Courageous career choices | Dupsy Abiola | TEDxUCL

Hi, my name's Dipsy and I want to talk to everyone here today about making courageous career choices. I want to talk to you about this because I think that what you do has the capacity to change not only your life, but the lives of so many. And often, that's facilitated by the choices that you make when it comes to deciding what you want to do in work. Being courageous about your career choices makes you a superhero. It doesn't mean that you have to do the most bold thing that you can imagine. Sometimes, bold things come to you by simply making the statement in your life that you're going to be present, and you're going to be a global citizen, and you're going to take whatever it is that you have at the moment and use that to make the most positive impact that you can make for yourself and others. A couple of years ago, I quit my job. I was working as a commercial barrister. I enjoyed my job, but I went down into our senior partner's office. And I like to say in a blaze of glory, but mainly it was just, hi, I quit. I said to him, I'm going to quit my job. And he said, oh, right, what are you going to do? Are you leaving for somewhere else? I was like, I'm going to do a startup, to which he was like, OK, brilliant. That's different. And I was like, yes, I'm going to do a startup because I feel really passionate about helping young people start their careers. The journey and the seeds of the idea for my startup came from my little sister, who was a UCL student. And she was struggling with deciding what she wanted to do with her life, which I think is one of the most important things that we all think about. And so I thought to myself, this is a big issue. And I'm not wrong, because the international labor organization says that youth unemployment is one of the biggest challenges that the world is going to face in the next couple of decades. Young people have the most amazing opportunity to do so much good. We're seeing advances in technology and the opportunities that that brings all the time. But we're also seeing that there is a difficulty in deciding what it is that people want to do. So I thought, I'm going to do this. I'm going to go out there, quit my job. And so I told my friends. And they said things like, amazing, that's such an interesting choice. And everybody knows that interesting choice is code for your nuts. Look at this lunatic. She's just given away a fairly lucrative career to eat ramen noodles and sit around in her pajamas, like trying to change the world. As nuts as that might be, I decided that it was a challenge that I was desperate to take, because with the time that I spend working, I wanted to do the things that I loved and was passionate about. Now, Steve Jobs has been quoted about many things. But one of the most famous quotes that he talks about is that the only way to do great work is to love what you do. But I would go a little bit further than that. I would say it's not enough to just love what you do, because I liked being a lawyer. I mean, I loved it. You get to help people. You get to do things. I think it's important to also push to do things that challenge you, that excite you, and slightly scare you, and to make a difference with the time that you have here. And that often means putting yourself in situations that you're not necessarily prepared for, but somehow you'll find a way to deal with. We've heard on the stage before that 90,000 hours of your life will be spent working. That's such a long time. Let that bed in, 90,000 hours. That's about a third of the time that you spend awake during your lifetime. So you really do not want to spend that time half comatose at a job that you hate. I mean, we've all been there, right, where we've been sitting with our friends, and they're like, ugh, Monday, ugh, ugh, ugh. I mean, we've all been there, right? Sunday, and then the shakes begin to set in around the time of Downton Abbey. You don't want that to be your life. I mean, it's toxic. It's even deadly. I mean, I laugh, but the image is funny. But people literally can work themselves to death or die from the stress caused by work. There are thousands of people who die every year in China, literally, from working. So given that work has such a capacity to change your life, you've got to think you only live once, and you've got to decide to yourself right now that I'm going to be bold about the choices that I make every single day because I just can't bear it otherwise. When you work, it can either be a jail sentence because, let's face it, it's decades, right? I mean, literally, murderers get out faster in terms of how long you're going to spend. So it's either a jail sentence or if you love what you do and you're doing things that push and inspire you, it's a get-out-of-jail-free card. And that's why when people, and I've spoken to tens of thousands of people thinking about starting their careers now through or read their aspirations through the company that I created, it's so important to think a lot about what you do, not just at the entry point of your career but throughout the entire time, not just for yourself but for all the people around you and all the things that you can do for the world. And the good news is you get plenty of chances to get it right. I mean, it's no longer the case that people will leave education and then work at one company and one job for the rest of their lives. You have 15 times to try and get it right, apparently, because you get up to 15 jobs probably in your lifetime these days, which means you can afford to make mistakes. And people do. And what people see as a mistake is just the beginning of an evolution to another thing. So I say to people, take the risky road. And by risk, I mean have the courage to do the things that not only are interesting to you and that you'll be good at, but also the things that mean that your life will be meaningful. You never know what's going to happen. Now, I must admit, occasionally, when it's dark and I'm alone, I think to myself, oh my God, what the hell have I signed up for? If things don't go well, I'll be that person who comes back with my tail between my legs saying, yeah, do you remember that time when I started that crazy startup and everything went terribly wrong? I cried myself to sleep a lot of times. But much like I don't know what's going to happen with my company, or to be honest, with the rest of my life, the thing that I do know is it's not about the end result, it's about the journey that you're on, and it's about doing the things that make you feel good every single day and present. Often people think that people who have the guts to buck the trend, the daredevil, similar to, you know, my friends literally thought that what I did was the equivalent of pouring gasoline on myself and running streaking across what was left of my career. But I don't think that that's the case. I think that being a daredevil is about having the courage to stand up for what you believe in, even if it means coming up against big systems. Daredevils aren't just people who decide to make these choices, they're the people who stand up and say, I believe in something and I want to change something, and they think of themselves as one person, but one person can make massive changes in the world. When we think about rebels, we tend to think about people who, you know, don't think too much about stuff and just want to break down systems. We don't think about the fact that even when you're really young, your voice can matter, and the things that you can do matter. Recently, the youngest person ever has been awarded a Nobel Peace Prize. She was just being herself, living her authentic truth, and she's changed the lives of many people for the better. I don't know what she's going to do in her life, but she's already touched so many, and it's just the beginning of what she's capable of doing. Steve Jobs also talked about rebels, crazy ones, misfits, deviants who blur outside the line, but in each of our career choices, we have the ability to be daredevils. We have the ability to take small steps, and those small steps can suddenly gather momentum and take us to places which we never thought we would get to. In this picture, there's Nelson Mandela, which obviously, I mean, everybody, you'd have to have been living under a rock and hit yourself on the head with it to not know who he is. He was a person who felt passionately about things. Doing, in the course of his environment, he decided that there were things that he felt passionately about, and he made those changes, putting his liberty at risk. People often don't see what they do in the world as linked to a particular profession, but what you do as a career, and when I talk about careers, I'm talking not just about the work you do on a day-to-day basis. It's about what you put out in the world. Now, standing next to Nelson Mandela is a person who's actually my hero, who many of you probably don't know about. That's my father. My father was affectionately known as MKO in Nigeria. He grew up in a very, very small village in Nigeria, and was very poor. He then studied quite a lot, and managed to get a scholarship to study in Scotland, and he became an accountant. Many people think that that's not thrilling, but he loved being an accountant because he loved the ability to take facts and figures and make businesses grow. But despite getting those qualifications, he took his first bold career choice and decided to move back to Africa, to Nigeria, and he was offered a very lucrative job working for an international company. Now, at that time in Nigeria, you had it made when you got to work in a great job at one of these companies, but you weren't given the opportunity to be a stakeholder. It was just not done at the time. And when my father asked whether he could be a stakeholder, he was told, you'll get a great paycheck, but that's not something that we do. So he did something that was pretty scary at the time, and he told them that he wasn't gonna take the job. He ripped up the contract and he said, you know what, I'm gonna go off and do my own thing, because he believed that being a stakeholder in the value that you're creating was incredibly important. And so even if he was going to fail, he believed it was better to try and build something so that he could affect the lives of the employees who worked for him, and also affect the ecosystem that he lived in so he could invest in the community. Fast forward a couple of decades, and my father was one of the most successful entrepreneurs in Nigeria at the time. He created thousands of jobs. He invested in infrastructure. He created universities, schools, funded education, and he felt very passionately that being an entrepreneur was about more than just building company. It's about building life. And he decided that it was more important to fight for the things that he believed in and try and go against things that he didn't. He loved education. He hated poverty. He loved opportunity. He hated oppression. So despite doing very well, he took his next bold career choice, which was to set aside his businesses and continue with his philanthropy. But he felt more and more that it wasn't enough just to contribute economically to the system and trying to make people's lives better. He believed that politically, it was important to have freedom and democracy, which at the time in Nigeria was a pipe dream. Military dictatorship was the standard, and he believed that that was something that had to change. So he became an unlikely democratic activist. Anyone who knew my father would say that he was always joking, always laughing, but this is one thing that he was very, very passionate about. And at great personal risk, he decided to push for democratic elections in Nigeria. And in the early 90s, he won by a landslide. This was unheard of. A boy from a small village who came from nothing, he built up all of those businesses, and he was beginning to start the dream of creating a better future for himself and the others who were around him. Now, unfortunately for my father, after that, things became very dangerous. He was eventually detained, and unfortunately, he never made it out of detention because the military dictators who were the force for oppression that he wanted to fight against weren't going to allow freedom at that stage. The last thing that my father said to me, I was very young when he went to stand up for the result that he had managed to achieve. I was young, but I knew that what he was going to do was both dangerous and I was scared. And I said to him, how can you go and go against these very dangerous men? You know, you're a businessman, you're a former accountant. There's nothing that you can do about this. You've tried your hardest. And my father said this to me, and I'll never forget it. He said, in life, the only thing that you can do is bold. We don't know what the outcome is going to be, but we do know that if you have the capacity to do good things, and you feel strongly about them, it's not about the outcome, it's about the journey. It's about standing up to do the things that we believe are right. And he said, you don't forget that. Irrespective of what happens, you don't forget that. And so every time I feel afraid about the choices that I am making, or every time I speak to someone who says, I'm not sure what I can do, and I'm not sure I can make a difference, I think of my father, because I was really privileged to have known someone who was a normal human being who just took a couple of decisions, and the wave of change and circumstance came against him. We now, because of my father, have a situation where Nigeria is a democratic nation. He never got to see that, and there's many changes that need to be made there. But he is proof that if you make bold choices, and if you live courageously, there's no end to what you can achieve. And like you say, you only live once. So with your 90,000 hours, I beseech every single person who's in this room to think about not just what they can do right now, or where they're going to go, but to do something that's meaningful to them, because in doing something meaningful, you affect other people's lives, and you never know where you're going to go. And I believe that every person has the capacity to make bold choices, and it's not about the outcome, it's about the journey. So thank you very much for listening to me. Thank you.