A deterministic way of life will limit your growth potential.
Excerpt from Steve Jobs’ 2005 Stanford University Commencement speech, “you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you must trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”
I started college as an Architecture major. In the first semester, I discovered that working full-time while attending architecture school was a formula for failure.
Four years later, I got a BSc. Math with a Computer Science concentration. Math major allowed me to work full-time while going to school full-time.
Was I good at Math? No, I failed Math in most of my senior high school years. But the Math curriculum allowed me to graduate one semester sooner than other engineering or business degrees.
Have I been exposed to Computer Science? No. I hadn't seen or touched a computer when I began college. I went for the Computer Science concentration because the Math Professor said we could do homework using a computer at school. In my ignorant mind, I thought, “Wow, that means I don’t have to do homework. The computer is going to do that for me!”
In the last semester of college, I wasn’t sure what jobs I could land.
I applied for jobs at construction job sites, hotel front desks, housekeeping, food and beverage departments, etc. I have tried a few software development houses, and they rejected my application because of my low GPA.
Out of nowhere, a head hunter called to arrange an interview two weeks before graduation. She set an interview for me at a local engineering company with a dozen other college graduates from around the state. She was fantastic! She walked me through how to interview, what I should do to follow up after the interviews, etc.
I was hired as an associate software programmer, the most junior job in the industry. My starting salary was about 1/3 of my peers who went to the same college but had EE degrees and high GPAs. I was ecstatic that I got a job!
Soon after I started to work in the software industry as a programmer, it was apparent to my colleagues that my programming skill was below adequate. Unsurprisingly, I was transferred from the software development group into the Customer Service group. No respectable software engineer would want to work as a Customer Service Representative. That would have been an insult and a signal that I should quit.
But I didn’t quit. And that was the best decision I have ever made.
Working in Customer Service forced me to learn the WHOLE product the company developed and sold to our banking customers. The daily customer interactions enabled me to understand the retail banking industry and why they wanted and needed to move quickly to electronic banking.
Equipped with a good understanding of the entire product set and the banking customers’ online banking needs, it paved the way for me to eventually work up the ladder from Customer Service, Professional Service, and Product Marketing and became the youngest President of the company.
I graduated with a hard-to-market Math degree and couldn’t find a job until a head hunter rescued me. The job I landed came with the lowest salary.
Later, I was disgracefully transferred to Customer Service because my software development skill was inadequate. I should have quit, most other software programmers would have, but I decided to stay. And I became the President of the company twelve years later.
A few years later, I was recruited to join a company in California. That was when I realized my first of many pots of gold in Silicon Valley.
When I looked back, I could see the dots connected perfectly.
My ignorance about computers doing my homework led me to have a Computer Concentration. My post-college poor job perspective forced me to land any job that I could put my hand to. None of my EE peers from the same college wanted to work anywhere other than the semiconductor industry. They despised software as a real industry.
My poor performance in software development and desperation to keep my job landed me a job in Customer Service.
With the help of my relatively low salary and broad knowledge of the banking product and industry, I was allowed to move around in the company from Customer Service to Professional Service and into Product Marketing. That, in turn, gave me a broad knowledge of banking products and the banking industry.
That made me a contender for the top job when it was opened.
My career could not have succeeded if I had thought like most with a deterministic way of life. My EE peers, for example, got exactly what they wanted: High Pay Engineers in the Semiconductor industry. Many have gone through rounds of laid-off since the 1990s, and their field has been decimated since the 2000s. None of those EE I know had ventured outside their area into software or any business role. Their deterministic way of life limited their opportunities to explore the broader landscape and forbade them to be curious and follow their intuition. And hence they became what they had gone for, but nothing more.
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