You Owe You: Ignite Your Power, Your Purpose, and Your Why

Chapter 1

It's You versus You

When You Take Ownership, You Become the CEO of Your Life.

Today, I walk into places of unimaginable privilege, from NBA locker rooms to the boardrooms of Fortune 500 companies. But my younger self would never have dared to imagine that boy playing on the block in Detroit could have such a life.

When I was growing up, there weren't many expectations for me. I was born in Chicago, and raised in Detroit in the 1970s. Back then, if you were blue collar in Detroit, your destiny was already dictated: You graduated from high school; got a job at Ford, General Motors, or Chrysler; started a family; worked on the assembly line for the next forty years; retired; and collected Social Security. That was how my life was supposed to go. And that wouldn't have been a bad way to do it. That's how my parents did it. That's how plenty of people did it back in the day, and that was a sweet life.

Here's what you have to remember: There weren't many expectations because it was just good that we were living. My great-grandparents were sharecroppers. Their parents had been enslaved. That my parents owned a house and had cars, that my mom had a garden to tend and a job at Ford Motor Company to go to every day, was beyond any expectation her ancestors had ever dreamed of. When survival is the goal, how can you even think about what your higher purpose might be?

Just so you can understand how I grew up, I have to tell you about how my mom, Vernessa Craig, grew up. If you ask Vernessa what was expected of her, she'll tell you: nothing. She'll tell you about how she made it in the 1960s in Chicago at the height of segregation. She'll tell you that as one of fourteen children in an eight-hundred-square-foot apartment on the South Side, there were no expectations of her because there wasn't a lot of hope for her to begin with.

Her grandparents were born in the Jim Crow era, a time when African Americans were bound by the color of their skin, and weren't allowed to share space with white people. Train cars, water fountains, restrooms, hotels-my family was barred from the dignity of communing in public places with white people. My mother's father was from outside of Selma, Alabama. Her mother came from Sardas, Alabama. These places were impoverished, rural, and still operating on a system that was basically slavery in all but name. Their families scraped together a living based on indentured servitude, giving up a share of their crops to the landowner in order to survive. But, like six million other African Americans over the course of about sixty-five years, they eventually picked up their lives and struck out for some better future up North.

Both of my grandparents, Jessie McWilliams and Mary Craig, and their parents landed in Detroit around 1940. They'd all traveled by train as children up from Alabama, and settled in a neighborhood called Black Bottom, which was famous for its tight-knit Black community. There, they all worked together, fed each other, and looked out for one another.

One of eight children, Jessie McWilliams-the son of Eva and Aaron McWilliams-came over from Ireland with his parents during the potato famine. Jessie was biracial and lighter skinned, passing as Cuban or Italian, so he could move through the world more freely than a Black man might.

My maternal great-grandmother, Kate Gardner, died giving birth to my grandmother, Mary Kate Craig. My mother talks about what a large hole it left in Mary's spirit, and how she was withdrawn and distant most of her life. She never spoke about her past. The only child of her parents, Mary was raised by a stepmother who was essentially her wet nurse and had ten other children with Mary's father, Fred. She always felt alienated; she couldn't connect to the rest of the family. I can remember it as a kid, feeling that my grandmother was serious and businesslike-a true provider, focused on getting her family what they needed to make it to the next day. Of course, as a child I didn't understand why my grandmother seemed distant. But thinking about how these women grew up and raised children and raised themselves without the help of anyone else, I can see now how it might have kept them from expressing their full range of emotions.

My grandparents Mary Craig and Jessie McWilliams met in Detroit, had three children, and never got married. Eventually, Jessie took off. Mary met Mr. Braxton, my mom's stepfather, and they moved to Chicago and had eleven more children. My mother grew up thinking that her father was dead, until one day he showed up when she was ten or eleven years old, and she didn't know him from Adam. She remembers how her father looked white and the woman he came with, her st...