Black Stories/12: Felicia Williams

Justin James Lopez:
Hey y’all. Welcome to another episode of Amazon’s Black Stories podcast, where we highlight the stories of Black designers, researchers, and creatives from all around the world. I’m your host, Justin James Lopez, and today I’m joined by design director Felicia Williams, as we talk through the concepts of building risk capital and betting on yourself. Now let’s hear her story.

Well, Felicia, thank you again for joining me today on this episode of the Black Stories podcast.

Felicia Williams:
Yeah.

Justin James Lopez:
I’m super excited about this, and I was thinking about the idea of betting on yourself, and if betting on yourself was a person, I honestly think that their name would be Felicia Williams, to be honest. And I know, and I think you know what I mean by that, but hopefully through this conversation that the audience here will start to understand more about what I mean by that. But for starters, let’s talk a little bit more about where you are today, what do you do? Yeah, let’s start there.

Felicia Williams:
Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, I’m so excited to be here. Just want to say thank you for inviting me and thanks for... Man, this year’s been a weird year, so I’m really glad that it worked out for us to come together and talk. Yeah, I can tell you a little bit about me and where I’m at, at least right now. So I’m actually talking to you from London. I know I don’t have a British accent, which also disappoints as well, I wish I had one. I did once gift my... I’ve an international team here, I did gift them once, after pushing them through a big deadline, I said that I would read back a recent leadership email in my best British accent. I can tell you there was a lot of critique in what in how I performed. So I try not to do that.

But yeah, so I’m an American in London, and I have been here for about six years now, which has been great. I’m actually just in the middle of doing my paperwork to become a dual citizen, which is pretty exciting for me. I have been a design leader, working across cutting edge tech, at the tip of the spear, if you will, doing a lot of zero to one. A lot of work at the intersection of hardware and software. So think about ambient computing, think about visual displays, think about head wearables. Just different types of technology that are going to really transform the way that humans and computers relate to one another. And it’s been an incredible journey, doing that kind of work. And so yeah, that’s what I’ve been doing. That’s what I’ve been up to. And yeah, excited.

Justin James Lopez:
Yeah, incredible journey indeed. So you mentioned you’re doing your paperwork to become a dual citizen. I’m assuming that means you’re not really excited about coming back and living in America at any point in the future?

Felicia Williams:
Well, no, it’s not so much about that. I would say actually, it’s just more about, I think that’s been something that I’ve been very interested in having, or achieving and accomplishing, for a long time. So a fun fact about me is that when I was at school, so I’m a dual major, dual minor. So I am a dual major in Fine Arts, Painting and New Media. New media is kind of a weird, catchall term. Basically, I’m old enough that I went to school long enough ago that I was into computers, and back then, our kids were into computers, my school didn’t know what to do with that. So they were like, “We’re just going to give you a new media, but you need to study a serious discipline”. So I was like, “Okay, so I’ll do painting”, not to diss people who paint. I love me some paint, but not to diss them.

It was seen as more serious than working with computers. Very interesting now. But my minors were Art History and Japanese, and I actually became conversationally fluent in Japanese because I wanted to apply to a grad school in Japan, that spoke Japanese. I didn’t want to wuss out, go to an English school. And so young Felicia was like, “I am leaving the United States at some point I’m going to go have an incredible adventure in Japan”. And then stuff happened where, basically, I was like, “You know what? There’s some interesting job opportunities, and some opportunities in the US”. And I ended up circumnavigating that. I did end up working in gaming, so I got a chance to go to Japan.

But all of that, is I say, is that living here in the UK, coming over here six years ago, I knew that that was still something that was very much a big goal of mine. And so the fact that I’m able to become a dual citizen, it’s just more gravy for me. I could definitely see myself coming back. I was actually just a New York recently and love New York, love Seattle. I used to live in Seattle, lots of great places. Grew up in Oklahoma, so I could come back. But, right now, I think I’m telling London, I’m telling England, that I’m ready to commit. I’m ready.

Justin James Lopez:
Commitment is tough. And you’ve been able to do that. So interesting, because you said you didn’t want to knock anyone that’s a painter. And I actually believe that because I remember reading that in your early life you actually wanted to be a painter, and a manga artist.

Felicia Williams:
I wanted to be a comic book artist. I wanted to be a manga artist. That was where the Japanese really came in. It’s so funny, because I think back then I would’ve called myself, I was a nerd. I’m a nerd. Oh, nerds are into video games. I love to play video games. My dad was a computer scientist and, actually, a microbiologist. And so he actually introduced a lot of new technology in the house. So I had an IBM, I had first Nintendo. There’s lots of really interesting things that were introduced in my household, and the Williams household, early on. So I was a bonafide nerd from, basically since I popped out. And so that’s just been something that I’ve really loved. And so that came along with just loving the culture, especially when it came to Japanese culture.

And so learning how to speak the language, and learning how to express stories, draw stories, in that anime, manga way was something that was really exciting for me. And so yes, I actually did want to be a comic book artist, comic book writer. I would say I was more about, I wanted to tell really interesting, incredible stories, and manga just seemed like a really fantastic way to do that. And I actually did apply and got into a very good Japanese Mangaka school, I did, but then I didn’t go. And there are lots of reasons for it, but I didn’t go. I became a video game designer, and a producer, and a creator director.

Justin James Lopez:
But tell me, why video games? What was it about video games that made you feel like that was a better option, at the time, at least, than continuing to pursue the manga route that you were on?

Felicia Williams:
Video games is just a different way of telling stories.

Justin James Lopez:
So it filled that need for storytelling, or just being a storyteller.

Felicia Williams:
That’s something actually that I talk a lot about, especially with junior designers, or young people who are looking to understand how they can shape their career, either based on the things that they’re interested in or based on some of their passions, or just in despite of those passions. I still talk to folks around me, especially parents who have young kids, and I’ll talk about the fact that I used to work in video games. They’re like, “Ugh, my son, he just, he’s always on the games”, “Oh, my daughter’s always on the games”. And I’m like, “Okay”, I’m like, “Hello, look at me, I believe you have a lot of respect for me and who I am”.

Justin James Lopez:
Yeah.

Felicia Williams:
Would you like to guess what I love to do when I was young?

Justin James Lopez:
Yeah.

Felicia Williams:
And they’re like, “Oh, what”? And I’m like, yeah, video games is a fantastic hobby. It can be a fantastic career. And there’s so many things you can do with it. So yeah, I moved from Mangaka novelist to video game designer, video game creative director.

Justin James Lopez:
Nice.

Felicia Williams:
And now just doing some digital design. Yeah.

Justin James Lopez:
Yeah. I love how candidly you say these things, right? Like, yeah, I just did all of the things, and once in my life I said no. And I had to deal with that. I do want to paint this picture better, because you started in Oklahoma, right?

Felicia Williams:
Yeah.

Justin James Lopez:
And your journey took you to Tokyo, it took you to Paris, it took you to Montreal.

Felicia Williams:
Yeah.

Justin James Lopez:
Now in London. Let alone all the places here in the US, New York and Seattle that you mentioned. I want to go back, from a physical perspective, obviously you moved to those places, but from a psychological perspective, what does it take to be able to make that kind of decision, right? Because I think that for you, from what I know, the yeses were more frequent than the no’s, in what you said yes to in your life. But I think for most younger people, especially people of color in the US specifically, it’s the opposite, where we get the nos more often than the yeses. So how did you manage to overcome that? What were your mechanisms to overcome that?

Felicia Williams:
That’s a great question. The first thing that comes to my mind is, and I’m sure this is actually true of a lot of young people, no matter their background, who are probably in that high achiever, high driven, lots of passion, highly driven, lots of passion category, where hearing “no” becomes the fuel, because it’s like, “Oh, I’m going to prove it to you”. I’m done hearing, “no”, let’s get to the yes list. What are the things that I can do? And if that list isn’t expansive enough, I’m about to make some changes, or I’m going to expand that list on my own.

And I certainly wouldn’t say that I have a shy personality type, or a personality type that shrinks away from conflict or things that are difficult. But I would say that that comes with practice, and that when you say yes in the face of many people telling you no, or there are opportunities that don’t look like they are shaped, or are, I suppose, aren’t ready to receive you, saying yes is as much about understanding the limitations and being okay with the prospect of failing, as it is about being excited with the prospect of being successful.

So saying yes is, I imagine there are people out there when they are looking at the option to go for something very daring, kind of jump in with two feet into something that they probably haven’t ever done before, and it’s very easy to get wrapped up in the visual of what happens when you achieve it.

Justin James Lopez:
So what’s the alternative? How do you view it?

Felicia Williams:
I like to think of myself as a very balanced person when it comes to looking at the options. I’m like, “Okay, yeah, this is what it’s going to look like when I achieve it”, but let’s be real about what happens if this doesn’t work out, and are there enough reasons or is there enough in that column of if it doesn’t work out, here’s some of the negative impacts that this will have on me. And if that column is a lot smaller than the positives, and you can still be afraid, you can still feel like it’s risky, but you should still do it. And to me, that has been my philosophy.

Justin James Lopez:
Yeah, that’s super helpful. So I will say, I’ll have a transparency moment here. So about four years ago I was working at a small company called Meta. And they, well at the time it wasn’t called Meta. But I was given the opportunity to shift and move to London and we were getting all the paperwork done and all of that. And then I just completely froze up, got cold feet and was like, absolutely not, how I exist in London. I literally...

Felicia Williams:
No. We could’ve been having this conversation in the same room.

Justin James Lopez:
In person! But I bring this up because I think that there’s this aspect of risk adversity, and even looking at the list, there’s almost this psychological barrier that’s created. And we talked about this before, in a previous conversation. You, over time, you didn’t make the big jump from Oklahoma, I’m just going to move to Japan. You built up your risk capital, almost. And you started to slowly use it. And as you slowly used it, you were able to build up more and more. Talk to me about how you did that.

Felicia Williams:
Yeah, that’s a great question. It’s so interesting because I can imagine what it was like when you were thinking and going through the paperwork for London. And I’m sorry that you didn’t choose to take the leap, but I will say there’s never a bad time to take that leap. So I will say I look forward to you coming, if not visiting London, then maybe having an adventure here for the long term. For that risk capital, it was just such a great term for that.

I suppose some of this is probably also due to birth order. Oh, I’ll just throw that out there. Okay, so here’s the facts. Here’s the real deal. I was the only child for 10 years. Imagine me, this mouth, this attitude, 10 years. My parents, they were just like, “Oh my god”. And I was like, okay. And I was their first kid. And you’re just used to, I think a lot of only children are used to just constantly pushing the bounds. You’re just testing boundaries, constantly. And, hopefully, if you have a family that’s open to that, of course, yes, I got the pushback, and sometimes you push it a little too far, but I was lucky that I had a family that was both able to help guide me and nourish me in that way.

But yeah, I tested a lot of boundaries. And then I got my younger siblings in, and I love them very much, though I still sometimes question the wisdom of that choice. No, I love them. I love you, I love you guys, I’m so glad you’re here. But then it’s this interesting thing where you start to see yourself in comparison to other kids, whether it’s your siblings or people around you.

So I’m a scientists daughter, and I don’t know if you know this, but there is a gene that is expressed in populations of people. It’s a small percentage of people. And this gene is, essentially, it motivates a small group of the population to migrate. So there’s a portion of the gene pool, these are your people who are very home bodied. So if you know that person from back home who’s like, “You know what? I was born here, I’m going to live here, I’m going to die here”. It may not necessarily be about any specific opportunity, or any specific people. It might be that’s literally written in their DNA, that they are very at home, very happy, very, they feel very comfortable, very at peace where they are. And then there are people like me, and there’s the joke in my family that I got two of these genes, they’re just like, you itchy feet, you’re like, “I have got to get out of here”.

And I think I’ve known that since I was a kid. But of course, it’s easier said than done. And so I think, for me, a lot of what I started to do as I started to get more independence, especially going into high school and things like that. I was joining various different clubs, different activities, whether it was arts or music or the sciences, et cetera. That gave me more of those opportunities to expand my horizon, to start to get out of my comfort zone. I think I was always pushing myself out of my comfort zone.

And finally, when it came to actual travel when I was at Tulsa, I became very close to a lot of the international community there. Because again, I always was very keen and interested and curious about the international community. So I was with a lot of the international kids, I got very close to a lot of the Japanese international students.

And I really wanted to go to Japan because I was like, “Ugh, I’ve been dying, I want to go”. I didn’t come from money and my family, they couldn’t really support those things. And actually I think that also probably led to a lot of my ingenuity. I think at times when my family would be like, it’s not so much about no, it’s about we can’t. We can’t afford it. It’s not something that we can prioritize. So then I found ingenuity in trying to find my own way through some of those challenges, especially financial challenges. I wasn’t a bad singer. I’m not going to sing on this podcast, but I will just say that.

Justin James Lopez:
It would be a lovely gift.

Felicia Williams:
And I entered in the university talent show and I won first place. And first place came with $500. And if you’ll believe it, back then, because a long time ago, I know my voice doesn’t sound that old, but I’m old. A long time ago, a round trip ticket from Oklahoma to Japan was just about $400. And I used that money to basically visit my friend.

Justin James Lopez:
Now at the time, was this the first time you had ever traveled?

Felicia Williams:
It wasn’t the first time I’d left Oklahoma. I had gone and visited family outside of Oklahoma. But it was the first time I had left the country and I got my first passport. Multiple people told me, and this is, okay, we’re all together. fam. Okay, so this is just all of us talking right now. Multiple people in my family told me, “I don’t know if you want to go to Japan, because we think that they’re probably racist out there”. And I was like, “Oh my God, please no, like relax”. I was like, £I’m sure I’ll be fine. I will be fine£. And you know what? There are racist people everywhere, that should not stop people from taking the opportunity to go to another place. And there’ll be plenty of people who will welcome me with open arms. And that is what happened.

I went, I had a fantastic time. It was about two weeks, it was over Christmas. And honestly that kick started a lot, for me. From then it was just, that was a huge step for me. And from there, I just kept taking those steps, I just kept taking those moves. My first job was in New York City. When I transferred schools, I went from Oklahoma all the way up to New York. My family joked that I went as far away as I possibly could.

And then from New York, I got a job in the city. And then I left New York for a job living in Paris and Montreal. Then I bounced hardcore west, sideways, to Seattle. And now I’ve bounced hardcore to the east to London, or west. Keep going west if you believe in a round earth. But yeah, I’ve been moving all over the place, but as you said, it’s been intentional, but it’s also been easier with each move because the last one was a stepping stone for me.

Justin James Lopez:
Yeah. And constantly pushing that boundary, I see a trend here of being that only child and pushing the boundaries in your home, and now you’re making the world your home and you’re consistently pushing those boundaries. So, I want to get real here for a second, right?

Felicia Williams:
Sure.

Justin James Lopez:
We have, what we consider, and I say we consider because a lot of us have not left America, we do have that, I don’t know if it’s we have that gene, or we just haven’t built up the risk capital that we’ve been talking about. We believe that we have a unique Black experience in America. But you have a really interesting perspective from living in so many different countries, and really spending time immersed there. What have you seen as the changes between your Black experience existing here in America, and shifting over to these different cultures that are radically different, in some cases?

Felicia Williams:
That’s such a great question because that is something that comes up quite a lot since I have moved to England and the UK. And because so much of Black culture, first, just to say, and I think we should always say and remind everyone, that Black culture is not a monolith. There are Black people all over the world. There are multiple countries that are Black majority, and those experiences are very unique. At the same time, it is also important to understand and deconstruct the fact that American Black culture, it is a very pervasive, and I don’t mean that in a negative way, but it has a global reach that no other community, no other Black community, on the planet has. So when people from communities outside of Black communities think about Black culture, it is often that they think about American culture as that representation, because American Black culture is so strong in terms of global dominance.

And that can create some very interesting conversations that I have had, in terms of even deconstructing Black culture inside of the United States. I’ll give you an example. So I grew up in the south. I grew up in a country community often I was the only one, okay? I was the only Black chick. It wasn’t even just whether I was a Black girl, I was literally the only Black person in a lot of the spaces that I was in. And some of that was based on the community I grew up in, so again, out in the country, and Oklahoma is a predominantly white community. But it was also compounded by the fact that my parents, being that only child, that first child, they were throwing me at everything. They were like, “Okay, what’s she going to be? Okay, we’re going to throw her at dance, and softball, and singing, and orchestra, and languages, and art”.

So I was being thrown around to all these places. Now, of course, I very much appreciate that from my parents. It’s given me a lot of rich background that I’ve been able to draw on. But it also meant that I was in these variety of spaces that I was not encountering a lot of other Black folks. As I got older, I started to encounter other Black folks from different communities. And that was a struggle for me, because I couldn’t always relate to their experience. And that’s just obviously inside of the United States, I definitely got the, “Oh, she sounds white, she talks white”. Because I didn’t grow up in an urban environment, and I mean urban broadly. I wasn’t near a city. The fact that I grew up in the country and I could not relate to an urban environment also seemed to be a mark against my Blackness, my ability to relate to the Black community.

Interestingly enough though, as I became more and more, I want to say, successful in terms of my career, the more I was sought out as a representative of the Black community. So I’ll never forget the monumental change between my middle school experience, where I was essentially, I suppose, a Black pariah, all sorts of things being called at me, Oreo, things like Black on the outside, white on the inside, despite the fact that both of my parents are Black. It’s really fascinating and really interesting. But I still carry some of those self doubts, I suppose, at times, depending on which communities I’m part of. And then as I have expanded my experience, both in the United States and then inside the United States and abroad, continuing to see that delineation of what my Black experiences, again, not suburban, very country. It’s so interesting. Sometimes I talk to other Black leaders and they’re like, “Oh, the Wire”.

And I’m like, “Oh, okay, like, for real?” When they finally did Watchmen and they were talking about the Black community in Tulsa, I was like... oh, there was an all Black cowboy movie. I think it was something with Idris Elba, I can’t even remember, but I was like, “Ugh”.

Justin James Lopez:
Oh, The Harder They Fall?

Felicia Williams:
Yes, yes. I was like, “Ugh. Finally”. But serious, that representation matters. And so then, you get outside of the United States, and then you have Juneteenth, you have Martin Luther King, you have the civil rights movement that we talk about here in the United States. And then I’ve got all of these Black British people around me and they are like, “Yeah, I don’t relate to the story of African Americans in terms of the story of slavery. I grew up in Nigeria, I grew up in Ethiopia. I did not have that. My relationship to my ancestors is through wind rush. They came over to build the UK after the war”.

So when I’m in a company, at an American company, especially when it comes to tech, whether it’s Meta or Google or Amazon. When Black leaders at these companies talk about the importance of Juneteenth, or they talk about the importance of Martin Luther King, I don’t disagree with them, those messages or those people being important, but I don’t relate. And I don’t feel like I’m being seen. And so I tried to pay as much attention to those things as possible, because I remember how that felt for me, when I was the only Black girl, maybe in a room, a sea of white faces, or the only Black girl in a room amongst the sea of Black folks who had, in the United States, who had a very different experience growing up than myself. And feeling like, yes, we share the same color of skin, various shades of melanin, but it doesn’t mean that our culture is a monolith.

Justin James Lopez:
It’s really easy for us to forget that, because we always filter the information that comes into our world based on our own experience. And it’s very easy for us, from a psychological perspective, to ignore the experiences of the other people, because we’re so busy saying, “Look at me. I need to be seen,” that we almost ignore, and this is so interesting because we come into the world from the perspective of “I want to be seen”. But in the process of doing that, we almost don’t see the other people, which is a really interesting phenomenon that, where we don’t have to jump into here. But I think that’s really, really beautiful. And I think you bring up a really good point, is that experience does change very radically based on the perspective that you’re standing from. But it’s important, as you mentioned, I think in another interview, it’s important to run into people and put yourself, and expose yourself to other people’s perspectives, so that you can broaden your own perspective.

And even from a design perspective, from a design perspective, the more you start to consider the different points of view of other people, you start to create more holistic, inclusive designs.

Felicia Williams:
That’s right.

Justin James Lopez:
And you’ll start to look at problems differently. And as you look at problems differently, you start to create more unique solutions to those different problems. When you are thinking about one thing, and I know that this is maybe difficult whenever you go, you have to give me only one thing. But one thing that you could give the younger version of you, as far as a piece of advice.

Felicia Williams:
Sure.

Justin James Lopez:
What would that be? And that younger version of you is all of the listeners here, that are like, “Hey, I don’t know if this is something that I could do”. And I mean that in the most holistic sense of everything that you’ve accomplished, going from this small city, knocking down all of these different barriers, living in all of these different spaces, and not just physically, but from a corporate standpoint, from a game designer to a producer, to design directors, and in so many different of these companies that most people only hear about on the news, what would that be?

Felicia Williams:
I’ll start by saying that, I think it’s important for all young people to understand the courage and having the courage to do something, is understanding the risk and doing it anyway. Having courage in your decisions, in who you are and what you know. And that is a significant thing to cultivate in ones self. And I feel like I had a lot of courage, but if I were to give myself some advice, if I would get in that time machine, I would also try to counsel myself to be more, I suppose, kinder to myself, maybe. I think it’s easy for us to forget that amongst all of the expectations that the world has for you, whether those are good expectations or negative expectations, of all the standards that people hold up for you, the standards that you hold yourself to are always going to be the highest. They’re always going to be the most challenging.

And I remember once, it was very stressful job. I was putting in 150%, as I usually do. But I was running up against barrier after barrier, and I remember one of my managers saying to me, “You know, Felicia, sometimes you don’t have to try so hard”. Now, when this manager said this to me, I was like, “What? No, what are you talking about”? I was completely offended. Probably wasn’t the right way to say this, but what I think he was trying to say, which I actually try now to think more about, is understanding that it is not always the best move to put in 100% of your energy into a thing. Because you need to understand how much energy you’re getting back from a thing, how much you’re putting in versus how much you’re getting back.

You don’t have infinite resources in your time, your attention, your priorities. You don’t have infinite resources. This is one of the things we talk a lot about in careers, is about burnout. You don’t want to burn yourself out. I think someone says, the shiniest stars burn brightest? Or something like that. You know what those stars also do, they implode. Okay. They explode. They burn the dust.

They don’t stick around, okay. And that’s not to say that you shouldn’t try hard, but sometimes you do need to take a step back and evaluate, of all of the things that you want to achieve, what are the things that you need to be putting most of your attention into? It can be really tempting and exciting to chase all of the butterflies, and all of the shiny things, and want to be great at all of those things.

But inevitably, if you peanut butter yourself across too many of those opportunities or too many of those things, you’re not going to be great at any one of those things. And you’re going to start stressing yourself out and thinking, “Ugh, what’s wrong with me? What am I not doing? What are the things that I need to be doing to be fixing this”? When in fact, you’re probably just tapped out, you’ve tapped yourself out of resources. And so, that’s probably what I would say to myself. Be more mindful, be kinder to yourself, prioritize. And sometimes you don’t have to try so hard. Dial in. Yeah. Dial in. Phone in.

Justin James Lopez:
And of course, to close this out of bet on yourself, right? Again, betting on yourself was a person. That person would be named Felicia Williams.

Felicia Williams:
That’s right.

Justin James Lopez:
Thank you for joining me, again. This has been an amazing conversation.

Felicia Williams:
Oh, thank you so much. This was really fantastic as well. And hey, you need to come over to London.

Justin James Lopez:
Yeah.

Felicia Williams:
We’re going to have a tea. We’re going to get you back on this track, man. We’re going to get you on the track.

Justin James Lopez:
We’ll do it. Let’s do it.