Following is written version of Fiat Vox podcast episode #46: “Berkeley Haas Chief of Staff Marco Lindsey lives like his 80-year-old self is watching:”
Every morning, Marco Lindsey wakes up in his East Oakland neighborhood — where he was born and raised. He puts on a suit and tie, packs his briefcase, chats with his neighbors and drives to work.
[Music: “Night Owl” by Blue Dot Sessions]
It might seem like a typical routine, but to Marco, it’s a lot more than that. It’s a way to show boys and young men in his community that they have possibilities — that who they can become and what they can achieve is much bigger than they might know.
“I’ll just say that when I was growing up, I never saw a lot of positive black male role models in the neighborhood,” says Marco. “There were a lot of blue-collar working-class people and, you know, that was great. But I never saw a doctor. I never saw an engineer. I never saw a black lawyer or anything like that.
“So, it kind of limited my thinking in regards to what I could aspire to be when I grew up. I just never saw it. And so, I never even thought to consider it.”
Marco has been the chief of staff to the dean at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business for five years. He’s worked at Berkeley for 11. And I think it’s safe to say that he’s a really driven person. He knows what it means to work hard.
As an example, Marco does these races called Spartan Races. They’re kind of like a hybrid of a triathlon and a hardcore CrossFit workout. He’s done eight of them so far.
“It’s almost all uphill running,” he says. “You’re crawling under barbed wire uphill. You’re scaling walls. It’s a lot of wall climbing. It’s a lot of climbing up ropes and climbing down ropes, monkey bars. It’s all these things, and basically the Spartan Race is designed to find your weakness and exploit it.”
Read more on UC Berkeley News.