One of the hardest questions I was asked growing up was “What do you want to be in the future?” Now, this question wasn’t difficult to answer because I had no idea what I wanted to do, it was difficult to answer because there were too many things I wanted to do. I wanted to be a musician, a doctor, a software engineer, a business owner, even an athlete. There were so many paths I wanted to take, so many things I wanted to devote myself to that it seemed dreadful to just choose to do one thing for the rest of my life. Most of all though, I wanted to continue being a student.
I loved pursuing different things because I love new challenges. I loved being a student because it meant pursuing different things. Every time I started something new, it was like being an Olympic Sprinter at the starting line, waiting for the sound of the gunshot to ring in the air. The more I didn’t know about something, the more I was excited to learn about it. When I entered college, I decided to study software engineering because I liked solving puzzles. Every puzzle felt like starting at the starting line again, and I wanted to solve problems that helped other people, so I studied Business Administration as well.
In the summer of my sophomore year in college, I accepted an internship within the private banking division of Singapore’s largest commercial bank. I had never been to Singapore before, nor had I any knowledge of private banking. My first week, I felt like I made the wrong choice. Everyone else was so knowledgeable about finance and used jargon that I didn’t understand. It didn’t help that everyone spoke English in a different dialect than me. I decided to take that internship as a challenge. I spent after work hours reading books on investing and learning as much as I could about the private banking world. The more I felt like other people knew more than I did, the more it meant that there was still more for me to learn from them.
The next time people talked about things that I didn’t understand, I simply asked them to explain it to me. I found that people were more than happy to help me because they were once in my position, and it created friendships that still remain today. Being someone who was always open to learning gave me opportunities to start many projects while I there. I was able to help start a project where I implemented my own business recommendations to increase net new money for the bank. In other project, I studied the spending patterns of mass market clients to identify potential private banking clients. Once again, I felt the passion behind pursuing different things and solving problems.
Even beyond the workplace, I found the aspect of living in a foreign country fascinating. Even when I became comfortable with the things I encountered at work, I was a student again when work ended. I had to learn how to use the complex bus and subway system, or even the local slang to order food at hawker centers. The more I didn’t know, the more I was eager to ask people around me. I wouldn’t have been able to learn what I did if people didn’t help me, and that made me want to help other people, too.
When it came time to decide on a career, I was drawn towards entrepreneurship because it meant that I could help solve problems that helped other people. From that internship, I learned the value of learning from other people and the value of being humble as a student. I realized that the reason why I love solving problems is because whenever I encounter a problem, I become a student again. I’m a student because I don’t know how to solve it yet, but I’m eager to learn how to. When you’re a hammer, everything is a nail - as long as I have the mindset of a student, everyone is a teacher.
I learn in situations where I am uncomfortable, where people are smarter than me, and where I am a beginner. When I graduated and landed a job at one of the big consulting firms in the US, this seemed just like what I wanted. But it didn’t take long to realize that the job was nothing like I imagined - it was stale, people were checked out, and most importantly, I wasn’t learning anything.
During every waking hour outside of work, I passionately worked on my YouTube channel. Even with an audience of only a few hundred people, I saw the impact I was having on them, and I constantly felt like I was learning new things every single week. Eventually, I decided to quit my full time job and work on my YouTube channel.
Unlike most stories you might hear like this, I quit my job before my channel made any money. In fact, I hadn’t even created the channel you probably know me for yet.
I lived off my savings, lived with 5 people, and it was so much fun. I spent every waking hour learning about entrepreneurship, learning about making videos, and trying out new stuff. I landed some clients and helped them run their social media, worked for some YouTubers, and I never gave up making my own channel work.
With some luck, it did work out, but I haven’t given up the mindset nor have I reached a tenth of the goals I have written down. I’m still learning, I’m still growing, and I’ve still got a long way to go. In many ways I’m still the same person, in a foreign country, asking for directions. No matter what level I reach, there will always people I can learn from, and I’ll always be willing to learn, willing to be taught, and willing to be a student, in every sense of the word.
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