When I came right out of college I remember someone pulling me aside and telling me how to exactly fit in. How to wear my hair, what clothes I should wear, even how I should talk and wave or not wave or hold my hands. I wish I never had that conversation. It held me back for like two years and it took me a while to learn this myself, but the idea that you are your own brand, and you are your own person.
Alexis MaybankIf I am forced to come up with organizing tips, I use my iPhone and I have my to-do list that I keep there, and I try to go in weekly and have at it. I am never going to get through that entire list, so I have to weekly, as I check in, push up the priority and the three or four things that I absolutely have to get done, and constantly reorder the list. If anything, I feel like I have gotten more comfortable with that fact: knowing that what is really, truly important will get done and then being comfortable when other things fall by the wayside.
Alexis MaybankI always have to add to a team someone who is a highly tactile, list-oriented person who keeps us on track. And call them a COO or executive all-star, or whatever. I need to balance myself with people around this table who are much better at organizing, which is certainly a blind spot of mine.
Alexis MaybankA career is measured over the course of the years, not moments. Over good decisions, over successes, not moments, failures, missteps, or bad comments. I learned that I needed to take a step back and look at my career not in that one moment that made me feel really bad, but what I had done not even in the past one or two years or last one or two hires, but that that career is built over many, many, many, many successive quarters and years and good decisions - never, ever made in that one moment where you felt really bad.
Alexis MaybankI have had lots of men on my team and I have had lots of women on my team, and men are asking constantly. That's one thing to just know as woman: by general rule, men are more generally asking than women.
Alexis MaybankAs an entrepreneur you are often failing as much as you are succeeding. You are falling on your face as much as you are stepping up and moving forward. You need resilience to get up, re-gather, think of what you are going to do next, not letting that misstep pull you down. Next, you cannot be afraid of looking stupid or not being perfect. You have to be okay with sticking your neck out, being willing to fall down, and knowing that you are more measured over time about how you are getting back up.
Alexis Maybank