3. My third major career decision was to remain devoutly focused in the face of adversity. Failure was never an option. I leaned heavily on 2Corinthians 12:9, as I still do.
I worked there for a year, it was third shift working at night, but I was always stopping by campus every week to read all the job postings. I desperately wanted to be in pharmaceutical research and on the biologics side. And finally one day, I saw what I was looking for and finally got into The Upjohn Company as a Research Associate. My first salaried position with benefits and paid vacation. It was here that I learned many surgical techniques, on many different species. I was even doing angioplasty on pigs & delivering nanoparticles to reverse plaque narrowing in arteries (atherosclerosis). I also got to write many technical papers and get published in professional journals like the Journal of Cardiovascular Pharmacology.
4. My fourth major career decision was to take a job doing what I didn’t want to do, so I’d have enough money to wait patiently, until I found a job doing exactly what I wanted to do.
Working in R&D was a game-changer for me. Many things which had been beyond my grasp suddenly came within reach. This was the first time in my life where I actually had disposable income, savings, and a 401k retirement plan. Little did I know this was only the tip of the iceberg. A buddy of mine left research and went into pharmaceutical sales, and he was always begging me to come over there because the money was better. He knew far more science than all the other drug reps who were mostly business graduates, so the doctors took him more seriously than other reps. Eventually, I didn’t have much choice. My company merged with another company, and then a few years after that, Pfizer bought the whole company and my job was gone. I tried to do my own thing with a small business for about a year, but ultimately I joined my friend in sales at AstraZeneca. Even though my small business had failed, they were impressed with the business acumen I had developed in 12 short months. Negatives can become positives if you are savvy enough to control the perspective. This is Sales 101.
My friend was right. Pharmaceutical sales was amazing. Company car, a laptop, a corporate AMEX card, tons of travel and my own spending account, and all I had to do was go talk to doctors about the science that I loved to talk about anyway. I’d still be doing that today…if things hadn’t changed, but they did. All the drug companies began to rapidly downsize their sales forces, and I was managed out with so many others. So I went back to #5 listed above, and began my most radical transformation ever. I wanted to become a currency trader and daytrade. Not on the floor of the commodities exchange. No, I wanted to trade from the comfort of my desk at home, using my own money. With help from my wife Gisselle, I went back to school and took a few graduate level finance & economics classes. Then, I taught myself to code so I could write my own trading algorithms (“trade bots”).
My trade bot works for me all day and night, every day. It took several years to become fluent enough to write a code capable of surviving the currency market. It’s brutal and merciless. There are no prisoners, only victors and losers. It’s not for the faint of heart, and it took nearly a decade to become profitable. Nothing on the internet was true, so I had to learn the entire business on my own, then spend many years figuring out how I was going to conquer it. Unless you have an extremely understanding spouse or a lot of money to live off, it’s next to impossible to do what I did. I had to give myself a Master’s degree in money management, price theory, trading psychology, and language coding. You have to be the kind of person that can push yourself. Nobody’s going to come beg you to make money.
6. My sixth major career decision was to add to my skillset in creative ways which build value.
My wife and I also have rental property which I manage. My wife is a Physician’s Assistant and works in an industry that is unrelated to my day-trading, and the rentals are on a separate economic cycle from what either of us are doing.
7. My golden career decision was to run our household like a business so we are insulated from economic shocks, like COVID or corporate downsizing. Diversify your sources of income, and ALWAYS have more than one money-maker at a time.
I’ve lived a lot of life over the last 50 years, and I’d be more than happy to discuss any of it with any of you who are considering any of the career avenues I’ve worked in.
God Bless,
Chauncey Turman
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