When Life Gives You Cauliflower, Make Cauliflower Wings
I’ve always known what I wanted. At 13 I decided that I wanted to pursue Mechanical Engineering, and at 16, I decided that I had to work for myself. I had gotten my first job, and was working 10–12 hours a shift. Doing grueling, menial tasks all day for a company that I didn’t care about, who’s mission I did not believe in. It motivated me to spend the remaining years of high school looking beyond what I would major in, and looking into companies where I can begin my career. Only I couldn’t find a company who was focusing on the social issues that I wanted to solve. I’d try to concoct ways of how I could persuade them to pivot in my direction, but the amount of red tape involved in raising a new idea or project, was just pure ridiculousness. I just couldn’t imagine spending my entire working career burning myself out to make someone else’s dream come true. I needed to be my own boss.
Fast forward to undergrad at Georgia Tech, I discovered the term “entrepreneurship’ and dove head first into Atlanta’s startup ecosystem. That experience ultimately solidified that entrepreneurship was what I was seeking and wanted to pursue to make my vision come into fruition. My last few years of undergrad, I was placing in hack-a-thons, social entrepreneurship case competitions, and I even interned at a startup! When the time came to begin my full-time job search, naturally everyone’s asking “What are you gonna do after graduation?” And I would answer excitedly, “I’m gonna go into entrepreneurship! I want to-”, as if a gut check reaction, people would immediately hit me with the “But what if…”, “But what about…?”, “You need a job that’s going to get you a guaranteed salary and benefits.”, or my personal favorite “Here’s all the bad things that are going to happen with startups that are 100% true because I read them in a facebook article.” I was getting it from all directions, and I must admit, points were made. So I reacted and changed my career trajectory to the “safer option” and focused on traditional careers at Fortune 500 Companies, and said that I would revisit the startup thing in the future after I had built up a nest egg.
At my first employer, I took on a Project Management Role, and was overworked and over utilized. I was burned out to the point where I didn’t have the time or the energy to work on my passions outside of work, so I left. Immediately after I went to work for an early stage startup and was in an operations, project management type of role, but I was stifled, and vastly underutilized. I managed to gain some key takeaways from these companies such as, how to be “scrappy”; products don’t need to be perfect to launch, just get it out there and iterate as you go.I learned how to delegate tasks, how to create processes, communicate with non technical partners, and the benefits of long form communication. By far the largest lessons I took away from these experiences was learning the type of boss I wanted and did not want to be, and how to create culture, and no it is not kombucha and beer on tap, guys. However, it felt like my technical skills were slipping away from me. There were so many new technologies that had emerged since I graduated like Machine Learning, Data Science, Deep Learning, etc. that I wanted to get into, but there are some skills that you can’t “job shadow” your way into. After being unhappy and complacent for months, the job ended. And shockingly, I was relieved. The universe had given me an out, and I took it. I realized that I kept trying to squeeze myself into these “safe” spaces where my dreams and interests did not fit. Those family and friends that I had spoken to pre-graduation had the best of intentions, but none of them had ANY entrepreneurship experience. I mean, they hadn’t even stepped inside of the building of a startup. So how were they so firm in their convictions? I reanalyzed each of those conversations and realized that the majority of those folks I had spoken to had a pattern of being risk averse; while I love them, why was I telling them about my big hairy goals? WRONG AUDIENCE. They were just projecting their fears onto me; it’s what we as people do, it’s what everyone does, but this time I wasn’t going to let it affect me.
I promised myself that I would use this opportunity to realign myself with my earlier career goals; using technology to solve social issues. Seeing that the world was moving in the direction of machine learning and automation, and taking a deep look at the founders of companies who were pioneering this technology, I couldn’t help but notice that these founders resembled your typical tech bros. My spidey senses told me that people of color were sure to be excluded from quality of life improving technical solutions. Solutions that could provide access and affordability to fresh food, education, professional careers, and mental health care. This led me to begin researching how I could reduce bias in machine learning algorithms and what softwares I needed to learn to make it happen. I started looking at alternative learning programs because I was NOT checking for another 5 years in school and stumbled upon Flatiron School’s Data Science Program. Fast forward to now, the experience has been amazing so far, it’s like drinking from a fire hose and the program moves faster than anything I’ve ever done before, but I’m loving every second of it. I don’t regret making this investment in myself at all. Now why do I share all of this? Is this one of those “Quit your job, start a business, get evicted, sleep in your car, and have sleep for dinner!” blog posts? Or one of those Everett College style commercials in written form; “What are you doing with your life?! Nothing!, sitting on the couch, being a trash can, empty your life savings and do something with yourself today!” Nope, quite the opposite.
By now with all of the COVID-19 related layoffs, I think the world is learning the same lesson: There are no “safe” or stable jobs, companies, or careers. You can get laid off from something you hate; you can fail at something you hate. If you’ve got the bandwidth, you owe it to yourself to try at something you love. Choose your struggle. While you’re sitting at home submitting 50 applications a day to companies you won’t remember, or sitting through that 30 minute phone screen only to hear “We’re actually looking for someone who has “these skills” *insert skills you don’t have here*.” Take a moment to get curious. Figure out what it is that you actually want to do, and what’s the fastest and cheapest way to get those skills. For me it was a coding bootcamp, but for you it could be entirely different. Don’t sleep on those $12 courses on Udemy, or the free content that Youtube provides; whatever you do just don’t fall back into the cycle of complacency and settling. You’ve got gifts the rest of the world needs to see. I’m willing to bet that you’ve also got a few risk averse people in your circle; you don’t have to tell everyone your dreams and plans. The amount of unwarranted advice is enough to make your head pop off of your shoulders and roll over into a ditch. Just pull up a Google Doc, drop your plan of attack in there, and keep it pushing. Never give up your search to find something that gets you out of bed in the morning, and put yourself in the position(s) to get it. If no one else is rooting for you, I am.
