Blavity was blessed with the opportunity to chop it up with tech entrepreneur, Angela Benton, and she offered some amazing insight on life and living it intentionally. For those who are unfamiliar, Benton has contributed to breaking the glass ceiling when it comes to women of color in tech. In 2011, she launched a successful online platform, NewMe Accelerator. The mechanism empowers entrepreneurs by educating them on how to accelerate their startups and ways to seek wisdom and funding from potential investors.
After so much recognition in Silicon Valley and corporate America, Benton tapped into voicing a deeper and more personable layer to her wealth of knowledge. That deeper layer is credited largely to her life experiences of overcoming cancer and being a single mom.
Blavity: You've been successful with NewMe and empowering entrepreneurs, but a lot of people don't know your personal journey. After achieving career success, when did you know that you reached personal success?
Angela Benton: These days, I don't view success as business or personal. To me, the two aren't in silos and are one thing. That said, I think that I'm still on a journey to success. I view success as living your life holistically in support of things that are important to you. While true balance can't ever be achieved, you'll never have all the things you want when you want them, my goal is to live a life that is inclusive of the things and people that are most important to me. Once I can do this consistently, I'd consider myself successful.
Blavity: How can you be a part of business and fully enjoy life at the same time?
Benton: I think it's about proportion and where you choose to make your investments. We go through cycles in our lives where we invest more time into, say, family or business. Whichever we are focusing on, the other seems to lack. Personally, I'm more intentional about the choices I make. I have boundaries now that I don't allow to be crossed by my work. I think this is necessary not just so that you have a "balanced" life, but also so that you aren't burning yourself out. Ideally, we all want to be in whatever we are doing for the long haul, right?
Blavity: A lot of entrepreneurs struggle with going after their goals and balancing personal trials and heartbreak. What do you do in those gloomy moments of defeat?
Benton: Struggles are inevitable, but keeping things in perspective helps a bunch. After I was diagnosed with cancer, I realized how irrelevant many of the things that I was worrying about were — including personal relationships. At the end of the day, if you don't have your health, nothing else really matters.
Blavity: Why do you think minimalism is important? What ways has it improved your life and removed barriers for you?
Benton: While I was going through chemo, I think I started practicing minimalism and didn't even know it. I started to truly understand the value of my time and what I wanted to invest it in. This concept of time, and that we each have a limited amount, moved from being conceptual for me and got really personal. Because I valued my time so much, and my perspective was refocused back to the things that really matter in life — family, health, friendships — I naturally wanted to spend more time on those things. Material things and superficial relationships that I had in my life that had been based on material success were exposed and uninteresting to me, so I began to eliminate those things and created a blank canvas to rebuild the life I wanted for myself.
Blavity: What is the biggest benefit of traveling and getting out there and exploring?
Benton: I think traveling allows you to stay creative. Putting yourself in different environments, with different people and different cultures, disturbs our norm. It forces us to think about things in a different way, and puts us into a state of mind that’s less analytical and more playful. That can be incredibly rejuvenating mentally.
Many of us wonder how so many successful people like Benton maintain an enjoyable life, and maintain a flourishing business simultaneously. Benton has stressed the importance of entrepreneurs enjoying life simply or “living artfully”. Personal trials, disappointments and emotional pain don’t stop on the way to the top, but Benton offers meaningful insight on how to simplify and diminish the pain.
One of the tools Angela used, to “simplify” the pain was minimalism. By living simply, Angela was able to take back the time and important moments that meant the most to her. The best part of her perspective on living a fully enjoyable and happier life in simplicity, is the importance of travel. Who doesn’t like to travel? And according to Angela, it’s a fundamental part of being a human who wants to enjoy life.
Angela's the author of, Revival: How I Rebuilt a Life for Longevity After Burnout, Cancer, and Heartbreak, an inspirational mix between hard life and business lessons learned. Revival is a clever blend between business and self-help. It’s a unique business book that focuses on the rarely discussed foundation of a business — you. It proves that success isn’t just about industry standards and the status quo. It’s about how you define success for yourself, building a solid foundation based on character, understanding that business and personal life sometimes blend, accepting that, without a holistically healthy you, success is moot, and so much more. Revival was released May 9, 2017, and is currently available for order on Amazon.
