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I am holding Forbes in my hands today, and I see my name on the 30 Under 30 list. There is immense joy, satisfaction, and perhaps still a bit of disbelief. But when I look at my life from the perspective of this
A personal journey from real estate to psychology, highlighting unexpected career paths and the value of persistence and adaptability.
Key Takeaways
- Career paths are often nonlinear and shaped by unexpected decisions.
- Skills and lessons from one industry can be valuable in another.
- Persistence and taking action without waiting for ideal conditions are crucial.
- Success is not just about hard work but about responsibility and adaptability.
- Honest dialogue about mental health and life experiences is important.
What the video covers
- The speaker reflects on being named in Forbes 30 Under 30 and the unexpected path leading there.
- Originally planned to study medicine but ended up in psychology after not getting in.
- Simultaneously built a career in real estate, progressing from agent to business owner.
- Merged psychology with business by converting part of the real estate office into a psychological practice.
- Emphasizes how seemingly unrelated experiences formed a cohesive career story over time.
- Discusses challenges and skepticism faced during psychology studies.
- Highlights the importance of responsibility, agency, and learning business skills in real estate.
- Rejects romanticizing hard work as a success formula, focusing instead on seizing opportunities.
- Shares insights on decision-making, growth, and balancing personal life with business.
- Encourages honest conversations about life and mental health through the platform Chicho.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction and Forbes 30 Under 30 Recognition
- 01:42Reflecting on Unplanned Career Paths
- 03:28Challenges and Skepticism in Psychology Studies
- 05:14Real Estate: Learning Responsibility and Business Skills
- 06:53Work Ethic, Opportunity, and Avoiding Romanticization
- 08:28Building the Psychology Practice and Early Growth
- 10:15Decision-Making Mistakes and Lessons Learned
- 15:27Balancing Ambition, Family, and Business Growth
- 20:02Success Moments and Reflections on the Journey
- 24:34Closing Thoughts and Invitation for Honest Conversations
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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moment, I see above all a story I never planned for myself before. The original plan was completely different. I wanted to study medicine, but I didn't get in.
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I ended up in psychology, which really started to interest me over time, but in parallel, my professional life was developing in a completely different world. Right after high school, I started working in real estate. Over time, I went from working as a real
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estate agent to running my own office. And when I was finishing my studies, everything pointed to the fact that I would tie my future to this very industry. But somewhere in the back of my mind, the thought kept returning
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that for five years I had been learning a profession that really interested me, yet I wasn't using it at all. And that was when we turned a part of our office into a single psychological practice. I wasn't opening a huge center. I had no
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plan for a dozen locations or a large team. I just wanted to check if this idea made sense and, frankly speaking, if there would even be anything to do in one office. And I think that is exactly why today I am most fascinated
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by the fact that none of these moments looked like the beginning of a path that would lead me to this place at the time. Not getting into medicine was just not getting into medicine. Real estate was a job that, over time,
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became my first business. The first office was an experiment. I didn't know which of these decisions would turn out to be important someday. I was simply making the next one based on what was in front of me at that given moment.
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Only today can I look back and see that these seemingly unrelated things started to form one story. I don't mean that everything had to happen or that every failure leads to something better. We never really know that. What
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fascinates me more is that we are only able to see the significance of certain decisions a few years later. When you are in the middle of your own story, you don't yet know which moment will prove to be important. And then years
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pass, you pick up Forbes, you see your name in it, and you think: "Wow, that really was my path." Only back then I didn't know where it was leading, and that is the path I want to tell you
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about today. At Chicho, you can talk about anything without judgment, without pretending, and without the need to be strong all the time. We are creating a space for honest conversations about life, emotions, successes, failures, or experiences. If you like what we create, leave a
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subscription, a comment, or a thumbs up. Thanks to this, we will be able to develop this project and invite more inspiring guests. Today it would be very easy to tell this story as: I didn't get into medical school, so fate
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steered me toward psychology, and it turned out to be exactly where I was meant to be, only I absolutely didn't think so at the time. Psychology still seemed like a field connected to people, health, and helping, so I decided to
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give it a try. There was no epiphany, no feeling that I had just found my calling. I enjoyed acquiring knowledge and knew that choosing this field wasn't a mistake, but I still imagined myself somewhere else. I wasn't planning on having my own practice or
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building a brand related to mental health. Psychology was an important part of my life, but it wasn't my career plan for a long time. I remember, in fact, that in our first year we would occasionally hear questions from
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some professors like: "What are you actually going to do after this degree? Work at McDonald's?" When you're 18 or 19 and you hear something like that from people who have known this industry much longer, that kind of comment sticks with you. Especially
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since I really didn't know the answer back then. I didn't know if I would work as a psychologist or go in a completely different direction. And that was actually when my life started to branch into two paths. On one side
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there was psychology, which interested me more and more, and on the other, real estate, which very quickly stopped being just a side job. I started as an agent and quickly realized that this world suited me. It was dynamic. A lot
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depended on me and on how much I did, how I talked to a client, or how I handled a given case. I liked that sense of agency, so I worked more and more, gained experience, started earning good money, and eventually
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opened my own office. That's why at the end of my studies the situation was a bit ironic. I was finishing psychology, but real estate was my actual career path. If someone had asked me back then where I saw myself in a few years, I
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probably would have answered that I saw myself in real estate, not in building a psychology center. And that is precisely why I love to return today to that first-year question: what are you going to do with that psychology degree?
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I didn't know the answer then. I also didn't know that a few years later, a company built specifically around psychology would be one of the reasons my name would end up on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list. So I guess it's good
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that I didn't take that question too seriously back then. There is one more paradox to this story. Before psychology became my job, it was actually a completely different industry that taught me many things without which I wouldn't have built the
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brand that exists now. And this is how we arrive at real estate. Real estate was probably the first place where I truly learned responsibility for the results of my own work. I realized very quickly that if I wanted to have
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clients, I had to go find them. If I want to sell a property, I have to put in specific work. If I don’t do something, it usually just won’t happen on its own. And this way of operating suited me very well. I liked
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the sense of agency, the ability to dream up something to do and then see a concrete result. Over time, I took on more and more responsibility.
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Eventually, I moved from working as an agent to running my own office. Only much later did I realize how much of that world I carried over into my current business. After all, I didn't work in real estate to prepare for
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running a psychology center. I learned sales because I had to sell. I learned how to talk to clients because our cooperation depended on it. I learned organization, marketing, and the costs of making decisions because at some point, I was simply running a company.
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That is why when the center started to take shape later, I wasn't starting from scratch business-wise. I didn't know the specifics of running a psychology center yet and had to learn many things from the start, but I already knew that a good idea alone
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isn't enough. A company needs clients, processes, marketing, people, and decisions that someone has to take responsibility for. However, there is one thing I didn't want to romanticize.
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When I talk about how much I worked, it's very easy to turn it into a story of "I worked while others rested." That is why I am where I am today, and I don't want that to be the moral of this
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episode. That was just how I operated at the time. I liked working, I wanted to be independent, and to earn my own money. I had a huge need for action.
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That was my way of life at that moment, not a recipe for success that I would want to sell to anyone. Looking back, the most valuable thing wasn't the fact that I could work very long hours. What was much more important was that I
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learned not to wait for ideal conditions. If I saw an opportunity, I tried. I started with what I had, and only then did I think about what the next step should be. And that exact way of thinking came in handy a few years
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later, when I finished my studies; I actually didn't have to change anything. I already had a company, I was earning money, and I could quietly continue to develop my real estate business. However, the thought that I
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psychology kept coming back to me. I didn't respond to that thought with a major revolution. I didn't quit real estate; I didn't say," I'm opening a psychology center. "We did something much simpler. Inside part of our office , we just opened one consultation room.
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My thinking was really simple. Let's make one room. Let's see if there will be work for it. I think that is exactly what I like most about this story.
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Today I know what happened later, but at the time, that one room didn't seem like the beginning of something big. I didn't have the feeling that I was making one of the most important professional decisions of my current
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life. I had the opportunity to try something, so I thought:" Okay, let's check it out. "Sometimes a decision that turns out to be one of the most important in your life, when you first make it, just feels like a good" let's
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try it "moment. And that is exactly how it was with Dicha. I also think that if someone had shown me the company at today's scale back then and told me how many elements I would have to build along the way, it could have looked
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very overwhelming. But I didn't have to build a dozen locations, a team of specialists, reception staff, and management on the very first day. I had to open one office. Only later did the next step appear. When one place wasn't
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enough anymore, it was time to think about the next one. When more patients started coming, we needed more specialists. When the team grew larger, the company had to be organized differently. So Dicha wasn't created according to a grand plan mapped out
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for several years. It grew at its own pace, but told this way, it might sound a bit too perfect. Opened an office, patients appeared, the company started growing, everything went beautifully and happily. But that, of course, was not the case. Preparing the office
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itself turned out to be the simplest part. It was much harder to make anyone aware that we even existed. We had to invest really big money in marketing, keep funding the company for the first few months, and learn things we had no
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clue about at the beginning. And that's when I very quickly realized that even a good idea doesn't start earning money just because it's a good idea. Ghom officially launched on March 1, 2022, and for the first few months, it
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primarily required investment. I was lucky enough to be able to afford it thanks to money I'd earned previously, because if I had assumed the company had to fund itself from the first month , the beginnings would have looked
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completely different. Marketing consumed the most. You can have a great office and good specialists, but at the beginning, you have one fundamental problem. No one knows you exist yet.
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For the first few months, the company wasn't earning money, so the funds had one primary task. To allow the company to grow. And I have one memory from that period that probably best shows what stage we were at back then. It's
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just good to remember that a few years ago, the company was at such a stage that instead of spending money on nice gifts, I had to allocate it to further development. And that is exactly why I wouldn't even say the beginnings of
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Ghom were difficult. They were intense, expensive, and full of things I had to learn while already on the job. But I don't remember a moment when I thought, I think I made a mistake. Maybe I should give this up. In a success story
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, this is often where a scene should appear where the owner sits broken, wants to quit everything, and the next day decides to keep fighting. For me, that scene simply didn't exist. When something didn't work, I wondered what
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we could do about it. When one method didn't bring results, I looked for the next one. I solved some problems quickly and others much more slowly, but I didn't treat them as a sign that the whole company might fail. I didn't
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ask myself if I should give up. Much more often I thought, okay, so what do we do about this next? Only over time did I discover that this way of operating also has a downside, because I didn't make every decision quickly
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enough. It happened that I already knew what I should do, and yet I postponed the moment when I actually did it. And paradoxically, it was these very decisions that cost me the most. I learned this most strongly with the
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first decisions concerning people. The team was much smaller back then, so I knew everyone very well. I recruited, onboarded, talked, and worked with them every day myself. When I knew someone was doing well, the problem started when, after another conversation, I
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basically already knew it wouldn't work out, but I still told myself:" I'll give it another week, maybe something will change, maybe a different talk is needed. "The thing is, that week very often changed nothing at all. Instead, I kept carrying those situations around
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in my head. I checked tasks, went back to things that someone was theoretically supposed to do, and spent more hours on a problem whose solution I already essentially knew. The first layoffs were difficult for me precisely because, on the other side, I didn't
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see a position, but a specific person. I knew that for me, this conversation would end in a moment and I would return to running the company, but for that person, it could mean a change in their daily life. I guess that's why I
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delayed some decisions. Not because I didn't know what to do. I just didn't want to be the person who delivers bad news. But after a few such situations, I began to notice a certain pattern.
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For weeks I wondered if I had really done everything I could, and when I finally made the decision, the company simply moved on. Someone else took over the duties, and the process often started working even better. And then I
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started asking myself a different question. Not whether I had definitely made the right decision, but if I knew this several weeks ago, why did I wait so long? That was one of the most important lessons for me in running a
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company. I understood that giving someone a chance and delaying a decision are two different things. I still believe that a person can make a mistake, need additional onboarding, or a clear message. But I learned to recognize the moment when I am no
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longer giving someone a chance. I am just pushing away the discomfort associated with a decision that has actually already been made. That's why when someone asks me if I've ever fired someone and later regretted it, my answer is: No. But I have regretted
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doing it too late. I think that delaying decisions was one of the costliest mistakes I ever made, because I paid for it not only with money, but also with my time and the time of others. And the bigger Jiho became, the
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more I saw that I could no longer function the way I did with my first office. With just a few people, I could know everything, personally conduct every interview, and find solutions myself whenever a problem arose. But as
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the company grew, I still kept trying to handle reception, recruitment, marketing, specialists, and daily management all at once. At some point, it dawned on me that the problem was no longer whether I was capable of working hard enough. I could work 12, 14 hours
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a day and keep going like that. But then, Jiho could only grow to the size that I personally was able to manage.
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And if I wanted to see how far this company could go, I couldn't just keep answering that by sacrificing more of my time. I had to do something much more difficult. I had to stop being necessary for everything. That was when
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a completely different chapter of this story began. As the company started to grow, it quickly became clear that I could no longer be the sole bottleneck for every single decision. Before, I could just work longer hours, sit down
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in the evenings or on weekends. After my daughter was born, for the first time, I truly felt that I no longer wanted to build the company. At the cost of every free hour I had.
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Paradoxically, I think this was also very good for Jiho, because it forced me to check if I had really built an organization, or just a large pile of duties centered around me. More and more things began to function without
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my daily involvement. I could not answer the phone, not know every minor decision, return to work after spending time with my daughter, and see that a problem which once would have come straight to me had already been solved
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by someone else. This was a very important discovery for me, because for years I felt that being needed for everything was proof that I was running the company well. Today, I look at it completely differently. That is, after
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several years, I would still have to personally oversee reception, hiring specialists, and every current decision . That would no longer be a success for me, but rather a sign that I had failed to build a real organization. Today, I
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am still very much involved in Jiho. I know what is happening and I make the most important decisions, but I can take a day off and I know the company will keep running. There are people who know what they are responsible for and
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do not need my presence for every single thing. Once, success for me meant that I was able to do everything by myself. Today, a much greater success for me is the fact that I don't have to. The arrival of my daughter
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changed one more thing for me. For most of my adult life, I functioned according to a very simple mechanism.
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If I wanted something, I could just dedicate more time to it. I could always find an extra hour somewhere.
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Usually, of course, by simply taking it from my free time. For years, it really didn't bother me. I liked working, I liked seeing the results. When my daughter was born, I felt for the first time that this mechanism couldn't work
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like that. Not because I suddenly stopped being ambitious. I still have plenty of ideas and I still want to see how far we can grow Dichom. Something else changed. The time I previously took only from myself stopped belonging
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just to me. Today, I work a lot during my daughter's naps, for example. We share childcare with my husband, which gives me a huge opportunity to keep growing the company. I'm still on call, I still work in the evenings sometimes,
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and I won't pretend I've reached some perfect balance. I haven't even had a week yet where I could completely disconnect from them. Funnily enough, I think the company is probably ready for that already. Perhaps it's me who isn't
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ready yet. The biggest change concerns my approach to pace. A few years ago, if I saw that I could reach a goal six months earlier by working more, the answer would be simple: okay, I'll work today. I still want to reach that goal.
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But for the first time, I can tell myself:" It will happen six months later. "That is also okay, because there is a boundary I don't want to push every time I think of another goal . That boundary is my own child's
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childhood. I can sometimes give up my own free evening, wake up earlier, or use her nap time. But I don't want to look at a huge Dichom in a few years and think that I built exactly what I
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wanted, but did it at the expense of something that will never happen again. The company can reach the next goal in half a year or a year. My daughter will be one only once, two only once, and five too. And professional success
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won't let me go back to this period someday and relive it. Interestingly, this awareness didn't take away my ambition at all. I still want more. I am still hugely curious about where we can get to. I simply stopped believing
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that the only way to a bigger goal must be a higher number of working hours.
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And I think that's why I look at Forbes 30 under 30 a bit differently now. It is a huge distinction for me. I really want to be happy, but I wouldn't want my child to look at this story and
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think:" My mom built a huge company, but she didn't spend time with me. "And it was at such a moment in my life that a message arrived, which stopped me for a moment in all that constant looking forward and made me truly look back for
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the first time in a long time. It was my dream. From the moment I sent in my application, I was waiting for any news , though at the same time I tried to tell myself that getting onto such a
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list is very difficult. There are certainly tons of submissions and it makes no sense to set yourself up for a specific result. I think I was protecting myself from disappointment a little, because it's easier to tell yourself that something was unlikely
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anyway than to admit straight out: I really want this very much. And I did want it, and I remember very well the day that the waiting ended, because paradoxically, there was absolutely nothing special about it. I was driving
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with my daughter, who fell asleep at some point. I thought I wouldn't wake her up yet, but would just drive through the McDonald's, buy some ice cream, and sit in the car for a moment.
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She would finish her nap, and I would have a dozen or so minutes for myself.
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I bought the ice cream, parked at McDonald's, and was sitting next to my sleeping daughter when I got an email.
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I opened it and read that I had just become a winner of the anniversary edition of Forbes 30 Under 30. I remember that for a moment, I just stared at the phone. I had been waiting for this very message, but when it
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finally arrived, I completely couldn't believe I was really reading it. I think I checked it several times, as if I wanted to make sure I had understood it correctly. And then something else dawned on me. I was sitting at a
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McDonald's. A few years earlier, during psychology, it would happen that we heard from lecturers:" And what are you even going to do after these studies?
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Work at McDonald's. "And now I was sitting at that very McDonald's in that parking lot, having finished psychology , with a phone in my hand, reading the news that I had become a Forbes 30 Under 30 laureate. Thanks, among other
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things, to a company built precisely around psychology. If I had wanted to invent the perfect scene for this story beforehand, I probably couldn't have come up with a better one. The funniest thing, however, was that I wanted to
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scream with joy, but I couldn't, because my daughter was sleeping next to me, so I sat completely quiet with ice cream in my hand and read the same email over and over again. That which was my dream—I had just found out
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that I really succeeded. And my big celebration looked like me trying not to even move too much, so I wouldn't accidentally wake her up. I think that's exactly why I remember this moment so well. There was no champagne,
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no big office, and no people standing around me. It was me, my daughter sleeping next to me, McDonald's ice cream, and a phone with the message I had been waiting for. Today, I wouldn't even want it to have looked any
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different, because Forbes did something else for me too. For a moment, it stopped me from constantly looking at what's next. For the first time in a long while, I had a reason to look back and think about how much had actually
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happened, how much I had done. And what I like most is that life didn't stop even then to create a perfect scene of success. I was still just a mom sitting in the car, making sure my child got
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her sleep. Only, between one look at my sleeping daughter and the next, I read the message I’d really dreamed of, and it would be hard to find a better ending for this story. When the initial joy passed, it really started to sink
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in that I had made it onto the Forbes 30 Under 30 list. I started wondering if anything actually changes because of this, because it truly was my dream. I don’t want to pretend now that it meant nothing to me. I really wanted to
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be there, and I am truly proud that I succeeded. And I think for the first time, I don’t feel the need to immediately wonder what I want to do next. I want to allow myself to just enjoy this for a moment, but at the
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same time, the next day I woke up and my life looked exactly the same. Jhom was still running. There were patients, specialists, things to do, and decisions to be made. At home, I was still a mom and a wife. It’s just
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that there was no magical transition from life before success to life after success. I think I used to imagine achieving big goals a little differently. It seemed to me that on the other side of something we really want, there must be some completely
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different feeling or a different reality. And today I see that most often it looks much more ordinary. You want something badly, you work toward it for a long time, you finally succeed , you are happy, you celebrate, and the
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next day life just goes on. And I think I like that more and more, because Forbes is not a finish line for me. It is more of a beautiful pause, a moment where someone from the outside actually forced me to stop looking ahead for a
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while and look back, which I do far too rarely. For me, once something starts working, it just quickly becomes my normal. Another thing that seemed huge to me a few years earlier becomes just a part of everyday life after a while.
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Instead of thinking:" Wow, look where we are, "I wonder, okay, what do we do next? Forbes interrupted this for a moment, allowed me to think, wow, actually a lot has really happened here . That’s why if I had to answer the
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question today, whether now that my name is in Forbes I feel like I have" already "made it, I would say yes, only I would remove the word" already "from that sentence. I have managed to do many things I am proud of, but I
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don’t feel like I’ve just reached the place where this story ends. Not because I have to achieve something bigger tomorrow. I’m just 28 years old, I have a family, Dicha, and ideas.
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I am curious about what else will happen in my life. I don’t know what I’ll be holding in my hands in 5 or 10 years. I don't think I even want to know today, because if I had written
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out an exact script for my life a few years ago, it probably wouldn’t have included half of the things I talked about in this episode. I didn't plan this life. I started to wonder if that sentence is actually true, and I think
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it is, it just needs one clarification. I didn't plan this path from the beginning, but that doesn't mean I didn't start dreaming about it along the way. I didn't have a ready-made map for the next 10 years. Many things only
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appeared before me over time, but once I knew the direction, I felt that I wanted to follow it. That was the case with Dicha. At first, I wanted to try one office, then I saw that we could do
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more. Along with the possibilities, my ambitions grew, and dreams began to appear that I hadn't had at all a few years earlier. And it was exactly the same with Forbes. It didn't happen by accident. I sent the application myself
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because I wanted to be here. I waited for an answer. I had hope. At the same time, I tried to tell myself that maybe it wasn't the right time yet, so that it wouldn't hurt as much. That is why
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today, when I say I didn't plan this life, I don't mean that I just sat around waiting for life to bring it to me. I didn't know the whole road, but when the next piece appeared before me, I decided if I wanted to follow it. And
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that is probably what I liked most about this story. Something that at one point wasn't in my plan at all. Over time it became my dream, and today it has become my reality. Many more things will probably happen in my life that I
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am not even considering right now. Perhaps in a few years I will dream of something that I wouldn't even be able to name at this moment. For the first time, I don't need to know, so this time I don't want to immediately ask
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what comes next. I want to just enjoy this for a while. Although, knowing myself, I'll probably open my computer tomorrow anyway and ask what we're doing next. If you feel that you need to talk, you can contact our
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specialists. See you soon.
Topics:career journeypsychologyreal estateForbes 30 Under 30mental healthbusiness growthentrepreneurshippersonal developmentdecision makingwork-life balance
