Looking Up: A Different Perspective (PDF)

 PRAISE FOR LOOKING UP “Michele Sullivan’s beautiful book shows us that cultivating empathy and compassion for others can bring out the best in us. Her message is much needed at a time when so much human progress depends on co...

 PRAISE FOR LOOKING UP “Michele Sullivan’s beautiful book shows us that cultivating empathy and compassion for others can bring out the best in us. Her message is much needed at a time when so much human progress depends on connection and understanding.” —Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook and founder of LeanIn.org and OptionB.org “This woman is a health hazard for bores or anyone crying into their beer... unless they’re tears of laughter or joy. She’s so sharp you could cut yourself on these pages. Michele has the brain of a neurophysicist and a spirit the size of the sky. If you want to be uplifted, Look this book Up.” —Bono, musician and philanthropist “Michele Sullivan has spent a lifetime dismantling assumptions and challenging traditional points of view—about both people and organizations. The lessons from Looking Up in her career in philanthropy show the power of both individual leadership and collaborative partnership.” —Michael Bloomberg, founder of Bloomberg LP and Bloomberg Philanthropies and three-term mayor of New York City “Looking Up is an uplifting memoir about the journey of an inspiring woman who saw no limits despite being born with a rare form of dwarfism. Throughout this book, Michele takes you on her personal journey that makes you laugh and cry as she refuses to be defined by what some would call a ‘disability.’ After reading Looking Up, you would be hard-pressed to see Michele as disabled at all—rather, she is differently abled. She is pure grace and grit, a unique combination enabling her to overcome all obstacles to successfully accomplish her personal and professional goals, some of which we might think are well beyond our own limits.” —Cynthia DiBartolo, founder, chairwoman, and CEO of Tigress Financial Partners “This book is a helpful resource for anyone interested in personal and professional growth. Because you are in charge of your own growth, I’d encourage you to grab a copy and read it with your team. I’m certainly going to do just that!” —Clay Scroggins, author of How to Lead in a World of Distraction “Be inspired to look up when your instinct may be to turn away. This book elicits a call to change perspective, to view people as they truly are and not only what we see. By changing her own perspective, Michele has changed the lives of millions of people around the globe. An inspiring read for all!” —Scott Harrison, founder and CEO of charity: water and author of Thirst: A Story of Redemption, Compassion, and a Mission to Bring Clean Water to the World “Throughout my career I was influenced and touched by some amazing leaders—Michele is one of them. As I strived to be a better leader, I learned from the example she set by embracing diversity and practicing the principles she has outlined in Looking Up. As I have dealt with the challenges of an ALS diagnosis, I have drawn from the courage Michele demonstrates each and every day. Her book will make you laugh and cry but more importantly, think. Enjoy.” —Ed Rapp, former Caterpillar Group president “Michele’s call to action is simple but profound: strip away the deep-seated biases and view others, instead, for their inherent value. Her captivating story and the enlightened lessons woven within will inspire you to live better, and to elevate others along your path.” —Bill Kurtis, award-winning journalist “When we look up to others, we discover their true value and it places an indelible imprint on our lives. Investing, both financially and emotionally, in social impact endeavors will not only improve our businesses, families, and communities—it will make us better people. Valuing those around us and giving of ourselves are essential and less complicated than you may think. Within these pages, Michele will inspire you, call you to action, and impart genuine wisdom.” —Jeff Whiteman, president/CEO of Empire Southwest Copyright © 2020 by Michele Sullivan All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other—except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by HarperCollins Leadership, an imprint of HarperCollins Focus LLC. Any internet addresses, phone numbers, or company or product information printed in this book are offered as a resource and are not intended in any way to be or to imply an endorsement by HarperCollins Leadership, nor does HarperCollins Leadership vouch for the existence, content, or services of these sites, phone numbers, companies, or products beyond the life of this book. Scripture quotations marked NIV are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com. The “NIV” and “New International Version” are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™ Photograph of author with Barack Obama courtesy of the White House. All other photos courtesy of the author and used with permission. ISBN 978-1-4002-1432-7 (eBook) ISBN 978-1-4002-1431-0 (HC) Epub Edition December 2019 9781400214327 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Sullivan, Michele, 1965- author. Title: Looking up : how a different perspective turns obstacles into advantages / Michele Sullivan. Description: [Nashville. TN] : HarperCollins Leadership, an imprint of HarperCollins Focus LLC, | Includes bibliographical references. | Summary: “Michele Sullivan, who has a rare form of dwarfism, shares how her physical posture taught her the most effective relational posture with others, which helped her become one of the most powerful women in philanthropy”-- Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2019031474 | ISBN 9781400214310 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781400214327 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Attitude change. | Interpersonal communication. | Vulnerability (Personality trait) Classification: LCC HM1186.S85 2020 | DDC 303.3/8--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019031474 Printed in the United States of America 20 21 22 23 LSC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Information about External Hyperlinks in this ebook Please note that the endnotes in this ebook may contain hyperlinks to external websites as part of bibliographic citations. These hyperlinks have not been activated by the publisher, who cannot verify the accuracy of these links beyond the date of publication.  This book is dedicated to my family and to those who choose every day to look up to others instead of down on them.  CONTENTS Cover Title Page Copyright Foreword by Cherie Blair Introduction: The Long and Short of It Chapter 1: Two Kinds of Growth Chapter 2: There Is No Such Thing as Knowledge at First Sigh Chapter 3: Seeing Others Takes Sacrifice Chapter 4: The Value of Being Wrong—at First Chapter 5: Letting Down Your Guard Chapter 6: Make the First Move Chapter 7: Asking for Help Is a Strength, Not a Weakness Chapter 8: Choose Intimacy over Influence Chapter 9: A New Line of Sight Chapter 10: The Real Measure of Impact Acknowledgments Notes About the Author Photos  FOREWORD Hi, Cherie—I’m Michele Sullivan.” This is how our friendship began in 2014, with a perfect blend of warmth and poise, as I’m sure it has for many others who have been lucky enough to meet Michele. We got on from the start and I felt inspired by the introduction. We met while attending the annual United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), where there are endless esteemed and accomplished people to meet. Michele and I instantly found a common ground: we were both there to elevate others. Michele was there with the Caterpillar Foundation, and I was representing the work of the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women and the incredible women entrepreneurs I have the privilege of working with all over the world. I started the foundation in 2008, with the vision of working toward economic equality between men and women, and we’ve been incredibly successful, helping nearly 150,000 aspiring women entrepreneurs across the world to start and grow businesses. Michele’s work with the Caterpillar Foundation had caught my attention in the months prior to attending the UNGA. I told Michele how I was a fan of her work. It was true then and it remains so today. Our friendship has grown over the years since we first met. We’ve found that the pair of us share important values: we both have a deep commitment to the rights of women, of children, and of those across the world who are unseen, overlooked, or unjustly disadvantaged. Moreover, whilst our lives have been different in so many ways, we also have shared experiences of making our way as women in the world—and we are far from alone. Women like Marisol Márquez, who was a participant in my foundation’s flagship entrepreneurship program and runs a production company in Mexico, are often at the sharp end of discrimination. Marisol has to take her male partner with her to business meetings to be taken seriously. As a young woman making her way in the world, a man must be sitting next to her to legitimize her voice. Although, of course, all of our experiences are unique and some of us are far luckier than others, Michele, Marisol, and I share this sense of familiarity with pushing back against discrimination and inequity with millions of others—men, women, and children—across the world. This has fundamentally shaped the course of our lives. In this book, you will find a woman whose story, though different in detail from mine and yours, is our story. We all have inherent value. And we have all been misunderstood and misrepresented at certain points in our lives. We’ve all been overlooked and underestimated more than once or twice, and it’s so often women who experience this most acutely. Michele’s story is a tribute to overcoming adversity with grace and strength, and is a timely reminder of the change we can all make in the world. This book poses important questions for us to consider: Will we seek to see the true value in others, whether or not they see value in us? Will we advocate for others, even if they don’t or can’t advocate for us? I encourage you to consider your answers as you turn the coming pages. I believe that if more of us embraced Michele’s message, and lived it with true conviction, we could make profound changes to the world around us. Cherie Blair CBE, QC Leading Queen’s Counsel, committed campaigner for women’s rights, wife of the former British prime minister, and founder of the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women MAY 10, 2019  INTRODUCTION The Long and Short of It I’m sure you picked up this book wondering what a little person might teach you. Honestly, I’d wonder the same thing if I saw someone like me on the cover. I’m also sure you’re coming to this book with some curiosity about the life I’ve led... what it’s like being small in a world where size and stature seem to really matter... what other people do when they see me or what I do when I see them seeing me. You might even wonder whether I drive a car or how I high-five or where I buy my clothes. Don’t feel bad about any of that. I have curiosities about you too. Our brains are hardwired to wonder about the people we see and then make quick conclusions about them before we’ve met. We walk into a room, and our brains immediately take account of who and what is in it. At a glance, we determine all kinds of things. Who’s safe and who’s not. Who we can learn from and who we can’t. Who’s like us and who isn’t. My brain still does this today, even though assumptions have been thrust upon me my entire life. No matter what others have assumed about you, your brain still assumes about others too. Even if we know the swift conclusions we form are arbitrary, and many have been proven wrong before, we still carry a powerful, natural affection for the instincts we’re counting on to survive in the world. We have to learn to override this instinct by remembering that surviving isn’t the point of life. Thriving is. This requires embracing a broader perspective on others instead of the snap judgments our brains form at first glance. If you’re older than seven, you’re probably taller than me. Ironically, always being the shorter one has given me some legitimate advantages. For starters, my shorter vantage point has forced me to look up to others my entire life. While it can be intimidating, even today, this permanent physical posture has taught me that the most powerful relational posture I can have with others is to look up to them rather than down on them. Learning to expand my view of others has been the most potent lesson in my life. It was the reason I didn’t choose the life of obscurity that some disabled persons feel is their only option, homebound and relegated to a handful of safe relationships with people who don’t stare. An expanded perspective on others is also the reason I was able to pursue my dreams, despite my disabilities, and land at the helm of one of the world’s most prominent philanthropic organizations, responsible for investing tens of millions of dollars every year in worthy causes. In short, how I’ve learned to see the people around me—to always look up to them rather than down on them—is the foundation of my leadership; it’s given my life its greatest impact and meaning. But this isn’t just my lesson. I believe looking up to others is the foundation of all human progress. Period. Can you imagine how the world would change if we all began looking up to each other? When we learn how to elevate the people around us, to discover and champion what’s noble and beautiful and powerful in them, we uncover the path of impact in one another’s lives. Others can teach us, even (and often more so) if they are different. We can affirm them, even if we are different. I hope my story illuminates this powerful dynamic and the profound lessons I’ve found within it. I can’t offer you any more than my experience. And there’s no guarantee that my words will reach your head or your heart. I wish I could say everything in person, sitting down somewhere together, talking face-to-face—I’ll sit on twelve inches of cushions. Since we can’t do that yet, I hope I can at least get you thinking bigger about the impact you can have when you learn how to look up to the people around you, whoever they are, wherever they’re from, whatever they look like. No matter what it is you want to accomplish in life, if it’s something bigger than your existence, the work will involve others. The strength of your collaboration and the ultimate outcome of the work you accomplish together is inextricably linked to how you see them—no matter how they see you. Ultimately, leadership is less about imparting something great to others and more about extracting something great from them, something that already exists within them though they can’t yet see it. But you can. Here’s where that journey began for me...  CHAPTER 1 TWO KINDS OF GROWTH Take her home and treat her like everybody else.” The doctor’s advice to my parents, given on the cold winter morning I was born, helped set the course of my life. The doctor could see I had clubfoot, but X-rays showed I had something else, a form of dwarfism called achondroplasia, usually referred to as simply “achon” (pronounced a-kon). This was the 1960s, so my parents had no frame of reference for what the diagnosis meant. If we’re being honest, neither did the doctors. Even though achon is the most common of the approximately two hundred types of dwarfism, this was over five decades ago, when you didn’t see a lot of little people in public. There’s no doubt in my mind the doctor was out of his element when faced with my condition, which made his recommendation all the more remarkable. His perspective gave my parents hope and direction, although I tend to think they would have taken that route regardless. They seemed built to handle pretty much anything. Even though both were in their early twenties when I was born, there wasn’t much they hadn’t already seen and conquered. Seemingly unfazed, they took me home and dedicated their lives to doing what the doctor had prescribed—so successfully that, for years, I never knew I was different from anyone else. Halloween was my first clue. We lived in a middle-class neighborhood of about forty houses in East Peoria, Illinois. My younger sister, older brother, and I slipped into character each year, and away we’d go, trick-or-treating with our parents leading the way. I was out-of-my-mind excited every year, but by about four years old, a subtle question had arisen in my mind: How come every neighbor knew it was me behind the ghost costume? I mean, my face was hidden... and yet every time a door opened, it was, “Hi, Michele! Come on in!” I also wondered why my trick-or-treating stint was so curiously short compared to my siblings’ epic trek. Three houses and I was done. My legs couldn’t go any farther. In contrast, my brother and sister hiked to every house in the neighborhood. Our parents supplemented my candy spoils to make it fair, so I never complained. But I didn’t understand why. Then I went to kindergarten. I leapt out of the car when we arrived at Robein Grade School for my first day of school. As my mom and I walked down two long hallways and the classroom came into view, I straightened my shoulders and stuck out my chest like I owned the place. If you’ve seen the BBC clip of the professor being interviewed when his young daughter comes strutting into his office in the background, you know about how I looked. I shoved open my classroom door and announced, “Hello!” in a shrill voice. The teacher grinned as she greeted me. Then she directed me to the other kids, who were playing in a circle, while she talked to my mom. I scurried over and plopped down next to them. “Hey!” I bubbled. I couldn’t believe my luck. Contrary to some kids who enter their first classroom terrified, I’d been awaiting this day my entire life. And I’d finally made it. I got right down to the business of playing with my new friends. More kids arrived and filled the classroom, and we bustled about while our teacher greeted the parents. I was chatting up everyone who’d listen when a blond boy in blue shorts and a white shirt stopped next to me. “Why are you so little?” he asked. “You look funny.” I kept chatting away. I didn’t think he was talking to me. He said it louder and craned over me to show that he was bigger. “What are you talking about?” I said. “I’m not little.” “Yeah, why do you look funny?” the girl on my other side echoed. “What’s the matter with you?” I just stood there. To break the sudden silence, I went back to playing. It was too late. Now every kid in the circle had stopped playing and was staring at me. I can still feel the moment in my bones. I glanced over my outfit, thinking maybe it was my clothes. I still didn’t speak, but the air had changed. The other kids busied themselves, still glancing over their shoulders to try and understand. My face and shoulders fell. My stomach churned. I looked around for someone else to play with, and that’s when I realized a new circle had formed, and I was standing outside it. In that instant I morphed from a confident young girl into a scared, self-conscious one. Isn’t it profound what a single event can do to a person? Confusion enveloped me throughout the rest of that day, like a fog that wouldn’t lift. For the first couple of hours, I tried to rise above it. I’d raise my hand with an answer to the teacher’s question. Then I’d speak and notice the head tilts and stares from the desks beside me. By 10:00 a.m. naptime, I was a bystander. I laid my head on the small square of brown carpet and didn’t close my eyes. I could only replay the phrases I’d heard and the looks I’d seen, over and over in my head. Eventually, the weight of fear and uncertainty was too much for me. After naptime was over, I kept my hands folded on my desk and my mouth shut. Isn’t it profound what a single event can do to a person? I beelined for my mom’s car as soon as the teacher dismissed us that afternoon. I crawled in the front seat, sat up, and looked straight ahead. “How did it go?” my mom asked as she put the car in drive. “Is there something wrong with me?” I countered. “What does ‘retarded’ mean?” She paused in a way she had never paused before that day. It was probably only seconds, but it may as well have been three hours. Her silence frightened me. I know now that she wanted to say the right thing. And that she had been thinking about her answer for five years. “Well,” she finally began, “you are smaller than everybody else, Michele—it’s how God made you.” She said it so matter-of-factly, in the same way she told me, “It’ll only be a little sting,” when I had to get a shot. Her tone took me aback. “But you can still do anything and everything,” she continued. “Keep getting to know people, and if they get to know you, they won’t think of you as being different.” We came to a stoplight and she turned toward me and looked right into my eyes, as if doing so would maximize my comprehension of what she said next. “Because the truth is, we all have our differences, honey. Some are just more obvious than others.” I would discover that my mom was right. But not before discovering that being different wasn’t as easy as it sounded. Recognizing your differences isn’t as difficult as embracing them, let alone learning that they can be your greatest advantage. That first day of kindergarten drew a big, fat line in the sand. Once I crossed it, there was no going back. The news that I was, and would remain, smaller than others my entire life was both confusing and shocking to my young heart, and it instantly darkened the world outside my home. The realization marked the beginning of a new journey from acceptance to confidence to understanding that looking up to others is much more than a matter of physical stature. The journey would take me a while. It had begun on that first day of school, but the majority of my early progress occurred at our kitchen table. Every night while I was growing up, my family gathered in the modest, linoleum-floored kitchen at 6:00 p.m. There we took our seats around the oval oak table and ate together. Over the adventurous concoctions my mom whipped up, we’d take turns sharing about our day. My mom was always curious and always reading, and she would usually share a nugget of wisdom she’d learned. My dad would tell us tales from the factory floor at Caterpillar (CAT), where he worked as a forklift operator and, later, as a foreman. My older brother, younger sister, and I would spill the latest school gossip—for me especially, something notable always seemed to happen—and my mom and dad were genuinely interested in what we were experiencing. (Remember when you were young and the most exciting days at school were when somebody puked?) Of course, they also asked what else we’d learned in class. Who did we hang out with at recess? How did we feel? What were we struggling with? It became something I counted on, this allotted time and place to let down any walls I’d built up to protect myself during the day. It was a safe place, a sanctuary of sorts, filled with people who knew the difference between hearing and listening. Even we kids came to understand this difference. Dinner at the kitchen table was also an important ritual because it’s where I began to fully comprehend the breadth of my family members’ lives. I was no longer just seeing them in passing. I was getting to know them, really know who they were, how they thought and hurt and dreamed. Though I sensed from a distance the emotional, physical, and financial tax that my circumstances had on them, at dinner I got to see the full spectrum of their colored lives. And they got to see mine. In that way, those precious hours around the table were as life-giving as they were lifesaving, especially as the doctor visits increased. I came to see that, despite being constantly in need of medical attention, life was not all about me. We had my mom to thank for the nightly tradition. Growing up, she and her family had relocated constantly. Her dad, a lanky, thick-haired Swede, toggled between seasonal work as a carpenter and intermittent entrepreneurship throughout her childhood, owning a single tavern at three different times in Minnesota, and holding various other jobs in North and South Dakota. Having grown up the son of first-generation immigrants during the Great Depression, he’d learned to take no opportunity lightly, and he moved the family as often as was necessary to ensure income. One of the only consistencies during my mom’s early years was sitting around the kitchen table for family dinner. In a postwar, mid-century America that seemed to be changing more rapidly than anyone could predict, it was formative to always have the stability of an evening meal together. But—such was her life—even that changed. When she was fourteen, my mom’s parents sent her alone on a twenty-four-hour bus ride from their small town in the prairieland of Minnesota to Peoria, Illinois, where her older sister and brother-in-law were about to have their second baby. Her sister was going to need help caring for the first child while she tended to her newborn, and apparently my middle school–age mom was the answer. Maybe it wasn’t as crazy as it sounds to me. My mom was used to being resourceful. The frequent relocation during her childhood may have forced it on her, but she hadn’t shrunk from the uncertainty. It seemed to strengthen her. The harsh Midwestern winters made her resilient. The odd jobs made her capable. All of this prepared her for a near and distant future. In the end, she navigated the solo trip to Peoria like a champ, which included changing bus stations in Chicago after she’d been told she wouldn’t have to, and then having no money for a taxi when there was no one to pick her up at her destination. Her sister had no phone, so my mom sat in a cotton dress and stockings and waited at the outdoor bus station, which was no more than a metal awning and a wooden bench. One hour later, her brother, who also lived in the area, showed up. When my mom finally stepped foot in her older sister’s home well into the evening, she offered no complaints and jumped right into a maternal responsibility that didn’t typically befall a teenager. She’d been born with more moxie than most girls her age. And she continued to grow. Years later, after meeting and marrying my father, the same sister and husband fell ill with tuberculosis. They were quarantined individually and apart from their four children. In order for the kids to not be placed in foster care, my parents took them in. In her midtwenties, my mom was caring for five kids under age seven. Long after my aunt and uncle recovered and my cousins moved back into their home, our fridge still featured a picture of my young mom with five towheaded children gathered in front of her. Her hair is already stark white—courtesy, I’m sure, of the weight of responsibility and various near disasters, like once discovering my three-year-old brother standing in the middle of the interstate that ran right outside their front door. Next to the photo was an index card with my mom’s handwriting: “Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.” That became a mantra of mine as I navigated adolescence. It was either that or accept a limited life at home, with siblings for friends and parents for teachers. This would have been the more common choice. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the only little people in the public eye were on a television set or at a circus. My mom wouldn’t allow me to hide, though I often tried, and she saw much more for my life than the average American did. With her direct but loving encouragement, I settled into a routine at school and there was a sense of normalcy to my days. My comparative differences were still, increasingly, prevalent. My legs weren’t long enough to walk up the steps of the school bus, so I crawled up on my hands and knees, like a toddler climbing stairs. I also had to keep to the outskirts of the school hallways so kids wouldn’t accidentally plow into me, which happened from time to time, once knocking me out cold. Eventually, everyone got used to seeing me, and I wasn’t worthy of their whispers and stares anymore. Within the safe confines of school, I was the short girl. So what? Been there, seen that. “Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.” And then it got even better. One day during second grade, the teacher introduced my class to a game called Around the World. It was a math game that used flash cards, and the teacher would divide us into pairs and show us some type of math problem. Each duo competed once, and whoever answered first out of the two got to move on in the competition. Like math’s version of college basketball’s March Madness, the competitive pool halved and halved again until eventually there was only one person remaining. The incentive to win, aside from pride, was that your animal got to come out of the cage. All the kids had cut out animals from a magazine and pinned them to a plain bulletin board that served as the “cage.” If you won the game, your animal got to be pinned on the grassy area (green construction paper) of the bulletin board, outside the cage, until the following week. What freedom! What do you know? It turned out that math was my forte. My animal was nearly always the last one standing. I’d get all the problems right, ahead of each competitor, and win the game. This meant my animal—I’d of course chosen a giraffe—was a permanent fixture on the lush green construction paper. There wasn’t much that compared to the pride I felt in seeing my lanky representative get pinned in position on the green paper outside the cage. Except, of course, my pride about being good at math. I had a distinct knack for numbers, and it led to the most significant development at that point in my young life: my schoolmates’ description of me changed. No longer was the common refrain, “Michele is small.” It became, “Michele is smart.” It was the first time in school that I was defined by something other than my height, the first time I was seen as something besides a little person, and it confirmed that what my parents had told me was true: I am more than my size. This meant that—aside from perhaps a WNBA star or a runway model—I could be anything. It would take me a little longer to understand that others didn’t always agree with this assessment. It would also take some time to wholly believe it myself. One summer afternoon, my siblings and I spent the day at my grandma’s house. It was a hot day that called for an ice cream cone, so we walked to the nearby ice cream shop after lunch. As we walked back home, we passed two middle school boys in a parking lot. I was focused on my delicious cone and didn’t notice them gawking. Then one of them swung around and shoved me from behind, so hard it knocked me off my feet. In a flash my face was flat on the asphalt and my ice cream was upside down and melting. My brother and sister started crying. When I pushed up on my elbows and looked back, the boys were laughing. “Take that, midget!” one cackled. My grandma gathered herself and helped me up. “Come on,” she said as she brushed me off. “We’ve just got to go. Come on.” As we hurried off, I started sobbing and the boys began chanting, “Midget! Midget! Midget!” I’d never heard the word before that day. It was the first time I’d ever been intentionally targeted. I’d been called names before and been knocked down more than a few times, but no one had ever attacked me on purpose. It was malicious and confusing. I felt demoralized, and the experience shook me to my core. That night at dinner, my siblings and I recounted the story to my parents. I saw my mom’s shoulders drop slightly, but when she saw I was looking at her, they lifted back up. “People make fun of things they don’t understand,” she said, reaching over and squeezing my hand. “I know it might be hard to realize this right now, but you’re a far bigger person than those boys today.” What happened that afternoon stayed with me long after the handprint on my back faded. All these years later, I can see that their cruel treatment of me stemmed from fear and ignorance. They couldn’t fit what they’d seen into a box they understood, so they made a presumption about my worth. But the way they chose to react was a sheer reflection of their own insecurity. Why would they look up to me when looking down on me felt more comfortable? I understand the choice from a human-nature standpoint; we’re drawn to comfort. But comfort is the wrong choice when it comes to how we see others. Comfort is the wrong choice when it comes to how we see others. Having gray hair, bearing one skin tone or another, wearing a suit, being shy, visible tattoos—these all create an instant profile in the minds of others. Yet it doesn’t tell half the story of who you are or what you’re capable of. That’s how life is. As we look at the people around us, we label them in order to understand our environment as quickly as possible. However, we begin to grow when we learn to see beyond the labels. I’m a woman who wears size 1 shoes. I’m as tall as a second grader. I roll around in a motorized scooter or, if I’m feeling frisky, I use crutches. The vertebrae in my neck are fused due to a death-defying fall I’ll tell you about later. This means my head doesn’t turn unless my entire upper body does, which is a little freaky or funny or both. Can you imagine what labels the sight of me conjures up when I come rolling into a boardroom or clicking down an office corridor? I’ve seen them all in the faces of others over a lifetime—from the head tilts of my kindergarten classmates to the chin tucks of uncertainty to the bulging eyes of those who look like they’ve seen a zombie. Some reactions make me giggle. I’ve learned they’re not personal; they’re the result of an incomplete perspective. That’s why I always try to take initiative to broaden another’s perspective. “Hi,” I say with a smile and an outstretched hand. “I’m Michele.” The other person’s eyes usually soften, and their perspective expands as we squeeze each other’s palm. If we stay on this path, mystery turns to adventure. Our minds and hearts begin to open. Bigger things can happen. They certainly have for me. Four decades after discovering that I had a mind for numbers, I found myself in the Oval Office for a meeting with President Obama. The business world was built for attractive, sprightly five- and six-foot-somethings who can walk with ease and authority. No one expects to see size 1s and a motorized scooter, but there I was, with a dozen other qualified people, discussing an education task force with the president of the United States. It was a “pinch me” moment. As I looked around at the broad range of diversity in the room—we were young and old; black, brown, and white; women and men; tall and short—I thought back to my first day of kindergarten and how my mom’s advice during the car ride home may have been the most important she ever gave me. “Get to know them,” she’d said. I eventually realized why this advice was repeated so often. Everyone already had a perception of me before I met them. I was little. My voice was squeaky. I was different. In the eyes of many, I was too little, too squeaky, and too different to accomplish big things. But now I was rolling my short, squeaking self to the head of a table where the most powerful man in the free world also sat. How had I gotten from that first difficult day of kindergarten to there? Constant growth. Which is irony in its purest form. By the time I was ten, I was physically done growing. That was it. I was four feet tall and finished. I remember going to my annual orthopedic appointment, eager to see that I’d grown another inch since the last visit. That was the usual benchmark—one inch a year, give or take. At each appointment I looked forward to saying, “See, Mommy? I’m not going to be little. I got my inch!” I had secretly held out hope that my being smaller was all a big misunderstanding. Then, at my ten-year-old checkup, I hadn’t grown any taller. Not even a centimeter. The doctor confirmed my fate in his booming voice. “Well, Michele, it looks like you’ve gone as far as you can go.” I didn’t believe him. Back then I was saucy when I didn’t get what I wanted (okay, still am). I made him measure again. Same thing. No more inches. I was devastated. I was going to live my life as a little person after all. While all of my peers would eventually transform into average-size adults, I would be stuck looking like a second grader. I left the doctor’s office with one persistent question in my head. As I looked out the window on the car ride home, I blurted it out. “Now what?” I asked my mom. “What do you mean?” she said. “I’m done growing. Now what do I do?” “Michele,” she said with a perfect blend of compassion and strength, “that’s just your size. It’s not who you are. You can continue to grow as much as you choose to.” Somehow, I knew what she was saying, even at ten. It washed over me like a sudden summer breeze. I immediately grasped that while I couldn’t control the limits of my physical growth, I could still choose to grow in other ways. Growth is never just physical, is it? In fact, most of us are done growing physically right when we become adults. Isn’t that an interesting twist in life? We’re done growing upward in the first quarter of life, but growth is still necessary if we want the last three-quarters of our lives to make an impact, if we want to discover and accomplish the things we’re created to do, if we want to meet the high mark of our full potential. Maybe physical growth stops as adulthood starts to remind us that the growth that ultimately matters isn’t on the outside. There are two kinds of growth: we grow up on the outside and we grow up on the inside. After about twenty years old, the only growth we can control is the inside, though some continue tinkering with the outside for years. Which one matters most to you? Maybe physical growth stops as adulthood starts to remind us that the growth that ultimately matters isn’t on the outside. In an ironic twist, I was the largest newborn of the three children in my family. But eventually my brother and sister passed me on our doctor’s growth charts. It’s always interesting to hear parents discuss where their kids fall on those charts. While there’s no imminent health concern if a child measures in the twentieth percentile in height, many parents seem disappointed and even dejected with this news. On the other hand, learning your child is in the ninetieth percentile seems bragworthy. It’s cause for celebration, like, “My child is headed for big things!” I think we all understand the inclination parents have to hope their children are tall—height does provide an advantage in the world. But it’s only an opening advantage. Ultimately, if you’re stunted on the inside, it won’t matter if you’re six-foot-anything. I had a distinct advantage in having to come to terms with this perspective very early in life. Once physical growth was no longer an option, I had a choice to make: Would I lament my percentile on the chart, or would I find other ways to grow? Although I had to search out my answer when I was only ten, the same question is posed to everyone throughout life. How do you prioritize your growth? Are you focused on the outside or on the inside? Your answer is a good indication of how you assign value to others. We all tend to celebrate in others what we value most in ourselves.  CHAPTER 2 THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS KNOWLEDGE AT FIRST SIGHT We use the phrase “love at first sight” often, but when I see the audacious way some people treat each other these days, I wonder whether more might believe in knowledge at first sight. How much can we know about a person from one photo, one post, or one passing glance? We like to say “a picture is worth a thousand words,” but if that’s true, then a person ought to be worth a thousand pictures. Knowing anyone takes more than one sighting. I realize this is easier said than done. Sometimes being a little person feels like being famous, except nobody knows your name. You garner stares, most of which aren’t remotely subtle, and then people sit and watch you. They might look away for a time, but their eyes eventually return. Are they intrigued? Disgusted? Impressed? Sometimes I glance over at someone who’s particularly glued to me and give a quick wave with my little hand. The priceless reaction, from embarrassment to sheer terror, is my entertainment. Forgive me, Father. Maybe I shouldn’t do it, but a little private levity goes a long way. While famous people often get approached for a photo, an autograph, or a proclamation of love, being a little person doesn’t evoke the same response. I don’t usually know where I stand when it comes to public opinion. Do you ever feel this way? It’s not like people are interrupting me during a dinner out because they want to shake my hand and express their admiration for my work. Don’t break out the violin. I’m not complaining, merely observing. I’m plenty used to the reaction that my presence can conjure up. I understand it too. Believe it or not, I reacted the same way when I came face-to-face with a little person for the first time. At one of our extended family gatherings in mid-1978 (I was twelve), my cousin told my mom and me that a student at her high school, named Gary, was a little person. My mom’s reaction —“Really!”—revealed that while she’d known there were other little people in the world, she hadn’t found any to show me. Throughout grade school, I’d repeatedly asked my parents if I was the only little person in the world. Though they assured me there were others—my doctor went as far as to say there were “lots more”—I had no proof. I had never seen another person like me. I couldn’t browse the internet or tune in to Little People, Big World. Tattoo (played by a little person named Hervé Villechaize) wasn’t yet proclaiming, “Da plane! Da plane!” on the TV show Fantasy Island, which would premiere its first season a few months later. In a roundabout way, the existence of this mysterious other little person validated something inside me. My mom turned to me and asked if I wanted to meet Gary. “Yes!” I said without hesitation. Right then and there, my mom made a plan with my cousin to get in touch with Gary’s parents, who, it turned out, lived only a ten-minute drive from us. Three weeks later, my parents and I pulled up to the curb at Gary’s house. With my face pressed eagerly against the window, excitement suddenly knotted in my throat the second my dad turned off the engine. For years, I’d been told I wasn’t the only one, and now, on the verge of confirming it was true, I suddenly wasn’t sure if I wanted to puke, celebrate, or run away. I clammed up and followed my parents to the front door. The meeting became more vivid in the years after it happened, but at the time, it felt like an out-of-body experience. I wasn’t my usual outgoing self with Gary or his parents. I gave a wave and a quick hello and then retreated into my shell like a turtle. I’m sure it had something to do with the typical middle school girl shyness that can manifest in the presence of a high school boy. It was more than that though. When we sat down in our own kitchen for dinner that night, I still hadn’t said much about meeting Gary, and I wasn’t sure if I would. As my siblings debriefed their days, I nodded like I was listening, but I was in my own head. The truth is, I was still unsure of my feelings and didn’t know what to say. My mom must have known, because when it came time for me to talk about my day, she reached for a copy of the Reader’s Digest sitting nearby and summarized an article she’d read weeks before about an organization called Little People of America, or LPA. Gary’s parents had mentioned the organization earlier that day. My mom explained that she’d written the LPA to get some more information about it and received a letter in the mail that very morning. She pulled a white envelope from between the Reader’s Digest pages and slid her chair next to mine, and we opened the letter together. We learned the LPA was a support system and resource center for little people and their families. There were locally based chapters throughout the United States, and Peoria was in the Little Prairie chapter. Periodic chapter meetings were held in Springfield, only an hour south of where we lived, at the house of a woman named JoAnne. My brain quickly computed what this meant. Not only did other little people actually exist but there were enough of us to form an organization. And a car ride could take me to them. My mom showed me on the letter where it listed some upcoming meeting dates, and we made a plan right then and there to attend one in a couple weeks’ time. On the drive to Springfield, a mix of hope and angst battled inside me. Meeting Gary had been something of a novelty, what I imagine it feels like to finally spot a grizzly bear in the wild or a great white on a dive in the Pacific. I had been wondering about seeing a “Gary” my entire life, and then it finally happened. The thought of meeting a group of people like me was something entirely different. It meant something else that I couldn’t quite identify yet. The hour-long drive passed in minutes, and before I knew it, we were parking in front of a two-story, brick-and-siding house with a white garage and a red front door. I’ve never been a swift walker, but the walk from our car to that red door felt like slow motion. My heart bumped against my chest. I already knew I wasn’t the only one anymore. But somehow—maybe because Gary was only a couple of years older than me—the implications hadn’t fully set in. I tried to take a deep breath and found it difficult. I honestly couldn’t tell if this was the same reaction I always had when walking into the company of people who’d never seen me, or something else. As we approached, my dad reached his thick, calloused hand back to me, and when he felt my hand in his, he enveloped it gently and firmly. We came to the door, and my dad knocked three times. Seconds later I could hear footsteps heading our way. Heat rose from my shoulders to my head. JoAnne opened the door with a big smile. She was an attractive woman in her fifties with light brown hair and a certain grace that put me at ease for a brief moment. My senses were still on overdrive, though, and I could tell by this time that my body was numbing itself for protection. I wanted to run but instead I squeezed my dad’s hand tighter. JoAnne led us from the entryway into her living room, where about a dozen little people of all ages, and their families, stood around socializing. I froze. My legs were cemented to the ground, and my mind went blank. I remember my eyes locking onto a young man in his late teens standing by the couch. He was behind his mother’s legs, peering at the floor. He was smaller than me. I stared and I knew I was staring, but I couldn’t stop myself. This might sound strange but, for the first time, I could see what I actually looked like in the world. I was stunned. We really are different, I thought. I get why people stare. It wasn’t just that we were short. We looked... different. Why this light bulb hadn’t popped on when I met Gary, I’ll never know; but now, standing in a room full of people like me, who were standing next to parents and siblings of typical size, I suddenly knew why I drew so much attention in public. My parents did all the talking for the next two hours. I offered up no more than a few obligatory hellos. It was rare for me not to have a lot to say (something that remains true to this day), but the setting felt too overwhelming. Too much to soak in. My worldview had been forever changed, but I wasn’t yet mature enough to comprehend what it might mean. My silence continued on the ride home. And into the next day, and the next. I was full of inner dialogue, wrestling over whether or not I wanted to be involved in LPA. Here’s what it came down to, although it existed on a more subconscious level than I could articulate at the time: If I became part of that community, it meant I’d have to accept who I was. It meant I’d officially be a little person. But more than that, I’d officially, and in no uncertain terms, be different. And not subtly different. Quite obviously different. I wasn’t so sure about embracing that. Could I handle standing out in the most ironic sort of way? As the days and weeks went on, there was a nagging thought that kept making its way back to me: When I was around the people from LPA, I wasn’t different. For those couple of hours, surrounded by a dozen others like me, it was almost as if we were the “normal” ones and it was everyone else who stood out. Whether I wanted to admit it or not, while the experience was emotionally complicated, it had also been a respite because I learned I wasn’t alone in my differences. I made the decision to go back to LPA, and it remains one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. Even though I had the love and support from my family, and even though I didn’t often dwell in a place of feeling “less than,” there was something about having a community of people who inherently understood me. Who understood exactly what I was going through. We saw eye to eye —literally and figuratively—and that kinship set the stage for something I’d spend years pondering, and even more years trying to answer: How much better would the world be if we all weren’t just looked at, but were actually seen the same way those who understand us are? There’s a profound leap we can all make when we finally understand that there’s no such thing as knowledge at first sight. It’s perfectly normal—wise, even—to be part of a close cohort with whom you don’t stand out. The goal, however, should never be to form your sole existence in a bubble. The goal should always be to expand from close cohort to diverse community. Investing only in people exactly like you will ensure that your growth slows and eventually hits a ceiling as familiarity and comfort reign. That doesn’t mean you can’t learn from people who have something in common with you. It just means that you won’t learn as much from them as you will from people who are different from you. It’s natural and more comfortable to be with friends and family who require little effort. We need environments that are safe and stable if for no other reason than to rest our emotions and recharge our spirits. We can also, however, become overly attached to comfortable crowds. When that happens, it’s all too easy to swell with self-absorption and arrogance. Left unchecked, we’ll eventually focus on our kind alone, and we’ll lose sight of the others outside our microcosm—we may even come to resent the outsiders and the intrusion to life that they represent. This precarious existence was captured well when, in 1957, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. told the congregation at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, “An individual has not begun to live until he can rise above the narrow horizons of his particular individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity. And this is one of the big problems of life, that so many people never quite get to the point of rising above self.”1  How much better would the world be if we all weren’t just looked at, but were actually seen the same way those who understand us are? Rising above ourselves begins with a broader perspective, not on our own desires and dreams, but on those of others. When we zoom out from our own existence and then zoom in on the lives of others, we quickly discover that people unlike us can increase our breadth of knowledge and depth of experience. People different from us offer new perspectives, new ideas, new sources of growth. Those unlike us open our eyes to greater possibilities; they can even forge a path to our own healing.  CHAPTER 3 SEEING OTHERS TAKES SACRIFICE There’s a critical difference between having sight and seeing something for what it is. Every day, we scan our environments for sights we can explain, objects and activities we understand well. As we age from children into adults, the scope of what we can understand grows exponentially. Eventually, we learn to see our way through life pretty naturally. Most of what we see we recognize right away—cars, the bank, stoplights, trees, and various animals. The trouble is, we tend to apply this instant recognition to people. Our sight fails us when we don’t learn to look further into the faces and figures we see around us. When my parents and I met Gary for the first time, it was late summer, and he’d recently returned from Johns Hopkins after having his leg casts removed. He’d had leg surgery in June, performed by an orthopedic surgeon named Dr. Kopits. Gary’s family had found Dr. Kopits through the LPA, and when his name came up, they strongly recommended that my parents contact him. Gary’s family couldn’t have known how perfect the timing of their recommendation was. My family had already spent the previous two months in five different doctors’ offices at places such as Mayo Clinic and Shriners Hospital, seeking recommendations for treating my hip dysplasia, which had become more problematic since I’d stopped growing. When we returned home from Gary’s, my mom called Dr. Kopits’s office for an appointment. Dr. Kopits was a unique physician in the medical world for his vision to enable people with dwarfism to thrive. Born in Budapest, Hungary, where his father and grandfather had been orthopedic surgeons before him, he moved to Buenos Aires in 1960 to study medicine at the Universidad de Buenos Aires. In 1964, the year before I was born, he moved to Baltimore for his internship at Union Memorial and then residency at Johns Hopkins, where he remained for two decades. While at Johns Hopkins, Dr. Kopits encountered patients seeking genetic counseling, in particular children who suffered from dwarfism.1 Few if any advances had been made in the treatment of dwarfism in the twelve years since I’d been born. There was no known specialist, at least that we could find—only well-trained physicians who still treated the physical challenges little people faced in the same manner they treated a patient without dwarfism. Where other doctors shied away from the many unknowns my condition presented, Dr. Kopits saw a profound opportunity. By 1975, three years before we met him, more than 80 percent of his patients were little people, and he had developed new surgical instruments and techniques for straightening misaligned hips, knees, ankles, and spines.2 His patients came not just from every part of the country to see him but from every part of the world. We had to wait over a month for our appointment, an understandable consequence of his dedication. When we entered his office that September, I was filled with wonder. Everything there was made for little people. The chairs were lower; the shelves with magazines and toys were accessible; the exam tables could be reached with a simple step stool; the water fountain was chest level. Once we took a seat in his office, he immediately pulled up an empty chair in front of me and asked about school. For twenty minutes, we discussed what I was studying, what I enjoyed (math, of course), and what I wanted to do when I grew up. The experience was night-and-day different from the previous doctors’ visits that year. Dr. Kopits once told the Washington Post, “The preached doctrine is that you cannot be a good physician if you get emotionally involved with your patients. My doctrine is that you cannot be a good physician unless you do get emotionally involved.”3 To say he was a talented doctor wouldn’t do him justice. There were many talented doctors during that time. He was an innovator and a godsend. But most accurately, he was an extraordinary man in an influential position who saw me for both my distinctions and my common human condition. To Dr. Kopits, I wasn’t a patient suffering with dwarfism; I was a middle school girl trying to understand herself and her place in the world, who had a physical challenge that didn’t have to stand in the way. For the first time I wasn’t a problem to solve; I was potential to unleash. I could see a bigger picture of my life in Dr. Kopits’s bright, confident eyes. The way he saw me forged a new perspective in my young mind: my dwarfism wasn’t the real challenge—my perspective was. Through him, the scope of my future broadened into the realm of “a normal life.” That might sound weird, but before meeting Dr. Kopits, I wasn’t thinking about what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wasn’t thinking about having a career and a house and all that came with becoming an adult one day. I was trying to figure out how to not get pointed at or knocked down in my school’s hallways. Despite my parents’ constant encouragement, I was still on the defense, and I felt my biggest goal in life was to become the best defender I could. In Dr. Kopits’s eyes, I could see that I’d been shortsighted. At the end of our conversation, he explained that he’d need me to sit through a series of X-rays and tests to understand the best course of treatment for my hips. I was expecting maybe an hour on a couple of cold, metal tables, holding my breath in various positions, like my previous experiences. The tests Dr. Kopits ordered—twelve in all—took two days. On the third day, we gathered in a huge conference room: me, my parents, Dr. Kopits, and his nurse practitioner. My X-rays were arranged in rows on two backlit walls. Dr. Kopits walked us through what my issues were as he pointed at specific pictures. He explained that the type of dwarfism I had was not achondroplasia, as I’d been told. He admitted he wasn’t sure what form I had but that it was a rarer form having the characteristics of multiple types of dwarfism. (Two years later, he determined I had what’s called metatropic dysplasia, a rare form with only one hundred known cases in history, which has led to me calling myself “Heinz 57” among my little friends, because of this odd mixture.) He then said he believed he could help me. It took nearly two hours for him to walk us through everything and answer all of our questions. There’s a spectrum of challenges for little people, ranging from extremely debilitating ones to no issues at all. Results also showed that I was somewhere in the middle and suffered primarily from severe hip dysplasia, which basically means that my hip socket and the ball at the end of my upper thigh bone aren’t close enough together to keep my hips from dislocating. Dr. Kopits recommended osteotomies—effectively, surgical dislocation, reconstruction, and relocation—on my hips first, then, after about six weeks, a similar surgery on both knees. If all went well, he said, it was possible but not certain that we wouldn’t have to operate on my ankles. Upon hearing Dr. Kopits detail the seemingly endless string of surgeries, the atmosphere in his office changed from hopeful to overwhelming. I was consumed with one thought: How am I going to attend school and make it to eighth-grade graduation? A bit more was going through my parents’ minds. They took everything in, then stood up and thanked Dr. Kopits for his time. Over handshakes, they promised to think about all he had said. What made their reaction so equivocal was that Dr. Kopits’s advice was a big departure from the other advice we’d received—from physical therapy to “wait and see” how I felt as I aged. In hindsight, I now know the other doctors didn’t know what to do with me. I was out of their element and outside the scope of their protocol. In the context of traditional medicine, that was certainly true of Dr. Kopits at one point in his career. But he looked outside that context and sought to learn something he didn’t already know. One of the most common hurdles to seeing others in a positive light is an unwillingness to look past what is easy to see. When our eyes are all we use to see other people, we aren’t looking with every resource we have. When our eyes are all we use to see other people, we aren’t looking with every resource we have. We drove back to our Baltimore hotel in silence that afternoon. I think we were all in shock that of all the doctors we’d seen, the one who seemed the most capable had recommended the most complex course of action. My mom headed up to our room, and my dad and I walked to the lobby to get a drink. My face was red and my brows furrowed; I could not get my head around how all the surgeries were going to happen without me missing my last year of middle school. I wanted to attend high school like everyone else. My dad got us a table in the modest hotel restaurant, and there he let me vent. I toggled between, “Why do I have to do this?” and “This just isn’t going to work, Daddy,” offering up school as my most compelling piece of evidence. He sat calmly with his hands folded on the table, nodding occasionally and never breaking eye contact. He didn’t try to talk me out of anything. He also didn’t concede. When we returned to the room thirty minutes later, my emotions were in check until I couldn’t find my mom. I peeked in the bathroom, but she wasn’t there. It wasn’t a big room, so I worried about where she’d gone. Then I remembered the small balcony. I walked over and pulled the curtains open, and there she was. Her arms were cradling her midsection like she was in pain. As soon as I began sliding the glass door, she shot up from her chair and glanced over at me. Her eyes were bloodshot. She’d been crying. The only time I’d seen my mom cry was when her father passed away. I was so taken aback by the sight of her wet eyes and splotchy face that I immediately started bawling. She reached out her arm and pulled me in tight. “I don’t—I don’t understand—why—I need—all the—surrrrgery,” I heaved in staccato. “I know, honey,” she replied softly, stroking my hair. “It’s all difficult to understand, but we need to do all we can for your health.” Suddenly a thought hit me: this wasn’t just hard for me; it might actually be harder on my parents. They were going to have to deal with the stress of missing work and the financial burden of these tests and surgeries, not to mention still parenting my two siblings while they were giving so much attention to me. There was also the pain of seeing me, their middle child, whom they loved unconditionally, struggling with a medical condition few seemed to understand. After much discussion over the next two days, my parents helped me see that what Dr. Kopits had recommended could improve my quality of life if it worked. None of us knew then how true that was, or to what degree our intersection with him would alter my existence forever. We waited nine months, until after my eighth-grade graduation in June, and then drove back to Johns Hopkins and Dr. Kopits for my first of many surgeries. I was geared up for hell. We’d been told each hip would require approximately ten hours under the knife. I imagine technology has come a long way since, but back then the way it worked was that you went in to get the first hip fixed and then spent seven days in a cast from your toes to your chest. Then you went back under the knife and had the second hip done. Then it was back in the body cast for several more weeks. Even thinking about it now makes me want to throw my size 1s at the wall. All I could think about back then was how my classmates would be lounging by the pool or on family vacation at some glorious beach. Meanwhile, I’d be mummified and envisioning shapes in the popcorn ceiling all summer. My parents hadn’t filled me in on the details. I knew I needed at least four surgeries, but I thought that meant over time. I prepared myself to get through one surgery that summer and that was that. Done for the year. Not so. Seven days after my first surgery, my mom spilled the beans that I was now going to have the second hip done. “What?” I exclaimed shrilly, as only a thirteen- year-old can. “You’ve got to be kidding! This is torture!” The good news—a small victory by comparison—was that after my merciless second hip surgery, the doctors allowed me to return home and spend the rest of my fossilized summer in my own bed. There was only one problem. My parents didn’t know how they’d get me back to Peoria. The family Buick wasn’t a suitable vehicle for a petrified little person who couldn’t be jostled. I couldn’t fly commercially because I had to lie flat. There was also the unfortunate cartwheel position that the cast put me in, which wasn’t doing wonders for my self-esteem. My dad had been working at Caterpillar for nearly fifteen years by this time, and he was well respected among his colleagues. He shared with his boss the looming predicament of transporting his daughter home from Baltimore, and then asked if there was a way the company could help. His boss worked up the ladder. Three days later, he came back to my dad, offering the use of a company jet. My first plane ride would be on a Cessna Citation I, a twin-engine aircraft that was a heck of a lot faster than a car. Maintenance removed all of the seats down the left side of the cabin and installed a hospital bed in their place. Five days after my second surgery, the plane landed in Baltimore with my dad and a company nurse on board. Meanwhile, my mom had arranged for an ambulance to take us from the hospital to meet the plane. All went perfectly until my dad and two EMTs carried me up the steps to board. I was giggling and said, “Hey Daddy, isn’t this great? I’m getting swept off my feet!” He laughed with me until we reached the door and realized that in my spread-eagle position, my legs didn’t fit through the opening. I could see the worried looks on the men’s faces as they backed my upper body out of the door. All these moving parts had been orchestrated to transport me home, some with real financial costs, and now they couldn’t get the patient onto the plane. With me still lying in their arms, the three stood there, staring at the opening. As I started to feel awful about the whole thing, one of the two pilots standing below the steps said, “Let’s flip her on her side.” So, Dad and the EMTs carefully rolled me onto my left side. Now one EMT was positioned directly in front of my face, cradling my upper body like a sleeping bag, while my dad and the other EMT supported my plaster-encased legs. I was an arrow with legs for feathers. I’m sure it looked as awkward as it felt. But as the guys slowly guided me through the doorway, there was an audible sigh of relief from all three. I fit! They carried me straight onto my hospital bed, which was bolted to the plane’s floor. The Caterpillar (CAT) nurse and EMTs made sure I was secured into my fancy lie-flat seat. Once my dad, mom, and the nurse took their own seats, I turned to my dad with a slight grin. “At least we know how to get me off the plane now,” I said. He shook his head and smiled. We made it home to the regional Peoria airport, where a second ambulance was waiting on the tarmac to drive us home. Though I was uncomfortable and felt some pain, my whole body relaxed as I rolled through the front door of our house. That first night, my dad placed me in a reclining wheelchair and guided me into the kitchen so I could eat with my family. The problem was, I was too reclined and too rigid to see the plate my mom set on my chest. As we discussed each other’s latest thoughts and experiences, one of my family members would tell me where to aim my fork. “The meat is at two o’clock... Your potatoes are at ten o’clock.” Half the food rolled down my neck and wedged itself in the top of my cast. A couple of peas rolled like a perfect putt into the small, round cutout in my abdomen. I laughed it all off. I was grateful to be sitting at the kitchen table with my loved ones again. I didn’t fully comprehend it in middle school, but the significance of the people who helped me as a young girl was enormous. It wasn’t just that they coached, listened, and joined me through some very tough times. I was also seeing strength in its most tangible form—sacrifice. With a very memorable introduction, CAT had become a part of my village before I ever knew I’d spend my career there. Here was the largest earthmoving equipment manufacturer in the world, moving heaven and earth to help a girl in a body cast get back home. If the C-suite had simply told my dad he wouldn’t lose any vacation days while helping me get home, we’d have considered them very thoughtful. But they entered into our lives and saw a dad who loved his daughter and wasn’t afraid to ask for help. I thought a lot about that over the summer, imagining the leaders at CAT who’d allowed us to use the company jet despite the inconvenience and expense. I also smiled about having a dad who was willing to stake his reputation on looking out for his little girl instead of himself. The conversation he had with his superior couldn’t have been an easy one, and though my dad always downplayed it, I know there was a high possibility of rejection. It was a company jet, for Pete’s sake! And my dad was not a top executive. Who makes that kind of request when they’re not in a position of leverage? A man who is looking at others’ needs more than his own. To this day, I keep a picture under my computer keyboard of me being carried up the steps of that plane. It’s there to constantly remind me that looking up to others requires something other than eyesight; it requires personal sacrifice of a kind greater than simply giving up our time and energy for their sake. To truly see others’ value, we have to give up our preconceived notions of who they are or appear to be. We have to let go of the premature belief that we have all the necessary facts to form an accurate conclusion. The Little Prince writer, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, was spot-on when he included in his story the pivotal line “One sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is invisible to the eyes.”4 We should ask ourselves whether we believe in the eyes of the heart. Don’t we know, deep down, that there is always more to others than meets the eye? Are we willing to do the work required to see what more there is? It’s easy to believe that sort of work is tedious or even risky if you suspect you won’t like what you find. While it’s true that not everything we discover about others is beautiful and inspiring, there is always gold too. Besides, aren’t hidden treasures the most valuable of all? We don’t think much of a common piece of granite, but we rearrange our lives to obtain a diamond. The treasure inside others is even more valuable than that. To truly see others’ value, we have to give up our preconceived notions of who they are or appear to be.  CHAPTER 4 THE VALUE OF BEING WRONG—AT FIRST I’d like to think most of us truly believe that every person on this planet is uniquely valuable. But we don’t act like it, do we? Do we see everyone we pass as we would someone famous, as if they have something interesting, important, or even indispensable to offer? I know parents see their kids this way. Friends see their closest friends this way. Good leaders see their team members this way. But how do we see the stranger? How do we see the person outside our own orbit, with whom we don’t have an obvious bond or to whom we feel we have no obligation? Do we see immeasurable potential when we walk the streets of our cities or the halls of our offices? People—mere people—would intrigue and excite us if we did. We wouldn’t find it difficult to enter into others’ lives. We’d see it as an adventure, a challenge, a treasure hunt with a reward to be shared. Unfortunately, if you stroll the city streets, this isn’t the reality you observe. Sadly, what we see on a far more regular basis are people passing each other with blinders on. When we do look at one another, there’s far more presumption and dread than appreciation and an enthusiasm to know more. How do we flip that script? It starts by each of us refusing to accept the default conclusions our brains provide us. The truth is, to some degree we have to see that we are wrong about others before we can be right. My parents and I returned to Maryland ten weeks after the plane ride, to have my body cast removed and begin my physical therapy. To get there, my mom asked Bradley University if she could borrow one of their vans. She’d only started working there ten months earlier, but like my dad, she wasn’t looking at herself, or at protocol; she was looking up to me. Bradley University said yes, and my dad then MacGyvered my reclining wheelchair to the van floor and drove us to Baltimore. Once there, my parents admitted me to Children’s Hospital, where I was to live for the duration of my recovery. The bad news was, my mom and dad could only stay with me for the first two weeks. They both had to get back to work, and while I understood that, it didn’t make it any easier. I was still a young girl, battling through all the questions of identity, self-esteem, and desire. The good news was, there were many other little people on my floor doing physical therapy under Dr. Kopits. Their presence was particularly opportune because being at Children’s instead of Johns Hopkins taught me that the next level of my growth was learning to see others the way I wanted them to see me—to see beyond what was plain to see. There was a girl on my floor who permanently lived at Children’s. I’ll call her Mary. She had a skin condition that was so extreme, it warranted around-the-clock care and a certain degree of isolation. All of her skin was basically one big infection. She had no fingers because the bacteria had eaten away at them, and her skin had been pulled back to her wrists. She didn’t have eyelids, so she slept with her eyes open. She had no hair, couldn’t walk, and might have weighed twenty-five pounds. A lot of people couldn’t bear the sight of her. There was another girl who lived at Children’s full-time whom I’ll call Lisa. She’d suffered severe burns over a majority of her body when she was a child. As a result, whatever part of her wasn’t covered by a hospital gown was covered in thick mounds of scar tissue. Her nerves from head to toe would frequently shoot sparks of pain throughout her body, and she had somehow learned to cope with it; I’ve learned since then that the suffering she endured was relentless. Lisa and Mary were some staggering kind of warriors inside their broken bodies, especially when you consider that neither girl had any family around. Ever. Their home was a room in a Baltimore hospital, and I never once saw anyone visit them besides Dr. Kopits and the nurses. There were about a dozen LPA comrades who occupied rooms next to Mary and Lisa, so when it came to proximity, we were close. But when it came to comprehending how it felt when people either couldn’t look at you or couldn’t stop looking at you, we were even closer. We may not have been able to grasp the specifics of their ailments—really, none of us could wholly grasp the specific challenges of any other person on our floor—but we all knew about pain, disappointment, and fear. We may not have known how it felt to not have a home or a family to hold you, but we understood loneliness and feelings of unworthiness. My relationships with Mary and Lisa taught me that empathy isn’t dependent on parallel circumstances. Both quickly became part of our hall’s cohort and joined us for full-time shenanigans. The girls on the hall, who comprised the majority, occasionally shut the boys out of one of our rooms and giggled about which ones we thought were cute. We’d swap food and books, and share secrets and fears. Over the course of that shared first summer at Children’s, we’d learn that Mary loved the color purple. Her favorite food was cinnamon rolls, and she dreamed of being a veterinarian. Lisa liked all the characters from the Peanuts gang, especially Peppermint Patty. She was allergic to bees and could roll her tongue. There was such beauty in our common ground. When I watched The Goonies for the first time several years later, that ragtag group of comrades in the film reminded me so much of our clan on the fourth floor. Like Mikey, Chunk, Data, Stef, Sloth, and the others we, too, were discovering treasure. The difference was that our treasure was found in each other and the depth of our relationships. We also had a lot of fun along the way. I remember one day we noticed how the nurses would pick up the phones and dial a certain number and it would turn the phone system into an intercom throughout the entire hospital. We nominated a couple of spies to get close enough to spot the number pattern the nurses dialed. I was one of them. It was the number 86. We held on to this information for a couple more nights until the time was right to test it out. At approximately 10:00 p.m., we commandeered the phone in the empty nurses’ station in the middle of our hall. Michael was the name of one of the boys in our cohort, and at the time there was a television commercial for Malt-O-Meal where a boy’s stomach would say in a deep voice, “Edgar, I’m hungry. I want my Malt-O-Meal.” Our Edgar picked up that phone, punched in 86, and announced, “Edgar, this is your tummy. Where’s my Malt-O-Meal?” Our eyes lit up in shock. It worked! We turned to each other, eyeballs like dinner plates, and slapped our hands over our mouths to smother our laughter. We’d already discussed our exit plan, so we calmed our convulsing giggles as best we could and immediately dispersed from the nurses’ station into smaller groups and a more casual manner. Hanging out in the hallway like usual... Suddenly, two nurses came rushing into the hall from the kitchen. They looked up and down the hall, trying to make sense of what had happened. It was a bigger deal than we had imagined— the intercom was primarily meant for critical situations, like paging a doctor or requesting additional help—but we kept our cool that night and shrugged our shoulders in innocence when asked if we knew anything. The next morning the head nurse interrogated us for a second time. She called us into the hallway, and with her hands on her hips, she said curtly, “Who did it?” Again, we didn’t know what she was talking about. Our nurses were some of the most amazing people who, unfortunately, didn’t always get our best behavior. Still, they were as eager as we were to make our floor as lighthearted as humanly possible. At least once a week, they placed us all in one room and handed each person a large syringe without the needle. Then they set a large bucket of water in the middle of the room and let us go after each other with hospital-issue squirt guns. Those suckers could produce some serious water pressure. They were like the original Super Soakers, and we were all drenched within minutes. While each patient on our hall was there for a serious and sometimes grave reason, from cancer to severe infection to major surgery, moments like these made for an incredibly rare culture that was never devoid of genuine joy and dignity—even in the midst of the darkness that we all knew wasn’t far away. One evening we noticed a deceased person being wheeled on a gurney to the elevator. It wasn’t someone from our floor, so a childish detachment set in. The thought popped into my head that there must be a morgue in the building somewhere, and that body was headed there. I rallied the troops later that night for a little field trip. We waited until after midnight, as the venture would require a little more “free time” than a moment to dial up the intercom. Once the coast was clear, I went door-to-door and waved everyone into the hall. I led our huddle to the elevator, and on a guess, I punched the button to the lowest level. When we stepped out, the entire floor was dark except for the dim fluorescent lights above the hallway in either direction. I led us down the hall to the right, reading the plaques beside each door until we found what we were looking for at the end of the hall. To my unexpected disappointment, the silver plaque to the right of the wide metal door read, simply: “Morgue.” I don’t know what else I thought it would say; my middle school mind probably hoped for “House of the Dead” or something in the horror genre. I’d built up my defenses in preparation. I’d warned my comrades what we might behold on this journey. And all we had was a plaque with “Morgue” on it. Boring. Then I had the thought that we might as well look around in there. There was no one on the entire hall but us and whoever was inside. I wiggled the handle and tried to enter. The door wouldn’t budge. A few more of us tried. No luck. It was locked—of course. But there was a window cut in the top half of the door, and we could see the room was dimly lit from what we’d discover were small, under-cabinet lights that presumably remained on 24/7. We quickly devised a rotating human ladder that allowed everyone to peer inside. When I looked, I saw nothing but a couple of empty gurneys, medical equipment, and a wall of stacked, handled, rectangular doors. We’d seen enough movies to know what was behind those doors, but no one dared voice it. There was simply an eerie silence as each person took his or her turn. When the last person had had a peek, someone spoke the mind of us all: “I think we should head back.” Over the next five summers, I underwent multiple surgeries and rounds of therapy in Baltimore—on my hips, my knees, and my ankles. I saw some of the same kids each summer. I met new ones. I formed lifelong bonds. And I learned how to say permanent goodbyes. As much as I missed my parents’ presence during those seasons, I felt at home at Children’s; my hallmates were an extension of my family, and they colored my most vivid adolescent memories. I was always proud to introduce them to my parents when they returned to bring me home. In contrast to my mom’s calm demeanor and thin figure, my dad had a commanding presence and a sturdy, six-foot-two frame. He kept a thick head of brown hair his whole life. He was like a blue-collar Tom Selleck, but a little thicker and without the Hollywood glitz. His face was pleasant, even when stern, and people always took notice when he entered a room or opened his mouth to speak. His deep voice and unhurried mannerisms made you feel safe in his presence—especially if you were a kid. He was a benevolent bear around us patients, and everyone fell in love with him. Dad regularly did “rounds” through our hall, visiting each of my hospital mates. He learned everyone’s breakfast order from McDonald’s in a matter of two days and showed up every morning thereafter with several white, red, and yellow bags full of Egg McMuffins, giant pancakes, hash browns, and apple pies. He was also the king of knock-knock jokes—a few of which even elevated beyond dad-joke realm—and he was the unofficial welcoming committee for the parents of new patients entering physical therapy for the first time. I watched countless quarters magically appear from behind new patients’ ears. I’d roll my eyes a thousand times, but inside I was as proud as any daughter in the world.  He never said it outright, but I think being able to offer lightness in the oft-heavy environment of that hospital gave him a sense of purpose. Maybe even some personal redemption. I never doubted my dad’s love for me. And though he tried to hide it, I knew he hated seeing me struggle. My dad was the youngest of six children and spent his formative years in Tennessee, where his father was often gone chasing down odd jobs, and his mother, to whom he was closest, was the breadwinner. This was during World War II, and to support herself and her kids, his mom worked long hours as a nurse in a local hospital. When Dad was thirteen, his mother passed away unexpectedly. Shaken but stoic, he went to live with one of his sisters in Tennessee because his father was not in a position to care for him. A year later, a tornado destroyed his sister’s home, which left her family in dire straits. Feeling that they could no longer properly care for my dad, his sister and her husband sent him to Peoria to live with one of their older brothers. When he was just shy of high school graduation, my dad joined the Air Force and wouldn’t return to Peoria until his honorable discharge four years later. The summer after he returned, he attended a stock car race with my mom’s brother. My mom was driving in the powder puff race. She didn’t win, but when she and my dad got one look at each other, the real prize revealed itself. (I still laugh at my mom driving a stock car back then because I’ve never seen my mom drive above the speed limit.) If my mom was the heart of our family, my dad was the backbone. And the funny bone. We relied on his strength and consistency, but also his humor. His commanding presence, but also his gentleness. He was the best kind of balance, and that extended to how he fathered us kids. Authoritative, playful, fair, thoughtful. When it came to me, he knew when to step in to help and when to step back and let me have my moment, even if it meant I would learn through failing. I accepted a daily paper route with my sister during eighth grade, delivering thirteen newspapers throughout our neighborhood. My bike was small and couldn’t carry my half in one trip, nor could I have pedaled with the added weight. My dad jimmied two baskets on either side of my bike that could hold a total of four papers. I’d deliver the four and then go back to our house to get the next four papers. Deliver, refill, repeat. I always did my own route except when the snow was deep. Then my dad would deliver them on foot on my behalf. I’d bundle up on the front porch and oversee his aim. (He did great... almost always.) Later, when it came time to get my own car, I visited several dealerships before realizing I needed to recruit my dad to come with me. The same thing kept happening every time I went alone: I’d walk through the door and stand there waiting for a salesperson to come over. Nobody ever came. So, I’d walk to the counter and ask if someone could help me. Hesitantly, they’d send over the most junior person, who’d end up being no help at all, and I would leave after five minutes. My dad agreed to come along, and of course, when we walked in together, salespeople fell all over themselves. As we toured the lot and inspected the different options, he deferred to me. Did I like the interior? Was there enough trunk space? Did I want to go classic white or navy blue? After the purchase was made and the paperwork was signed for a black cherry Dodge Daytona Turbo, the salesman handed my dad the keys. “Why are you handing these to me?” he asked, incredulous. “It’s her car!” Getting my own set of wheels came at the perfect time because it coincided with getting my first full-time job at Caterpillar. After I finished my first year of graduate school, I applied for a summer internship at CAT. I was obviously familiar with the company, not only because they employed my dad and had graciously let me use their jet after my hip surgery, but because it was headquartered in Peoria. Everybody in town was familiar with it, and many families that I knew well worked there too. If I could land a CAT internship, I knew it would look great on my résumé and be a solid career move. I had by this point learned that my math skills made me well suited for the emerging field of information technology (IT). It was the late 1980s, and there were very few women in the technology field, let alone the specialization of this new thing called the internet. I thrived on the challenge of learning the topic, and then a recruiter at CAT, named Chuck, delivered the disappointing news over the phone that I wasn’t accepted for their summer IT internship. As I was sighing with defeat, he said, “But we’d like to offer you a full-time position instead. That is, if you’d like to work here.” You would have been hard-pressed to find someone more excited than I was. I could barely squeak out a response. “Really?” I said. “Really?” Over the next twenty years, I built an extremely fulfilling career at CAT, holding different positions in various divisions. When I made the jump to its philanthropic arm, the Caterpillar Foundation, in 2011, my primary role became leading a team in investing millions of dollars in grant money every year to create sustainable change in individual lives. Of all the facets of my job that I loved—the collaboration, strategy, research, advocacy—it was the fostering of relationships with both our grantees and the individuals they were helping that I treasured most of all. It often reminded me of my summers at Children’s and my relationships with both the medical staff and my fellow patients. In 2013, I traveled to Uganda with one of those grantees, Opportunity International (OI), which provides small business loans, insurance, and savings accounts in underdeveloped countries. It was a typical muggy day as we headed east from Kampala. The dirt roads made for a long and bumpy ride, and I lasted an hour before I needed to use the ladies’ room, also known where we were as “the bush.” The driver pulled off the road in an area with good coverage. I had no toilet paper, but that wasn’t remotely a concern. I walked about ten feet from the vehicle and realized that if a black mamba were to strike my backside when I squatted, my colleagues might never find me. The dry grass was over my head. Needless to say, I survived, while providing some comic relief to my fellow travelers. I felt as though I should probably bow when I finally returned to the Land Cruiser. Two hours later down the dirt road, we finally arrived at the village I’d come to Africa to see. We pulled off the road into a (shorter) grassy opening. I approached a group of fifty farmers who were OI clients. I was there to hear their stories and learn how our investments in their work were helping their families overcome generations of poverty. OI used GPS mapping to determine the precise size of the farmers’ land so they could maximize their plantings, then arranged training so they could determine the ideal blend of seed and fertilizer that would yield the biggest harvest. This sort of information is provided on the labels of the plants we buy at our local Home Depot, but these farmers historically relied on a blend of trial and error and local assumptions. Though it’s not bad information, it’s rarely complete. Through our partnership, we were able to give them the broader understanding they needed. Out of the group of about fifty farmers, a woman named Betty stood out. Her yellow cotton dress, which was probably a far more vibrant shade before the years of sun and layers of dirt infiltrated every last fiber, was like a high five among the earth tones of the others’ clothing. I saw it in my peripheral vision the whole time I spoke to the group. When I finally approached her and introduced myself, she responded vibrantly, telling me her name. I asked her if she’d like to sit and talk with me, and I pointed to a tree that cast a large shadow where we could find some refuge from the heat. She nodded and waited for me to lead the way. We spent ten minutes together, and her strength seemed to grow with each passing minute. She shared with me how her husband had been significantly injured and could no longer run their sugarcane farm. She successfully took over and kept her family afloat. But she had bigger aspirations than her family’s survival. Her parents couldn’t afford to send her to school, so her dream was to ensure all ten of her kids attended college and could support themselves and their families with good-paying careers in a bigger city, like Kampala. As she spoke, I thought back to when I started at Caterpillar in the late 1980s. It was an overtly masculine brand in the male-dominated construction industry, and I was eager to prove myself worthy of the fraternity. I knew the task would not be easy. Betty and I had far different circumstances, but there were threads of her story that I couldn’t help but relate to—not just on a female level, but on a human level. The more I saw her, really saw her, the more empowered I felt by her presence. She was a gift to me. A treasure. You might assume my capacity for empathy and compassion came from my own situation. The truth is, it came from the people in my life who first showed it to me. People like Dr. Kopits. The LPA community. My family. As I grew from an uncertain middle schooler to a young adult, they taught me the value of a steady support system and the power one’s perspective had on another’s life. Their ability to see beyond my stature, my voice, my age, into the strength and potential in my soul—that’s what shaped the way I saw others, like Mary and Lisa, and later, Betty. It made me realize that, sure, I looked different and I sounded different, but I faced adversity and dreamed like everyone did—even my first hospital roommate, Alana, who at seventeen lost her leg to cancer, and at eighteen lost her life. She suffered big. But she dreamed bigger, dreamed of attending college, having a boyfriend, and one day getting married. Had I not taken the time to know her—to peer beyond her unfortunate realities right in front of me—I’d have never discovered her bright, brilliant soul. I’d have never been lifted up by her mere presence. At most, I’d have felt sorry for her. I’d have been capable of sympathy but not empathy. Information but not understanding. What would happen if we all sought to know each other beyond first sight? Peer beyond the initial snapshot? What if we met others with the primary objective to seek out our similarities and our sha