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We just hosted our first meet-up in Mexico City! 🔥 

It was super fun. I’m psyched to host more meet-ups in more cities.

In this edition, we’re going to hear from an ex-Googler building an unconventional portfolio career. This is part of designing your independent money path. Enjoy.

Today, in 10 minutes or less, you’ll learn:

• 🔬 How a former Google Product Lead transitioned from tech worker to becoming a Psychedelics Researcher and Executive Coach

• 🥘 The unexpected dinner conversation that sparked a major career pivot

• 🔮 Why aiming for an "80% happy vision" of your life isn't enough

• 🩺 His counterintuitive approach to excelling in both medical school and coaching

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🧑‍⚕️ From Googler to Psychedelics Researcher & Executive Coach | Fayzan Rab

Fayzan is a child of immigrants, MD candidate at Emory University, and certified executive coach. Previously, Fayzan worked in product at Google and a mental health startup as well as organized for a presidential campaign.

He writes about the intersection of transformational leadership, religiously and culturally sensitive care, and the evolving landscape of MDMA and psilocybin.

You can find him in Atlanta, Georgia with his fiance and cat!

Tell us about your career journey.

I spent most of my 20’s flirting with one direction for my career and then another. I went from Google to considering law school then a mission-driven startup to a political campaign and finally to medical school. In that journey, I was always looking for what a long-term direction would look like for my life.

The only problem was that I never felt like any of the paths I chose ever spoke to all of me. I was constantly trading one part of me for another. After doing 3 or 4 of these transitions, I started to grow disillusioned. I had dinner one night with a former Googler-turned-coach who thought I had the makings of a great coach. 

Me? 

I felt so lost and confused but something inside me felt like she was onto something.

I signed up for a sample coaching session and something lit up for the first time in a decade: I could hear my own voice.

I decided to take a leap of faith and sign up for an accredited coach training program through the International Coaching Federation (ICF).

For the last 5 years, coaching has become a vehicle for me to integrate the different aspects of my identity to create something that will truly serve the world. I am now creating something at the intersection of medicine, entrepreneurship, coaching, religion, and psychedelics and I could not be more excited and clear. 

This is quite profound for me. 

I went from feeling confused most days to life feeling simple, organic, and natural.

I have clarity on what my long-term commitments are and they seem coalescing towards a unified vision of my life.

When did you decide to make each transition?

I was repeating a pattern in my early 20’s around my career. 

It would go something like this: 

1. Get super excited about the next thing I am getting involved in (working at Google, being a PM at a mission-driven startup, becoming a criminal justice lawyer, etc), 

2. Hit a point of disappointment, skepticism, or disillusionment (“oh man, I am still behind a computer filling out google docs”)

3. Put a ton of pressure on myself to make a change or I was “not being authentic”

It’s hard to get long-term clarity when you are feeling urgency or pressure to make a change.

I knew that the every 2-years-make-a-switch cycle was unsustainable. Working with a coach was my breakthrough moment where I could slow down, get supported, and work through my own resistance to thinking long-term.

What are 1-2 things you did to navigate these transitions? How did you handle fear and imposter syndrome?

I did a lot of internal work at each of these transition points. I mean a lot. 

I bought every book under the sun about career clarity and personal development (i.e, Design Your Life, Atomic Habits, Brene Brown’s full collection). 

I spoke to friends and parents about my aspirations. I consulted with mentors in terms of what they thought was best for me.

I was taking in a lot of information but ironically I was becoming less clear. 

I had a ton of voices in my head of what others thought was best for me. 

When those voices conflicted (i.e., you would make a great political organizer vs you would make an amazing doctor), I would feel stuck. 

I found myself ruminating, intellectualizing, and rationalizing every step I was taking. It was exhausting.

Something that helped immensely was getting clear on the experience I wanted to be having in my career. Even if the vision felt unclear, I could often articulate what I would want my day-to-day experience to be like.

In my opinion, being able to articulate the experience I want matters much more than the specific job or career.

Most people I talk to know the former (“I want to be a VP in Product next year”) but they are less clear on the experience (“I want to be in a job where I am maximally using my gifts and talents and my contributions are being valued by my peers”). 

Sometimes when we aim too much for the goal, we miss what we really want (i.e, the experience).

How do you balance psychedelic research and executive coaching?