Up until this point, I haven’t really thought of any vision for my career. Whenever somebody asked me what my career vision was, I couldn’t respond well. But now I’m at a turning point in my life and career, I figured it might be good to reflect on my career so far and think of what I want to focus on in the next several years.
Work-Life Balance, Career Growth, and Compensation
Work-Life Balance
One of the most important elements for a job for me is work-life balance. I know some folks live to work (aka. workaholic), and as much as I enjoy working on cool projects and content creation or whatever, one crucial thing for me is to be present at home. I work to live rather than live to work so I can fulfill my responsibilities outside of work. And for that, I need a good work-life balance. Remote work also helps a ton here to cut out the commute time and spend more time with my family. I don’t want to work 60hr/w and put everything around the house and kids onto my wife’s plate. That’s irresponsibility.
Career Growth
Another piece is career growth. I recently quit my job I stayed for about 2.5 years. I liked the job since it gave me a great work-life balance and decent benefits. But there were limited career opportunities and growth. It was a large enterprise and it almost seemed impossible to pivot my role/responsibilities or to get promoted. And that’s one reason for me to start looking for another job.
In that sense, working on side gigs satisfied my desire for growth and learning more on my own terms. I also got to make some money that way (I talk about it on my newsletter).
Compensation
Honestly, compensation is not as important as the other two elements I just mentioned. I used to dream of getting rich as soon as I can, but at this stage in my life, there are many more things you care about than getting rich. That said, at least I want to provide my family a decent level of financial freedom and to pay the bills (can’t really laugh at how expensive everything is getting nowadays!). I have a small goal on compensation though. That is to make more than $200k/yr (yup, I never made more than that). Whether it’s on W2 or my consulting gigs or the mix of both. I feel $200k is a good threshold which once you go over, you’d have enough flexibility in what you can spend money on while saving a decent amount of money for later in life.
One of my life goals is to have enough money to go back and forth between the US and Japan once a year (just the plane tickets cost at least $1k per person, once they’re 2yrs-old). We have 2 kids currently, but considering there will be more, I’d like to make more money. Maybe someday, I’d be making like $300k/yr~$500k/yr. Who knows.
At the end of the day, as long as I’m growing and learning at a good pace, I believe compensation comes with it.
Where To Go From Here
I recently got an offer to work at a SaaS startup starting next week as a contractor and as a full-time employee in July (2025). I was offered to work asap as a full-time employee, but I had another part-time commitment, and so I negotiated to start as a part-time contractor.
I was actually considering going all-in on my consulting gigs this year. But this full-time gig came my way, and after thinking through a lot of things, I came to the conclusion that I wanted to work for this startup full-time. I’ll be one of the first data hires, meaning I’ll be doing everything from date ingestion, transformation, reporting, and data management. I believe the experience I’ll gain at this company will better equip me down the road in the long run.
Another reason was that the company allows me to work from Japan for a few months in the year. At least that’s what I was told when I’d talked to the CTO about it. So, as long as that holds true, staying at this company is worth it in my opinion (location flexibility is one of the reasons why I pursue my own business. If a company provides that for me while on W2, I should take advantage of that). And not to mention my salary will be more than 1.5x compared to my last W2 job.
I plan on staying at the company for as long as I can. It can be a few years or maybe 10 years, or it could be a lot shorter than that. Who knows. After that though, I’m thinking I’d go all in on my consulting business. Or if I loved working at a startup, I might jump on another startup.
I’m also interested in giving one of my micro business ideas a shot. Perhaps a SaaS business or something. More to come on that. I’ll still be doing some consulting and content creation on the side while I work for this startup, so I’m not sure if I ever actually have time on working on my SaaS startup idea. But at least I have something I can work on when nothing goes against my plan.
Conclusion
I’ll be starting a new W2 job, will continue working on my consulting/content creation gigs on the side, and keep on pursuing freedoms (financial, location, and time/calendar). More to come on my journey, and I hope you get something out of my writings!
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