Recently, Michelle Yeoh became the first Asian woman to win an Oscar for Best Actress. In her acceptance speech, she told all the boys and girls who look like her that: “This is proof that dreams — dream big and dreams do come true. And ladies, never let anyone tell you are past your prime. Never give up.”
Her speech moved me and I started wondering about how Michelle’s advice applies to our careers. Why are dreams important for career growth advancement?
I reflected on my own career journey, and how after graduating college — I had a very specific dream of becoming a Product Manager (PM), ideally in the Bay Area.
I did end up making it the Bay and was thankful to have landed my first job as an Advertising Manager (Client Services) at an adtech company. My role was to manage ad campaigns on FB/IG on behalf of big Fortune 500 clients. After some time, I found myself feeling like this role wasn’t quite right for me — I helped advertisers earn more, but I wasn’t getting to see the bigger picture. On top of that, it was an Excel-heavy reporting role, and I wanted to connect consumers and people instead of trends in a spreadsheet.
But I hadn’t given up on my dream of PM. So I asked myself — how could I strategically get there with the experience I had?
That led me to deciding to become a Customer Success Manager. I knew a lot of people with that title later became PMs because companies want to build products that are customer-centric.
I went from 5 managed clients to over 140 clients overnight. The style of customer service was completely different. I loved building very deep relationships and I wanted to help everyone, but it became difficult with the limited time I had. I quickly started working long hours — 7am for European ones, staying on late for the ones in Australia. After 6 months, I concluded this type of CSM role (high velocity, low touch) wasn’t quite right either.
Finally, I decided to hit pause on my dream of becoming a PM, and I decided my new dream would be to do something I like and something I am good at.
I recognized that I was pretty good at helping people get jobs. People would ask for me to review their resumes and mock interviewing since I had graduated from college. I had even referred 5 people to my first company, and all 5 of them got hired. And it also felt good too — people would tell me how much it meant to them, how it was changing their life getting a new job!
So, I decided to become a Recruiting Manager for a Series A startup and drove great success helping hire over 40+ full-time employees, contractors, and interns. A couple years into the role, I became interested in Learning and Development (L&D). Since I was actively contributing to onboarding and culture, my manager promoted me to lead that in addition to my recruiting responsibilities. I finally was feeling really happy and satisfied with my career.
And then, something funny happened. One day, my manager came to me and said: “We have some changes going on at the company, and we would like for you to become a Product Manager — is this still something you’d be interested in doing?”
I was so surprised that I didn’t know how to react at first! I remembered thinking that: “This is some sort of fluke and I just got really lucky.”
But then, I paused and realized I had helped many of my clients who had no “formal experience” also secure titles and positions they didn’t believe they could attain. Though my clients and I all had different backgrounds, titles, and industries, I sought to understand what we all had in common.
I came to discover that the mutual point of overlap and commonality was all of us had the same dream of wanting to feel fulfilled. According to Merriam-Webster, the definition of fulfilled is to 1) feel happy or satisfied 2) like ones talents’ are fully being used.
But still, I felt the need to dig deeper — why did being fulfilled seemed to be correlated with all my clients and me getting paid more, having better work life balance, and overall seeming much happier generally with ourselves?
Finally, I discovered the Law of Attraction and was able to shed light on my own story. By focusing on feeling fulfilled, reality reflected back to me something I wanted to have (Product Manager) because I already was embodying that energy.
Today, it has cemented my philosophy behind how I choose to help the clients get the career advancement they want. “If I focus on being fulfilled in my career, I will have the career advancement I want.”
Like Michelle said, dreams do come true — don’t give up! I believe that feeling satisfied in your career will open doors to a better and happier life overall and that motivates me to work even harder, so that you don’t spend your days wishing you could be happy. I know what that’s like to feel that way. It’s totally possible to achieve the results of career fulfillment and advancement you’ve been wanting, and it would be my honor to join you on your journey. Your dreams matter always — let’s make them come true TODAY!
