A short monologue by Jacqueline Elliott reflecting on mistakes and lessons from building a business. The speaker admits past errors (trusting the wrong people), highlights learning through hardship, and emphasizes core values—caring for people, integration of personal and professional life, and embodying a consistent, positive identity that affects interactions beyond work.
Chapters
You know what? We did do a lot of things wrong. We did mess up a lot. We trusted the wrong people. We got hurt. We did a lot of things that we had to learn in order to build our business. But now we can tell you and identify, hey, what did we do? We did a lot of things right, too. That's why we are who we are, because we put a lot of heart into it, and that's never gone away. I think that that's the core of business. Caring about your people, caring about who you're doing life with. Because we see it in our business. I mean, we're so involved with everything that we do. We don't have separate lives. We don't have a family life. We don't have a business life. We're, like, all together in this. There's no clocking in or clocking out. It's your identity. It's who you've become. Those core values. I mean, you carry it not just here, you carry it at home, you carry it at the grocery store. You walk into Safeway, and they're like, oh, here's another Elliot. Why? Because you carry a smile? Because you're nice to them, because you say hello. Because you leave them better than you did when you met them. That's who we become.