Initially, the idea of writing this post came about during a conversation I had with someone very special to me. That person is my mom. We often have stimulating conversations around life, career and choices — and this one happened to be about my personal growth related to previous jobs I’ve had since graduating college.
In the midst of our conversation, I realized I wanted to take the time to reflect and expand on this topic even more after we spoke. After a few hours, I decided to outline this idea.
There are two goals behind this post:
- To unpack how some jobs changed my life.
- To practice writing better (this is part of my 2021 goals).
Job number one
In this job, I was an intern helping with managing budgets and forecasts in an IT department. Much of what I did was simple data organization in spreadsheets. There were a few times I’d sit with the heads of the department and review budgets and forecasts — where I learned how these things affect the rest of the department’s (and company’s) goals.
I didn’t realize it at the time but the most challenging aspect of this internship experience was the idea that I had no direction from a superior. In other words, I’d go in every day confused about what I should be doing or learning. This may not seem much of a challenge but it actually taught me a lot.
A bit of a back story, my direct supervisor had become very ill during 98% of my time here — it left me without any guidance for the majority of my internship as they were out of the office. The 2% of the time I did see them was during my onboarding week, but that’s about it.
The work itself wasn’t exciting and definitely not unique. If anything, I learned how to use Excel better. I shouldn’t downplay that skill though, it’s actually very useful. Learning how to use Excel in a better way helped me be more efficient when working with spreadsheets and aggregated data, like analyzing marketing metrics in my current role.
As much as I thought this experience didn’t teach me anything, I now realized that having no direction and guidance actually kickstarted my self-starter instincts or entrepreneurial mindset. Currently, I’m in a role where there’s hardly any direction or guidance from a superior (first marketing hire at an early stage startup). I don’t have a manager to lean on to find the next priority, I create my own priorities and expectations with the company’s best interests in mind — which oftentimes is growth. The only difference between before and now is that I’m considered the “expert” now. I don’t need to lean on anyone to contribute and bring value to my team or company.
In other words, the lack of direction and guidance from a superior indirectly taught me to be independently proactive about what I do.
This is not to say I know everything and never need anyone to do the work I do. In fact, it’s the exact opposite. I wouldn’t be able to do half of the things I do currently without the help of my team. I don’t need guidance to create growth but I still need collaboration.
I think there is a difference between requiring guidance to get started and working with smart people to better my work. Rather than seeking help to determine if I should get started on one thing over another, I immediately test what I think will help my team get closer to our goals. Along the way, I lean on my team and ask for feedback so that the action I take has the highest chance of returning impactful results.
Job number two
Funny enough, a year later I ended up getting a position as a temp the next summer (practically another internship) at the same company. This time I was focused on helping with managing daily sales audits and a few customer support requests like refunds.
Compared to my internship experience, there were many more nuanced things to learn and apply to my day-to-day in this new role — which proved to be difficult to learn in the beginning. I had a co-worker that sat next to me and graciously helped me anytime I was struggling. That person helped me so much. I hope they receive just as much help, if not more, for their struggles too.
The reason I write about this role is not about my work experience like the internship, but rather a personal challenge I set for myself while I was here. The personal challenge was simple — schedule a meeting with someone new every single day until the last day of my pre-determined time here (about 3 months).
I knew that during my time as an intern I didn’t have much of an experience I hoped to have, to no one’s fault of course. But realizing that I was working at the same company again, I had a chance to make my experience different. So I did just that.
I met someone new every single day. I would schedule lunch meetings or take meetings that fit the other person’s schedule better. I did everything I had to do in order to spend at least 15-30 minutes with someone new in the company. I’ve met directors, senior managers, interns, associates, and even some of the executive suite (i.e. CFO, CEO, CIO).
During the conversations, I would ask for typical career advice and life advice. Questions like “would you critique my resume” or “how did you get to where you are today?” I thought these questions would be best because I was just starting my career and any advice would help.
However, there was one question that always caught the person sitting on the other side of the table off-guard. That question was “are you happy doing what you’re doing now?” The majority of the people I spoke with immediately expressed their gratitude and happiness in that stage of their life.
I enjoyed every answer I received for that question but I didn’t find value from all of them. Frankly, those that didn’t struggle in answering that question ended up not being very compelling. I only found value when that person on the other side of the table became vulnerable in their attempt to answer that question — which was very few.
I remember one person sat silently for a noticeably long time before answering that question, a few said no they weren’t happy and explained their reasoning, and one even went as far as leaving the company after a few weeks I asked them the question — which I’m sure wasn’t because of me. However, it would be interesting to find out what that person strives for today and to confirm if the question I asked had any part in their decision to leave.
There were 2 things I learned from this experience.
- Lack of fulfillment in life has everything to do with the decisions you make for yourself.
- People in the C-suite are not as impressive as I assumed. They are ordinary people too, just with a lot more responsibility.
This whole experience changed my life in a way that continues to shape me today. I find roles or commit to experiences that ultimately make me feel fulfilled. Hearing the few vulnerable responses from people that were twice my age was enough to make me want to ask myself what I’d want in my future experiences.
Job number three
Working at a boutique car dealership wasn’t exactly the plan after graduating college. Since I graduated with a finance degree in 2018, I automatically assumed working in a finance-related role would fulfill my career aspirations. Fortunately, I found something I enjoy much, much more — marketing.
But what does working at a boutique car dealership have to do with a job that changed my life? Before we get to that, let’s speak to some of the challenges I faced:
- Working with toxic leadership.
- Working with anxiety and depression.
In the past five years, understanding what it’s like to work with toxic leadership has been one of the most eye-opening experiences for me. You can bet that during my time here I didn’t like it one bit. I’d been shamed for the smallest mistakes and rejected for wrongly contributing. It was a very degrading experience. It also didn’t help that my mental health wasn’t at its best during this time.
An awful comment that really stuck was “what good is it if you have a degree?”
I won’t get into what actually sparked a comment like that because that’s not important. What’s important is how it affected me. Hearing this comment definitely caused me to question myself a lot — my self-worth, my competence, my value, you name it. This leads to point 2. Working with anxiety and depression.
On top of dealing with this degrading environment, I had some of the toughest days during this time that I’ve ever had in my life so far. So you can imagine what it’s like to have poor mental health on top of working with this toxic leadership described above.
You might be wondering, “why didn’t you take yourself out of that situation?” At the time, my grace period for student loans was ending soon, which means the responsibility of student debt payments hung over my head. And if you personally have student debt (or have had student debt), I’m sure you can relate to how scary that can be.
Desperately, I took the first opportunity I can find in order to make money to pay the minimums for my looming student debt. Plus, the actual work that I did wasn’t difficult. I photographed cool cars, drove cool cars, and learned a bit of what it takes to sell cool cars. Just to clarify, I’m not a “car guy” and I don’t think I ever will be.
There are two things that I learned from this job. And one thing that I didn’t learn.
What I learned:
- How NOT to be a leader.
- It’s really important (and okay) to choose myself first. Especially in times when my mental health isn’t at its best.
What I didn’t learn:
- How to drive a manual car (just in case you were wondering).
It might sound a bit crazy, but I wouldn’t replace this experience even if I could and I’m glad I had to go through it. Without this entire experience, I wouldn’t be able to understand the difference between poor leadership vs. great leadership. I would only be able to assume what that difference is. It’s life-changing when you actually see it first hand. As for my mental health, I wouldn’t have taken it as seriously as I do today if I hadn’t experienced it to the extent that I did.
As I continue to make progress in my career, I use this experience as a reminder of how much a leader affects the people around them — and use it as a framework for choosing leaders (or being that leader) that I’d like to work with in the future. And as life’s circumstances change, I think back and also use this experience to gauge and to understand how much progress I’ve made for my well-being. Which contributes to the amount of gratitude I have today.
Job number four
For context, my role here was my first real experience in marketing. I won’t spend time talking about the specifics of what I did here but if you’re interested in learning that stuff I wrote a separate post about that here.
At a high level, my role in this job can be described as the first marketing hire of a marketing agency that partnered with 10+ brands (at the time), except those brands were sister companies. So imagine you own an umbrella company with 10+ different companies underneath it, and you were the person to help facilitate the growth of each one under that umbrella, that was me. Of course, I had an amazing team to help with that, but let’s not dismiss how much work was actually involved.
I went from being a marketing practitioner to a marketing leader. In other words, I went from creating campaigns for Facebook Ads and posting on social media to managing a marketing team of 25+ freelancers and an in-office team of five. This whole journey proved to be challenging but very, VERY rewarding. Some challenges I faced were:
- Understanding what marketing actually means and what it takes to be successful at it. I came from a finance background and some skills translate over to marketing (i.e. the ability to find insights by analyzing data) but it was still a new realm for me.
- Quick decision-making and even quicker execution. Managing the expectations and workflows between all of the brands proved to be extremely demanding. And oftentimes stressful.
- Leadership. Before this role, I never experienced what it’s like to be that person everyone relied on to solve problems — especially at this scale. There were “fires” to put out every day, mostly small. But every so often I’ll have a BIG fire that would really test me (and my team). In these stressful times, I think back about how NOT to be a leader and remind myself I’m working with humans.
If it wasn’t for this opportunity, I wouldn’t have found the aspiration to build a career around marketing. Thanks to this experience, I found what I want to spend my time on career-wise. I feel incredibly lucky and grateful for the doors that opened for me after this milestone in my career — it truly was life-changing.
So, what’s next?
I’m thinking about updating this post after each career milestone. So whenever the current chapter closes (if ever), I will try to update this. Thanks for reading, I hope you can find some value in what I said here. If you have any questions or want to spark a conversation, feel free to message me or find me on Twitter.