When people introduce me, they read the list of successes. I am grateful for that, but it is only half the story, and honestly it is the less useful half. So I started a series on how I failed, because nobody is defined by their wins. You are defined by how you handle the falls.

Part one goes back to the early days of Operation HOPE after the 1992 Los Angeles unrest, when people laughed at a young man talking about capitalism and financial literacy in South Central. I share the grant that got pulled at the last minute over local politics, the first center that kept getting mistaken for an eyeglass shop, and how I talked my way into a cyber cafe ribbon cutting before the cyber cafe even existed.

Then comes the big one. For more than a decade a single corporate partner funded our HOPE banking centers, and I had to resell the vision to seven different CEOs along the way. When the funding finally ended, I called my team together on a Friday night and we faced a hard truth. Almost every location was losing money. What looked like a disaster turned into the best thing that ever happened to us, because it forced us to find a model that could actually last: HOPE Inside, operating within the bank branches themselves.

My friend Quincy Jones told me it takes twenty years to change a culture. This is the story of an overnight success that took twenty years, told so that maybe yours will take two. If you are in the middle of your own storm right now, this one is for you.

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Prefer to watch? The full episode is on YouTube.