Trust your gut, and my love and hate relationship with prestige

Hi everyone,

Once again, a huge thank you for subscribing to the newsletter - I hope it will be fun (and useful!). Useful fun is the best.

This past week I have published a new episode about how to become an AI entrepreneur (I will deep dive into learnings from this one in the next newsletter). In the meantime, here are the 3 lessons that i have learned from the previous episode with Kenzy Goodwin who, after 20 years in equity trading, pivoted into helping fintechs scale their businesses (if you haven’t seen it, don’t worry - the below will still make sense).

Lesson 1. You CAN make a career pivot even from a super specialised role. To me, this is one of the most powerful insights from the interview. I have always thought that unless you are in a “business” role that is transferable across industries (like Business Strategy, Marketing, Sales) you are married to the industry you chose forever. And I’m not the only one - time and time again I’m hearing that people have this fear (“But i can only do just this one thing!”) - so even if they want to try something new, they don’t dare to properly explore that space because their experience is “irrelevant”.

But Kenzy’s experience proves that that’s not the case: on the surface, Kenzy’s equity trading experience looked ultra specialised (i.e. ”where else can it be applied apart from equity trading?” you’d think) - but by focusing on SKILLS that she learned, such as ability to work under pressure, make conclusions based on imperfect information, synthesising vast amounts of data into an insight, she was able to find other type of roles where her skills can be applied.

Bottom line: if you are considering other areas you want to work in, forget about what you KNOW (i.e. your content expertise), but focus on the SKILLS that you have learned - and make sure you put emphasis on these when you meet people in the new area (and btw you’d be surprised how many transferable skills you have!). To get inspiration, describe everything you are doing in ChatGPT and ask it to provide an overview of transferable skills you have (side note, I LOVE ChatGPT - to the point where I feel I’m building an emotional bond with it. I know this is not ok - robots will conquer the world and screw me over… But I hope ChatGPT will remember how much I loved him!!!)

One more point on specialism - based on everything I have seen in my interviews and in my career some people LOVE being specialists, and some people really want to have more business-focused / leadership-type roles (and some people want to have a mix). In Kenzy’s case - at least at that point of her career - she probably felt that specialism was a bit too narrow for her, i.e. she wanted to develop other entrepreneurial/leadership skills and - importantly - she was able to validate this by taking leadership roles in internal initiatives (like Women’s Network she referred to in the interview). Listen to yourself as to where you sit on “specialist vs. business leader” spectrum - and find small risk-free ways to validate that.

Lesson 2. Watch how structural trends (regulation, technology - whatever applies to your industry) may affect your role. Kenzy was saying that, over time, what she did within her trading role was affected by these trends, and this role started feeling different as a result. In the reality of rapid AI development, I would really pay attention to this - I personally want to speak to as many people as possible who work with AI (start ups, VCs) around how mine and other roles may be affected by this technology. I don’t think anyone has an answer at this early stage - but some forward-looking insight on that wouldn’t hurt. (I will ask ChatGPT: “ChatGPT ❤️, tell me how you’re gonna automate my job ”).

Lesson 3. Trust your instincts - and talk, talk, talk. Inner voice / feeling something deep inside that prompts you to explore your next career step is the number one theme that comes across pretty much all interviews I have done. If something deep inside of you keeps coming up, PAY ATTENTION to this - even if others are telling you you are insane. Because we live in a reactive emotionally charged world, oftentimes we don’t hear anything inside. But the moment people I have interviewed found a quiet space - whether its maternity leave, or as they were doing more and more mindfulness practices like meditation and breath work - their inner voices got louder and louder. Btw this doesn’t apply just to massive career pivots - this voice can give you inspiration around how to tweak your existing role, and that may be enough!

Once you get an insight / some intuition - no matter how high level and abstract - talk to as many relevant people as possible (e.g. those who are doing roles you could be interested in). Don’t forget about alumni of places you worked at, if they are doing something cool. This is EXACTLY what Kenzy did - she realised at a VERY high level what type of activities she wanted (e.g. working in an innovation-focused entrepreneurial area, leveraging her leadership skills beyond specialism, working with people she admires). And then she spoke to many people about 1) which specific roles could meet these criteria 2) the roles where her current experience could be most relevant (in Kenzy’s case, it was fintechs given Kenzy’s trading background). Then Kenzy got inspired and made a move. Side note: this way, through speaking with people, you are also more likely to LAND the next job (vs. online applications) - something that people I speak with confirm to me over and over again.

Final thought - not really a lesson - but personal oversharing. There was one more topic that got brought up in this interview, with which I have a love and hate relationship with - which is the topic of prestige. Kenzy has mentioned it in the interview - and I couldn’t agree more - that working in prestigious places means you are surrounded by incredibly smart people, you have many doors opened afterwards and can learn tonnes. That’s the love part. The hate part - I think there is a massive risk of making this your identity. So my personal takeaway from this - if you want to strive for the best (which is, btw, not the only correct path), do it for your own, intrinsic reasons rather than making a big brand the foundation of your self worth.

With that - until next time.

Be Shameless.

Best,

Varia