When individuals consider my current designation, the fact
that I am a Senior Vice President in the engineering field, a leader, and a
person who guides young professionals, they usually dwell on the performance.
But the reality is much more than that and more humiliating: I was not alone in
walking this journey. All of the stages of my emergence out of the ghetto
community of Shaolin in Savanna-la-Mar to the corporate leadership were
conditioned by the mentors who invested in me at the time when I could do
little but possess raw determination and ambition.
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Being brought up in a disadvantaged community in Jamaica,
there was no hand-holding, but there was knowledge. My earliest role models
were my parents and my grandmother- entrepreneurs since I was a child. They did
not talk about such notions as business acumen and leadership development, but
in a way, they did teach me the concept of discipline, working ethic, and
resilience. Lessons gained early on as forms of entrepreneurship include
selling box drinks and raising callaloo in the farm, running my business of
selling June plums at school, and later becoming the neighborhood barber.
However, once I went beyond the walls of Shaolin, other
mentors not related to my family started influencing my life path. In the
School of Manning, I was more perceived by teachers than I thought of myself.
They understood that a boy who could juggle school and hustle to support his
family was not merely trying to make ends meet it could be making it. They
motivated my academic competitiveness and their discipline brought structure at
the time when distractions were all around.
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Another important role in my development was played by
coaches. Coaches made me learn the importance of strategy, team work and
composure whether I was on the soccer field, at the board of table tennis or at
a chess room. Sports were not just extra-curricular activities, but they were
balance training on how to endure. They challenged me to fight but they also
taught me that personality was more important than winning.
A close brush with death motorbike accident was one of the
most significant events in my life. It took mental determination, which I had
not imagined I possessed, to recover, and once again the mentors helped, not by
resolving the issues, but by reminding me that a downturn can turn into an
upswing. Their counseling enabled them to turn pain into purpose, and fear into
fuel.
Mentors emerged in each of these new countries: professors
that helped me to think and supervisors that helped me to work harder than my
colleagues and the engineering firm leaders who did not feel threatened by my
ambition but actually encouraged me. They provided guidance, helped me out of
my mistakes and allowed me chances to demonstrate myself. Mentorship was a
two-way process at such companies as SmithGroup, WSP and Introba. I got to know
the executives who had overcome their own challenges and I ended up mentoring
young engineers, interns and peers who reminded me of who I used to be many
years ago.
Mentorship, I had understood, is among the greatest equalizers
to disadvantaged individuals. It creates a connection between opportunity and
talent. It paves the way that would not otherwise have been open to me, my
progress would perhaps have been halted in the path of adversity, had not the
mentors who entered my life at every turn taken part in it.
This mentorship idea led to the establishment of DTR
Foundation and my devotion to philanthropy. And, should guidance steer my life
in a different path, it might help steer the lives of thousands of youths going
through their own form of Shaolin, struggling neighborhood, rough school
atmosphere, and the difficult early years of immigration.
My story, coming out of the ghetto up to the top of the
world, has a single truth behind it: mentors are multipliers. They amplify
trust, orientation, strength and prospects. They get the picture of what you
will become in the future when you can only see what you are currently going
through. And through them a lad who had two cemeteries about him learnt that
his beginning did not fix his end.
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