“Your comfort isn’t necessarily your destiny,” Eva Marcille told the closing session of the ninth annual Sistas in Sales Summit in New York in September. She had been asked what the biggest cost of her success has been. Her answer was one word. “Loneliness.”
Marcille is a model and entrepreneur who was on America’s Next Top Model, has acted in All the Queen’s Men, has appeared on The Real Housewives of Atlanta, and is now building a cannabis brand called Sunflower by Eva. She is 41, and she has been working in front of people since her late teens. What she described to a room of saleswomen was not the loneliness of having nobody around.
“When I say lonely is because I don’t have the validators in the room,” she said. “Sometimes you’re scared to go there because you want your people with you, because that’s your comfort. But your comfort isn’t necessarily your destiny.”
She put the rest of it in the language of an organisation chart. “You have your CEO, you have your COO, y’all CEOs, y’all the visionaries,” she said. “The operating officer does what you say, but it’s because you have the vision.” The vision is the part nobody else in the building can sign off on. “There’s something about getting so clear with who you are that it’s necessary to be a leader,” she said.
What she did not name is worth sitting with. She was not asked about the hours, and she did not reach for money, the schedule or the travel. Asked for the biggest cost of more than two decades of being looked at, the thing she picked was the absence of anybody in the room who could tell her she was right.
And she did not soften the ending. “You will be alone, and not alone in a bad way, and alone in a necessary way.”
