Bobby Herrera - The Gift of Struggle: Life-Changing Lessons about Leading

Part One:

Part Two:

Part Three:

Pay It Forward:

Chapter 1

The Bus Story

When I was 17, my brother Ed and I played on the same high school basketball team. Returning from an away game one night on the team bus, we all talked excitedly, reliving the highlights of the game we had just won. Along the way, the bus stopped at a restaurant so the team could unload and eat dinner. Everyone filed outexcept for Ed and me.

My brother and I couldnt afford to buy meals on school trips. Instead, our mom would send us off with her legendary burritos so we could still participate in sports with the other kids. Eating on the bus was routine. We were long past any embarrassment we might have felt.

Minutes after the team had gone, we were about to dig into our dinner. Unexpectedly, Mr. Teague, the father of a teammate, reboarded the bus. He didnt say much at firstjust teased me a bit because my younger brother had outscored me in the game. But Ill always remember what he said next.

Bobby, he said, it would make me very happy if you would allow me to buy you boys dinner so you can join the rest of the team. No one else has to know. To thank me, you just have to do the same thing in the future for another great kid like yourself.

That small gesture had a profound impact on me. As a family of migrant workers, I had felt from a very young age that we were socially invisible. I lived in a country that relied on my familys work for readily available food, but no one acknowledged what we did. Our family traveled six months of the year to work in the fields, and I inevitably returned home to find that my friends lives had moved on, leaving me anxious to reconnect and catch up on the fun-filled summer I had missed.

As a high school junior, I couldnt imagine that I would live a life different from the one I had, but I was dead set on not getting stuck where I was. As a resilient kid with the desire to take control of my own story, I realized I had to get my life togetherand fast. When my dad would tease that he would break my plate when I graduated, it wasnt really a joke. I would soon be on my own.

That day on the bus I was seen in a new and important way. I knew my parents loved me. I had teachers and coaches who had taken the time to encourage and cultivate me. But Mr. Teague was different. He was a successful businessman in our town. In my eyes, he was someone who had made it bigdefinitely not the type of person I expected to pay attention to me. And yet he not only acknowledged me but also offered kindness and gave me a purpose. In a simple statement, Mr. Teague said that I could one day help somebody else who really needed it, like I had.

Ill never forget the gratitude I felt as Ed and I joined the team for dinner that night. It changed the way I looked at my life and what I wanted to achieve.

Chapter 2

Struggle and Gifts

I have told the bus story to countless groups, and people always come up to me afterwards to tell me how much hearing that story mattered to them. Many tell me they have a bus story of their own. Maybe you do too.

As a kid from the wrong side of the opportunity divide, I can tell you that there was only one thing that mattered to me: I wanted to get off the bus. I wanted the same opportunities that I saw all around me. That was my struggle.

Struggle is painful. Whatever our individual circumstances, we all understand struggle as part of the human condition. It can be demoralizing and defeating when you make a mistake or simply become stuck and dont know where to turn. Its publicly humiliating when you cant hide your failure from others. Nonetheless, my advice for anyone with the courage to do so is to make struggle your best friend. Although its uncomfortable, its the most honest and revealing measure of progress toward becoming the leader you desire to be.

To understand my journey with struggle, I would like to tell you a story about my dad.

In the spring of 1954 my dad, Jorge, waited in line at a reception center in northern Mexico as he had been doing every spring for years. There were millions more like him across Mexico, waiting day after day to be selected as a bracero. Braceros were manual laborers, their name coming from the Spanish word meaning one who works with his arms. The Bracero Program was an agreement between the United States and Mexico that began in 1942 and continued until 1964. It was created to supply temporary labor to the United States, offsetting worker shortages during World War II.

While millions waited, only 300,000 were chosen to become contract workers that year. As a teenager, my father had set his heart on joining the military, but family hardships had made it impossible. After missing that opportunity, he was determined to become a bracero. He had to wait for nine years, but my father was finally selected.

As a bracero, my dad performed long hours of backbreaking work harvesting produce throughout the western United States, leaving his wife and young children behind in Mexico for months at a time. Enduring harsh conditions, he earned less than $1 an hour. Though he always tried to protect me from knowing the worst of his experiences, I know now that housing and sanitation were typically substandard (if not squalid) and food was inadequateconditions that violated the braceros contract agreements. But that didnt seem to matter. Treatment of laborers in the field was often brutal.

During the last days of his life, my dad told me that the day he became a bracero was the day he won la loterathe lottery. Knowing what he had been through, I was more than a little confused by his words. I would have expected anger at the deprivation, ill treatment, and low wages he was forced to endure. But my dad had a different perspective. His mother, my abuelita, was rescued off the streets after being orphaned as a baby girl. Growing up in Chihuahua, mired in intergenerational poverty, my dads single-minded aim was to end his familys cycle of impoverishment. He would offer his own children something more than he had. There was no sacrifice too great and no condition too harsh for him to bear when it came to providing for us.