Learn. Earn. Return.

On one of my many YouTube Shorts scroll sessions, I came across an excerpt of a Denzel Washington interview with a young journalist. As the conversation wrapped up, he offered her three words of advice: learn, earn, and return. He broke it down. When you’re young, your mission is to learn. As you get older, it’s to earn. And when you start to slow down, you return the knowledge you’ve gathered over a lifetime.

I thought his cycle-of-life idea was profound when I heard it. Then I started thinking about my own life and realized how those three little words carried so much truth and such powerful life lessons.

The Learning Years

Looking back, it feels like I’ve lived a thousand lives. I am grateful for most of them because each one taught me something I carried into the next.

My first hard lesson came in college. At the age of 12, I announced to the world that I was going to Howard University. I had never been to Washington, DC, and never set foot on campus until I was 18. But as a young, eager student, I was determined to prove Howard was the right choice. It was where I would chart my own course, build my own life, and refuse to live in anyone’s shadow. My mission was clear: I would take on the world on my own terms, by my own hands. The world had something to say about that.

Howard was absolutely the right choice. I was just not ready for it. Not financially. Not emotionally. The early years were tenuous. Never enough money. Never enough time to figure out what came next. But I was determined. And after a few false starts, I finished. The biggest thing I learned was how not to quit when things didn’t work out the first time.

My twenties had plenty more lessons waiting for me. During those years, I worked a lot of jobs. Three of them fired me, and each one taught me something I could not have learned any other way.

Three Firings. Three Lessons.

The first was a receptionist job at a hair salon. I was running late for a shift, and it was my last strike. I called in and told a coworker I trusted as a friend to let the manager know. She never passed it along. I showed up to find out I no longer had a job. That woman took my trust and handed my reputation to someone else without a second thought.

Lesson one: never hand someone else the keys to your livelihood. No matter how much you trust them.

The second was a junior counselor position at a community center. I was ambitious. I pushed the people around me to do more, reach further, aim higher. What I didn’t understand then was that not everyone wants to be pushed. My naivety made me easy to set up, and I got fired.

Lesson two: your ambition can feel like a threat to people who didn’t ask for it. Read the room before you try to change it.

The third was a waitressing job I took specifically to save money for school. I made no secret of it. I talked about going back constantly and skipped the social events because I had bigger plans. When it was time to cut staff, I was the first to go. Not because I was a bad waitress, but because I had never made a single deposit into that team. I showed up for the paycheck and disappeared for everything else.

Lesson three: social capital is not optional. Even when you have somewhere better to be, show up. People remember who was there and who wasn’t.

Three jobs. Three very different mistakes. One through-line: relationships are the work underneath the work. I had to lose three jobs to really believe that.

The Earning Years

When Denzel said earn, my first thought was money. I have to laugh at that because I did not become the billionaire I envisioned in my late teens. If you are over 40 and you’ve been paying attention, you have spent two to three decades accumulating something money cannot buy outright: wisdom, perspective, and the kind of clarity that comes from living through things and choosing to learn from them instead of just surviving them.

One of the biggest things I earned was perspective. The older I get, the more I realize that life has never been particularly interested in my timeline. I did not have a big plan for my 30s. I had spent so much time catching up that my singular goal was to live a life that exceeded my expectations. Then, at 31, I got promoted to the title I thought would propel my career to the highest heights. At 32, I got married. And I thought that by 35 I would have the title, the husband, and the children.

Instead, at 35, I had no job, no husband, and no children. What I did have was a stubborn belief that my story wasn’t finished yet. I didn’t know exactly what came next, so I kept moving. I kept learning. I kept saying yes to experiences that didn’t fit the life plan I had created for myself. At 25, I would have looked at my 35-year-old self and thought she had failed. At 45, I looked back at that younger woman with gratitude. She was brave enough to let go of one version of success so another version could emerge.

By 50, I finally understood something she couldn’t have known: the life I ended up building fit me better than the one I had spent so many years expecting.

The Return

Losing my grandfather, and then my father not long after, changed the way I thought about return. For most of my life, an older generation was always ahead of me. Then one day I looked up and realized I had become part of it. As I reflect on the lessons I’ve learned and the perspective I’ve earned, I can see how those experiences helped shape a life that feels like mine. It hasn’t been easy getting here, but it was worth every scrape, wrong turn, and firing. I like to think I still have plenty left to learn and earn, but I also have a lot to return.

Return, the way I understand it, is not a grand gesture. It is turning around and reaching back for the people behind you, the ones standing exactly where you once stood, headstrong and hopeful and trying to figure out the rules of a game no one fully explained. I think about the younger women in my life, the ones in their learning years, making the same kind of moves I made, trusting the wrong people, pushing too hard in the wrong rooms, and treating social connection like an afterthought.

I want to be the person who tells them the truth before the firing, before the lesson costs them what it cost me. But if they’re anything like I was, some lessons will still have to be learned the hard way. Maybe that’s part of learning, too. I can tell them what I know, let them see how I’ve lived, and share the stories. What they do with what I share is up to them. Once I’ve given it to them, that knowledge belongs to them. It is no longer just mine.

That is what return looks like for me. Not a speech. Not a platform. Just the willingness to say what I know out loud, to the people who need it, in a way that is useful to them. Denzel said it in three words. It took me a lifetime to understand all three.

The learning shaped me. The earning proved me. Now it is time to see what the return does.