Timestamps

00:00:00: Introduction

00:02:24: Eric's first job

00:03:48: Eric at University

00:04:56: Risking a move to the UK

00:09:03: Eric's knotty moment

00:13:58: Being stubbornly adaptive

00:17:25: Returning to Singapore and a great boss

00:20:49: What Eric is most proud of

00:24:39: Eric's career advice

00:28:37: Institute of Life

00:31:01: Final thoughts

Interview Transcription

Sarah Ellis:  Hi, I'm Sarah and this is the Squiggly Careers podcast, where each week we take a different topic to do with work and explore the ups and the downs and some ideas for action and tools to try out that we hope will help you to navigate your career with a bit more confidence, clarity and control.

It's National Careers Week here in the UK which has inspired us to do a few different sorts of episodes.  We've had some Squiggly Career conversations with a few really fascinating and interesting people to give you a window into their world of work, which is always such a good thing to do.  Our conversations this week include Helen talking to Jim MacLeod, a Royal Navy Rear Admiral, who shares some incredible examples of how he's squiggled and stayed.  You can hear me talking to Steph Douglas, the founder of Don't Buy Her Flowers, about her entrepreneurial life and the realities of running her business and how that works and at times doesn't work with the rest of her life; she's very honest and fun, so really worth listening to that.  And you can hear Helen chatting to BBC journalist, Simon Mundie, about progression and how to create, not wait, for career opportunities.

Today, you're going to hear my conversation with Eric Sim.  Eric is brilliant, his career story is full of resilience and bravery and our conversation together, I think will always stay with me.  I will always remember some of the advice and the words of wisdom and just his general calm and collected approach to our conversation together.  He's got a brilliant story which I don't want to share too much of, because I'd much rather you listened to it and hear it straight from Eric, but I do really appreciate him taking the time to talk us.  He was actually recommended to us by one our Squiggly Career community, so I did some research, he does some incredible writing on LinkedIn where he has over 2 million followers.  So, I got in touch with him out of the blue, so I am very grateful for him saying, "Yes", and then making time for us completely out of his time zone, given he lives in a very different part of the world.  I hope you enjoy learning more about him and his career story.

Eric, thank you so much for joining us today for this Squiggly Career Conversation.  I can't wait to find out more about you and your career.

Eric Sim:  Sarah, thank you for inviting me.  It's really a delight to be on your show.

Sarah Ellis:  We thought it might be good to just start from the start of your career, and I know you've squiggled in lots of different directions and we're going to explore loads of those things together.  What was your first job?  How did you get that first job?  Maybe share a bit about how you started in the world of work.

Eric Sim:  My very first job is when I was around 10 years old.  My father sells noodles, he was a street food vendor, so he had been selling prawn noodles for 30 years.  When I was young, so I was brought to the stall to help out, cleaning the tables.  Then from cleaning the tables to washing the bowls, taking orders and eventually cooking, slicing the chilli and without knowing rubbing my eyes.

Sarah Ellis:  Oh no!

Eric Sim:  So, I get all that.  I helped him for 10 years before he finally decided to retire.  When I was 17, I was able to cook for myself.

Sarah Ellis:  Then, when you either left home or went into the first job that you did that was perhaps outside of your family, what did that look like?  What did you want to do?  Where were you hoping to start your career, and did it work out as you'd hoped?

Eric Sim:  I did a bar tending job in a nightclub when I was in the university to make some pocket money, because by that time I was year two in my university days, I was studying engineering.  After that I thought, "Maybe let's try something else.  Let's try banking", and I knew nothing about banking.  My friend, my engineering classmate, he told me, "Hey, do you know that DBS Bank came to the campus for campus recruitment?"  I say, "I didn't know about it, we are in engineering", so obviously they didn't come to engineering department.  He say, "Why don't you write in?"

I wrote in unsolicited to say that, "I'm Eric Sim.  I'm going to graduate from engineering, I'm interested in banking, marketing or sales or risk management, anything, just give me a chance".  They called me up for interview.  I met up with the hiring manager directly.  Two weeks later they give me a call to say, "Yes, come down for one more round of HR interview", and after that got the job.

Sarah Ellis:  When you are thinking back now over your career, because as we'll discuss you've done lots of really interesting different things, you've lived in different places as well, what feels like the bravest decision you've made in your career in hindsight?  I don't know whether it felt brave at the time or not, but when you're now looking back over what you've done so far, was there a moment where it did feel like you were doing something very different or really far out of your comfort zone?

Eric Sim:  In my first job, being an engineer with zero social skills I didn't do well, because I didn't know how to treat people, I didn't communicate well.  After two years I thought, "I need to reset.  How can I reset?  If I go and find another job, it's going to be the same thing.  Why don't I go and do a Masters in a country that I've never been", so I chose Lancaster University in the UK.  I took all my savings, but my savings was only enough for about ten months.  It is a one-year course so I said, "Should I go, or should I not go?"  I decided that I should go while I'm still young.  For the very last one month I didn't have money, I'll just borrow.  So, I went.

I didn't think that it was very risky or rash, but now looking back, to take all your entire savings, and I'm still short of one month, to live in a country that I'd never been.  I'd never been to the West at that point in time.  I was 27 years old, hardly travelled, a short time in Hong Kong, that's it.  Now, I'm going to a place and I'm not sure whether I can used to the cold, whether I can complete my study; and I'm changing from a job that comes with stable monthly income to one where I'm paying and there's no guarantee I get a job after that.  Lancaster is not your Oxbridge or Ivy League that you are guaranteed a job.

Sarah Ellis:  I think that sounds very brave when you start to put all the different factors together: you've never been to the West before, you didn't know if you were going to get a job, you were using up all of your money.  It is the perfect storm of things that must have felt really hard.  Did anything surprise you about that year?  When you were in the North of England, which as you said it's pretty cold, with lots of people that you'd not met before, studying in a way that was probably very new to you, leaving behind friends and family as well as the stability, what surprised you about that experience?

Eric Sim:  In Singapore, the focus is on academy, and you need to study hard and get your grades.  People go a poor family route to get out of poverty, study hard, get your grades, get a job.  There was not much of entertainment.  When I went to Lancaster, the thing they welcome you with is this pub crawl.

Sarah Ellis:  Okay, so you got inducted by going to lots of pubs!

Eric Sim:  Yeah.  Pub crawl, so I say, "Yeah, we can go to a pub", but I didn't know there are pubs in the school.  I never experienced that where the pub is in the school, so I say, "Wow".  It's really living a life, not just studying, because going to a pub is not just for drinking, it is also socialising and so that's where I can improve my social skills, how to talk to people.  These are very important because later on when I go to work, I need the skills to do the selling to customers, to build the relationship with my colleagues.

Sarah Ellis:  Yeah.  As you then came out of that experience, going almost back to studying for the year, and then you started to progress into the roles that then you went into, what was a tough moment?  We sometimes describe them as knotty moments.  In your Squiggly Career, we know there's no such thing as a straight line to success, everyone has these knotty moments where it's really tough, things feel hard and we find our way through those moments, but they are difficult. 

I'm sure if someone went onto your LinkedIn profile, when I was doing my research before our interview today, they would look at you and they'd be like, "Wow, he's got all this incredible experience, he's so successful, he now runs his own organisation", so all of these very shiny things.  Lots of people will think, "I could never do what Eric's done, I could never do that".  So, I think it's always nice for our listeners to learn a bit about something that perhaps didn't quite go to plan, but then also feel reassured that you found your way through that.

Eric Sim:  Yeah, there is one which is more recent now, to bring people to my most recent banking career.  I joined one of the international investment banks, and in our industry we call them Bulge Bracket Banks, so there are nine of them.  When I first joined, I told my boss that I'd been teaching in the university, I'd like to continue that.  This was maybe three months into the job, and I need to fly back to Singapore.  I was based in Hong Kong, and the job was position a managing director position in a top investment bank.  I say, "I need to fly back, and I will be receiving a teaching fee", so when I do work outside, I want to get the blessing of my boss and the proper approval.  I didn't want to do it quietly.  He told me that, "Eric, you are moonlighting".  So, obviously he's not really happy for me to do so, which is rightly so.  Banks pay me enough.

Now, what should I do?  Do I, for the sake of a couple of thousand dollars, strain the relationship with my boss potentially risking MD position in a top investment bank.  I just joined the bank for three months.  It's not a good way to create an impression.  Then I decided I should continue and insist, so I say, "Okay, if you're not happy with me receiving these teaching fees, I will ask them to just reimburse my flight and my accommodation".  He say, "Okay", so I got the school to say, "Don't pay me, but just reimburse".  I get slightly less, I say, "I'm okay", but I want to get paid, I want to make it proper and finally he approve.  I got HR to approve, I got compliance to approve, and I did that, and I continue my teaching.

The relationship, I don't know how it has been, because if I didn't do that would it be better or worse, I'm not sure, but I'm glad I did because I then went on to become Adjunct Associate Professor at one of the top Hong Kong universities.  Because I continue, that's why I can do pivot into a portfolio career which is what I'm doing now, teaching at a university, training, writing book and doing key opinion leader marketing.

Had I said, "Okay, maybe now is not the time, maybe I try next year".  One way is to tell the university, to say that, "I just joined this bank, this is one of the biggest jobs, I cannot teach for you this year.  Let me come back next year".  Chances are, they would have found somebody and come the following year they would use that somebody instead of coming back to me.  Then my teaching will stop, and if my teaching stop it is difficult to go to and then say, "Can you make Adjunct Associate Professor?"  "You haven't been teaching for a few years, how can we know that you can still teach?"  So, that is a knotty moment which I gladly untie.

Sarah Ellis:  What is so interesting about that story is you didn't necessarily know at that time you were going to do that career pivot, but what you did sounded to me certainly like you were very confident about how much you enjoyed teaching.  It sounded like you got a lot of satisfaction from that and you knew it was important to you as part of your learning, and your development.

Sometimes there's a great phrase that someone I worked with introduced me to where he said, "At times we need to be stubbornly adaptive".  You just described yourself being stubbornly adaptive, because you held on to what was really important to you which is, "Okay, well I do still want that teaching to happen, I don't want to let go of that, but I will adapt in terms of what it looks like to make that happen.  If that means in the short term, I don’t get the fees, or we do it in a slightly different way, I will adapt around it, but I'm going to hold on to that thing that's really important to me" and with that potential jeopardy of thinking, "I'm not sure what this means in terms of my relationships".

I think when you stay true to what's important to you, it gives you that confidence to keep going, perhaps.

Eric Sim:  Yes, and I managed to stay for six years and those in that position, if your boss doesn't like you, you normally get fired.  Sometimes it's also to show them, "This is also how I negotiate with client".  The client will say no to you to say that we are not going to hire your bank to do our corporate finance acquisition or fundraising.  But it is me with this attitude, I will restructure the deal, I will say, "If you don't like this target, maybe I'll give you another target.  If you don't like to buy companies in China, maybe I'll bring you to the US to buy company".  There is always people saying no to us.  I cannot accept no all the time, otherwise I will not go anywhere.

Sarah Ellis:  You mention your relationship with managers and bosses.  How important have those people been as part of your career or have there been other people maybe informal mentors or families or friends who have been those critical people for you as you've been developing throughout your career?

Eric Sim:  Bosses are very important and good bosses don't come easily.  If one person has one good boss in his or her career, you consider yourself lucky.  So, I consider myself lucky.  When I graduate from Lancaster University thinking, "Now I spend my money, I worked hard.  I took the right bet, let me go to London and interview with some international bank, maybe I can get a job in London".  I went there wearing my suit.  I didn't have a suit from Singapore, we didn't need to wear suits at that time, so I went to Oxfam to buy a second-hand suit and obviously I didn't get my size, so I need to buy something like two size bigger.

I'm wearing this suit and when you go to Oxfam you don't get a full suit, you just get a jacket.  I just make do with my own pants.  Unmatched suit, oversized, just came from Singapore studying for eight to nine months, now going to London for interview.  I think I went for five different companies but none of them give me the second round, I wouldn't give myself the second round.  No choice, no job, no money, so I came back to Singapore.

When I came back to Singapore it was 1997 and that was the Asian Financial Crisis.  Currency depreciated some 20% to 30% and there was no job, not the job that I wanted.  I wanted to work in the front office, and because the market was volatile some banks lost money at that time, they were looking for a risk manager to manage the risk factors, so I change tack and say, "Okay, let me change to risk management and see what jobs I can find".  Within a month I got two offers, one from Standard Chartered Bank and one from a bank bigger than Standard Chartered Bank.  I later on chose a smaller bank, not a sexier role, but because the boss believe in me.

The boss believed in me, and I chose him.  He believed in me so much that when I give an answer that is obviously wrong, he wants to know my thinking behind it.  He says, "This is so obviously wrong, and I know that, Eric, you normally don't give this type of answer, tell me your rationale".  When I tell him the rationale, the obviously wrong turns out to be right.  That gives me a lot of confidence to share my opinion, because before that I have this inferiority complex, I have a lot of self-doubt.  I'm not sure I wouldn't say it, but with him I suddenly become another person and that built a very strong foundation for my career afterwards.

Sarah Ellis:  What a brilliant example of a leader as well, being vulnerable enough and creating an environment of trust where he then says to you not, "You're wrong", but, "I'm curious to know how you got to that conclusion" or, "Tell me more about that", and just demonstrating that ability to want to understand, to ask really good questions.  Then of course it's the output of that, the outcome of that is then you do an even better job, because as you said it built your confidence, your manager also being open to changing their mind, to hearing a different point of view and perspective.  I do think for all of us when we work for those brilliant bosses, what we see is role modelling.  We see role modelling of really great behaviours that bring the best out in all of us.

Then I think, when we move into manager positions ourselves, we then think, "That's what I want to do.  I know how important it is to behave in a way where if that's the behaviours I want to see from my team, that has got to come from me, it's got to start with me".

Eric Sim:  You are so right, Sarah.  Very key, instead of always looking for the best, biggest company, highest title or higher salary, is just look for a boss, because the kind of confidence and foundation that you can build for yourself under such a boss means your market value will go up.  It means you can command a much higher salary later on.

Sarah Ellis:  You have done so many interesting and different things in your career, so whether that's writing books or as you said, you now have more of a portfolio career doing lots of different things, doing speaking; you write some brilliant articles on LinkedIn that I was reading; you've worked in big investment banks.  When you reflect, what do you feel most proud of?  Is there a standout thing that you feel proud of, or maybe a couple of things that you could share with our listeners?

Eric Sim:  After I left banking, I'm very happy that people still come to me, whether they are junior or senior.  The last thing I want is, when I held the MD title in the investment bank, obviously if I decide their bonus, if I decide their performance appraisal, they will treat me nice.  The last thing I want is when I no longer hold that title, then people disappear or they treat you differently.  But no, I'm still very happy, the people who treated me nice are still treating me very nice.  People who didn't treat me nice are also now are treating me nice.  Maybe I'm no longer a threat to them, because I'm no longer competing with them in the same industry.

This is something that I feel I can be proud of.  That means I must have treated them well.  I must have treated them with respect, I didn't make them unnecessarily come back to work on a Sunday night, which is very common in banking.  People who I thought didn't like me when I was working in banking, it could be because we are fighting for views or competing; but now, they have changed.  Once that competition goes away, yes, they come back.  They ask me out for lunch, they even buy my books.  I've got people who buy ten copies to say, "Eric, here to support you, I just bought ten copies of your books".

Sarah Ellis:  That is so nice, it just shows the importance of investing and building relationships and how those relationships often go way beyond the role that you're in in that moment, because you never quite know where those relationships might pop up again or they might take you.  I think I had a similar fear when I moved out of working in big organisations, like yourself I worked for Barclays, I worked in banking, then I worked for a big British food retailer for a while.  And I remember first going into, as you've described, we're probably not quite as portfolio as you, but to run my own company thinking, "Does that mean that no one is going to be interested in me anymore?"

You have that fear don't you that those relationships are built on the role and the job titles that you had.  Then, what you realise with a bit of perspective is all of those brilliant people who supported you then are going to support you now.  I think we had that exact same experience of, if anything, those people support you more, because they want to see you succeed and they believe in you.  I think it just reminds us that investing in our career community, which sometimes I think has felt hard over the last couple of years with the pandemic, and everybody has very busy day jobs and we can always prioritise those tasks that we've got to tick off our to do lists, but just spending some time in your days and your weeks just building those relationships in a less transactional way, in a more just being really curious, having conversations exactly like the conversation we're having today, where I'm just really curious to learn more about your career, there's not an output or an outcome that we have to get to.  It's just about learning, and then you never know where those relationships might take you.

We always ask this question for every guest that we have on the podcast which is, has there been any advice that you've been given in your career that's really stuck with you, that you found really helpful; or, do you just have advice that you could share with our listeners that you just think is really useful as people are thinking a bit about their careers and where their Squiggly Careers could take them?

Eric Sim:  Yeah, social capital.  Social capital is your currency to success.  Social capital is the goodwill that you have accumulated over the years, so whether you are buying coffee or lunches, whether you are helping other people.  Every time you help somebody, every time you buy lunch or pick somebody out, you are kind of depositing your social capital in a bank.  This will earn you interest.  The interest is going to be very minimal if you withdraw within a short time, but if you let it sit for three, five, ten years, it can really become a big chunk.

Then one day when you need it, you can use it all in one go.  You can be buying all your coffee and lunches over the years, but you don't ask for anything.  But one day, like for example in my case, last December I published a book and when I go on my social media and say, "I just publish a book", the people who I have treated with respect and well, they come back and buy my book.  It could be somebody I treated well 5, 10, 15 years ago, even 20, it's so amazing. 

People from my school days, my classmates and my army days, they all start appearing.  I said, "Where have you been?"  They say, "I have been reading your LinkedIn articles".  I say, "You never engage", they say, "It's not convenient because they are now senior, or sometimes they are CEO of some companies, it's not appropriate for them to engage or comment, but they are reading and when it's time they return the favour, so to speak.  For us, now that we've gone so long, it's no longer returning the favour, it's just the right thing to do.

Sarah Ellis:  Yeah.  I think what you've described there so brilliantly is that giving mindset.  The research that people like Adam Grant over at Wharton has done on, if you give without keeping score, so you just think, "How can I help?  How can I give?"  That giving could be, "I'm just going to buy you a cup of coffee", or, "I'm just going to give you ten minutes", or, "You've got a question and I'm going to try and help you with that" and we don't worry about an immediate return on that giving, then it pays off.  We sometimes describe it as career karma.  Just trust that by doing the right thing, the right thing will then happen to you.

Eric Sim:  Yes, karma.  I wouldn't call it career karma because this can be life karma.

Sarah Ellis:  You're right, it's probably bigger than that.

Eric Sim:  Sometimes people just help you back and you wanted to find out about some information.  It could be something for your family, so your kids need to go to some schools.  Moving to another country, if you've got some social capital, you can just call, "Hey, what school should I get my kids into?" or, "Which apartment should I rent?  Which area should I stay?"  All those, if you have social capital is simple, but if you don't have, you go through some agents, then they may not give you the best advice.

Sarah Ellis:  That's such a lovely way of thinking about it, I've not heard it described as social capital before, but that idea of making those investments really makes sense to me.  As you say, it's probably good life advice, not only career advice.

Eric, if people wanted to find out more about you and the work that you do, because there are lots of places they could go, perhaps you could just share a bit about the company that you run and your books and where you would like to point people towards, if people are thinking, "Wow, Eric's been really fascinating and now I want to dive a bit deeper into the work that he does".

Eric Sim:  Sure, I'm the founder of Institute of Life.  Our mission is to train professionals to be successful at work and in life.  I write on LinkedIn for the last seven years, giving career advice, life advice, taking advantage of our weakness and failure.  A lot of people wanted to dig more and it's very difficult to search for my articles that are written more than a year ago, so I have written this book, I've put all the best bits into this book.  It has got 66 bite-sized chapters, each chapter with a story and with an actionable tip that the reader can take away.

If anybody wants to know more about me, come to LinkedIn, pop by, say hi.  If you want to read a couple of chapters, go to Amazon look for Small Action by Eric Sim.  In the Kindle version I have made five chapters for free, you can read.  The introduction and five chapters, that alone is already enough to give you a few tips to get going.  You don't have to buy the book, just read the five chapters.  With this, you will be able to know more about me and my work.

If you want to join the community, you can follow #66smallactions on LinkedIn or Instagram.  If you google or you search, you will see my followers, my community talking about the book and talking about the action they have taken from the book.  When it comes to me, it's not just me, you've got a whole community of people, of like-minded people, who love self-development, who love building relationship, who understand the meaning of social capital.

Sarah Ellis:  Brilliant, I think everybody who listens to this podcast, if you've chosen to listen to our podcast, they are people who love self-development.  We will put all of the links to everything that Eric just talked through in the show notes.  If you just scroll down, we'll make that all clickable, we'll put that in our LinkedIn when we post today's show and we'll also do that on Instagram as well, so we'll make it really easy for you to find all of those things that Eric described.

For today, I just wanted to say thank you so much to Eric for taking the time to talk to us.  I was saying to him at the start of our conversation that he was actually recommended to us by one of our Squiggly Career community and podcast listeners.  Then obviously, I did lots of research and got in touch with Eric.  So, this is the first time that we've connected, and I feel like we've got lots in common in terms of what we're trying to do, in making careers better for everyone and sharing your ideas and your insights so generously with everyone.  So, thank you so much for your time.

Eric Sim:  Thank you, Sarah for inviting me, I really enjoy myself today and to the listener out there, I'll see you on LinkedIn.

Sarah Ellis:  Thank you for listening to today's podcast.  If you're inspired to explore how you could develop in different directions, there are loads of free courses and learning available on the Government Skills for Life website that is gov.uk/skillsforlife.  Put the link in the show notes and it's really worth having a quick click around, because there's loads of good courses out there from things like the basics of coding, learning about green skills.  Run by brilliant experts and very credible universities from all across the UK, different training providers.  Most of the courses can be done remotely and they're pretty flexible and free, which is a good combination.  So, worth having a look at that if that feels relevant for you.

That's all for this week, thanks so much for listening to today's episode, and we'll be back with you again soon, bye for now.