I left my career to start a business that I had no experience in.
And before this turns into a personal essay on “if I can do it, you can too!”, let me just stop you right there. This isn’t for everyone. I repeat, do not quit your career if you don’t like what you’re doing right now. It’s more important to know what you actually like doing before you go ahead and bite that bullet.
Finding your passion is hard. It took me about a year or so to test the waters, just to understand what truly motivated me. You’ll have to do some real introspective digging to ask yourself all the why’s (at least three), and then figure out whether moving away from your career is a step towards aligning yourself there.
Here’s my story.
I was working in the field of neuropsychology, both clinically and in research with a focus on ageing and dementia. Not a lot of people know what neuropsychology is. I mean, it’s a pretty esoteric line of work. Even my friends and family didn’t get what I was doing up till the day I left.
Neuropsychology is the study of the relationship between the brain and behaviour. As a clinical neuropsychologist, I was administering cognitive assessments and clinical interviews, making diagnoses, and providing recommendations to specialist referrals from the private and public sector.
My favourite part of my job was playing detective. Trying to figure out what was going on and then providing patients and their loved ones an explanation about the changes happening in their brain. Seeing their eyes light up as they put two and two together was so, so satisfying. As rewarding as it was though, I still felt that there was something missing.
You see, neuropsychology is a field that relies heavily on standardised procedure. Without this, we can’t interpret cognitive performance as ‘normal’ or ‘abnormal’, and without knowing what ‘normal’ was, we can’t then diagnose aka do our job. It was about a year or so into doing assessment after assessment, that I knew a world of highly standardised routine and procedure was just not for me, good sir.
During that time, I was working at Eva in my off-hours and sometimes, in-between-hours. Don’t worry. My employers knew about Eva and the autonomy they gave me was incredible and something I am still grateful for to this day. They were happy as along as I stayed on top of my caseload.
It was at Eva where I got my dopamine hit (neuropsych joke) of New! Variety!! Different! I became Lisa the customer service assistant! Other times, I was Jean, who was Lisa’s manager because sometimes people didn’t like Lisa and wanted to speak to someone higher up. (To all those who spoke with me in the early days — yep, it was still me). It was the trials and tribulations of looking like a ‘big’ company when really it was just my partner and I at the time. Other days, I was managing the community socials, growing Instagram followers, organising grid content & writing captions. I was also managing photoshoots, creating business policy and absorbing as much as I could on Facebook algorithm, SEO and Google. Ah, 2017–2018. What a time to get stuck into digital marketing but I digress.
It was a great mix for a while — I dabbled in the routine, standardised world of neuropsychological interviews, assessments and report-writing. And this would be dynamically offset by the funky fresh start-up world, where I was learning something new everyday, whilst having no idea what I was doing at the same time.
When I finally got my full endorsement as a clinical neuropsychologist in early 2020 (Australia makes you do 3000 hours after you graduate to be certified legit), I knew that it was time to decide where to dedicate 100% of my time and effort. I mean, if you only put in 50%, you’ll only get 50% back, right?
It’ll come as no surprise to anyone that I chose Eva in the end. But in reflecting back on decision day, I remember doing the following. I made a list of the things that I knew I liked doing:
- Playing detective and solving problems
- Autonomy and getting shit done
- Diversity in the work that I do
- Learning through failures, or “flearning” as they say
- Growing personally and professionally
- Making a difference in people’s lives
And things that I didn’t like doing:
- Routine, unchanging work
- Wasting time
- Being inefficient
Not all start-ups live past the two year mark, and it’s also a serious consideration factor when making a career switch. Eva has been incredibly fortunate to have continued staying bootstrapped and in the black these last few years. Not going to lie, having really smart people around you helps with this a lot too.
Now that it’s been about a couple of years since I made the full switch to Eva, I’ve since made a ton of mistakes (we’re talking product launches, promotional campaigns, people management, to name a few). But I’m grateful for having sunk my teeth into establishing the foundations of our marketing department; helped nurture an inclusive and high performance agile culture; dipped my feet into a company rebrand, as well as having revisited organisational design more times than I can count as the company grew 100% YOY. As cliché as it sounds, I wish I had made the career switch earlier.
For anyone worried that a lack of experience is stopping you from a career change, the most poignant learning I can share with you is that experience doesn’t really count for much in the early days. Not really if you have clarity of direction, a genuine thirst for growth, and the humility to roll with the punches.
So don’t worry about what other people think when you say you’re leaving your career. Maybe, it’s best to rephrase it to this instead — you’re just starting something that you actually want to do. Plus, career changes always look cool on your resume.
Happy flearning!
