I have always heard Steve Jobs saying that people need to find their passion! I didn’t know what was mine, the only thing I knew was that when I will discover my passion it will definitely be my rebirth.
In 2007 I was finalizing my masters, I knew that I wanted a career in research because I have always known that I wanted to leave a legacy and add a positive value to humanity. I have earned a full scholarship to complete a Ph.D. program in Science at Paris XI University in France. So I went for it because this is what I wanted at that time. During my Ph.D. Although I was finding new results and publishing articles, I felt that I got bored staying in the laboratory analyzing and experimenting without meeting new people. I felt that I needed to meet new people and interact with them.
At that time the world economic crisis started, my professor told me that there will be a lack of funding for research projects. Many of my colleagues who used to work for top pharmaceutical companies got fired because of budget cuts. I said to myself that I didn’t want to become a budget cut, I want to be an asset, not a liability.
It just happened that the Univeristy sent us Ph.D. students, as part of the Ph.D. program, to visit LOREAL laboratories in Paris where I met this research director who was an AUDENCIA, Shcool of management graduate. We had a 5 minutes chat, where he told me that having an MBA allowed him to access high-level positions. So I decided to create more opportunities for my future and directly applied for a scholarship for the Audencia MBA program while finishing my Ph.D. I wanted to learn about the business world and how to be financially in control of my destiny. I got accepted with a scholarship into the program!
It was a huge challenge to work two programs in different cities (Paris and Nantes) yet I graduated both programs with honors in the same year. I still don’t know how I managed to do it, but I remember that I wanted to quit because of the pressure and huge workload, Yet something in me kept me pushing forward…
At Audencia, my business school, there was this great library called “Phileas Fogg” (the protagonist in the 1873 Jules Verne novel Around the World in Eighty Days). I used to spend most of my time at the library trying to locate biographies of highly successful people, I don’t know why, but I loved to learn how these people made it in life. On the library’s door, there was a quote by “Phileas Fogg” that I will never forget:
”People travel the world looking for something they don’t know and when they find it they discover that they had it in them all along; This is why the best place to travel to is within yourself”.
It wasn’t until I discovered Grant Cardone, that everything made sense to me! It only took him one youtube video where he said: “Don’t go to work, to work, go to work to prosper”. “Success is my duty, my obligation, my responsibility”.
Success was my passion all along! All I needed to do, was to go to the library to find it!
