If You Want To Choose The Right Career, Please Watch This

Look, the job market is not just changing, it's completely outdated for anyone who's trying to make career decisions in the traditional way. A few years ago, everyone said, learn to code. That was the safest career move. It was the advice that every parent gave to their child. It turns out that these white-collar jobs that we thought were going to be safe, they're the ones being replaced by AI first. So in this video, I'm going to break down the seven-step framework for choosing your Whether in your early 20s, you're still trying to figure out your first direction, your first path, or you're in your mid-30s like me, and you're considering some big career shift. Now before we jump into this framework, I need you to understand why the traditional career advice is failing a lot of people. And if you don't get this, you're going to keep making decisions based on outdated advice. Because the truth is, a lot of career counselors out there, and even our own parents, they're still thinking from the mindset of early 1990s to the 2000s. They're telling students to follow your passion without any kind of market validation. I mean, that entire old way of thinking, it assumes a few things that don't exist anymore. It assumes stable industries, linear career paths, and employers who are looking for credentials rather than actual real-world results. But what's happening right now is completely different. Research shows that about 20% of workers with bachelor's degrees are now working in roles that are highly exposed to AI replacement. And it's not just coding. It's entry-level, white-collar positions across the board. It's literally the positions that students need to get their foot in the door. All of these are disappearing faster than senior roles. But the crazy part is that while everyone is fighting over these fewer traditional jobs, over here, there's an entire economy that's emerging that most people are not really looking at. At least not considering to be real career paths. That's the creator economy. It's exploded to over $250 billion and projected to hit $500 billion by 2027. And there are over 200 million active content creators worldwide, and it's growing fast. And what's special about the creator economy is that it has allowed us, maybe for the first time in history, to do what we love for a living. You can create content, and create products, and talk about things that actually interest you and make a full-time living from it. So that brings us to the important question of this video, is how do we choose the right career path? So I'll use this sad face to talk about things that you shouldn't do. These are the don'ts. And this guy, money eyes, these are what you should do. So the first step is something that a lot of people don't really consider, and that is the energy audit. The question isn't, what am I passionate about? That's way too vague, and it changes all the time, right? So don't pick a career path solely on your passion. The real question is, what makes you lose track of time? See, most career assessments out there, they focus on your aptitude, right? What are you naturally good at? What skills do you have? But being good at something doesn't mean that it energizes you. And now that things are just constantly changing, we need to learn and adapt and stay ahead of the AI disruption. So the work that energizes you is what you'll naturally get better at faster. When I was working as a doctor, especially during COVID as a frontline doctor, I was counting my hours. Every single shift, I was just thinking about, when can I leave? Even though the work was important, even though I was passionate about medicine and passionate about helping people, at the end of the day, every single day, my energy was just drained. But now the funny part is, when I got home after a 12-hour, 15-hour shift, completely exhausted, I'd actually start working on my YouTube videos. I was editing content, planning the next video, thinking about ideas and the business side of the channel. And suddenly, I'd have all this energy back. That energy mismatch, you can't ignore that. My body was telling me something that my logical brain just kept trying to ignore. Now, on the other hand, if you're trying to switch careers or shift into something new, then you already have a lot of years of data. So look back, right? Which parts of your current job actually energize you? Which parts of it drain you? I mean, you can push through the work that drains you for years, maybe even decades, but eventually it does catch up to you and the burnout becomes real. Point number two is market validation. Now, step two is making sure that other people actually value your work enough to pay you for it. Because when you're doing something without getting paid for it, that's just a really expensive hobby. The job market is evolving way too fast to rely on predictions about what will be valuable four years from now, five years from now. Students are spending six figures on college degrees for jobs that might not even exist by the time they graduate. And if you're shifting careers, those people are too afraid to move because they don't know if the new path will actually generate income. So here's what changed my mindset. We didn't quit our jobs and just hoped for YouTube to work out. We actually tested it while we still had stable income. We started getting small sponsorships here and there. We made money from YouTube. We made a course and sold it for $400. That was like our first course. Never going to forget that night where Maddie and I were just up late playing video games and we got this notification on our phone, like we made our first course sale. But that was proof that you actually can get paid for what we were doing. And at the time, we grew our audience to like 200,000 subscribers while I was working full time as a doctor. So here, don't pursue hobby and pursue, make sure you get paid. So we had proof that people would pay us before we considered making YouTube our main thing, right? That's validating the market. And luckily for us, we all live in a time now where you can test almost any career direction with low cost experiments. Like let's say you wanted to be a, I don't know, a consultant or a coach. Can you offer free coaching to three people in your immediate network? Maybe your friends, your family members, whoever. Can you get them results and then ask them for a testimonial? And would they leave you good reviews? You can use that as your testimonials for your first clients. Or let's say that you're interested in UX design. Do a small freelance project on a digital marketplace like Fiverr or Upwork. Charge like, I don't know, $500 for a small project. And if you actually like the work that you do and people pay you for it, that is market validation. And of course, we can't forget content creation, right? I love testing and market validating content creation, especially YouTube, because you don't need anyone's permission. You don't need to go out there and find a customer. You can start creating content right now, post it online and get feedback from the world. You've got the creator economy, freelancing, and just the internet in general. These have made market validation cheap and fast. You don't need to invest years of your life without testing first. And this is where so many people get it wrong. They either never test and just hope that their degree lands them a good job, or they make a massive leap without any validation. And then they wonder why it doesn't work out. So test small, get real market feedback, and then decide whether you want to invest more time. All right, point number three is exploring adjacent opportunities. So here's where I would say that people who are trying to change their careers, this is where they have a big advantage. And if you're a student, then this is where you need to stop ignoring your extracurricular activities because that could be very important. The lesson here is do not start from zero, ever. So do not start from zero and always stack what you have. Every experience that you've had, every job, every hobby, every skill that you've picked up, all of these things create unique combinations that create new opportunities for you. When I left medicine to focus on content creation full-time, I wasn't starting over. I was actually combining doctor plus content creator plus business into something that nobody else had. And that rare combination, it opened a lot of doors for me. Health and education brands wanted to work with someone who understood both medical and content strategy. Like in the early days, I was making content about how to study, how to get better grades, how to be more productive as a student. These are all things that I had learned through all the years of going through medical school and residency. When I made content about that and taught students online, it really resonated with people. And so fast forward a few years and we had hit a million subscribers and we'd figured out how to grow a massive YouTube channel, which led me to working at massive YouTube companies like Spotter. That's examples of me just stacking my skills year over year. So successful career pivots, they leverage like 60 to 70% of the previous skills into new contexts. You're not throwing everything away. You're just recombining what you already have. And by the way, all that medical training, it really taught me a lot of skills, taught me systematic thinking, how to break down complex problems, how to perform under pressure and how to teach complicated concepts in simple terms. Every single one of the skills that I named translated directly into my new business. So if you're a student right now, your part time jobs, your hobbies, your side interests, your side hustles, those aren't supposed to just be distractions. They can be unique building blocks that you use to build your skill stack. And for people who are changing careers, your previous career isn't wasted time. It's your competitive advantage. The question isn't how do I start over? It's how do I leverage this rare combination of experiences that nobody else has? All right. Now, point number four is to calculate your runway. How long can you run your experiment for? So this is where we get a little more strategic because the biggest career mistakes, they come from one of two extremes. You're either moving too fast without preparation or you're waiting too long for that perfect certainty that actually never comes. You need to know your numbers. Specifically, you need to know how long can I experiment with this for before I need to generate income? When my brother and I decided to go all in on content creation, it wasn't just purely emotion and vibes. I mean, yes, emotion was involved and I'll get into that in a later step, but we also ran the numbers. So I had already worked several years as a doctor and saved up a lot of money and we already achieved monetization through multiple revenue streams. So sponsorships, digital products and building an audience. And we had our MDs as a safety net if everything just completely failed and crumbled. So we calculated how long can we run without the traditional income before we need to make a change. So don't guess, you want to calculate your runway. So for students, right now, your biggest asset is your time. You can test five different pathways in the time it takes someone in their mid-career to test just one. You have less financial obligations, you have fewer people who depend on you. So you want to use that as a runway to experiment fast. But that doesn't mean be reckless. It means you got to be strategic about testing multiple things before you commit to an expensive degree or a training program. And for people who are looking for a career shift, you want to calculate your financial runway specifically. How many months of expenses do you have saved up and can you transition while keeping your current job and building on the side? Side hustle is such a powerful thing. Do you need to build up more savings before making a move? And here's the other calculation, we call it timing windows. It's that now or never moment. For me, it was realizing that if we had waited until we had kids, for example, that friction would just be way too high. But you know what I mean, right? Like between a demanding medical career and being a new parent, when would I have the time or the energy to build up a business from scratch? I mean, that time window was closing and that was always in the back of my mind. So don't just jump without knowing your runway, but also don't just wait for that perfect moment because it never comes. All right, if you're finding this framework valuable so far and you want the complete system for building your own thing while working your current job, then I put together a YouTube production system. It's the exact process that I've used to grow a creator business while working full time as a doctor. So inside you'll find the strategies, the tools, the tech, the AI, the systems, all the things that I use to build something on the side that eventually gave me options. Link in the description below. All right, so moving on to point number five, and that is small bets. You want to make small decisions that are not permanent, that give you real feedback, right? Don't make big commitments or jump all in unless you have the proof. Don't go all in and instead make small bets. So when I was working on my YouTube business as a side hustle, when I came home after a I still wanted to put small bets, make small videos, right? Move the needle forward a little bit by bit. But that overlap period, that was so important to me, right? All the small bets that we were doing, reaching out to a bunch of sponsors, building a bunch of courses, all of that was data and feedback. But that's how small bets work. Over time, they just build and compound. So for students out there, if you don't have a good idea, then you don't need to declare your major on day one of college. You can take a bunch of different diverse classes in all different disciplines. You can try internships in different fields and have conversations with people in different fields who are doing the work that you think you might want to try. Those are all small bets that you can try on specific pathways. Now for people who are kind of switching careers, build your thing on the side before you quit your main thing. Freelance on the weekends, start that YouTube channel now, even if you can only post like once a month. You want to test that path with small, reversible bets. You're not betting your entire career on one decision. You're making a series of small tests and experiments, and you can pivot at any time. Test, learn, adjust, and then make bigger moves once you have enough data. Point number six is to ignore sunk costs, because your past does not dictate your future. So do not worry about past. Think about the future. Now this is the hardest step psychologically, but it's also the most important, is you have to ignore your sunk cost fallacy. The time and the money and the effort that you've already invested in the wrong path, it's gone. That's sunk cost. The only question that matters now is what should I do moving forward? But our brains, they don't work that way. Our brains are going to say, I've already invested five, 10 years into this career. I can't just throw it away. But then five becomes 10, and then 10 becomes 20, and then you blink and now you're 65 years old and you live a lifetime of regret. I mean, look at me, right? I left medicine after years of training, after finally getting that dream job that I had, that great pay, that job security. People thought I was crazy. And look, I can get into all of that in a different video. In fact, I have a bunch already here. But that time for me had already gone. The only question left was whether I'd waste the next 10 years of my life trying to justify the last 10 years. You see, one day at work, I was hanging out and talking to one of my coworkers, right? He was a fellow physician and he was 10 years ahead of me. He was miserable. He stayed in his job because of sunk cost and his regret. You could hear it all over his voice. The sunk cost fallacy is why people stay in the wrong careers for decades. So for students, if you're two years into the wrong major, don't let it turn into four years. Those two years are gone either way. The question is, what are you going to do with the next two years? And two years in the grand scheme of your life is just a drop in the pond. Now, if you're shifting careers, your previous career is not wasted. Remember back in step number three, it's actually your advantage. But don't stay in a career that you hate just to justify the time that you've already invested. But just remember, your past does not dictate your future unless you allow it to. Point number seven here is to make decisions from your future self, not from your current fear. So when I was trying to decide whether to leave medicine and go all in on my YouTube channel, I got stuck for months. I mean, I had spreadsheets. I had lists of pros and cons. I had endless discussions with my brother, my girlfriend at the time, who is now my wife, my parents. My fear told me to stay. What if YouTube doesn't work out long term? What if we fail? What if we can't get back into medicine if we needed to? But then I asked myself a different question, and that is, what story do I want to tell my kids someday? Did I want to tell them that I just played it safe my entire life, even when I saw the path that I was headed towards? Or did I want to tell them that I took a calculated risk to build something meaningful, something that was mine? And looking back, this question means so much more to me now that I do have a daughter. Someone I can share both my fears and my future vision with. When I imagine myself being 70, 80 years old, just looking back at this moment, which decision would I regret most? And that question broke through everything. Because my current self was scared of change, the uncertainty, the transition period. You know, research shows that we regret the chances that we didn't take way more than we regret the chances that we did take and that we failed at. So when you look back at your life, most people don't remember the times where they just played it safe. They remember the times when they took that leap of faith. So fear, faith. So here are the seven steps. It's not about making one single perfect decision that determines the rest of your life. It's about building a system for making many good decisions over time. The job market is evolving so fast that your career will require multiple course corrections. The students who think that they're choosing their forever path, they'll pivot probably multiple times. And if you feel like you need to make a career shift, you feel like you're starting over, you're actually just making your next move. And you have to just build on everything that you've learned up to that point. Now I know it's scary out there, but just keep in mind that the people who succeed are not the people who happen to pick the perfect career from day one. Instead, you want to work on acquiring all of these skills and just implementing throughout the course of your career. Because honestly, these are the meta skills. These are the things that will compound over the course of your entire life. And remember, use these seven steps to make smarter decisions about where you want to invest your time and your energy for the future. And if you want our complete system for how to do all this, how to build your own thing, even while working in a job, how to create content strategically and efficiently, then check out our YouTube production system in the description below. It's everything that I wish I had when I started out five years ago. Anyways, thanks for watching. Don't stop learning and I'll see you next time.