Convince Yourself First

I really do believe the first person that you have to convince about anything is yourself. And that is that confidence. For example, we talked about that rocket in that when I finally, after failing so many times and having that rocket go up, I just knew inside of myself I could do this, I could do science, I could do math, even though the world around me was telling me I couldn't. But I had convinced myself that I could. So for whatever your dream is, you're the one, you have to say, I can do this. And know that within yourself and then figure out what is it going to take to get you there. You know, you see that? My Stanford diploma. You know, when I was in fourth grade, my teacher, in a very far sighted fashion, showed our class in Las Cruces, New Mexico, which back then was a small desert town. She showed us pictures of great universities. And when I saw the iconic red tile roof and sandstone buildings and then the beautiful green hills, remember I grew up in the desert. I said, I want to go there. And she looked at me and she said, you know Sylvia, it's one of the best colleges in the world, universities in the world. And she said, and you're smart, you can go there. And so at fourth grade I just said, I going there. And you know, that's like an amazing, amazing goal for myself. But you know, I set about, what is it going to take so that I can get there? And I methodically went and did all those things. One of the first things I realized is I had to get really good grades.

What's so interesting is that you had someone who said to you, hey, guess what, Sylvia, you can do that. That's a realistic dream. There are other people who get different messages where people say that's unrealistic. You know what, you can forget it, you'll never get in there. That's not a place for you.

Well, you know what, I had plenty of that in my career and even in high school. My high school counselor, when I signed up to go to college counseling, she looked at me and she said, what are you doing there? And I said, I'm here to get college counseling. And she said, girls like you don't go to college. And statistically she was right. But as an educator, she was really wrong to say that. You know what, that was like the three nos. I stood up, went into her office and she followed me in and she said, well, what are you going to study? And I said, I'm going to be an engineer. And she laughed and she said, girls aren't engineers. And I went on and as you know, became a rocket scientist and engineer and all that. But also in my career, many times, you know, I did global and international travel, and it was really hard to convince them to let me do that. And in fact, twice in my career, I had to pay for my trips to the countries before I even had that assignment in that company because they didn't believe I could go there. So on my own dime, I went to these two different countries. I met business leaders, I got letters of recommendation. I came back and put those on my boss's desk, and they were like, we're hiring boss's desk. And then what could they do but to hire me, you know, another time? I could not break into another company's international business no matter what I did. I had amazing sales track record on the domestic side. And so what I did is I created a presentation showing that if they had the same kind of penetration in multinational accounts in the Pacific Apple, Pacific region as I had back then, I would be able to, you know, their sales would be up by several hundred million dollars. And I remember the sales vice president, I had my little presentation, got him for just a few minutes in one of the side team rooms, he looked at the presentation, he said, oh, wow, this is great. And he went to grab the presentation. I put my hand on it, and he said, don't I get this? And I said, yes, you do, but it comes with me.