The 3 V's to Success

Introduction

Each year, the routine offered very little variation from the previous. Approximately, an hour before its scheduled start, I would reluctantly get dressed in one of my two pair—black or navy blue—“church” pants, a white dress shirt, and depending upon my age at the time, black cotton clip-on tie, with a square bottom. After the age of thirteen, I retired the clip-on for a standard black tie and an occasional secondhand sports coat; however, the tie was still cotton and continued to have the square bottom. This was my annual awards banquet uniform, with very little variation. Like many of you, I have always been a creature of habit. And while my family’s financial resources, or lack thereof, often dictated the limits of my awards banquet wardrobe, the idea of having standard attire for particular occasions and events is a practice that I still employ today. For example, in the majority of my speaking engagements, I am often dressed in all black. While there are several all black combinations that I now have, which is far different from the wardrobe limitations of my childhood, I find it less stressful to already have an idea of what I’m going to wear. Seeing that the boundaries of my childhood awards banquet uniform often liberated me from the stresses of wardrobe choices and options, I often found no need to include rushing in my annual routine of getting dressed to attend an event that was certainly not going to start on time, and whose program was sure to introduce an undesirable feeling of déjà-vu. The menu was the same. The people were, usually, the same. The program, with the exception of the keynote speaker, was usually the same. And while the keynote speaker offered very little variation from this mindless world of predictability, oftentimes, the message that he or she gave failed to offer any similar deviation.

Later, the summer of 1995, would prove to offer that impulsive alternative, in every way imaginable, that I had since been searching for. On that Saturday evening, my presence was expected at a corporate awards banquet for an organization called INROADS. INROADS is an organization that focuses on the development and placement of “talented, minority youth” in business, preparing them for “corporate and community leadership”. That summer, I had the pleasure of participating in INROADS’ rigorous corporate training program, which also provided me with an opportunity to obtain a summer internship with one of the nation’s largest companies—General Electric. Therefore, the reluctance that had usually preceded such ceremonies had now been transformed to excitement. Never had I been expected to attend an awards ceremony with such professional influence. My previous awards ceremony experiences were limited to those organizations with non-existent budgets, and even less of a presence of creativity. They were often catered by one of the participants’ mothers whose life was spent in the kitchen and hosted by some local sports hero that often spoke with the overall eloquence of a fat kid, with a mound of mashed potatoes in his mouth. But the INROADS banquet was different. It was held in a hotel. It had a real menu and real speakers. It had a corporate presence, a budget, sponsors, and a real program. In other words, it was organized and therefore was too important of an occasion for me to wear my usual awards banquet uniform. I needed to look nice, clean, and professional.