Have you ever met someone who used to be a tax accountant then became a rapper? Me neither. But that’s exactly what our guest on this week’s Career Relaunch episode did. Deepak Shukla, a former Deloitte tax accountant turned rapper and SEO agency founder shares his thoughts on what it’s like to break into a new industry when you don’t exactly look the part. We’ll also talk about putting yourself out there, dealing with judgement, and focusing on the future rather than the past. I’ll also address a listener question about balancing your current role and identity with your future ambitions.

Key Career Insights

1. Just because you don’t make it in a certain industry doesn’t mean that the experience was for nothing.
2. You have to courageously put yourself out there to at least give yourself the opportunity to succeed. This helps you become better and more effective with your work.
3. The only way to build up your tolerance to judgement and critique is to put yourself in situations where you HAVE to face this . . . so you can get used to it.
4. Minimize the amount of time and effort you devote to analysizing what went wrong during a failure and instead try to focus on the actions you can take to do better next time.

Tweetables to Share

Related Resources

We talked on the show about how you shouldn’t be overly concerned with other’s opinions of your career progress or trajectory. This article in the Book of Life entitled No One Cares is a good reminder that we should focus more on what choices make sense for us rather than what others think of those choices.

Listener Challenge

During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I challenged you to think about where you wanna be 12 months from now. What sort of work do you wanna be doing more of? What sort of projects do you want filling your time? How do you want to be spending more of your days?

Once you’re clear on where you see your professional life a year from now, try to embrace one new behaviour that’s consistent with that future. Act like the person you hope to become rather than the person you have been in the past. It could be devoting a little more time to that side project you wanna have as your full-time job. Or simply changing how you introduce yourself. Or investing in that training that creates a bridge from your current work to your future work.

About Deepak Shukla, Founder of Pearl Lemon

Deepak Shukla runs Pearl Lemon, an SEO Agency, by day and by night runs ultra-marathons, plods around Ironman events and hangs out with his cat Jenny. A few years ago, he left his corporate job at Deloitte as a Tax consultant during the height of the recession to become a rapper. Over 150 songs later, after running his own music studio with over 200 international clients, he travelled the world to over 50 countries while running 2 businesses, and even trained to become a British soldier! You can follow Deepak on Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn.

Also, be sure to check out some of Deepak’s former rap videos and his “Winners Get Bruised” music video we referenced during the show:

Did You Enjoy This Episode? Please Let Us Know!

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Comments, Suggestions, or Questions?

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Thanks to Grammarly for Supporting Career Relaunch

Built by linguists and language lovers, Grammarly’s writing app finds and corrects hundreds of complex writing errors — so you don’t have to. Career Relaunch listeners can download Grammarly for free by going to GetGrammarly.com/relaunch.