No Ceiling Season 3 Guest: Dami Odunewu

Local women share their journey to the top of their professions and the challenges and triumphs they faced along the way. They’re rewriting the script on success and there’s no ceiling.

Dami Odunewu is my guest for the third episode of No Ceiling Season 3. She’s the founder of Purpose Connect, a software that takes a new approach to hiring by eliminating the resume. A company motto reads: We’re on a mission to make hiring more human. Dami says the idea comes from her own story. When she found her calling, she wanted others to find theirs too. Her life’s passion is in providing equitable access to health care. Growing up in Nigeria, she was a witness to the consequences of a system that required payment before treatment. Her medical missions nonprofit, Divine Missions HC, pays for life-saving treatments in third-world countries. In this episode, we talk about finding meaningful work, celebrating diversity and living in Nigeria. Below is an excerpt from our conversation.

Christine Temple: Where does your passion come from for creating this ease and removing these barriers from great employees and great workplaces?
Dami Odunewu: That sort of is tied with what I consider my purpose in life, which is health care. There is nothing as great as knowing why you’re on earth, what you want to be doing on earth. We spend over 60% of our lives working, why would we want to spend it anywhere else but somewhere that’s going to fulfill us? That for me started with discovering my purpose with respect to health care and getting access to health care to individuals and communities where people can’t really afford health care. Many third-world countries, for instance, you have to prepay for your treatment. Even if it’s the difference between whether you’re going to live or die, if you don’t prepay, they’re not going to do anything. For me, all my life and until I die, I’m going to work to provide access to health care to people who need it around the world and here locally. My first job out of college was at CoxHealth, and I didn’t take that decision lightly. Every step of the way for me was: How does this get me closer to accomplishing this big dream of providing access to health care to people who need it most? I get in the workplace, and I feel like I’m well positioned to continue to work toward that. I find that my personal objective in life now is aligned with my employer’s objective, mission and vision. But then, I see co-workers all around me who don’t even know why they want to be there, who don’t mean to be there. One of my favorite things to say is: Be where you mean to be or you’re just going to be frustrated. You’re not going to look forward to Monday. That’s where the drive came from. I’m living proof that if I can have 100% fulfillment in my place of work, anybody else can do that. It’s a partnership between us as employees and employers, and until we begin to look at it that way, we’re just going to have that crazy “find a new job” cycle.

Related: No Ceiling from SBJ Podcasts