8 Life And Career Lessons From ‘Matriarch,’ The Tina Knowles Memoir

Earlier this month, music industry matriarch Tina Knowles – mother of music superstars Beyonce Knowles Carter and Solange Knowles – released her life story. Knowles’s memoir Matriarch offers an intimate and in-depth look behind the scenes of one of the music industry’s most successful families. But Knowles’s story describes not only the genesis of her family’s music industry fame, but also her family story. She shares the humble journey from poverty in Galveston, Texas to how she eventually became a successful business woman in her own right.  Here are eight life and career lessons from Matriarch, Knowles’ new memoir.

1. Tap Into Your Core Desire To Solve A Problem.  While she is well-known for helping manage her famous daughters, Knowles was a successful business owner in Houston before her daughters found fame. In the memoir, Knowles tells the origin story of her business success, and how despite her lack of formal business training, she tapped into her desire to make women feel beautiful. Building on that desire, she zeroed in on professional women’s lack of time to spend in hair salons. She built her first salon Headliners into an oasis for busy women, specializing in getting them in and out in record time, so they could get back to work. By tapping into her passion to make women feel beautiful and confident and working to address a clear problem her customers had, she was able to build a successful business which, according to her memoir, grossed half a million dollars in the first year.
2. You Already Have What You Need To Do Something Amazing.  Knowles tells story after story of how she and her family members turned their passions for sewing, beauty, or art into lucrative income streams. Her mother was a talented seamstress whose work kept her poor family afloat during Knowles’ childhood. She taught her daughter and other family members to sew as well.  While Knowles didn’t attend fashion or business school, she went on to later build her ready-to-wear fashion line House of Dereon into a fashion brand which was eventually acquired in 2011.
3. Allow Yourself To Meet Yourself.  After her first marriage dissolved, Knowles was overwhelmed by sadness, and decided to take a one-month sabbatical from work. Away from the demands of the office, she allowed herself to truly rest for the first time in her life. During this time, she enlisted a therapist to help her focus on herself and navigate the emotional fallout from her divorce. Her therapist encouraged her to make a list of both her biggest failures as well as her successes. By writing out the list of her wins, Knowles was able to see herself and her situation more clearly and begin to reclaim her sense of self worth. Her list of wins overshadowed her list of failures and sparked a new journey to self-acceptance and self-love.
4. Reframe Your Differences.  Throughout the book, Knowles frames her differences as the assets that helped her stand out and eventually make her mark. While she lamented her core insecurity that she wasn’t respected as a fashion designer, or that her lack of formal education made her a target for ridicule, she repeatedly illustrated how having a different perspective helped her to see what others couldn’t. Existing outside of the fashion establishment allowed her to take chances and make artistic choices as Destiny’ Child’s and later Beyonce’s stylist that contributed to their stage presence. The artists built their brands both on their musical talent and the signature style Knowles created for them.
5. Passion And Dedication Can Still Lead To Burnout.  Years after her famous daughters had made their mark, Knowles was still dutifully performing the tasks of Beyonce’s stylist and confidante, going on tour with her daughter, pulling together last-minute stage looks before each performance. The grueling work took its toll, and though Knowles says she prized the responsibility of motherhood and enjoyed sharing her gift for styling with her daughter, she’d neglected herself in her dedication to those roles. Exhausted, she embarked on what she called her “selfish era” and dedicated herself to exploration and self-care.
6. You Don’t Have to Work To Earn Your Worth.  Growing up in the segregated South, Knowles’s mother taught her that having skills that others needed – like sewing and dressmaking – could provide resources and protection. But Knowles inadvertently absorbed the idea that her work was her way to earn love. She wrote how she later had to unlearn this idea. Though she loved her work, as an adult she realized she didn’t have to work to earn her worth.
7. No Season Is Wasted.  One of the recurring themes in Matriarch is how the seeds planted in earlier seasons of her life as well as life lessons handed down from previous generations of women in her family eventually sprout and bloom.  Knowles’s journey clearly illustrates the principle that no season is wasted. What appears as a failure today may resurface in future years as a point of inspiration or the foundation on which you can build something new.
8. Don’t Count Yourself Out.  In the book, Knowles shares a number of her financial and personal setbacks.  Knowles’s story of resilience highlights the reality that while most people will inevitably face hardships in life, you can always begin again if you still have yourself.