Don’t beat yourself up on making the right decision. Your dream job is the result of multiple journeys, not just one decision.
Last month, I wrote about leaving advertising after six years. I didn’t fully register the entirety of those six years until I unpacked memories about all my job transitions. It turned out to be quite a list. I questioned whether my experiences were worthy before I started writing, but I gained more confidence the more I wrote. Writing these stories is now a necessity, as it helps me remember these experiences and crystallizes the learnings from them. So here I am, on another attempt at my writing-every-month New Year’s resolution.
Since I started the new job, two friends reached out and shared their interest in making a change in the New Year. One of them (Yes, Wen, I’m looking at you) expected me to give a full-on speech about profound soul-searching, extensive research, tireless job comparisons, and comprehensive decision-making. In the end, Wen was shocked only to find out how spontaneous it seemed when I accepted a job offer from a coffee chat.
Wen asked me, “How did you know it would be the right opportunity? I mean, you’re making a 180-degree change; this is not a small decision.”
“Actually, it’s not that hard,” I responded after a pause. “I know I want to become more technical, which is precisely what the new team offered. Getting started with this new path sooner rather than later is enough motivation to get me to switch jobs. After all, I don’t know enough to form an opinion at this point. I’ll just dive right in and see for myself.”
Many use the metaphor “a leap into the unknown” for career switching decisions. Frankly, I don’t think leaping is scary. Given my experience in the past six years from one place to another, leaping might be the easiest part compared to the rest of my journey. Dream jobs don’t just fall into my lap. It takes effort to actively carve out possible paths.
Let me explain.
I majored in finance back in college but had no interest in looking for a finance job. That’s probably the only thing that I ruled out early on. I received a full-time marketing job offer in a Silicon Valley startup with a couple of marketing internships and writing gigs for Chinese media. The startup was early-stage with no dedicated marketing lead, so I didn’t receive a long list of job responsibilities. I was expected to build marketing content for our newsletters and social media. I thought that could be what I do for the rest of my life: content marketing.
But things quickly changed. To prepare for a crowdfunding campaign, we needed to drive significant traffic to the product detail page, especially net-new customers outside of our existing subscribers and social followers. Our CEO hired a media-agency consultant to launch Facebook advertising campaigns, focusing on new-to-brand acquisition. That was the first time I saw the magic of digital advertising: You only need software with a starting budget of several hundred dollars; a paid ad placement would go live and reach thousands of people. It was quick, targeted, and can cater to budgets big or small.
With this encounter, I started to march into the world of advertising intentionally. Since the startup was frugal in the marketing budget, I mainly focused on organic social content while running a few small-scale ad campaigns on the side. Content marketing and advertising are typically two specialized paths in most marketing teams because it requires different skill sets. However, working with these two tracks simultaneously, I realized that advertising fascinated me more and gradually shifted my interest.
When I came back to New York City in 2017, though sophisticated brands wouldn’t take my one-year startup marketing experiences too seriously, many hiring managers did spot the mention of Facebook marketing in my resume. So with this small validation, I pivoted my job-search to exclusively digital advertising instead of any marketing generalist role.
I joined an agency that used specialized ad-tech software to conduct large media buys in digital channels for advertising clients. I didn’t know that the software would be more complex and capable than Facebook Ads Manager. I was just excited about furthering my quest in advertising.
Outside of formal in-job training, I also loved going to vendors’ “lunch and learn” to learn new tech or product demos. New York is the capital for ad tech, and we were able to see new interactive ad formats, new measurement tools, and new audience solutions all the time. While many colleagues prefer powering through work as this is often the only no-meeting-filled hour, I would rather spend the hour learning. I geeked out on the media-trading software, participated in beta testing, and did user interviews. There was no immediate opportunity to convert my product interest into a job on building or improving products, but it did plant a seed for me.
For the two years I worked on a media-in-house digital marketing team, my scope expanded from campaign management to upstream creative strategy to downstream media analytics. It made me realize that campaign optimization can be defined broadly and narrowly. If we only evaluate the campaign where it runs, we have minimal options for improving its performance. When I tapped on the upstream work on creative strategy, ad creatives, in turn, became a controllable variable that I could make changes to. Outside the campaign setup side, I also understood how each marketing channel contributed to the overall eCommerce sales.
As I learned more and more about the work, I became more interested and invested and took more time to study on my own. As a result, I built expertise in programmatic campaign management over time. Eventually, this deep focus helped me double my salary with a Big Tech job offer. In addition, it magically connected with ad-tech product work that I’d been thinking about for a couple of years.
Honestly, I couldn’t have planned all of these. Did I know I’d start with a content-focused marketing job and then change to an analytics-driven advertising one? No. Did I know I’d be working as an agency trader, a marketer, and an account manager in the vendor side? No. Did I know I’d be interested in products when I first got a marketing job? Again, no. I didn’t predict or have control over any of these changes. I kept exploring to unveil what was in front of me and made the best of it despite the circumstances. The path was built over time. And better yet, I’m creating my own road.
Remembering from the famous Steve Jobs quote: “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.” I shared that exact notion: whatever the decision is, you won’t see the whole picture until you go all the way. Don’t dwell on any decision for too long or beat yourself up on making a decision. The decision itself is not that important.
Special thanks to my editors: Jamie Yang and Wen Zhang.
