What Do I Currently Believe About My Career Life Domain? [Part 3] | 2/7/22

Another aspect to the Career LD that I believe in is to do something that’s never been done before. I didn’t always believe this but after starting to work at 2U, I realized we’re aiming to do something that hasn’t been done before. We’re not just trying to do something better than what other people have done. We’re trying to do it at a scale not seen before. That’s another reason that gets me excited to go to work. To achieve these things though, we need to have inputs that others haven’t had before. That means coming up with new ideas, building on others’ concepts and making it our own. There has to be a right balance between novelty and proven things. Not just on a company, strategic level, but tactically within my function and specific role.

I think my career for the rest of my life will be about doing things that have never been done before. I just know myself that I place too high of an importance on novelty that I’ll find boring things that have already been achieved. I’m just gonna keep coming up with ideas on a large company level as well as for my role and I’ll get a chance to implement those.

Which this is another thing I’ve come to believe about my career. That it’s a place for me to try out and experiment with different concepts and ideas. If I have so many ideas for personal projects outside of work, then work is just a way to express my creativity in a defined scope. Right now, that just happens to be laundry and marketing and franchising. But I will always continue to push the boundaries on what I can experiment with and what I have to follow a process or system on. When I experiment, it’s an expression of who I am. That’s what I believe a career should be for anyone. An avenue to express their full selves.

If you’re in a position where you can’t express your full self, then you’re not able to reach your highest potential. The person that you can become. And sometimes it’s not even recognizing that your highest self exists because of how numb you’ve become to how you’ve not been able to fully express yourself. It feels like you’re trapped in a system that you may not know how to get out of.

If we can’t express our full selves of one-half to one-third of our waking lives, then we’re literally only being a fraction of the person we know we can be. That’s why literally everyone who goes into a profession or has their income stream match with their passion, their happiness, fulfillment and even other areas of their life improves also. Even if they’re making less money, they’re more grateful for that time they get to spend doing what they like to do.

I have been on both sides of it of not being able to be my full self and being able to be my full self. I just look forward to the work days that much more compared to the weekends. Well, I look forward to each day equally. Monday’s excitement level = Friday’s excitement level. That’s what I believe it should always be like for me.

When all the days are equal from that perspective, then I start to blur the lines between ‘work’ and ‘life.’ It’s just all the same. My ideas personally infiltrate into my career and thoughts from the workplace carry over into my life outside of the job. That’s what I believe is best for me going forward as well. When I don’t know the difference between work and play. It’s just all one thing. One of my favorite quotes sums it up:

“The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his information and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he's always doing both.” - James Michener.

Even now when someone asks me what I do on the weekend if I’m not traveling or anything, I’ll probably say I’m working. Sometimes that’ll be on 2U / LL related things, sometimes it’s personal projects. But to me, it’s just time and energy allocation, management, and investment.

Another aspect that my brother told me when I was looking at applying for jobs was find an industry or mission that resonates with me and find companies who have that mission and then apply there. That makes sense holistically now as well in terms of attracting the right type of organization into my career path. I truly believe now that if you have a vision and expectancy that it will happen, then it won’t matter when it’ll happen. It’ll happen when it’s meant to happen. The thing is there may be other forces at play here if there isn’t an organization that you’re attracting.

And that’s that you may be on the path to creating one yourself. I believe that my current job at 2U will be the last position that I ever apply for again to be my main income source. I’m going to ride 2U / LL out hopefully until it successfully exits and then probably start my own thing. I may start my own thing on the side concurrently and see how that grows. And there may be a fork in the road that I’ll have to choose between 2U and the side thing to become my main thing. That would be a good problem to have, but alas I’m still (always) only in the present.

A macro thing is about creating a job or even an industry as a whole. There are so many jobs out there that weren’t there 10,20, 50 years ago. So there are gonna be even more careers out there in the next 10, 20, 50 years that aren’t a thing now. What I can do to prepare myself for those new jobs and industries is to acquire the skills and mindset necessary to capitalize on those new opportunities. Better yet, I can be one of those people and entities that creates those jobs and industries for others.

I believe I’m adept at identifying patterns as well as incongruencies, both macro and micro. I can then apply that perspective to put myself in the right position to create those new opportunities.

What this massive shift and creation of jobs also means is that there will be more and more people who have to be multi-careered, instead of the typical mono-careered. It’s not good enough to just be a master of one thing now. You have to have experience in many realms. So work is one way to get experience. But what I do outside of that scope is also an amazing opportunity to get experience. What I’m doing now with creating content and now a course and who knows what next is just putting myself in the right position to capitalize on the right opportunity. I’m preparing myself already for a multi-careered career. One career in tech. One in marketing. One in teaching. One in content creation. And that’s only at 25. Can you imagine when I’m 50?!

I believe that a career is an opportunity for me to look at something from the clouds as well as the dirt. Especially now, as I’m building an Organizational Operating System, to look at something from a CEO level. And then simultaneously to look at something from a frontline employee level, like a Driver, delivering and picking up bags of laundry. It gives perspective on how I play a part in making all that happen. The 30,000 ft view and the sea-level view.

Now a lot of these beliefs may be agreeable or non-agreeable to what my parents and their generation think, especially as immigrant parents. They have a belief that a career is a means to an end of getting settled, having a family, raising kids, and then repeating that. That you have to sacrifice your dreams for the dreams of your children. And that may be an implicit assumption of me, my brother and perhaps other people around my age.

However, I don’t necessarily believe that. If my parents sacrificed for my dreams, then isn’t it my duty and responsibility to follow my dreams?

If my ambitions are to help generations of people, then isn’t that something they can potentially accept if I don’t follow a path that they would have taken?

I don’t believe in a 9-5 job. Yes, those may be the primary hours in the day when communication may happen with people who are in the same company. But work can happen before or after as well. On weekends as well. Again, if both parties consent to that, not just one forcing another which creates a toxic work culture. But the lessons of a career and job go far beyond the scope of that job. And the lessons of life from 5 pm to 9 am come into play from 9 am - 5 pm. It’s all interconnected and intertwined.

I think part of my parents’ beliefs and sacrifice is that a job was the way to provide for the family. That you had to sacrifice part of who you are to get food on the table. And I’d like to think I would have done the same thing if I was in their position. The position I’m in now though is different.

If their duty was to provide a living, then my duty is to live.

They may not have been able to express themselves fully at the workplace. But I’ve been afforded that comfort and luxury. So shouldn’t I take advantage of that in the way that I see fit?

They may see success and comfort with bigger established companies. But I may see stagnation and confinement. Where they see pride and prestige with brand names, I see boringness and bureaucracy. On the flip side, with smaller companies, startups, where they may see risk and failure, I see potential and opportunity. I see passion, purpose, and connectedness with smaller companies because I’m closer to the end customer. To the value that’s being provided to someone. It’s not just a way of acquiring money, it’s an avenue for discovering who I am.

I feel for my parents generation because I feel many of them have at best put on hold, at worst not even know about finding out who they truly are. Isn’t that the point of life? The first and last question of life: Who am I? I’ve the luxury of taking time and energy to rediscover the answer to that question. I want to capitalize on that.

I don’t want to just be a part of an existing brand name. I want to help build one. And ultimately, I want to lead something that is created and has massive success. I want to build something not just new, but something that lasts. That’s legacy. I want to take the ideas from my mind and intuition and bring them to fruition.

There are also so many solopreneurs, freelancers, small businesses these days. And I think there will only be more and more of those. And there will also be fewer and fewer companies, conglomerates at the top that just absorb all these smaller ones.

Side note, it’s actually like the quote about specialization:

“Knowing more and more about less and less until you know everything about nothing.”

So how does that relate and translate? That there will be small businesses and solopreneurs that encompass literally everything. Every job, industry, etc. The bigger companies will essentially own every process and product and service. But the one thing the companies will never own are the people. They’ll create systems to understand everything about the person on the outside and even on the level of the intellect. But only the person will truly understand themselves on the inside.

And so I believe I have to create a system where understanding who we each truly are is the main and ultimate purpose. That’s what I believe about my career. :)