I wanted to be in the circus.
Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
This is a standing question in The Guardian's decades-long The Q&A and also recurs independently in career and life interviews.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Farai Chideya, News & Notes, Leading Ladies series, NPR, 22 March 2007 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 195 →An artist travelling and playing with the Stones.
I didn’t want to be anything because I don’t look ahead. Even as a kid I thought it was pointless.
An obstetrician.
More from Mellody Hobson
View profile →So I started with this idea of could we do private equity totally differently than had been done? One of the major features of what we do is something called demand aggregation, where we go to corporations and what we call the CPO, the purchasing officers of those - chief purchasing officers. We developed a council of Fortune 500 companies.
I told our Ariel team, we are not going to limp out of COVID. We're going to slingshot out of COVID. We're going to be pulling that rubber band back and back, and we're going to be warehousing ideas, and getting work done, and so when this is over we will pole vault ahead.
Our business everyday is to make money for people. And I take it as seriously as doctors who are trying to cure cancer, because by giving people financial freedom, we allow them to do great things in their lives - from retire to send their kids to college, to buy their first house, to fund a business that they might want to start.
silver bullet is probably incentives. I think that if corporate America really said, "you're not going to get your full bonus if you don't have a diverse team working for you," I think we'd see some changes, really, really fast.
We would constantly have to move because we couldn't quite afford the places that we were living. And sometimes we got evicted. And it was just very, very difficult as a child to try to understand that.
I'd say be just like you. I once had someone tell me that I don't remind them of anyone that they ever met. And I took that as a huge compliment, which meant I was original. And so I would suggest to her that she speak her truth with her life, with her own sense of purpose and pursue her dreams.
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Bozoma Saint John, Gino D'Acampo, Angela Hartnett, Lee Child, Esther Rantzen, Jon Sopel
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