Swallow Your Ego and Get Down from There

You'll never reach your global maxima if you don't let yourself come down your local maxima.

“I left my six-figure job to build a startup” is a corny opener, but it is the truth. I’ve been very transparent about my journey across platforms like Twitter, TikTok, and Substack, and my initial fear of being known as “the girl who fell off” nearly manifested as I’ve instead been known as “the girl who quit the job she hated”.

I built my first real business, an apparel brand called Serena Li (with my best friend and co-founder), while I was still working as an investment banking analyst at Evercore. I’ve since turned down an offer to join L Catterton’s growth tech investing team as I realized that finance is not the path I’m intended to take in this life. Do I regret it? Absolutely, unequivocally no.

My first endeavour into entrepreneurship was at age 14. I attended a local pitch competition called Y2, which ultimately instilled in me a lifelong curiosity about building something meaningful that refused to die, no matter how hard I tried to kill it. Throughout my five years of being a college investment club striver and brief stint in New York finance, there was always a little voice in the back of my head: what if you could build something?

When people reach out from my TikToks or Substacks, a question I get a lot is “Do you ever think about what you gave up?” I understand why they would ask this, as this is a fear anyone would have to wrestle with as they contemplate making a massive trade-off in their lives. I think about this in a similar way to how I think about regret: What’s the point? I could spend all day comparing myself to my peers who have gone on to take associate promotions or make shut-up money in private equity (caveat that shut-up money isn’t f*ck you money), but that’s comparing apples to oranges. I’m not them, and they are not me.

Many of us live in a meta where life is quantified by the achievements we’ve got under our belts, and ironically, we get so wrapped up in it that we don’t realize the very act of optimizing for achievement is what holds us back. A big reason why I left my job may have been the push factors that I didn’t love being chained to a bleak, fluorescent-lit desk, staring at Excel for 16 hours a day, or that I simply didn’t care about alternative assets M&A, but the pull factors are just as strong. I could never have the time or mental capacity to go all in on building something that was my own if I stayed in that job. I could not have gone through the painful but satisfying process of going deep, discovering a problem, having a hypothesis, and getting myself an answer. Put simply, if my global maxima in life is to build something meaningful, staying in finance was merely the local maxima of being 23 years old.

I think much of life is driven by the permission we grant ourselves to do things. Academic settings may train us to ask teachers for permission, and corporate settings may train us to ask managers for permission, but at the end of the day, your life is your own, and what you do is merely what you give yourself permission to do.

Now I’m 8 months into trying to build a startup at the opportunity cost of a $350k salary, good perception from random people, and a (relatively) stable career trajectory. But I’ve also learned more in this time than in my entire two years in finance. At 24, I think I owe it to myself to permit myself to try. The cost of failure is low, and the cost of never trying is irreparable.

At this very moment, I’m still in the red from doing all this. My startup idea didn’t take off as I had delusionally dreamt, but these things take time. I’ve learned to eat sh*t more than I would like, and every day I still manage to get up excited to try again because I am giving myself a chance to figure it out. When we live in the high-achievement meta long enough, we become blind to our own egos. Ego isn’t always high self-talk and arrogance; it’s often hidden in the subtleties of how you are willing to be perceived by others. I never minded failing - I knew that it made me stronger, but a muscle that took time to develop was failing publicly, and knowing how to ask for help. I’ll be the first to admit this isn’t working, but I’ll also be the first to get my hands dirty and fix it. No one is going to rescue you except yourself.

Most of us are lucky to even have these options to contemplate in the first place - don’t take that for granted, and at the very least, give yourself the chance to just try.