Next Move, Best Move

Chapter 4Setting Long‐Term and Short‐Term Career Goals

Career Affirmation: I am positioning myself to become a leader in my industry.

In Chapter 2, I shared that I imagined myself graduating and becoming the modern‐day version of Shanté Smith and Conny Spalding in Two Can Play That Game (2001). When this film came out, I was still in high school, and I never saw it at the movie theater, despite the film opening at No. 2 in the United States during its first weekend. When I learned about this film, it quickly became a favorite in my DVD collection.

Two Can Play That Game has absolutely nothing to do with career and leadership development, yet these two characters impressed me. Ironically, the film does not show many scenes of the characters doing any work, except an event that Conny organized. However, that scene still focused on the relationship plot of the movie. But, I wasn't paying attention to the relationship drama during the film. To this day, I don't know why these characters made such an impression on me. I was a marketing major in college when I watched this movie, so I frequently dreamed of getting to the same place in my career as Shanté or Conny, but I had no idea what it would take to get there. In fact, it wasn't until I was 10‐plus years out of college that I started to think about how old Shanté and Conny must have been in that film. After I rewatched the film to make sure I had the storyline correct for this book, I noticed there is a quick one‐liner in ...