Day 7: Still Unemployed

TLDR:

I am taking the plunge and switching from a corporate background to travelling the world and freelancing. My ultimate goal is to lie on a beach somewhere working and sippin’ on a pina colada. I’ll be detailing my experiences here as a first-time aspiring digital nomad!

I grew up moving around a lot, going to different schools, being taught in different languages. I never really had the time to be attached to one environment before moving to another. But like most people, I knew that I wanted to do something, make something and add something to this world.

Unfortunately, my first career choice was largely influenced by my internship in the finance industry. It didn’t really strike me at the time that my inability to focus in an area of study eventually contributed to my lack of personal vision and ended up in me pursuing investment banking as that was what seemed like the ideal path to be on at the time.

Corporate life in a nutshell

I was blinded by the lifestyle that came with the job but the enthusiasm quickly buried under the thought of having to endure this for the rest of my life. I got out and I worked another few years at a VC helping startups build their companies and being a part of someone else’s dreams.

But something didn’t feel right. I didn’t know what I wanted to do and I applied to graduate school hoping it was going to clarify my goals. It didn’t. A friend in grad school told me that a lot of people try to look out for you and tell you how to live your life or how you’re living someone else’s dreams and it’d be stupid to throw all that away. “But I don’t want to live in a dream, I want to live in the dream”. So I decided to drop out of school and start freelancing and travelling around the world.

And so my digital nomad life began.

On the day after I had decided this, I woke up and felt really good about my decision — I felt like it was the beginning of a whole new adventure. I emailed my adviser and professors to let them know that I had decided to withdrawal from school. I called up my family to let them know my decision and for obvious reasons they freaked out… but I’d already made up my mind.

Here’s what I’ve been doing in my first two weeks:

1. De-corporated my Resume:

My resume used to be a simple black and white resume for corporate jobs. Specifically finance. You can imagine how unexciting it looked with a lot of cramped up buzzwords and formal descriptions. I went online and looked for some templates and made a more eye-catching one for myself. As resumes with designs usually doesn’t look good too many words, I was forced to be clearer and more concise. I attached my original resume on the second page for more information.

2. De-corporated my Cover Letter:

I threw out my boring and very corporate “To Whom it May Concern” cover letter. This was originally written so that companies I had applied for could see my personality and passion for that position. However, I realized that I was no longer talking to the robots of the corporate world and a cover letter that had a personality was far more important than a formally written one. I tried to make changes that highlighted my personality and tailored the cover letter as much as possible to each post I was applying for.

3. Registered for Medium.

Prior to this, I had lots of thoughts and ideas but never thought of documenting these on a public blog. Having a Medium account will hopefully allow me to share these thoughts with you all and help me to build up a web presence along the way.

4. Registered for a bunch of remote job hunting sites:

My goal is to apply for about 50–100 marketing jobs a month, with around 10 to 20 jobs a day. The websites I registered for included (these were mainly found from google):

- Working Nomads

- Remotive

- CloudPeeps

- Lets Work Remotely

- Hubstaff Talent

- Dice

- UpWork

- Directly from the startup company weibsites

So what have my experiences been like so far? Well, it’s still early days, but I expected to get a response rate of around 10%. I’ve sent off 40 applications so far and had 4 responses. I’m hoping to keep up this pace until I find something suitable.

The search continues…DUM DUM DUMMMM