We Are Officially In Singapore!
Hi all, this is Akiko, CEO and founder of Wantedly.
We had an amazing launch event last week on 2nd March 2017, with more than 150 participants–comprising of companies, talents and the media, joining us at our celebration at the Red Dot Design Museum.
We kickstarted the morning with my interview on CNBC, where we were featured on Squawk Box Asia. I shared about how Wantedly helps match companies with high quality, passive job seekers who may not be serious about changing jobs just yet, and advocated for Motivation 3.0: creative work driven by inner motivations for autonomy, mastery and purpose that creates job satisfaction in today’s workplace.
We headed to the Red Dot Design Museum right after, and went through multiple rounds of full-dressed rehearsals as the venue got progressively set up. I saw how the event space went from a completely empty space except for a stage, to one where it got filled with Wantedly posters, life-sized standees, goodie bags that contained a fidget cube which was the crowd favourite… as well as lots of food and drinks!
The event turned out to be a great success and ended with a BANG! Here are some fun photos that captured the fun we had:
My Keyntote
The Wave!
So Why Wantedly Singapore?
My mother, a psychologist, has a huge influence on me. Coming from the academic industry, you don’t expect to get paid very much (in Japan, at least!). I remember how she really enjoyed her work nevertheless, because it was more than just a job to her – it was something she believed in, and to her, this job was her way to discover cool, new facts about the universe through the numerous experiments she conducted. That was her life’s mission. She used to stay up till late at night and spent even spent time on the weekends working. I knew something must be powering her through those long hours. I just didn’t know at the time that it was passion that gave her this motivation.
After many years of enjoying her work, she’s now well-rewarded financially and socially, working closely with the government to shape methods that the police use to conduct interviews with child witnesses.
Work is Your Life
Growing up seeing my mother really enjoying what she did at work left a lasting impact on me. I began to believe that this is what life's about: that your work can be something you’re passionate about. You spend around 30% or more of your entire life for work, and unless you are from super wealthy family, most of us need to work to be independent and make an everyday living. It made total sense to me, that this 30% of your life should be dedicated to something your find super exciting.
People were not that Happy
Yet, reality was really far from that. When I started working for Goldman Sachs, people weren't happy with their jobs despite the large paychecks, and my university classmates who have gone on to work in large corporations across different industries weren’t that happy either. What baffled me was that they were okay with feeling this way. I soon realized that a lot of people saw their jobs as “obligations” and that you get paid because you are doing something you “hate”.
Here is the scary thing: a lot of people look forward to the weekend, thus the phrase TGIF was coined. Think about it, when you’re hoping that your week flies by, it also means that you’re hoping for your life to pass you by really quickly. Surely, nobody hopes to shorten their lives, right? But those people who look forward to the weekend and Friday are actually wishing for their lives to be shorten.
I thought that this thinking is wrong. Really wrong. It is essentially a waste of our lives.
Help Talented People Make A Leap
Of course, not everyone can afford to do what they love as their profession. Some people are still at the stage where they are going through each day, trying to make ends meet. But I believe that for the majority of us who are well educated and have good families, we are able to take some risks and challenge themselves to be better. Yet, I see so many of them still choosing to stay in their comfort zone, and striving to live up to the expectations of their parents and partners, without trying to challenge the status quo.
If you have what it takes and are able to take the necessary risks to get you to where you desire to be in life, and yet you’re feeling afraid to make those pivotal decisions, here’s some advice I’d like to share with you:
Two Tips
Think of it this way: If you know you are going to die in a month, how differently would you you make your decisions? You won’t be living just to look good for others on Instagram or Snapchat. It’s your life. You shoudn’t live it for somebody else.
Next, change your environment. You are the average of the five people around you spend the most time with. So surround yourself with people who challenge you to be better and help you improve, because they will be critical to you success. We are all largely affected by our environments. So let’s start somewhere, even if it’s small; then change our community, and experience how it starts to change the way we perceive the world.
Surround Yourself With Like-minded Peers
To make it easy on you to change your environment, we created Wantedly Visit, to allow you to easily discover and connect with companies that share your mission and values, so that you can visit the offices of like-minded companies casually to find out more, expand your network and meet cool people.
This is the mission of Wantedly, to convert the concept of “Work” from something boring and worth hating, to something that is super exciting. If you want to understand more about work that motivates you, here’s an article that explains it well: http://reward-process.com/en/employee-motivation/do-you-know-motivation-3-0/
At Wantedly, we want to inspire a better world by enabling more of you to experience Motivation 3.0, to realise our mission of creating a world where work meets passion. Therefore, we persistently develop websites and apps that help you to connect with like-minded peers and companies, so that you no longer need to be stranded in the carrots and sticks of Motivation 2.0, and have the courage to pursue Motivation 3.0 of Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose at work.
I strongly believe that the younger generation of Singaporeans, like the Japanese, share my belief of pursuing passion at work. This, despite the fact that as Asians, we are generally risk-averse and face huge social pressure not to fail.
I’m so happy to share that we have launched officially. I hope we become an integral part of the community here in Singapore, and inspire many of you to create your own version of a world where work meets passion.
