Making a A Blueprint for Success

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Matthew Drayton could easily have ended up a social statistic, just another poor Black man from Georgia who made the wrong choices at the wrong time and ended up on drugs, in jail or dead. Someone you’d probably never heard of or would read about on these pages.

But he didn’t. And he didn’t because he took responsibility for his life and for the choices he made along the way. “Decisions have consequences,” Drayton said in an interview with Color Magazine, “so you should always think about where your decisions will lead you before you make them. It isn’t always the big moments in your life, either. If your friends are going out and you need to stay in and get stuff done, for example, then make the right decision. Stay home and take care of what needs to be done.”

Drayton chose to join the military as a young man as a way to leave his environment and become independent. And while he knows that isn’t the path all young men need to take, that decision not only lead to a successful military career spanning almost three decades, but success in his post-military career, marriage and life overall.

“Throughout my life, I have held hard work and solid ethics at high regard. While these life lessons may seem old-fashioned, I’ve learned that they’re indispensable to success in career, love and life,” Drayton said. “You don’t have to come from wealth or have the perfect upbringing to become successful. Working hard in school and being prepared and punctual in the workplace can separate you from the pack and gradually build into a successful career.”

Today, Drayton is the owner of Drayton Communications, a corporate speaker, life coach, consultant and leadership expert with more than 35 years of experience in government and commercial commerce. He has also been mentoring youth for over a decade and is currently the Executive Director of Great Oak Youth Development Center, a non-profit organization that mentors at risk youth. Happily married to his wife of 32 years and father to two grown children, he shares his personal story and guidance for today’s youth struggling with adversity in his book, Succeeding While Black: A Blueprint for Success.

“I didn’t think I’d ever write a book, but I had so much inside me that I wanted to pass on that it felt like it called out to me to get it done,” he explained. “And it took a while, too, because writing is a lot different than working with a client at my job or talking to a young man that I am mentoring. Those are specific cases and I needed to make my thoughts more universal for the book so anybody who picked up a copy would, hopefully get something out of it.”

Although his personal story is the editorial backbone of Succeeding While Black, the book never lectures the reader or tries to make them think they have to do what the author did to be a success. “Telling people what to do with their lives is the quickest way to get them to stop listening,” Drayton said with a laugh. “I really try to get people to think about the decision making process in their lives, making decisions and being responsible for the choices they make. Yes, success is about getting to a favorable outcome and achieving your goals, but success doesn’t always equate to being very wealthy or famous. There are a lot of successful people who aren’t wealthy or famous.”

That strange desire to be wealthy and famous that plagues so many young people today, he added, is something he runs into far too often in his role as a youth counselor. “A kid makes a few jump shots and he thinks he’s ready for the NBA. I don’t want to crush anybody’s dreams, but the reality is that so very few young men make it into professional sport that they need to have a backup plan for when they don’t get that call on draft day,” Drayton said. “And if their dream is to be a basketball player or a musician, they should be ready to do the work to make that happen. You see Beyoncé dancing up on the stage, but you never see the hundreds of hours she spends rehearsing to make it look that good. And I’m sure that once the initial glow of winning an NBA championship wore off for Stephen Curry, he was back in the gym working out for next year. Success, at whatever level, starts with hard work.”