How I Found My Perfect Career (advice for indecisive people and career changers) | Tina Huang

0:00The sponsor of today's video 365 data science is making their entire platform free for 21 days. Check details in description. Hey friends, welcome back to another video. I have exactly the career that I want right now in this point of my life. I genuinely can say that. This is a combination of doing YouTube lonely octopus, which is a self-learning platform currently in beta, as well as a B2B media agency. If someone were to ask me, Tina, is this the career that you've always wanted to have since you were a tiny Tina? And that definitely is no. Because this career that I have right now, this combination, would not have been possible even like 10 years ago. There's a quote by Steve Jobs that goes somewhere along the lines of, wow, if you look in the past somewhere along the way, all the dots make sense. So in this video, I want to tell you guys about how I got to this career that I have right now. All the mistakes that I made along the way, this combination of both luck and a bias towards action. Also, just getting completely f***ed and being forced to grow as a person. I told you I was going to be honest.

1:00Before I get started, I just want to put a plug for my newsletter called Boops Keyboard. It's about learning, it's about productivity. It's also where I drop new things that you can sign up for, including lonely octopus. Okay, let us start. It all started in a stormy, wintery night in 1995. When Tina was born. I'm kidding, I was actually born on a very bright and sunny Wednesday. You know, there are some kids that just know what they want to do with their lives? I feel like especially teachers. Teachers just kind of know that they want to be teachers ever since they're really, really young. But for me, I literally had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. Like maybe I'll do science, maybe I'll be an astronaut, maybe I'll be like a writer, just like literally all over the place. So let's fast forward now to when I was trying to sign what to do for college. I actually applied to a lot of different places, and I applied to different majors for different places. Like for Carnegie Mellon and a lot of US places, I applied to computer science and economics. For Canada, at University of Toronto, I applied for life sciences. And I also applied to a few schools in England, in which I believe I applied for econometrics.

2:03Econometrics, I think that's what it's called. But eventually I decided to go to the University of Toronto, where I studied life sciences. And I figured I'm just going to be a doctor. I'm Asian, so you know, you can be a doctor, a lawyer, we're an engineer, so I just went with doctor. How ridiculous is it that when you're 17 or 18 years old, you're expected to sign what you want to do? You've had so little exposure to life at this point, yet you're supposed to choose a major. Like, let's just all agree that that's absolutely ridiculous. But anyways, when you're for life sciences, spend a couple years doing that, and then when we have to choose a specific major, I went from pharmacology. Why did I go from pharmacology? Because I was like, drugs are pretty cool. Don't quote me on that. And also, because both my friends did pharmacology. So I was like, oh, I guess I'll just do pharmacology. So at that point, I still wanted to be a doctor. I was still premed, and I did all the right things in order to get into medical school. I did the research. I did the volunteering. I kept up my GPA as much as I could. But I was also absolutely miserable. I had sunk so much time into being this perfect premed student.

3:04All I ever did was to get into medical school. I never explored different subjects and took different courses where did anything like go abroad for a year, because I was so scared that I would impact my GPA. I regret this so much. I spent the time between 17 and 21 literally doing nothing except what I thought was the correct thing to do. It kind of was just like, I buried my head in the stand, like an ostrich, and just pretended everything was great. And I really wanted to go to medical school up to my 30th year of undergraduate. And I remember this, right? I clear as day, I went to go to the lab to do research at my, I guess, like summer job slash internship. And then I went to go volunteer at the hospital. I was really exhausted afterwards, but then I dragged myself into the library and then started studying for the MCAT again, which is the test that you have to take in order to get into medical school. And I remember just like looking around me in the library, it was really quiet. Everybody was studying. And you just kind of like looked up and it kind of just hit me like, holy fuck, I really don't want to go to medical school. I really didn't want to be a doctor.

4:04I hated volunteering at hospitals. I just hate hospitals in general. I didn't care about the research I was doing. And I just knew that I would make a terrible doctor. Firstly, because my personality, I have like a pretty, I don't really call it like hyperactive or just like, you know, whatever this is, this kind of personality. And do you really want your doctor to be like, oh no, like, you know, you might be, you might be dying. Who knows these days? I do really want your doctor to be like that. No, and more importantly than that, I just didn't care. Like, you can't be a good doctor if you don't give a shit. So I pretty much fell into an existential crisis. I had this like ridiculous limiting belief that careers are like neat little boxes. And you pick up that box over there, and you exactly optimize for what that career requires. And you just walk down that path. So since I already chose the box of being a doctor and optimized exactly to become a doctor, I was so lost. What was I supposed to do? Like, waste the past three years of hard work and just go choose another box. I completely also believe in the sunk cost fallacy. The fact that I put in so much effort

5:05and so many, so much time. So I should just like try to suck it up and keep doing it. I was still really lost when the final year of my undergraduate was coming. It just so happened that I had a couple electives left that I had to do. And it just so happened that I ended up doing two computer science courses. These were introduction to Python courses. Now I would be lying if I told you that I just like, realize that this was the best thing ever. Like, it really wasn't like, I was like, oh, this is okay. This is kind of fun. And I also knew that the people who did computer science ended up getting the best jobs. So I was like, all right, hopefully I can at least get a job if I knew how to code. I didn't know the terminology at time, but what I was doing was building identity capital, which is the accumulation of different skills and resources that make you valuable in the marketplace. I was able to take the identity capital and then trade that in so I could get a position in a bioinformatics lab. Did I really deserve that position? What I really qualified for that position? Absolutely not, but he still hired me anyway because of the identity capital. And once I was in there, it was definitely very difficult because you see I was learning Python

6:06when I was taking those courses. But in the lab, people were using R. So I essentially have to learn R by myself. I was decent at that time and I even considered doing a masters degree where a PhD in research. But ultimately I decided not to because I just really didn't like the bives of academia. So I made a leap of faith and decided to do a master's in computer science at the University of Pennsylvania. I actually do think that this is one of my best traits, which is the fact that I have a very big bias towards action. It's also one of my worst traits in the sense that I put to me in very unfortunate situations as I will talk about later. But in this case, it is a very good trait. At that time, if I had actually known the amount of pain and effort and self-doubt that would have come with that computer science degree, it's very accelerated computer science degree, I probably would not have done it. This is one of the most insecure times that I felt in my life because I was just like not good at computer science. This is when I failed my first exam ever in my life. But I did eventually land two internship offers, one from Goldman Sachs and one from Amazon.

7:08So what I learned during that recruiting cycle, interviewing cycle is a very crucial lesson. It's the fact that personality and context and just a little bit of trying can get you so far in life. I was woefully unprepared for those interviews. For Goldman Sachs, I failed three of the four final round interviews. Like I'm not even kidding, I literally failed three of the four. Like one of the interviews, I think it was something like, oh, like can you design a database, like that interacts with some stack? Or I don't even remember what the question was. Like I literally said, I'm sorry, I haven't learned this in school yet. Like I don't understand what the question means. And another one of the interviews was about graphs, right? And at that time, I didn't learn about graphs yet. So I also just like directly just said to the guy, I'm just like, you know, I haven't learned about graphs yet. That's going to be next week's topic. So you may be wondering why in the world would they have picked me? Because I think I had personality. I think a lot of people, when they go into interviews, they try to come up with like very professional and just don't really show who they are as person. So I think in that way, I was able to stand out. Another thing is that one of my strengths is talking.

8:11If you compare me to someone from sales, for example, I would be absolutely awful. However, in the context of software engineers, I am very, very good at talking. So I really tried to push that and just emphasize how good I am at communication. And finally, I just showed that I really cared. I said like, you know, I don't know about graphs right now, but I'm going to learn that next week. And I will make sure that I know all these things when I start my internship. That combination of traits, I think, I hypothesize is the reason why they finally accept me. And then, but anyways, I ended up choosing Goldman Sachs and I did my internship as a software engineer. During that time, I got this impeding doom again. This dreadful feeling, just like the feeling that I got when I realized I didn't want to be a doctor anymore. So this time around, I learned from my lesson from last time. You know, let's not bury our head in the sand. I pretend to be in a ostrich and wait three years and waste that time before realizing this. So I decided to not be a software engineer. Then I did. I had to apply into data science positions. And actually the only place I would give me an interview

9:12was Facebook. But it is going to bother you because you're human. And I was human. I am human still. So I ended up going through those interview rounds. I actually had to learn SQL by myself because I was taking a computer science degree, not a data science degree. And I eventually got that job. Another really important lesson by this time of my career is realizing how important the ability to self-learn was. I had to learn SQL by myself in 11 days actually. So there's a video over here that explains how I did that. Now speaking of self-learning, I want to talk about this amazing opportunity that is presented by 365 data science, the sponsor of today's video. 365 data science is an online learning platform where you can learn about data, business, and of course data science. I'm an instructor that partnered with them on two different courses now. And it's also the platform that people and lonely octopists are learning from. So what I'm trying to say is that I really think that this is an amazing resource. So now I want to tell you guys about this amazing initiative that they're doing right now. They're offering their entire platform for free, for a limited amount of time. You get access to the entire platform with their entire course catalog of over 55 courses.

10:13You also get access to the resume builder to all the exams, all the exercises, download a material as well as their whole like gamified system with rewards built in. This campaign will take place from November 1st at 3 p.m. GMT plus one until November 21st at 259 GMT plus one. I'll link in the description how it is that you can access this campaign. Everyone can join and enjoy 100% off this entire platform for 20 days. And there's no credit card required. Like seriously, this is such a great opportunity. And I implore you to take advantage of this. All right, now back to the video. Okay, so now fast forward a couple of years in which I worked at Meta. And then I finally decided to quit my job at Meta to pursue this career that I have right now. I pushed myself to a point where I was trying to work two full time jobs, could not manage that and just like completely derailed myself and then finally quit my job. So was that ultimately a good thing? Yes, was that the best way of doing it? Definitely not. But yes, that is pretty much where I am right now career wise. I was doing YouTube. I started that company with my friends in order to do that as B2B media company

11:14and then also with lonely octopus now. And this is the perfect career that I could possibly ask for at this time of my life. And I'm so incredibly grateful that I have it. Now I also wanna give you guys a couple pieces of advice that I did not do correctly and I regret today. So the first one is experimentation. I could have saved myself a lot of trouble if I just started experimenting in college and not be terrified about my GPA. And if I explored different things, maybe I'd even have to do a master's in computer science. Maybe I would have figured out that computer science was the way to go. And I could have gone to the industry and not have to waste money on a master's degree. So if you're in college right now, we're just in general, like you feel like you're not satisfied with where you are in your career. Don't be so afraid to experiment. Other piece of advice is kind of related to that, which is the sunk cost fallacy. Don't be like me and just bury your head in the sand and just be like, oh no, I already spent this many years pursuing this goal. So now it's too late and I should just spend the rest of my life doing something that I don't like. Like that makes no sense. This is your life. And just don't a society define like whether you're too older or not to do something.

12:14Like ultimately you're the one experiencing your life. And ultimately you would also be the one regretting your decisions if you didn't choose to do the things that you want to do. That's not to say that you should take ridiculous risk and just quit your job or something like that. But you can think of it as in low investment things. You could buy a course and learn how to code. That cost you like $10. We're like $20 or something like that. Okay, so last thing, I kind of touched upon this earlier, but I just want to like re-emphasize this because it's so important. Build identity capital. For all my career changes out there for all of my indecisive people out there, build identity capital, things that are valuable to the marketplace. Like for me, again, like I wasn't like this is the best thing I've recoding is so fun, like I just want to do this forever. It wasn't like that. It was because I knew that it's valuable to marketplace. The society around you does not operate on your terms. Like you don't get to choose what are the important things. But once you build identity capital, once you have the skills that society likes, then you're able to have a lot more leverage. You can end up doing something like I would be a data scientist. I will do this,

13:14buy will leverage those skills and start making videos on YouTube about data science. You realize there's a lot more options that are available to you if you just do valuable things. And then you can pick, all right. So thank you so much for watching this video. I hope just kind of learning about my journey towards where I am right now is helpful to you guys and some of this advice will help you as well. Well, I will see you guys in the next video where I live stream.