Hey, work lifers. We'll be back for season four next month. For now, here's the second of four new episodes of Taken for Granite.

Today's guest is Leader extraordinaire Melody Hobson. In the eight years that I've known her,

she's consistently challenged me to think again about giving and receiving feedback and speaking

truth to power.

Melody has a long list of trailblazing achievements.

In March, she became chairperson of Starbucks, making her the only current blackboard

chair of an S&P 500 company.

She'll soon become the first black woman to have a building named after her at Princeton.

She's been on many lists, including Times 100 most influential people. But through it all,

she's only worked in one place, aerial investments, the first black-owned mutual fund in the U.S.,

where she's now the president and co-CEO.

30 years at one company, since 1991, I've only worked at one company. The average American has 11 jobs in their lifetime, but it makes complete and total sense if you grew up as me,

that you would cling to permanency and security. I'm the youngest of six kids.

My mother was a single mom. She worked really, really hard, but we often were in tough situations

of getting evicted or getting our lights turned off or our phone disconnected or our car

repossessed. Sometimes I didn't know where we were going to live.

It was just a terrible way to live. And as a result of that, I just had this great sense of

financial insecurity. I ended up having an obsession with school, which was the center of calm

and security for me in a world that was not calm and not secure. And I could control outcomes at school.

So I became this crazy student. And then I went to Princeton. And in all of those settings, I was just an observer.

I saw the life that I wanted. I romanticized the friends that I had and the lives that they had and the

two-parent households and all of these things. And it did give me this aspiration for financial security.

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