Samarria Caldwell

I know where I want to be in life, and I know that I can't take the foot off the gas. I have to keep going. I have extremely extreme ambitions. My end goal is to go into the legal field and eventually become president of the United States someday. I'm only in my twenties, and so far in my lifetime, I am the only person that I have come across that has had this hope and dream. It might be pretty far-fetched and far out there, but in my mind, the sky is the limit, and I do believe that I will reach the sky. I feel that I will get to that point in my life someday. That vision and determination is what drives me to keep pushing forward every single day.

The best career advice I've ever received is to know your audience. What that basically entails is to always be able to read the room and know how to respond within that room. It helps you navigate within the industry or navigate within your position, knowing how to basically work within that business or within that company. Being able to read the room and adjust accordingly has been invaluable in helping me succeed in my career.

You might not see a lot of women in this industry, and your voice definitely will be minimized. But just keep pushing forward, and it goes back to the know your audience advice that I received. If you find one person in that one space that is willing to listen, that'll be your ear and your anchor that might help you to move forward and get the goals that you're trying to achieve.

The biggest challenge in my field right now is the cost of everything. Inflation is affecting the transportation field drastically, to the point where everything has increased, I'd say, 20 or 30%. Take fuel surcharge and gas, for example. Diesel is extremely expensive, like $5 a gallon, when just a couple months prior we were only at $3 and some change. That's almost a 40-50% increase, and that is affecting our line haul costs tremendously. A lane that could have been a line haul of $400 to get from point A to point B, like from Mesquite, Texas to Fort Worth, Texas, has now increased to something that's over $600, $700. Everything is so pricey right now, and it's not like we can choose to not pay that. We have to have inventory, we have to have work for our employees to get their day going. These are costs that we're having to eat, and if the customer is not okay with paying that, we still have to receive the shipment, so we still have to eat the cost one way or another.

The main value that is most important to me in both work and personal life is work-life balance. Being able to turn it off is something that you might not want to do, but it's something that you need to do. I'm learning that now, that you can't do everything. You can't conquer it all, and it's okay to ask for help. This pertains to my personal life too, and it kind of coincides with each other. If you have hit your max in one area in your life, you should immediately take a step back and just turn it off for the day. Let's say you're done with work at 4:30 but you still have at least 2 hours worth of work. Cut it off at 5, 5:15, and then just go into work a little bit earlier to finish the work you did not finish the day prior, so you're not getting burnt out faster than what you anticipated.