The Aim’s Career Advice for Covid-19 Class of 2020–2021
Many students of Class of 2020 (and 2021) have recently approached me for extraordinary career advices during these extraordinary times. Naturally, I have automated my nuggets of wisdom into a list of reading list but I’ve decided to compile my favorite advice that have stuck with me for the past 10 years into this super McNugget set of wisdoms, doused with a sprinkle of my real world experiences living them. I hope that this class of 2020 will find great comfort knowing that despite the overwhelming adversity and hardship to find a job opportunity now, the experience will create a resilient generation that will thrive and survive many crises to come. So how can you jump the curve on your career and not waste time and make mistakes like I have? It all starts with…
What are your values?
Your values are the fundamental building blocks of living a good life. What do you hold dear and believe in as a mantra for your life and work. Establish a set of strong values that helps you to prioritize and measure that you are living the life that you want and things that you believe are important in the way you live and work.
If the work that you do are aligned with your values, then you are on the right track and your life is turning out the way you want it to. You might not notice it, but you usually feel a sense of contentment and satisfaction. When you are unclear about what your values are, or are working in a company that does not align with your values, that’s when you feel like going to the office is doing the wrong thing, that you are out of place and out of sync with the people in your office. While we can persevere and make narratives in our head to justify our reason why we still work there, usually this source of unhappiness eats away at your motivations and energy.
This is why identifying your values is so important early on in your career as it helps you to select what sort of opportunities, business partners, investors, and communities you want to be associated with that will uplift you and those that you want to avoid because they will take you down to the gutters. As suggested in the articles below, find a time when you were most proud, fulfilled and satisfied, and happy about yourself and consider what made you feel this way. The sources of feelings usually are your inherent values, which you should them make a list of of a list of many as possible, then narrowing it down to your top 5 values.
Making decisions with your values, and joining companies based on the values that align with yours or starting your own startup that has built a culture based on your values will mean that making decisions every day is easier and less emotionally draining. At the end of the day, you can always go to bed and sleep easy knowing that you live your life according to your internal compass and that the decisions are the best one for the circumstance.
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Growth vs Fixed Mindset
Much has already been said on the internet about this topic, especially in the seminal book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck. While you might now have time to read full book, here’s how it works if you observed your peers: In your year or cohort, there will be a bunch of people who strive to get approval from the professors and teachers, are proud to boast of their grades and cry when they did achieve perfect marks. They are often overachievers that believe that they are special because they gotten into this school, and in order to live up to the school’s standards (or their parents), they spend all their energies and time across their careers, and in their relationships to tell people they are exceptional. Every decision they made was to reconfirm to themselves and their peers of intelligence, personality, or character. These folks end up being the corporate drones that play politics, entrench themselves in hierarchies and status-bearing organizations with SEVP titles, engage in petty turf wars and reject criticism. “Will I succeed or fail? Will I look smart or dumb? Will I be accepted or rejected? Will I feel like a winner or a loser?” were the questions that would always be asked every time a decision was being made.
Then there is the 2% of every class and cohort like me, a bit of a curious nerd who approaches every problem with a beginners mind and read biographies of the greats like Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, Bill Gates etc. etc. and realized that all these visionaries and superstars started as nobodies and honed their craft through sweat and tears, making the hard yards and a little bit of luck.
Like playing a character in a Role-Playing Game, you are a character that always start with Level 1 and there’s only way which is up as you tackle your quest and level up yourself. This growth mindset comes natural to me, because I am always reminding myself that as a bit of a noob and nobody, I can always reinvent myself and you can cultivate skills and experience through your efforts. And yes, we may all not be off to the same starting block with our stock of talents and aptitudes, interests, or temperaments — I have observed their my world view, my lifestyle, my habits, and priorities are evolving for the better as I consciously try to cultivate them.
Obviously, I have no intention of comparing myself to Steve Jobs or Richard Branson, but am I always reminded that if these legends has had to go through bankruptcies, getting ousted from their companies, grew up with dyslexia, made bad investments that have gone sour, and still end up on the Hall of Fame, there’s really no way we can know or predict success. While I had my own fair share of setbacks and depression, including failing to graduate for high school and university on time (twice!), I have always lived by the mantra of Failing Forward and believed that whatever happens is a good thing and that despite every setback, there will be a silver lining and a lesson to be learned every time. And so far, Failing Forward has never failed me.
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Don’t focus on passion — focus on becoming an expert
“Follow your passion” is an advice that most startup founders throw at audiences and followers time and time again and I admit that I am guilty of this sometimes (I consciously try to avoid this soundbite, and if I do end up saying it somewhere, please call me out!). But once I watched this video and read the book So Good They Can’t Ignore You, by Cal Newport, I can totally see why this advice is not so helpful in so many levels.
First off, let’s understand the Newport’s Law that he jokingly made in this clip: “Telling a young person to follow their passion reduces the probability they will end up passionate.”
I truly agree with Cal with the fact that we all have no pre-existing passion. I couldn’t recall a time when I woke up and said I wanted to be an entrepreneur. In fact, when I was really young I told my parents and family that I wanted to be a tuk-tuk driver, since it’s the closest thing to sitting in a street legal Ferrari during the late 80s in Bangkok! I only discovered entrepreneurship when I read Losing my Virginity by Richard Branson, and almost deluded myself that I wanted to go to Harvard Law when I read another book. When I left college with an Accounting degree but no interest in the subject, I was completely lost. I had a vague idea of my end goal to become a world changing entrepreneur, but had no bankable skills or internships under my belt. After a few detours but invaluable experience trying my hand as a food stylist, day trader or social worker, I ended up discovering social entrepreneurship on Google after a deep amount of introspection that I wanted to work in a field where I was “doing well while doing good”. But when I joined my first non-profit, I wasn’t passionate about my work except that it aligned with my values “Service to others”. I built business models for businesses I didn’t understand off, visited farms and forest tea plantations to talk with farmers and community leaders, and tried to get into manufacturing particle boards from coconut husks.
Quick story: On the first day of my job, I recalled being asked to create a business plan for a community bio-mass power plant FROM SCRATCH for a business I never heard of and understood! Then I went on to get thrown on stage to MC and facilitate workshops for social entrepreneurs despite having a bit of stage fright, running around to organize an incubation program from scratch when we were short on people and did everything for the first time. I had no experience in running a business at the time, and I was sure as hell not qualified to give anyone advice. I recalled many times where I would read something online like TechCrunch, and then regurgitate to entrepreneurs to their annoyance (not another idea!) and hope that with our best intention, some founders will take our advice. Luckily some of them didn’t because if they did, they might be out of a business by now. That said, after the baptism of fire for two years, I ended up becoming a Project Manager for the incubator. Despite our best intentions, we had a 99% mortality rate in our program and I can only recall 1 out 30+ businesses that I’ve worked with that is still thriving and becoming somewhat successful. Something wasn’t working, and we had to find a solution fast before our non-profit’s funding dried up or that the social entrepreneurs starting to call it quits.
While this might seem like a failure, it did provoke an interesting question to myself any my team: “Why are the entrepreneurs failing, and how can we improve their chances of success?” Once we started to take a step back and ask this question, we immediately fell into a rabbit hole online. This was when I discovered coworking spaces, Paul Graham’s essays and Y Combinator, Brad Feld’s book on Startup Communities and Techstars, and all the cool things happening in Silicon Valley, Israel, Singapore and beyond. After much introspection, we decided that one of the first things we needed to tackle was to start a coworking space to bring entrepreneurs together and conduct training, mentoring and community support better to support our batch. We took the 2 years of failures and learnings and designed a space and program that combined all the event organizing, facilitation, training, mentoring, networking, project management skills that I accumulated over the 2 years. By this time, I was the most entrepreneurially qualified person on the team to lead the project, having worked so hard and starting to becoming comfortable leading my own activities an initiative. While I still felt like I had much to learn, many people started to recognize my talent and I started to feel comfortable in this new found career path. At the end of the day, due to various reasons we ended up not launching the coworking space in the non-profit. But the foundation of expertise gave me the confidence to launch Thailand’s first coworking space, HUBBA, and the rest is history!
So whenever anyone asks me how to find their passion or should they turn their passion into skills, my number one advice is to find what you do so easily that people feel like you are a natural or super talented, that they sing you praise or encourage you to do more of. Over time, that expertise will turn into mastery and it could very well become your passion and calling.
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Generalize first, specialise later
One of the biggest questions new graduates ask me is the conundrum between discovering your dream career early and specializing or trying a bunch of things and having a “jack of all trades, master of none” approach to early career. As a person who have worked as a food stylist, day trader, conference facilitator, event organizer, accelerator manager, management consultant, development professional for the UN, professional MC and speaker, community builder, part investor, and part-time barista, janitor and front desk staff for my coworking space, I can confidently say that the skills I picked up even for the most mudane, low paying or “uninteresting” gig to the eyes of many has taught me something in life. Skills I used to MC workshops and meetups early in my career taught me how to go on stage to professionally MC for the most epic Demo Days for the best accelerator in Thailand, dtac Accelerate. My fear of cold calling was cured on the first day of my management consulting job where I was asked to make 50 phone calls a day to do tele-research. Organizing Startup Weekends and hackathons helped me to understand more about how to organize programs, run teams and build learning activities for 1,000 people at Startup Battleground. So generalizing early in my career has helped me tremendously, and allowed me to connect the dots with my past skills and experience forward to my next opportunities as new doors open.
While some of the jobs were not as fun and interesting as I expected, many times I ended up learning something more about myself: Was the job not a good fit with my values? Do I want to work for a different kind of team or boss? If the project I was working did not inspire me, what kind of projects would I be more interested in? Do I like to work in a fancy office down town, or in a relaxed atmosphere with flexible time? In the end, if you look hard enough, every experience will teach you something. And once you start to understand what you doesn’t motivate you, overtime you will be able to triangulate on what does motivate you. And that’s when you should start to double down and specialize.
Don’t believe me? Read the research below to understand why the most successful entrepreneurs generalize first, specialize later.
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Seek mentors early on
One of the secrets of success for many entrepreneurs is that we have a support team behind us, hidden from view, that helps us see and overcome our flow, make better decisions with confidence, pick us up and back us when we are down, and give us timely advice that helps us to avoid driving off a cliff with our business. Many times, these seasoned entrepreneurs, experts you meet at a networking event, wise elders in the community, your parent’s friends, a friend from high-school or someone in your family can be so good. Just find someone who you feel is a few steps ahead of you in your journey and even if they’re not directly in your field or industry, find someone that is willing to teach and spend time with you and that you can learn from them. Once you do, it’s time to start engaging with them!
When you have developed a trusting relationship with one another, and you can feel safe to be candid and honest, and respect the views and perspective of the mentor, thats a good sign that this person can be your mentor (loving to hangout and drink til the break of dawn with your mentor is a plus). Then check to see if your mentor fit’s in with Brad Feld’s Mentor Manifesto to see if they have the mindset to be a good mentor. Many mentors in the startup community are naturally like this and open to the opportunity to mentor the next generation because many of us have benefitted from great advice and mentors in the past. So get to know them early, and make sure to build rapport and a relationship with them. It could just start with fun conversations at the bar, sharing an interesting project you’re working on that your prospective mentor might be interested in, and helping them out on a few projects or volunteer opportunities. The key is to think of building a relationship from the point of view of a mentor: why should I help this person? Why should I spend precious time after work and during weekends to help this person? What will I learn from the experience? Is this a person that is likeable, that is pleasant to be around and that I believe should and could succeed? How has this person been a positive force in my life, and is the relationship symbiotic and two way, or am I just giving? Answer these questions, and approach your mentor with humility, proactively and with a #givefirst attitude.
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Be a humble narcissist
For overachievers, founders and Type A personality like myself, many times we are labelled as narcissistic, attention seeking, limelight hogging founder. Actually, it is scientifically proven that we are often misunderstood. According to Bradley Owens, an organizational psychologist whose research that was published in the Harvard Business Review, stated that “First, certain aspects of narcissism–extreme drive, self-confidence, and a desire to lead–have the potential to bring about productive results. It’s likely because of these potentially constructive qualities that researchers have found narcissistic leaders aren’t uniformly bad; their track records tend to be something of a mixed bag, leading to positive outcomes as well as negative ones.”
Many research and cultures have shown that the developmental and positive benefits of humility so I won’t go into that. But what I would say is that over the years, I have taught myself to be more and more humble over time. While starting the first coworking space in the country and run the biggest conference in town can really give you a big ego boost, I learned early on that once you started to believe the voices in your head and become attached to the fame and glory, you start limiting yourself in your ability to grow, adapt and pivot. Everyday, I make a conscious effort to acknowledge my team’s strengths and good work, and own up to my own limits and mistakes.
Having read the work on “humble narcissism” by Adam Grant, I was able to reconcile my self-confidence that is needed to spur me into taking a lot of risk and jumping into the startup founder rabbit hole, without to cross the line into a full blown egomaniac mode. To keep my confidence in check, just like entrepreneurship is a mental muscle that we need to flex, we need to understand that being humble is also another mental muscle that we can work on to transform into a reflex, habit and skill. Understanding the value, practicing it every day, in as making it a natural trait has helped me immensely. While humble narcissists like myself tend to have grand visions of changing the world and reinventing their country or industry, I am often the first one to say that I’m not good or don’t know something, and open to learning from other, even the most junior person on the team. I still today have the highest expectations of my career, and what success looks like and I know that to achieve all the things I want to do, this one lifetime wont be enough. But I have now realized that to create lasting systemic change, it will require more than a singular hero but a collective, sustained effort from my team mates, my community and people that share my beliefs and that we should give the spotlight and opportunities for many people in our lives to show their shine, or outshine us in their different, unique ways. And because of this mindset, in this study on self-reported narcissists from a Fortune 100 company effective, the more humble you are, the more their employees were more engaged.
Scott Fitzgerald is quoted as saying: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” I believe that humble narcissism” has proven to be powerful leadership formula: sometimes we need a leader who is aggressive, confident, competitive, and determined. But at the same time, leaders nowadays need to have high EQ and really build and grown a strong culture based on trust, collaboration, open-mindedness, understanding and compassion.While the bar for great leadership continues to elevate, in the past, these two styles of leadership were incompatible. I have found that rather than pick one over the other, be yourself, be both and have these two strong traits balance each other out to have the best of both worlds.
Yes it is true, your network IS your networth
With so many great quotes and nuggets of wisdom are shared in this article below that I wouldn’t want to spoil it for you, read this original Medium post that was written by Sanjeev Agrawal that was so well written and shared by me so many time. But I just want to reiterate a very important point that has served me so well over the past 8 years, that wherever and whomever you choose to work for early in your career, the game changer is usually the people that you ended up becoming colleagues, lifelong friends and mentor/mentees with. These are the people that ends up investing in your angel round, find you a job when you’re just laid off, or that you invite as your cofounder when you’re ready to start another gig. Case in point: the PayPal Mafia. So choose companies where you know the smartest, nicest, most driven people are hanging out and find every way to get in no matter what, whether it is via an internship, working pro-bono or for free (at first), and striking conversations on cold email and Twitter. It took me 3 months of applying to the first non-profit that I really wanted to work for, and that included calling the office repeatedly and sending a cover letter and resume directly to the MD. The starting salary was 8,000 baht and I maxed out at 20,000 baht. But the cash wasn’t the main thing I was looking for: it was the network, the experience and the chance to be a part of something bigger like launching the social enterprise movement in Thailand. While we did not succeed during my tenure and had many setbacks, the personal network was invaluable: one of my interns ended being my angel investor and advisor, and two folks ended up being our first and second employee.
As Eric Schmidt said to Sheryl Sandberg: “If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, get on, don’t ask what seat.” Grab a spot in a company that is willing to give young talent a chance to break out and become somebody. A company that wants to see their staff succeed and become a rockstar, and in the hope that one day even if that staff leaves, the company can be proud of that alumni and collaborate with them on some projects. If this is the kind of value that the company and the leadership have (find out more about who you will work for on their blogs, their social media or through first hand account of current staff), then what are you waiting for? If not, keep on looking, there’s always a better company on any of these job platforms.
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Automate yourself out of a job
In a world driven by technology, artificial intelligence, robots and big data is automating jobs in many traditional industries out of existence, it’s surprising that we have all been so resistant to change for so long. Until recently, I’ve still been hearing the same old advice that has always been told by my parents and society still often repeated by elders, the media or other parents: to study hard, get good grades, get an MBA, find a stable employer, maybe one of the Fortune 500 companies, a blue chip firm in our country or a government job and that these companies will take care of us for life, or at least on our resume, our stint at Google Amazon etc. will open doors to bigger and better gigs. That’s the world our parents used to live in, and they’re actually right; these formulas worked in an age where job opportunities are scarce, obtaining knowledge is expensive and building connections and network is very exclusive to only a certain group of elites.
However, with Covid-19, the paradigm shift in the past few months have rendered all these dogmas obsolete. Investment in artificial intelligence and robots have accelerated. Joblessness is increasing and people are finding it hard to find the same jobs they were laid out from. Companies are embracing remote work and realized that it just works as fine, if not better for a big group of employees. Even the most well funded companies by SoftBank Vision Fund or blue chip industries like airlines, travel, banking are laying off people and globally with record unemployment, people are engaging in re-skilling and up-skilling more than ever. So while lifelong learning now is a no-brainer for everyone, I like to let you in on a secret. All of our jobs are at risk of automation, even mine (you can check if your job is too)! At 94% risk, it’s bring tears to my eyes to know that auditors and accountants are highly at risk of being automated out. I wish nobody has to suffer as I did ever again!
So how should we approach re-skilling and up-skilling? Like Bill Gates, one of the primary skills I look for in my staff, especially my tech team, is laziness and this applies to everyone in any industry. This is not to say I love my staff to spend time playing video games and Tinder at work all day; I’m looking for people who will find a problem and fix it once and for all. To scale our startups and tech, we cannot have people spend time fixing bugs and issues over and over again. With some first principle thinking, great design and a bit of engineering, most problems and bugs can be fixed and you never have to look back. Applying this to careers, it means that if you’re life is spent on fixing problems, learning from them, and moving on to harder problems, you won’t need to deal with lower hanging, routine problems that soon will be automated out like Administrative tasks, Personal Finance Advisory and running Nuclear Power Plants. As long as you are practicing and growing your experience, creativity and ability to wrangle humans, you will continue to outsmart AI.
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Company culture matters more than ever
During the pandemic, I have had the chance to talk to mentees who I career coach to get them into the exciting careers in technology. One recurring theme that I have noticed is that many people have chosen jobs for their “brand name”, their perceived stability, for the job that the candidate knows that they can do well since they’ve done it before, or ones that seems like the safe bet. Having made such choices without internally reflecting on their values, your mastery goals, and reflecting with good mentors, a lot of people have suffered in their new roles and compounded their stress as they arrive on the job to realize that the company’s vision and mission is unaligned with their core drivers, that the culture is broken and the team feels remote and uncaring behind the facade of Zoom calls. This often leads these candidates to regret their career choices, doubt their own decision making abilities and sink deeper into despair of not being able to find the right match.
For a lot of us who have the luxury of choosing our next adventure, one of the best chances to find out whether we will excel at our new gig is to ask about the culture of the prospective workplace at our job interviews (and to staff at the company if any opportunity allows). Specifically, you should ask:
- How does the company is evolving during the pandemic and how it is adapting to remote and hybrid work,
- How does the company plans to keep the team connected, motivated and recognized (as people slowly lose touch and drift apart from the lack of physical interaction)
- How does the company deals with slow downs, set backs and failures (as the pandemic affects production, timelines and project status, how does the company stay on track while being flexible to the changing circumstances rather than forcing employees to come to work and exposing themselves to Covid-19)
For a lot of us, our lives are already upended by the pandemic and we’ll be spending a lot of time at home working in front of our computer. We are all anxious and unknowingly depressed about the world, the economy, the climate, the protests and other crisis unfolding on the news. You should be looking to find companies that are seriously adapting to new forms of work, who is ready to support and uplift you even if you’re not in the office and that the company is realistic and adaptable in strategic planning, while nimble enough to capture new trends that emerge from the pandemic. Those companies will excel post Covid as they will draw the best talent that will help you grow while the other laggards will stall and fail to retain to their best people. Save your sanity and pick a company with a good culture, because in good company, the incredible people there will be likely carry the company through.
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How will you measure your life?
In 2010, Clay published a piece based on these ideas that became a book by the same name, How Will You Measure Your Life. Yesterday, an unpublished letter of H.E. Dr. Surin Pitsuwan, the late former Secretary General of ASEAN that he sent to himself was made public. Both made the same point: How do you know if your life was a life well lived?
This is the compass which guides my career choices, who I work with, the projects I work on and how I live my life. I don’t know how long I will live, and neither do you so if you believe that life is fragile and that everyday is a blessing, let’s start living and working like tomorrow will be the last day of our life.
By Prof. Clayton Christensen:
“I have a pretty clear idea of how my ideas have generated enormous revenue for companies that have used my research; I know I’ve had a substantial impact. But as I’ve confronted this disease, it’s been interesting to see how unimportant that impact is to me now. I’ve concluded that the metric by which God will assess my life isn’t dollars but the individual people whose lives I’ve touched.
I think that’s the way it will work for us all. Don’t worry about the level of individual prominence you have achieved; worry about the individuals you have helped become better people. This is my final recommendation: Think about the metric by which your life will be judged, and make a resolution to live every day so that in the end, your life will be judged a success.”
By Dr. Surin Pitsuwan:
“1 February 2016
Dear Surin,
Your life has been blessed with so much opportunity & many good things in life.
It can be called a life of many facets and dimensions. It began as a very simple Kampong boy on the extreme margin of the Thai society back in the late 1940s — after the 2nd World War — , surrounded by poverty and scarcity of everything [a] good life was supposed to have, even during those days. But you have persevered against all odds. You have come a long way to the top not only of Thailand, but your name & your fame have been recognized by people in many countries in Southeast Asia, East Asia & across the globe.
You should count your blessings & be grateful for what God [has] given you. Also you should not let [go of] opportunities to share with others many of His Blessings you have had.
Live for others as much as for yourself!
Surin Pitsuwan”
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