What is my job / What I do for a living

hey guys so I've not made a video for a few weeks probably I thought I should start something today it's gloomy and boring outside I thought I should make an effort brighten up the day and go out and do something interesting so let's go good morning freezing cold morning hear [Music] that sound warms up the day nice there is ice indeed magic seats heating on temperature up one of the car as I promised that I would make a video about what I do once I have over a thousand subscribers so I suppose that time has come and now by making this video [Music] I don't know what the light is like because the sun is shining from all directions so I hope this video look sensible many of you have asked because I guess you're curious and a couple of people some young viewers made comments to say I want to do what he does and be able to get those cars so it's very sweet to hear that and it's good to have ambitions and goals I think it's the day requires sunglasses I don't know what it is with me recently I was started losing sunglasses all my life I never lost sunglasses or anything for that matter but recently I don't know why I keep losing them and that I have to buy new ones and they're not cheap [Music] come on car it's zero degrees in London it says according to the weather report that later on it's going to warm up to about seven or eight degrees but right now it's frozen and the windscreen is refusing to slow down well there's no ice on the outside but there's a lot of steam on the inside if I do this it makes a lot of noise okay so as I was saying I think I was talking about what I do for a living and many people make these videos and they go on and on and on and you're just like okay get to the point tell me what you do and then if I'm interested I listen to the rest of it if not that's it but I think they want you to watch the whole video in my case as always I appreciate if you watch it because I make so much effort making videos but if you don't that's fine as well this isn't my day job making videos as I mentioned in my previous videos I used to be a medical doctor I studied medicine and then started working in surgery for a number of years until I think I worked for about three years and then I realized that there was things about my physical life that I couldn't cope with one of which was being up awake all night and then starting a day job in the morning so as a doctor back in the day you had to do your night shift and then wake up in the morning and do your day job this has changed over the years with the EU regulations but anyhow back in the day if you had to work a loss at hand I can't function if I don't have a good night's sleep I feel like a zombie the next day and when you're dealing with other people's lives the last thing you want to do is not to be fresh and not to have a fully functioning mind so after three years I decided that I needed to do something else plus I was very interested in technology and it was a hobby whenever I had any spare time I would spend doing stuff with technology I spoke to one of my consultants at the time and said look I like what I do I help like helping people but I'm not sure if I am cut out for this in the long run I'm not excited about coming to work every day half the time I feel shattered and he said you're still very young this though I think I was 29 or 30 between 28 and 30 I can't remember exactly how old I was but the point was that he said you can do this for another 20 30 years and look back and think gosh I wish I had changed but you can change now for a few years if you don't like it you can always come back so I used to work for a private hospital from time to time and I found out that that hospital company owned several hospitals in London and they were planning to buy three new hospitals so I thought this would be a good opportunity I went to the CEO I said look I'm a doctor and I know how the patient care and all the processes work I love technology and I understand you're buying these hospitals can I help with your mergers and integrations with these three hospitals and he was very surprised and he said well I don't know I can't make a decision but I can get you in touch with our project team and our IT team and you can have a chat with them see what they say plus we can't if you start working in that role we can't pay you your doctor salary like I'm fine to take a pay cut which I did I went to the other guys and I said look I don't want you to pay me I don't want you to trust me just give me a week's worth of unpaid work if I can prove to you that I am good enough then we can talk about the job so within the first three days I was offered a job and I took it I helped with the merger and integration of those three hospitals into the existing group off I think it was nine that they owned so I looked at the whole technology landscape and how everything works and then did the stuff that I thought was common sense but apparently that was quite complex work and they felt that I had delivered over and above what they expected so within the first six months I got a promotion and at the end of the project when all the work was complete the CEO gave me an award it was a good start I think it's everyone keeps telling you this and I think it's very true if you love what you do you will be successful and you will enjoy it so I don't miss being a doctor because I went and started doing what I really enjoy it and it was my hobby and I ended up getting a job so I left that and then went into various other firms and what I do now is I'm a management consultant but I specialize in post-merger integration and divestitures planning green fencing so these are kind of like business terms but basically when companies buy other companies the decisions are made in boardrooms looking at Finance sheets and piell's and how one company is performing and how their portfolio could benefit the other they can't for various reasons for sometimes for shareholder value sometimes for insider trading reasons sometimes not to scare the staff there's so many reasons why they can't discuss it openly and have everyone its input so the decisions I made behind closed doors once the deal is done then people like me come in to make sure that everything integrates and merges smoothly people are not impacted you can get value from that deal if you have any synergies that you can get so all of that it is very interesting because I don't like doing business as usual operational mundane stuff that you do over and over again the same thing I like new challenges so this kind of a job allows me to go into places which are completely unknown to me and to so many other people who work in those organizations and then I help them bring everything together I create new teams sometimes virtual teams sometimes real people who are there on-site and then bring everyone together well I think I'm very proud of is the fact that I'm good with people and I like bringing out the best in people and several times in my life I have done this where I've taken teams that were previously like the underperforming or unhappy and I've turned it around and made them really really happy and very successful and high-performing teams and it's all because if you understand human nature and you make sure that people are happy in what they do they'll be successful you can buy people's time you can't buy their brain you can only buy their brain and loyalty if they are interested and they're you can't buy it with money you can buy it with love and care and that's what I do but before I take all this credit and look like a saint I should point out that I was not always like that I used to be a standard typical boss who thought that if you check people in and to make sure that they're in the office on time and they seem to be doing their work then you get the job done and then I used to worship Steve Jobs because everything that he said and did was true to my nature and I used to think about he's perfect he's just like me until I read a few books and especially his autobiography written by Walter Isaacson I think I have read it about three times and after he died I was very sad that one of my idols was dead and when I read his book it was a massive I hope now it made me realize that I was so much like him in every way the way I operated and did things but at the same time I was not a very good person and I didn't allow people around me to relax I only found that out after reading that book about him and realizing what he did to the people around him it gave me an insight into my own behavior so for the following two years I made it my mission to completely change the way I operate and I turned everything around in my life in terms of how I treated my teens and how I got them to deliver and then I realized that wow I have this skill that I've never used and I love working with people and I really enjoy making them happy and so it's very unfortunate that Steve Jobs died but after his death it really helped me understand who I am by reading all that and then or maybe if he was alive I probably would have found out through his autobiography anyway nonetheless the point is I from my mistakes and other people's mistakes and changed and now I love my teams and people that I work with and some of them have become really long-standing friends and it's it's amazing when you get messages a couple of years later after you left work people telling you that they miss you and they wish that you were there as their boss it's very flattering and it makes you feel good about what you do so yeah if anyone has that kind of style of Management do read Steve Jobs's autobiography and see what are the things that you shouldn't do because it really helped me so yeah this is what I do I work as a consultant now and I work with large organizations could be banks or other large companies I say large companies I'm happy to work with small companies and startups which I do we'll come to that in a minute the fun thing about large organizations is that they're very complex and they're lots of complications created by people's egos they're complications created by systems technologies processes and when you work through an integration or a large change program it's so much fun to work through those complexities create solutions that will fix the problems so I work with the large corporations and banks so we've told the whole in regulatory driven change that was forcing the banks to change the way they operate and starring fencing and separating the retail and Investment divisions so I spent several years there doing that kind of work and I sometimes work with companies that are selling parts of their company so if a company is a very large organization and it has a past that is ready for sale then I will go in sort of separate it out bring fence it prepare it for sale once it's sold and help it integrate with the other firms so that's the kind of stuff I do it's it's very interesting it's very challenging it's very different every time my main thing is I'd like to work on things that are new and different rather than doing the same thing over and over again and my job allows me to do that I also have this motto or this way of thinking where I think that I don't like full-time permanent jobs where you have to work through certain parameters and then they judge you and then they do your annual reviews and then you're told whether you're good enough for nice and all that if I'm not good enough fire me otherwise let me get on with the job and I will make your business fantastic and amazing and successful so that's why I work as an independent consultant because it keeps me out of that sort of complicated world of corporate espionage I love technology and because it's been a hobby and a passion I like doing software bills and coming up with new ideas and developments and things sometimes if I find an idea that I can either do myself or if I find a bunch of young entrepreneurs or young I don't know innovators who don't know how to set up a business but they know what to do that I will sometimes partner with them and help them set it up and then sell it when the time is right for obviously an equity stake [Music] that really is also a fun journey because you come up with new creations and ideas and set up new businesses that sometimes make money sometimes don't but the whole process is what's exciting and also you end up helping people who don't really know how to do all these things and for me because I've done it for nearly 20 years now it's very very easy or it seems very easy comes very naturally to me while others find it daunting so it's quite interesting to do those kind of things I also like I don't think I could be a teacher because I'm really impatient and I have very low tolerance levels but I like teaching training people on the job so I always tend to hire at least 10% of people in my team who are complete newbies to that world but I choose them based on their ambitions and their hunger to do something which always pays off because they deliver over and above what their job decree choirs and you get the satisfaction of giving someone one a job and to the knowledge transfer and the training that they otherwise wouldn't get because the world just goes through CDs and ticks boxes rather than looking at people's talents so for me someone's desire to do something and their ambition is more important than their degree so that's how I hire people after a frozen gloomy stars its turn into a beautiful sunny day [Music] in terms of my plans for the next part of 2018 roll the next 11 months in 2018 I have always envied people who speak several languages and either by choice or by circumstance where they grew up in an environment and they're multilingual and this year I've decided that instead of him being other people and wishing that I had that I can change it I've worked all my life really hard to achieve a standard of living that I find comfortable but I haven't really done things that give me the personal satisfaction of growth yes after I moved into the business world I decided that I had a BSc and a bachelor's and Surgery and a bachelor's in medicine but I didn't have a degree in business so I went and did an MBA and it was quite hard and I spent spent I pretty much wiped out two years of my life because I worked from 9 to 5 and from 6 to 9 I would go to university and then on weekends and any other spare time I had I'd be writing assignments and studying so those 2 years were really really tough I used to think that since I've done medicine everything else is a piece of cake but MBA was really hard hard work also I decided not to do a small selection of subjects I decided to do all and I think I took out 13 modules or something and ended up overloading myself mmm bien to be honest I don't think I learnt anything that I didn't already know because I've been working in the industry for about five years before I started my MBA and but it feels good to have a piece of paper for someone who doesn't really know you and doesn't understand what you're capable of offering especially when you're young it's good to have a piece of paper says yes I've got a certificate or a degree but it's never the defining factor for your skills I suppose so yeah back to the language thing I've decided that I'm going to go live in whichever country I choose whether it's France Netherlands Germany and now I've thrown Sweden in the mix as well because one of my favourite countries I'm going to go and spend three four months and completely immerse myself into the society the culture the language specifically because I want to learn at least one more language if not two in 2018 of course you can't really master a language in such a short space of time but if I can have the conversation in French or German then I'll be happy and that's the plan I will try to get some contract work maybe a part time which is 2 or 3 days a week and then spend the rest of the time living in that country and learning and immersing myself into the language I will join a full-time language school at the moment is quite likely to be Germany and I think all the feedback that I've heard and received from my viewers and my friends it looks like it might end up being Munich because everyone is telling me that Munich is the kind of place I would enjoy living in so yeah let's see where this goes so yeah watch this space see where I end up I'm heading out to Berlin Frankfurt and Munich in February that I take a little short break to do some business due diligence and a little holiday in Malta and then I'm going to Amsterdam for a few days to look at where I want to live and if it's the place that I could see myself living in and then I come back and then I think I'm going to go to Bordeaux but we'll find out soon enough where I end up

Channel: EthanFromLondon

Views: 225,536

Keywords: Cars, Fashion, Porsche, ManagementConsultant, Doctor, WhatIdoforaliving, whatismyjob

Id: rojTqGUAp6Q

Length: 24min 13sec (1453 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 31 2018