driving there early in the morning, because as a startup executive now and before that, as a micro entrepreneur, I got pretty accustomed to keeping the hours that might drive some people insane or might cause them to question their life choices. But you know what? Those are the people that I made money off of, and I love it. Yeah, I'll be up at 430 I'll go to bed at 1230 or might go to bed at 430 It depends, and that's okay. But anyway, back to the point I saw him there, and you know what he was doing? He wasn't asking for money. He wasn't reeking of cheap alcohol. He didn't light up anything, Spark, anything, bum, a SIG or try to sell a single he didn't have any bootlegs on offer that day. He didn't have dirty tatters. Now, granted, he didn't look like he went to the fanciest haberdasher, but he looked respectable. And you know why? He looked respectable to me because he was working. He had a broom in his hand and a dustpan in the oven, and he was sweeping up and cleaning up that same parking lot where he once was a blight. He had seen the light. And everyone has their testimony. Everyone has their aha, their epiphany, their moment where success in micro form or macro finds them, or they find it. And we as a society, we as a country, we as a nation of optimists, of builders and not breakers. And when things break, because we are people who know how to make we mend them, we build bridges, we affix awards to walls and shelves to them, but we do not erect them for the sake of monumental ignorance and so being able to connect with him, even without a word uttered. It reminded me that empowerment starts small and grows large. So when I saw that man, I had nothing but respect, not just for what he was doing, earning an income at the same place where he might have cost in business a year or two before, I had respect for the fact that he had a journey, he had a path, and someone, somewhere, cleared the pipeline so that he could come through to the Other side. And yes, some people do not make it to the light at the end of the tunnel. Some people are not shown the promised land. But it's not about how righteous you are, how wicked you are. Again, the binary judgment has to go out the window. One thing they always say on tattoos that you see in the hood, in the ghetto, in the in whatever you call it, only God can judge me. Let that sit there for a second. Only God can judge me. You'll see it in a prison cell. You'll see it in the jailhouse. You'll see it in the POS office. You're not as likely to see it in the boardroom of a fortune 500 company. You won't see it in the wood line rooms of the University of Chicago, but you'll see it on the streets of Chicago, in the streets, and empowering people to sweep up and clean up those streets right where they are there, my friends, there is where we start this work. Because just as I've never gotten a job from a poor man, I've never seen a poor man refuse honest work if he has been holistically cared for as a human person, whether as a man or a woman, if he has been or if she has been considered a brother or a sister, a mother or a father, a son or a daughter, somebody's baby needs our help today. So I have a couple questions, and I want you to think about it. What have you done to help someone who looked helpless? What have you seen and said to yourself, if only I could, but then you didn't take the next step of trying. And what have you tried at, but maybe gave up a little bit too soon, or maybe on in retrospect, if you did a bit more, did it a bit differently, it could have gone another way. Think about that. The next time you see someone pushing a cart with bags, think about that. The next time you see a street walker with a skirt that would be better as a scarf. Consider it in the emergency room if you're ever there and you see someone at the end or very near it, as John F Kennedy once said, it's for us as Americans to ask not what our country can do for us, but what we can do for our country, and to those on the political side of things who say Donald Trump is wrong for saying we must make America great again, I challenge you to prove that America is great. Prove him wrong that something needs to be done again. Right, but for those of you who think he's right, I also challenge you, let's prove him right, because I do think that Donald Trump is right, and this is controversial to say, But America is a good place. America can be a kind place. America has the potential to be quite nice to some, but the widening gap in socioeconomic status cannot be ignored, and Lord knows, I fought against it when I was being educated, the middle class is disappearing. No way we're doing just fine in Prince George's County. It's the oasis of black wealth. It's the mecca of minority success. It's the place to be if you look like me. But how do people get there? How do people know about that, and what about the people who are in these wonderful opportunity zones but don't know how to take advantage? Have we taught each other how to network? Have we opened doors when others were slammed? Have we taken someone by the hand when the windows were shut on their fingers, and at the risk of sounding like I'm moralizing, I say all of this, but I don't just talk about it. I'm speaking about it because I am about it. I've been about it, and I wonder if you were put to the test, would you pass with flying colors, or would you fail miserably? The answer is within you, and I'm no guru. I've just learned a bit there's a voice that tells you, I got this. I can do this. Listen to that voice. Heed its call to press on, to press forward, to move upward, to go beyond and above, and take your ideas to the max, up level them. Be bold, be big, be brash, be beautiful. Make things happen for yourself and take the hits as they come, because eventually you'll learn something from someone. And so I learned from him everything that you see today can change by tomorrow. And it wasn't overnight that he transformed, I'm sure, but it was a transformation just the same. So let's take another example. I'm trying to make economics accessible for people. So I've talked about someone who is what we would call the underclass. This is the bottom 20% and lower. But let's look at Blue Collar, working class, lower middle class folks. Well, nearly in that same neighborhood, there were people with Section Eight vouchers, but they worked. There were single mothers. One had four children and quite a large income, above 75k not above 100 others, like a lesbian couple, raised, I think, about three or four children in their household, and they didn't have money for a Christmas tree. I remember distinctly one one holiday season, and they were creative. They took newspaper and made a Christmas tree out of it and put it on the wall, and their children did receive gifts that Christmas. What is that experience to someone listening to a podcast? Though, not to say that everyone who has iPhones are rich, but I guarantee you, the people who are listening to this have the luxury of that time. And working class by definition, means you're putting in time. You're exchanging in an indentured and not incentivized way, your most precious resource for a basic subsistence and possibly living wage existence. And you're working to live, yes, but you're also living to work. You're getting up very early. You're going to that job site, you're putting up with leadership and management that has what we call adaptive leadership problems. And adaptive leadership problems are simply this. They don't know how to lead people. Okay, there's there's books on authentic leadership, servant leadership, and one day, I'll talk about all this, but I want to focus on economics.