It’s not about the circumstance you’re born into but how you work yourself through it.
Freddie Figgers – 31-year-old entrepreneur has just one piece of advice to people: “Don’t let your circumstances define who you are.”
Figgers’s success all started with a broken computer.
At the age of eight, Figgers faced a piece of truth that would change his life forever.
“He said, ‘Listen I’m going to shoot it to you straight, Fred. Your biological mother, she threw you away,’” Figgers recalled his conversation with his adoptive father Nathan Figgers.
Figgers was found in a dumpster and he always considered that as a metaphor for his formative years – that he’s a piece of trash.
But despite this self-deprecating perception, Nathan and his wife Betty Mae always reminded him that he was more than just a discarded baby.
When he was young child, life wasn’t kind to Nathan.
Accordingly, Nathan was constantly bullied when kids knew about his past and it reached a point where his father had to wait for him at the bus stop.
In spite of that, he still learned the value of looking after other people, much like how his father did to the community.
When he was nine, Figgers’ parents gave him a secondhand Macintosh and his life has changed since then.
As a tinkerer, Figgers used capacitors from his father’s radio alarm clock, then replaced the computer’s broken parts and it switched on. At that moment, he knew what he wanted to do.
At the age of 12, his first career was fixing computers for the town. Then, his big break came when the city asked him to make a program to check the city’s water gauges.
But his most important work came from adversity. Nathan was rapidly developing Alzheimer’s and would wander out aimlessly. He then made a simple speaker system with a GPS tracker installed in Nathan’s shoe. So if Nathan wandered off, he could easily find him.
Figgers wanted to do something more for the community with the gifts he possessed.
His biggest idea came when he realized that big parts of rural America don’t even have a 2G or 3G network. Quincy, the town he was from, was still using dial-up.
No one wanted to invest in these towns and Figgers wanted to fill that gap. He established Figgers Communication and became the youngest telecom operator in the US. The company is also the only black-owned telecommunications company in the US.
Besides the company, he also has a foundation that invests in disadvantaged communities.
Through all of the pain, loss, and challenges he endured, he said that all of these became necessary in shaping him into the man he is today.
If there’s something he wants to leave his little girl, it’s the lesson “never give up, no matter how cold the world may look,” and more importantly, for her to make a positive impact on the people she meets.
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