#6 - A Brief History of Jobs
I didn't always want to be a lawyer. I wanted to be a writer, but they said how are you gonna eat?
Hello,
How are you doing on this rainy evening? I’ve been writing a lot this week and my eyes hurt. I’m worried that I may need a new prescription for my glasses. I’m sorry that I had to use them to function you know. I’d prefer not wearing any. Maybe in the future I’ll consider laser procedures for my eyes.
Anyway, Katastrofe Mala is still ongoing! This week’s chapter, which is the fourth one, is also up. Do you read it? Do you like it? Please let me know what you think.
And if you like this week’s newsletters, please let me know as well.
Have a great week ahead! 💛
Do you work for your employer for more than 7 years or are you a millennial? Have you always known the kind of profession that you want to pursue or are you normal? As a kid, I didn't even know what I wanted to do next week, let alone a dream profession. I think it's such a weird thing to ask a child, what kind of job they want to do to earn money. At least that's how adults introduced the concept of jobs to me when I was little. Be a doctor or an engineer when you grow up, they earn a lot of money. So that's the value of a job then? To earn money.
However, money was hard to find for my family, so I grew to be sensitive about the lack of it. Both of my parents had to work to make ends meet. My father didn't want my mother to work in an office though, but fortunately she came from a big family of pedagang. She sold home-made goods instead.
She was good with sewing and had a good sense of fashion. So she made and sold nice bedsheets to the neighbors. Sometimes she also sold kue lapan jam, a traditional wet cake from Palembang. She didn’t do it often, because as the name suggests it was really time-consuming to make. One time she made bandanas and asked me to sell them for Rp10,000 each to my friends at school. It was my first taste of being a pedagang. I was embarrassed offering and selling them at school, but I managed to sell many. I was eight.
By the time I got to 12th grade, some of my friends already knew what they wanted to study in college. I didn't. I self-contemplated a lot back then. I knew for a fact that I loved reading and writing, but I didn't know what I could make out of it. I didn't know anyone who was an artist. Artistry as a profession was a secret club I didn't know how to reach. So art didn't seem like much of a choice to me.
My aunt's family consisted of doctors and she strongly encouraged me to study medicine. I saw how well-off her family was and honestly the idea was tempting. But I knew my limit. Being a doctor was akin to studying for the rest of your life and I just didn't have the brain for it. Nor have I got the brains to do complicated numbers, so accounting and economics were also out of the options. The more I thought about it, the more I realized I didn't even know what my options were outside of the traditionally popular ones like medicine, engineering, and economics.
I tried to approach the problem from a different angle. I thought about what I was good at, and it was English. I was confident when it came to language and words. I knew I could do it well. I also knew that I wanted to travel the world. It would be great if I could do it for work. And the answer suddenly came to me. I should be a diplomat. What do I have to study to be one? International Relations? Cool, I’d apply for it. Then my best friend's mom stopped me.
She was a notary and a very good friend to me in her own right. She said if I wanted to get into the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, I should study international law instead. Lawyers had a higher chance to get the job. She was the only lawyer I knew and I believed her. A few days before the national university entrance test (in my time it was called SPMB), I changed my chosen program to law. International Relations became my second choice. Yes, I was dumb. Fortunately, I got accepted in my chosen law school. And it gave me even more questions in life.
I studied international law as planned. I enjoyed studying it. When the semester break came, I interned at the Directorate of Law, Ministry of Foreign Affairs for about a month. I came in excited and left it disappointed. I wasn't doing anything worthy there. The public workers even spent their time watching television. In hindsight, I should have interned at the Directorate of International Treaties instead, which was where all the action was; but I didn't regret the experience. I learned that I didn’t want to be a public servant.
So now I gotta find a new direction asap. It's ridiculous how much pressure we get as young adults when it comes to professions. They make it sound like your profession defines you as a person and you have to make a decision as early as possible. That is the stuff of nightmares.
I tried everything and every sector. During my last year of law school I interned in a campus NGO for a few months. The organization focused on monitoring public courts and my job was to observe trials. It was fun, but litigation was not my strong suit. Judicial analysis always gave me anxiety. Furthermore, the NGO was full of sharp and vocal people, and I felt I wasn't smart enough to be there. When a friend offered me an internship opportunity at a commercial law firm, I immediately took it.
To tell you the truth, I wasn't confident in being a corporate lawyer either. I didn't understand banking, investment, or capital market laws. For a long time, I thought I was going to be a diplomat, and I focused on international and state administrative laws instead of corporate ones. I was shaking during the internship interview. But I guess I said something right, because they hired me, along with three of my good friends. Their existence made the internship experience so much better. The firm's partners and associates treated and taught me well. It also didn't hurt that they paid me an almost-UMR salary, which was a lot even for an interning paralegal in a Sudirman law firm. I quickly enjoyed the work.
The firm mostly advised for mining and plantation businesses. It touched a lot of state administrative laws, which I was good at. I was also a quick study, so it didn't take long for the partners to trust me with contract drafting (starting from the easy ones, like employment contracts). But on the flip side, I saw that what they said about law firms was also true. I worked a lot of late nights, splitting my time between classes and the office. The deadlines were demanding, and I was anxious that I underperformed. After almost a year, I used my thesis as an excuse and resigned. The partners expected me to come back after graduation, but I didn't return.
Since I'd already had experience dealing with mining and plantation, and my thesis was also about the environment; I applied to an environmental United Nations agency. I think my official title was research consultant. It was a project-based gig and I had to submit a monthly invoice to get paid. I was technically not an employee. There I worked for a bunch of smart people who were all senior environmental lawyers, and the anxiety returned. I felt like when I was interning in that campus NGO again. I was not smart enough for this. So after a year, I quit with an excuse of looking for a more permanent job. Guess where I worked next. A Malaysian palm plantation company.
I know what you're thinking, because I think it too. Even then, young as I was, I felt like I was betraying myself. But I had the relevant lawyering experience and I needed the money. So I took the job. The CEO was my mother's acquaintance and he was very kind to me. He told me before everyone else that the Jakarta office was closing and the employees would be offered to relocate to the Medan office. It gave me time to look for a new job. I only worked at the company for about a year. At the time I took it as a sign to leave natural resources sector entirely. It simply wasn't doing it for me. So I returned to commercial lawyering.
I applied to a very small law firm in Gatot Subroto. My Air and Space Law teacher referred me to the firm's partner. I got in very easily. There were only two partners and four associates there, including me. The projects were relatively modest compared to the expensive mining merger and acquisition I used to handle. In the new firm, it was more about employment, sale and purchase of lands, factory rentals, mundane stuff. It didn't pay me as much as prestigious law firms in Sudirman and Kuningan, but I got to leave work at 5pm and the deadlines were reasonable. And I realized that I liked what I was doing. In the middle of all of this, I did consider about doing something else. Maybe lawyering was not for me. But working at a humane law firm had made me see that I actually loved lawyering and contract drafting; and most of all, that I was good at it. I finally thought that I could do this.
And now we got to the part where I thought a lot about the kind of lawyering I wanted to do. Despite my experience, I was not interested in doing any of those business sectors. My one and true interest remained to be the entertainment industry. By then, my endeavor in the entertainment industry had grown from a mere hobby to a passionate one, even lucrative side hustles. Wouldn't it be great if I could do entertainment law on main?
But the problem was there was no such thing as entertainment law in Indonesia. There still isn't. Entertainment law as an academic subject is not formally recognized here. I had no mentor I could ask for advise nor any Indonesian school I can go to for studies. I had to make my own way.
So I teamed up with like-minded friends from law school who were as passionate about the entertainment industry as I was. We offered our legal services to our artist friends and often gave our advices for free in the hopes they would refer us to more of their artist friends. I personally made a point of putting myself right in the middle of the industry. I sought new friends from advertising agencies, film and music festivals, to book and comic publishers.
It was slow going and I admit I did lose my way for a little bit. I almost quit. In my pursuit of entertainment law I ran out of my money; my savings were almost spent. I had the spirit, but the lack of entertainment law community made me anxious. There was no senior lawyer who could teach me how to do this, and I was always scared I'd give my clients the wrong advice. My anxiety also got in the way of my client acquisition, I often undersold myself. I didn't have the confidence to approach potential clients who had money, and I undercharged the small-tier clients that paid me.
I was a mess. I took whatever job I could because I needed the money. So there was a time I took a pay cut to work on digital marketing instead. It was mostly digital analytics and I didn't regret it one bit. My experience there has made me better equipped as an entertainment lawyer now that everything is online.
After a few years of doing entertainment law, my hard work had finally started to pay off. People I didn't know, including professionals I recognized from the media, started to look for me. Slowly I found my way back into the entertainment industry. And after handling various kinds of projects from different entertainment sub-sectors, I finally gained the confidence I needed to do this gig with more authority. And what do you know? Now that I'm a full-time entertainment lawyer, I got my opportunities to be a professional artist, in this case as a writer. I'm just ... glad I didn't quit.
If you read my job history on a paper, at a glance it would look like I was always focused and like I knew what I was doing. But looking back, I really didn't. I was only doing it one day at a time, taking the step that was right in front of me. I didn't have a plan of any kind. I only knew what I liked and what kind of person I wanted to be, and I think that's what we should ask our children instead. What do you like? What kind of person do you want to be?
Yes, a job is necessary to earn a living, but there are more values we can pursue, more than simply earning as much money as possible. The other furthest side of the spectrum would be work according to your passion, which I think is a huge mind trap. I think it actually takes time and experience to figure out what we're passionate about. And I also think passion is more about values than a profession. If your passion is making people's lives easier, you can do it by being a doctor, a lawyer, a driver, or any other kind of service providers.
Moreover, I think it’s also important for kids to know many people from various jobs. It will show them pictures of what they can be or do when they grow up. It will introduce them to people they can ask questions to, so they can learn about their options. So they won’t feel so alone.
I didn't always know my passion lies in pop culture and the entertainment industry. I only knew that I enjoyed consuming media and I'd like to create something that made people feel just as good. And over the years I realized that that is what I'm passionate about. Making people feel good through art. I can do that by creating my own art or by improving the ecosystem to allow other artists to keep creating their art. I can do that by writing, teaching, or lawyering. And it is such a privilege to have found a self-purpose like this. Will my purpose change in the future? Who knows? All I know is I'm giving myself the space to grow.
"... passion is more about values than a profession."
What a great point. It really is something that is not as rigidly defined as a lot of people seem to suggest, might even change over time, and therefore elusive, takes a fair bit of work to find. Which means no shame if we haven't figured it out or defined it satisfyingly.
This one hit me hard, somewhat.
Thank you for writing this, and have a nice day, Kak Uti!