When Nicole Alvino was 23 years old, she was given power of attorney to buy a $400M Turkish power plant.
As part of Enron CFO Andrew Fastow’s SWAT team, Nicole saw first-hand the collapse of Enron, including the fraud and conspiracy charges against her colleagues and the bankruptcy of the company.
If in Nicole’s shoes at that time, I would feel confused, angry, and distrustful of corporate America. And while Nicole did have some of those feelings, the experience eventually brought her a sense of clarity about what exactly she wanted out of her career — the kind of clarity that many of us aspire towards.
Listen to our conversation with Nicole here, on Spotify, or Apple Podcasts.
Here’s a quick run-down of the episode:
Our guest: Nicole Alvino, Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of SocialChorus
Career highlights: Studied Economics and Japanese at Vanderbilt, was on the SWAT team for Enron’s CFO, attended Stanford’s GSB, founded a company in the health and wellness space, founded SocialChorus (where she works today) which is on a mission to help companies work as one
What the interview has got us thinking about: What makes some people more risk-tolerant than others?
If you like Nicole’s episode, check out our interview with Ming Zhao, which delves into how Ming eventually found happiness in her career after losing her sense of belonging.
Unlike Nicole, for Allen Xu, the author of today’s blog post, there hasn’t been a single, life-altering experience that has brought him clarity on what he wants out of his career and life. In fact, he’s still figuring it out, through a process that involves working with his therapist, journaling, and tapping into his child-like sense of desire.
“What we want: personally and professionally, it’s a question that leads us through moments and decisions big and small. For the ambitious, it powers us to work harder, longer, for our goals; for me, it was the drive that propelled me first to and through Stanford, and then to a job in the Boston Consulting Group’s Washington D.C. office. But how often do we stop to check whether those goals are still aligned, with the “want” that birthed them in the first place?”
Read about how Allen is learning to tune into his “want” voice.
Allen is pursuing his JD-MBA at Yale Law School and Yale SOM, focused on the intersection of health and housing access. Before grad school, Allen worked in Washington D.C. as a consultant at BCG and led growth strategy at HarrisX, a market research startup. A proud Kansan, Allen can be reached at allen.xu@yale.edu.
If you’re curious about the research on job satisfaction, check out 80,000 Hour’s analysis of 60 studies on what makes for a dream job. They boil it down to six ingredients for finding fulfilling work and discuss why following your passions and avoiding stress can actually lead you astray.
As always, thanks for being apart of the How I Got Here community! If you have feedback for us, please email us so we can keep improving.
- Lara
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