This is my first article in years and my most personal one to date. What a difference a year makes. I hope that this article will give anyone who reads it a sense of how important it is to understand one’s self and be guided by values, as well as the value of building a support system of trusted friends and confidants.
At the start of 2020, I was physically lost roaming the Medina in Casablanca and mentally lost without a sense of direction in my life. Two weeks prior, I had received a third rejection out of three MBA applications I had submitted to begin graduate school in August 2020, and suddenly I had no idea where I was headed. I was working in Management Consulting at the time and was well on track to receive a graduate school sponsorship offer from my Firm in a few months, but there was suddenly no graduate school admission to be sponsored. I knew I could apply to more schools, but something about doing that didn’t feel right. I gave myself a few days to grieve — rejection always hurts — and luckily, I was surrounded by family as I was on holiday with my brother and his wife when the third rejection email came. Their words were comforting, but I needed space to think. Over the years, I have found that I do my best reflecting in unfamiliar territory and so, I booked a ticket and boarded a flight to visit Morocco for the first time where I planned to get lost in my thoughts.
Before I ramble on, this article is about 2021 and not 2020, so I will move quickly through the next few episodes. I am writing this article hoping it inspires someone, and because after spending so much time in my head in 2021, I am eager to share what I have learned from my most testing year personally and professionally. These learnings have allowed me to reaffirm my values as a human being and to ensure that my values guide every decision that I make in my life moving forward. I will also give credit to those who have contributed to my introspection in ways beyond what they can imagine. I hope that this article will give anyone who reads it a sense of how important it is to understand one’s self and be guided by values, as well as the value of building a support system of trusted friends and confidants.
Back to January 2020, I left Morocco with a renewed sense of purpose after a week of reflection and immersion in a foreign culture. I had no idea yet where I would be going when I left my Firm that summer, a decision that I decided would remain unchanged, but I knew what I wanted to look for. And I was invigorated by the clarity. A few months down the line, I was having dinner with a friend and mentor, Adam Kendall, at a restaurant in Sierra Leone and mentioned to him what my goals were for the next few months. I had worked with Adam four times over my three years at our Firm, so I knew that he understood what motivated me in ways that others would not. I was right. Adam knew of an opportunity that he thought would be the perfect fit for me and so connected me to my soon-to-be employer. A few months later, I was on a flight to New York.
This article is about how my year in New York has shaped me and what I have learned from it. I would say that the biggest contributing factor has been moving to a new city and being forced to spend so much time alone as I have mostly worked from home. In my old job, I would travel alone to a new place every three months for a week or two to reflect on how my life was progressing and what direction I wanted to steer it in. In that sense, 2021 has felt like a long holiday abroad where I managed to get a year’s worth of reflection.
Another contributing factor was my desire to begin to think long-term with my decisions. My twenties have gone exactly as I wanted them to. I worked for an organization that accelerated my professional development and I found fulfillment in my work. I traveled the world and made significant progress towards my goal of visiting thirty countries before I turned thirty. I began to build a support system of people I trusted and loved so dearly. I was very happy to plan my life three years at a time when I left university, but suddenly, I felt the need to change that at the start of 2021. I have always felt like age is really just a number, so I am not pressured because I am approaching thirty. Instead, I want to begin making longer-term life decisions with intent. Where do I buy my first house? Do I want to settle down with a partner? Who with? Where do I want to settle for the next 5–10years?
Some would say life happens the way it does for a reason. Sometimes I believe this and other times I don’t. Either way, moving to New York when I did now feels like life was happening as it should have. Maybe not during some low points in the year, but certainly in hindsight. Over the past few weeks, I have gained some clarity that has given me a renewed sense of optimism and purpose, and I have written this article to share my biggest lessons from this whirlwind of a year. I have shared two lessons below — one personal and one professional.
- PERSONAL: Do not focus on just ‘finding’ meaning in life. Instead, ‘forge’ meaning, and use that to build identity.
Sometime in August 2021, I rang my friend Manuel Escandon to rant about how lonely and frustrated I was feeling in New York. Most of the time at least. I recognize that I am an extrovert and I feel most invigorated around people, but I get my energy from engaging in meaningful conversations and not just engaging for the sake of it. I was growing frustrated because I felt like I didn’t have enough meaningful relationships around me in New York in the way that I did back at home. I had a good friend stay with me over the summer which helped a lot (more below), and so I felt the void rush back as soon as he returned to school in August.
My conversation with Manuel was not where I learned this first lesson, but it was where I started to reflect on ‘meaning’ and ‘intent’. I spoke to him about my time in New York and how a dearth of meaningful personal connections was making things feel meaningless. A few other things bothered me at the time, and I shared these with him in detail, including many that may be too personal for this article. He then spoke to me about what psychologists call the ‘four ultimate existential concerns ‘— death, freedom, isolation, and meaninglessness. I may be wrong, but I think one of his points to me was that life in itself has no meaning and it would be a lost cause to search for it.
A few weeks later, I was binge-watching videos on YouTube and landed on a Ted Talk by Andrew Solomon titled ‘How the worst moments in our lives make us who we are’. Like me, Andrew’s perspectives on life had been shaped by his travels, which he had written about in his book titled ‘Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change’. Over the course of the video, Andrew shared anecdotes of how his struggles and the courageous people he had met over the years had shaped him. However, there was something he said towards the end of the video that caught my attention: “forge meaning, build identity”.
I immediately recalled my conversation from weeks ago with Manuel about how life in itself was meaningless and it dawned on me that instead of finding meaning, I needed to create it — or forge it as Andrew had very nicely articulated. I needed to acknowledge the things that mattered most to me in life, my core values, and turn those into intentional actions every day that would give my life meaning. This lesson led me to take a big decision that I had been avoiding for a while. I think I already knew that I would take that decision, but I needed to rationalize it in my head. And right there, I had my answer. I was forging meaning and taking a decision to build ‘my person’ that was underpinned by ‘my core values’.
This article has been written in real-time and so it remains to be seen how things will turn out, but through my past experiences and those of others, I have learned not to underestimate the power of having a renewed sense of optimism and purpose.
2. PROFESSIONAL: Clarity on what you want to do with your life actually comes from doing. As you ‘do’, take the time to recognize when you have to learn and when you have to take what you have learned to create value. Many times, you will be lucky to get both at once.
This is a long one, but credit to the friends and mentors from whom I have learned this — Kemi Onabanjo-Joseph and Toni Oki. My conversation with Kemi actually happened very early in 2020, just before I left my old Firm. Kemi was a Junior Partner at the Firm who I looked up to and was constantly inspired by. We had worked together for a little over three months in Ghana. She loved to travel like me and had a goal of visiting thirty countries before she turned thirty (sound familiar?), which I believe she surpassed and turned into forty before forty. She also balanced being a Junior Partner with being a blogger and a model, and she was (and still is) very popular on Instagram for her Christmas giveaways.
In my earlier years at the Firm, I learned from Kemi that I could ‘kill’ it at work and in my personal life, and I could allow both intersect seamlessly to truly create work-life balance, while also setting boundaries where I needed to. More importantly, I could be completely unapologetic about it. As someone who firmly believes that I can have it all and strives to do so, it was great to have someone to look up to who I believed had it all.
When I decided to leave the Firm, I was excited about the future but anxious about what I would do next. I wanted to move to Rwanda to work for the Government’s tax authority, but also had an opportunity to move to Europe to work with an International Organization that focused on financing for healthcare. I was also well advanced in the process of transferring to my Firm’s London office for a year, while having parallel conversations about moving to New York. At the core of all the opportunities was a desire to move abroad while staying true to doing work I found fulfilling. My conversation with Kemi and her profound advice didn’t come before I decided on what to do next — it came as validation after I had decided: “It is easy to worry about whether we’ve made the right decision when we do, but just keep going. The clarity on what you want to do will actually come from doing things, and not just thinking about them”.
At the time, I took it as gospel because it came from someone who I looked up to and whose perspectives I trusted, but it made much more sense some months into my new job when I was forced to text Kemi to let her know that she was completely right. I was working with one of the most inspirational leaders I had ever met — Damilola Ogunbiyi — while also doing work that fulfilled me most days. Other days, I was left frustrated by certain aspects of the job. If I never had that conversation with Kemi, maybe I would have been more bothered by it, but all I could ever think about was the phrase: “clarity comes from doing”. It was okay to love certain things about the job and hate others. If anything, I was learning more about what I wanted to do long-term and why.
During the summer of 2021, my friend Toni lived with me for three months while he interned in New York. Toni and I also became friends while we were both working in Ghana in 2018, and I believe that we bonded over similar professional interests and some shared values. Over the years, I have grown to trust his counsel and the summer living as flat mates in New York gave us plenty of time to debate about life, work, relationships, sustainability, football and many more topics.
During one of such conversations, we spoke about our experiences since moving to America and how they had shaped our perspectives on finding fulfilment in our work. Like me, Toni is passionate about economic development but had spent the summer interning at a very ‘Corporate America’ private equity firm. Given our similar interests, it is no surprise that we have followed somewhat similar career paths to date, and with my growing interest in building more finance expertise, I sought to understand how he managed to find fulfilment in this work given that it was more profits than people.
I don’t remember what he said verbatim, but it was something like “I have learned to recognize where I am at the moment and why this job is important for me at this time. I came here to learn, knowing that what I learn will empower me to create the value that I want in the future. Maybe I am not as fulfilled by my work as I once was, even though I find fulfillment in the learning, but I will also seek fulfillment in other activities outside of work”.
This conversation changed my perspective on how I think about my career and the many more years ahead of me. The clarity will come from doing, but it will also come from recognizing where I am at each point. Take the time to recognize when you have to learn and when you have to take what you have learned to create value. Many times, you will be lucky to get both at once.
