To Be Truly Happy in Life I Left the Largest Company in the World to Join a Startup as Employee #11

It’s not easy walking away from a stable six-figure job with great job security for a significant cut in pay to join a risky startup but that’s exactly what I am doing and I couldn’t be happier.

Ask my parents about this move and they will likely disagree with it. Luckily I haven’t been able to fully explain to them in Chinese what I am actually doing so the phrase “ignorance is bliss” is in play here. I feel the need to mention my parents because they have drilled into me my entire life that the most important thing in life is to make as much money as possible and have financial security. After all, they were poor peasants from China that immigrated to America to the small town of Marion, South Carolina to scratch out a life running a restaurant. Who am I to gamble away a future that was built by their sacrifices, hard work, and savings?

Yet I have no regrets walking away from money and prestige. I had already done it once after business school when I turned down a sponsorship from Deloitte that would have paid for all of my MBA in addition to providing me a substantial salary bump. Now I was doing it again by walking away from my leadership development program at Walmart that would have set me up for an executive position at the world’s largest company. All for the opportunity to join MindSumo, a 5-year-old startup that only has 10 employees, as their first marketing hire.

Days into making this big pivot in my life I must say I have gained a newfound passion and excitement that I haven’t experienced in a long time. I am walking into the unknown where I have a chance to build something new and directly engage with people in a positive way. It will be a totally new environment where taking risks is encouraged, failure is tolerated, and learning is constantly occurring.

By leaving the corporate life I feel that I will no longer be invisible behind Excel models, PowerPoints, and reports where my time is spent as a support function instead of a decision maker. Instead of wondering if any of the work I was doing would materially matter in the big picture, I will get an opportunity to reach the very users and customers in a very personal way. More importantly I will have an escape from the office politics, slow moving bureaucracy, and risk averse corporate culture that stifles creativity and growth.

Before deciding to make this pivot I had spent countless hours trying to figure out how I could find fulfillment and happiness through my career. Was it money, prestige, job title, or industry? These are the things that I had looked to early in my career when I was dreaming big and looking to prove myself to the world. I thought I had the perfect game plan figured out: start with a successful career in management consulting, get into a top MBA program, and land in a leadership development program at a company that would fast track me to the C-suite.

Yet ten years down this path it all still felt empty to me. I had become jaded and disengaged at work and all around me I was hearing that many of my peers were feeling the same unhappiness. I could tell in my current situation that complacency was settling in as my early enthusiasm for work after school was replaced by the realities of corporate life aka going through the motions in a narrowly defined role. Work became auto-pilot for me as I lost the drive to pursue ideas outside my role because there wasn’t an environment that supported this type of behavior. It made more sense to just do the minimum to collect a paycheck and hope that it was enough to slowly progress my career forward so that 10 or 15 years from now I would get an executive title and start calling the shots.

I could have taken the easy way out by joining another large company and find a new position with a sexy “strategy” title or join an “innovation” or “analytics” group. However, I think I would run into the same frustrations down the road because large organizations are built to have these systematic flaws in them. Maybe that’s why a recent Gallup poll found that 70 percent of Americans report feeling unhappy, uninspired and less engaged in their job.

Don’t get me wrong, I am eternally grateful and humbled that by all of the incredible knowledge and skills I have gained so far. I have worked with some of the brightest people in the world in some of the most interesting industries. But what really kept nagging at me throughout all of this was if I were to die today, would I be proud of my accomplishments and the legacy I left behind? Was I willing to subject myself to working for something I didn’t believe in? The answer I kept coming back to was no.

Naturally I tried to find this sense of fulfillment from outside of work, like others do, by spending time with family and friends, volunteering in the community, or exploring a hobby in photography and cooking. While these things are very important in my life, they still weren’t enough to fill the hole inside me to take on something bigger with meaning in my professional career. No amount of happiness articles, Tony Robbins podcasts, and weekend escapes into the woods could get me to a quick answer. However, after months of reflection on moments where I felt fulfillment and happiness I kept coming back to instances where I was personally helping people, constantly learning and growing, and living life by my own terms.

So I began my job search with a newfound purpose to find something different. When I saw the role to join MindSumo, I saw an opportunity to chart a new path with a small, ambitious company with the potential to change the way college students engage with companies to solve problems and find job opportunities. Their mission of using these challenges to make recruiting more of a meritocracy drew me in despite the risks that come with joining a smaller company with an evolving business model. After all according to Forbes, 90% of startups will fail.

Given the opportunity to make a difference, I think I’ll take those odds. I know at a startup the hours can be long, the structure is usually missing, and resources are limited but the trade-off is incredible freedom to apply my strategic mindset, love for data analytics, and creativity to figure it all out. Exploring new ways to hustle, hack, and experiment will take me down new paths of learning and making an impact on education and jobs will leave me with an immense feeling of satisfaction. I can’t wait to make work fun again and I look forward to sharing my journey along the way.

Thanks for reading my first Medium post. If you enjoyed my thoughts please click the little green heart below and I will keep them coming.