Why I left my corporate career to join Semco Digital
Hey, my name is Ian and I’m one of the team members at Semco Digital, the startup responsible for LeadWise, an initiative to help leaders to transform organizations inspired by business pioneer Ricardo Semler.
In this post, I’m going to share a little bit about my personal journey, especially how prioritizing the most important things in my life led me to leave my successful corporate career to join this entrepreneurial venture.
My passion for sports
I’ve always dreamed of traveling the world. Living new experiences, meeting different people and cultures, exploring beautiful landscapes…
My family didn’t have a lot of money to travel when I was growing up. However, I was really into sports, and competing gave me an opportunity to travel.
My father had always played beach volleyball, and I loved to watch him play at the beaches of Rio de Janeiro. Unsurprisingly,I followed in footsteps and became a beach volleyball player.
Even though I was short for a volleyball player, I was very motivated to win and make my family proud.
Through beach volleyball, I had the chance to visit more than 20 countries representing Brazil and won important titles, including the under-18 World Championship in Greece when I was 15.
I loved that life! Training every day on the beach, traveling, visiting exotic paradises… but I knew how difficult it would be to build a professional career in sports in Brazil, and I couldn’t see myself going pro.
With that in mind, I continued my studies and decided to focus on building a corporate career.
My first foray into corporate life
After obtaining my Bachelor’s degree in Marketing, I joined multinational L’Oréal with hopes of one day working abroad.
In my second year at the company, they suggested I apply to a master’s program in International HR Management at Panthéon-Assas/Sorbonne in Paris and work at the headquarters office.
Moving to Paris was like a dream coming true.
At the age of 24, I was working at the headquarters of the worldwide leader in the cosmetics industry in one of the most beautiful cities in the world… What a experience! And best of all, France allowed me to have almost 40 vacation days per year!!! :-)
I spent 4 years in Paris traveling as much as I could and working in different roles in Learning and Development, Trade Marketing and Digital Marketing.
It was definitively a great experience in my life!
Breaking through
When I moved back to Brazil, I became Director of Digital and Communications at a very young age, with all the responsibility and status that came with it.
I was living a comfortable life and my career was progressing quite well. You could say I was comfortably living on autopilot. However something happened that would change completely my path.
I joined a 5-day leadership workshop organized by the company with two inspiring coaches. The goal was to improve fundamental management techniques, including giving feedback, practicing active listening, mentoring and so on.
During an exercise, I shared my challenges at work and received a group coaching session. At one point, one of the guiding coaches asked me a question that made me freeze. She said:
“What is your purpose in life?”
I found myself in the middle of the room, with everyone staring at me and I didn’t have any clue of what to say!
One simple question made me realize that I was living on the auto-pilot without meaning in my career, something I hadn’t realized before.
At that moment, I felt that I needed to rethink my life.
My journey of self discovery
From that moment, I started to seek answers to questions that I had never asked.
I read books (Born for this, Synchronicity, The Purpose Economy, The Charge…), watched several talks (many of them from TED), joined online courses, listened to podcasts (This is your life, How to quit working, The Suitcase Entrepreneur…) and started to discover a new world of meaningful possibilities that I has been completely unaware of.
And it’s funny to think of how blind I was about simple concepts in life before starting this journey:
- What really matters in life?
- How should I spend my most precious assets — my time and energy?
- What kind of contribution do I want to offer to the world?
- What are my real dreams?
So I started to redesign my life and adopting a new mindset and behaviors.
Like many people that embark on journeys of self-discovery, I started meditating, spending more time with loved ones, trying to be present with people, exercising more, appreciating simple moments like walking the dog, and seeking better work-life balance.
But something fundamental was still missing… I didn’t feel fulfilled in my job.
Quitting
So after few months, my girlfriend and I went on vacation to Mexico to visit my cousin Rafael and his wife, who were living in Playa del Carmen.
As usual, we talked about many things in life — family, business, ideas — over a never-ending supply of delicious Corona Margaritas.
Rafael and I have always been very close — not just cousins, but friends who admired each other, but we followed very different career paths. Rafael has always been a bright serial entrepreneur, who could never feel fulfilled in a corporate structure.
Soon, he had an idea… He had been looking for a partner to start a new venture with Ricardo Semler, but he hadn’t thought of me because he didn’t know about the journey I was won.
Rafael shared more about the project, and I trusted the synchronicity and decided to go forward!
I felt a huge wave of excitement about the new possibilities, but at the same time, an enormous fear of losing everything I had built for my “promising corporate career,” (By the way, here are some tips to deal with fear in this article).
I can assure you that leaving the comfort zone is not easy!I knew that I needed to pursue a more meaningful life and work, but taking courage to make the change was extremely difficult.
Back in Brazil, I talked to my family, my girlfriend and a few very good friends and with their support, I decided to take action!
Taking the road of entrepreneurship
So I announced to L’Oréal, after almost 10 years, that I was leaving the company follow my entrepreneurial dreams.
I can tell you that at that time, it was one of the most challenging decisions that I’ve ever made.
Brazil was living a moment of financial crisis with high levels of unemployment and almost everyone that I knew would tell me: “are you f:*#@ing crazy?!”.
But as Mark Zuckerberg says: “The riskiest thing is to take no risks.”
Fancy apartment, car, business cards, good income… Those things were nice, but they weren’t connected to my values and beliefs anymore. I couldn’t keep living with the illusion of a lifetime secure corporate career when I was no longer being fulfilled in life, and when deep down I knew that security was just an illusion.
I needed to try new things, be brave to find new paths and be more aligned with the purpose I had recently discovered.
Outcomes so far…
I can say today that WHY I’m doing the things I do is much more clear for me. What our Teal movement friends from Reinventing Organizations would call “evolutionary purpose” is much stronger for me.
I can be 100% myself at work, with no corporate masks or hierarchical games to play, working with amazing people in a very transparent and trustful way.
I’m learning new things every day and constantly stepping out of my comfort zone. I feel that I’m growing as an individual and as a professional.
I have greater work-life balance, even when working more hours than I used to do. I have much more flexibility and waste less time because I’m more purposeful.
Recently, I became a digital nomad, which was one of my dreams. And now I have the freedom to work from anywhere and keep exploring the world. Soon, I’ll be traveling through Australia for 3 months with my girlfriend as she joins me in post-corporate life.
I need a lot of resilience to stay strong in moments of uncertainty or when in the midst of failure. And I’m learning how to feel comfortable with the discomfort, since change and impermanence are the only real truths.
So here I am now… A part of this amazing team and ready to contribute to a greater purpose which is transforming the way we work, bringing more happiness, meaning and quality of life to workplaces.
And what about you, how do you find purpose in your job and life?
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LeadWise believes that we need to change how work works. We do this by developing online and in-person courses, workshops and cultivating peer-learning through our international community. Join the movement at www.leadwise.co.
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