A Purpose Bigger Than You: Finding Success through Learning, Helping, and Loving - Featuring Paolo Gallo

Paolo Gallo, author of, The Seven Games of Leadership and The Compass and the Radar, brings a wealth of experience from his leadership positions at the International Finance Corporation, The World Bank, and The World Economic Forum. 

Paolo stresses the significance of aligning our decisions with our genuine passions and skills. He also underscores the importance of clarity in discerning our priorities and recommends embracing confusion as a regular aspect of self-discovery.

Listen to the episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, Podbean, or your favorite podcast platform.

Please check Paolo Gallo’s books The Seven Games of Leadership and The Compass and the Radar, and use the affiliate links to support Pity Party Over at no additional cost to you.

How do you navigate life transitions while maintaining a sense of direction and purpose? Share your story!

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TRANSCRIPT

Stephen Matini: Have you always had clarity about the trajectory, what you wanted to do? How did  it work for you? Because for a lot of people, they find out who they are and what they want to be later on in life. Even myself, I take all kinds of detours and turns and I learned about myself as I went, but your career seems to be so very clear, very almost like if you knew where you were going, at least that's the impression that I got.

Paolo Gallo: I believe I had, but not because I'm particularly clever, but because I had clarity in what I wanted to do in my life since my early twenties and without tending to many things. But I started to study economics mainly by default because they said, oh, law, I think it's too boring, medicine, I faint if I see a drop of blood engineering. No freaking way. I don't understand mathematics.

So I chose economics mainly by default. So it wasn't really totally convinced choice when I started university, but as I was studying this subject, all of a sudden things start to make a lot of sense.

You study economics, finance, strategy, marketing, accounting, human resources and law and sociology, and all of a sudden I start to see a puzzle that fit together quite well. And then in the third year, I studied human resources and organizational behavior and bingo, I said that's exactly what I wanted to do.

And I haven't changed my mind since then because I've always been passionate about developing people and organizations. And you may see that the last 30 years, that's pretty much what I've been doing in different contexts, in different organizations. But I have this clarity of thoughts and clarity of feelings about what would be my trajectory since my early twenties.

And now that I'm in just turned 60 recently, I like to think that I've been doing what I loved for the last 35 years and I've not regretted.

Stephen Matini: Amongst many different experiences, and that you work in human resources really a super high level, you work for the World Economic Forum, for the World Bank. What is your fondest memory of the time, something that you may have accomplished that somehow is really dear to your heart? 

Paolo Gallo: Listen, more than accomplishment, perhaps, there is a story that I also quoted in some of my speeches now because I start working for the World Bank. And yeah, I was happy, but I wasn't a hundred percent yet into the role. And a few months into the role, my boss asked me to go to Africa and been to Ghana and then to Senegal.

Our first trip to Africa, I remember the driver said to me, listen, I'll take you to a village where I come from. And so we went to this village and then he showed me, said many years ago in this village we didn't have a well, and my mother used to walk seven kilometers each way just to get two buckets of water. And it was polluted water and it was a dangerous journey because it's full of a wild beast.