BIO: Adrian Choo is a Career Strategist in Asia and the founder of Career Agility International. Sze-Yen Chee is the Executive Director/Co-founder of Career Agility International and is a top Singaporean career coach.

STORY: We look at their book The Great Career Paradox (When Pursuing Career Success May Not Lead To Career Happiness).

LEARNING: Your career is not everything.

“You’re more than your career. You can fail in your career, but you haven’t failed in life.”

Adrian Choo and Sze-Yen Chee

Guest profile

Adrian Choo is the One and Only Career Strategist in Asia and is the founder of Career Agility International. Sze-Yen Chee is the Executive Director/Co-founder of Career Agility International and is Singapore’s top Career Coach. Together, they wrote a great book: The Great Career Paradox (When Pursuing Career Success May Not Lead To Career Happiness).

In today’s episode, we’re going to do things differently. Instead of talking about Adrian Choo’s worst investment ever—we already did that in episode 495—we’ll talk about the book he’s co-authored with Sze-Yen Chee: The Great Career Paradox (When Pursuing Career Success May Not Lead To Career Happiness).

The book idea is born

Post-COVID, Adrian and Sze-Yen noticed a shift in values manifesting in the form of quiet quitting and the Great Resignation. Many people were still coming to terms with that. This led to the idea of writing a book to amalgamate and put together all the observations they’d made.

One of the reasons why the authors named the book The Great Career Paradox is because they noticed a fascinating trend where many believe that to achieve personal happiness, they must have career success. They work hard to drive their career success and don’t care about other things in their life, such as their health, family, hobbies, etc., that are equally important. Then they achieve success, yet they feel empty inside. To fill this gap, they work even harder in their career to get even more successful. And hence, a career paradox that you cannot achieve happiness through just your career.

Breaking out of the career paradox

Adrian and Sze-Yen wrote their book to help people break out of their career paradox. They use their wisdom to help their readers manage the little speed bumps people experience in their career journey.

The book will help readers take care of the career path aspects of their life or at least be aware of what they can do to manage their careers better. That gives them a lot more bandwidth, time, and mind space for the things that really matter—including family, hobbies, health, etc.

The book gives you clarity and introduces you to new logic and different points of view toward career progression.

Your career is not everything

One of the biggest things that Adrian and Sze-Yen want to dispel is that your career is everything. You’re more than your career. You can fail in your career, but that doesn’t mean you have failed. It’s just a job. You can recover.

Adrian and Sze-Yen emphasize the need to find your life’s purpose and plot your career strategy around that purpose instead of making your career your purpose.

Andrew’s takeaways

Not everybody is driven by the goal of achieving a lot in life. Some people want a good job and don’t want to push everything to the limit. So bosses need to understand the different motivations different employees have.
As a boss, you must know that people go through all sorts of seasons and will therefore be different people during those seasons.

Actionable advice

Adrian advises career professionals to know when to pull back to avoid burnout. He suggests approaching your career the same way a professional athlete approaches theirs. They never train excessively to avoid injuring themselves.

Sze-Yen’s advice is to continue growing no matter the season you are in. Continue accumulating skills, sponsors, and mentors, and keep up with current trends because the world is changing at an unbelievable pace. So always have a future-oriented growth mindset.

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