10 Years In The Past

Before I jumped to my first job, I took a “gap semester” off to figure out what I’m going to do with my career and my life. I defended my graduate thesis successfully but I didn’t know what was next. So I talked to my professor and asked to delay my graduation. Then I got an extra semester to think. I really appreciated it. It seems unusual to stay at school if you got all the credits required and defended the thesis. Because a normal person will be thrilled to finally be done with school and open a new chapter of life. But that’s what I did and I just don’t know what to do. The original strategy was to go to graduate school and get a full-time job, then a work visa and green card. But as I gained more knowledge about my major and gained more skills in courses and a part-time job in the IT department, I realized that it seems not hard to get a full-time job, but I’m not sure that’s what I really want. I wasn’t motivated by finding a full-time job.

Starting to think about what I really wanted was not an easy change until I failed the entrance exams for a college many years ago. Maybe I will use another time to discuss it in detail, but to make a long story short, that failure made me think hard about what I really want, not what other people want. In fact, that’s the greatest failure for me at my early stage of life with not that much cost. I’m really grateful for that till today.

The extra semester was definitely not a good experience because I was worried about my future but a really rewarding experience in my life. It’s because I came up with a new goal to start my own business in the near future. It seems like a lot of people are talking about wanting to build their own startup in the past 10 or 20 years and there are a lot of successful cases and inspiring stories in Silicon Valley. I think I was influenced by those stories. And I might use another page to discuss it. Then the journey began.

In order to achieve the goal, I first tried to figure out the gap between where I was and the goal, e.g. I had no money and knew no people at the time, and figured out how I could start. It’s natural to think of DIY, build it by myself, e.g. build MVP and get funding, which means I need to be a solid engineer. Also, it’s not enough to just know how to build the product from a technical perspective, but building and running a startup needs way more skills, the most important skill is to manage the team.

So with that strategy in mind, I found a job at my friend’s startup, then moved to a second startup, then now a third mid-stage startup. Learning by doing is what I believe is the most effective way to gain knowledge, at least in certain areas. It seems like a contrary point but learning from other experiences is another most efficient way, because life is short, which is another topic I might touch on later. Since I wanted to build a startup, finding a job at a startup and learning how to build one was my strategy. Years passed by, and I trained myself to be a solid engineer to be able to build a product from scratch and developed a lot of management and people skills being a manager, which is where I’m now.

I’m very lucky to be able to align my “ultimate” goal with the work, so work is not just working, it’s an arena where I can “struggle” to solve all kinds of problems and meanwhile develop skills that are needed to achieve my ultimate goal. I have been having a lot of challenges and fun, and it is very fulfilling by learning a lot every day. In hindsight, that’s how I get motivated.

The goal is not achieved yet and has not changed and I’m getting closer. But something inside me changed. The goal is not just to build a startup, but also it becomes richer to be happy, be useful, to focus more on experience, the journey.

01/29/2022