Melissa Stone

I think it's the people who believe in me - my family and my friends who have always been that central source of support for me. But then also, I think it's my own ability to have resilience in moments that have been hard, when I've just wanted to give up. Having the support there to help me through that, but also having the grit to just get through it on my own. Yeah, I think that resilience has been key - just digging in and doing the hard things sometimes. There have been so many moments where I've wanted to give up and abandon ship and move into the next thing. I have total ADHD, so I'm always attracted to the next shiny thing. One of the biggest challenges for me is to stabilize myself in a place for long enough to build a really solid, strong foundation and do work that goes deep, rather than just jumping into the next thing and starting over in a way that sometimes feels a little bit easier. Staying put when you face hard challenges and doing deeper work, allowing yourself to be challenged by things - that's what's made the difference.

Early on in my career, I really wanted to work for the United Nations, and I did a couple of cold calls with people. I wound up calling someone named Daniel Seymour at UN Women, and he was kind enough to take a call with me when I was very young, just out of school. He told me that I seemed very enthusiastic and vivacious about what I wanted to do, and he could see me at the UN for sure. But he was really honest in saying that sometimes this role isn't for everyone, and he wanted me to really think about the type of work I wanted to be doing right now. He explained that when you're first starting your career, especially in places like the UN, there might not be a lot of career growth right off the bat, and there weren't a lot of promotional pathways upward for people who are just starting out. The advice he gave me was that sometimes it's better for people to go out and explore what they want to do in other areas, and then come back to these larger institutions or organizations once they have earned that career capital, so that they can wind up in places and positions that suit them better. It was really good advice for me to hear at the time. Everything is very much about timing, and sometimes the thing that I want the most is not necessarily the thing that I need to be doing at that moment in time. It's always something I can return back to. I'm someone who's worked in a lot of different industries and contexts and spaces, and I think that curiosity is an extremely important and meaningful muscle to build. Sometimes that needs to happen before you enter the space that you think is the absolute thing that you want to enter into.

I think these places are what you make of them, and my industry in particular is what you make of them. It is such a resource-rich world here that you can really tap into that and leverage those things in ways that can really benefit you and follow you for the rest of your career. The colleague collaborations and connections that I make in Meta, and not only in Meta, but the external parties that I work with in my job, are so enriching and will continue to be enriching throughout the rest of my career. Those are things that I'm proud of, connections that I'm building every single day, and I know will just continue to be assets for me as I continue on in my career. I think it's really important to enter into these spaces with an open mind. I'll be honest and say that I entered into Meta with a lot of predetermined assumptions of what the culture and space would look like. Even though I consider myself having a really open mind, I think there were parts of me that had a closed mind entering into this space. Had I released that earlier on, I would have maybe tapped into some more of the resources around me, and those assumptions, by the way, have been very challenged. So just enter into these spaces with open minds, being ready and eager to dive into the different offerings and connections that you can make in spaces like this. Really, just show up and do your best work. If you do those things, you're gonna have a very fruitful experience in a place like this.

To work at a place like Meta, there's lots of benefits that you have access to, like professional development. I feel like right now, the biggest thing for me is I'm in a place where they're heavily investing in employees learning and development of AI skills, and I think that that's a really awesome place to be. I feel like I'm exposed to so many different types of resources and tools and things that I'm playing with every single day to learn what the heck is going on with AI and how it can benefit me, but also what the challenges and potential perils are. To be close enough to that to really try to understand it in an intimate way is incredible. There's also always career advancement opportunities in one way or another. I could apply to another department today within Meta, and my application would be recognized. There are paths for career development also within my own team and department. So there are ways where you don't have to feel complacent.

I think it's taken me a long time to get to a place where I've developed a balance for myself and my work and my life. A value of mine is to work as hard as I can, whenever I can, but it's also to allow room to have balance and take breaths when you need it. Values in my work are really to just do good and to do right by people - not only by the people that you work alongside, but the people that you are working for. To always kind of keep that at the center of what you're doing, because it's easy to lose sight of that. I think there's a lot of really challenging decisions that you have to make the longer your career goes on, but staying as close to the path, that navigation that you set out, those core values that you set out to do - being as close to that as possible - I think that's always the right way to kind of go down those paths.