In case you’ve been watching my youtube videos, you might think that I am an Ex-Banker who made some films and is now a YouTuber, among other things. And that’s not totally wrong. But it’s not the whole truth either.
It might have been a bit confusing to you as I never talked in much detail about the process.
I figured that you might be interested to know a bit more about the person behind Multiple Careers, how I got to this point, and what authority I have to speak on this topic.
Authority? “Who are you to talk about careers and tell me what to do with mine?”, you might ask.
The answer is, that everything that I write about and talk about in my videos is based on my own experience with work, jobs, career, and life. I meshed this up with knowledge I’ve distilled from other people, and concepts I’ve learned from these books. This developed into my own perspective about careers which I share through my videos, blog posts, and other content. A perspective that I found useful in developing a fulfilling and meaningful career. One that I kept finetuning and revising over the last 3 years. One that has helped me grow into a better version of myself and have a happier life overall.
If you are curious to find out what the experiences that shaped my thinking were, then let’s start with this. I’ll share with you, in two parts, an overview of all the jobs and careers I had until this point, and the insights that I gathered in retrospect. In some future posts, I’ll go into some of them in more detail.
What this did for me personally, was to make sense of all the work I did until now. It also helped me clarify what it means to have a career versus a job. I hope that after reading this, the difference between a job and a career will also become more clear to you. And if you want to make sense of your working life until now, you might want to try this exercise yourself!
Disclaimer: I’m omitting ‘kids’ jobs such as plucking white hair stranded for 10 cents each, or opening my pop-up snack shop in my grandparents’ living room.
My first job was as a German language tutor at the age of 16. I earned around $40/month, which at that time was more than the monthly allowance I got. I did that job simply to earn some money and keep my own German language skills alive. But thinking of it, there was an aspect of it that I liked. I enjoyed explaining something to someone to a point where they could understand it well. A thing that I realized I am inclined to do until this day and am doing regularly through my youtube videos. I did this for about a year, and during that time I never thought of it as something that would carry on beyond high school.
During university, I had a lot of jobs. Some of these jobs were the early start of a career that I was totally unaware of. I learned skills in these jobs that would become useful to me much later on.
My first job during university was at a German restaurant I worked at for around 3 years. I just arrived and took the first job I could find. And I was lucky. I got paid € 7 per hour, in cash. This wasn’t a career for me, beyond any doubt. But it turned out to become something more than a job. The owners of the restaurant became like my family. What was perfect about this job was that I didn’t need to think a lot. After studying economic concepts all day, this was a job where I could just go on autopilot. It was physically exhausting but mentally relieving.
After a year plus, I started a second job as student assistant at the international admissions office of my University. This was the first time I had a job managing small projects. Before this, I had started managing projects in high school, as the student council president. This was the first job in which I felt some pride and ambition growing in me. It was not just about earning money and getting experience. There was some satisfaction in doing something that I was and was seen as being really good at. But what did I, a 20ish year old know at that time?
During different semester breaks, I sorted photo negatives at a photo processing lab, worked at the CEBIT exhibition hall in Hannover, and interned at SAP. Working at SAP was the first time where I felt in awe of the company I worked for. I developed a kind of ‘crush’ on the company. And it was not just because of their immaculate canteen menu. When I told my fellow students that I got a job at SAP, I felt that I was met with some form of respect. In hindsight, it was weird that I felt disproportionately proud of something to which I contributed almost nothing. This trait of mine was certainly something that would later come back to bite me.
I remember that there was a time in between, where I was thinking of getting a job going on walks with elderly people. I saw an ad somewhere, and if my memory is not totally failing me, one of my fellow students had that kind of job. For some reason, I didn’t pursue it. The same happened with the nanny job. I almost became a nanny. I got to the point of meeting a family interviewing for nannies. But luckily both I and the family had a hunch that it wasn’t a good idea. I was neither experienced with kids nor did I have a great interest in them. And I had no regret and felt no disappointment whatsoever about not getting the job. This was a good lesson for future me – your hunches can really tell you something!
Okay, so the job count until here is 6.
After graduating from university, I got another job at SAP. This time it was as project support for one of their Project Management Offices. I was basically doing project support for the rollout of the software in different countries. I didn’t know much about the software and knew nothing about programming. But I didn’t have to. My responsibility was to help keep the project running smoothly. Here, I had a job and a potential start of a career. I didn’t follow this career path, however. I didn’t know what I wanted at this point. At that time, other things were going on in my personal life. I was in a toxic relationship – which I won’t go into right now – that took up most of my energy and willpower. After less than a year, I moved back to Indonesia, further and deeper into that toxic relationship.
A few months after my mom pampered me with homecooked food and took me out to eat delicious Indonesian food, it was time to get serious with job hunting. That was the beginning of a job and a career that was exciting, formative, rewarding, but I never wanted.
To be continued – part 2
