 What advice would you give others if you're a product manager at Amazon? How would you design your career path if you can start over? In this video, I'm going to interview the Amazon product manager and share with you how to design your career path so that you will never regret. This is Dr. NCD, a director product from drncd.com. And today we have a special guest, John Marty. He's going to share with you guys what career path to choose. And he's also someone who used to work for Amazon. He's also a dad with a boy and also doing some financial real estate stuff. He has so much life experience to share with you guys. All right. So John, do you want a quick intro of yourself besides my quick intro? Yeah, no problem. You did a great job. Thanks, Dr. Nancy. Appreciate you having me on. And yeah, I've been at Amazon doing product management for the past four years, taking a little break right now. And I've been doing a lot of user experience related projects for amazon.com. There's a lot of different divisions within Amazon. I think a lot of people don't realize that Amazon has like a million different little startups. It's not just .com. There's so many things going on. And the whole company doesn't operate like this monolithic thing from Jeff Bezos down. It's kind of like a little startup over here that has their own little profit law statement, little startup over here doing this little thing. And so millions of little interesting projects that are all kind of in this ecosystem. But I'm going to draw from my wisdom and share on your channel. Awesome. I love this. And we have lots of people on my channel and some of my students aiming to join Amazon. And I believe there's a golden nugget in what you're going to share with us. Perfect. Thank you. Okay. So John, let's do this. Let's start our main topic about what Korea has to choose. I think that's a step one for everybody thinking about do I join Google, Amazon, or do I, well, just enjoy life, you know, or achieve natural freedom, right? So what's your take on step one, what Korea has to choose? Yeah. I mean, the biggest thing is you have to identify what your core values are. And if you don't, sometimes it's hard to kind of even frame like, well, what are the core values that I'm even interested in? And there's a lot of different ways to do it. But like the most scrappy way to do it is just to get a piece of paper or a notepad on your computer and just type in, what are core values? And you can just see a list of, you know, a laundry list of core values. One of them might be humor. One of them might be equality for you or family. It's like, well, if your number one core value is family and you want to spend time with your family more than maybe you're trying to achieve a sense of financial freedom, maybe your core value is getting in, getting money, and getting out as soon as possible. Maybe your core value is staying and retiring until staying in the workforce for 35 years and retiring and trying to find some kind of passion project within corporate America. To be honest with you, I find it very difficult to find passion or dream jobs in corporate. You and I have been in the arena for a while. And if you speak to people in Serena, they tell you about, like, I mean, I have a lot of gray hair in my beard for a reason because there's a lot of stresses, a lot of things you can't control. The only thing you can control is the values that you're striving towards. And so I would say, look at the top five values that are interesting to you. If you're looking for the ability to be ultra creative and unconstrained, put that on the top and kind of shuffle them around. And you don't have to have them be set in stone. You can just be like, right now, in this point in my life, I feel like my top five values are this in this order. And as you go and you grow and change, you might get into a corporate job and say, geez, you know, I'm actually valuing this other thing too. Or maybe it's higher than the other one. But at least you have it in the forefront of your mind because what a lot of people are not doing is they're not consciously aware of their core values and they're letting the corporate system kind of steer them into just, you know, a rudderless ship kind of navigating through corporate. And they end up in a career path that maybe they're not ultimately satisfied in or in a just a general path of life that they're not satisfied in. So very important to list those out. Yeah. So I do echo with what you said. And I do things come with experience. And I do think it depends on the stage of your career. If you're really younger, you might want, I want to get a fan. Fancy, make lots of money. Yeah. And then later on in your life, as you experience more things, the different period of your life had different kind of core value. And then you reprioritize later on. And actually there's a very interesting like story actually happened yesterday. One of my students, she is also in our age and she got offered from Amazon. She also got another offer in a startup and she wanted to turn down the offer from Amazon. I think is she must align her core value. I had a long conversation with her to figure out what's the best for her. And you're right. It's just different stage of your life. Your values will change as long as align with the values. There's no good or bad choice is your own perfect choice. Yeah. And you know, I'll add to that one thing as far as the values go, values that you have don't be mistaken that the values are corporate wide. Right. Oh, my values are aligned with the company's values. That is a trap that a lot of young individuals, even mid career, late career individuals get into. Values are team specific. Every team operates like its own microorganism, its own microclimate of culture. And it's very important for you to not pay attention to like the corporate glam of the puppy dogs running around, you know, the break room and ping-pong tables and stuff like that. It's important for you to say, is my value stream aligned specifically to my manager and my manager's manager and the people that I'm going to be directly reporting to on a day-to-day basis? If not, you know, then you're in for a rude awakening. I agree. Yeah. And also sounds a little bit scary. It is. It is. Personal value to align their value. That's right. That's right. So step one is a value. I think we tell them more than they need to know. We tell them more than they need to know, yeah. Okay. So besides the value, what else do you think they need to know to choose their career path? Yeah. Second one is you really want to peer into the future. We have these kind of sexy ideas about certain career paths and it's very important for you to identify people on LinkedIn who are in those career paths, who have been in them for a really long time and for you to reach out to them and say, you know, hey, like I'm a young individual. I'm looking for to get into this world and I want to peer into the future. I want to see what it's like, what you've gone through. What are the great parts you love? What are the parts you hate about this? How long does it take to get promoted? All of these different things uncover the ants under the rug so you can make the most informative decision for you. There are people who go into software engineering school. I did a talk at USC more recently and these students were like, yeah, I just got into engineering for the money. And it's like, okay, well, that's a decision you have based on maybe a value stream that you have. Or some people think it's sexy and then they really get into coding and go, not liking this or not liking the idea of the promotion path that people are telling me about. So really important to peer into the future, leverage the individuals who have been in the game for a long time and see what they say. So let me ask you this question. I think it makes so much sense, but people still just go into coding for the near term financial success. I think there's nothing wrong for near term financial success. By the way, I do think we need to help them think about what's long term. So let's say if for family reason or any other reason, so you decide to join the software engineering space for short term financial success. How long do you suggest and to rethink what's the next step to get out or to realign what your true value besides money? Yeah, yeah. So I think it's important to focus on there's two buckets. There's things we can control and there's things that we can't control. We have to focus on what we can control. The problem that we often get into with these ideas of like dream jobs or dream career paths or what have you is that there are too many uncontrollable factors like a bad boss, like a bad corporate culture. Any number of scenarios will completely derail you. You could think and we were talking about this offline, you could think that like working at Google is going to be like the absolute mega dream for you. But really at the end of the day, you might just be dealing with a lot of politics to move a single button around or you're like, man, this is just not what I thought it would be. So I think in the corporate sphere, you have to do what you can to align your interest as much as possible. But you also have to realize that like corporate is corporate. And when you in point number two peer into the future, you're going to really get the perspective of like the pain in the industry that we all face. It's a slog. It is work. And one thing that somebody told me, he's like a foremost performance coach. And he told me that we often think that we tend to think about passion in corporate America, like passion and romantic love from the ages of 18 to 25. And so we think that we're going to get a job that makes us feel this like constant state of elation. And it's not that way. I mean, it's 10 hours a day working all the time, doing a lot of things that we really don't like doing a large part of the time. So for me personally, I optimize in corporate for money. And I back burner the interest side of things towards my values. So I want to make as much money as possible because my value is time freedom. And so I'm trying to use that money in corporate to one day build a bridge to my exit. I'm not trying to stay until I'm 65 and everybody's different. I agree. Yeah, I like the strategy using the money you can accumulate in the corporate America and lead to financial freedom. And I think we have lost in common regarding our common interest in financial freedom and retire as well. Yes, but with your own passion. Awesome. Yeah. So what do you think besides those two, what are the things people need to talk about or think about when they choose their career path? Yeah. So number three, I would say maintain a sense of perspective. And what I mean by that is we are faced with the paradox of choice. We can be literally anything we want and it causes a great deal of anxiety for young individuals because they say I could be anything. And so the choice that I made is always a stressful choice because I think there could be something on the horizon that could be better. And so it's important for you to realize like what your values are and peering into the future, stacking those two things together, give you a foundation to have some perspective of what you're actually getting into. And it also feeds into how you can reevaluate your core values after you have those conversations because if you ground your sense of perspective, you're going to really quickly realize after you have these conversations with people, every industry has ants under the rug. Every industry. It doesn't matter if you're in engineering or you're in product or this or that. You might be in one company where you're working for a year and you're like having the best time of your life and all of a sudden there's a corporate reshuffle, people get fired and then you have a terrible loss and you're like, oh my God, I'm on an island now and my life is totally different. So things are constantly changing. You can never, but that's every industry. And I think it's important for you to kind of say no matter what I do, there's going to be struggles. Even if I'm an entrepreneur, there's going to be struggles. So maintaining the perspective of just saying, okay, like I know what I'm getting into. I'm not going to use this word like passion to kind of be this like myth that I hold onto. I'm going to find interest. I'm going to work hard. And I think if you say those things and you realize every industry has its things, then it sets you more at ease of thinking that like you're missing out or that you didn't follow the right path. Yeah, I do like how you bring this up regarding the perspective because as you mentioned, like each industry has ends on the rugs and it actually happened to one of my students. He's crazy. So he has been working for the company for eight years and all of a sudden everybody got laid off during COVID. And he was taught performer like multiple years and all of a sudden everybody's gone including himself. And he hadn't like trying to get a job for eight years and suddenly realized, oh actually I was underpaid the whole time. He was able to actually, I believe roughly the numbers, I could potentially double his market value. And it's just crazy. And the people didn't realize this. And now when corporate America suddenly to a shift, how would you see it in different perspectives? I always tell others you see it as a marathon, see your life or Korea as a marathon. And you do the short-term thing, but please make sure you align this with your long-term goal. Your long-term could be financial independence, could be a personal interest or whatever you want to achieve. My personal is like I really want to build a nonprofit or at least helping out with certain nonprofit is what I'm doing right now, align with that. And thus the hours I put into corporate America usually justify my long-term goal or not. If not, please change your perspective. You understand what you put in, what you plan to get out. Yeah, yeah, I completely agree. It's really important for you to kind of just look at the goals that you have and don't follow kind of like the societal narrative of goals. I think that's so important. Like the societal narrative of goals is get into corporate, get a great job, get paid really well, keep climbing the ladder, keep climbing the ladder. But instead of that, say to yourself like, what do I want? Unconstrained. What do I want? What values do I really have? Not to like these subconscious societal values that are kind of like pulling the strings from above that I'm not even aware of. Like, do I just want to be an artist? Okay, awesome. Like be an artist. Be a solo artist. Like if that is your primary value, then do that. You know, if you want to be a gardener, then just do that. Or get into a point where you're running corporate. And you're pursuing some passion projects on the side. Like Dr. Nancy has her YouTube channel. I have my YouTube channel. We are doing a lot of passion projects on the side, the nonprofits, what have you. Our corporate jobs are feeding some of our passions, right? So you don't have to be following just one path. You can be following numerous paths. Not saying that that's easy, but it allows you the freedom to make those explorational bets as you are navigating corporate as well. Awesome. And actually really resonate with me regarding doing some side passion project that has something to do with YouTube. It's crazy. Somebody, I have several mentors really push my life to a different direction. Actually come from the YouTube story. One of the time I did my talk to my mentors, I really want to start a YouTube channel. I was actually, I wanted and I really want to teach and share my experience with the world. It's crazy. I just want to share. I don't care. I want to say something. And then I was like, but I'm not making money from YouTube. I was like, but it's just like, I'm not like someone selling like beauty products. Lots of women sell beauty products. I'm selling like career advice, but all the but and my mentor at the time was like, Nancy, come to my office. I need sit down with you, have hard, hard conversation. What if I give you 48 hours? Do anything you want to do. What would you do? I was like, YouTube videos, go do it. Don't expect getting any money from it. Just just go do it and see how it goes. And that kind of push helps me to continue my YouTube journey and help my business or like the YouTube channel. Actually more than YouTube channels continue to grow. It's my 80, 20 rules and you never know. You spend like 20% of the time, maybe 10%, maybe 5% of the time building a YouTube channel, or you never know where it leads to, but it will feed lots of satisfaction, personal satisfaction that you've made for a long time. I totally agree. That's what's interesting too. You know, like there's an exploratory journey with all of us. Most people don't know exactly what they want to do, right? And you think about what career path to choose. That's one kind of linear vein of what we can do. Ideally what we want to do is and it feeds the utility of getting paid and feeding us, right? There's a utility involved in being in corporate America and we may not choose the right path at first and there's nothing wrong with that because we can always pivot. I made a pivot in 2014. I was working at Best Buy for $12 an hour. So my life is very, very different right now than it was back then. We can always pivot and make changes at any age, but I think it's really important for us to explore our passions that are unconstrained by financial gain. I'm interested in a YouTube channel. I started it four years ago. I wasn't into it for the money. I just wanted to share my thoughts with the world. I just wanted to do something unconstrained by monetary value or a trading of money. And it has led me to so many interesting opportunities that I would have never imagined and it was all because I just started. And sometimes the path is not defined for you. You're just like, I'm following this thing over here, following this thing over here, and I don't know where I'm going, but I have this goal over here. So yeah, do that. Do what Nancy and I are doing. Yeah, start a YouTube channel. What is my influencer? What is TikTok? Yeah, Instagram or TikTok or whatever. Use these platforms to share your passion projects with the world. Build a community for what you love. And once you do that, you find yourself not being constrained by like, oh, I want to get promoted, right? Because that has a lever. It's like one person is determining your fate. I'm not okay with this kind of like one path, someone else determining my entire fate scenario, which is why I have numerous buckets. Exactly. Thank you for sharing with us. So you saw today, and I believe all my audience will be like, yes, we've grown so much today. Thank you so much, John. And at the same time, also encourage everybody to check out John's YouTube channel. I'm going to link it in the description down below. Thank you very much for joining us. Do you want any last minute comment? Yeah, so thanks for having me, Dr. Nancy. I appreciate you. If you want to learn more about me, I have my YouTube channel. Just look up John Marty, M-A-R-T-Y. Marty McFly. Back to the future. Some people call me McFly. Some people just call me Marty. Whatever you want to call me is fine. And I'm on LinkedIn as well. I post daily on LinkedIn there, and I'm very easily accessible. I answer every DM on LinkedIn as well. Awesome. Thank you. Thank you so much, John, for sharing with us. Okay, great. I'm going to see you guys next time, and also see you, John. Thank you for joining us today. All right, see you guys. Bye.