Reshaping the story of your career: Joseph Liu at TEDxCardiff

so what do you do this is a common question that comes up in social gatherings dinner parties weddings networking events TED conferences now if I were to ask you the question right now what do you do think about how you would respond what would you say and more importantly how does it feel to say that now on the surface what do you do is a common question it's just an innocent conversation starter right but on another level you might feel like there's some sort of judgment involved judgement about how important you are how successful you are how useful you are based simply on what you do for a living and have you ever noticed that there are times in your life when you enjoy getting that question and then there are times in your life when you don't enjoy getting that question so for example you might enjoy getting that question if you've just been promoted or maybe you're working for a highly respected organization and you might not enjoy getting that question if you've just been laid off and made redundant or maybe you're not feeling passionate about what you do well it turns out most of us aren't feeling passionate about what we do in galip's most recent state of the global workplace poll that covers 142 countries they found that only 13% of us are feeling fully engaged with our work and yet there's a tendency to maintain the trajectory of our careers after all our careers are part of our identity right and sometimes it's hard to let go of who you've been for so long imagine if you were to do that if you were to let go of who you've been and to walk away from one career to pursue another that's exactly what I chose to do 12 years ago what I chose to do again last year and it's what I feel we all must do sometimes we evolve our careers as we ourselves evolve so today I'd like to share with you my own personal story of career change three lessons I learned when standing on the cusp of change which I hope will be useful to you if you're also pondering a change in your own life and finally wrap up with talking about if you question that you might want to ask yourself if you're trying to clarify whether it's time for you to move on now right now when I get asked the question what do you do I actually enjoy getting the question now I enjoy giving my response I tell people that I coach individuals to develop who they are as a brand and to relaunch themselves during times of change in their careers their lives and their organizations and part of the reason why I enjoy doing this kind of work is because my own career has gone through its own set of transformations over the years you see 12 years ago when I was asked that question what do you do I was actually dreading the question and I was ashamed of my response but before I get into that moment let me explain you how I reached that point now as a small child you're not asked the question what do you do you're asked a question what do you want to be when you grow up and when I was asked a question what you want to be when you grow up I would tell people I want to be a doctor and this is something I decided at the age of five when I had to go to the hospital to get some stitches on my left eye you can still see the scar and from that moment on I thought you know I want to do that because I was so impressed with that doctors ability to fix me up ten years later a competing interest came up and that was in business I loved the idea of starting something from nothing of marketing an idea of creating a solution to a problem and so I got a business license and I started a small business in the basement of my parent's home in Springfield Missouri called Joe's disks and I sold blank floppy disks which were a hot item at the time now that didn't exactly work out and become the next Amazon for a lot of reasons one reason is because right when I was developing that interest in business another event occurred in my life which squashed that interest before I had a chance to really blossom at the age of 17 I was playing tennis one day and I felt the sharp pain go through the right side of my chest and it felt like the air was knocked out of me it was later diagnosed as a primary spontaneous pneumothorax now this happens to about 7 out of 100,000 people and it's when your lung spontaneously collapses on itself and it makes it very difficult to breathe now by the time the doctors caught this and diagnosed it properly had gotten pretty bad today either shove a metal rod between my ribs and perform of Chester's we inflate it and reattach it now I took all this to be a sign that actually you know what maybe I should become a doctor you see there are two stories that take place in all of our lives there is the story of what actually occurred so the factual events and then there's the narrative that we overlay on top of those stories to make sense of those events especially when those events are painful and so the narrative that I decided I wanted to write was something along the lines of becoming a doctor one day equipped with this insight of knowing what it's like to be a patient and then I did what we all do when we have a goal in mind I began to invest myself in it so I spent the next four years at Northwestern University studying the pre Medical Sciences I majored in psychology because I loved human behavior but I also thought it'd be useful to know that as a doctor and I also spent three summers doing medical research and as I was going through this I began to feel what a lot of people tell me they feel if they aren't feeling 100% satisfied with their careers I would wake up each morning I wasn't really looking forward to the day or I would not feel like I was making the most of who I am and I was actually kind of feeling quite depleted in terms of my energy but I carried on anyway took the ten hour exam to get into medical school and as I became more invested in this narrative it became harder and harder to extract myself from it next thing I know in 2002 I matriculated to the Georgetown School of Medicine in Washington DC and I remember being at the white coat ceremony where you take the Hippocratic oath to do no harm and I felt incredibly conflicted because on the one hand I was proud of having reached this goal in my life to be surrounded by all these people were going to make such a noble contribution to society but on the other I was deeply unhappy I felt trapped and I remember being in gross anatomy lab the second week of medical school and holding the human heart in my hands and looking down at this pair of lungs in this cadaver being reminded to this organ that failed me so many years ago I thought well here I am is this still where I want to be and it was one of those moments where you feel like you realize that you know you think you know where you want to go in life and then you get there and something's a little bit off and I remember looking around at all my classmates furiously dissecting their cadaver risen scribbling in their lab notebooks and it was a moment when I felt incredibly misplaced you ever feel that when you feel like you're wearing the wrong shoe and no matter how hard you try it just doesn't fit like right and it was at that moment that I realized I had a pivotal decision to make I could either finish what I started or I could quit and I didn't actually know what I wanted to do but I knew at that moment it was no longer this and so at after only the second week medical school I withdrew from the program unraveling all that I invested to get there and bringing this nice narrative to an abrupt end I went from being the 3% of applicants at getting the medical school to the only 1% of students that drop out and when someone asked me the question what do you do I had to say well I just dropped out of medical school and it was at that moment that I felt like complete and utter failure and with no job in hand and no idea what I wanted to do next my career suddenly hit rock bottom before it actually even began and from that moment on I became fascinated almost obsessed with this tension that exists between maintaining the status quo of our lives and moving on to something new which has mean the second part of my talk that three lessons I learned when standing on the cusp of change when I left medical school when I moved from the u.s. to the UK four years ago and when I left my corporate marketing job last year to launch the looma to coaching the first lesson has to do with the paradox of goals now sometimes people ask me what took you so long Joseph to get off that road to becoming a doctor you saw the signs why didn't you just quit earlier the truth is I don't really know I don't know why we don't get off of the road earlier when we feel like something's not right what I do know is that I'm an incredibly goal-oriented individual maybe you're the same way maybe when you set a goal you'll do everything you can to achieve that goal no matter what the cost there's something admirable on that what's interesting is that there's a double-edged sword when it comes to goals on the one hand goals provide our lives with intention with direction with purpose but on the other they're incredibly limiting they can prevent this from being open to other ideas another interest that pop up along the way and that's because sometimes it's hard to see clearly when you're moving so fast toward a goal I set my sights on becoming a doctor and as strange as it sounds I never took the time to look up and make sure I wanted to go there I just got on the train of life and although it was uncomfortable I just kept on riding the train because there's actually comfort in knowing you're going somewhere and what I learned from all this is that detours lead to discovery that if you are willing to step off the road and take the long way around even if it seems like initially it's distraction that it at least opens up the opportunity for you to discover a path forward that resonates more effectively with who you are and what you want from your life not just what you feel you should want from your life the second lesson has to do with the stubborn power of investment now after I left medical school the good thing was I was able to kind of pick up the pieces and I rediscovered my interest in business that spark I had when I launched Joe's disks and I did not go launch another floppy disk company instead I spent the next 10 years working in brand management and marketing for both large and small companies in the US and the UK I went from studying gross anatomy to marketing gross products initially so I started on bin liners and trash bags then moved on to drain opener and then it got better I moved on to luxury deserts and most recently luxury ice cream and I got a chance to work on new product launches and also brand relaunches and I always found the brand relaunches to be much more interesting because you have a chance to reinvent and reinvigorate a brand in a way that represents its future not its past I got a chance to rename a company to redesign a package to launch a brand's first national ad campaign and interestingly enough during those times there was an interesting dynamic where there was a tendency for there to be a tension between ingrained legacy of a brand and potential opportunity and everything that had been invested in building that brand prevented people from wanting to change and evolve that brand so I would hear things like well we can't change the name of our company because although that would be a more versatile name people won't understand what we do anymore we can't change the way this package looks on shelf although it would modernize it consumers won't be able to find us on shelf anymore or we can't launch this new ad campaign be it would allow us to reach new consumers but our existing consumers are going to feel alienated now Daniel Kahneman is a very well-known psychologist at Princeton University and he stated that we prefer certainty over uncertainty that we prefer avoiding a loss over receiving a gain and I think that helps to kind of explain the parallel dynamic that happens in our careers where there's a tendency to maintain the logical stories of our careers this is the idea of never giving up and never giving in and finishing what you start there's something quite admirable in that nobody likes the person who stands up in the middle of a movie theater and walks out in the middle of a movie even if the movie is bad I've only done it once it's actually very tough to do and what I learned from all this is that sometimes moving on is harder than holding on that sometimes investment is so strong it's the one thing that's keeping you from progressing your life forward but recognizing that that dynamic exists is actually the first step toward being able to cut your losses and move on especially when your intuition is telling you that this surely is not as good as it gets the final lesson has to do with the upside of chaos now when I left medical school everything was thrown up in the air but my interest in business reemerged and I was able to grab on to it and run with it when I moved from the u.s. to the UK four years ago everything was up in the air for me again it was very chaotic I had to rebuild my life to restart my career here but I was reminded of how much I actually thrive on this idea of building something from nothing and just over a year ago when I was getting ready to transition to a new brand management role my father passed away and I was reminded of life's fragility the same way I was reminded of life's fragility when I had that collapsed lung and it made me kind of slow down and re-evaluate my life and it made me realize I wanted to shift my life from building and relaunching products to building and relaunching people and I didn't want to put it off the point is that transitions are messy they are ugly they are not pretty and they are not fun it's like being on a highway and trying to get off on the interchange you always end up in a traffic jam but sometimes that's the only way to get off and get on get on to a new direction and what I learned is am its opportunity the opportunity to rediscover who you really are because when you're feeling lost all the boundaries in your life they disappear and when the boundaries are gone anything is possible and you can move in a new direction a new opportunity can emerge finally to wrap up with these lessons in mind I thought I'd share with you a few questions that you might want to consider asking yourself if you are on the cusp of change and maybe you're wondering if it's time for you to move on these are questions I asked myself at every fork in the road and I think they're simple questions but they're not always easy to answer and the first question is what keeps you here second what is that costing you because while staying put is serving you in some way there is always an opportunity cost always finally is it worth it is it worth that trade-off is it worth getting that promotion if your marriage is falling apart cuz you're never home on time is it worth the money if your help is poor is it worth the stability your job offers you if the rest of your life has become unstable is it worth having a convenient answer for the question what do you do if you feel like you should be doing something else and if the answer is no the next question you gotta ask yourself is what are you willing to let go of to make room for something else sometimes in life you have to let go of part of your life to make room for the pursuit of something greater when I left my corporate marketing job I had to be willing to let go of the steady paycheck and the credibility of being associated with the large brand so that I could make room for the pursuit of having a more direct and personal impact on the people in the world around me now you might be sitting there thinking well Joseph I don't know about that I my situations not that great maybe the situation isn't right for me to make a move maybe my financial situation isn't correct the timings off what do you say to that well I say that the timing needs to be right for you because changing directions in life and making a pivot is an enormous amount of investment and time sometimes money you have to really want it and only you can know when the timing is right in the conditions are right the great news is you get to draw the line you get to decide you get to decide when the conditions are good enough you get to decide when the path forward is clear enough you get to decide when your risk tolerance is high enough and you get to decide when you have had enough when the fear of the known is greater than the fear of the unknown and when the idea of doing nothing seems riskier than the idea of doing something when the thought of standing still is more agonizing to you than the thought of moving on not because you know exactly where you want to go but because you do know precisely it's not here and because you do believe at least broadly that somewhere out there something better awaits you in closing as far as how things turned out for me well I can tell you that all these windy roads have definitely made for quite an adventure for me and a memorable journey it's not over yet but I can also tell you that it was worth it because right now I wake up each morning and I can't wait to get my day started because I'm doing work that I feel is making the most of who I am both personally and professionally I'm doing work that I care about that I think is meaningful to me and hopefully therefore in turn meaningful to others and I do believe that if you're willing to remain open to new roads to embrace the chaos that comes your way when you cut your losses and to bravely let go of one aspect of your life to make room for the pursuit of something greater than this question of what do you do will be a nice reminder of the time that you chose to boldly relaunch your career in a way that has a positive impact on your life the people in your life and the world around you imagine what would be possible if you were to act on that one idea that has been lingering in the back of your mind for so long to begin to rewrite the next chapter of your career in fact maybe to reshape the entire story of your career how would your life change if you took that step thank you you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 179,253

Keywords: tedx talk, ted x, TEDx, ted talks, tedx, ted, tedxcardiff, ted talk, tedx talks

Id: OGpVOSPqboc

Length: 17min 39sec (1059 seconds)

Published: Sat May 24 2014