Kushaan: The Experimentation King

Kushaan’s the kind of guy who doesn’t like to sit still — especially when it comes to his career.

At any point in time he’s thinking about how he can learn something new, provide more value, or help others in his vicinity.

Kushaan is the “growth mindset” personified. He’s consistently followed his curiosities, learned to trust his gut, and hasn’t been afraid to take on new challenges. Add that to a sense of humbleness, gratitude, and wisdom that you’d likely only find in someone twice his age.

More than anything, my conversation with Kushaan taught me about the infinite directions our careers can go. Our interests going into college were so similar — languages, journalism, communication, helping people — and yet our careers have gone in completely different directions.

As Kushaan says: “I think it’s really about giving yourself permission to change your vision of who you are, which is really hard for people to do when they’re stuck in this idea of a career path.”

Needless to say, I couldn’t be more thrilled that our paths crossed, and I only wish I’d had his insight all along in my own career journey.

In a Nutshell: Kushaan’s Career Path

Kushaan’s earliest career epiphany came in sixth grade history class.

“We were making paper maché buildings and that was a lot of fun for me, so I decided I wanted to be a history teacher.”

While that career goal only lasted until eighth grade, it sparked an interest in how the world works, how the government was formed, and how history has played a role in what exists in our government and economy today.

By the time he got to high school, Kushaan discovered he had a knack for languages — Spanish in particular.

“I think I just enjoyed that there was so much to learn about Spanish that could have real life implications. It wasn’t necessarily just going to class and then after class you were done, but you could go home and learn random words about food and the weather and a lot of things that you may not have learned in class.”

The tangible nature of language, and the ability to learn it outside of class, motivated Kushaan to learn a whole slew of other languages — French, Latin, Mandarin. While he might not have reached fluency, his love of languages sparked a potential career interest in international development and diplomacy, and gave him a jumping off point when it came time to choose a college and major.

“I literally just had no idea what I wanted to do, but I hadn’t given up on the whole bilingual idea, so I thought I’d study Spanish, maybe Italian too. Any school I applied to had to have some sort of language program, and I was especially interested in Middlebury College in Vermont which is known for its language instruction.”

Kushaan ended up attending the University of Maryland (UMD), a school with a Romance Languages major, a Division 1 Sports team, and a beautiful campus. The locale near Washington DC also appealed to him — in the worst case, being in a city always had its premiere job opportunities

Once in college, Kushaan experimented quite a bit with his major. Though he started as a Spanish and English major, he struggled with the exact types of jobs he wanted after graduation. Realizing his friends were pursuing more concrete career paths, he took that as a sign that he should probably do the same, and since he really like writing, he decided on Journalism.

“I was really excited. This isn’t as ambiguous as Spanish and English — it’s a career path! I know famous people that are journalists and people that enjoy their careers in journalism.”

With some freelance journalism and internships under his belt, Kushaan was finally confronted with the sad realities of the field:

“Not only are you gonna be broke for a really long time, but what I had enjoyed about writing is the idea that you could be creative and really bring your own voice to something. But the more I got into journalism, I realized it was a lot more rigid and structured and you had to be constantly validated by an editor.”

Fortunately, Kushaan had to take an economics class as part of his journalism degree, and that led him to his next career shift: business. Nevertheless, he struggled with what that meant for his identity as a creative person.

“Economics made a lot of sense to me, so I started opening up to the idea of business. My dad was a businessman, and for the longest time I never thought I could go down an avenue like that because I’m a creative person, I enjoy the arts, and I’m never gonna be the guy who wears a suit and has a briefcase and gives presentations.”

It was at this point that Kushaan first starting thinking about the financial implications of his career choices. Applying to the business school seemed like a good bet to have a career that would actually earn him and income. What’s more, the business school application process required real world activities: he had to submit a resume and prove that he had some real world work experience.

After an unpaid internship at his uncle’s company, Kushaan was accepted into the business school, only to be met with more uncertainty in his career decisions.

“Within the business school I changed my major 3 or 4 times. Everyone told me to be a finance major because that’s where the big bucks are, but I hated it. I also tried international business to leverage my interest in languages, but that was a disaster too.”

Kuahaan eventually decided on supply chain — he was especially interested in how businesses operate based on how they can predict demand — but his first supply chain internship showed him that jobs in the field weren’t nearly as exciting in reality as they seemed theoretically.

“I realized that what I really liked was having this ambiguous problem that someone gives you and you figure out how you’re going to change their behavior and do something tangible to solve the problem.”

That’s when Kushaan discovered consulting. Everywhere he looked on the internet consulting was romanticized — people were traveling the world, solving business problems — and he became completely enamored with the idea of it.

At the same time, Kushaan enrolled in a class called Social Innovation Fellows where he learned about using business to solve the biggest social issues in the world.

Kushaan was torn. Should he pursue consulting with a big firm or with educational institutions and nonprofits that were doing more valuable work towards specific systemic issues?

Kushaan ultimately ended up at IBM — mostly because it seemed like the best of both worlds: they marketed themselves as driving systemic change through consulting, doing things like bringing internet to rural communities and using data and artificial intelligence to help blind people see.

Yet, as is the case with most rosy eyed recent grads, his experience at IBM wasn’t what he had initially expected.

After I graduated college, I started at IBM in consulting and my first project was a surprise, to say the least. I realized that once you get into big consulting companies, they’ll first put you on projects that are pretty arbitrary until you prove yourself.

But Kushaan was determined to do his best no matter the project. Even his first one, which involved editing a big document.

To which he lamented: “I spent all that money in college to edit a 160 page document!”

But he didn’t let that deter him. He realized that editing the document gave him multiple avenues to talk to people throughout the organization. Though he had a lot of free time on that project, he used it effectively.

“I did a lot of writing on LinkedIn and that was my initial exposure to — hey! I’m in the real world! I realized my experience could be valuable to college students, graduates, and others trying to get into consulting.”

When his second project didn’t involve much as far as career development, he tried something new. He started a nonprofit, SocialRise, to teach others how to use Linkedin to their advantage. He realized that Linkedin mostly catered to senior executives and that other marginalized communities — under resourced entrepreneurs, immigrants, refugees, etc. — could benefit from learning LinkedIn tricks.

“Working on SocialRise was the first time in my career that I felt like I had control over something. I wasn’t thrown into something I didn’t care about. It was a different feeling where you were in charge of pressing the red button. You didn’t have to wait for people to tell you what to do.”

Kushaan leveraged his semi-remote schedule at IBM to build SocialRise, setting up workshops in DC when he could. At one point, he considered working on SocialRise full time, but then reality struck:

“Everything is easier when you have a paycheck coming in. I realized that I didn’t care that my day job didn’t excite me. What I cared about was that I had a means to solve a problem that I cared about, and that means was this income coming through my day job.”

By chance, Kushaan ended up transitioning to a project within IBM as a user tester for a software product. While he knew he wanted to explore roles outside of the consulting world, he saw the role as something he could do while job searching for his next move.

Surprisingly, that role ended up being transformative for Kushaan. Not only did he realize he enjoyed user testing, but due to some staffing changes, he ended up moving up to Senior Tester after only 3 months on the project.

“I was about ready to see what else was out there, but I said okay let’s see where this goes.”

And it certainly went. He went from Senior User Tester to a client facing Product Strategist to a Scrum Master / Product Manager leading a team of 7 reports.

“There were a lot of roles I never knew existed. Product Management is this new big sexy thing and I had no idea what it was in college and didn’t really discover what it was until I was actually doing it. And then it hit me that all these times I wanted to job search and didn’t have any traction, part of the issue was that I just didn’t know the next role I wanted to go into.”

With Product Management experience under his belt, Kushaan decided that it was finally time to get out of consulting.

“I loved product management and for the first time felt like I had transferable skills. I’m creating user stories, running agile sprints, coding, writing SQL queries. I was doing all these really technical things that were enjoyable, easy to learn, and I had a team of people I loved working with.”

After debating whether or not to do grad school to focus on product management, Kushaan decided to pursue one more professional experience, giving himself permission to try something else before investing into the opportunity costs.

“I ended up staying in that position for a year so that I could have one year of product management under my belt. What I realized is that no one looked at it as one year of product management, they only looked at it as four years at IBM. I could have left a few months in and externally no one would have cared that it was one role and then another role.”

Inspired by the opportunity to help with the 2018 Midterm elections, Kushaan joined NGPvan, a digital fundraising software that works with political campaigns and nonprofits. He liked that the company had tangible products and services, and it brought him full circle on his desire to work with a cool, mission-driven organization.

What’s more, the new role gave him yet another breakthrough on his desired career direction.

“I got a lot of exposure to the product marketing side, once products were actually finished. I liked being able to work against an open market, find prospects and sales leads, and focus on future adoptions. I realized that what I enjoyed wasn’t necessarily just building processes, but getting people to fall in love with products.”

Kushaan has now just embarked on his next career move: attending Tradecraft in San Francisco, an immersive 3 month program where he’ll focus on growth marketing in a product context. With a mixture of classroom learning, hands-on projects with real startups, and career soul-searching, Kushaan is excited about where the program might lead him.

“I think the biggest advantage for me is taking a pause. In 4 years of working, I’ve never gone to school. I’ve never had more than 4 days off in a row outside of full-time PTO. San Francisco has also always appealed to me.”

After this point, Kushaan is definitely looking to settle down a bit and grow in one role and company. But he has to regrets about experimenting early on — all those roles gave him valuable insight about his skill set and his interests moving forward.

Through it all, Kushaan really identifies with this quote from David Cain:

“Like all important choices teenagers must make, you need to be at least thirty to get it right. No seventeen-year-old has any real idea who they are or what they’re doing. The only strategy is to do new and interesting things as frequently as possible, trying to find those veins of meaning, doing as little permanent damage in the meantime to your health and your finances. There is enormous pressure to get this choice right, and you won’t…Go to class and learn the material, not for the material’s sake, but so that you can learn how to learn things, and how to admit it when you don’t understand something.”

What an important sentiment, and one I think Kushaan has lived out whole-heartedly throughout his career.

Adding It Up: Confirming My Happiness Formula Assumptions

Here’s how Kushaan’s journey adds up to my assumptions about finding happiness in your career:

Hands-on Opportunities

• Every time Kushaan was interested in a career path — journalism, supply chain, consulting — an internship or project is what showed him the realities of working in that area. Seeing the reality of jobs in these fields took him out of the theoretical mindset of a career path, and zeroed in on what his day to day life would be like in these roles.

A Supervisor’s Faith

• Maybe it was luck, maybe it was a supervisor that saw potential in him, but Kushaan’s path from User Tester to Product Manager stemmed a series of opportunities passed along from above. Though these were all new roles for him, his supervisors trusted in his ability to learn quickly and grow.

An Inspiring Mentor

• Mentorship is very informal for Kushaan, but he’s had a few along the way, even if he didn’t recognize those relationships as “mentors” until 2 or 3 years later. He confided in one of his RAs at university and community of people who supported him as he grew SocialRise, and credits Sam Klein at IBM for passing along cool opportunities, like writing for IBM’s social business blog.
• “It doesn’t need to be that we set up weekly check-ins. It’s the people that I can gchat at any time during the day and not even talk about work or get advice. It’s just to build rapport and get their genuine feedback on decisions that impact my life.”

A Supportive Community

• Kushaan says the student clubs and a business fraternity he took part in during business school were helpful in evaluating potential career choices. Kushaan is also part of StartingBloc — an impact-centric professional community.

Kushaan’s Tips for Career Shifters and People that Feel Stuck:

Keep your time — follow your own path:

“When people ask me for career advice and changing my major and mind every 2 years — the best advice I give them is that you should just give yourself permission to not abide by the idea that anything in your life needs to be timeboxed. I think I had a lot of time at IBM figuring out that if I had stayed until the end of this contract — one more year — it would somehow be validated by some outside authority. People will understand if you want to move when it’s your time to.”

Keep the balance — challenge vs. control:

“The other thing I think a lot about with my career is the balance between challenge and control. If you have too much challenge and not enough control, you’re spiraling and burning out a lot. If you have too much control and not enough challenge, that’s also a recipe for burnout.

“When I was managing my reports I was very sensitive to helping them keep that balance. I told them my role isn’t to get you interested in what we’re doing right now, my role is to get you to a place where you can thrive. If that’s not here, I’m not gonna take it personally. You do what you want and we’ll find a backfill. If you feel like you’re not challenged enough and spiraling out of control, I want to be that person that tries to bring the balance back in your life.”

Keep in mind — advice is anecdotal:

“A lot of advice is really anecdotal. Almost every single piece of advice I take now, I take with a grain of salt. The people that know me better will know what I’m capable of and not capable of and their advice will reflect that. But I found that when I’m asking strangers for advice, they’ll generally tell you what they think is right based on their experience. A lot of mentorship is not about figuring out what advice to trust, but about figuring out what people to prioritize when it comes to advice.

“When I’m giving advice to new people, I always make it very clear that any advice I give is anecdotal and nothing should stop them from doing the things they want to do. I will support you no matter what you do. I’ll just give my own two cents to warn you about the same traps.”