Introduction
Hi Everyone, and thanks so much for joining me! Today we’re going to talk about someone that crosses my mind quite frequently, that I draw a lot of inspiration from, and why YOU should too. And that person is the one and only Rihanna. Now, you may be wondering, what does Rihanna have to do with science and technology, and career effectiveness in the age of rapid technological change, which are the types of topics we talk about here at Innovate and Improve?
Well, I would argue that she has quite a bit to do with it, and today I’m going to share with you why I think that. But first, I’d like to take a second to introduce myself. I have worked at the intersection of science and technology for many years, and I’m very passionate about sharing my experiences, success, failures, and lessons learned, and providing support to those of you that are excited and interested in getting involved in this very dynamic space.
So, when it comes to thinking about Rihanna, obviously, she’s very inspirational in the GENERAL sense. In a relatively short time, we’ve watched her evolve from being a pop star, to a powerhouse business woman with her own brand and her own companies, and then to the cultural icon we all know and love today. But if we think a little bit more deeply about her trajectory, I think there’s a lot of other valuable lessons that we can learn from her. Specifically, there are two areas that come to mind for me. The first is a bit more straightforward, and the second one is a bit more nuanced, and I hope you stick around to hear about both of them!
First lesson
So, the first lesson that I take away from observing Rihanna, is that as far as I can tell from her public persona – obviously I don’t know her personally (even though I wish I did!) is that she really doesn’t seem to care about what other people think and seems quite unaffected by her surroundings in the good sense. Meaning that she goes about her life, she does what she does, she does it VERY well, and gets rewarded and admired for it, and that’s AWESOME!
When I interpret that in terms of my career trajectory in science and technology, moving from being a PhD student, to a postdoctoral researcher, and then out in the professional world is that the nature of the work that we do is very hard, and requires a lot of deep thinking and reflection. And of course, it’s very important to be that way in these types of domains because you need to approach what you’re doing with a lot of rigor, and get right whatever it is that you’re working on.
However, when I reflect on myself, and on my former colleagues and former classmates, one second order consequence of the deep thinking we do, that I don’t think is very good, is that we end up turning in on ourselves and becoming very self conscious about sharing or talking about our work, until we feel that it’s perfect. That means that we’re waiting for the perfect moment, the perfect design, the perfect theory, the perfect research proposal, etc., and we keep torturing ourselves and working on it isolated until we feel that we’re ready to talk about it with people or act on it in some way.
And what’s sad about that is that we have so much more value, and creativity, and imagination, and potential locked inside of ourselves than we give ourselves credit for. And none of that is able to see the light of day simply because we just feel that we need to wait for that perfect moment to share with people, because we fear their questions, or their poking holes in our theories, or calling us out somehow for being an idiot.
Over the years I’ve implemented some techniques that help me get over that. The one thing that I’ve done, is that I’ve pushed myself to seize any opportunity I’ve had to be able to speak publicly about my work be it as a student or be it in forums in the companies I’ve worked at. When I would do that, that would FORCE me to have to talk about my work while it was kind of in motion rather than waiting for it to be perfect. So, psychologically that was already putting me in the mindset that it’s not going to be perfect, you have to make the best of it, and tell the story as it is, and figure out which aspects of it to show to the audience to invite their questions and comments.
That was one of the good things that would happen. People wouldn’t be mean, or call you out in any way. On the contrary, what they would end up doing is asking interesting questions and providing constructive criticism that would make me reflect and go back and improve my work, and make it better and richer much more quickly than I would have if I just kept sitting in my office or at my desk or at my laptop alone, torturing myself trying to create the perfect thing.
The other thing that I would do, working at a big company with thousands of people, is leverage the internal social media of that company to post about my work that was in progress, and to also post about my thoughts and interpretations of what was happening in the science and technology world around me. And that was also a really eye opening experience because what you realize is that most people are quite friendly and would post nice comments. Sometimes something really exciting would happen, like a senior executive would take notice and also post a comment and look at my LinkedIn profile and that would be super exciting.
And, the worst that can happen is that sometimes, I will admit, I would get trolled. That was also a very eye opening experience for me because I realized that that was really the worst that can happen is that someone’s going to troll you. I looked at it, I laughed about it, and it helped me to continue building a thicker skin and really thinking about chasing positivity instead of worrying about the negativity. Because at the end of the day, if that’s the worst that can happen, you just learn to live with it and it won’t bother you as much.
Second lesson
The second lesson that I learned by observing Rihanna is the more nuanced one. And that is to create the change that you want to see in the world. What I’m thinking about here is Rihanna as the businesswoman and the wonderful companies that she’s created in the makeup, the skincare, the lingerie spaces.
As you’re all probably aware, in recent years there’s been an enormous shift toward brands being more inclusive and body positive, and that’s really wonderful. And what we have also been seeing, though, is the legacy brands like, for example, Victoria’s Secret, being under fire for not being that way. And what I take away from that is that there’s this massive shift that’s happening, Victoria’s Secret is tone deaf about it, there’s a lot of people making all sorts of negative commentary about that, which, in my opinion is not particularly productive.
Because what does Rihanna turn around and do? She goes and starts a company that does exactly that. She goes and makes these amazing companies that are inclusive for everyone and these wonderful products.
For me, the way I interpret that is that we need to not try and focus so much on something that already exists and try to change it. Especially in the science and technology world, where there’s new stuff being developed all the time that we can leverage to build new things instead of focusing on old things that over time slowly slip into irrelevance on their own. I think no one is going to remember the people that made negative comments about Victoria’s Secret or try to force them to change, but everyone is going to remember Rihanna for making these amazing companies.
Another lesson that I take away from Rihanna building things for the world she wants to live in is that when I joined the corporate world after having been a PhD student and postdoctoral researcher, I had this preconceived notion that in a big company, there’s all these different teams working on cool stuff getting along singing Kumbaya together and everything is all peachy. When in fact, I couldn’t be more wrong. There’s all these initiatives happening in-flight. There’s all these teams, not necessarily in competition with each other, but their working on parallel types of things and there’s a lot of politics and stuff like that involved.
And, at least for me, some of the biggest breakthroughs I’ve had in my career happened by working a little bit extra, by working a little bit overtime, and building small projects and working on things that I can show as an example to all these colleagues with initiatives happening in mid-flight, which would help create opportunities for me to grow and get more responsibility in the roles that I had.
Conclusion
So, to conclude, today we talked about how Rihanna can be very inspirational when we think about her career trajectory through the lens of career effectiveness in the age of rapid technological change. First we learned that by trying really hard to not care about the world around us and taking actions to seize opportunities to talk to other people and get an ongoing feedback loop going is really beneficial because the best that can happen is that we’ll get feedback that will help us improve our work, and broaden our networks, and get more opportunities for advancement. The worst that can happen is that we’ll get trolled and that’s just something that we learn to laugh about and live with because we just want to chase the good things.
The second thing we learned from watching Rihanna is to create the world that we want to live in ourselves, and given that there’s so many opportunities with the technological tools that are available to us today, we can create our own projects and share them with the world, or share them with our colleagues in the companies we work in and attract others to us who want to work with us instead of us trying to jump into other things and try to force change on things that are already in flight.
I think when it comes to your own development that is much more valuable.
I want to thank you again so much for joining me! If you enjoyed what you heard, please consider following this podcast. I look forward to catching up again in the next one! Bye for now!
Innovate and Improve 