Growth Mindset Passion

CEO Dreams

Shellye Archambeau

11.20.21

Shellye Archambeau has wanted to be a CEO since she was 16 years old. How did such grand ambitions begin? She traces it all back to a conversation with her high school guidance counselor.

Summary:

Shellye Archambeau has wanted to be a CEO since she was 16 years old. How did such grand ambitions begin? She traces it all back to a conversation with her high school guidance counselor.

Thuy

You write in your book that you dreamed of being a CEO ever since you were 16 years old. I had no idea what I would be doing at 16 years old. So, that's pretty amazing that you kind of had a framework already for your ambitions and goals. How did you know at such a young age, what your purpose was? What you wanted to be and what you wanted to stand for?
Shellye_Archambeau

Shellye Archambeau

It's interesting because I don't actually think I knew all of that. So, what transpired was, it was a conversation with the guidance counselor, the obligatory junior year conversation that says, do you want to go to college? If so write these applications, there's a whole process. And so she says, “Do you want to go to college?” And I said, “Yes,” she goes, “What do you want to do after college?” And I'm like, honestly, I don't know. I just want to be able to keep my thermostat at 72 degrees because my family never let it go above 68 in the wintertime. So she said, “Well, what do you like to do?” And I give her a lot of credit for this because I said, oh, clubs, you know, I love my clubs. I'm in French club, American field services, national honor site and even girl scout, but don't tell anybody, I mean all that and everything I was involved in, I ultimately rose to leadership. I loved leading these clubs. And she said to me, well, business and clubs are the same thing. You pull people together, go after a common objective and get things done. And I said done, I know what I want to do now. I want to run a business because I like running clubs. And then when I looked it up, the people who run businesses are called CEOs. So I said, great, I'm going to become a CEO and literally it wasn't this agonizing, okay, what is my purpose? What do I really want? It wasn't any of that. It was just as simple as picking it because it sounded like what I like to do. And because I was a goal oriented person anyway, I really just wanted a goal. Give me a goal of what I'm going to shoot for. And then I'm going to figure out how to go get it done and learn along the way how it works, what industry, I mean, all those other things I'll figure out and sure enough, it worked that way.