The Purpose-Driven Social Entrepreneur

by Karim Abouelnaga

  Starting a company is much like being on a roller coaster, with all of the ups and downs and twists and turns. It feels like one percent of your time you’re on top of the world and another one percent of your time you’re in the bottom of the bottom. The remaining 98 percent of the time you’re either on your way up or on your way down. Now, I try to stay humble when I’m at the top so that I have the strength and the endurance to pull through when I feel like I’m at the bottom.

  The next set of chapters will walk you through my reflections and my mindset at the beginning and beyond on my journey building and running my company.

  Chapter Seven

  Man in the Mirror

  “Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”

  —Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Every great book on purpose—and I am certain there are many—should start with a disclaimer, one that goes something along the lines of: “This book may or may not help you find your purpose. In fact, if you believe you have found your purpose after reading this book, please send the credits my way. If you are still lost in your search for purpose, that is okay. If you did not find your purpose, please do not give up. And lastly, if you believed you had found your purpose but later discovered that it was not and later find a better way to help others discover their purpose, just remember that all sales are final.”

  When it comes to purpose and meaning, we all want the same thing. We want to know that we were put on this Earth for some reason. We want something that is going to motivate us to get out of bed in the morning and do something.

  When it comes to discovering your purpose, there is a good chance you will be wrong. There is also a good chance you may be right, and right multiple times because you may have multiple purposes. One person who comes to mind when I think of the notion of multiple purposes is George H. W. Bush. While he found purpose in serving his country as the forty-first president of the United States, raising his son who later became the forty-third president of the United States is just as purpose-worthy. I am in no way saying that your kids have to be the president of the United States for it to count as purpose-worthy, but I am saying that raising a family or guiding the next generation of our youth is purposeful. Many teachers and youth advocacy workers have that privilege every single day.

  Knowing how high the stakes are when it comes to filling the longing desire to know what your purpose is in life, I thought it would be especially fitting to share with you one of the most sobering truths about success. I have seen shades of it throughout my childhood, my adulthood, and in the lives of other people. I have read memoirs about it and have heard many notable people reiterate it. That is, when you are rich and successful and happy, people will be drawn to you. When you are poor, unsuccessful and depressed, the people who were drawn to you before will not be by your side. This is true regardless of where you grew up or the social circles you maintain.

  Let’s start with one of the most valuable insights that I learned along my journey to the purpose-driven work and the purpose-driven life I lead. Keep the learnings in this chapter front and center as you reflect through the rest of my perspective.

  It was my senior year of college, and I would soon graduate from Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration. I had a full-time offer to work in Black Rock’s fixed-income portfolio management group following my successful summer internship. The offer was for a yearly salary of $70,000 plus a one-time signing bonus of $10,000. If I turned the offer down, I would be able to dedicate myself full time to working on Practice Makes Perfect. That came with zero dollars and a zero-dollar signing bonus. I would later discover that it would come with a lot of agony, lost friendships, broken promises, and demanding sacrifices on my behalf.

  Like most anxious college graduates, I wanted to make the best decision possible. After all, I would not be able to bounce back from a big failure as fast as some of my peers with more extensive family connections could. On one side, I was told that the time after you graduate from college is the best time in your life to take risks because you have the least amount of responsibility. On the other hand, I was told that it would be really dumb to turn down an offer where I could make that much money at a company that was so well respected at a time when my family had so little. The pressure caused paralysis, and I tried for as long as possible not to make a decision. If I’d had the perspective I have today, I would have made the decision so much faster.

  When we find ourselves in moments where we have to make difficult decisions like that, the most responsible thing to do is turn to someone we trust and get advice. In some cases, we even find ourselves deferring to an older person and asking them to make the decision for us. That sounds good and peachy until you realize it is your life. The only person who can make the most informed decisions about the things occurring in your life is you.

  At the time I was graduating, I had a couple of mentors tell me I was crazy to even consider my company as an option. If I turned down my Black Rock offer, I would never get that kind of opportunity again. It got to a point where I had mentors who were so passionate about the advice they were giving that it was not really advice anymore. They really just wanted me to do what they thought was best.

  I knew that if I took their advice, I might be able to continue to go to them until I stopped doing what they told me to do. But what good would it be if the advice was the wrong advice anyway? If I did not take their advice, they might feel like they had wasted their time sharing their perspectives. They might go as far as severing ties.

  Nonetheless, something did not feel right about taking the advice that would lead me to Black Rock right out of college. I started to believe that my mentors who were telling me to take the $80,000 offer to support my family did not fully appreciate the importance of the work I was carrying out or how I truly felt about my work. It sounds silly in hindsight that I was the one who was upset with them for looking out for what they believed was in the best interest of my family.

  However, it was in that moment that I asked myself: In 10 years, success or failure, will I be happy? The answer to that question really worked me up when I thought through the worst-case scenario, which was my standing in front of the mirror feeling like a failure and knowing I had let someone else make the decision for me.

  One sign of a great leader is someone who takes credit for their failures and owns up to their mistakes. In that moment, I realized that the first person I needed to be accountable to was myself. What the actual decision was going to be did not matter as much as who made the decision. The most important thing was knowing that I was the one who made the decision, because standing in front of that mirror alone in ten years as an unhappy failure who had made the final decision would feel better than standing in front of that mirror alone in ten years as an unhappy failure who had lived someone else’s life or listened to someone else about how I should live my life.

  The same is true for you as you read this book. Avoid the temptation to use my experiences as advice for your life or for finding your purpose. Instead, take it in as perspective. Understand that what I have done is one way. Doing it the same exact way may lead to a different outcome. What matters is not the outcome, but that it is the right outcome for you.

  I ultimately made the decision to turn down my Black Rock offer and to continue building my company. I have not had and do not foresee any regrets. Almost a year later, I was fortunate enough to find a mentor who would help me grow Practice Makes Perfect. His name was Jacob Lief, and he had founded Ubuntu Pathways during his senior year of college at the University of Pennsylvania almost twenty years earlier. During one of our first meetings, he gave me a spin on the “man in the mirror” advice when he told me, “You know your business better than anyone else.” Jake made it very clear that he would never tell me what decision I should make; that was my job as the CEO, because I knew my business better than anyone else
ever could.

  You know your life better than anyone else; do not let someone less experienced with your life make the decisions that impact and influence how you live. Instead, gather perspective and reflect. There are so many factors to consider when making a decision that we do not always have the time or the words to describe. In every decision, we need to consider the relationships impacted, the emotions involved, the potential outcomes and which we desire less than others, the historical decisions made, and the level of urgency. To adequately convey these things to someone else would take hours before they could give you the best decision. Instead, use the time you have with a mentor to learn from what they know best: their decisions and the outcomes of those decisions. Then internalize the parts that are most applicable to you to make the final decision.

  Today, I avoid people who advise me on what to do—and you should too. Instead, I find myself gravitating toward individuals who share their own experiences and insights, which allows me to pull parallels and make my own decisions. That is how everyone should live their lives: owning their own decisions. Focus on the outcomes, internalize the perspective, reflect on your own life, and own your final decisions.

  Chapter Eight

  Live on Your Clock

  “Live your life by a compass, not a clock.”

  —Stephen Covey

  By the time I graduated from college and people found out what I was up to with Practice Makes Perfect, I started to get requests to speak, mentor, and answer questions from people all around the world. Time after time, I would hear people say, “I don’t even remember what I was doing at your age, but I definitely was not changing the world.” People would comment on my young age, they would mention how impressed they were with me, some would flatter me, and others would talk about me like I was a Martian because of what I had accomplished. Time and time again, people would compare me to their lazy, unmotivated, undriven children. It was gratifying at first, but quickly became too much. I became annoyed that so many parents were judging their children based on a side-by-side comparison to me.

  In 2015 I got invited to give two small graduation speeches, one to the seniors graduating from the School of Hotel Administration at Cornell, where I got my degree, and the other to the kids graduating from the second year of their fellowship in a nonprofit called America Needs You, which I participated in when I was a sophomore and junior in college. By the time I got to the graduation speeches, I was so tired and fed up with comparisons that I made that the theme of my talk, not only because it was obnoxious to consistently have people compared to me but because we all find our purpose at different points in our lives. At any given moment, we might be in the middle of a life event or experiencing something that is going to eventually give us the clarity we have been looking for to move forward and act on our purpose. Here’s the talk with some minor tweaks so it is reader-friendly:

  Let’s talk about time. When people asked me about my theme for the talk and I said it was going to be about time, the first thing they did was laugh. If there is anything I am really good at doing, it is making sure I never have time, because I have used it all—every single minute of every single day. Then they laugh because they think that I am going to talk to you all about time management. And, of course, they know with all of the things I take on that I am probably not the best person to talk to you all about time management. So I won’t.

  And just for the record, I actually never planned on talking about time management, because I don’t believe that there is such a thing as time management or a time management expert. If there were, I would definitely hire them.

  See, the truth is we can’t manage time. We can manage our lives, but definitely not time. No matter what we do, the clock will always continue to tick. Isn’t that cool?

  No matter what we do, the clock will always continue to tick.

  Time is such an obscure concept.

  If you’re here today, you probably know that there is never enough time. And you’re probably hoping that my speech doesn’t run too long. Because how ironic would it be if the person speaking about time didn’t understand the value of it?

  Well, I do, so I’ll make my points quickly. Because this day and this time is all about you.

  When you graduate from the America Needs You program today, the one thing you need to understand is that everyone has an internal clock. And everyone’s internal clock is wired very differently. Some of your clocks will tick for a very long time, and others not so long. All of our clocks started ticking at different times, and they will likely stop ticking at different times too.

  Now you’re probably thinking, why is this twenty-three-year-old alum talking to you all about such a depressing topic on such a happy day? It’s because four years ago, or thirty-five thousand sixty-three hours ago, I was in your place.

  And it actually isn’t that depressing. I want you all to enjoy the same success I have been blessed enough to see since then. I want to prevent you all from making the one mistake that so many people our age do, and that is sitting there and drawing your life’s path based on the people sitting next to you.

  Do not take jobs or make personal decisions based on what the people sitting next to you are doing. Be your own person. Define a fulfilling life for yourself and chase it. Because fulfillment does not come from a job, from volunteering, or from working at a not-for-profit. Fulfillment comes from within. Fulfillment comes from understanding what you enjoy doing and what you do not enjoy doing and then increasing the amount of time you spend on the things you enjoy doing and reducing the amount of time you spend on the things you do not enjoy doing.

  The only thing worse than taking jobs or making personal life decisions based on what the people next to you are doing is comparing yourself to what the average person your age is doing. You wind up running through life and spending your precious time seeing where you stack up. You lose sight of the fact that we all have one life and that we were all put on this Earth for a reason. We can spend our time searching for that reason or we can define that reason. We can spend our time planning what we want our meaningful life to look like or copying what others have done.

  Try to avoid being a duplicate at all costs. If you do not have a goal or a purpose for your life today, I want you to leave this room knowing that your purpose or your goal is to make an impact, to make a dent in our world.

  Stay away from trying to compare yourself to others. Even more importantly, do not sit there and compare your life to the average person or the average life. If you do that, you will be average. The average person gives back. The average person does not make a dent. And if you were average, you would not be here today.

  You are all capable of so much more than average. In fact, you should all skew the average. Do not let the average define you. Each and every one of you has the capacity and the bandwidth to effect real change and make a dent in our world. The reality is that your clock may run much longer or much shorter than the person’s sitting next to you—and that is okay.

  It is not how many days or hours we have; it is what we do with those minutes and seconds that count.

  So do not waste the time that you do have thinking about the average path or your friend’s path. Instead, define your path.

  I used my time in America Needs You to build and sustain meaningful relationships with my mentors, the volunteers, and their friends. They opened my eyes to the possibilities. And to this very day, they have continued to support me.

  Two of them are in this room here today: Lev and Rob. And from each of them I learned something different. From Rob I learned that things do not just happen; you have to make them happen. In his words to me in an email we exchanged in 2011, he said, “Hustle never sleeps.” If you have had a chance to spend some time with Rob, you will know that it is a very “Rob” thing to say.

  And from Lev I learned that you need to follow your gut and that at the end of
the day, the most important person you have to answer to . . . is yourself, so do not live someone else’s life.

  Since my America Needs You experience, I have gone on to graduate in the top 10 percent of my class at Cornell, raised almost $2 million to advance summer education for economically disadvantaged youth who grew up like me, and directly influenced the lives of over five hundred children through Practice Makes Perfect.

  Lev, Rob, and I have a few things in common: we were all raised on modest means, have loving mothers, and have made a conscious decision to dedicate a portion of our lives to developing others, whether that be through America Needs You, Practice Makes Perfect, or Hunter College.

  You all have the capacity and the bandwidth to effect real change. Each and every one of you can make a huge dent in our world. And we need more of them.

  So again, do not sit there comparing yourself to what the average is or to what other people are doing. Your clock may run much longer or shorter than the person’s sitting next to you—and that is okay. Your one real obligation in this world is to be you. Be the most authentic and genuine version of you.

  So, when you graduate today . . . go ahead and compare averages . . . I dare you.

  Thank you and God bless you all.

  The first disservice is when people compare themselves to you and their kids to you. The second disservice is when you start to compare yourself to others. And the final disservice is when you begin to compare yourself to the average. The only thing you need to be concerned with is your time. Do yourself that service and start to frame your thinking through the lens of your time.