Now that I’ve mentioned four books about perseverance authored by women, I’ll throw in a biography of a man written by another man, The Monk of Mokha by Dave Eggers. The protagonist, Mokhtar Alkhanshari, was born in America to parents from Yemen, a war-torn Arabian country twenty miles east of Eritrea and Djibouti.
By his teens Mokhtar knew he excelled at sales, but in his early twenties having exceeded his quotas as a car salesman, he quit that job because his boss used and encouraged unethical tactics. When I realized that my mentor had sucked me into an unethical scheme of selling his consulting services I also quit.
Mokhtar had an epiphany when he glanced across the street from his go-nowhere job as a doorman. He noticed the larger-than-life Hills Brother’s Coffee statue dressed in Yemeni garb. Mokhtar, like most Americans, enjoyed good coffee, and he calculated that with his Yemeni connections he could import top-notch beans.
Funding, however, was a problem. Before this idea, Mokhtar’s career plan was to become a lawyer—my initial plan also. In both our cases, a lack of funds squashed those dreams. Again, inadequate capital affected our entrepreneurial aspirations.
However, in different ways we struggled and risked our reputations to fund our businesses. Because Mokhtar was neither a parent nor a woman, he was free to risk danger in his travels to Yemen during its relentless civil war. We both had steep learning curves and falls. However, we both bounced back to create multi-million-dollar corporations.
Regarding wine, I’m a 95% teetotaler but was fascinated to learn about its intricacies in Victoria James’s Wine Girl: The Obstacles, Humiliations, and Triumphs of America’s Youngest Sommelier. Both she and I rose in status from sex-object waitress to the founder and CEO of a corporation. Also, both of our work environments included uncouth heavy-drinking macho men.
Before savoring Victoria’s story, I thought my male wire customers were plenty rough-and-tumble. But I was surprised to learn Victoria suffered more frequent and more extreme sexual harassment than I ever had. Perhaps one reason is that I usually met my customers in their office buildings, while Victoria met hers in bars and liquor-licensed restaurants.
Jokes were made about my long legs, but lewder comments were made about Victoria’s large breasts and other body parts. To eliminate such unwelcome attention, she padded herself to disguise her gorgeous hourglass shape, a tactic she arrived at after having been raped not once but twice. I was blessed to have only some untoward kisses and a supposedly surreptitious rub of my average-size breasts against one man’s back. Soon after these events, I laughed about them. If I’d been raped, I would have been traumatized and may not have had Victoria’s fortitude.
Do you know how much education, international experience, and flavor knowledge is required to be certified as either a coffee Q Grader or a wine Sommelier? Neither Mokhtar nor Victoria had a college degree, but their product certifications were more difficult and valuable. In contrast I must humbly admit that Vulcan’s necessary wire knowhow was something an average person could learn in a full day or two.
Mokhtar was the only Yemeni to achieve coffee’s Q Grader status, and Victoria, at only twenty-one, was the youngest sommelier in the U.S. To my knowledge I’m the only female founder of an industrial wire corporation. All three of us initially had inferior knowledge of our products and rose up from our failures.
Would you say we all had balls?