Maarten: A brand — new start
I’m new to Medium and first of all want to make you understand why I joined Medium. Thereby I’ll cover a short history of my professional life. Enjoy it, disgust it or get new insights. as long it does something to you.
Hell Yeah! I finally remade* my decision and start changing my career to what I’d actually like doing for a long time. To celebrate this I want to write a short story how I got here.
- remade: this will become clear if you read further in the story.
Dear journey
My youth was pretty smooth and I was this typical well treated Dutch happy kid. Although I was far from the smartest kid in the room. This resulted that I had to start my studies at the ‘VMBO’. From here onward I always had the eagerness to prove that I was worth of more and could even become a university student like the smartest kids. With this goal in mind I started studying and via a sport & movement study at the university of applied science I fought my way in to University. Here I applied for the major Economics major and took a minor in Psychology. The combination was is called behavioral economics and this is something that I was always triggered by, mainly due to the books from among others Daniel Kahneman and Dan Ariely.
“ As a VMBO kid I always looked up to people who went to University, once I was their it didn’t feel special at all”
You’re hard on yourself
Interesting as the study was I still was from from the smartest kid in the room, but hard work combined with figuring out how you should study at university made me succeed. Now just like me you probably also had a best and worst part during your study. For me the worst part was when I got an internship at a highly corporate company (think of fully suited and corporate accent). It was a super interesting internship but this wasn’t where I belong at all. Worse than the environment at the internship was my thesis period. Due to my (best part of the study) Singapore exchange I was forced to write it all by myself instead of my classmates who were partnered with other students. The best part was thus my exchange to Singapore, if you have been here (or haven’t) have a look at the Lego movie and you know what the Singaporean life is like. The country was only a small piece of the best experience, my roommates and friends were what really made it a super successful trip. This exchange gave me time to review the path I was following and what I actually would like to do once i graduated.
Figure out my life
The best experience made me realize that my ambitions are not in corporate economics, but instead in a more creative field and creative profession. This came from my hobbies such as acting, presenting and impro-theater. Once I finished my bachelor I made a radical change and got accepted for a Master in Information Studies: Serious Games. This was an amazing new path because I was studying a whole different set of materials, though still applying a lot of my behavioral economics knowledge. Thereby the people here were so different than from my bachelor program, which gave me much insights in how “creative” people study compared to “business” people. Not everyone has money as his primary motive. Working on all sort of projects, from making boring tasks more fun for children, to redesigning the BMC (Business Model Canvas) I started to figure out what I actually like doing.
“A paper is useless if you don’t know how to use it”.
During my holiday in Japan I heard that I graduated. Now I had some general creative knowledge, but I never had the time to really focus on a particular part of the creative process. This because the study was covering a wide variety of topics. Searching for a job became rather hard, because for creative professions I do exhibit the soft skills (Analytical, empathy, consumer behavior and design thinking), though I wasn’t a designer, a coder or whatever hip term it was given it those days. After searching a job in the creative field, and being rejected because I was too much of a generalist I went for the “easy way out” and started a traineeship as an account manager for a Start/scale-up.
Although I found this super interesting I wasn’t getting out of it what I was looking for in creative terms. During my traineeship I found a behavioral economics job (assortment & cross sell specialist) at an e-commerce company, and transferred from account manager to a data analyst. My ambition to pursuit a creative job was still there, though it was rather hard to achieve this as I got marked as an analytical & data driven person rather than a “creative” person. After a year I did fell in love with the company but the job and the data analytics track wasn’t for me, so it was time for another radical change.
“Focus is what drives success, goals are what drives motivation but passion is what drives you”.
Again and again and again…
I was kinda lost and didn’t knew what I should focus on in this creative field. And even worse everything is called “creative” this days. As soon as you have to think or brainstorm it is marked as “creative”. I had to figure out on the one hand what are people looking for, but even more important which part of the creative process do I enjoy the most.
So decided to leave my job I got quite scared after being rejected for several creative jobs, and started convincing myself once more that the “real” creative job is not for me. So before I left my current job I got hired at an M&A consultancy, this because it’s also creative and I enjoy the ideation part, presenting, teamwork, plus having a wide diversity of projects. Even more important was that I believed that this could open the door for me towards a creative job or a job as creative consultant. Now because I knew from the start that I probably wasn’t planning on staying at the M&A consultancy for years, I was frank, and we closed a deal.
Now a year later I do enjoy the parts of the job as mentioned above, but my creative heart is not satisfied. When we were in between projects I started reviewing our website, and started to write down possible improvements. Thereby I worked on several infographics to use during presentations to make complicated information easier to digest. I enjoyed this process so much, that after diving deeper in to the field of UX, reading books, articles and blogs I figured out that this is what I want to do. So after reviewing a lot of programs I decided to sign up for a fulltime bootcamp and start in September to pursuit my passion.
“Business, creativity, empathizing, presenting, design (thinking), story telling, and teamwork all come together in UX”
Just why?
Some people say it is an egocentric move I made, to start over again all the time. Why don’t you just settle with your current job? You earn a good salary, you like the people, the atmosphere etc.? I can understand this completely, but living with a feeling that you didn’t gave it all is something I can’t, but yes I do agree this is a egocentric motif.
Now I cannot say I would advice anyone to follow the same, or a similar path like me. And if I could just change my mindset I’d probably would have been satisfied with my previous jobs as well. However, this is what I want to do and now that (as far as I know) we only have one life, I rather at least try.
My main take away.
The most valuable skill I took away from this journey is that you have to understand when the grass is really greener on the other side of the hill, and when it is just an ideal thought. This journey thought me to level with people from all sort of backgrounds, and it increased my interest in what drives and motivates people in general.
Looking back I could have done many things different, but I proved to myself that I can easily adjust towards an environment and job, however I can’t force myself to lose my interest in this creative goal I have.
Ending my first post I want to thank you for reading my story. I hope I succeed and that you got something out of this story. If you want to hear more keep an eye out and of course feel free to get in contact with me via medium or linkedin.
Thanks again and good luck with your activities
Greetings from,
Maarten van Hoogdalem
