A Career in Search of Beauty

There is a sense of wellbeing when your job means to seek beauty. Especially if you are a creative person. Thus Paola Colotta has constantly searched for beauty in her personal and professional experience. She is committed to creating and promoting beautiful products and services, in the sense they are culturally stimulating and vibrant, as the Bocconi alumna – now Country Manager Italy and Iberia of Moleskine – defines them. “When you do a job that makes you feel good, at ease, you also achieve better results and arrive satisfied at the end of your day.” The fact remains that building a career is a journey, a progressive discovery of many factors that you need to learn to manage. Negative moments can happen (and do happen sooner or later), but “you should avoid experiencing them as failures, as moral stains you’d like to hide. You must think about them, and understand why they happened,” explains Colotta. “It is a process that helps you move forward and progress.” With a Bocconi degree in Economics for Arts, Culture and Communication and a Master of Science in Business Administration from the Copenhagen Business School, Ms Colotta felt she had to put “beauty” at the center of her life already as a student at Bocconi. “I met beautiful people with cultural depth and many interests. During that period, I became aware that I wanted to seek beauty in my professional life too,” confirms Colotta, who also helped curate content at the Radio Bocconi station on campus. With her Master degree she chose to specialize in communication and branding and her first professional experience was at Pomellato, an Italian goldsmith brand.

“I might not have said it at the beginning but I enjoyed working in that position. I interacted with customers and many other people on beautiful products that I got to know well. I was doing something that satisfied me and so the feeling of being at ease emerged once again, immersed in the beauty of the products I was selling,” explains the alumna. After that experience, she moved on to another jewelry company. After about 11 months, however, she understood that the new environment was not for her and, “even though I was already married and had a career, I took a sabbatical to travel for a few months in Nepal, Vietnam, Burma and Cambodia. Of course, I had savings that allowed me to do so, but it still took courage. I don't know whether another person would have made the same choice," says Colotta. She also created a fanzine during this period of her life, in support of a Nepalese orphanage. "In short, I needed to refresh my mind, purify myself and to replenish positive energy within me. Learning to contextualize the unhappy moments in my life, and give them the right weight by eliminating useless mental superstructures helped me to become more oriented towards the future, towards what can be beautiful again."

Today, Paola Colotta has been working for Moleskine for about eight years. In the meantime she has become a mother and has seen her responsibilities expand from the Spanish and Portuguese markets to the Italian one at the beginning of 2025. Regardless of her career, "I am and will remain at this company because I deeply appreciate it and fully share its values. In life, seeking one's own comfort and overall wellbeing is a choice that needs to be reaffirmed every day, we must remember this. The results are not long in coming."