When it comes to your career, you can just do things

Jia Ming Huang
July 15, 2026

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We hope that this newsletter serves as inspiration that you really can just take an idea, and execute. You’re the only one holding yourself back. Just do things.

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Today, we’ll have a guest writer.

Kuan-lin (Fermín) Liu is a recent MBA graduate of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and an incoming management consultant. His focus is at the intersection of AI, strategy, and storytelling. Follow him on LinkedIn.

When it comes to your career, you can just do things

In business school, students are either poets or quants. You are either a right-brained person with qualitative and soft skills or a left-brained person with quantitative and analytical prowess. Though not a formal label the school gives you, I can attest, as a recent MBA graduate, that people do categorize themselves and each other based on this outdated dichotomy.

During orientation, I was talking to someone in my cohort about my background and mentioned that I had spent the previous three years working in marketing for a technology company.

“I didn’t expect that,” he said. “I thought you would have done marketing for a CPG company.”

He did not say it explicitly, but the implication was clear: he thought I was more poet than quant, more humanities than STEM.

The funny thing is, I was probably more experienced and credentialed in one particular area of finance than most of my quant classmates.

In what now feels like a pandemic fever dream, I, a humanities major from Dartmouth College and journalist by trade, moved to Hong Kong in 2018 to pursue a master’s in real estate with a focus in investment and development. Then, I joined CBRE on their consulting team and advised developers and government clients on what to do with their land and commercial real estate projects.

While my foray into real estate was short-lived, I always refer to it as proof that you can just do things when it comes to your career.

In 2017, two years after college, I found myself thinking about graduate school while working as a journalist. I knew I wanted a degree that would boost my quantitative skills, but finance, not to mention economics, felt too abstract. So, I decided to apply to master’s programs in real estate, based entirely on the fact that I had covered commercial real estate for about eight months as a business reporter and I found the three grades of office buildings neat.

When I received my acceptances and really decided to pursue a degree in real estate, I made that my new career goal. I wanted to work at one of the Big Five (the world’s five largest property services and investment firms) and become the head of a department in ten years. The only problem at the time? I had no real estate experience.

Because my program was only a year long, I knew I needed to come in with some sort of experience so I could do well in my job search. So, I did what no one at the time would have advised me to do because the idea that “you can just do things” is a relatively new concept that Gen Z invented, and sadly, I am a millennial. I reached out to a director at JLL, one of the Big Five, whom I had met through a media presentation and asked to intern for him.

The director and I were not close by any means. I had met him at most three times, during events where he presented to the press how the commercial real estate market in Taiwan was doing. At first, he said he would ask around to see if there was a need and get back to me. If memory serves, they didn’t have an intern position that needed to be filled. I asked about another kind of arrangement. He said a contractor role might work, and within a few weeks, I started at JLL as an analyst on a 4-month contract.

On my last day, the director and I got coffee. He told me that the reason I got the job was that he found me “really annoying but in a good way.” I laughed and took it as a compliment, and as it turned out, he would not be the only person to describe me in those words.

With JLL on my resume, I started my master’s program with a little less imposter syndrome. By repeating what I did with JLL with other people and companies, I landed an internship at Gaw Capital, a real estate private equity firm, and then the coveted full-time role with CBRE, one of the Big Five. All this in an industry that I didn’t know existed two years before.

If you remember how I started this post, you already know that I later went into tech marketing before getting my MBA. The ten-year plan in real estate did not completely materialize but only because I chose to explore a new field and went headfirst into content marketing.

As for where I’ll be practicing marketing now that I’m done with my MBA, the answer is I won’t. I am making yet another career pivot and will be starting as a management consultant very soon.

I will be the first to admit that none of this was particularly easy or cost-free. Add to that the horrible state of the current job market, and I understand why people may be skeptical of the idea of just doing things. But with so many AI tools, free learning resources, and communities at our disposal, you really can just do things with your career.

My advice to anyone thinking about making a career change boils down to three key steps:

1. Follow your interests, even if they seem random

Most career paths are not straight, but in retrospect, they do make sense.

2. Play to your strengths

For me, storytelling has always been the throughline in my career, and it was what gave me an advantage to pivot into tech marketing.

3. Learn the missing skills as you go

You do not need to know everything before you start. Just enough curiosity, preparation, and persistence to close the gap. Once you learn the skills on the job, those become part of your toolkit for your next role.

Up until a few months ago, I was resigned to the idea that my two-year foray into commercial real estate had been a waste. Who knew that advising on a data center development project would now make me the perfect candidate for my next chapter?

Kuan Lin (Fermín) Liu

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