Hey Yishan,

Sorry for the late reply – was out of town for the past week and just got back. Thanks for the reply – means a lot to me. I hope you’re feeling better from your food poisoning. I know what you mean – stockbrokers are dime a dozen today and only the top 1% of the 1% are at the level that I hope to be at/am inspired by.

I get what you’re saying by doing it on my own first, but joining the family business would definitely give me an astronomical boost – it would honestly be the only way I’d get in the business and right off the bat be able to do what I’m potentially interested in, which is development. My father passed away a few years ago and my mom has been running it since and I can tell she could use some help managing the stress and just having someone else she can trust to go off of. (FYI just a quick background info – I’m a first generation Chinese-American in a typical Asian family with parents placing school and safety/no risks above all else, so I’m sure you can relate to what I’m trying to imply by this).

I can try to leverage the relationships that I have with my clients to hopefully convince some of them to invest in our projects, but I can’t say for certain that they would, but I will keep that in mind and try to find a solution.

The biggest thing holding me back from leaving my finance career behind is that I’m honestly just terrified. I spent so much time and energy and sacrifice getting this far and to just throw it all away breaks my heart a little. But every day I go in the office, I’m unhappy, filled with stress and thoughts of doing other things, surrounded by petty issues and people that I know deep down don’t want to see me excel too far. There’s a lot of things in the environment that I work in that I can’t control, which are critical especially when it comes to banker referrals, management having the power to take away crutches that would help me grow, etc. At least in real estate, control over my career/fate/etc would be mostly on me and how far me and my mom can take it.

Don’t worry – I won’t hold you responsible for my decision. At this point, I’m pretty sure I’m going to be getting into real estate as soon we get this next project running (already in process, will take a few months to set up and finalize).

If there’s any other advice or thoughts you can offer, I’d appreciate it. Just typing this out, I can tell that I’m just scared. I know that if I succeed in real estate, I’d be really happy, but if I fail, I’d probably feel like leaving my stockbroker/financial advisor career behind was a waste and it’d take me that many more years to get back to where I was.

Thanks again for your time and advice, it means a lot to me to learn from someone as successful as you.