Mastering the Mind with Mecca
“I’ve learned that if you can be honest with yourself about who you are and what keeps you grounded, you’ll always find your way.”
- Mecca Parker
Mecca Parker is Glimmer 411®’s Chief Marketing Officer and Partner and in his 24 years of life, when he thinks back on what helped him get to where he is today, it all points back to a lesson he learned from one of his earliest memories—
“When I was 5 or 6, my Dad cut my hair for the first time. At the time, I hated it. As a kid, there’s something scary about those clippers when they’re right in your face.”
“But looking back at the bigger picture, I realized that my dad was teaching me to take my hair, and my life, into my own hands.”
Inspired by his dad, Mecca believes life really is what you make of it and uses that same hands-on approach throughout the rest of his life as a whole.
Originally from Takoma Park, Maryland, Mecca moved around a lot as a kid. Before heading off to Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) for his undergraduate degree in 2015, he’d been to six different schools— each with a different maze of racial, cultural, and socio-economic conditions than the last.
“At the time I didn’t realize it, but I was basically being shown a buffet at the restaurant of life,” Mecca says, “And once I got old enough to start making my own life choices, I was able to pick and choose from all the experiences I’d lived and the people I’d met to imagine the life that I wanted to live.”
As Mecca approached the end of his high school career, he realized he wanted to pivot in a different direction from the road most of the kids in his school were following and start building the life he knew he could.
“I thought a lot about that memory of my Dad cutting my hair and like him, I wanted to become someone that could create a future for themselves.”
“For me, this looked like being the owner of my own business to build solutions for people to make their lives simpler and easier, I just needed to figure out how to make that happen.”
Mecca found a roadmap in the form of a mentor Darryl Britt, a black CMU alum who’d earned multiple degrees and was the CEO of his own business — all things Mecca wanted to achieve.
“Having a mentor was instrumental for me. He inspired me and let me learn from his mistakes so I didn’t have to make them myself. Knowing that he'd achieved all these things and made it through pushed me to take a big leap in my life: shipping everything I owned to Pittsburgh to go to school at CMU.”
After graduating from Carnegie Mellon and officially joining Glimmer 411®, Mecca took his second big leap and moved across the country again to Los Angeles to start a job in management consulting.
“I got a lot out of being in both Pittsburgh and LA. I met some really inspiring people and made some great memories but being so far from my roots really made me question my identity,” Mecca says.
“I learned that if you can be honest with yourself about who you are and what keeps you grounded, you’ll always find your way home.”
“Sometimes an experience will show you what you don’t want in life, and those experiences are just as valuable. Whenever I’m in a situation like that, when things are new or uncertain, I just think of it as a challenge, and I’ve grown to love a good challenge.”
The love of a good challenge motivated Mecca to master cutting his own hair at age 19 and rarely rely on barbers. This air of exploration has been a defining theme throughout his hair journey, though he remembers a time when his grandparents would insist he kept it picked out and perfectly neat.
“Both my Grandpa and my Grandma were in the military,” he says, “so they were all about looking neat, like not a hair out of place neat, and I took after that.”
“But as I grew up, I learned that black people’s hair, that natural hair, doesn’t have to look perfect. Natural hair is its own kind of masterpiece,” Mecca continued, “everybody’s hair is their own and unique. Aside from keeping it healthy, we shouldn't try to force it into the box that society thinks it should be in.”
Recently, Mecca has been practicing his philosophy of, “just giving my hair what it needs to be healthy and seeing where it goes from there.”
“I’ve mostly been just doing maintenance cuts right now because I just want to explore how my hair actually is naturally and appreciate the little details - things like the fluctuating curl patterns and different densities and thicknesses.”
Mecca is preparing for the next big leaps in his life and all the challenges that’ll come with it using the same mindset of acceptance. His hand-on approach to life and appreciation of every detail in the moment has never led him astray and he’s expecting this next phase of life will be all he can make of it.
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