Elizabeth Jones

I attribute my success to hearing those words when I was young from my very first boss. She said to me, 'I would like to give you a raise, you've been here for 3 years and never had one, but you're not worth the $5 an hour that we pay you.' I have never heard more motivating words in my entire life. Hearing that I wasn't worth what I was there making for 3 years really put a fire underneath me to get motivated. It changed my entire perspective. I didn't realize that, you know, of course there are some nuances to her as a manager, she should have done a better job, but for me, at that age, hearing that was like, wow, I guess I really need to polish my work and button up. Just hearing that I wasn't good enough and taking it to heart, that I wanted to be good enough, so I'm still working on it. I'm still a work in progress.

I think the best career advice that I ever received is from my very first boss. She said to me, 'I would like to give you a raise, you've been here for 3 years and never had one, but you're not worth the $5 an hour that we pay you.' I know those are strange motivational words, but hearing that, hearing that I wasn't worth what I was there making for 3 years, really put a fire underneath me to get motivated. It changed my entire perspective. I started when I was young, and by that time I was a few years older, I'd been there for 3 years. But hearing that, I was like, wow, I guess I really need to polish my work and button up. What that ultimately tells me is that the best advice, and the best you'll ever get from anyone, is when they are being direct with you. The moral of the story is that the best advice that I've ever received is being direct. Because when someone is direct with you, they're giving you enough respect as a person to be direct with you, which is huge, because most people are not honest with you. They've got their mask on, their frame of reference. But yeah, that's the best advice I've ever been given.

Listen to your gut. No matter what. 100% of the time. Listen to your gut and act. Act on it. If you're thinking it, it's not real until you have acted on it. So you need to act. You need to act with discernment. Act with character, act with credibility. You need to act. Act on it. Without action, nothing happens.

The biggest challenges are AI, which is probably the number one challenge. The second challenge is the people who are running businesses, our leaders, the C-suite of every corporation on the planet. All of them have ideas about what they think AI is, and they all have, of course, the ego. They all have ideas, and all of their ideas are the best. But really, Merriam-Webster defines an expert as someone who has done the same thing every day for 10 years. We haven't had AI for 10 years yet. We don't have experts yet. It's not old enough, it's not mature enough. So when I hear the term AI expert, my eyeballs hit my brain, they're rolling so hard. There's no AI expert out there. I mean, you have people who build it, but there are a lot of people who are playing the game. The biggest challenge right now is wading through reality and trying to discern what is real reality versus what is projected reality. You see a lot of things online about this consulting business and this coaching business and this AI thing. Well, if it's just people selling to other coaches and other C-suites and other AI companies, then essentially it's an MLM, it's just a multi-level marketing scheme, it's a Ponzi scheme, and that's a bubble, it's gonna burst. The sooner that we can get some guardrails on it, the sooner that we can start speaking a true, clear narrative about the reality of what's going on in the trenches of workers, and we relearn how human beings work. We've forgotten how human beings work, and we just don't know, we're lost right now, and we need someone to have a come to the table and take a deep breath, let's get the landscape and figure this out.

Integrity is number one. Empathy is number 2. And organization are my top 3 things that comprise everything that I am and all that I do.