How Immigrants Can Reframe The Exhausting Narrative of The American Dream

Navigating Culture | Sharing The Stories of Bold, Brave & Badass Immigrant Women Creating their Dream Life

What does it mean to make it in The United States of America? So many of us were sold the dream that making it means we need the huge house, the million dollars or the flashiest car.
But could ‘making’ it mean something else entirely?
Meet Johanna Vizmanos, an immigrant from the Philippines who thought coming to America would be the answer to all the frustrations she felt in her mother country.

As a doctor’s kid, her father wanted her to study for a safe and stable profession. But no matter how much he tried, Johanna had her eyes set on the Internet’s Big Lights. She wanted to work in social media, but just couldn’t find a way in her home country.
So she moved to the USA. Except moving here was not the instant success story that some of us are told it will be. Instead Johanna had to work. As a barista, a cashier, a server…

In all this time, she never gave up and started pitching and eventually getting pitched by clients to produce social media campaigns. Finally, it was happening, and Johanna used the momentum she was experiencing on social media to launch her own lipstick line, Kolorete Cosmetics. That’s right, our guest today is launching the FIRST-EVER Filipino cosmetics line in the USA.
When you ask Johanna what she would change about her story, she responds with a simple, ‘nothing”. She is grateful for the journey because she is creating what she is meant to create in this world.
I love Johanna’s story because I think we can all learn from it. Instead of seeing success as the end-goal, as the final show-y trophy, we can find success in knowing that we are doing the work everyday to figure out what we really want to bring into the world and living that out.

Listen to this episode if you want to learn why your success is in discovering your own path, and staying committed to living it out.
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Learn more about Johanna below:
Instagram - @johannavizmanos
Learn more about Johanna's beauty brand, Kolorete Cosmetics below:
Instagram - @koloretelips
Website - www.koloretecosmetics.com