Let’s Rethink This Chooses Meta J Mereday as January’s “Impact Journalist”

Meta J Mereday is a Civilian First Responder, better known as a Domestic Warrior, with a family background rooted in the military with even deeper and even deeper roots in community, social and economic justice by way of advocating for veterans and other under-served constituencies. How best to bring attention to these diverse areas – and so much more – than to write about them to bring awareness and, ideally, positive change?

That predilection dates to grade school, where teachers were able to channel her creative talents and energy through writing and leading initiatives. They found they could keep her busy by supplying her with sufficient quantities of pencils and paper in addition to artistic and collaborative projects. She tutored students in her class and younger students and served as Office Assistant. This multifaceted formula continued during her years at Roosevelt Jr - Sr High School (Roosevelt, NY) where she mastered numerous activities including All County in Music, playing three musical instruments for Orchestra, Concert and Marching Bands and served as Sports Broadcaster and Editor for the Yearbook. She was named Class Speaker and Most Artistic.

 While pursuing her degree at San Jose State University’s (San Jose, CA) School of Journalism and Mass Communications, she continued to freelance and incorporate her creative talents to design photo layouts and promotional pieces for aspiring publishers and local business owners. There, she refined her writing and editing and graduated with a BA in Advertising and Speech Communication. Years later the school honored her in a blog profiling her work and community service. (Editor’s Note: SJSU is my Alma Mater)

“I am cause-activated,” she says. “Injustices motivate me.” Derogatory remarks by some NFL officials while she was attending a sports event motivated her to become a member of the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) and to be Co-Founder of the National Black Public Relations Society, Inc. Upon her return she returned to New York, she attended Hofstra University (Hempstead, NY) to add an MBA to her profile to add to her credentials and focus on economic empowerment to “raise all boats” to potentially equally levels.

Fast-forward to 2013

We have to get here quickly to get to today’s accomplishments, saving me from having to catalog past numerous heroic efforts (For example, she became known as a 9-11 Civilian First Responder and Front Line Media Correspondent during her volunteer service at Ground Zero immediately following the attacks on September 11, 2001 and reporting onsite to various media outlets including live for a television station in in Columbia, SC.). While advocating for diverse business inclusion for the rebuild of lower Manhattan and seeing the need to build up veteran-owned businesses to create jobs for unemployed veterans; she launched VEDI, Inc (Veteran Entrepreneurial Development Initiatives) as a New York State not-for-profit to address a growing need within the Veteran Owned Business and Service Disabled Veteran Owned Business (VOB/SDVOBs) for growth and development training. VEDI, Inc has become a national resource for veteran business development and veteran community advocacy.

VEDI, Inc is a task force member of the National Veterans Business Development Council whose mission is to increase the certifications for veteran-owned businesses and to help grow their operations and create jobs to reduce veteran unemployment.

Now, let’s get back to her journalism chops. Meta was recognized by the nonprofit Military Veterans in Journalism (MVJ) recently when they selected her to be included in their Expert Directory in recognition of her longstanding involvement in reporting on veterans issues and her advocacy for veterans and their families.

Lastly, Meta’s participation with the collaboration Veteran Mission Possible (VMP) is a story in itself. Like several other “Solution Providers” that found their way to our site, she made submisstions to an initiative launched by the VA entitled Mission Possible to see if she could secure a share of the $25M in grant funding. There were 1,370 competitors (VMP was one of them). She (and we) were not among the 40 chosen. However, when she discovered that VMP had started a community to give people “a second chance to make a first impression,” she came right to our doorstep. And, discovered that we were/are a key affiliate of MVJ. Having yet another opportunity to showcase her talents to uplift proactive solutions to combat the issues impacting our veterans and their families – and our nation as a whole – was right where she needed to be.

How could we not select her? 

After a group of naked mole rats was deprived of air for 18 minutes, they stopped moving. But when the air returned, they sprang to life as if nothing had happened.

Other rodents, like field mice, perish when deprived of air for just 45 seconds. Why is the naked mole rat different? They can survive so long without oxygen because they can switch to a plant-like metabolism when deprived of air. An adaptation they’ve gained over millions of years living in tunnels deep underground.

Most land animals can’t live deep within the earth as the naked mole rat does. They don’t have a process that allows them to function without air. Most people fail to reach their goals because they are also lacking a process. They lack a process to produce change.

In fact, most people use an approach to change that’s almost guaranteed to fail

I call it the Failed Change Equation. Here’s what it looks like.

Motivation + Information = Change

When we want to change, we assume that if we are motivated to make the change and have the necessary information about how and why to make the change, then we will change. But how well does this work when we try to change a hard-to-change behavior?

For example, Jen wanted to stop yelling at her kids when they did something she didn’t like. She would come home to a house that was a total mess with the kids’ jackets lying on the floor, spilled food on the table, and papers and books were strewn about (at least they were reading).

She had decided to stop barking at the kids to clean up when she got home. And for a few days, she was successful. But after day three, she’d had it. She started getting upset and yelling again.

Why was it so hard for Jen to change?

She was motivated to change. She felt guilty about yelling at her kids. And she wanted to have a healthy relationship with them. She had information about why this change was useful. She’d read parenting books and knew yelling wasn’t a good long-term solution. Despite having the information and motivation, she wasn’t able to sustain the change.

So if Motivation plus Information does not equal change, then what does?

The answer is the Complete Change Formula. It is not about adding anything. This equation involves subtracting one element.

Motivation + Information – Beliefs = Change

You still need motivation and information, but you subtract beliefs. That’s what makes lasting change possible. When Bella wanted to start a business but failed to take the necessary steps due to fear of failure, she eliminated beliefs that stopped her, such as “I’m not smart enough,” “I’m not good enough,” and “If I fail, people will look down on me.”

When Jermaine wanted to stop spending double the time required on his copywriting before handing it over to a client, he eliminated beliefs like “What makes me good enough is doing things perfectly” and “I’m not good enough.”

Bella and Jermaine were able to change these behaviors after these beliefs were eliminated. They used the Complete Change Formula.

And what happened to Jen?

Jen eliminated a few beliefs in one-on-one sessions. She eliminated, “If kids don’t do what a parent wants, they don’t respect the parent,” “It’s bad to have a messy house,” and “If kids don’t obey, they are doing it to spite you.” After these beliefs were gone, she reported that she was not angry when she came home to a messy house.

But, she was still committed to solving the problem, so she came up with games to get the kids involved in keeping things clean. She also kept a chart with points to reward them for their progress. As a result, the house got cleaner (but not perfect), but also she had much more fun with her children. (By the way, I don’t teach parents to use points and rewards, she came up with those strategies on her own.)

But can change really be that simple?

I know that it sounds hard to believe that just one element can unleash lasting change. But think about how many people believe that giving information and drumming up motivation will produce change even though it’s pretty easy to do both. I can easily give you a book or article about what to do, and I might even tell you stories to inspire you to do it. That’s not hard to do.

The information might stick, the motivation probably won’t. Change seems hard because we keep trying failed methods over and over, and it starts to feel hard after a while. The reason changes don’t stick is despite all the information and motivation, limiting beliefs are still there, humming in the background, ready to take over when we aren’t focused on the change anymore.

But when the beliefs are gone, they can’t take you off track anymore. You are free to choose a new way to behave. You don’t have to keep wedded to old habits. You can do something different.

Summary

We fail to produce lasting changes in our behavior due to the failed change equation — Information + Motivation = Change.

We can make change last by subtracting one element — beliefs.

We need to eliminate limiting beliefs because beliefs will take us off track once we are no longer focused on the change.

Naked mole rats can live so long without air because they have a mechanism that allows them to do so – they can switch to a plant-like metabolism when needed. You, too, have a hidden inner mechanism to produce change. The ability to eliminate limiting beliefs. With that ability, you can change just about anything in your life.

It’s that terrible/joyful holiday period when we push aside our pains and disappointments to join with the joy of the season and imagine a coming year full of wonders and possibilities.

Of those pains here in America, none is greater than that of the specter of suicide, especially those among our military veterans — now averaging 44 per day. 44 per day!!!

Can we ever hope for a time when those numbers abate, and the tragedies recede? Yes, if we just take lessons from the much-beloved movie classic, It’s a Wonderful Life and bring them into practice in our own lives. Let me draw from that story.

Continue reading at this link.

After earning a Ph.D. in human genetics in 1987, I chose to enter the nascent biotechnology industry rather than pursue conventional academic science. Venture capitalists in Cambridge, Mass, and elsewhere had caught wind of revolutionary genetic discoveries in university labs and academic medical centers. They saw a new gold rush opportunity.

The credo, then and now, is to bet big money on ten startup biotech companies, and if just one develops a high valuation in a buy out or IPO, presto! Instant millionaires! While saving patient lives too!

I joined a small army of scientists, engineers, patent attorneys, and young CEOs who set out to radically redefine human disease and treatment from the DNA on up. We knew that once we delineated the molecular pathway of any disease, we could prevent it with early detection and target treatment right at the root cause; ‘targeted therapeutics’ like the “Silver Bullet” for cancer, remember? All this transformation was enabled by loads of venture capital. Those were heady days. We intended to bring medicinal chemistry (pharmaceuticals) out of the dark ages. I contributed to early game-changing products and technological innovations. Some of the early companies and products are still impacting people’s lives today.

Most public life science companies back then and today have zero revenue. That’s right, companies trading on NASDAQ value their stocks based on intellectual property (patent applications) and potential revenue. These are high risk investments. It seems only right that those early investors in life-saving technologies would or should expect high returns on these investments. Some of the early investors became, and are still becoming, very rich from IPOs and acquisitions.

My colleagues and I asked, so what is wrong with that? In fact, as scientists, we felt that we should be well-rewarded for our role in inventing life-changing medicines, as some of us did.

There’s a but…

This 35 year-old biotechnology funding model should no longer be exalted because it’s now working against our collective interests.

Despite a tsunami of molecular knowledge generated by academicians and industry researchers concerning human diseases, we have developed drugs for only 10 percent of the roughly 6500 human diseases we know about — and at increasingly stratospheric prices.

I attribute this to two significant and important facts:

1. About 90 percent of human diseases are not addressed with medicines today.
2. any medicines that are developed are made available only because they can be priced for profit, not for the larger human needs they address.

We perverted the purpose of biotech companies by how we financed them. As is true in life, so it is in industry. You get the behavior you reward. And the process is addictive. It starts with a new company accepting high-cost early venture capital funds, followed by private equity and bankers doing IPOs and mergers and acquisitions, and finally the intoxicating experience of arriving in public markets. Everyone is financially rewarded. Except the patient.

High-cost capitalization

The behaviors incentivized by what I call “high-cost capitalization” include:

• Maximize prices, especially if the drug is novel or rare. David Axelrod saw something upside down in that thinking as he tweeted, “Your money or your life is a hell of a choice that people shouldn’t have to make.”
• Patient populations are framed as “markets” to entice the discovery of costly blockbuster drugs.
• Ignoring prevention and early detection technologies because they are not blockbusters.
• Trade secrets and price preservation are pillars of the industry
• Development and purchase of potential cures can be shelved to protect companies and shareholders if the profit potential is inadequate.
• Generated profits are used contrary to the purpose of furthering healthcare research. Only 7-15 percent of profits are reinvested in R&D for new products; the rest goes to executive pay, stock buybacks, marketing and sales.
• Lean efficiency is not a standard. As of 2022, it takes 10-15 years and about $1-3 billion to commercialize a new drug, positioning pharma in the top three most profitable industries on the planet.

Wake up!

In 2019, some colleagues and I said, “Wait! Are our labs in the business of forming companies so that we can ring the bell on Wall Street, or in the business of creating medicines that heal people? And if we want to work on any opportunity for improving lives such as repurposing old drugs for new disease targets (frowned upon) or any preventive or early detection test (no money in that), how could we ever get financed?”

Sometimes events collide with ideas.

COVID happened. We saw what our industry could do when it addressed an urgent need, as opposed to targeting a “market.”

We saw companies choosing to make low-profit vaccines, and doing it within a single year. Not for $3B! We saw how testing companies were immediately funded to create PCR and home tests to meet a healthcare need, not a marketing plan. They found ways to capitalize that effort — for the public good. We can now see that placing health above profit is achievable – and desirable.

We saw an effort to share all data and technical know-how globally. Government and private industry worked together to meet this emergency. COVID vaccines and therapeutics have remained private intellectual property, not placed in the public domain as were the polio vaccines in the 1950s. Nevertheless, with taxpayer support we now can have all the medicines America needs. And we can afford them too.

Is this socialized medicine?

If you are talking about the industry sector in which my company is located, then no. It’s “conscious capitalism.” Audacity Therapeutics does not need charity, nor government programs, nor social or public services. We believe that private industry can and should be delivering on the public’s need for medicine.

But we do need some rethinking to bring that about.

We need more biotech and pharma companies, like ours, that are organized to operate differently. Companies that are financially able to say “No Thanks!” to high-cost capital.

Audacity Therapeutics is so-named because we had the temerity to ask what if there were biomedical and pharmaceutical companies with a healthier primary purpose and duty that could:

• Develop effective therapies for untreated or under-treated human diseases, as many as possible.
• Demand capital efficiency and a culture of deliverables, not promises
• Focus on disease solutions opportunities rather than 10X return market opportunities
• Prioritize medically valuable products for patients rather than capital value to financial markets
• Guarantee that drugs are produced at prices affordable/accessible to all patients worldwide.
• Provide fulfilling jobs and contribute to a balanced and just healthcare economy

From this ethical framework, we aim to prove that quality healthcare can be both profitable and affordable.

For more details, visit AudacityTherapeutics.com