Camille D. Jamerson examines Dorothy Vaughan from Hidden Figures, who learned Fortran before IBM computers arrived at NASA, keeping her team essential. CDJ argues foresight is an entrepreneurial superpower: scan for shifts coming, learn skills before they're required, teach your team. She shares how her own book became outdated before publication.
Chapters
Hey, welcome back to Mocha Moments. I'm your host, CDJ, also known as Camille D. Jamerson of CDJ Associates. Today we're gonna talk about something that I learned at a movie theater. Yeah, something that I learned while watching a movie a couple of years ago. I couldn't put my finger on what the lesson was at the time, but when I rewatched the movie, I got it. A couple of years ago, a movie came out by the name of Hidden Figures. If you know the story, you know it's the story of a couple of African American women who were brilliant, what they called at the time, human computers, brilliant with math and science, and they had a major part in getting off the first shuttle to the moon. So I was watching the movie and there was this particular scene with one of the characters whose name was Dorothy Vaughn. She was played by Octavia Spencer. And in the movie, she was in NASA and she was walking past this room and the room was like a warehouse but she saw people bringing boxes in and moving things around and workers working in that particular room, wiring, that sort of thing. And she asked one of the foremen, like, "What's going on in there? What are they gonna be putting in there?" And the foreman told her they are going to be putting, oh, the International Business Machines had bought that space. And we know them now as IBM. So what she found out was that her and her team of African American women who were all human computers, so to speak, would actually be replaced by these machines. He didn't say that, but she figured that out. So she had to start thinking really quickly and have the foresight to know what to do next. So what did she do? She went to the library and she bought a book on, it's called Fortran, I guess that's the coding for computers. I am no wise computer genius, but get the lesson. She went to the library, got a book about coding computers, and what that allowed her to do was to learn how to code the computers, and then she taught what she learned to the other African American women who worked under her as human computers, because what she had the foresight to know was that if they're bringing in all of these computers, somebody's gotta program 'em, right? Somebody's gotta program 'em. So the lesson in that is what is the next thing coming in your industry? Whatever your industry is, whatever business you're building, What's the next thing? Don't think about what everybody is doing right now. Don't think about the positions that are available right now. Don't think about the roles that are available right now. Think about what is coming. What's the next thing? Because you wanna be ahead of the game because some of the things that you're thinking about doing now will be obsolete by the time you get there. It totally happened to me. I wrote a whole book. I mean, literally, a whole book. And by the time I got my arms around finishing some of the last chapters, a lot of the things that I had said in the previous chapters were already obsolete, or I referred to links or companies that were no longer in business, or I shared, um, tips and strategies that, um, had been made kind of null and void by better things that were already out. So you've got to have the foresight to think 2 and 3 steps ahead if you're going to be the mogul that it is that you want to be. So you might as well start thinking about it now. This is what's going on now, but what's coming? What's coming? You can find that out in conferences, you can find that out by reading, you can find that out by just literally brainstorming, you can figure that out by talking to or interviewing leaders in that, in your particular industry for your blog or your podcast or your TV show or whatever, but you want to get ahead of what's happening in your industry so when it happens, you're already there. You want to have the foresight of Dorothy Vaughan so that when the next wave hits, you're already in place. So that's our mogul moment for today. Have foresight. Think ahead, get ahead of the game, and be ready for what's coming. Thanks so much for tuning in today. It was a pleasure talking to you. As we near the end of Season 1, you wanna make certain that people that you know that could use this broadcast or that are in business or should be in business or need to have that extra motivating push to get in business, that they get in now so they can go back, listen to all the Season 1s And all of my videos are really short, so they can do it in no time. Because when we go into season 2, we're going to be talking about business building principles. So we're getting all this foundational stuff out of the way first in season 1. But in season 2, when we make that crossover in the spring, and yes, spring is coming, but we make that crossover in the spring, we're going to be talking about some really foundational business principles. So you want to make certain that you get all the old videos, watch them all, and then you're ready for season 2 because we will start building businesses together. Great? Awesome! So thanks so much. Follow me on social media. Put in the comments what you liked, what you didn't like, and I'll talk with you soon. It's a pleasure.
