Have you ever met someone who used to be a tax accountant then became a rapper? Me neither. But that’s exactly what our guest on this week’s Career Relaunch episode did. Deepak Shukla, a former Deloitte tax accountant turned rapper and SEO agency founder shares his thoughts on what it’s like to break into a new industry when you don’t exactly look the part. We’ll also talk about putting yourself out there, dealing with judgement, and focusing on the future rather than the past. I’ll also address a listener question about balancing your current role and identity with your future ambitions.

Key Career Insights

1. Just because you don’t make it in a certain industry doesn’t mean that the experience was for nothing.
2. You have to courageously put yourself out there to at least give yourself the opportunity to succeed. This helps you become better and more effective with your work.
3. The only way to build up your tolerance to judgement and critique is to put yourself in situations where you HAVE to face this . . . so you can get used to it.
4. Minimize the amount of time and effort you devote to analysizing what went wrong during a failure and instead try to focus on the actions you can take to do better next time.

Tweetables to Share

Related Resources

We talked on the show about how you shouldn’t be overly concerned with other’s opinions of your career progress or trajectory. This article in the Book of Life entitled No One Cares is a good reminder that we should focus more on what choices make sense for us rather than what others think of those choices.

Listener Challenge

During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I challenged you to think about where you wanna be 12 months from now. What sort of work do you wanna be doing more of? What sort o