What Got Me Here Will Not Get Me There
While incarcerated, I read What Got You Here Won’t Get You There. The book had a big impact on my thinking.
Marshall Goldsmith, the author, helped leaders who aspired to advance from one stage of their career to another, including those who wanted to become CEOs. I always tried to learn from leaders who built great businesses. They had to be intentional. They had to think about opportunity costs. They had to understand that every decision either moved them closer to the next level or kept them locked in place.
While incarcerated, I had to make the same kinds of intentional decisions.
In the beginning, I had to start by defining success. As a person serving multiple decades in prison, I had to think about how I could make that time useful. I asked myself questions such as:
What could I become the best in the world at doing?
I anticipated that I would serve multiple decades. For that reason, I hoped to leverage the experience to work toward reforming the system. My hope was to bring ideas that could lead to meaningful change. Instead of measuring justice only by how much time a person served in prison, I wanted to advance a different idea.
Society should encourage people to work toward reconciliation, build skills, create a record of preparation, and earn higher levels of liberty through merit.
That approach differs from many prison reentry programs.
In my view, too many programs focus on participation rather than results. They give certificates for attendance, but they do not always teach people how to build a record that proves growth, discipline, accountability, and preparation for success. A person may complete a program, receive a certificate, and still lack the tools to persuade a judge, a case manager, a probation officer, an employer, or a family member that he or she is ready for the next phase of life.
Prison Professors takes a different approach.
We do not want people to pursue participation trophies. We want people to pursue measurable progress and get results. We want them to define success, set clear goals, document their work, build communication skills, prepare for employment, and create a body of work that others can evaluate.
That vision required me to build in phases.
Phase One: Build credibility.
While I was incarcerated, I focused on developing academic and professional credentials. I worked to become a better writer, a better communicator, and a better thinker. With academic credentials and stronger communication skills, I hoped to persuade people to think differently about justice.
Rather than focusing only on vengeance, I wanted people to consider the merits of incentivizing excellence. If a person in prison works hard to reconcile with society, prepare for the job market, contribute to others, and document that progress, the system should recognize that work.
Phase Two: Build financial independence.
The second phase began after my release. I had to build income streams that would allow me to become financially independent. With financial independence, I would gain freedom of time.
I could deploy my resources to build programs, write lessons, and create systems that would measure the progress of people working through our platform. During the first decade of my release, investments led to a multimillion-dollar net worth. The investments we had made could support us and continue growing on their own. Rather than striving to earn more money, I could focus the rest of my working career on making an impact, building pathways for more people to work toward lives of meaning, relevance, and dignity.
I could work without compensation, striving to help as many people as possible use time in prison to prepare for success upon release. As a nonprofit, Prison Professors is part of a personal mission. Good preparations can lead to a better future.
Phase Three: Build support.
The third phase was to build broader support. One of the world’s leading impact investors, Bill McGlashan, became a believer. Bill is the founder of TPG Capital and The Rise Fund. He invests in people with the expectation of building sustainable ventures.
Bill spent hundreds of hours teaching me principles of impact investing. He also donated resources that helped our nonprofit grow.
His guidance helped me think more clearly about sustainability, measurement, and scale. Good intentions alone do not change systems. We need strategy. We need accountability. We need data. We need to show results.
Phase Four: Build scale.
The fourth phase was to scale.
I shared my vision of working to transform America’s prison system with other successful people, including Changpeng Zhao. To succeed, I anticipated that we would need a multi-year commitment and a budget of approximately $2 million per year.
I did not have sufficient resources to fund that initiative alone, but I could contribute my full time without compensation.
Those resources would allow us to develop stronger relationships with government officials. They would help us build a transparent platform that shows how people are working to prepare for success upon release. We could collect data to advance conversations about reforms that encourage people to earn higher levels of liberty through merit.
That is the heart of our work.
We want to show that people in prison can do more than serve time. They can build records. They can develop skills. They can memorialize their growth. They can create assets that help them advocate for themselves.
Phase Five: Build transparency.
The fifth phase is transparency.
We have built our platform, and more than 7,600 participants are now using Prison Professors to memorialize the steps they are taking to prepare for success upon release. Together, those participants have published more than 12.1 million words on our website.
Those words represent biographies, journals, book reports, release plans, and personal reflections. They show effort. They show discipline. They show a person’s thinking over time. They create a record that can help someone advance arguments for higher levels of liberty, stronger family relationships, and better income opportunities.
That is why Prison Professors differs from programs that only measure attendance.
We measure effort.
We measure consistency.
We measure written work.
We measure preparation.
We measure the development of a body of work.
Participants in Prison Professors work toward getting results, not certificates.
A certificate may show that someone sat in a class. A profile can show how that person thinks, what that person learned, what goals that person set, and what steps that person is taking to prepare for success.
Phase Six: Build community.
The next phase is to build our community.
As a result of CZ’s memoir, Freedom of Money, a team of Web 3.0 developers launched an independent initiative to support our mission. They created a website to describe a token project that has resulted in donations for our nonprofit that are currently valued at more than $400,000.
Members of the community also created graphics and messaging to help others understand how people in the Web 3.0 community are using the #BNB platform to support the mission of Prison Professors.
In the months to follow, we will continue developing this next phase. We want to reach athletes, celebrities, influencers, entrepreneurs, and others who believe in results-based change.
We can show them how Prison Professors works to improve outcomes for people in the criminal justice system. Through this work, we can help end intergenerational cycles of recidivism and poverty while improving the culture of confinement.
We will continue building systems that encourage people to prepare, document, and prove their readiness for success.
The lesson I learned from What Got You Here Won’t Get You There still guides me. Each phase requires different thinking. Each phase requires better tools. Each phase requires more discipline. Each phase requires a willingness to measure results.
Step by step, we will continue to build ‘n build, as recommended by the #BNB community.