This is a piece I prepared for my first Toastmasters speech, presented at the HubSpot Chapter of Toastmasters last week. It was surprisingly tough to talk about myself for a full 7 minutes - both when I was writing the speech as well as delivering it. One of the interesting comments I got from my evaluator is that it was a very intimate, personal speech, which I realize is my way of sharing stories generally, especially on my blog. So here you go, blog readers, my first Toastmasters "Ice Breaker" speech!
Thank you, Mr. Toastmaster and fellow members and guests.
In preparing for this speech, I thought back to some of the defining moments in my life and found a surprising common thread. I don’t consider myself much of a risk taker. I don’t like to gamble. I don’t really play the stock market. I've never been sky diving and have no desire to do so.
But when I look back at those defining moments of my life, they all involve taking a risk. And I wanted to share a few of those stories of these risks that have shaped who I am today.
The most recent risk being my coming to HubSpot.
HubSpot
I joined HubSpot about 4 years ago and, when I was interviewing, the company was in a very different place compared to where it is today. The company was about 15 people, all fitting into two small rooms at the CIC. I was fresh out of undergrad and had no experience with the startup world. As far as I was concerned, a startup was a small company that could go under at any moment.
At the same time as I was interviewing at HubSpot, I had gotten another offer at a company that was its complete opposite. It was a large company out in the suburbs with hundreds of employees, was very hierarchical with a ladder to climb, and was even built around delivering outbound marketing services. Despite all those things, it was a very appealing offer. The people were great, very friendly and casual, and there was a clear path for me there. There were a lot of open questions about HubSpot - what exactly I'd be doing, how much longer the company was really going to survive.
I went back and forth, and back and forth again. And, at the last possible moment, I accepted the offer to come work for Mike Volpe at this tiny startup no one had ever heard of.
In retrospect, it all worked out. I've gotten the most amazing opportunities to work on and lead interesting projects and I've gotten to work with the most passionate, brilliant, and fun people I've ever had the chance to meet. And I'm not just saying that because those people are sitting in front of me. By taking this risk, I learned that there are more important things in a job than stability, especially at this stage in my life. By taking this risk, I learned that what matters most to me are the people I work with and the opportunities I have to learn.
McGill
The decision to come to HubSpot was one of only two decisions in my life about which I really went back and forth. The other was my decision was to go to McGill University for my undergraduate degree. Among all the schools I applied to for college, McGill definitely stuck out like a sore thumb. Most were small liberal arts schools in the middle of nowhere. And they were all in the United States.
I first visited McGill as part of a family vacation during the small window that is summer in Montreal. Before visiting, I had already made my decision. I would not go to a school outside the States. Then I visited the campus, explored the Montreal Jazz Festival, and thought, nope, definitely not coming to this school. I applied anyway, and thank goodness I did, because when I visited the school after I got in, I fell in love with the people and the city.
But McGill would have been a huge change. I grew up in the suburbs and this was a big European city. I went to a small school where no classes were more than 25 people, and McGill had 18,000 students and classes with up to 600 people. When it came down to making a decision, I was choosing between going to McGill or staying local and going to Brandeis University. Brandeis was the ultimate safe decision - close to my family, with a lot of people there I already knew. And I struggled with deciding between what I knew - Brandeis - and the huge unknown that was McGill.
In the end, I pushed myself to break out into the unknown. And it was one of the best decisions of my life. And, while McGill did introduce me to some of my closest friends as well as one of my favorite cities in the world, I learned that this risk was valuable for more than the happy ending. This risk also taught me that there is a huge value in pushing yourself to go outside of your bubble. If you stay with what’s comfortable, nothing will ever change and you'll never get to learn what you don’t know you don't know.
HubSpot and McGill are two risks I took that I would never give up. And, as I mentioned, I don’t consider myself a risk taker. So I tried to dig into my past experiences further to understand where this behavior really came from.
Immigration
The first big risk of my life was actually not my own decision - it was my family deciding to immigrate to the United States. My parents were in their 30s at the time, with two small children, my brother at 9 years old and me at 2 years old. Living in the former Soviet Union was no picnic for our family and my parents wanted to get us out of there. But the decision to immigrate wasn’t as simple as deciding to move from Boston to San Francisco. Immigrating meant leaving your family, your friends, your language, your job, and, to top it off, simply requesting the permission to immigrate put you on the government’s - for lack of a better term - shit list, threatening your livelihood even while you continued to live in that country. So deciding to immigrate was no small matter.
But immigration brought the potential for a much better life, with more opportunities for their children. It may sound corny, but it is true. No more bribes to get healthcare, no more kids picking fights because we were Jewish. My parents put in the request to immigrate... and got rejected. They got rejected again and again every 6 months for 4 years. But that didn’t stop them, they kept trying because this huge decision was really important to them. And finally, in 1987, we got permission to leave and made it safely to Lexington, Massachusetts with just 4 suitcases carrying all of our belongings.
My family's immigration taught me that the risk of failure and the risk of negative consequences may have to be a necessary part of going after something great. From requesting to immigrate to actually packing up and leaving our lives behind, we were giving up a lot for the possibility of something better. That risk was both a leap of faith and also a sign of taking control of our life in order to make it better.
Conclusion
The risks in my life have not only defined who I am - where I live, who my friends are, what I do for a living - but also taught me so much.
The decision to take this job at HubSpot taught me that what matters are the people and opportunities with which you surround yourself. The decision to go to McGill taught me how important it is to push yourself out of your comfort zone to experience new things. And perhaps the strength to take those risks actually came from my family, who taught me, through our immigration, that sometimes you need to take a leap of faith and take control of your life for the chance to make it better.
Maybe I'm more of a risk taker than I ever realized, considering it’s the risks in my life that stand out as defining moments. Or maybe I've simply learned that not taking risks is actually the greatest risk of all.
Thank you.
By the way, if you want a humorous look into my family's life in the former Soviet Union, watch this amazing video of my brother telling a story from his childhood: A Soviet Childhood Gang.
Also note that some of the facts/memories above might be slightly off from reality, but hey, that's my memory.
Flickr photo credit: parl
