Sometimes the seeds of success are planted by watching someone else overcome adversity with determination, grit, and a refusal to allow hardship to take your dreams away. For me, that person was my mother, Dr. Connie Walker. Growing up in Atlanta, I watched her, a single parent working two jobs, striving to set an example for my sister and me. I’ll never forget sitting in a hallway during her grad school night school classes, long before there were online classes to make the journey easier. I was tired after the hour-long drive, but there my mother was, in class, getting an education to advance her career and lift my sister and I out of poverty.

I didn’t fully understand it at the time, but she was showing us what resilience looked like. Later, I would need to harness her strength to retu

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