Heather Overcoming obstacles

The hardest part of my career has easily been joining Google.

I joined in 2002 when the company was quite small.
All men for the most part, I was the only woman in the room most of the time.
And the way I got through it was to find that thing that I wanted
to be the expert at, find the thing I wanted to achieve.
And to really focus on that every day, break it down into small pieces,
celebrate your milestones when you hit them.
And then at the end, I had achieved something that no one else in the team
could have, they had all tried and I was the one who got it done.
And so I get to sort of reflect on that occasionally and think, yeah, I did that.
Every time a packet passes between an end user's computer and
Google it crosses a barrier that I put in place for the first time.
So I got more and more interesting projects and
people began to rely on me more and it really helped me overcome the shyness.
It helped me overcome my questioning of whether or
not I belong here because I actually got to contribute in a meaningful way.