How to Make a Comeback (According to Whitney Wolfe Herd)
Hint: Resillience and the ability to make meaning from hardship are key ingredients.
Hannah, a spin mentor of mine, posted this to her story, and it resonated with me, so I thought I’d share:
I hope 2024 was wonderful—if not, kind. If it wasn’t, know that life does get better. It gets easier. Joy comes back, like a sunrise. You might not have ever felt this joy, or you did — but it’s been awhile. And so, it feels like a distant memory…a vague and fuzzy dream. The “best year” of your life might be taking longer than you hope, and deserve, to arrive.
But please wait, and look for moments of joy.
If you’re like me and you feel like 2024 put you through the frickin dishwasher, I want you to read these stories:
Ursula Burns (Former CEO of Xerox) faced a pivotal moment when Xerox was on the brink of bankruptcy in the early 2000s. As a senior executive, she took on the challenge of helping restructure the company during a massive industry shift from paper to digital. She led a $6 billion acquisition of Affiliated Computer Services, which transformed Xerox into a tech-driven business. Rising from an intern to CEO, she not only saved the company but also shattered stereotypes as the first Black woman to lead a Fortune 500 company.
Janice Bryant Howroyd’s defining moment came when she was denied a business loan due to racial discrimination, despite her growing success. Determined, she leveraged her savings and a small loan from her mother to bootstrap ActOne, a staffing agency. She secured her first big contract by delivering exceptional service and proving doubters wrong. Her perseverance turned that single client into a multi-billion-dollar workforce solutions empire.
After leaving Tinder amidst public allegations of sexual harassment, Whitney Wolfe Herd faced intense scrutiny and doubt about her future. In that moment, she channeled her pain into creating something empowering: Bumble. Starting with a clear mission to make dating safer for women, she overcame personal and professional adversity to revolutionize the industry. Taking Bumble public at 31 cemented her as a trailblazer who turned hardship into triumph.
While the details of these three situations are all different, this is what I see in all three stories:
Resilience in the face of unjust systemic barriers and personal hardship
The ability to make meaning from pain, and transform adversity into opportunity
The world can be cruel to women, especially to black women. There is room to fall apart then pick the pieces up and continue on.
If you want to dive a little deeper on one of these stories and what you can learn from it, read my LinkedIn article, The 3-Step Comeback Strategy That Turned Whitney Wolfe Heard Into The World's Youngest Female Billionaire. When I first heard Whitney’s story, it inspired me so much it led me to work for Bumble in 2018/19.
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Stay weird,
— Reggie