Can Means You Will

As a kid, my dad had sayings that he would use every day. One of those was, “can’t means you won’t.” And for someone whose first language wasn’t English, that one was pretty catchy. I had no idea what it meant until years later, and I think a positive alternative is needed now, “can means you will.”

This past week, I went running with a few other runners I didn’t know, and we began chatting. The one woman told me that she was running in a race soon in remembrance of her grandmother, who was in the WACs (Woman’s Army Corp) way back in WW2. She was in the Army during a time when making a career choice as a woman was still questionable.

That reminded me of a story I just read about Lieutenant Charity Adams Earley, a United States Army Officer.

She was the first African American woman to become an officer in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps. She was the commanding officer of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, which was made up of African American women serving overseas during World War II.

She was given a job that seemed impossible, and at first thought not essential. The job was to clean out, sort, and deliver a gigantic amount of mail to troops actively serving in a war. Without any real training to do that kind of work, she led her troops, also all African American, to make it so. To learn more about her story, you can watch it on YouTube, read about her on the National Women’s History Museum website, or watch the movie on Netflix called The Six Triple Eight.

Her work story is another of the many stories about determination and resilience. I think it is also a love story. She loved herself and her team enough to dig into what seemed impossible. She took a stand that the work had meaning; it was an essential assignment, and she made it happen.

I think there is a risk at work when we see tasks as too big. We aren’t exactly prepared, so we feel like we can walk away. In reality, someone is counting on us, and what we do matters.

As we dig into this big Workday implementation, this is a good story to consider, a good theme to remember. And with a twist on my dad’s saying, “can means we will.”