Episode 44: Fight for What You Believe In with Willie Jackson

Highlights of This Episode:

• How Willie used a website to tell his own story after college rather than relying on a traditional résumé
• Why he left his lucrative consulting job
• What was especially difficult about his technical support work at W3 Edge
• How his “four years in the fire” at W3 Edge prepared him to do virtually anything
• Why Willie thinks our culture (in the U.S.) is sick
• Why “it’s important that we acknowledge how hard it is just to get up in the morning and get through the day”
• Why Willie started Abernathy magazine
• Why the media coverage of Michael Brown’s death means that “if you’re a black person and killed at the hands of the law enforcement, you die twice”
• Why his next event after (after the Abernathy launch) is going be to be bigger and better

“Whether or not you win, life is sure better when you’re fighting like hell for what you believe in.” –Willie Jackson (Click to share – thanks!)

About Willie Jackson:

Willie Jackson is the founder and publisher of Abernathy, the magazine for Black men. Previously, Willie served as the Director of Web Optimization at W3 EDGE, a Boston-based interactive web development and marketing agency. Before joining W3 EDGE, Willie spent five months in Buenos Aires, Argentina, immersing himself in a foreign culture in order to challenge himself and his assumptions about life outside what’s familiar.

In 2011, Willie served as the CTO of The Domino Project, a publishing company started by bestselling author and marketing guru Seth Godin. Before that, Willie spent three years as an IT Consultant with Accenture in Atlanta, specializing in portal and content management deployments.

Willie is a member of the Young Entrepreneur Council. He is a regular speaker at conferences, where he addresses topics such as web performance, careers, and doing the impossible. He writes semi-regularly on his eponymous blog about business and success through the eyes of a curious marketer, and he has been featured in documentaries (I’m Fine, Thanks), on HTGV (House Hunters International Episode HHINT-5010H), and in print (The Icarus Deception by Seth Godin, 2012).

A graduate of Florida State University (Information Technology), Jackson currently lives in New York City.

Links and Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

• Abernathy
• Seth Godin’s Domino Project
• Black Lives Matter
• Lift Off Retreat
• INROADS
• W3 EDGE
• Accenture
• Michael Brown
• Willie Jackson’s blog post
• Worse Than Slavery
• Nate Silver’s blog post
• Bill Clinton’s “three strikes” law
• Sandra Bland
• Basecamp
• MailChimp
• The YEC
• abernathymagazine.com/launch

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