Lean In

had to stay up all night spinning the tapes to input the data. When I tried to execute my final calculations, I took down the entire system. That’s right. Years before Mark famously crashed that same Harvard system, I beat him to it.
    When I graduated from college, I had only the vaguest notion of where I was headed. This confusion was in deep contrast to my father’s clear conviction of what he wanted to do from a young age. When my dad was sixteen, he felt a sharp abdominal pain during a basketball practice. My grandmother—good Jewish mother that she was—assumed it was hunger and fed him a big dinner. That made it worse. He ended up in the hospital, where he was diagnosed with acute appendicitis, but because he had eaten, they couldn’t operate for twelve excruciating hours. The next morning, a surgeon removed his appendix and, along with it, the pain. My father chose his career that day, deciding that he would become a physician so he could help ease other people’s suffering.
    My mother shared my father’s desire to help others. She was only eleven when she heard her rabbi give a sermon on the importance of civil rights and
tikkun olam
, a Hebrew phrase that means “repairing the world.” She responded to the call,grabbing a tin can and knocking on doors to support civil rights workers in the South. She has remained a passionate volunteer and human rights activist ever since. I grew up watching my mother work tirelessly on behalf of persecuted Jews in the Soviet Union. She and her friend Margery Sanford would write heartfelt appeals calling for the release of political prisoners. In the evenings, my dad would join them. Thanks to the collective efforts of concerned people all over the world, many lives were saved.
    Throughout my childhood, my parents emphasized the importance of pursuing a meaningful life. Dinner discussions often centered on social injustice and those fighting to make the world a better place. As a child, I never thought about what I wanted to be, but I thought a lot about what I wanted to do. As sappy as it sounds, I hoped to change the world. My sister and brother both became doctors, and I always believed I would work at a nonprofit or in government. That was my dream. And while I don’t believe in mapping out each step of a career, I do believe it helps to have a long-term dream or goal.
    A long-term dream does not have to be realistic or even specific. It may reflect the desire to work in a particular field or to travel throughout the world. Maybe the dream is to have professional autonomy or a certain amount of free time. Maybe it’s to create something lasting or win a coveted prize. Some goals require more traditional paths; anyone who aspires to become a Supreme Court justice should probably start by attending law school. But even a vague goal can provide direction, a far-off guidepost to move toward.
    With an eye on my childhood dream, the first job I took out of college was at the World Bank as research assistant to Larry Summers, who was serving a term as chief economist. Based in Washington, D.C., the Bank’s mission is to reduce global poverty. I spent my first nine months in the stacks of the Bank library on the corner of Nineteenth and Pennsylvania,looking up facts and figures for Larry’s papers and speeches. Larry then generously arranged for me to join an India health field mission to get a closer look at what the Bank actually did.
    Flying to India took me into an entirely different world. The team was working to eradicate leprosy, which was endemic in India’s most remote and poorest regions. The conditions were appalling. Due to the stigma of the disease, patients were often exiled from their villages and ended up lying on dirt floors in awful places that passed for clinics. Facts and figures could never have prepared me for this reality. I have the deepest respect for people who provide hands-on help to those in crises. It is the most difficult work in the world.
    I returned to D.C. with a plan to attend law school, but Lant Pritchett, an economist in Larry’s office who has devoted his life to the study of poverty, persuaded me that business school would be a better alternative. I headed back to Cambridge. I tried to stay socially conscious by joining the highly unpopular Nonprofit Club. I also spent my second year studying social marketing—how marketing can be used to solve social problems—with Professor Kash Rangan. One of the cases we worked on