Question the Script

My friend Brian is on the advisory board of a scholarship program for students of color at a major university. A theme he saw emerge across almost 100 interviews of high-caliber students of color from across the country — one I’ve seen echoed across campuses I’ve visited in the last year myself — was that they all already knew what they were going to do with their lives!

“They’ve been told by their parents and by their communities that there are very specific jobs that are successful. Jobs like being a lawyer, or a doctor. And so they have very well-defined scripts they come to school following. It takes them a long time to realize there are a lot more ways to succeed than they ever knew… We’re trying to encourage them to keep an open mind, for just a little bit longer, until after their freshman year at least.”

It’s the same story we heard from an illustrious Stanford grad. Aishetu Dozie, founder and CEO of Bossy Cosmetics — “a mission-driven women’s-empowerment company that masquerades as a beauty brand,” which recently celebrated having four products selected by Oprah Winfrey as being among Oprah’s Favorite Things — said that she struggled with the career shift she knew needed to make. Growing up in the projects of Cambridge with her single mother, an immigrant from Nigeria, she had a very clear script:

“I didn't come from privilege, so I had to work to make money. Finance was where the money was, so that's what I did for 20 years… Being a first generation American there's a lot of baggage — you are told what ‘the right way’ is. Coming from communities of color, you don't talk about pursuing passion. ‘You go make some money. That's what you do. If you have the opportunity, you go to an Ivy league school. Don't you dare waste that.’ So there's a lot of community that tells you what you should do.”

After a health crisis forced her to reevaluate the stress of her finance job, she came to Stanford to “unlearn a bunch of things relearn some new things: all the stuff that I didn't feel I had the privilege to do when I was much younger. I was like, ‘Okay look, we have a little bit of privilege in life, how do we think very differently?’ I wanted to move from being, you know, almost successful to having significance in life.”

Through the course of her fellowship, she discovered her purpose: helping other women build their confidence.

“I asked myself, ‘How can I live my purpose out?’ And immediately, the answer came, ‘The right way to do it is to get a job with a salary…’ But one day, while I was on a walk, I asked myself, ‘What would do if you could do anything? If there was no “right answer”?’”

While the circumstances of my birth and upbringing are different in many respects, I can relate to the sense of having a script for what the “right” ways to think about career are — for what the seemingly obvious '“right answers” and “no brainer” decisions are — and I’ve experienced first-hand how limiting those scripts can be.

But hearing stories like Aishetu’s, and many others, has given me a bit more permission to deviate from the scripted path — at the very least, to question it — and to redefine work in a way that I’ve found both liberating and purposeful.

Related: Paint & Pipette Presents: Aishetu Dozie
Related: Grant Permission to Deviate
Related: Redefine What’s “Work”

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