Eric Pennington
Public administrator, lawyer and civic leader

I do think it's extremely important to own yourself, to own your life story, and to not look at any particular part of your life and let it define you. You are a collection of all of your life's work, and some of that may be bad, and most of it we hope is good, but I don't embrace this notion that any of it is “bad”. I think that as we move forward, there are parts of our lives that are less desirable than others, but it makes us who we are. We have to own that and embrace it and use it as a catalyst to help us move forward and understand where we don't want to go. Sometimes it will help us remind us that going down that path wasn't such a good idea. So when that opportunity to go down a similar path is presented in front of us, perhaps it's best to go a different way, but you have to own all those prior mistakes, stumbles, failures, falls, and know that those are all opportunities to help make us a better person, to make this world a better place and just help us succeed

I think the one thing about life is it's all uncertain that we never know where we’re going to end up or what's going to happen. Let me share a personal experience. I was one of five children raised by a single mother, and there was a period in our life as a youngster where we were homeless and we lived here in Newark, in a station wagon for some period of time. And at that time, without question, I had no idea what the next day was going to hold, whether we want to make it to the next day or not. But I knew that we wanted to get to a better place and the only way to do that was to survive to the next day, stick together, help each other and make it through that experience. Although I would not wish that on anybody it was certainly a life altering experience that let me know that you can almost get through anything and that humans are very resilient people. We can make it through difficult times, and hopefully you can use those experiences as a foundation to do something so much better because you know that whatever is facing you now can't possibly be as difficult as what you've gone through before and you can succeed.

Belonging is a bit of an elusive concept sometimes. A lot of your ability to belong is based on where you've been in your life. And if you come from an environment that is different than mainstream America, it's kind of tough immediately to feel like you belong. You have to feel like you have to prove yourself almost every day. I'll go back to another experience in my life where I didn't feel like I belonged, and I think I may have made at that time the wrong choice, but it turned out to be another one of the experiences in life that helps you do better. As a senior in high school, I was invited to meet with the dean of Yale to see whether or not they would accept me and admit me into the school. It turns out that I was going to be admitted to the school and was invited up for a final visit to spend the night with some students at Yale, and then the next day to meet with the Dean and essentially sign an acceptance letter to go. Well, I went to Yale and they paid for my bus ticket. I went there. I got into New Haven, got off the bus and walked to the campus. And when I got to the campus, the area around the campus was very similar to my environment here in Essex County, it was very urban. There were stores on the corner, bodegas similar to what we had here, but then when I reached the campus and there were literally these ivy walls and these big gates with these big stone structures. And I walked through that gate and immediately felt like I did not belong. I did stay overnight and the next morning I got up and I did not go to the Dean's office. I went back home because I felt so out of place and so much like I could never belong in a place like that. That was one of the times where I deselected. And at that moment I thought that was the best thing for me to do. I have learned since that that was probably not the best idea in the world. They wrote me later to find out what happened and to see if I wanted to come back, and I did not.

I think one of the most important things that I've learned is don't take yourself out of the running. Don't deselect. If you want something and you see something and you think it's interesting to you, pursue it. Even if people tell you that you don't have the background for that, you haven't met the prerequisites, I don't really think that's a good fit for you. But if you believe that's something you can do, let somebody else tell you no, give it a shot. See if you can achieve it and pursue, and you might surprise yourself. Oftentimes through my life, I've learned that people who had more confidence in me than I had in myself were right that they knew that I could do something that even I didn't think I could do, but I knew I wanted to do it.

Challenges in life, I think are opportunities for us to grow and oftentimes when you're faced with something you haven't experienced before that raises your discomfort level because you just don't know how things are going to go. But this relates back to probably a theme that I've had in my life all along, is that it is difficult. I'll change that. I don't want to say it's difficult that when you face things in life that are different or challenging and it raises your discomfort level, but you have to keep your eye on what the objective is, where you want to go. And as long as you know ultimately where you're trying to get to and you're faced with challenges along the way, just relying on your past experiences and recognizing that you have been through some difficult times, it's highly likely that you'll be able to get through whatever that challenge is. And when you come out on the other side, you'll have a new experience, a new idea of what it is you can accomplish and what you can achieve. And so you just have to keep moving forward to get through whatever that obstacle is.

One of the ways to get to a bigger perspective is by having an open mind. You have to be willing to learn more information. You have to be willing to take in information that you may not even agree with. But just because you don't agree with the information it doesn't mean that it's information that you shouldn't have as part of what's in your toolkit. All of that information is important to be able to move forward, make good decisions, and to have the impact on life that you want to have. To have this big perspective, you have to have a lot of information. You have to be open, you have to be willing to learn, and you have to be willing to allow some of the thoughts and hypotheses that you may have had before be challenged and you find out that maybe it wasn't quite what you thought it was, and it helps you get to a better place.

I think one of the things that I've learned throughout my life in developing good relationships is being open and honest and being vulnerable, allowing people to see you, allowing people to see who you really are. And that's risky because oftentimes when you expose a portion of yourself that you think may not be as wonderful as other people might be, it gives people an opportunity to use that against you. But you have to be confident enough in yourself and hope that you've picked the people who are around you, who are going to be beneficial to you, that it's okay to expose yourself because when you do, they get to see the real you and you get to let people know who you really are. That gives you an opportunity to expand your horizons, get access to things in life that you may not otherwise have had access to, and find areas of your life that you didn't even know that you were quite as interested in.

I think to embrace the moment more, even though as I talked about a moment ago, that living through a difficult urban environment, sometimes it's like being in PTSD, it's still your life and there are lots of good things that happen in that life. And I would tell myself to embrace the good things, learn from the things that are not so good, so that you could just become a better person, a better contributor to life, and just recognize that you're going to achieve all the things that you want to if you keep pushing forward.