Evan Carmichael tells a viewer torn between commerce and media studies to follow what excites them, not the safe path. He uses Steve Jobs dropping out to take calligraphy classes, then using that skill to design Apple's typography, as proof that combining disparate interests creates something irreplaceable.
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Follow your flow. If you're not sure what to do next in your life, if you don't know what to study, if you don't know where to take your business, the best advice that I can give you right now is to follow your flow. Find the things that excite you, that interest you, find the things that make you come alive and go do that even if it doesn't make any sense right now. This video comes as a response to a question I got from my YouTube viewers. Love you guys. Tanya, who wrote in to say, I've always been a commerce student and dreamed of becoming a businesswoman, but BS in media studies is a great field of work and artistic. I love to write stories, poetry, and so on. I'm confused. I don't even know exactly where these both degrees will take me. If you could only tell me what is exactly in these degrees to work on. Tanya, this is a great question, and I really feel for you. And I think everybody at some point in their life goes through this period where they're trying to figure out, what do I do with my life? You know, am I studying the wrong thing? Am I in the wrong job? Have I created the wrong business? And the best thing that you can do right now is not just take a degree because that's the safe thing to do, because that's the easy way to get a job, is to explore what you're interested in. Follow your flow. And it may not make sense right now, and that's the scary part, right? You have no idea how it's going to work out, but that's the challenge for you to be courageous enough and to follow your flow. And all of these things are going to come together at some point in your future to make you an unstoppable force, to make you somebody unique that cannot just be replaced by somebody else. Because all these other people are going and taking the standard traditional courses to fill standard traditional jobs, and they're replaceable, and they're boring, and they don't like their lives. You are going to be able to create something where you have the business experience, but then you also bring in the artistic side and the media side. You could bring that together to be truly unique and different. That's what the world will reward— people who are unique and different and are following things that they are excited and passionate about. One of my favorite stories that relates really well to you is Steve Jobs. Okay, Steve Jobs, when he was in university, he found himself being— he was getting disconnected, you know, like, I'm not, I'm not You know what, this isn't for me. And he quit. He dropped out of school. And people said, what are you, nuts? Like, you have this great opportunity. You have this great safe job path lined out for you. Why would you drop out? And you can look back on his life now and say, oh, that was so easy. Steve Jobs, what a great decision. You know, he became a billionaire entrepreneur, built the most valuable company in the world. That was so smart to do. But when he did that, he had no idea what he was going to do. He didn't have that certainty, but he had the courage to know that what he was doing right now wasn't working, and he had to find something else to do. He had to discover his flow. And so he dropped out of university and then started dropping in, not even getting credit, dropping in on calligraphy classes to learn about fonts. And as an outsider, you may look at that and say, are you nuts? You left a stable path to have this stable potential job, to leave university so you can take classes that teach you about fonts, how to draw different letters. Are you kidding me? And Steve Jobs at the time too didn't know how that would all work out. He didn't know how he would ever use this ever in his life, had no idea. But he knew that he was interested by it. He was excited by it. He loved the content in that class more than all of the other classes he was taking. And so he continued learning. And years later, when he started Apple Computer and started building his computers, the Apple products were the first ones to have different fonts. They were the first ones to bring that in, where all the other computers had the standard, boring, basic fonts. And that was one of the key ways that Apple stood out. If you wanted to have beautiful fonts in your computer for all your programs, you had to go buy an apple. And he had no idea how those dots were lined up, but he trusted that somehow they would. So this is, this is the question. This is the thing. How courageous are you? Because you have to be willing to jump off into the unknown and trust that by following a path that excites you, following a path that makes you come alive, You're going to discover yourself and bring together all these different elements that nobody has ever done in the history of life before into a unique person that's going to be you. And when you discover that person and you bring all those elements together, you're going to be an unstoppable force because that's who you truly are. You're going to reach your potential. But do you have the courage to jump off and do it? Even if you don't know how it's going to work out yet. That's the question. Good luck and believe. For those of you watching, you like the video, you can subscribe to the channel by clicking on the link, and I will see you soon.
