Do you want to get a degree, or do you want to be a dummy?
Growing up, I assumed that my life would magically fall into place when the time was right. I thought my dreams for the future were pretty normal; grow up, get a job, be happy, and be successful. But I never thought the time would come where I would have to quantify my success.
My mother never went to college but managed to start her own business without a formal education. She took a few licensing classes and put her own money into starting her own daycare business. She used to talk about wanting to open a bunch of centers around Maryland, having shuttle buses to pick kids up and drop kids off at school. After running her business from home for 14 years, in 2015, she finally opened her first center. But by the end of the first month I remember her telling me, “This just isn’t what I thought it was going to be.”
She gave up her part of the center to her co-director and returned home to reopen daycare from our house. A short time later, things were back to normal, and she hasn’t mentioned opening up a center since. Before, the first 14 years of owning and running her own business, didn’t seem to mean much until after she opened the center. Suddenly her work for the last 14 years wasn’t leading up to something bigger; what she had already accomplished was enough.
People tend to think that smaller businesses are struggling, or striving to be like the bigger businesses. People always preach about reaching as many customers as possible, because at the end of the day the amount of money you can make in your lifetime defines your success. As many people know you don’t have a lot of worth in the job market without a degree because experience has become so undervalued in our society. The idea that you need a piece of paper to prove that you are capable to work doesn’t really make sense when you have people with decades worth of experience who are currently unemployed.
For my project I want to focus on business owners who are running successful businesses, but don’t have a college degree. It would be interesting to see how these different business owners quantify their success. Is it having a high earning business, or a well maintained work-life balance, or if they are measuring their success at all.
Families are often a focus for all women, and there is this dance between home life and work. Women are expected to choose their families over their careers. But to support your family you have to work so where does the balance become a compromise? I would like to zero in on African American women that own their own businesses because I think they fill and interesting place socially in society. Contending with misogynoir and other forms of symbolic violence regarding their race and gender, mean black women navigate a different landscape than people in other social groups. Especially in the professional field. African American female business owners probably offer a completely unique perspective on how they imagine their success.
