What left-field career move am I going to make next?
This question has been on my mind ever since we decided to wind down Orenda.
Yes.
This question has been on my mind ever since we decided to wind down Orenda.
It’s odd to be an Asian person dropping out of college… to go work with the homeless, churches, and hospitals.
It’s probably equally odd for someone like that to switch and go flip houses.
MAYBE it might make more sense then, after, for that someone to co-found an education company to teach teens how to be more confident, productive, self aware, socially savvy, and optimistic about life.
After that… anything could happen.
My career timeline so far
Ok. But for real. Here’s the update.
My path up to this point has been mostly defined by these factors:
Will I have a lot of autonomy?
Can I grow quickly? How much room is there to grow?
Does the work serve a meaningful goal?
And so long as I had 2 out of the 3, it’d be easy for me to be pretty excited to commit to it.
I’ve never been in a position where I felt the need/want to consider what my financial non-negotiables were. And in retrospect, I’m glad I made that optimization during my 20s. I learned a ton, went on crazy life adventures, and never would have been able to predict the paths that I took.
But things change!
Here I am, thinking a lot more about finances now, so I don’t have to be as concerned about the finances later down the road (e.g. starting a family, investments, retirement).
So what next?
The Experiment, and The Fallback.
The Experiment
I’m going to take a month to take a serious stab at coaching.
I’ve coached real estate investors, teens, parents, founders, and professionals. I’ve done it it informally and formally.
I’ve coached on topics real estate, spirituality, self-worth, productivity, interpersonal conflict, social skills, emotional fluency, career transition, and defining values.
But in none of those cases, did I do it with my full focus and energy. I had always done it on the side on some level.
After the feedback from friends over the last few years and from existing clients, I know that coaching can be a phenomenally empowering tool to support people (which makes it meaningful) as well as it being a strong suit (which makes it enjoyable).
I want to see if there’s intersection here between:
Doing something that is resonant to me
Solves a valuable need in society
Doing something I’m good at
Has the potential to support my financial goals
Credit to Wenley Tong for this awesome reference:
The Fallback
If the traction isn’t there by the end of a month, then I’ll finally — oh man — work my way into the 9–5 life.
If I end up on that track, It will be a huge change for me on multiple levels.
It would be the first time that my full time focus didn’t involve thinking about the A-Z of an organization. It’d be the first time that I’d work on a team larger than 5 people. It’d be the first time I wouldn’t have to think about sales/marketing in a way that would directly affect my income.
It would possibly be the first time I’d have to consistently spend time in traffic (oh boy).
So many firsts.
But I’ll cross that bridge when I get there.
The Fallback, of course, only kicks in if The Experiment fails.
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So what does that mean?
That means… starting right now, my test is going live.
For the next 30 days, I’ll be offering FREE coaching to anyone who books time with me.
Some goals:
I want to coach at least 30 different people
I want to more deeply understand who can best benefit from coaching, what those benefits are, whether it’s a big enough need, and whether I am the right person to fill that need
I want to understand what people currently think about coaching, objections, reservations, or concerns they have about it
And practically, I want to understand how willing/able people would be to pay for it, because bills are a thing =/
If you’d like to sign up yourself, read more about it here.
If you’d like to support me during this experiment, feel free to pass the link on to friends who you think could benefit from trying this.
Please feel free to book me up to TWO sessions :)
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Aside from the coaching, I expect to publish some kind of long-form writing once a week (assuming coaching doesn’t take over my life, but I wouldn’t be opposed to that at all).
I’ll be posting my long-form content on Medium.
I may be more active writing some short-form on Quora as well.
Thank you all who have supported me along the way, maybe I’ll catch you on a coaching call!
If there’s something specific you’d like to see me write about it, feel free to comment and I’ll take it into consideration =D