May Sun

What carried me on for a decade is being influenced by influential women at different places. When I was at Goldman Sachs, I met a lot of female leaderships at the male-dominated banking industry, and they would mentor me so generously. I learned so much from them that I feel like I could carry on, like I need to carry the fire they have to the next generation. At Google, it's the same thing. You can get so much exposure to women who are so brilliant. This passion and energy, I just can't resist to push myself forward, get influenced by them. I mentor younger women and also just try to pass on this fire that I have experienced. I think it's very moving, you know, that I see them and I can, someday someone might inspire, you know, aspire to be like you one of these days.

The first thing that came to my mind is a quote from my grad school chair back then. He said to me so many times, it's like, fake it until you make it. In the beginning, when I was transitioning from physical product design to digital product design, it was so challenging because I didn't have the background, I didn't have the portfolio I need to show, so I was just stressed. I was scared. So he would sit me down and be like, hey, you need to fake it until you make it, you need to go see different clients, talk to them, have them see your thoughts, like, more fakely being the designer you want to be, the designer you can be. I think that's pretty brilliant that he gave me that advice.

I think it's a trending topic right now, which is AI. It's an opportunity, at the same time, a challenge. I actually have a YouTube channel talking about that quite a bit. I'm testing it. The opportunity is you could leverage AI to optimize your ability, regardless your skill level. But the challenge comes in that your organization is changing the way how you work. You're almost being forced to change the way how you work. And also, you might be fair about you lose your job. So the challenge, it's interesting, but I guess any revolution in technology happens that way. If you think about Photoshop, back then, illustrators were so scared that Photoshop would take their jobs away, because back then, they do photo manipulation by hand. Now you have Photoshop with one click, you changed it. Did that take away illustrators' jobs? Not really. So I have an optimistic attitude towards AI. I think if you use it well and adopt it, that you could find more opportunities for yourself. You can keep contributing to the company, or find side opportunities for yourself. I think us as individuals, we should be open to all opportunities. You never know what's gonna happen.

I trained quite a bit when I was first hearing about doing the retirement early. I was like, oh my god, that sounds so amazing, right? Like, retire early should be one of my values. Like, I need to gain the freedom I have. Life should be about freedom. And then I tried it. The funny thing is, I can't let design go. I imagine what my day's gonna be after I retire. I'm thinking about, I'm gonna design for clients. So, what's the difference between I'm retired versus I'm working? It's the same. So, the true freedom, which is, I guess, that's my life value, the true freedom is to do whatever you feel you like to do on the work, professionally. I'm sure different people have different ways of thinking about this. Financial freedom is a big bucket, but for me, it's about stimulate myself to the happy stage to be free. It's a different kind of freedom, I guess.