I write my blog as, “The Voice of Experience” for BannerView.com. With this moniker, I try to impart my years of business experience and lessons learned to you. But when I started on my journey in business, I of course came to it with no real practical experience, rather, like many of us starting out, I came as a bright-eyed kid and fortunately, with a great education and an amalgam of people in my life who had influenced and inspired me.

At our core, we are the sum of the influences of people in our life and life experience. I think how you process life’s experiences has much to do with the people who influence you--especially our heroes and heroines. Beyond my wonderful parents, who have led remarkable and inspirational lives, and are my heroes, I grew up as a voracious reader and fan of history. One of my earliest historic heroes, is a heroine named Nellie Bly. Actually, that was her pen name taken from a Stephen Foster song. Her real name was Elizabeth Cochran Seaman http://www.nellieblyonline.com/bio

I met her as a junior in high school---okay, she lived from 1864-1922, but her story and inspiration were certainly alive to me as a young, impressionable girl of 17. Nellie was the FIRST investigative reporter writing from the 1880s until her death. She invented “eye witness news,” and certainly was a woman ahead of her time. I included a link to a great website that tells her story. But amongst the numerous things that impressed me about her, was her intrepid strength and spirit to take on the impossible in a time when there were limited options, and that’s an understatement, for how women were to live their lives. In addition and very importantly, was looking at the quality of her work and how she pioneered journalism. She lived her news stories.

There are two great examples of which I will briefly share. Nellie worked for Joseph Pulitzer’s, “New York World” and created her own “beat”-- writing exposés on many subjects. One most famous, was on the abuse of the mentally ill in the New York asylum, Blackwell’s Island. Nellie feigned being mentally ill in order to be admitted. The minute she was admitted, she acted perfectly normal, but her behavior was totally ignored and she experienced, like her fellow inmates (they were treated like prisoners), filthy living conditions, rotten food and physical abuse from doctors and nurses. She stayed there for ten days before a fellow World reporter was able to free her. She then wrote a series of articles that rocked New York and changed how the mentally ill were treated. Even the name of the asylum was changed to Welfare Island. The second story I will share, is how Nellie set out to go around the world by herself in order to break Jules Verne’s record set by his fictional character, Phileas Fogg, in “Around the World in 80 Days.” She did it in 72 days, six hours, eleven minutes and fourteen seconds! For a woman to travel alone in the late 1800s was totally unheard of. Nellie wrote of her experiences throughout her journey, and the world was mesmerized. She was quite the sensation. She was quite the inspiration.

So, as a girl of 17, in reading about Nellie’s life at a time when the Women’s Movement was under way in the 1970s, her life served as an example for me to never cower from a challenge and to have faith in myself and my abilities. I entered the workforce at a time when women were just starting to be admitted to law school and MBA programs, and when women were starting to break some of the Glass Ceiling in business. All those years later, we still have a way to go. But how I chose to navigate my journey in business was heavily inspired by the grit of Nellie Bly.

Do you have a hero or heroine? Take a moment and think of the characters about whom you have read, the people who have been fixed in history, and the people you know. Who amongst them are your hero and why? Make sure there’s a bit of them in you.