How I Found My Perfect Career (advice for indecisive people and career changers)

to sponsor of today's video 365 data science is making their entire platform free for 21 days check details and descriptions hey friends welcome back to another video I have exactly the career that I want right now in this point of my life I genuinely can say that this is a combination of doing YouTube Lonely octopus which is a self-learning platform currently in beta as well as a B2B media agency if someone were to ask me Tina is this the career that you've always wanted to have since you were a Tiny Tina and that definitely is no because this career that I have right now this combination would not have been possible even like 10 years ago there's a quote by Steve Jobs that goes somewhere along the lines of wow if you look in the past somewhere along the way all the dots make sense foreign so in this video I want to tell you guys about how I got to this career that I have right now all the mistakes that I made along the way this combination of both luck and a bias towards action also just getting completely [ __ ] and being forced to grow as a person I told you I was going to be honest before I get started I just want to put a plug for my newsletter called boops keyboard it's about learnings about productivity it's also where I drop new things that you can sign up for including lonely octopus okay let us start it all started in a stormy wintery night in 1995. when Tina was born I'm kidding I was actually born on a very bright and sunny Wednesday you know there are some kids that just know what they want to do with their lives I feel like especially teachers just kind of know that they want to be teachers ever since they're really young but for me I literally had no idea what I wanted to do with my life like maybe I'll do science maybe I'll be an astronaut maybe I'll be like a writer just like literally all over the place so let's fast forward now to when I was trying to decide what to do for college I actually applied to a lot of different places and I apply to different Majors for different places like for Carnegie Mellon and a lot of us places I applied to computer science and economics for Canada at University of Toronto I applied for life sciences and I also applied to a few schools in England in which I believe I applied for economic tricks econometrics I think that's what it's called but eventually I decided to go to the University of Toronto where I studied life sciences and I figured I'm just going to be a doctor I'm Asian so you know you can be a doctor a lawyer or an engineer so I just went with Doctor how ridiculous is it that when you're 17 or 18 years old you're expected to decide what you want to do you've had so little exposure to life at this point yet you're supposed to choose a major like let's just all agree that that's absolutely ridiculous but anyways Waiting For Life Sciences spent a couple years doing that and then when we had to choose a specific major I went from pharmacology why did I go for pharmacology because I was like drugs are pretty cool don't quote me on that and also because most of my friends did pharmacologists I was like guess I'll just do pharmacology so at that point I still wanted to be a doctor I was still pre-med and I did all the right things in order to get into medical school I did do research I did the volunteering I kept up my GPA as much as I could but I was also absolutely miserable I had sunk so much time into being this perfect pre-med student all I ever did was to get into medical school I never explored different subjects and took different courses or did anything like go abroad for a year because I was so scared that it would impact my GPA I regret this so much I spent a time between 17 and 21 literally doing nothing except what I thought was the correct thing to do it kind of was just like I buried my head in the stand like an ostrich and just pretended everything was great and I really wanted to go to medical school up to my third year of undergraduate and I remember this right like clear as day I went to go to the lab to do research at my I guess like summer job internship and then I went to go volunteer at the hospital I was really exhausted afterwards but then I dragged myself into the library three and I started studying for the MCAT again which is the test that you have to take in order to get into medical school and I remember just like looking around me in the library it was really quiet everybody was studying and you just kind of like looked up and it kind of just hit me like holy [ __ ] I really don't want to go to medical school I really didn't want to be a doctor I hated volunteering at hospitals I just hate hospitals in general I didn't care about the research I was doing and I just knew that I would make a terrible doctor firstly because my personality I have like a pretty I don't know you call it like hyperactive or just like you know whatever this is this kind of personality and do you really want your doctor to be like oh no like you know you might be dying who knows these days I do really want your doctor to be like that no and more importantly than that I just didn't care like you can't be a good doctor if you don't give a [ __ ] so I pretty much fell into an existential crisis I had this like ridiculous limiting belief that careers are like neat little boxes and you pick up that box over there and you exactly optimize for what that career requires and you just walk down that path so since I already chose the box of being a doctor and optimized exactly to become a doctor I was so lost what was I supposed to do like waste the past three years of hard work and just go choose another box I completely also believe in the sunk cost fallacy the fact that I put in so much effort and so many so much time so I should just like try to suck it up and keep doing it I was still really lost when the final year of my undergraduate was coming it just so happened that I had a couple electives left that I had to do and it just so happened that I ended up doing two computer science courses these were introduction to python courses now I would be lying if I told you that I just like realized that this was the best thing ever like it really wasn't like I was like oh this is okay this is kind of fun um and I also knew that the people who did computer science ended up getting the best jobs so I was like all right hopefully I can at least get a job if I knew how to code I didn't know the terminology at the time but what I was doing was building identity Capital which is the Q simulation of different skills and resources that make you valuable in the marketplace I was able to take the identity capital and then trade that in so I could get a position in a bioinformatics lab did I really deserve that position and was I really qualified for that position absolutely not but he still hired me anyway because of that identity capital and once I was in there it was definitely very difficult because you see I was learning python when I was taking those courses but in the lab people were using R so I essentially had to learn R by myself I was decent at that time and I even considered doing a master's degree or a PhD in research but ultimately I decided not to because I just really didn't like the Vibes of Academia so I made a leap of faith and decided to do a masters in computer science at the University of Pennsylvania I actually do think that this is one of my best traits which is the fact that I have a very big bias towards action it's also one of my worst trades in the sense that it puts me in very unfortunate situations as I will talk about later but in this case it is a very good trait at that time if I had actually known the amount of pain and effort and self-doubt that would have come with that computer science degree this very accelerated computer science degree I probably would not have done it this is one of the most insecure times that I felt in my life because I was just like not good at computer science this is when I failed my first exam ever in my life but I did eventually Land Two internship offers one from Goldman Sachs and one from Amazon so what I learned during that recruiting cycle interviewing cycle is a very crucial lesson it's the fact that personality and context and just a little bit of trying can get you so far in life I was woefully unprepared for those interviews for Goldman Sachs I failed three of the four final round interviews like I'm not even kidding I literally failed three of the four like one of the interviews I think it was something like oh like can you design a database like that interacts with some stacker I don't even remember what the question was like I literally said I'm sorry I haven't learned this in school yet like I don't understand what the question means and another one of the interviews was about graphs right and at that time I didn't learn about graphs yet so I also just like directly just said to the guy I'm just like you know I haven't learned about graphs yet that's going to be next week's topic so you may be wondering why in the world would they have picked me because I think I had personality I think a lot of people when they go into interviews they try to come up with like very professional and just don't really show who they are as a person so I think in that way I was able to stand out another thing is that one of my strengths is talking if you compare me to someone from sales for example I would be absolutely awful however in the context of software Engineers I am very good at talking so I really tried to push that and just emphasize how good I am at communication and finally I just show that I really cared I said like you know I don't know about graphs right now but I'm going to learn that next week and I will make sure that I know all these things when I start my internship that combination of traits I think I hypothesize is the reason why they finally accepted me in then but anyways I ended up choosing Goldman Sachs and I did my internship as a software engineer during that time I got this impeding doom again this Dreadful feeling just like the feeling that I got when I realized I didn't want to be a doctor anymore so this time around I learned from my lesson from last time you know let's not bury our head in the sand and pretend to be an ostrich and wait three years and waste that time before realizing this so I decided to not be a software engineer then and there I ended up applying to data science positions and actually the only place that would give me an interview was Facebook but it is going to bother you because you're human and I was human I am human still um so I ended up going through those interview rounds I actually had to learn SQL by myself because I was taking a computer science degree not a data science degree and I eventually got that job another really important Lesson by this time of my career is realizing how important the ability to self learn was I had to learn SQL by myself in 11 days actually so there's a video over here that explains how I did that now speaking of self-learning I want to talk about this amazing opportunity that is presented by 365 data science sponsor of today's video 365 data science is an online learning platform where you can learn about Data Business and of course data science I'm an instructor that partnered with them on two different courses now and it's also the platform that people on lonely octopus are learning from so what I'm trying to say is that I really think that this is an amazing resource so now I want to tell you guys about this amazing initiative that they're doing right now they're offering their entire platform for free for a limited amount of time you get access to the entire platform with your entire course catalog of over 55 courses you also get access to the Resume Builder to all the exams all the exercises downloadable material as well as their whole like gamified system with 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then also with lonely octopus now and this is the perfect career that I could possibly ask for at this time in my life and I'm so incredibly grateful that I have it now I also want to give you guys a couple pieces of advice that I did not do correctly and I regret today so the first one is experimentation I could have saved myself a lot of trouble if I just started experimenting in college and not be terrified about my GPA and if I explore different things maybe I didn't even have to do a master's in computer science maybe I would have figured out that computer science was the way to go and I could have gone to the industry tree and not have to waste money on a master's degree so if you're in college right now or just in general like you feel like you're not satisfied with where you are in your career don't be so afraid to experiment other piece of advice is kind of related to that which is the sunk cost fallacy don't be like me and just bury your head in the sand and just be like oh no I already spent this many years pursuing this goal so now it's too late and I should just spend the rest of my life doing something that I don't like that makes no sense this is your life and just don't let Society Define like whether you're too old or not to do something like ultimately you're the one experiencing your life and ultimately you would also be the one regretting your decisions if you didn't choose to do the things that you want to do that's not to say that you should take ridiculous risk and just like quit your job or something like that but you can think of it as in like low investment things like you could buy a course and learn how to code that cost you like ten dollars or like twenty dollars or something like that okay so last thing I kind of touched upon this earlier um but I just want to like re-emphasize this because it's so important build identity Capital all right for all my career Changers out there for all of my indecisive people out there build identity Capital things that are valuable to the marketplace like for me again like I wasn't like this is the best thing ever coding is so fun like I just want to do this forever it wasn't like that it was because I knew that it's valuable to Marketplace the society around you does not operate on your terms like you don't get to choose what are the important things but once you build identity Capital once you have the skills that Society likes then you are able to have a lot more leverage you can end up doing something like I would be a data scientist I will do this but I will leverage those skills and start making videos on YouTube about data science you realize there's a lot more options that are available to you if you just do valuable things and then you can alright so thank you so much for watching this video I hope just kind of learning about my journey towards where I am right now is helpful to you guys and some of this advice will help you as well I will see you guys in the next video or live stream