‘I thought I was a loser’: how a career coach’s book showed this Hong Kong woman it’s OK to have many interests. Now she’s CEO of her own start-up
- Olivia Chan had multiple interests but no burning career ambition when she was at university, and it made her feel like she was a loser in Hong Kong society
- When she read Margaret Lobenstine’s book The Renaissance Soul, it showed her how to balance a variety of passions without losing focus, and how to prioritise
Career and life coach Margaret Lobenstine’s The Renaissance Soul: How to Make Your Passions Your Life – A Creative and Practical Guide (2006) details how people can be successful while balancing a wide variety of passions without losing focus, feeling overstretched or flitting from job to job.
Olivia Chan Yuen-ue, founder and CEO of Hong Kong-based BeautyFact, an app that allows users to check the ingredients in cosmetics for safety and sustainability, tells Richard Lord how it changed her life.
I read this book about eight or nine years ago. It was recommended by a mentor I had when I was studying Chinese literature and comparative literature at the University of Hong Kong.
Those subjects don’t really lead to anything professional in Hong Kong, and I was quite lost on my career path. A lot of the other people there were studying business, and it was clear what they were going to do in their careers.
I had an interest in so many things but I never specialised in anything. In Hong Kong, everyone prefers you to have one ambition, to be a doctor or a scientist or whatever, from when you’re very young. You need to have a chosen career path. Before I read this book, I thought I was kind of a loser in Hong Kong society.
I felt the book was relatable – it talks about what it’s like to have more than one career path. It suggests that it’s OK to be interested in lots of things. It talks about how to prioritise your time – how to do one thing at a time and incorporate new things into that.
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I was very into writing at that time. It’s not something you earn a lot of money for in Hong Kong. I wrote for the university magazine and became a beauty editor after I graduated. It became my first profession.
I was also quite good at swimming; three years after graduating from university, I got my swimming trainer licence, and that became my second job, teaching children to swim at the weekend.
At the same time, I also felt interested in technology and e-commerce, so I used my spare time to study for a postgraduate diploma in digital marketing. I was doing a lot of things at the same time, which is what the book’s about. And the business I do now combines editorial, beauty and technology.
Building a start-up, you can’t just specialise in one thing. As the book says, I need to continue learning a lot of things throughout my life. For example, I was quite an introvert before I started the business; now I have to communicate with a lot of people, and I’ve also had to learn the financial side.
After reading this book, I could be confident in who I am. I’d thought I couldn’t be a professional. I realised that although I’m the sort of person described in the book, I can still be successful and happy.
And I feel happy about my current situation.
