キャリアの選択と経験
This is Reinamoto's podcast, The Creative Mindset.
Hi everyone, welcome to The Creative Mindset, a podcast about what the future holds at the
intersection of creativity and technology. I am Reinamoto, the founding partner of I&CO,
a global innovation firm based in New York, Tokyo, and now Singapore.
Today's episode is Ask Me Anything, where we take questions from our listeners and invite
one of them onto our show to have a real-time conversation. The question comes from Gavin
Lam, an experienced marketer based in Singapore with close to 20 years of experience.
He started his career as an account manager at Ogilvy in Singapore, one of the most prominent
agency networks in the world. He and I met at AKQA, another global agency. I was the worldwide
chief creative officer and I used to travel to all the offices, including Shanghai, where he was
based at the time. Since then, he's worked at storied sportswear brands such as Adidas, Lululemon,
and Anta, a Chinese brand that has claimed the lead position in China overtaking Nike.
Gavin's question was quite broad to begin with, but ultimately, it was about how he should decide
on his next steps as an experienced professional with two decades of experience. So, let's get
started. Gavin, it's been a long time. Good to see you. Yeah, same here. You never change.
I never change? That's right. I've seen you in the last 10 years. Yeah.
Incredible. So, I guess it was 10 years ago that we met. So, for the context of our listeners,
Gavin and I used to work together at the same agency, but in different offices.
What year you joined AKQA? It was 10.
So, by that point, I had been at AKQA for five years and I was overseeing the US as well as
Asia. That was my remit. So, I used to go to Asia several times a year and you were in Shanghai at
that time, I believe. And we had started an office in Shanghai, I think in 2007. So, I would travel
to Shanghai a few times a year and that's where we met when we were 10, 15 years younger.
Yes. Exactly. Yeah.
So, perhaps in your own words, quickly introduce who you are, what you do,
what you're doing now and why you are here. Yeah, of course. Thank you. Thank you, Ray. I think
I had some wonderful years learning a lot at AKQA and remember one of the biggest achievements was
how we drew our motley crew of very passionate, highly creative, crazy digital freaks. I was
working on Nike for many years and then I think I wanted to try something different. So, then I went
back to Wieden, again, a place that I have very fond memories of. But then I had already spent
seven years in Shanghai. I'm originally from Singapore. So, after seven years in Shanghai,
I felt that it's time to go back home. So, me and my wife, we went back home to Singapore and we
had a master's. I did a master's, we had a baby. And then after two years, then we felt actually
we're still not done with Shanghai. So, we went back. So, the second seven year was with Adidas
and Lululemon. But then something very interesting happened at Lululemon. It was the Shanghai lockdown.
It was 2022. That was quite an episode. So, I want to share a little story. Again, it's very
帰国の困難と新たな挑戦
based on faith and religion. The whole lockdown in Shanghai, that was quite scary. And then at
the time when it happened, there was a lot of freedom taken away. And I think that's
been very important. It happens, you didn't realize it. It happened and then there was so much
uncertainty and fear. And then so then we made plans to leave the country, to come home.
And then I have two kids and then we have so many things to come back. And then
we didn't have a job. I didn't have a job. Then there's so many things to sort out.
It's almost impossible to come back, to move back. And then finally then at the end, everything worked
out. And then I didn't have a job at that time. And then when I came home and then I went for a
few interviews. And then the interview is, oh, you're a great candidate, perfect, blah, blah, blah.
But then at the end, it just didn't happen. You're just not right to fit, etc.
And then I stopped praying for the interviewer to like me or I will pass the question. Instead,
I just pray, hey, you know what, I leave it to you. Whatever you think is right for me at the
right time is all in your hands. And then after a week, I got a call and then I got a job from
ANTA and then, you know, we want you to help us, blah, blah, blah, just do it together.
And then at the moment, I realized I only fear Him and respecting God because I feel that
that He made the impossible happen. And then after that, I just feel like
that I have very little fear of things. Obviously, you feel like your safety,
these are all things. But beyond that, I don't have any big fears. I only feel like
not doing the mission that He wants me to do. Yeah, this is my big fear now. I've been trying
to look for this, find this answer. What is it that I can do that He can let me do the mission
He wants me to do? And then that actually reset a lot of my values and perspective on life.
And that's why I chose to come home. I've been home about a year now. Some of the questions
I'm asking myself, what do I want to do? Some passion and motivations. So that's what I wanted
to ask you today, Ray. Yeah. So currently, you said you're in a transitional period, but are you
working at the time? Are you taking some time off to think about your next chapter? Where exactly
are you in your work and life? So now I'm with ANTA, the Chinese brand. They set up a Southeast
Asian office. So over here, I'm helping them with their globalization plans, how to extend the brand
to the Southeast Asian market. Yeah. Where in your life stage are you? I mean, I'm in my mid-forties.
I look younger, hopefully. Yes, you do. You look good. Thank you. Sport changes lives. Yeah. So
after that, I did a lot of running. So that's also one thing that I've identified. How can I
maybe use my passion and experience in sports to do something in the next chapter? I think when you
reach your forties and even mid to late forties, the question that we ask ourselves,
what should I do next? Becomes, what should I do for the rest of my life?
When you are in your twenties and thirties, you could have multiple things still left in your
キャリアの再考
career specifically. But as you reach your mid-forties and even late forties and say,
even your fifties, once we start to, and we do need to think about the rest of our career, at
least. And maybe in my parents and perhaps in your parents' generation, the end of one's career was
around age 60. If you reach 60 years old, that was in Japan, there's such a thing, such a thing as
the specific retirement age, which was the age 60. And then it was raised to 65.
And now a lot of the countries and nations are getting rid of that specific age where you end
your career. So the end of one's career is not as finite as it used to be. But at the same time,
the older we get, in some cases, I think the options become wider, but in some other cases,
options become narrower as well, because we have responsibilities, we have other considerations to
think about. So what is the balance between trying to be relevant and trying to be yourself? I find
that's also one important question I've been asking myself, who am I? And then how do I find
this identity to be different and unique? And then do we start from there? How do I balance
the two? I feel much more satisfied when I was able to find myself and be who I am. So that's
one thing I wanted to think about, how do I balance being relevant and also being unique?
Obviously, I cannot be unique, but irrelevant. I want to find this balance between the two. And
that's why I'm struggling to find what I find meaningful to myself. Do you look for something
or do you do something that you feel great about because you feel passionate about or you're
interested in a certain topic? Or do you need to change what you do to stay relevant or to become
relevant? And what's the balance between the two, right? But to step back a little bit, are there
things that you think make you different from other people? I think my ability to be the bridge
between China and the West. And that's how I place myself there. And then also this curiosity,
how creativity can solve a lot of solutions. And then finally, I think my belief in running
and sports and how it can change lives. And that's why I think I've been trying to
combine these three things together. I'm also a fellow believer in Christianity.
So I thought of starting this new Instagram channel. It's called Run for Christ. And then
I also feel that there's some kind of overlap between running and life. Because the more you
give into running, the more you get back. I feel that's also my philosophy in life. The more you
give and give, somehow you get back as well into your life. Yeah. And also one thing I started to,
I also had a passion for teaching. So I went to apply to be a part-time adjunct lecturer at
Singapore University of Social Sciences. Yeah. And then so I enjoy trying to, when I teach,
to share these philosophies, the mindsets. Yeah. The combination of what you just mentioned,
going from you being a bridge between China, Singapore, and the West is one thing.
The second thing is your interest and passion for running. The third thing that you mentioned
is about your belief in faith and giving. And the fourth thing is education. So by combining
キャリアの選択と成功
those four things, not sure yet exactly what the intersection of those four things, but still,
that's a very special and possibly unique combination of different aspects of who you
are as an individual. So the thing is the professional relevance that you were asking
about is, I think it's something that we all have to be constantly trying to figure out.
We live in a world in which each one of us needs to make a living by earning money. That's the
societal system that we, in which we live in, in which we live. So we can't quite escape that
construct of having to earn money to make a living. So that's the bottom line. And
you either find a job that roughly fits what you think you want to do. Yeah. Or you create
something that fits exactly what you want to do. Yeah. And I've come to at least a mental conclusion
that a job, whether it's something that you get employed for, or a job that you create for
yourself, if you keep looking for that perfect job, it will never arrive. I find myself telling
people more and more, if you think you have to look for that perfect job, it will never materialize
in front of your eye. And instead, try doing things that you think could be a professional
opportunity. At least start on your own and see what might stick. So I want to ask you then,
how do you define success? What goes through your head to this journey? That's a good question.
The way that I try to look at my own success, ultimately, I want to be able to
contribute to the larger society. But I try to think of it as a ripple. The first and foremost
is the direct people that I'm connected to and associated with, i.e. my family, right? My
responsibility is to make them happy, to be able to provide them with happy life and happiness. So
that's well-being. That's my immediate goal. The second concentric circle outside of my family is
the people that I work with. I want to be able to provide good working environment and good culture.
And then the circle around after that will be organizations and clients that I work with. So
if I'm able to provide good solutions, good ideas, good things to the partners and clients
that I work with, then my concentric circle becomes bigger. And if I'm able to provide them
things that they can then take to influence even bigger circles of people, then even though me as
a single individual, the contribution that I can make as an individual might be limited.
If I'm able to influence five people this month and then another five people next month,
and if I can keep repeating that, then it becomes a ripple effect. And you can actually calculate
the number of people you can influence over the course of your 20 years left or 30 years left
in your career. And it's millions of people that you can reach potentially. Trying to reach a
million people from day one is difficult, but this piece of writing that I do, and if I can
change one person's perspective or influence one person's perspective or 10 person's perspective,
that's a start. Like I find a personal mission, right? A personal mission. How do you define
these missions? Personally, I was never motivated by money, for better or worse. Maybe I should have
キャリアとミッドライフクライシス
been more motivated by money now that I look back on my career. Money is just part of life,
that you have to make it work. We all need money. And if that's the thing that motivates you,
great. That gives you freedom. That gives you a lot of things that you don't have. So
it's not a wrong thing to focus on. But the important question is what fulfills you the
most? And again, like in your case, I think you have a lot of things figured out for yourself,
at least spiritually, internally, what's important to you, or at least partially what's
important to you. Yeah. So I would just close out by saying that what you want to do in life,
what you want to accomplish in life and work isn't something that you look for, but it's
something that you create. And a lot of people that I know, they never take the action because
they keep looking for it, thinking that it's somewhere there and it will show up in front
of them one day. But creating yourself is the shortest distance. Awesome.
So that was Ask Me Anything from Gavin Lam, an expense marketer based in Singapore with
close to 20 years of experience in the marketing and creative industry. So my three key takeaways
from my conversation with Gavin were number one, midlife crisis is real and it's okay. Everyone
will have it and everybody's going through it. Number two, build your career at a 10 year
increment. And number three, looking for what you want to do next is a futile exercise. The future
is yours to make. So key takeaway number one, midlife crisis is real. This is something that
when I was in my 20s and even in my 30s that I thought I would never have to go through. And as
I was in my 40s, I realized that I was having a certain kind of midlife crisis that I didn't expect.
Also looking around, anybody very close to me in my family or friends or even people that I don't
know directly in the similar age bracket, and that is anybody from say late 30s into their 40s or
even into their early 50s, everybody comes to a junction in their career where they don't know
quite what to do next. And now that I've passed the age of 40, I'm really surprised how common
this situation is, the situation of having some sort of midlife crisis. And if I were honest to
myself and if I were honest to everybody who's listening to this now, that I think I was a little
ashamed of myself for having a midlife crisis. In my 20s and 30s, I thought I knew how I was going
to build my career. And in my 30s is when I started to think about starting my own company. And there
was a certain level of clarity that I had about my future. But as I was contemplating or starting
my company, and even after I started my own company, that there have been moments when I
either doubted myself or whether I was doing what I wanted to do, what I should be doing.
There were questions that haunted me and kept me up at night. And that's when I realized that
midlife crisis can take many different ways and forms for different people. And I think I was
having some sort of identity crisis in terms of what I should be doing for the next few years,
キャリアの長期的な設計
next five years, or even next decade. And then that is a question that many, many people that I know
either directly or indirectly seem to face and even struggle. I've often taken conversations
with various people, and I take those conversations because, A, I feel like I can
help them and contribute to the challenges and questions and even struggles that they
might go through based on my own experience. But also it helps me to think and give me clarity
about the future that I should be building and that I should be pursuing.
And I've come to a realization and I'm now at peace with this idea of midlife crisis because it
is real and it's okay. Everybody will have it and everybody's going through it.
Key takeaway number two, build your career at a 10-year increment. This is a realization
and a thesis that I've realized after I hit my 40s, looking back that I ended up building my
career in a 10-year increment. I used to, and I still do think of my own career, and I often give
advice to individuals that I work with and people that I talk to, especially young people, to think
of their career in a five-year increment. Hey, what do you want to be doing in five years? Where
do you see yourself in five years from now? That sort of thing. But now looking back, I realize
and see that I was able to build a certain kind of intellectual and professional muscle in a 10-year
increment. So in your 20s, or at least in my 20s, what I was doing that I now find quite valuable
is the act of making. I spent a lot of time in my 20s, hours, days, nights, weekends, making things.
I was working at RGA, another very prominent agency, and I was still learning my way into the
field of design and creativity. When I was starting out my career, the internet was booming,
or at least was becoming a mainstream platform that everybody would engage with, and I was building
websites, services, apps, and other types of expenses online, and that was my training ground
for making and craftsmanship. And in hindsight, that experience, I was able to spend, like I said,
hours, days, nights, weekends, because I was able to focus on myself. I didn't have a family yet.
I didn't have kids to feed. I didn't have a mortgage to pay. As long as I could make ends meet,
which, by the way, wasn't easy. I wasn't making a lot of money in my 20s, and I was quite literally
living paycheck to paycheck, if that. Sometimes I would have to take other jobs to make ends meet,
because I was living in New York City. I wasn't able to live on my own, so I lived with my brother
to split the bills and find ways to save money. But the thing is, because I didn't have a lot of
personal and family obligations, that I could really focus on myself and focus on things that
I wanted to do, which was just designing and making things. But that really trained my
craftsmanship muscle, which then later became useful as I got into the managerial and leadership
positions. So that's what I focused on in my 20s, which is craftsmanship. In my 30s, as I started to
get into a more managerial position, I spent the bulk of my time at AKQA during my 30s,
戦略的思考の習慣
where I went from being a designer to a creative director, and eventually to the chief creative
officer, where I was overseeing not just one office, but multiple offices, eventually 14
offices across the world. And what I needed to do was to spend less time on actually making things,
pushing pixels and designing, but more time thinking and writing strategy for other people
to follow and to implement. Sometimes those strategies came in the form of presentation
decks that I would author and design for client presentations. And other times, those
strategies and thought pieces that I would write were for the internal audience at the company.
One of the things I used to do as a chief creative officer of AKQA was to teach ideation,
brainstorming, but specifically presentation techniques. I used to do these in-house
training courses for various employees at different offices. I would go to different
offices and I would hold workshops to help people with presentations. So even though my role
as a chief creative officer became less hands-on at a client level,
what I needed to provide was the strategy for the agency, for the offices, and for the teams
to follow and implement. So that's what I did in my 30s. What I mean by the muscle of strategy
in your 30s is that it's not only thinking about how you do things, what you should do,
and why you do things, but it's training your muscle to think about a problem at hand
strategically, not just executionally. So it's not just about how you should make this or how
you should make it happen, but how you should approach it and why you should do what you're
about to do. So it's really training the muscle to think critically about the problem that you
have at hand and train yourself and push yourself to look at that situation from an objective,
strategic perspective, as opposed to having a specific method of doing this thing or that thing.
So it's less about having a set strategy that you would implement during your 30s or even in
your 40s, but creating and having that habit, building that habit to think about things
critically and strategically. So strategy is about finding the dots and connecting them
and creating a narrative out of it. It's not just about finding the dots and tackling them separately,
but finding them, see the link between those dots and then creating a coherent narrative.
That to me is strategy and training yourself, pushing yourself to think that way becomes a
valuable tool. And then as I got into my 40s, I started my own company and I'm in the position
to lead not only a team, but now a company, even though you might not be hundreds and thousands of
people, but still an entity that I need to lead to take us to the next place where we should go.
And then finally, as I get close to and into my 50s, and I'm not quite there yet, but what I would
like to do in my 50s is to be able to contribute to the people around me, to the organizations
around me, and to the world that we live in as much as possible. And that is a lofty thing to
think about, and that is a lofty thing to say, but I do believe that as we gain more experience
キャリアの変遷と挑戦
and as we age, the emphasis becomes from the self in your 20s and then to your family in your 30s
and 40s. And while keeping that emphasis on your family, that I would like to be able to also
contribute to society at large. So focusing on making things in your 20s, writing strategies in
your 30s, practicing leadership in your 40s, and then being able to contribute in your 50s,
I found that framework useful to think about the building of one's career.
Key takeaway number three, and this was the last point that I made in my conversation with Gavin,
which was looking for what you want to do next is a futile exercise. The future is yours to make.
The benefit and the curse of being in your 40s, and especially the people that I know directly,
many of them are very accomplished individuals, some of them who have leadership positions
and who've been able to achieve many, many, many things in their lives, yet as they go deeper into
their 40s, they find it hard to find the next thing that they should do. And the reason why it's
hard to find the next thing that they should do is because in your 40s, you have a lot of
personal responsibilities and financial responsibilities, whether it's the family
that you have to raise and keep paying for, say, education and housing and other things,
you just collect more things as you age, family, kids, pets, cars, house, and other types of
lifestyle assets that become more and more expensive. And it's difficult to leave those
things behind. And not that you have to leave those things behind to really pursue what you
want to do, you could maintain those things. But a lot of people have trouble, including myself,
hey, how do I keep this really good, comfortable lifestyle that I built for myself? Because I
worked hard in my 20s and 30s, I got high-paying gigs, and I'm living in a nice place and nice
house, and I want to maintain. But hey, you know what? If I change my job, let alone my career,
that I might have to take a pay cut. Or if I start my own thing, when would I get my first
paycheck? Those worries become real, especially in your 40s, as you have these assets that you have
to look after. So the trap that a lot of people, including myself, get into is there's an ideal
thing, whether it's a job or the type of work that you might want to do in your 40s and potentially
for the rest of your career. Because in your 20s, you don't have to think about the rest of your
career or the rest of your life yet. Even in your 30s, you might have another 20, 30 years left in
your career, if not more. But in your 40s, other things beyond those assets that I mentioned,
say your parents are getting old, so you have to start thinking about how to take care of them.
Your career is not getting any longer. It might be for the next 10, 15 years, but being 50 is not
as far as you thought it was. And that could cripple you from making a drastic change in your
career. And that is why it's increasingly more difficult as you age, as you get older, especially
in your 20s, to make that kind of jump, to make that kind of change, and even to take a leap of
キャリア形成のポイント
faith. So the trap that we, a lot of us get into is to keep looking for what you want to do next.
But the problem is, is that what you really want to do next is not out there. That is why, like I
said to Gavin, that keep looking for what you want to do is not a futile exercise because you're not
going to find it. The best way to find what you want to do next is to make it, to build it. The future
is yours to make. So to summarize, the three key takeaways from my conversation with Gavin were,
number one, midlife crisis is real, and it's okay. Everyone will have it, and everyone is going
through it. Key takeaway number two, build your career at a 10-year increment. And number three,
looking for what you want to do next is a futile exercise. The future is yours to make. If you're
listening to this on Spotify, there's a Q&A field, so please do send us your questions and comments.
And if you like our podcast, please give us a five-star rating. We'll be so grateful. I'm
Reina Moro, and this is The Queer Mindset. See you next time.
