EPISODE 40: BECOME AN ENTREPRENEUR (NOT A DOCTOR OR A LAWYER)
SHOW NOTES
We’re talking about entrepreneurialism this week — especially because it can fly in the face of what traditional Asian parents want for us (which is usually to become a doctor and a lawyer, or as Christopher Vo, LMFT shares, “If your parents are really progressive… an engineer!” What do you do if you realize you’re not made for normal, if you’re yearning for “out of bounds,” if you’re looking to live true to your wild nature when you weren’t raised to believe that being different is okay?
We also cover:
Re Perez’s book, Your Brand Should Be Gay (Even If You’re Not): The Art and Science of Creating an Authentic Brand
Kimberly Ann Johnson’s books, The Fourth Trimester and Call of The Wild
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Welcome to the F*ck Saving Face podcast. I'm your host, Judy Tsuei, and together we'll explore mental and emotional health for Asian Americans, especially breaking through any taboo topics. Like may not always be pretty, but it is indeed beautiful. Let's make your story beautiful today.
It requires so much Moxie, grit, tenacity, perseverance, and it can oftentimes be a very lonely journey. It's also kind of flying in the face of a lot of what conventional Asian parents might tell you to do, which is to pursue a career as a doctor or a lawyer, or as in episode 38, Christopher licensed marriage and family therapist said if they're really progressive, they encourage you to become an engineer.
What I also think is interesting is that a lot of us who grew up as first generation Asian American kids, our parents probably had small businesses and that's how they work to support our families. And yet I think that the definition of entrepreneurial-ism in American culture, especially is different than the idea of what was represented to us growing up.
So this week we talk with repress, he CEO of branding for the people and agency in Austin, Texas. And he recently wrote a best-selling book called your brand should be gay, even if you're not the art and science of creating an authentic brand. The interview is great because we talk a lot about the things that are very key and important to me, which is how to show up authentically.
And when he published this book, he felt like it was his, you know, stake in the ground, telling everyone that he works with whether or not they knew it, that he is gay. And yet it was also an opportunity to just normalize it and demonstrate how you can have an effective, powerful brand that is truly resonant with who you are and how you show up in the world.
For today, I'll share a bit about my journey and how I got to where I am. It's definitely not been the prescriptive. Go to college, get a job, buy a house, start a family that kind of bath. And I'll be totally honest that as much as I endeavor to listen to my heart and to live wildly by the nature that I have, I was born in the year of the horse as is my daughter, by the way, three Zodiac cycles after me.
So I feel like that idea of, you know, a free roaming horse, bucking traditions, really living on a free range, being wild. That's very resonant with me. And at the same time, I'm still in this, it, that truly encourages us to fall in line and do what is quote unquote normal. So it can often feel like an internal conflict of what it is that I feel I was born for, that I was meant to do.
And what I'm told is safe by society. But I think that as we've seen over the last couple of years, especially with the world as it's been safety has always been an illusion and we do what we can to, you know, create the best circumstances possible. But that doesn't always mean that the outcome is going to turn out the way that we thought it was going to.
I didn't pursue a traditional path when it came to a career, especially not for an Asian American, I didn't become a doctor or a lawyer. I couldn't even get into business school. My path wasn't paved with guidance. It was dug up with heart. I arrived at UC Berkeley, just damn grateful that I got in and sure that any second someone would realize that they had made a mistake and send me to a lower level university that would reflect how I truly felt about myself.
It didn't matter that I'd manage my way through stress and trauma to get to where I was that I had paid my own way through sat, prep, classes, and college applications. I could have spent that money that I was making when I was 15 and a half till I was 17 on ice blended lattes from coffee bean we're on clothes, or maybe even saving up for a car, but I spent it on getting into a top tier public university.
I didn't know how to schedule for classes. I missed my first login date and time because honestly, I was flying by the seat of my pants calling in and pressing numbers. This was before the days of internet registering. I didn't know that I also had to pick a major. I tried, I tried desperately to want to do business or econ or something more solid than English.
I tried psychology. I even tried to make my own fucking major with interdisciplinary studies and none of it worked. I didn't feel qualified or cool enough to make it into journalism school. Hello. Talk to people, interview them. Who did I think I was, so I aimed for English. But because that seemed a little too liberal.
I double majored in mass communications. It was business school. Adjacent marketing was kind of close to econ, right? How would I ever make money? What was I ever going to do with my life? I literally had a friend tell me freshman year and engineer, what are you going to do with an English degree? But the quiet nine of creativity kept at me.
And then I led a case competition team for the advertising Federation affiliated with the Haas school of business. Again, business school adjacent. I walked through those hallowed halls and felt almost, almost good enough. Almost smart enough, almost enough. Again, it didn't matter that I had a Haas professor, Dr.
Trudy carrot ward, who was our advisor who believed in me. She said that I was this unique kind of person who had this perfect blend of both strategy and creativity, how rare that was, how incredible we almost won our case competition. Almost. I had no idea what I was doing as president of this organization, but here we were a few points shy from winning and it was widely known that there was a chip on the judge's shoulders against Berkeley.
That we thought we were all that. So they judged us harder. It didn't matter that I won not one, but two awards for advertising throughout my college career and was flown from California to New York on all expense paid trips. I stayed at the Waldorf Astoria. I won the American advertising. Federation's top 25, most promising minority awards.
I won a coveted internship with Darcy Mesias Benton and Bowles on Madison avenue. So that when I watched Madmen years later, I know exactly what they were talking about. I won so many competitions that when I asked my sister and mother one time, why they weren't excited. When I called back to tell them that I had won, they said, this happens to all the time.
It's not a big deal. Every single time I would make that drive from Berkeley down the five through the grapevine to LA I would get home and my mother would ask, do you have enough money? But it's not like they had any money to spare. As a sophomore in college, I was working two to three jobs at a time living off of financial aid.
And I was the one who sent money home to them for my father's dental work. Then when I got a full-time job in my early twenties, I sent the money to take their first vacation ever to Hawaii. A few years later when I moved to Shanghai, China to work as an editor, killing myself with an eating disorder, my mother called me right before Christmas to say, we have a surprise.
We're taking a trip for Christmas. I thought she was going to say that they bought tickets to come see me. We're going to Hawaii. My mother said going back to the islands where I had originally bought them a trip to the place that I would eventually moved to in my mid thirties. We're calling to tell you that we're all going your three siblings and your dad and I, and if something happens to us, we wanted you to know, my mother was calling to tell me that they could all die on a plane together.
She also wasn't calling to invite me no one from my family called me on Christmas. My career has evolved from copywriter to marketing strategist, to freelancer, to travel writer, to photo shoot model, to editor, to editorial contributor, to coach, to yoga teacher, to Reiki practitioner, to who knows what else?
I've lived in 30 places, over 20 cities in five states and five countries. I have gone from self-employed to full-time employee, to contract employee to making it up as I go. I made a hell of a lot of money with ease. I've made very little money with a lot of work. I've created a story for my life that is unlike anyone else's.
I have been wild at heart. I have not lived a life. That's been guided by the norm by traditional expectations. And I felt conflicted at so many points in my life to give up what I was made for to do the thing the world kept telling me to do, to buy a house, to settle down, to be quote unquote normal, especially after having a child.
But I wasn't made for normal and every single time I've tried, my heart feels like it's going to claw out of my chest at the need for wild, for more, for out of bounds for outside. What most would consider safe, reliable, trusted. True. Recently, my friend, Kimberly Ann Johnson, the author of the fourth trimester and her recent book, call of the wild shared to help encourage me to complete my book proposal for my memoir.
You are meant for a wild, you are meant to be untamed. There are two quotes that I've loved throughout my life. One I've always lived by and one that's recently come into my purview, but that I feel like describes me so well. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die for the harder I work, the more I live, I rejoice in life for its own sake.
And this was said by George Bernard Shaw. It's pretty much the first part of this quote that I have always remembered, which incidentally I thought was said by some 1920s, Hollywood starlet. Just this idea that I want to be thoroughly used up when I die. And the next quote is by John a shed, a ship in Harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.
I have come back again and again to the safe Harbor. I spend a little time here and then I know that I am meant to be at open sea. I want to know that by the end of my life, I have used up every single spark of creativity, purpose drive, ambition, and connection. That was within me, that there was absolutely nothing left that I could have contributed to the world that I made the most of every single second, I was gifted.
And so if you have been called by the wild, by the unknown, by the nagging persistence of your soul, knowing that you were designed or destined for something possibly vastly different, or even just a smidge different from where you are now know that you're not alone, that you can give yourself permission to live a life by your own standards.
The world likes to think it's safer by having more people fall in line. Instead, it just creates more people, feeling stuck, feeling lost, feeling far from being vibrant and alive. I believe that if we have only this one go around and existence and that since the beginning of time, to the end of time, there will only ever be one of us, one expression born into us than it would be a damn shame if we didn't live into all of what makes us unique.
This week, we'll be exploring how to own and express all of who you are in business and in life. I hope you'll join me. As I mentioned on Wednesday and episode 41, I'll be interviewing repress. He CEO of branding for the people. It's a great interview. One of the things that I really love is when my interview guests say, well, I've never shared this publicly before, or I've never had a conversation about this before, which are some of the things that recess in our conversation.
If you're looking for more ways in which I've broken the Asian American stereotype to crack open the mold and live a life that's more true. You can support me on Patrion or going to our website. Fuck saving face.com. And here's a little plug from my sweet daughter. Please support my moms podcast. It has a bad word in it, but I think you'll know where to find it.
If you do choose to support me on Patrion, you'll get access to ask me anything sessions. And when I say that, I truly do mean anything. Everything I've hinted to in all of these Monday essays so far that I actually haven't shared fully outright because you know, a wise person knows when to say one. Also, if you're looking for something else to listen to, that's relevant to everything that we've talked about here, putting your life into context within the greater universe and this broad expanse of time.
I highly recommend listening to Michelle Thaller. She is a renowned astronomer and a science commentator, and she wrote an essay for this podcast called meditative story. The title of the essay is, are tiny, meaningful lives in the vast universe. And I listened to that episode on repeat over and over multiple times, just one specific line in it, where she talks about her relationship with her husband and how, because of what physicists now understand as the construct of time, what the beginning and the end of time all mean and our place within it as humans and what this means for connection and for how we want to be in our lives.
I think it's super powerful and it's a wonderful scientific lens to something very spiritual at times. So go give that a listen. I'll link to it. In the show notes, you can go find this on episode 40 on the fuck saving face website.
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