E135: Precious Kolawole has learned how to debug the immigrant mentality

In this episode, I’m chatting with Precious Kolawole, who moved from Nigeria to Canada through the Shopify Dev Degree program, and has also seen her TEDx talk “How coding can change your life-and the world” go viral.

There’s a trap that awaits most immigrants. It’s subtle, and it sounds like self-awareness: Maybe they won’t pick me because of my accent. Maybe I don’t belong here. Maybe I should expect less.

Precious knows this too well. She describes sitting before a performance review at Shopify, telling herself to calm down, preparing for disappointment despite knowing she’d worked harder than anyone. When her supervisors told her she’d earned the highest rating, she screamed on the call. They paused, confused. Why this reaction? Because she’d already decided she wouldn’t get it. “It’s very funny how we think,” she says. “We think too much. We’re immigrants.”

But what makes Precious different is how she reorients herself. She traces it back to coding, specifically, to debugging. When you debug code, errors are problems that always have a solution, that’s if you’re willing to keep looking.

And that mindset has carried into how she approaches her immigration journey in Canada.

Precious and I dig into:

• Leaving behind a medical degree, a Microsoft Nigeria offer, and communities she founded

• How her family stays connected across four countries through mandatory Sunday calls

• Why Canada’s talent visa puts power in employers’ hands, and what that costs the country

• The Nobel Prize effect and the danger of letting success make you comfortable