In the second episode of Changing Careers, Igor tells about his glaucoma and how he planned to deal with it in front of others. But Becky inspires him to be upfront about it instead of hiding it. This might have been the moment when accepting and dealing with difficulties led to becoming stronger and being ready to take on what life has installed for them, quite literally, running to the next opportunity. This podcast was recorded on February 27, 2023.
Transcript:
Frank: Okay. Welcome everybody. We are going to start part two of our Changing Careers discussion podcast series with Igor. It’s early evening over here in France and probably a sunny warm summer’s day in Curitiba in Brazil. Good afternoon Igor. Great to see you again. How are you today?
Igor Hello Frank. I’m doing very good. It’s a pleasure to talk to you and share a few stories.
Frank Well, I’m going to challenge you because I was really gripped when I worked through the last interview or the last discussion. It was just fun to read through it again and to listen to it again. So let’s keep the momentum. We’re going to start off in Canada.
Right at the beginning last week you said there were three career changes in your life. The first one was you started as a nurse technician in Brazil, which was something that your stepfather said would be a good job for you. You liked it. It was pleasure. I don’t know if it was pleasure but certainly it was a good job. It fulfilled you. But nursing is a lot of dedication.
Igor It’s hard work.
Frank It’s hard work. The rewards are more emotional and social and less financial. And then your father said, well, why don’t you move to something else? You went into to a dairy technology course, college. You could earn more money, and it made you a little bit more flexible. And then you spent a year with Becky and her family in California. And by all intents and purposes, you had a fantastic time.
And I want to explore this from a lessons-learned perspective using hindsight. Hindsight is a wonderful thing. And while you were living in California, you probably learned something that you didn’t know at the time but you realized later. And of course when somebody wants to change their career, they will say in hindsight, this was good, this was not so good, this was brilliant.
So what did you learn in California with Becky and her family that made you realize much later that, wow, this really influenced me or this really helped me or this was something I didn’t think of before that I learned about myself and that helped me in my future career path?
Igor Well, there’s things I learned that I would frame as practical things that, of course, helped me a lot at the time and it still help me. Some things like communicating more effectively, understanding how to break big tasks using small ones, but I have to choose one.
So I choose one which has a, it seems like a subjective lesson, but it’s very practical as well. So I have a health issue. So my eyesight is not so good as of everyone else, which doesn’t have this problem. The name is glaucoma. I was born with glaucoma and basically like in a nutshell, my pressure of my eye, it’s higher than of normal people and if I don’t take care of this, this high pressure can identify the nerves of my eye and I could get blind. However, I was born with that and I have been treating all my life and everything is okay. But my eyesight is not so good, especially in the corners of my vision. I can do everything, but for example, I’m not so confident on driving. For example, I’m terrible at sports that involve balls because if the ball comes from an angle that I don’t see very well, I can’t hit properly. So I always had to deal with these kinds of difficulties in my life. And when I went to the dairy farm in California, the biggest lesson that I chose to share today, it was, it is of course to, how important it is to first understand that it’s a condition, and it doesn’t limit it to do other things, because I can walk around corners and make things happen even with this issue. And seems obvious now to talk about that because like when we talk to people, it seems very obvious that, okay, of course you’re going to walk around corners.
But before going to the farm, I always thought, okay, I will hide that. I won’t talk about with that, with anyone. And when I need to do something that I can’t, I will just like pretend I did. I will maybe ask someone else to do. I didn’t have a very mature way of dealing with those difficulties. So when I, while arriving in the farm, Becky, she’s, she’s, I don’t know if it’s offensive, but how can I say someone is chubby, is chubby without offensive?
Frank She’s a, she’s a little, she’s a big woman. Yeah.
Igor. She’s a big woman. Yes. And she’s, she, she’s very, very smart. Like she, she has a, like, she has a very blue eye that seems like she’s looking like throughout you, like inside your soul, you know? And right there, like right away, it was very funny because my thought was, okay, I don’t need to tell Becky that I have this problem. Everything is fine.
And we were, she picked me, picked me up at San Francisco airport and we went to driving until Petaluma. And we stopped at some place to eat chicken or something like that. I think it was chicken. We sat on the table and she looked like, like she looked at me, like very straight to my eye. Do you have some night, some vision, some vision issue? Like in 15 minutes of talking and meeting her. And I thought, Oh my God, my plan didn’t work. Then I told her what I had. I felt very uncomfortable to talk about that because I was scared. So if I had, if I had, if she knows I have some kind of issue, maybe she, she won’t delegate some tasks for me. Maybe she would talk to me as a different person and things like that.
But at the time she just had asked me, I explained to her what, what I, what I had. And she said, okay. And we didn’t touch on this subject anymore for the next days. And doing my work on the farm, it was very, very interesting because they would ask me to do things. I would do everything. I was able to do everything and I did well, the better I could. But there at some point of my work, I had to, to feed the cows in a very distant place. So, and they, they had a truck. And back, I asked Becky, could I use the truck? And she, she said, like, you could use, but, uh, I don’t recommend because you don’t have a driver licence. And I asked her, but, uh, is that just because the driver licence and, or it’s because I have the vision issue.
And she said, no, it’s just, uh, just because of the driver license. And, and after this conversation, I, I kind of got in a conclusion that, uh, it is very useful for me, even the problem I have. So since then, every time I start doing some work or when I start dating people, like dating girls, I would, I would share, like the, uh, I would see the person in front of me, how, how they would deal with this characteristic of mine. And it was very useful because people knew right away, and we didn’t have this kind of elephant in the room. That’s people would, uh, would think that I had something, but they would be afraid to ask and offend me.
I will do not talk about that. It’s a very weird relationship, which I had before having the, this experience in the farm. So my, the big lesson I told the story, but the big, the big lesson is like share what your difficulties with people, because it’s not a weakness. It’s just a weakness. If you, if you accept that you are not able to do things because of that, but if you, uh, cherish people and talk to people and share with them that you are able to do things and how you will do things besides of this issue you have, it’s a very good way of avoiding a lot of problems and communicate communication difficulties. That’s a big lesson for me.
Frank There’s actually a lot of symbolism in, in this, because if you are, um, slightly impaired the way the, the, the, the, that your vision is that way, your vision is impaired. Um, it makes preparing for the unexpected a little bit more difficult because there are certain, like, as you said, you, you, uh, when things happen at a certain angle of your vision, you don’t notice it until it’s almost too late. So, so the lesson learned there is, uh, if you have to prepare for the unexpected, so you have to tell somebody upfront, look, I have this inherited issue. Um, nothing I can do about it, except I take medication. Um, I’m aware of it. I can prepare myself, but this is the case. So being upfront, honest and transparent. Yeah.
Igor Um, it’s cool because I did a talk last year. I think I even sent you the video. It was in Portuguese, but I sent you the video. Maybe there is some AI that you can upload the video and translate soon. But, uh, I, I told you, I told the, because the, the talk was about how you can use planning to make things happen. It was about project management and something I learned with therapy and reflecting, uh, to myself is that the fact that I always had to prepare to things made me a very good planner. So like it’s, it’s made me a very good professional in a lot of ways because I had this difficulty. So when I, as a child, I couldn’t rely on my vision. I would, I would give like a very cool example.
When I, when I was traveling to Europe, uh, I didn’t have a smartphone at the time. And I could, I couldn’t rely that I would be able to read all the plates, like, because some plates are very far. So I would have to walk there. Some plates, some plates move, are moving like buses. So I had to study the map and plan everything and that, but I didn’t have cell phone. So I have to plan, memorize and go have my, my tour or something like that.
And another interesting thing about these difficulties, I have many, but another one is that I, I do jujitsu and, uh, I, I, I go to compete very frequently, especially this year, I’m planning to go to compete very frequently. And at this gym, there’s this academy that I’m training right now, uh, right when I went to the first competition with them, because I didn’t start to train with those people. I told them, I told my teacher, because the way it is works. So imagine I stayed with a lot of people, a lot of mats in the middle, like six or eight mats, and we go fight. So I’m going to fight against someone. And my teacher and my teammates are like in the other time, other side of the fence, maybe let’s say 25 meters away of me. And usually those people do signs, like they do, do this, do that. And they do signs with the arms and with the hands. And as I knew my difficulty, and I had to deal with that in the past, I told the right away, my teacher, okay, you have to scream. I, if you do a sign, I, I won’t see. And then today it’s funny because when I go fight, everyone is screaming very loud. Igor, do this, do that. And for me it’s an advantage because I can just focus on my fight and don’t look away.
Frank But of course your opponent can hear you as well. Yeah. Or does he have to wear something to not hear the messages coming through?
Igor Yes. Yes. That’s a good point. Okay.
Frank Um, you spent a year in California, um, and it had to come to an end because I suppose you only had a one-year visa or a one-year visa to, to stay there. Uh, and then you, uh, you moved to a small town in Alberta in Canada. Um, so to tell the story, uh, based on a handful of questions, why Canada? What did you do to prepare yourself for this, uh, for this move? Uh, it wasn’t really a career change, but it was a job change, a different working environment. So there must have been something that you wanted to experience there that you may or may not have, uh, heard or thought about beforehand. And then what happened in Canada? What did you do there? Uh, and just to add as a little bonus, because I checked this up beforehand, you were not far away from probably the two nicest national parks in Canada, Banff National Park and Jasper National Park, um, a stone’s throw away. So tell us about the Canada time.
Igor Well, the, the reason I went to Canada right in the end of my time in the United States, I had to plan what I would do next. And the options I had was going back to Brazil and find a job in a factory because it’s impossible to work in a farm in Brazil and get more, get a good payment because we had only small farms and familiar farms and things like that. So I had this option and I had the option to work abroad with the same strategy I did in the United States, which was ab exchange program and trainee exchange program. So I had these two, those two options and I didn’t want to, to come back to Brazil because I didn’t think I would be happy here. I, I was very enjoying a lot the process of improving my English, uh, earning dollars was very good as well. So I decided to just go somewhere else. And like in these options of keeping working abroad, I would, I could choose many other countries that would accept me, but I chose Canada because I always wanted to know Canada. Uh, it’s like in Brazil, we have a very good feeling about Canada that people are very nice. There are a lot of, uh, good opportunities. There, there is no here in Brazil, we don’t have snow. So it would be a very interesting thing. Like in California, I didn’t have the chance to work in snow. So I chose Canada for those reasons. And the experience was, it, it, it was a very interesting experience because it was good in a way that I had to deal with snow and I really wanted to do that. It was a life dream for me, like in California, I was a little bit disappointed of not having to deal with snow. And so in Canada, I dealt with a lot of snow and it was very good.
And I really enjoy like to go in the snow with a lot of clothes, with caps, gloves, big boots, like Eskimo, you know, I really like this. I still like it today. And, but in Canada, the family, they, they were very nice people, like really nice, uh, and good with good intentions, but I didn’t create a very strong connection with them. I still don’t know why, uh, I don’t know if it was my fault or if, if, if they didn’t want this connection or maybe my expectations were too high, but the connection wasn’t very close and so good. And I, I lived with them in the house of the family for one month, but after one month, I moved to a, to a house in the farm, but I, I lived alone in the beginning with a guy from Philippines and then alone. So this was very different. So I was living alone. The family was fine, very gentle, but it wasn’t like my family, which was the case in California. So I was very lonely most of the time.
Uh, and most of the things I was doing was very repetitive because I, I, I had done in California, so milking cows, um, feeding cows, dealing with cow’s injuries, um, drive, driving tractors a little bit. So I was, it was a very repetitive and work and together with the loneliness, I started to think five months after arriving in Canada that I wouldn’t be able to stay for one, one full year. I, I was starting to get a little bit sad, uh, spending money with useless things. I would go to a shopping mall when I had the chance and spend a lot of things that had no sense.
So I started to playing, uh, plan B. And I thought a little bit about coming back to Brazil, but I didn’t want to like, to go back to Brazil without a solid next step in terms of career. And one day, like it, I was walking all day long. It was snowing, very dark. I was very sad and I was milking the cars, the cars, sorry. I was milking the cow, the cows in the afternoon shift. And like, like a magic, I have idea, why don’t I go to France? I have money. I am in Canada. I don’t meet visa. And I was missing a lot of doing parkour because in the farm, didn’t have any spots to train parkour. And I started to consider the idea. Why milking cows? So when I got, when I got home, I just opened my computer and I told myself, I won’t think twice. I will just buy the ticket. Then I bought the ticket for, uh, two months after I had the idea and the next day I communicated my boss. I thought it would be very difficult that they would get mad with me, that they would be sad, but they just said, okay, we will get another one, which is a good sign. Maybe I did the right decision.
Uh, so in Canada was a very different experience. Good things, I can talk about this experience. It is, I, as I was in a very isolated town and my host family wasn’t so willing to drive me to towns, uh, they, they wasn’t like Becky. I had to find something to do. And then they started to run like crazy. I would run every day for two hours, three hours. And in this process, I started to sign up for long run. So in Canada, I ran two full marathons, which is, which is 42 kilometers. And I ran 100 kilometers, which is, if you type Google Scaldini on Google, uh, and Google images, there is a photo of me crossing the finish line at 21 hours. And this was, uh, in a nutshell, my experience in Canada.
Uh, the, like, the main thing about Canada was learning that loneliness matters and I’m not, and I firmly believe that no one is a lonely wolf. I think people need a social life, even if they think they don’t have, uh, if you consider yourself that you like to be alone, you like to be alone because when you want, and you have the chance, you’re going to deal with people. I’m going to imagine if you can’t do that, it’s a very hard thing to deal with. This is a very good lesson. And the fact of running 100 K, what’s like very life-changing for me, because like, intrinsically for myself made me, made me very confident on everything I want to do. I know it’s possible because for me, 100 K was impossible and it wasn’t. So of course it was, it was hard in terms of physical energy, but strategically, it’s not so hard. You just have to run, train and run, train, and you, someday you’re going to be able to do that. So, it made me confident that if I follow my plan and I be constant, I can do anything I want.
Those are the big lessons from Canada.
Frank It seems to me that, um, sort of trying to, to condense this into a handful of words, um, in order to process it, um, in order to process it, California was about people and relationships.
Igor Yes.
And Canada was about physical endurance and physical fitness and physical boundaries and overcoming these boundaries. And if you take these two, these two elements, you’re not really looking at a career. You’re not focusing on your career, but you’re actually focusing on personal growth and personal development because, because when I lived in, in, in Australia, back in, in, in the seventies, half a century ago, um, a lot of people would leave high school and then go to Europe for a year and just discover themselves and learn about themselves. And I mean, back in the seventies and eighties, doing that was a totally different ball game than doing this in, in, in the 21st century. Um, and they would come back, they would sort themselves out? and then they would start university or do some work or figure out what, okay, I’ve now got an idea of what I want to do. And then I’m going to go and do that. Um, so people and physical experience equals a better person in the future. Is that an equation that one could use?
Igor Yes, sure. Surely. And I think it’s a very important thing to say, because at the time, of course, I didn’t know about that, as Steve Jobs said in this, in his very famous commitment speech, like we have to connect the dots, like, retrospectively, like, at that time, you have no idea, but something I believe, and I suggest to everyone that I have the chance to suggest something about career is that, like, focus on improving yourself as a human being, because if you think in a big picture, like, when you are in a company, you are part of a process that you, like, your value is to move things around you. So you have to be able to move things effectively, being, managing people, bringing results in some technical sense, maybe developing some things. So you have to make, make things happen, like move things in this big picture, which is a company. And the way to do that is to be a effective human being in terms of skills, of course, so hard skills and soft skills, but also knowing yourself, because if you know yourself, at least in my experience, you are able to have a sense on how to achieve things. So I know, if some, if my boss come to me, Igor, we have to build the rocket next month. So if I know myself, I know how I would be able to achieve that. I know that I wouldn’t be able to learn rocket engineer tonight, but I know, I know that I would be able to reach 1000 engineer on LinkedIn and persuade them to work for me. So I have to know myself to move things and also help you to have confidence on yourself. So if I know myself, I know that I find ways to do my job because I know myself and I won’t get desperate on trying to do things that the other people did, trying to do things that people say that is the right thing to do, but those people not necessarily have experience, not, I will not follow unwise advice. So yes, I think, and at the time I didn’t know, now I know, and now I have this sense while I am advancing my career that I have to know myself.
It’s a very important thing to the career. I would say it’s the most important thing because I’m sure you had the experience throughout your life and who is listening also had to deal with people that they have no idea what to do, what they’re doing. They are completely lost on everything. Like they don’t know what the next step, they don’t know how to communicate, they don’t know how to write it down because they don’t know themselves. So it’s impossible to move things. So I think it’s an important point to say. You just said the magic words.
Frank You just said the magic words. A lot of people these days don’t know how to do this because they’re too busy communicating on social media about something that is probably totally irrelevant. There’s no university course anywhere. How can I be an effective human being? So you have to do it yourself and that requires thinking about what you do, what you have done and what you want to do, not necessarily in that order. But it requires thinking and living consciously, being aware of what’s going on around you, what you were doing and what is happening and what isn’t happening.
Igor Yeah, I would add as well like what’s the impact of what you are doing or of what you are not doing. Like understand the big picture because right now we are talking in a moment it’s AI, it’s a hot topic everyone is talking about and people, most of the people complain about AI that they’re gonna, they got to lose their jobs and I think they’re like they have to worry about that.
But my criticism for those people is that they don’t understand the big picture. So I was talking to a friend who is a copywriter? and I was talking to her about that like if she, because she doesn’t want to use ChatGPT because she feels like she’s cheating. So and we start to talk about what’s gonna happen with agencies because what’s gonna happen is that agencies will start to stop hiring a lot of copywriters. They’re gonna hire one person which is good on chat GPT and what this person will be very productive and will be able to update the text because the point that those people are missing is that people want to use chat GPT and just control see the text that chat GPT will send to you and then use. We’re gonna have people to dilapidate.
So dilapidation of text now it’s the next thing. So if you understand the big picture as a copywriter this is the next thing. It doesn’t mean that you have to lose your job. You just have to adapt because the big picture is moving, is changing. So if you don’t understand the big picture you’re just gonna get annoyed that oh it is your change and it’s bad. Everyone who deals with that is bad. Everyone is guilty and just enter a complaining flow which will never get out.
I would add like understanding the impact that you have in the ecosystem.
Frank And you can actually close the circle again by saying at the beginning of our conversation today you talked about your eyesight and how Becky within 15 minutes of you having a chicken meal together with her sensed that something was amiss.
Igor Yes.
Frank She asked you point blank do you have an issue with your eyesight? Yes. You had no other choice except to say yes ma’am I do. And then you’ve worked together to compensate for this. And the lesson that you can take out of this is that you had admittedly a hugely caring family in California. You had a superwoman in Becky, a model, you could almost duplicate them, but she took away your fear and she but she took away your fear. Then you went to Canada and you did things, you pushed yourself physically so and that you conquered your fear there. You are in a constant process of evaluating yourself and thinking what went wrong. In business, in industry, we talk of continuous improvement. How can I make a product or a process better? And here you can apply this whole concept of continuous improvement to yourself and say how can I improve myself to achieve the goals that I want to achieve. And that the circle then closes to this revolution that is hitting the workplace called ChatGPT. I personally think it’s the next best thing. It’s fantastic. But you have to learn how to use it and adapt to it and make it work for you so that you can overcome the fear and the disruption that this thing will bring and whatever happens down the road. So the takeaway in today’s conversation is confronting any fears by looking at people who will support you, asking them for support, pushing yourself physically and being somehow prepared for or positively prepared for what’s happening in the future. Would that be a good summary of what you experienced?
Igor Yes, I think so. And it’s interesting how everything and that technology, I don’t want to, it’s not that I don’t like, but I don’t feel I’m able to talk about knowledge very well because every time I talk about knowledge, it seems like a very motivational and superficial thing. But I really would like people to think about how knowledge is important, you know, like because it’s everything. Like I did a post on LinkedIn, I think it was last week about how knowledge compounds in itself and like it will save you a lot of trouble, a lot of money. So knowledge, it’s a very important thing, not only about the world, but about yourself. It makes you confident. One thing that I remember which happened in Canada, because in Canada I already had this experience, so I was very fine with that.
Because in the United States, I had this kind of internal conversation and this psychological cycle of thinking, oh my God, they think I’m not able, I didn’t want them to discover that I have this problem. I dealt with that in California, but in Canada I was completely fine. I was like, okay, I have it and whatever, I will do what I need to do, but I won’t deny that I have that. And people would drive tractors and driving tractor is the big field. It’s not so easy as it looks like. So if you imagine a very huge field that you cannot see the end on the horizon, it was this environment in Canada. So we had to walk the field to plant corn and harvest the corn and feed the cows. So in the period of harvesting, someone had to drive the tractors, but had to drive very aligned with the field. Because if you just change the angle a little bit, at the end of the day, you’re going to do a big diagonal line in the field. That doesn’t make sense. So you have to be very straight. Then you make the turn and come back straight and you have to do like that. It’s not so easy. And when we start doing that, I say that right away, say, oh, maybe I’m not the best. And I was with like a 15 years old, which was a cousin of someone of the farm. And I told my boss, maybe it’s not a good idea, leave John, it was his name, to drive the tractor because he knew how to do that. And I go pick up the rocks on the field because something that happens a lot in farming is that the tractor is harvesting and there’s a rock and the rock go inside the tractor and break the tractor, and it’s a big pain in the ass. So I suggest that and I started to walk the field and collecting the rocks. And it was very efficient because the tractor didn’t break once in this day, which was very unusual. So this is an example of knowing myself and being honest about myself, make things way better and way efficient.
Frank So certain old trends are coming back. There seems to be a dancing trend coming back. I see it on YouTube shorts, a lot of people promoting dancing and skipping with a skipping rope. So maybe you could introduce an old trend again on self-reflection and observation.
Igor Very old trend.
Frank No, but simply sitting down and keeping a journal or writing a diary. Dear diary, today this and this happened. And in 30 years time, you can read about and say, oh my God, is that the case?
So Igor, very powerful lessons learned there. We seem to be going around the world. So next time you will take us to France.
Igor Yes.
Frank In other conversations, you did actually mention how you managed to land in France with a bang. Very fascinating little story there.
Igor Yes.
Frank Yes. And then we can continue discussing how Europe shaped you even further in what will then become career moves and career developments, et cetera. So bienvenue en France, as we say here.
Igor Yes, I miss France.
Frank You miss France? Well, it’s only a couple of hours away. That little bit of water across between Brazil and Portugal, it’s nothing.
Igor Oh, by the way, I’m going to Portugal this year. Can you believe that?
Frank Well, we have to meet up.
Igor Yeah, I’m going. I have a brother who is working Portugal and one dream of mine for a long time is to travel internationally with my mom because my mom is very poor. She would never travel internationally. So I’m like I’m here. I don’t know if the expression is right outside Brazil, but I’m killing to have rabbits with just one club. Ah, you fly
Frank in English. You say you kill two flies with one stone.
Igor Cool.
Frank No, sorry. That’s the German-translated note. You kill two birds with one stone. In English, you kill two birds with one stone.
Igor So I’m doing that and we are going to visit Portugal.
Frank Well, let me know in advance so that I can get myself organized so we can drink an espresso somewhere in Portugal.
Igor Cool. Wow. Cool. Would be very nice.
Frank We’ll do that. Igor, thank you very much for today’s insight. And I look forward to talking to you about France, Europe and the rest of the world in the third installment of our Changing Careers series.
Igor Thank you a lot.
Links related to this podcast.
Igor and the 100 km run:
https://caep.org/blog/one-mile-at-a-time-for-brazilian-trainee-igor-scaldini/