I want to be thriving in my work and that’s not a question of how hard or easy things can be. Everything I do in my daily life whether I’m eating at dinner table or hacking away at a website, is set to be in alignment with my overall strategic mission.

The top question I get when I tell people back home that I’m moving back is, “What are you going to do when you get here?”. It’s a legitimate question and quite frankly it’s still up in the air. There’s a multitude of gigs that I’ve been doing since the tourism industry died in Seoul. I’ve been building websites, teaching English, coaching startups and helping random inquiries from strangers in different countries about Korea.

One such request was from a YouTuber from the Middle East with 100,000 subscribers. He creates content for the Arabic speaking PUBG community. Interesting niche, but I’m sure it’s lucrative. Recently his ID was banned on the video game for a reason unbeknownst to him. He contacted me through a number of my public profiles and asked me to help him contact the headquarters which is here in Seoul, South Korea.

Easy request, easy money, but not nearly enough to be a living wage to support my wife and 2 kids. I want to be challenged and move up higher up on the value chain. One thing this pandemic experience has taught me is understanding what’s most important to me. As a self-help coach, I’ve been forced to forced to re-examine my core values and write down my own personal mission statement again. In doing so, I realize how much I have changed.

One exercise I teach people to do is write the last chapter of their autobiography where you are at the end of your life. That’s a great one to see where you want, what you want your accomplishments to be and a great compass for you to guide your life right now. In doing so, you extract the hidden values you hold onto that you otherwise might not have known. What I found out about what I want to do was the following:

Community and authentic connection is everything to me. I cherish the people around me and the connections I’ve built with people. So that means above money and fame, I want to create better and intimate connections with the people I already know. I think there is hidden value in all of them that we can uncover if we are clever enough. I would rather have a smaller intimate group who can complement one another’s roles and have a sole purpose together to travel forward together with.

I don’t want to be known as a hard-worker. Hard working is going to the mill and chopping wood all day. It’s a simple task that takes time and energy where you clock out at the end of the day. I want to be thriving in my work and that’s not a question of how hard or easy things can be. Everything I do in my daily life whether I’m eating at dinner table or hacking away at a website, is set to be in alignment with my overall strategic mission. And if that consumes every bit of my day? Well that still wasn’t really hard for me to do then.

I am a Motivator-in-Chief. When I was in the finance industry, I always dreamed about operating my own company. I would read these 10K reports on the fascinating things all these CEOs were out there doing. And then when I entered into the entrepreneurial world, I realized there are so many details that needed to fuel the operations that I would freeze in analysis paralysis. I realize I’m somewhere in between that fascination of what it can be and the realities of the daily grind. You can call it marketing, communicating to people and changing culture. Or you can call it being a motivator to push things to the next level. Ultimately I’m the oil that greases the gears in order to get things running smoother and efficiently.

So as you can see, even though it is a legitimate question, there is so much more that goes into calculating an answer. The honest answer is that I don’t know right now. Originally I thought that I would go back to the States and start a travel agency there helping friends and family with their travel needs. Consult with companies on how I could lower their costs to booking travel for them. But that all now seems like it will be years away until we can figure out what the new normal will be. I’m happy to also lend my client facing services and marketing mind to a high impact company doing great things for society.

The time that I have now until the time it is for me to leave for the States, I will continue to do what I do, but to also make sure I write down every thought that comes to mind through one of my public profiles.