Alina Okun

I came to the United States as a child from Eastern Europe, and that shaped almost every decision I made early on in my career. When you're an immigrant, you think about security differently. You pick what's stable. You pick what will keep you independent.

For college, Pace University made more sense than NYU. The Co-Op program meant I would graduate with real work experience. For my major, I picked accounting. Someone told me that no matter the economy, accountants are always needed. I became a CPA, which opened doors and gave me a credential that would prove useful for decades.

My first job was at Arthur Andersen, one of the largest accounting firms at the time. Within six months, I knew public accounting wasn't for me. I stayed almost two years anyway, until Enron ended the company.

After that, I landed at Simon & Schuster. To this day, it remains my favorite job. Meeting authors and reading early releases was genuinely fun.

Then I had children, and everything changed.

It was the first time I started to make career decisions based on what would work for me as a mother. No travel. Predictable hours. Flexibility for daycare and doctors' appointments.

Before I had kids, it never occurred to me that I would have to choose between them and my career. I believed that in the 21st century, women had moved past that tradeoff. I was wrong. The social infrastructure in the U.S. doesn't support it, and my career had to wait.

I had my first child at 25. A few years later, it felt like my career was over before it began. Looking back now, I can see that season was actually short. Children are little for only a few years. At the time, though, it felt permanent.

About ten years into my corporate career, I knew things weren't right. I tried working with a life coach, but it didn't help. I needed to actually make a change.

So, I bought a franchise. The pitch was appealing: in business for yourself, not by yourself. I looked for one that would let me use my professional background, because I didn't want to throw away a decade of experience.

The training turned out to be the most valuable part. When you own a franchise, your job is primarily sales and marketing. After two business degrees and ten years in finance, I had never been taught either. That experience taught me more about running a business than any classroom. I call it my real-life MBA.

The franchise led to an unexpected job that took me to new countries and showed me how business works in different cultures. Even though I had no intentions of coming back to the corporate world, I stayed at that company longer than anywhere I had worked before.

Eventually, even the work I loved became something I dreaded.

The newness wore off. What remained was repetitive and uninspiring. I found myself thinking that no human being should be doing what I was doing. These tasks were meant for machines. Instead, I was becoming the machine.

In my last years there, desperate for intellectual oxygen, I enrolled in a doctoral program in Strategy and Innovation. I was working 60+ hours a week, spending another 20+ hours on coursework and my dissertation, commuting 12 hours a week, and raising two kids.

One evening, sitting alone in my NYC office at 10 pm, I had a premonition. I had to leave this job or something terrible would happen to me. My body knew what my mind wasn't ready to accept.

Three months later, I quit. No job lined up. No clear plan. Just vague ideas about finishing my doctorate, maybe consulting, possibly writing a book. Mostly, I needed to feel like myself again.

It took almost two years for the fog to lift.

I defended my dissertation in September 2019 and earned my doctorate. I expected to feel relief. Instead, I felt empty. I had pushed myself so hard for so long that there was nothing left.