Navigating your life after college is hard. How do we know what we want? How do we approach tough choices and forks in the road? The How I Decided podcast helps you navigate these questions through guests sharing stories about their own career and life choices.
My guest today is Kevin Kim. Kevin and I first met through NYU Athletics, but a few weeks ago I was just scrolling through my Instagram reels and saw Kevin pop up on my feed, talking about his experience as a Division 3 golfer. I found it super interesting that he was creating social media content and called him that same day to ask about why he was doing it and how the experience was for him. Later that week, one of Kevin’s videos went viral, hitting over 500K views. I think there are definitely negative connotations around being an influencer or content creator these days, especially if you’re in college and someone like Kevin who goes to a great school and plays on a sports team. Wouldn’t creating content be a huge distraction? In our conversation Kevin and I discuss:
- 0:00 Intro
- 2:59 Why Kevin Started Making Content
- 5:25 Consistency and How Kevin Faced His Social Anxiety
- 11:51 How Building Your Personal Brand In College Is Risk-Free!
- 16:06 How a 9–5 and Content Creation Can Coexist
- 19:49 Pursuing What You Want When There’s Peer Pressure
- 24:18 What Was Unexpected About Making Content?
- 26:37 Episode Takeaways
🎙 You can listen to the episode on Spotify or Youtube
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Takeaways
- Creating content allowed Kevin to get over his fear of being judged. Maybe we should seek out more experiences that allow us to overcome our fears by facing them straight on!
- An important part of decision making is understanding the risk and potential consequences of your choices. But sometimes those perceived consequences aren’t actually really ones that you should care about…Part of what made the decision to be a content creator simpler for Kevin is that there really is no risk to creating content beyond superficial things like getting teased by your friends. It’s a risk-free choice and those kinds of choices are easy to make.
- Decisions don’t have to be all one or another. Consider if there are ways to make both your options coexist. For Kevin, he can make content and do a full-time internship, and actually he argues that having a 9–5 makes his content more authentic and relatable so it actually helps him out! Pursuing both choices can actually increase the quality of one of the choices. (btw if there’s a technical term for this please let me know…I have no idea what to call it)
Referenced
- Professor Anika Sharma at NYU Stern
Where to find Kevin
Thank you so much for reading and listening. If you’re interested in decision-making like I am, would love to connect and share notes! Think there’s anything I should’ve followed up on in my convo with Kevin? Reach out and let me know!
