Werk Your Net: Bridging the Gap in Our Networks

By Yasna Vismale

While anyone can achieve success, the reality is not everyone has equitable access to the necessary tools to reach it. This stems from an inequity rooted in our networks. Vismale's Werk Your Net is a book dedicated to bridging this gap by empowering young people from marginalized communities to build their network and net-worth and help

• Language: English
• Publisher: Yasna Vismale
• Release date: Dec 13, 2020
• ISBN: 9781636761718

Book preview

Werk Your Net

Bridging the Gap in our Networks

Yasna Vismale

new degree press

copyright © 2020 Yasna Vismale

All rights reserved.

Werk Your Net

Bridging the Gap in our Networks

ISBN

978-1-63676-644-7 Paperback

978-1-63676-167-1 Kindle Ebook

978-1-63676-171-8 Digital Ebook

Contents

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Introduction

Why I Am Writing This Book: The Gap in Our Networks

Chapter 1

The Self-Made Myth: Why Networks Matter

Chapter 2

Why We Are the Way We Are: Achieving Self-Awareness

Chapter 3

How to Get Motivated: Especially When You Don’t Feel Like It

Chapter 4

The Gap in Our Empathy

Chapter 5

Where Is Everyone Hanging Out: How Do We Find Them?

Chapter 6

The Language of Love + Cold Emails

Chapter 7

Status, Personality, and Expectations

Chapter 8

The Art and Science of a Conversation

Chapter 9

Get Connected. For Free. (How to Increase Traction)

Chapter 10

Keeping the Flame Alive 

My Muses: Interviews

My Support System: Thank You for Supporting My Book Campaign

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

APPENDIX

Introduction

Why I Am Writing This Book: The Gap in Our Networks

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Handcrafted, Eco-Friendly, Stuffed Animals

I think the only time my parents ever handed me money was the 25 cents that I got from the tooth fairy. . . . once. As the child of immigrants, the concept of an allowance was foreign to me. When I told my mom that I wanted a Nintendo DS so I could play Pokémon with my cousin Julian, she told me I needed to find a way to buy it. So, I did. When I was eight years old, I started selling my art through my Auntie Satomi’s yearly craft sale, which she hosted at her home. There, I would sell handcrafted stuffed animals called Yaz-nimals that I made from old or unused socks, charging $10 to $20. Each toy had a unique story and fashion style. Over years of creating stuffed animals, a few stories I can still remember include, Stella Arionis the lonely office worker who was a hardworking lizard always putting her career and coffee over romance, Super-bear a teddy bear with a cape and the ability to always save the day, Billy the bunny boy who didn’t listen to his mom and ran with scissors, and several more. I also sold portraits for $2. 

With my mind set on just trying to sell my crafts, I didn’t realize that I was also learning how to actively build my network—a skill I would come to value highly later. The first year I started selling my stuffed animals, I remember sitting at the piano, hidden away in the back of the room. After waiting for people to come for twenty minutes, I identified the problem and created a large sign signaling that I was there (marketing). Then, I started to walk around to introduce myself and show people where I was located. When the room didn’t work for me, I started working the room. I learned that the location of your station can impact the engagement you receive from customers. 

When I upgraded from being stationed next to the piano to being near the entrance of the sale, I got a lot more customers because I was more visible. However, on the flip side, because I was the first seller people saw, they would often give me a maybe later because they wanted to look at everything before buying anything. My strategy was to wait until they came back out (the entrance was also the exit) and remember to continue the conversation about whatever it was we were talking about when they first came through.

I knew that selling was more than just a trade—my stuffed animals for the money in my customer’s wallets. I learned from a young age that when people are buying your product, especially if the product is art and doesn’t necessarily have a fixed purpose, they are buying it for the why rather than the what. I learned how to be personal in the way I made my stuffed animals and the way I would market them to individuals. 

They weren’t just stuffed animals that a second grader made. They were handcrafted, eco-friendly stuffed animals. Each one was unique with its own name, background, experiences, and identity, just like the person to whom I was selling it. In the end, I wasn’t selling stuffed animals, I was selling stories. At the art sale, I also learned how to start and hold a conversation with anyone, control my reactions, and be open. This allowed me to learn how to listen to people and figure out what emotionally moved them, be open to feedback to improve my art business for next time, and not take it personally if someone didn’t like what I was selling. While I did come to the craft sale with the goal of selling my stuffed animals, by the end I was always left feeling inspired, touched, and challenged by the people who took either thirty seconds or thirty minutes talking to me about their thoughts and opinions. 

Even with a goal in mind of how much money I wanted to make and how many stuffed animals I wanted to sell, I still allowed myself to enjoy the process. 

My positive attitude, returning customers, and referrals gained through people who loved my stuffed animals allowed my business to flourish. I purchased a shiny dark blue DS to beat my cousin in Pokémon with. I’m totally kidding—Julian is a lot better at every single video game than I am. Learning the skillset of being a successful salesperson early on in my life allowed me to figure out how to connect with people from various walks of life. It also allowed me to strategize how to achieve specific goals through a different means than many of my peers. Now at twenty-one years old, I used the same methods from the art sale that I did when fundraising for my book. I beat my fundraising goal 6 times faster than the original timeline I was given and raised 1.6 times more than my original goal before the end of the campaign. 

Networks: To Have and To Need

This book will debunk misconceptions about what networking is and provide a step-by-step process as well as examples of how to reach out to people and to help those who need it the most.

An article on Quartz states, 43 percent of white students admitted to Harvard were either legacies, recruited athletes, children of faculty and staff, or students from the Dean’s Interest list—whose parents essentially were tipped that with enough donations their children would get in. Compared to this statistic, only 16 percent of all Black, Asian, and Hispanic admitted students fell into one of these categories.¹

While we all have access to specific networks (like I did with my aunt and the craft sale), many of us are not born into networks that can help us climb the socio-economic ladder. Being connected helps us gain access to more information to make decisions, strategize our educational and career oriented paths, and establish relationships with decision makers of various institutions. Societal inequities are amplified when information is not shared and our access to advice and expertise is limited by our own personal networks. The lack of availability of advice/mentoring and less access to information about certain opportunities, societal inequities are amplified in these cases as well.

According to resources such as the National Bureau of Economic Research, McKinsey & Company, the Wall Street Journal, and researchers at Stanford, Berkeley, and Brown . . . 

•Children from families in the top 1 percent of earners are seventy-seven times more likely to attend an Ivy League college compared to the children of families in the bottom quintile.²

•Only one in five senior leaders in corporate America is a woman. One in twenty-five is a woman of color. ³

•Silicon Valley’s tech workforce is 2.2 percent Black and 4.7 percent Hispanic⁴

•Immigrants are 11 percent of all US residents, but 20 percent of low-wage workers.⁵

•And lastly, white men hold 91.1 percent of Fortune 500 board chairs and 78.7 percent of lead directorships. ⁶

This is where Werk Your Net comes in. I am lucky to have understood the importance of networking and to be able to refine this skill throughout my life, starting from the time I was seven. However, most of us still struggle with reaching out to people beyond our immediate social circles, and it can feel impossible to reach past our comfort zones in order to forge these new connections. Yet, gaps in our network significantly impact people with backgrounds similar to my own because we are often not connected to opportunities and people within our own immediate circles who can promote socio-economic mobility. 

My Story

The problem isn’t that we don’t have enough qualified women, members of the LGBTQ+ community, people of color, people with disabilities, and immigrants. The problem is that we are often assessed by standards which were not created for us and do not allow us to express our skillsets.

Don’t get me wrong, people from underrepresented communities are very well-connected. Our network includes our family, friends, and people we talk to within our daily lives. We don’t call it networking—we call it going to birthday parties, family BBQs, bar hopping, and church. I lived in Jamaica, Queens, until I was five. My entire neighborhood consisted mainly of Caribbean immigrants who helped raise me. My neighbor, Mimi, would often babysit and feed me if my mother was feeling sick. In the house across the street, a famous Soca singer from Trinidad called Papa would always welcome me and let me play with his parrot.

My father always invited family members and his artist friends over to our house, and they would constantly introduce me to different kinds of music while my mother cooked. Her food was a mix of recipes from her home country, Japan, and from my father’s native culture, Trinidadian and Toboggan. I grew up surrounded by friendly faces.

As children, immigrants, people of color, and those of us from humble financial backgrounds are highly connected, and we have our own networks. The difference is that we are less likely to be connected to the kind of networks that can help us progress professionally and financially.

A 2018 McKinsey & Company study of one thousand companies found that organizations in the top quartile for gender diversity on their leadership teams were 21 percent more likely to experience high profitability. Meanwhile, ethnic and cultural diversity resulted in a 33 percent increase in profitability performance.⁷

My Mission

Diversity is equal to a collection of experiences put in association with one another and the advantage gained by sharing those experiences, not a label for who is or isn’t diverse. Being a minority and being friends with people of the same background does not mean your network is diverse. 

Everyone has connections and networks. Everyone also has a deficit within their own networks no matter how well connected we are, especially as we often pursue relationships with those we find similar to us. However, the gap in our networks stems from a mixture of historical events, generational wealth, and systemic oppression (including the Atlantic slave trade, housing discrimination, Chinese exclusion act, etc. . . .). This past built an infrastructure that gives some groups privilege and benefits over others. In order to bridge this divide, we need more equitable practices in place to decrease discrimination toward minorities and increase our opportunities to move up the socio-economic ladder.

While hiring firms, educational institutions, scholarships, and other decision makers are responsible for finding more ways to make their organizations more accessible, it doesn’t mean that people who are not being included in the conversation need to sit and wait for them. You can start from wherever you are and build a wider network that will help you achieve your goals.

I was enrolled in every college success organization I could find, including the Young Executives of Color, Y-Scholars, Center of Talented Youth Scholars, College Access Now, and Black Achievers. If not for my academic advisors, mentors I met through different programs, and my mother, who was driven by her desire to give me the education she never had, I would probably have not even applied to Columbia, let alone be accepted. This is not because I wasn’t smart or qualified enough to get in, but because I would not have known how to prepare myself or understand the traits Columbia sought. As a student who had the privilege to grow up with a strong and expansive support network including my family and family friends, I can proudly say that I was one of few students who got into their dream college, Columbia University. Whether it was achieving the feat of becoming an Ivy League student or figuring out a way to get into the spaces of industries I have been interested in learning about, I have noticed the sheer difficulty in just getting access to the information needed in order to excel. I realize not everyone will have that same strong foundation with which I grew up, but I firmly believe that anyone can learn the skills and use the strategies outlined in this book to build their own network and help them move toward accomplishing their goals.

This Book

Werk Your Net has a double audience. 

My primary audience: is anyone who may not be well connected, but