Monthly-ish Personal Update (Nov 2023)

Hi, this is my private monthly-ish personal update to my most valued friends and allies. Please don’t share with others. More info here. Guilt-free unsubscribe link at the bottom.

tl;dr I’m restarting my side project Gen Propel. I felt stuck and disappointed in 2022 and 2023. Friends are the best, and making friends is important and hard. I hope you’re doing well, and I’d love to hear from you.

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It’s been a while since my last “monthly” update in January 2022. I’m happy to finally send another one. This will be longer than normal since it summarizes the last two years 😅 Feel free to scan and read only the sections that interest you.

Ok, here goes my top 3 updates.

I’m picking Gen Propel back up, and I am super excited.

In May 2021, we launched Gen Propel’s pilot “job searching abroad” cohort-based course. It went well. The five slots we opened were sold out despite minimal marketing. 

But then I paused it. I was starting a new job and wanted to focus on making sure I passed probation. Emotionally, my job search felt draining and I couldn’t bear the thought of making people go through the same experience. This is stupid of course. Emotional turmoil is intrinsic to the job search. The course doesn’t cause it, it brings comfort to the process.

However, I never stopped helping people with their job search. 

• I recently had burgers with R here in Berlin. She’s a software engineer from Iran who wanted to move due to the economic situation in Iran. After two grueling years, she finally made it to Berlin. She said, “Friends would always ask me, ‘How is the job search going?’ I’d even gotten a job offer that was then withdrawn because of COVID. After 1.5 years of this, I didn’t want to talk about it anymore. It hurt.”
• I was talking to X over Thai food. He’s a Portuguese who’s moving to Dubai to live with his fiance. I asked if the tips I gave were working. He said, “I already have so many meetings lined up. With this approach, the job search feels much less lonelier. It’s a lot easier to feel like you’re making progress and it’s going somewhere.”
• I was doing user research to understand the whole problem space. B said, “Just got back from your site. This is incredible. I am sold. When do you restart? Why did you even stop?” 

[Disclaimer: Because of a lack of actual data, I extrapolate on the global statistics below. It’s inaccurate from a statistical perspective, but should be in the rough ballpark.]

I checked up on our students from 2021 and learned that 60% (3 out of just 5, but still!) have landed jobs and are now living abroad. Contrast that to the global statistics. In 2020, 900 million people wanted to migrate internationally. Of this, only 6.6 million successfully managed to. (Gallup, World Migration Report) That’s a 0.73% success rate!

When I think about each person, the intensity of their desire to move, the immensity of the effort required, the odds being so against them… I feel so inspired to make a small contribution to helping them do one of the most difficult things they will ever undertake in life.

So anyway it was paused, and now I’m back and more excited than ever. 

My vision has expanded. When we started, the idea was to teach a course. Now I think of it as “an MBA on job hunting abroad”. Just like an MBA, it’s not just what you learn in class. It’s also building and getting support from a network, as well as companies approaching the school to hire pre-screened professionals. 

For our next product, I’m writing a how-to manual. I think it makes sense from a side project perspective. I can sell it for cheaper, so it’s easier to buy. Anyone can buy it anytime, which I hope can earn me semi-passive income. It will also allow me to spend more time investing on building an audience.

My goal with the how-to manual is to write the most pragmatic “job searching in Germany” book in the world. If you google “how to get a job in Germany” it’s all so generic telling you to network and to send lots of applications. But how do you do it? What exactly do you do everyday? How do you deal with the inevitable and intense negative emotions? 

For this, I will try Rob Fitzpatrick’s “Write Useful Books” process - writing the book with readers. 

It seemed to me like I was running in place from 2022-2023, and it makes me feel disappointed.

I recently had a catch up with O. He’s a good friend and former colleague from Giant Swarm. We both left the company in 2021. He went all in on his startup. I moved to Craft, and then I moved to Forto. While he gained entrepreneurial experiences such as raising startup funding, dealing with co-founder drama, and building his own product, I basically continued working in a job. 

When I look back on the last ten years, my life is completely different every 1-2 years. From 2012 to 2022, I quit my first job, started a consulting business, got into tech, became a digital nomad, earned my first million (in Philippine pesos), became a nationally competitive freestyle wrestler, moved to Germany…

And then basically nothing happened from 2022 to 2023.

That’s how it felt at least. If I look at the facts though, it’s not true that I did nothing except work a job. I conducted a career experiment (which I’m still doing) by taking on a Product Operations role from Product Management. I did talks and panels on Product Operations, and am now well-placed to take advantage of it, if I wanted to. I started a real estate investing club with some friends. We learned a lot, including the facts that it’s not possible to cashflow in Berlin right now and that we’re not excited to spend our days looking for deals.

It seems common sense that (1) you need to try a lot of things because it’s impossible to know what will work, and (2) every failure is one step closer to success. It sounds so obvious on paper. But when you’re actually in the middle of it… It feels like wasting time, instead of successfully learning what doesn’t work. 

I tend to discount “experiments that didn’t become my thing” and have an impulse to abandon this part of my story. So it’s helpful to me to be writing this. From now on, I will include “learned that X does not work (for me)” in my list of things I’ve achieved.

Most critically, in 2022, I got my permanent residency in Germany. This was at that time the most important thing to achieve and the biggest reason I needed to stay employed.

My life in Berlin is filled with friendship, and I am so happy and grateful about it.

During my early days in Germany, one need that dominated was the desire to make friends. It was hard, especially in the first one and a half years when we were in Hamburg and COVID was a thing. 

Once you have friends, it’s easy to take the fact that you have them for granted. This was a main priority for me in 2019 and 2020, but somehow it is not in my list of “Life Goals Achieved”. I guess it feels silly to have “made friends” alongside “completed the Berlin Marathon”.

But friends play a huge part in making life worth living. In the book Friendships Don’t Just Happen, the author writes that studies show conclusively that

Low social interaction can be compared to the damage caused by smoking fifteen cigarettes a day, being an alcoholic, or not exercising.

Despite this, we give so much attention to our weight, when in fact feeling disconnected is twice as dangerous as obesity. She writes, “I had a phone full of far-flung friends’ phone numbers, but I didn’t yet know anyone I could just sit and laugh with in a cafe.” This is how I felt. 

As an aside, it’s common for expats in Berlin to say it’s difficult to make friends here. I believe that’s not accurate. Regardless of whether you’re in Manila or in Berlin, what’s hard is making friends as an adult, when we don’t have the convenience of being in an environment where we are naturally and consistently spending a lot of time with a lot of people.

What have I learned about making friends as an adult?

The most important thing is to get lucky. You do that by increasing your “surface area of luck”. I am certain I first read this concept from Scott Adams, but I can’t find the quote now. I did find that Charlotte Grysolle put this in an elegant equation in her blog:

Surface Area of Luck = The Action You Take Around [X] x The Number of People You Communicate [X] To

Here’s what I tried:

1. Said yes to everything. For example, a then-acquaintance-now friend invited us to the German chapter of our university alumni association. Even though it initially sounded a bit lame, we said yes. Now we have a big community of Filipinos in Berlin.
2. Did stuff and initiated constantly. We met with a lot of people whenever we visited Berlin. I tried to create and join all kinds of groups, like a book club, a running group, etc. We signed up for a half marathon in Lisbon, which two then-acquaintances found interesting enough to join. Now we go on an annual running trip. 
3. Made friends at work, especially in person in the office.
4. I used Facebook Groups, Twitter, and even Bumble BFF. For Twitter, I searched for keywords about my interests, e.g. “books” “product management” to find people in Hamburg. I met with one person and he was a weirdo, so that didn’t work.

I couldn’t know which of these tactics would work. But each one included the components of taking action and communicating that action to people. Together, they made my “surface area of luck” quite big.

This is not even limited to making friends. Somehow, we never learned the skill of “getting out there” and being proactive at meeting people. We never learned how important and useful it is, whether you’re selling a product, searching for a job, or making friends.

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What else? In 2022, we ran the Berlin Marathon and watched Eurovision live in Torino, Italy. In 2023, I’m loving the speaking-focused German lessons with Lalia. We had the great fortune to go on my friend’s “wedding hike” in Chilean Patagonia. I wrote Sam Altman on Risk Taking and am proud of it.

Your turn

1. How are you? What’s top of mind these days? I’d love to hear from you.
2. Do you know of people who ran a business on the side and transitioned from full time employment to running their own business? I’d love to hear real stories and strategies.
3. Have you tried working with a life coach or a business coach? I’m considering investing in one and coaching a few people myself (focused on job searching abroad).