Ep. 88 - Hedging Against Risk and Being Fluid to Build Your Own Career Mashup - with Eva Sadej

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It may seem to some that fluidity is innate to every worker in the millennial generation, but the reality is that this flexibility and willingness to adapt can be achieved by anyone — even if it has to be worked towards. And in this new world of work, traditional paradigms and workflows have fundamentally changed.

The model of career progression and growth used to be linear, and that’s certainly what Floss Bar and Med Bar founder Eva Sadej was conditioned to believe. But Eva is now a featured career mashupper featured in my new book “Building the Business of You: A System to Align Passion and Potential Through Your Own Career Mashup” — so don’t convince yourself that you’re too old to learn a new trick.

While Eva’s journey started out following the traditional linear path, she chose to take a detour. She parallel pathed her way toward entrepreneurship and subsequently defined a career that could leverage all of her talents and interests, all while hedging against risk, being fluid, and still taking a systematic approach.

Starting Traditionally, Finding Your Path, & Choosing Fluidity

Eva grew up in a traditional Polish household where she “was raised to cook and clean, and to be a housewife.” But she never pigeonholed herself into doing one thing. She excelled academically while attending the acclaimed Stuyvescant high school in New York and was also a champion runner.

Eva’s family wasn’t wealthy, so securing a scholarship or financial aid for college was a priority. Her focus on academics got her into college at Harvard, where she chose to go down the pre-med route.

But here’s where Eva’s “traditional path” started to shift. She saw how much debt her siblings were in, so she pivoted pursuing finance and, subsequently, worked at Bridgewater, one of the top hedge funds in the world.

Eva was fortunate to find a company right out of school that fit not only what she was looking for in a work environment but also who she was as a person, her broader interests, and what she wanted to learn. And although Eva started from the perspective that a traditional linear route was going to yield the best results, her experience at Bridgewater wasn’t a straight line. She explored various roles to find what stuck.

“I just didn’t know what I was going to be doing. I was just trying to try things because, when you’re a young person, you just want to learn. And I was there to really learn.”
“So everything bumped into another thing. It started in tech, but I wasn’t that good at coding, but I was reasonable at product management. There was a cool project and I got to lead that project. I understood process improvement, but I felt it was career limiting. So I went into investment and took the amazing world-class investment program. After I did that, I was just getting itchy being there for four years. So it was just a mishmash. It wasn’t anything planful.”

Systematically Pivoting to Start Her Entrepreneurial Venture While Parallel-Pathing to Hedge Against Risk

The ability to ‘shape-shift’ was an important skill she learned at Bridgewater and this fluid mindset and approach was invaluable when she decided to pivot yet again, this time towards entrepreneurship.

She knew what it took to build a successful side hustle and saw the fulfillment it could bring, as she had a front row seat to the creation of her partner’s successful whiskey subscription startup.

This experience inspired her and, once she identified the market opportunity to fill, she began taking systematic steps to make her new dream a reality. She applied the practice of ‘structured creativity’ to help her identify a list of ideas to pursue. Inspired by Dry Bar, a women’s hair care brand that disrupted the salon business, Eva looked for ways to apply the disruptive approach to other fields, which led her to dental services.

And as one who was always hedging against risk, Eva decided to parallel track her entrepreneurial venture while attending business school.

And to break through in an industry where she was an outsider, she applied psychological principles, such as borrowed credibility, leveraging knowledge acquired from her psych minor in college, coupled with the experience garnered at Bridgewater. This helped her build the mental fortitude needed to take on challenging situations she faced.

Optionality and Flexibility to Find Traction

Many workers today desire — and even need — to have options and flexibility in their jobs and careers. For Eva, that was vital because she knew she couldn’t always control the uncontrollable when it came to business and life.

By being fluid and mashing up her experiences, skills, past roles, and passions, Eva created Floss Bar, a mobile dental service that brings healthcare directly to companies and their employees. Unsurprisingly, she was also able to dynamically pivot and evolve her company during the pandemic, creating a new business line with COVID-19 testing called MedBar.

This understanding of the need to constantly try new things, learn from these situations, and leverage all of her past skills and experiences in these new environments meant Eva was able to build the traction necessary to get where she is today. She has, in essence, created her own career mashup, which has enabled her to achieve a level of impact and fulfillment that she wouldn’t have attained by taking a more traditional, linear path.

Career Advice

If you're young, just do it. The older you get, the less likely you're going to be an entrepreneur.
Once you take that leap you're going to be proud of yourself for the rest of your life.

Key Takeaways

If you can achieve emotional stability in difficult environments, that's when you can layer on leadership.
Shape shifting is really important. When you move roles a lot where you don't know everybody, you are really a startup, in each of those roles.
We're all brands and we're all our own startups. A person and a startup are not fundamentally different, and sometimes people need to restart the same way that businesses do.
There are opportunities to pursue multiple different paths, one of which may be your primary path. However, you may have this side hustle which could become a primary route. That hustle is all about being able to fulfill another side of you.
Leveraging the concept of borrowed credibility can enable you to break through when you are an industry outsider.
- If you're going into a meeting, or interaction with industry insiders, take someone who is credible to that meeting. Have them state their credibility at the beginning.
- Plan in advance that the expert defers to you for questions that you have knowledge of, and answers to.This creates social proof that you are an expert as well.
Mentors are valuable because you don’t know what you don't know.
Content list management is another strategy that is valuable to employ to help you gain traction in an area where you initially have limited understanding.
- You always need a threshold level of understanding to be able to lead others
  - Understand the topic 70% to be able to manage those doing it, but when it comes to the details and the plans and your most important decisions, consider getting opposing views from experts to see all sides of the problem/solution.
Rather than having one expert to depend on, facilitate dialogue of different perspectives so you’re able to truly see a comprehensive view of all the dynamics, which will help you plan effectively based on understanding the potential scenarios and outcomes.
- It’s essentially a data gathering exercise to understand how to ultimately hedge against risks.
Optionally is important because things don't always go your way and there's the variables you can control and ones you can’t. So it’s important to have options from different business strategies you can employ.
Remaining calm is the first stepping stone of leadership because you can’t lead if you are panicking.
Hedge risk from afar and try to get ahead of it. The reality is that risks manifest so just assume there will be risks but don’t be afraid of them.