Uncertainty is the only certainty | Mark Goh | TEDxYouth@Toronto
[Music] so who here has a career plan hands up master plan any sort of plan okay a lot of you that's pretty good and now I'm gonna tell you why that probably won't matter so today I'm talking about career path uncertainty how to deal with it and why it's not necessarily a bad thing When I was your age and in high school I had the whole plan I knew every step I had actually written down my entire life story for ten years and this is what I thought it would look like I would graduate from school with a business degree get a job in finance and slowly work my way up until I was going to be the head of a large investment fund nice clean sequential steps the entire way but as you may have guessed from the title of my talk that's not exactly how it turned out this is what my career path actually looked like I did graduate with a business degree I got an incredible job at a school but wasn't quite enough so I moved to London helped my firm build an office there but then jump to an even more prestigious investment fund with even bigger ambitions and even with the dream job I had that wasn't quite what I wanted so out of whim I quit my job I traveled the world and I came back to Toronto I started a company charge spot I was of starving entrepreneur living on ramen you guys will soon know the feeling we raise money we grew really fast we failed we struggled we recovered we grew again and Here I am standing right here in front of you guys today and you guys are all probably thinking man that's really messed up it is a super disjointed career path but what I want to share with you is that it's actually quite normal everybody has a plan every successful person has a vision of how things are supposed to turn out but they also face uncertainty missteps unexpected events the whole way in fact the only constant throughout any number of career paths will be you guessed it uncertainty and so when I graduated from university got my first job my peers would sit around the lunchroom table and we would all strategize on how we would achieve our goal of becoming a partner at a really large investment fund and do you know what they're doing today the first one is a partner at a large investment fund he actually made it the next one is a CEO of a chicken transportation company the next one runs a Chocolate Factory in California and one buys and sells software companies out of Florida none of these none of my friends would have guessed that this is where they ended up but each one of them is really successful and very happy in their own right career path uncertainty permeates all sectors roles walks you cannot avoid it so if everybody faces it why am I here talking about it to you guys today well it's because startups are a case study in uncertainty and let me illustrate this for you this graph shows that nearly 90% of 22,000 startups faced uncertainty hurdles and failures along the way 90% and remember behind each and every one of these statistics is a person not so indifferent for myself they're smart ambitious and they had a plan a plan so compelling they were given millions of dollars to execute on it but yet 90% of them didn't go to plan I was actually told by my CEO coach just about about a month ago dealing with uncertainty is my job as a start-up founder and so good thing uncertainty is a constant because now I will always have a job so let's talk really quickly about some of the causes of this uncertainty the first one is external factors some of them could be as simple as one company buying another company your role being made redundant and all of a sudden you're out of a job maybe it's a new job maybe it's a different career but you're not on the same path it could be as severe as war war change is not just careers guys divorce changes lives people's countries right completely out of your control so let's illustrate this with the last one how many of you guys in the audience remember the recession of 2008 hands up Wow that was way more than I expected that was at the start of my career so I probably seem like a dinosaur to you guys but I saw my peers rising stars people with 4.0 GPA s the first picks when people were hiring lose their jobs overnight like this why because a few bankers were too reckless with their money at the time in fact during the recession nearly 1 in 8 people lost their jobs the average Joe had no role to play in this except getting screwed and it was completely out of their control so ok kind of dire but don't worry you'll get better next internal factors your values how you perceive the world will change over your life and that is going to redefine your definition of success and if you have a new goal a new definition of success your career path is going to change so you can achieve it it's really simple and over the next four years as you guys go to university you will set out on a very different path than the one you're thinking about today the interactions you have will alter how you see the world let's take a very simple example if you are in a classroom that prioritizes openness acceptance of different opinions those values will form and you will carry those forward on the other hand if you are in a class where the prof prioritizes undemanding respect authority you're going to develop values of conformity and you'll take that onwards you can't change that to further illustrate this guy's who here has an idea of what they want to be right when they get out of university hands up okay quite a lot of you this is how many of you will want to change your career path in just the first years that you're out let alone if that is the path that you stick to over the next four for me I had the job I had dreamed about when I came out of school but experiences volunteering in Kenya meeting to now love of my life my wife helped me prioritize relationships community spending time with people that mattered spending time with entrepreneurs made me want to build something make a difference and all of a sudden everything that I had strived for worked 90 hours a week for didn't matter now I want to build something create something and help people build their own careers okay so I basically told you that you can't control what's gonna happen in the world and you can't control what you're gonna change in the world it's not all dire so what do you do up to this point I told you that uncertainty is the only constant in your career path but now I'm gonna give you guys the power to add one more constant into that and that is learning and growth so each one of these unexpected events the twists the setbacks that you guys are going to encounter provide an amazing opportunity to learn so you don't make the same mistake again and you come out a better person on the back of it this type of mindset is called the growth mindset and it was pioneered by Professor Carol Dweck a Stanford University psychologist professor Dweck doesn't see the world in terms of successes and failures she sees the world in terms of learners and non learners but it's no coincidence that the learners are the successful ones in life and the fact that you guys are sitting right here today signals me that you're probably learners and that is super important because if you got 1% better every day from now until the time you finished University in four years time you will literally be 2 million times better do the math it is not easy to learn develop and maintain this mindset I struggled for years doing it as you might have been remembered during my career slide the squiggly one I told you that we struggle that charge spot and we did if I had let those failures get me down slow me down and I didn't adapt and learn we wouldn't be here as a company day we wouldn't employ the people that we do today I wouldn't be standing on this stage that ability to learn adapt and grow is what's going to keep you light years ahead of your peers ok guys so let's wrap this up super quick takeaways one always have a plan the most successful people in the world have a plan but 2x fact that planned to change regardless of how good you think your plan is it will not survive first contact remember the 22,000 startups it didn't survive first contact but finally learn adapt and grow as this plan changes that's really important if you guys can learn to do that today you'll be able to enjoy the journey and I'm sure that for each and every single one of you it will be a phenomenal journey so guys thanks a lot for taking our time I hope you have an amazing day congrats on being here [Applause]