Built to Belong

by Natalie Franke

  It wasn’t until I asked my husband a single question that I discovered this for myself.

  Me: What is my superpower? You know, my greatest strength?

  Hugh: You love people well. You see the best in them. That is your superpower. It sometimes gets you hurt, you know, when people take advantage of your kindness, but it’s because you genuinely care about others, because you genuinely believe the best in them, that you are so good at what you do.

  I need to be honest with you—I wasn’t loving his answer. I see the good in people? That’s what he thought was my greatest strength.

  I’ll admit, I was hoping he would say something about my insane levels of creativity or my rock-star communications skills. Perhaps he would tell me that I work harder than anyone he knows, that I never quit. I’m not sure what I expected, but it definitely wasn’t that.

  In his eyes, my superpower was my ability to love others and see the best in them. He knew all my strengths and chose to call out that superpower because it was the quality that he believed enabled me to make the greatest impact on others.

  He reminded me that my superpower is not insignificant. I had turned my strength into one of the largest grassroots communities of creative entrepreneurs in the world. By leveraging the gift of loving people well, I was able to empower and unite tens of thousands of people from completely different walks of life.

  This simple question unlocked a deeper understanding of who I am and what I have to offer. It also taught me that our superpowers aren’t always what we expect.

  WHEN 1 + 1 = 3

  On a late San Francisco summer night, my best friend Rebecca, my husband, and I were having one of our weekly pizza and wine dinners when she brought up a concept that she had been wrestling with for weeks. As entrepreneurs, we would frequently bounce ideas off each other, but this night she was particularly fired up. About what? I wasn’t sure.

  With a warm slice of pizza in hand, she leaned in and asked, “What if email marketing was as simple as posting to social media?”

  “Go on…” I nodded.

  “What if there was a way to democratize the design process so that anyone—and I mean anyone—could create a high-converting and aesthetically pleasing email campaign. What if it could look like you have an entire development and design team crafting your emails, but really… it’s just you.”

  Now, before we go any further, I need you to understand that this is how Rebecca talks all the time. Yes, even over a bottle of wine. My best friend runs on a remarkable level of philosophical thought and creative vision.

  Rebecca Shostak was raised in Silicon Valley. A design genius whose weapons of choice are a full suite of Adobe, a glass of red wine, and a yearly pass to the MoMA, she’s 100 percent introverted and would be perfectly happy dominating the world from behind her laptop.

  She is left-handed, red-haired, and within five minutes of meeting her, I realized that she was one of the most unique and remarkable people I had ever met.

  In addition to all of that, Rebecca is a design virtuoso. She went from creating merchandise for bands like Linkin Park and Rihanna to building a successful online design and template business that helped create other multimillion-dollar businesses.

  She sees the world differently, and as a result, Rebecca often sees opportunities and patterns of behavior that the rest of us miss. Her superpower is her creativity and imagination—matched only by her esoteric intellectualism, which, as a fellow nerd, I admired from day one.

  As we sat side by side in my tiny apartment kitchen that night, Rebecca reached for her notebook. With giddy enthusiasm, she started flipping through the pages filled with scribbles and blotches of black ink. One page after another revealed her vision for creating a brand-new email marketing platform unlike anything that I had ever seen before.

  My friend had built an entire piece of software in her mind, and seeing her flex her genius was astounding. There was an incredible amount of untapped potential just sitting there. Her idea was a spark waiting to be ignited into a roaring fire.

  Rebecca was an architect in need of a builder.

  That’s where my other friend, and colleague, Martha came in.

  Everyone remembers the first time they meet Martha Bitar. The queen of sales with a magnetic personality, this petite powerhouse can walk into any room and immediately woo all in attendance. Raised in Mexico and educated in Texas, she will drop a y’all and then proceed to switch into fluent Spanish… or any of the other five languages she speaks.

  You might think that at four foot eleven, she would be easily overlooked in a crowded room, but you would be sorely mistaken. Martha has cracked the code to creating deep, meaningful connections in a matter of minutes with nearly anyone she meets. She is at home in the world, never staying in one place for long. She’s lived in Paris and Dubai; she’s traveled across Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.

  Oh, and with years of sales training, she has mastered the art of convincing anyone to do just about anything.

  To put it in perspective, Martha convinced my husband and me to move across the country and take the greatest career risk of our lives—selling our company to a start-up in California. All it took was a good brunch, a scavenger hunt, and a single conversation about the possibility of what could be. Martha is impressive, inspiring, and a force of nature.

  Martha and Rebecca grabbed a few drinks after work, and that notebook full of ideas became the road map to building the emailing marketing company Flodesk.

  Rebecca’s design genius and product prowess combined with Martha’s magnetic people skills and sheer willpower were the perfect mix. They took the concept from ideation to beta launch within a year and then proceeded to bootstrap the business while scaling rapidly.

  Through every bump in the road and every start-up challenge, they found a way to lean on each other. Apart, they couldn’t be more different. However, together they were able to amplify each other’s strengths and turn an idea into a seven-figure business in under a year.

  Today that company impacts the way tens of thousands of small businesses market themselves online. Isn’t that wild?

  Apart these two women were successful in their own right. However, together, they became unstoppable.

  Earlier in the book, we talked about the scientifically proven possibility of increased performance when two competitors are in the arena together. Well, I believe that in business, the same can be said for partners or collaborators joining forces.

  When we don’t shy away from our distinct abilities, when we stop being afraid of standing out and sharing our unique gifts, that is when others can see how to come alongside us and amplify our impact.

  By holding back, by being afraid to truly be ourselves, we fail to create space for our talents to be multiplied. Martha and Rebecca are proof that there is power in collaboration when we accept one another’s distinct gifts and talents.

  In the intersection where one person’s weakness meets another’s strength, there lies the potential to amplify our collective power. That’s when one plus one suddenly equals three. That’s when a notebook full of ideas turns into something so much greater.

  When we embrace who we are and accept one another for our differences, the collective is strengthened. Just as you can’t create an exquisite dinner with only one ingredient, you can’t build a strong company or cultivate a thriving community when everyone is exactly the same.

  Uniqueness is not weakness. When we understand how we are each individually wired, we lay down our weapons of competition and comparison to discover that everyone has a role that only they can play.

  Our individual differences are a strength to the collective, not a weakness. When we aim to fit in, we fail to honor our uniqueness and how it can complement a community, a company, or our collective world. We find greater satisfaction in our work and in our relationships when we are living as our truest selves, and we fight for others to have that same opportunity.

  Belonging isn’t built i
n a day, and it isn’t a place where we suddenly arrive. It is a daily decision and a battle worth fighting—for you, for me, and for the collective.

  CHAPTER NINE

  STRONGEST IN THE STRUGGLE

  Beep—Beep—Beeeeeeeep!

  The glaring white lights of the recovery room dangled above as my head throbbed. My eyes opened, and immediately I could tell that something was wrong.

  I was thirsty. That was the last sensation I’d expected to feel as I regained consciousness after brain surgery—maybe a headache or some dizziness, but instead I was unbearably thirsty. In the span of six hours, I had turned into one of those baby vampires whose entire world revolved around getting another drink.

  It was all consuming, unrelenting, and nearly incapacitating.

  Oh, and before you think I’m overreacting, I’m not talking about your average experience with thirst. This is not the feeling you get when you’re overdue for a glass of water or just finished working out in the summer sun. I’m talking about not being able to swallow because your entire throat feels like it has disintegrated into grains of sand after spending three hundred years baking in the heat on the driest place on earth thirsty. Like Walter White in Breaking Bad after traversing the entire New Mexico desert while on the brink of death thirsty.

  And in my daze of early consciousness, there was only one thing that I believed would come close to quenching that unbearable sensation… a juicy Popsicle.

  I know… I know… It’s strange. I fumbled with the bedside remote and awkwardly pushed the call button. *rinnnnnnnng!*

  A kind nurse entered the curtained-off room, and I begged her to find me a Popsicle. A strange request, but it was the only thing in the world that I wanted and, well, I had just come out of brain surgery, so she seemed sympathetic to my bizarre craving.

  “I’ll be right back, dear,” she responded.

  I reached into my mouth, worried that my tongue had somehow dried up and fallen off. Nope, it was still there. False alarm.

  I guess this is a normal part of waking up from surgery… probably no big deal… Maybe it has something to do with being intubated, I thought to myself. Before brain surgery, I hadn’t so much as had my wisdom teeth out or broken a bone.

  This was my first time under anesthesia, so what did I know?

  In a few minutes, the nurse returned carrying three bright-red cherry Popsicle sticks. My savior! She unwrapped the first Popsicle, and I couldn’t eat it quickly enough.…

  In my uncoordinated post-surgery state, I inhaled it. Red icy Popsicle went dripping onto my hospital gown, running down my face and hands. Small chunks broke off and fell into my braided hair. It was everywhere.

  It felt like the only thing keeping me alive was that darn Popsicle. Finishing the final bite, I set the stick aside. One Popsicle down… two to go…

  That’s when the curtain swung open. Hugh and my mom had finally made it up to the recovery room. I smiled a big goofy grin. It was so good to see them.

  The look on my husband’s face was one I had never seen before. It wasn’t happiness to see me or relief that I was okay.… No, it was horror.

  My husband looked absolutely horrified. Expecting to see me peacefully resting after surgery, my husband instead walked in on his wife covered in red sticky liquid that appeared to be gushing from her mouth. It was like a scene from a horror movie.

  Hugh’s face went flush, and his eyes darted around the room for the nurse. I could see the situation unfolding faster than I could respond to stop it.

  “Uh, is that blood?” he asked.

  The nurse laughed. “That’s a Popsicle. She asked for it!”

  Color slowly returned to his cheeks as he sat down next to me. When he tried to clean me up with a napkin, I brushed his hand aside and abruptly reached for the next Popsicle.

  “I am so thirsty,” I mumbled once again.

  As I chomped down on another one, that pesky sensation seemed to get worse with each passing second. “Can you ask my doctor if this is normal?” I begged him. This feeling was getting out of control.

  My nurse brought me a glass of water, which I also downed in a single gulp. Nothing was working. Oh, and now I really had to pee. Like, really had to pee.

  What in the world?

  The nurse gave it a name. Diabetes insipidus. An unquenchable sensation of thirst caused by the failure of the pituitary gland to produce a critical hormone called vasopressin. While they were up there poking around in my brain, that important little gland got jostled and resulted in a complication that many brain surgery patients know all too well.

  To sum it up, having DI means that you’re constantly thirsty and you pee nonstop. Upon diagnosis, you assume the role of “worst person to go on a road trip with” and immediately become the girl who carries a water canteen everywhere she goes. In the long list of potential surgery complications, this was one of the ones I failed to take note of while signing off on the procedure.

  It hadn’t sounded like a big deal at the time, but sitting in my hospital bed and feeling like my insides were turning into dust was a slightly different story. Yikes.

  This was, without a doubt, foreshadowing for how the next few months of my life would unfold: Panic googling and middle-of-the-night ER visits. Asking far-too-personal questions in support groups. Crying, so much crying, when I wished things could “just go back” to the way they were before.

  Sitting in that hospital bed, I knew that the surgery might be over, but the hardest part, the process of healing, was just beginning.

  Here is the truth: It is hard to navigate the darkest valleys of our lives. No one can prepare you for them. The unrelenting pain, the paralyzing fear, the fiery rage, the depths of despair—sometimes spread apart and other times coming for you all at once. There is no way around them. No magic button to make them go away. There is only moving forward. Step by step, bit by bit, you learn how to navigate through the darkness.

  EMPOWERED TO OVERCOME

  After my brain surgery, there were several months when I relied entirely on the support of others. My community carried me. Home-cooked meals delivered to our doorstep. Prayers from friends across the globe. Constant phone calls and handwritten cards to ensure that I never once lost sight of the love that surrounded me.

  For the first time since starting my business, I was forced to rely on the community that I spent so many years building for others. Nearly every day for a month, Rising Tide leaders and small-business buddies took over my social media accounts. They created content for my blog and recorded videos for my Instagram.

  During the weeks when I was forced to focus on my health, they made sure that my business would be waiting for me on the other side of recovery.

  My community carried me—personally and professionally. They took work off my plate and worries from my mind. They showed up and stepped up. They kept my world moving when I wasn’t able to do it myself.

  Our culture tells us to feign a false narrative of having it all together—don’t tell people if you are lonely, if your business is struggling, or if you are scared or hurting. But the value of our community shines brightest in our moments of struggle.

  When we are weak, our community is strong. When we struggle, our community rises up to take the load from our shoulders. Relationships strengthen our resilience. In a way, our connection to others can directly empower us to overcome the adversity we are facing.

  The truth about resilience, about that unrelenting grit that keeps us moving forward, is that it is strengthened by our connections to others. Surrounding yourself with encouraging, supportive, and empowering people can truly make all the difference.

  But don’t just take my word for it. According to the Harvard Graduate School of Education, “When confronted with the fallout of childhood trauma, why do some children adapt and overcome, while others bear lifelong scars that flatten their potential? A growing body of evidence points to one common answer: Every child who winds up doing well has had at least one st
able and committed relationship with a supportive adult.”1

  One relationship. It’s truly that simple. One strong and impactful relationship can be the difference between children who rise above their adversity and those who don’t. This applies to all of us as well.

  In order to strengthen our resilience, we must be open and willing to tear down those narratives that tell us to go at it alone. We must open our eyes to the outstretched arms all around us. We must be willing to give and to accept help.

  We must choose to kick our ego to the curb, set aside our fears of being vulnerable, and let people in. We have to surrender what is picture perfect for what is real. We must embrace what makes us beautifully broken and therefore distinctly human. Then, and only then, can our community come alongside us to carry the heavy load.

  DON’T GIVE UP THE SHIP

  It was the summer of 1955 when my grandfather, Frank, reported for induction day at the United States Naval Academy. A towering teenager at six foot four, he had gotten in on a congressional third alternate appointment after committing to play football for the navy blue and gold.

  This meant that Frank, along with others who were approved admission as second- and third-round picks in order to fill quota, were arriving a few days late. Standing outside the admissions office, he met his future roommate, Jack, upon swearing in. After Plebe Summer, he and Jack would remain roommates for all four years.

  Jack was an athletic fellow with an assertive personality who would never back away from a good prank. They shared a sense of humor and a deeply rooted faith. My grandfather knew right away that they were going to be friends.

  When you enter the academy, you arrive on campus several weeks before the start of classes. As is tradition, you hug your family goodbye and march—yes, literally march—into the most grueling year of your life as a plebe (a freshman).