As Dina M. Suggs, vice president of the St. Louis American Foundation, introduced Pamela Samuels-Young on Thursday afternoon, a room of more than 530 successful people had to feel twinges of envy for the 2007 Salute to Excellence in Business keynote speaker.
Her educational accomplishments alone are impressive, featuring an undergraduate degree from the University of Southern California and graduate degrees from the prestigious Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University and the University of California at Berkeley School of Law.
Her professional accomplishments are not those of a slouch, either. Samuels-Young is managing counsel for labor and employment law at Toyota Motor Sales, USA, and professor of ethics and business law at the University of Redlands’ Graduate School of Business.
“I look OK on paper,” Samuels-Young said, once she took the podium.
This understatement, delivered to a business audience accustomed to valuing highly what is “on paper,” set the stage for a keynote speech that reevaluated the meaning of success.
“As an individual, you need to look at the whole picture,” Samuels-Young said.
“You can’t have a crappy family life and call yourself ‘successful.’ I have worked at firms with people who thought they were successful yet never saw their children.”
Samuels-Young had nothing to say about her own family, other than a passing reference to her (unnamed) husband. She spoke, instead, about having the courage to pursue your own dreams and the focus to stick to that pursuit, even if it takes you outside your current career path or established parameters of success.
In her case, she is working to develop her career as an author so that she eventually can resign from her legal practice and write full-time.
Samuels-Young is the author of two legal thrillers, In Firm Pursuit and Every Reasonable Doubt. She said her agent currently is peddling a third novel, thus far without success.
“I’m not afraid to dream big dreams,” Samuels-Young said. “Currently, my vision is to be a New York Times best-selling author.”
When she addressed the Salute audience, a more famous author of legal thrillers, John Grisham, topped the New York Times list for hardcover fiction with his novel Playing for Pizza.
Grisham influenced her career, in way. She said every time she finished a Grisham novel, she would ask herself, “Does he know any black lawyers? Any women lawyers?”
As a working black woman lawyer, she said, she rose every morning at 4 a.m. to work on her first novel and also devoted her weekends and vacations to writing. (No comment on how this influenced her family life or the “whole picture” of her being.)
After three years, she said, she finished that book. After distributing 20 copies to friends, she said, she had a difficult time getting any feedback. One friend finally admitted to her that it wasn’t very good – but that the early chapters of a second effort she had started were promising and that she should finish that book instead of trying to sell the first.
“It was like having two children,” she said, “and people telling you, ‘Leave that 3-year-old at home. But that new one, bring her out, she’s cute.’”
Samuels-Young said this anecdote taught her, “You need some objective criteria somewhere in the mix saying, ‘This is what’s going to work for you.’”
At the same time, she said, chasing a dream will attract envy and negativity from those too timid to take their own risks. She mentioned a colleague who buried her in depressing statistics about first-time authors once she shared with him her authorial ambitions.
“You will find the people closest to you will be the most negative,” Samuels-Young said.
“You have to decide to hold onto what you want to do.”
Just as her speech began with a leveling of her impressive accomplishments, Samuels-Young ended with her and her audience standing in the same shoes.
She told the crowd that one day she would be a best-selling author and they could remember when she stood before them and told them this was her dream. She challenged them, on that future day, to be able to say that they, too, had set a goal and worked to obtain it.
She said, “So, whether you move forward with your vision, I’m going after mine.”
