Finding Opportunity Within Chaos

Read time: 6 minutes

The culmination of parenthood hit me all at once last weekend.

I was in the car with my 2 young daughters (2.5 yrs and 8 months), navigating home from a half day trip to a local aquarium 30 minutes away from our house.

Right as I'm about to enter the freeway, both of them started crying and screaming in the backseat from exhaustion.

At that same moment, my wife called on the phone frantically needing my help because her flight home had just been canceled and there was a real possibility of her getting stranded on the other side of the country.

I had to think quickly and prioritize my next set of actions before we crashed due to 'sudden driver head explosion'.

So I told my wife I’d call her back. I pulled over on the side of a random street, changed my daughter's diaper in the back of the trunk and gave her older sister a snack.

Thanks to Google Flights, I was able to send my wife a couple different alternative routes that will get her home that night.

Phew. Crisis averted!

It was a good reminder to me that in both parenthood and business, moments of chaos require quick thinking and prioritization to navigate effectively.

Disrupting the Natural Order of Things

In my career, there have been many times where it felt chaotic in the moment.

And while you’re deep in the heart of the storm, it’s hard to imagine that there is opportunity hiding within the swirl of turmoil.

Chaos disrupts the natural order of things. It breaks routines and standard ways of thinking and operating.

When this happens, it creates opportunities to think differently and approach situations in a new way.

Towards my last couple years working at Marriott, I interviewed for three jobs that I didn’t get.

Each time I would make it to the final two candidates and the role would be given to the other person who’d have 5-10 more years of experience – someone who ‘put in their time.’

You see, Marriott is the type of organization that rewards tenure and loyalty.

It’s quite common to find people who have been at the company for 20+ years.

And when you’re surrounded by so many people who have been at the company for that long, you tend to drink the Kool-Aid and accept that it’s the obvious career path laid out for you.

But for a young, talented and ambitious person trying to accelerate their career?

You won’t ascend quickly in that type of organization.

This led to a lot of frustration that built up as I kept slamming into a career ceiling wall.

Every time I’d put my foot on the gas, the company always found away to pump the breaks.

And in the midst of that feeling of chaos and disarray, an opportunity presented itself, like a small beam of light breaking through the storm clouds.

Napkin Math

Around that same time, I started to get very interested in the stock market and trading stocks.

Over the course of 2 years, I would spend over 1,800+ hours studying stock charts and trading equity markets.

I learned a lot and experienced a wide spectrum of highs and lows — but the best thing to come out of that experience?

A simple idea that sparked opportunity within the career crises I was facing.

One early morning, while doing some research ahead of the market open at 6:30 AM, a curious thought crossed my mind.

I pulled up the chart of Marriott stock (MAR). I saw it had a $30B market capitalization at the time.

I then curiously divided that number by the number of employees in the company at the time, which was 226,500.

I got $132,450/employee.

Following my curiosity further, I then pulled up one of the most successful companies I closely followed, Google’s stock chart (GOOG).

It had a $550B market capitalization (you can do your own math to see how long ago this was).

Then another thought crossed my mind, Google is worth nearly 20x more than Marriott, it must be a pretty large company, right (thinking 20x Marriott’s 226,500 employees)?

I go look it up. It turned out, Google only had 72,000 employees at the time.

Whoa. I do the same math, $550B / 72,000 employees. That’s $7,640,000/employee.

Google has 58x more in market value per employee vs Marriott?

Wow. I stop and put my pen down. I sit in silence for a good minute and let it sink in.

The shear multiples on what tech companies could afford to pay top talent started to come into focus.

I knew that my ambitions to earn a lot more money were never going to materialize where I was.

At that moment, for the first time in 8 years, I knew with absolute certainty I had to leave Marriott and find a job in tech.

I didn’t quite know if what I stumbled upon actually made sense, but directionally I was certain that it did.

It became a major inflection point around how I started to think and plan my career going forward.

3 months, 500+ applications and many interviews later, I joined Google.

In Conclusion

In the turbulence of modern life, where our personal life and career collide, moments of chaos or crises can often reveal new insights.

Remember: chaos brings change.

So, when things seem in disarray, pause to search for the opportunity and keep moving forward with determination.

It may just change your life. It sure changed mine.

Thank you for reading,

CJ

P.S. If you know someone who may find this useful, please share it with them and encourage them to subscribe! You can share your own personal referral link:

 https://findingsignal.beehiiv.com/subscribe?ref=PLACEHOLDER