Finding Your Passion and Pursuing it with Intentionality: From Goldman to Google to Author, Featuring Felicia Iyamu

Have you ever found yourself lying awake at 3am wondering about your existence and what you’re doing with your life? Or scrolling through Reddit reading an inspirational story about an individual who managed to turn their passion into a job and wondering if you could do the same?

Felicia and I recently co-hosted a Zoom Event on finding your passion and pursuing it with intentionality to help attendees think through some of these topics. Felicia, a fiction book author, provided insight into her journey to publishing her first book and her pivot from working in banking to tech. And, no, she did not quit her job as a Product Marketing Manager at Google to focus on writing. So how did she do it?

Here are 3 key insights from the event:

Takeaway 1: Tie back all decisions that you make to your values.

Felicia felt internal friction between her work as an investment banker in natural resources and her values, e.g., work-life balance. Hence, she took the courage to make a change by applying for other jobs and evaluated which ones aligned with her values during the interviews. Working at Google excited her, so she took a leap of faith and has been there for 4 years now.

Your value system should serve as a foundation to guide your decisions. It sounds simple, but oftentimes one could be influenced or pressured into making certain decisions. That’s why having the self-awareness to identify the internal friction or misalignment with your values and being courageous enough to make a change is key to ensuring that you’re pursuing a life with intention.

While the decision cited by Felicia is related to a pivot point in her career, this is a lesson that we can apply to all life decisions, from the companies you work for, to the friends and life partner you choose, and so much more.

Pro tip: Look at yourself from a third-person perspective and perform a root cause analysis into why you’re feeling a certain way about different situations in your life. Doing so can help you establish a list of values with which you identify, such as hard work, humility, etc. This is a simple exercise we can all do before going to sleep or even on the commute to work, and it is healthy to do it often because what we value can evolve over time.

Takeaway 2: Keep an open mind - Inspiration can come from anywhere! 

When you keep an open mind as you go through life, you find multiple points of inspiration. Felicia’s first book, titled Icarus, the Moon and Sun, is an intersection between finding oneself and becoming acquainted with uplifting, marginalized characters: a rule-abiding girl from East Berlin who sees the wall fall; a well-off girl from SoHo in New York who prefers Harlem and the Bronx; a happy boy from India discovering his sexuality; a selfless boy from North Korea trying to escape but unsure what he is seeking. The inspiration for her book came from a melting pot of diverse experiences and research.

Another book that Felicia highly recommends for individuals looking to get inspired is Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear, by Elizabeth Gilbert, which helped her to overcome a writer’s block, and the takeaways from the book were life-changing to her. 

Takeaway 3: Have a clear plan on how you’re going to execute your passion project. 

From the objective to the resources needed, think about how you will approach your passion project. When you’re implementing something that is passion-driven and that big-picture objective is ever-present in your mind, you will find the drive and time to do it. For example, Felicia would wake up early in the morning to write from 4am to 8am as this was the time when she generated her best ideas. She was also writing whenever she had free pockets of time. 

It was extremely apparent that Felicia is passionate about writing. Her eyes lit up whenever she talked about her writing experiences. I believe the excitement that you feel when talking about various topics is a significant telltale sign of your passions.

Also, if you have a full-time job that is taking care of the bills, for practicality reasons, Felicia does not recommend you quit your job to focus on your passion project entirely. Another piece of advice that resonated with me is how she advocated to frame her job positively to align with her passions. 

I hope this has inspired you to start thinking deeper about your value system and encouraged you to begin your own mini passion projects, whether it’s writing or something else! Along the way, be determined to accomplish but never hard on yourself - life is a marathon, not a sprint. 

If you would like to check out other upcoming events that I will be hosting, click here.

Felicia Iyamu's Background:

Felicia Iyamu graduated from Brown University with an economics degree. She then started her career at Goldman Sachs in Natural Resources Investment Banking in New York City. After a few years, she pivoted and joined Google as a Product Marketing Manager, first in California and now in Singapore. She has been at Google for over four years, three of them in Asia. While working at Google, she pursued her passion of authoring a novel and it is available for pre-order here.

A special thank you to Alexa Ong:

Alexa Ong is a final year business and marketing major at the National University of Singapore. With a passion for writing and community building, she also designs digital media solutions with 2 friends to improve patient adherence to eye health care. She attended the recent Zoom event which I co-hosted with Felicia Iyamu and afterwards pitched the idea of co-publishing this event recap article on LinkedIn as a way of sharing the insights with a greater amount of people. Thank you, Alexa!