Dirty Carats
Can You Dig It?
Shopping for an engagement ring can be more stressful than getting a 5-minute meeting invite from HR on a Friday afternoon. The pressure to pick that Goldilocks Rock — timeless, symbolic, and affordable (without looking like you raided a piggy bank) — is enough to make a diamond itself.
But one spouse-to-be may have found a way to take the pressure off the (carbon) dating process for her boyfriend.
Earlier this summer, a New York woman spent three weeks digging for her own engagement-ring diamond. Determined to find an ethically sourced uncut gem, Micherre Fox went full-on Indiana Jones at Arkansas’s Crater of Diamonds State Park — the only public diamond mine in the world — every day from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., armed with nothing but a shovel. Now that’s a goal digger.
Fortunately, Raiders of the Lost Arkansas Diamond has a happy ending. On the last day of her excavation vacation, just as she was about to call it quits, Fox hit pay dirt — unearthing a 2.3-carat white diamond, the third-largest found this year.
Mission accomplished, she flew home and handed the rock to her boyfriend. Now all he has to do is devise a proposal grand enough to top her rock-finding adventure.
No pressure.
Did You Make the Doughnuts?
Back in April I wrote a post about goals, at the end of which I asked the following thought-provoking and (hopefully) motivating question:
Six months from now — in October — you will either have
six months of progress or
six months of excuses
Which will it be?
Hopefully your answer leans toward progress. If not, that’s okay. Life gets in the way — but every day offers another chance to start again.
For me, it’s been a mixed bag. After being shaved off the corporate workforce late last year, I found a steady income stream by the end of Q2 this year. I’m also still cranking out Sunday Setups after 10 months — and, more importantly, people are still reading them.
Even so, I feel stuck on a few goals. But I’m okay with that. In the past, I would’ve unleashed an unrelenting barrage of negative self-talk about my stuck-in-the-mudness, but mindfulness has helped me reframe that lack of progress as an opening instead of an ending.
Mindfulness has also helped me draw energy from past wins, big and small. Whenever I doubt myself, I think back to how I overcame what felt like an impossible challenge to earn my bachelor’s degree — and how that experience reminds me I can do hard things.
Back in 1995, I was a student at the University of Pittsburgh. (Yes, I’m old. Do the math.) The internet was the hot new thing that was gonna take the world by storm, and my friends and I knew it. So we started a small web-design business targeting any company brave enough to let a group of 22-year-olds drag them into the future.
It was tough sledding but we did score some major wins — like putting the country’s oldest Black newspaper online — but after two years, we flamed out. Honestly, I think we were a year or two too early.
During that time, I had withdrawn from school — seven classes shy of a degree — to focus on the business. When it went belly up, I went home with no job, no money, and no degree. Thankfully, my mom took me back in and gently reminded me that as a Black man in corporate America, a missing degree could be a glass ceiling I couldn’t afford to hit.
I landed a full-time job as a programmer but couldn’t get any local school to accept my Pitt credits. Most required at least two more years of study — way more than seven classes — and I wasn’t having it. So I negotiated two deals that would change everything.
First, I convinced the Dean of Pitt’s Computer Science School to let me transfer credits from a college in the DMV. The deal: if I physically attended four classes in Pittsburgh, I could take three locally and still graduate from Pitt.
Second, I convinced my manager to let me work four 10-hour days each week, so I could remain full-time while finishing school.
Then came the hard part — doing the work. I spread those four classes across two semesters, so for eight months, my schedule looked like this:
Sunday: Drive from D.C. to Pittsburgh (260 miles, 4 hours)
Monday: Study 8 a.m.–4 p.m.; class 4–8:30 p.m.; drive back to D.C.
Tuesday: Work 6 a.m.–6 p.m.; then drive back to Pittsburgh
Wednesday: Study 8 a.m.–4 p.m.; class 4–8:30 p.m.; drive back to D.C.
Thursday: Work 6 a.m.–6 p.m.
Friday: Work 6 a.m.–6 p.m.
Saturday: Work 9 a.m.–5 p.m.
I felt like a truck driver, logging more than 1,200 miles per month while consuming Dr. Pepper and Snickers to remain alert. Through it all, I only missed one day of class — thanks to 12 inches of snow — and I maintained a 3.0 GPA. A year later I walked across the stage and grabbed my degree, completing a journey that had more twists and turns than an F1 race track.
But I wouldn't change a thing.
Thirty-some-odd years later I still draw inspiration from this experience every time I start to feel that stuck-in-the-mudness. Reflecting on the hurdles I cleared along the way to obtaining my goal reminds me of my resilience and reignites my self-confidence.
If life got in the way of your progress this year, it happens. Accept it. Then, reset your focus and resume the pursuit — and if you need inspiration, dig back through your own story. The proof you can do hard things is already buried there.
