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.

For you: What passion do you have that solves a problem for other people?

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.

For you: Where may you be overcomplicating your contribution to the world? Is there something people are already asking you for that you can begin to offer now?

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.

“If I met me, I would want to date me,” Knowles wrote. “If I met me, I would want to be my friend. I would like me. Now I just had to meet me.”

For you: When you make a list of your failures and then a list of your wins, what do you notice about yourself?

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.

For you: How can you reframe your differences as assets instead of liabilities? Where is there strength in your unique experience and story?

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.

For you: Have you made your passion for what you do an excuse for overworking?

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.

For you: How connected is your self-worth and identity to the work that you do?

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. The sewing skills she learned from her mother during childhood emerged later in the form of Knowles sewing costumes for the members of Destiny’s Child and launching her own fashion brand. Her short-lived high school singing group inspired how she helped manage her daughters’ music careers. When, in her early twenties she had to leave an exciting job working at a makeup counter in Los Angeles to return to Texas to care for her ill parents, she would later use a bit of that expertise to build her successful beauty salon in Houston. 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.

For you: What lessons can you glean from past seasons of perceived failure? How can you build something better and more informed on the back of your past experiences?

8 – Don’t Count Yourself Out

In the book, Knowles shares a number of her financial and personal setbacks, including how she and her first husband filed for bankruptcy after receiving a significant tax bill. She also shared how at one early point in their journey, Destiny’s Child’s lost what they thought was going to be their big break when a production deal fell through. 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.

For you: What goals have you given up on due to temporary circumstances? Where may it be appropriate to try again?

Though she’s known for her famous progeny, with Matriarch, Tina Knowles has carved out a notable new lane. Her memoir details a life story that is as instructive as it is memorable.