Evan Carmichael tells 19-year-old Nick to stop searching for the perfect career and start experimenting instead. Try different jobs and projects to find what excites you. Steve Jobs dropped out to study typography, which later gave Apple its distinctive fonts.
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Explore. If you're not sure what to do with your life, if you're not sure what business you want to run, if you have an uncertainty in your life, explore. Don't put so much pressure on yourself to find the right thing, the perfect thing right away, because that's not usually how things happen. You have to give yourself the chance to explore. Try things out. See what works. See what you enjoy. If you don't like it, quit. Go do something else. If you like something, keep going and see where it leads. This comes as a result of a question from Nick, who's one of my YouTube viewers. Love you guys. Wrote the long email. Now, Nick, guys, you gotta shorten up the emails. I love that you're kind of pouring your hearts out, but this takes time to read. Anyway, Nick is 19 years old and is unsure what to do next. Okay, he's a business major. He loves technology. He loves business. He loves the internet. He loves staying on top of tech trends. And he's unsure what to do next. What do I do next? Nick, don't put so much pressure on yourself, okay? Just explore. So maybe that means going to get a job at a tech company. Maybe that means starting up some kind of business, website, or tech resource yourself. See what's missing in the world and try to make something, or try to learn something by working at another business and see if you enjoy it. If you're not sure what your passion is, try different things out. Something will stick. And don't put so much pressure you have to find the right thing right away. A while ago, I took art classes. Okay, it's like I got to do something different. I want to, I want to explore something new. So I said, okay, I'm gonna do art classes. And I kind of forced myself to go to these art classes, and I wasn't very good. But I just wasn't enjoying it, and for some reason I kept going like, "Ah, I gotta get good at this." I was desperate to find something new to explore and forced it on this art class that wasn't the right thing. The art class was not for me. I left it. I didn't sign up again because I just wasn't having fun. And then earlier this year, I guess last year, I took up snowboarding. I just went. I went one day snowboarding. I'd never done it before, and you know what? I loved it. I fell in love with snowboarding, and I started picking it up and started going more frequently and getting better at it. So it's the same thing with finding a business idea or finding your passion. Don't force it on— I really want to go work at Samsung, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna go get this job, or I really want to be an entrepreneur, and then this has to be my business and has to work out. If you don't have that vision, you have to find it for yourself, and you don't find it until you start to explore. I'm reminded of Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple. He went to university and he was, he was bored. Like, it wasn't for him. He didn't know what to do, and he dropped out of his classes. He dropped— he officially dropped out of university and instead started dropping in on classes about typography, fonts. And if you look at that from an outside world, you think, "Steve, what are you— like, are you crazy? What are you doing? You're dropping out of school where you can go and get a real job out of, get hired and make money and survive, and instead of doing that, you're dropping in on classes where you don't get a credit for to learn about writing and fonts? Are you crazy?" And he didn't know what he was doing either. Okay, at that time it wasn't all mapped out for him. He didn't know what he was doing. But when he actually led to create Apple, the thing that made Apple different was their fonts. Apple had lots of different fonts where all their competitors didn't, and that came because Steve Jobs had a passion for fonts and sat in on those classes. The point is you don't know how the dots are going to connect. You cannot plot this thing. You can't say this, this, this, this, and I'm a success. You can't force yourself to do something that you don't enjoy and love doing. If you try, you will not be successful. So explore. Find what excites you. Find what's your— what your passion is, what you're excited about, and then stick with that. And have the courage to leave something that you don't like. That's where most people fall down. They get stuck on a career path that they realize more and more that they hate, but they're too afraid to leave it to do something new because they don't even know what to do. They don't know what that new thing is. So you stick on this mediocre life. You have to have the courage to leave the good, the okay, the mediocre for something great, even if you don't know what that looks like yet. So start exploring. Believe. For those of you watching, you like the video, please give it a thumbs up below. It always makes you want to do more. And let me know what you think. Leave a comment underneath. You have a question, leave it below. I'll do a video response for you. Thank you so much, and I'll see you soon.
