Living Between Multiple Professional Identities
What I'm Up To (PTO), What I Reflected On (Professional Identities), and What's Occupying My Mind (Internet Diet)- all part of Allen's Friday Flights
Hello Professionally Curious One!
I’m back!
Many I need a vacation.
Didn’t I just go on one?
Shush.
Cheers,
Allen
Past Publications
The Things:
Where the hell is the Southern California Sun?
Sushi Noguchi in Yorba Linda even at lunch price isn’t as good as Gurume in Irvine. I said what I said.
The Parlor is now my second favorite pasta & pizza place.
Skal Pizza is my current favorite pasta & pizza place.
The OC Zoo has a lot of different cats and a bear, all for $3 admission.
I can officially recommend Pho Kim Long in Las Vegas.
Seasons Kitchen in Anaheim serves Malaysian / Indonesian food, which is essentially South East Asian comfort food - and I adore this place.
Adding to my Le Creuset collection, I am putting the Rectangular Skinny Grill (For $100-$120 at William Sonoma) as a must buy kitchen essential, especially if you want to immediately level up your vegetable and searring game without out putting effort.
Hammer Burger in Santa Ana is one of the most affordable, and also the best, smash burger in Southern California - provided that you accept a mustard-forward place. It’s not $20 that’s for sure.
Pacific Catch in Irvine is a premium version of California Fish Grill, and it does it damn well.
Diablo 4 (on PS5) has local couch coop for up to 4 players, with each player able to keep their progression - all for the price of one game collectively. Oh, and it’s actually really good.
Finished For All Mankind Season 2 and holy shit it’s just too damn good - definitely “Pre-Expanse”.
Apollo for Reddit is shutting down June 30 and I’m so sad as that’s how I interact with Reddit.
What I Reflected On (Between Multiple Professional Identities)
TL;DR: Reflecting on a piece I wrote 1 year ago
Storytelling Multiple Professional Identities
It’s been 1 year since I created a piece centered on articulating the various professional dimensions of me. One thing that has been on my mind after publishing that piece, as well as publishing the last AAPI centered piece, was around the topic of identity capital and what happens when you have so many identities driven by different experiences.
The thought that sparked this was the phrase: “I’m too Asian to be “American”, and “I’m too American to be “Asian”.
In my professional life, I hold quite a few identities. Some could be seen as stark contrasts, others as supplemental. Whether the multitude of identities are things I have benefitted from depends on the circumstance, need, and my own clarity of a scenario.
Here’s a short list:
I’m too Web3 to be Web2; but I can be too degen decentralized to be a traditionalist.
I’m too product/engineery to be a finance professional, but I’m also too much of a financial professional be a techy.
I’m too “IT Audit” to be a Financial Auditor, and I’m too much of a financial auditor to be an IT Auditor. Let’s just agree, I’m not internal audit.
I’m between Engineering, Business, and Design ←- lol product managers
How does one articulate all of this?
I have historically found it difficult to articulate all that I think I am based on the wide experiences I have. If I try to write a resume, I have found myself evolving it into a rather long chronological story that tracks every thing I’ve done down to the exact title and day I did it. Talking beyond one or two things is already feels too much.
Which is why if you find yourself doing what I did, I recommend you stop and keep it to the 1 most relevant thing. If they, whomever is asking, wants more - they’ll ask.
In U.S. corporate world, at the junior and middle manager level, it’s an unspoken principle that when you enter a round of introductions, you lead with your titles. “Hi I’m Allen and I am a senior from the Technology Risk practice”. In hindsight, this is probably more of a consulting thing.
It can get bland.
If you dislike what you think is the most dominant professional identity and you are trying to find a way to put distance, you may find yourself adding a bit too many additional standouts. “Hi I’m Allen from the Technology Risk Practice, with a specialty in <Insert industry that’s supposed to sound sexy here>” or “I also have done rotations in <insert another experience you suffered through here>.
What you share with colleagues is driven on the context.
With professional strangers, it’s no different.
In interviews, when it came to “so tell me about yourself”, I have found that I typically started with articulating what I have done in a linear chronological order. If my resume is written too granularly (linear and chronologically meticulous), the story I share becomes non-sensical and boring.
My mistake is that I have spent a great amount of energy trying to cover too many things and in the process, fumbled my communication and left confusing over try-hard impressions. My other mistake is that I had to chronologically tell a story.
A story needs to have a beginning, middle, and end, but an interesting story can rearrange it to suit the moment. More importantly, I found it to be perfectly acceptable, and even effective, to roll your stories up into overarching themes or “verticals”, so to speak.
Some of us have careers where the one employer provides 20 jobs. The choice on how you want to convey it can go beyond listing the 20 jobs. You can go for themes or patterns - and sure you can do the easy route of operationally describing where you were coded to in the organization, or you can take creative liberty in bundling them up. And yes, you can break chronology.
I describe my time at EY as a client-serving shit show learning experience spanning a multitude of business topics that only overlap a little. I do so because the theme I’m conveying is I face ambiguity and disruptive forces regularly and I find that to be more important that to describe the tactical work I did from Job A my first year.
I’ve decided to storytell my experiences creatively (I had over 100 opportunities to do this) as it was something more compelling than base chronological faces. In the past, I have spent more energy outwardly justifying the meaning and significance to others through quantity in a same way a very traditional Chinese restaurant’s menu has 300 items across 12 pages, when really this could be simplified to 10 dishes with a few variations each.
Think of it as the In-n-out menu - 3 combos, each based on each other, that’s it.
Some Principles:
A career break has afforded me the clarity to understand a few realizations about having multiple identities, even identities that could be mutually exclusive:
All Identities You Pick Up Are Additive
There are many moments where I did not like a specific experience, a job, or the function I was in. There were many extended moments where I did not like it for a long time. I would go as far as to hide it - cover it up, replace it, and even erase it.
It took me a very long time to realize that all the experiences I have accumulated, and thus my identity capital, are simply additive to who I am and there is no way to erase that it happened. And there is no reason for me to actively discredit said experience.
It might be hard to find a way to incorporate it or find the value, and this is where I would lean on finding new perspectives to reconnect the dots I have collected. Almost always, I simply don’t have the right lens to appreciate what identities I have in a way that it becomes a strong basis to my professional identity.
You Accumulate Identity Capital
I accumulate identity capital, which is unique experiences that I am proud of, can talk at lengths on, wish others did, or are in someway professional significant
What meaning I give to an identity (or experience), is what power I give to myself.
Where I “sit” in a spectrum of dual identities as a result of my experiences, and how that makes me feel, is determined by me - but it probably won’t feel like that.
Me not revealing, or having the opportunity to share all that I have done, does not diminish what value I can bring. Conversely, revealing all those identities is also not a measurement of the value I could bring.
I have to figure out what the audience is looking for and tailor to that - and not drown them in quantity. Selectively share the relevant bits; there will be opportunities to share the rest if its needed.
Note
I wasn’t sure where I was going with this, but it was quite the thinking exercise to reflect on a topic I previously reflected on exactly 1 year ago.
What’s On My Mind
TL;DR: Reddit blackout got me thinking about my internet diet.
The Internet Diet
The way you interact with the internet will determine whether you are a doom scrolling and feeling incrementally shittier, or are curiosity driven and incrementally feeling better.
So here’s a collection of my current favorite posts from specific content creators across different platforms excluding LinkedIn because I think everyone on LinkedIn is a lunatic, including yours truly.
My Top 3 Instagram Content Creators
Personal Finance Club - a bit cheesy, I enjoyed the reframing Jeremy Schneider does. I especially like this post that compared the earnings from $148k of investments equals a minimum wage worker’s wages.
Dr. Leah Katz is a psychologist based in Portland Oregon who does short-form content on different mental health & therapy topics. Consider it free passive therapy learning.
Trivarna Hariharan Poetry - an IG focused on short literary piece cut outs. Am I at my poetry stage in life?
My Favorite Random Reddit Posts
“Which House Energy Improvements are most Cost-Effective? My research and results” - The answer is air leaks.
Native speakers, what are some interesting quirks you've noticed from those learning your language? - How certain cultures use the word “kindly” instead of “please”.
My Favorite Substack Posts Recently
The Hollywood Romance Age Gap: A Statistical Analysis by DANIEL PARRIS
How to Create a Masterpiece by TOMAS PUEYO