How will my job as mayor be judged? I am very mindful—and I touched on this earlier—that there are people who really actively work to create a false narrative, but I can't walk out the door looking forward if I'm looking over my shoulder. So as long as my street committee is okay with the job that I've done, I'm okay with the job that I've done.
History will be the judge. As people look back at this time in our lives, they will look at leadership and whether we did right or we did wrong. Hopefully, whatever is written about this time in our country's history, and in our city's history, I will be judged kindly.
I am working very hard to not always focus on the things that I did wrong, or the things that I could have done better, recognizing that it's okay to pat myself on the back and say, “You did good.” That's really hard for me, but I am learning to be kind to myself.
It was helpful to me to write [my departure] letter to the city because, when I looked at it on paper, I thought, You should be very proud because there was no playbook. There was nobody to pick up the phone to call who could say, “this is how you manage through a pandemic.” So I'm proud of us, because there are so many cities that didn't get through it whole. It doesn't mean we don't have our share of challenges, but we didn't lay off employees, we didn't furlough employees, we didn't have to raise taxes, we didn't have to slash our city budget. We made it through whole, and it was because we did some things differently and we did it our way—the Atlanta way.
What next? I'll never say never about running for office again, but the opportunities are much more plentiful than I even knew to dream. I think it was Oprah Winfrey who I would always hear say, “God dreams bigger dreams for you than you can ever dream for yourself.” That's what this moment feels like.
Whatever it is, it will be one of purpose and passion. I don't want to trade one set of limitations for another set of limitations. I don't want to be restricted. I want to be able to chart my path, on my terms.
A guy I was talking to yesterday gave me a great exercise that I'm going to actually do. I have this running bucket list of things I want to do and he said, “Put each one on a piece of paper, write the pros and cons of each one and that will help you prioritize.” Some of it can be on the one‐year plan, the five‐year plan, the 10‐year plan. I have come to recognize, you don't have to do it all today. You get to decide. And sometimes you'll make decisions that don't make sense to anybody else. And they'll never make sense to everybody else. But as long as you're comfortable with it, that's all that matters.
It's okay to do things differently. It's okay to not follow the playbook. It's okay to be the one who writes the playbook.
I've never been ordinary. So, why at 50‐plus years old would I start trying to be ordinary? Especially when the most joy, the most success, and the most satisfaction I've ever gotten in life has been when I did things differently.
3 Samuel Bright
Chief Product and Experience Officer, Upwork
Since his first breath, Sam Bright has represented the sum of disparate parts. So the fact that this ambitious, earnest, biracial son of a midwestern American mother and Ghanaian father earned degrees from little‐known Taylor College, one of the oldest evangelical Christian universities in the nation, and Harvard Business School, one of the most brazenly boastful and revered institutions on the planet, should come as no surprise.
Whatever you imagine the distinctions—or discrepancies—to be between his formative influences, this seasoned 38‐year‐old tech executive is a seamless standout product of it all.
An intensely focused high achiever from a young age, Bright was going to follow his parents' footsteps and become a pastor. Second‐guessing that plan late in high school contributed in part to a father‐son rift that changed his life, but he has remained true to his own values and chosen path, while continuing to search his soul at every fork in the road.
His track record so far includes impressive runs at eBay, Merrill Lynch, and Forrester Research, where he was its youngest industry analyst. He has been noted for his steady hand at growing multi‐billion‐dollar P&Ls, executing high volumes of complex domestic and global transactions, and leading large teams through critical inflection points. At Upwork (branded as “the world's largest work marketplace”), he leads an 800‐person global team in product, design, and customer experience. He is also currently intent on mastering a relatively new role, as dad to his very young son.
My dad was from Ghana, my mom was from Indiana; they met at a ministry conference in Miami and raised me as a double‐pastors' kid—an only child—in Peoria, Illinois. When I was three or four, my dad changed our last name from Nutakor to Bright, and I've often wondered how that has changed the course of my life.
He was an only child whose father passed away when he was young, and his mother passed shortly after I was born. He moved from Ghana to London years before he moved to the States, and he did not stay in touch with his family. So my sense of heritage was a little underdeveloped because the one source that could tell me about it had moved away from it, and my name doesn't reflect it. Even today, when I tell people that I'm Ghanaian, there's always a bit of surprise, especially from other folks who are Ghanaian.
Here I am, the son of a first‐generation immigrant in my dad, and my mom, who told me that, at least on one side of her family, she could trace her lineage all the way back to John Paul Jones, the Revolutionary War commander. So I always felt a simultaneous sense of otherness and duality. And being the product of those different worlds, combined, definitely made me more of a lone wolf.
Peoria, where I grew up, is sort of this microcosm of the culture of the country. Caterpillar [the nation's leading manufacturer of construction equipment] was headquartered there while I was growing up. It was also the birthplace of Richard Pryor.
I went to a small parochial school that was very good to me and invested in me in many ways. And yet, there weren't a lot of folks who looked like me in that environment—and not a lot of pastors' kids either, even though it was a parochial school. I have memories of my parents counseling folks, going to hospitals, and visiting members of their congregation to try to look in on their needs, and that imbued a sense of mission in how I see the world.
Duality is an overarching theme threaded throughout my journey. Being the only, the first, and the youngest, and eventually having that marry with achievement and all the expectations, ideas, and agendas associated with it, is something that I have become more reflective on over time, both as a person and a leader.
As a kid, I competed in spelling bees through both the Association of Christian Schools International (ACSI) National Spelling Bee and the Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee, which is the one that's on ESPN. Starting in third grade, I just joined on a lark. The winners got trophies and the losers got cookies. As you got older, the trophies got bigger.
I competed for five years and went to both of those national bees, three years in a row. I was making progress each time (in my third year, I won the [Scripps Howard] city bee, I won the regional, and I went to the nationals) but, as I progressed, I felt that I stood out more, and not always in a positive way.
There weren't that many spellers who were going to the national bee over and over again. There weren't any other spellers who were going to both the ACSI and the Scripps Howard. And Peoria hadn't been represented that frequently in one of these spelling bees, much less both. You layer on the complexity of my ethnicity, of being Black, of being a pastor's kid, and
