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- 25 | How Dreams Become Reality: Jason Zhu He – Founder of Ikigai Network
25 | How Dreams Become Reality: Jason Zhu He – Founder of Ikigai Network
When your passion and career conflict, how do you spend time?
By finding the intersection.
As a top law student and lover of videography, Jason Zhu He actually created the intersection for himself.
He co-founded The Australian Law Student, which helps law students transition from studying to working… and Jason is the producer.
For fans of Francesc Miralles and Hector Garcia, you might say Jason found his Ikigai.
So it’s only natural that he also co-founded Ikigai Network, a streaming platform that boasts collaborations with The Department of Education, Clayton Utz, and leaders like Tony Abbott.
Their employee interviews and career advice help you stop following the crowd, and find your own “reason to get up in the morning”.
But how did he achieve all this whilst studying full time?
Well, you’ll have to read the Q&A I guess…
Enjoy.
Q&A
I noticed that your experiences form a unique bridge between videography and law. Where did your passion for each area start, and what’s helped you land opportunities in both?
My passion for videography started when my Mum bought me a small camera for my 16th birthday. I learnt video and photo editing from YouTube tutorials, started my own Youtube channel, and made a few videos for school sports. I really enjoyed making people and things look good in a visual medium.
It also allowed me to gain entrepreneurial experience too – the day after I finished my HSC I went to every single car dealership on Military Point road (where many fancy car dealers are), and asked them to let me film ads for their brands. Every single one turned me down.
Luckily I had people like my co-founders of Ikigai Network (Lachlan Pullar, Rory Glover) who gave me a chance to build a career advice video platform to help students understand various careers better.
They saw my work and asked me to do a few pilot episodes. When I proved myself on the content production side, they saw that I also had a lot to offer in terms of growing the business, and quickly I was running a large portion of Ikigai Network. That’s just one example of how videography has helped me land opportunities.
For law, I must admit I fell into it by accident, again, thanks to my Mum, who recognised how useful it was and encouraged me to study it. In first year, I fell in love with mooting competitions, which are competitions based on fictional cases where you have to argue in a fake court. It gave me a great chance to develop research, writing, and oral presentation.
Aside from the incredible people I’ve had the chance to meet along the way (like my co-founders for The Australian Law Student podcast), studying law has also taught me to read quickly, think logically, and express myself clearly. This has had huge benefits for everything from pitching to clients, to even writing interview questions for Ikigai interviews.
How do you balance your time and energy commitments with running Ikigai Network, producing for The Australian Law Student, working as a legal assistant and studying at uni?
1. Prioritise
In 1st and 2nd year of university, I was really doing too much, and not only were my results suffering but even my health. I had a long hard think about what I wanted in my future.
I decided that I was going to do law or startups, but didn’t want to choose yet, so hedged my bets and worked toward both.
Then I had to figure out what I had to do to get there. For law that was very clear – dedicate enough time to studying to maintain good marks, get a law job, do law related extracurriculars and apply for clerkships in penultimate year.
For startups it was less clear, and essentially I decided to keep working on Ikigai Network, train people to take over the most time consuming parts of the role, and keep my options open by networking with interesting people. That’s how I met my two co-founders of The Australian Law Student, and we began working on that.
Prioritising meant cutting away things that were less important but taking up a lot of time.
I was very very addicted to social media, so worked very hard to reduce my dependencies, by deleting apps off my phone, keeping logged out of accounts. I also highly recommend an app called oneSec that blocks you for a few seconds before you open certain distracting apps.
2. Build habits
Especially when you don’t have pressing deadlines, it can be difficult to find motivation to do work, but I’ve found that building habits of work is very helpful. Now I don’t have to make a conscious effort to work – I just sit down and start working out of habit.
I’m a bit of a night owl, so usually after dinner is when I do a lot of my work. I have discovered that I will get distracted in my room with my desktop PC and phone, so often I will go downstairs and just work on my laptop which has no social media accounts logged in.
3. Use a calendar to keep track of everything
Pretty self explanatory.
4. Listen to your body
Make sure you get enough sleep, exercise, do things that you like and see the people you love. You cannot deprive yourself of this for too long.
What’s a dream you had as a child that has stayed with you to this day?
Owning and operating a company that has a positive impact on other people.
What were early barriers to pursuing your biggest dreams, internal or external? What mindsets, habits and strategies helped you overcome them?
I think a big barrier for anyone pursuing their dreams, not just me, is not knowing the right people who can help you achieve your dreams. Those people who take you under their wing, open doors for you, or even just refer you to that one other person who sets the ball in motion.
I think the biggest mindset that has helped me overcome this is understanding ‘luck from motion’, one of the four kinds of luck theorised by Dr James Austin in his book, Chase, Chance, & Creativity: The Lucky Art of Novelty.
The four kinds are Blind Luck, Luck from Motion, Luck from Preparation, and Luck from Uniqueness.
Dr Austin writes “[Luck from Motion] favors those who have a persistent curiosity about many things coupled with an energetic willingness to experiment and explore.”
A personal example of this: two years ago I did a winter jurisprudence course, external to my university studies. Part of the course was taught by a senior counsel barrister. After the course, I kept in contact with him. He was appointed as a judge and invited me to his swearing in ceremony. I attended and the Hon. Tony Abbott, former PM of Australia was also there. I struck up a conversation with Mr Abbott’s aide and exchanged details. A few months later, I followed up asking if Mr Abbott would be interested in filming an interview for Ikigai Network, to which he agreed.
For that opportunity to eventuate, a huge amount of luck was required, but that luck was only made possible by me turning up, and going beyond at every link of the chain of causation.
I believe that luck through motion is one of the more equitable because it really depends on how many opportunities you take (as opposed to say, blind luck which includes things like the lottery of your birth).
Hence, I always try and fit in as many coffee chats, lunchtime seminars, evening networking events, and always try to help others in ways I can.
If you could capture the attention of every single person for thirty seconds, what would you say?
You can find someone with a certain opinion on everything. This is especially when it comes to careers – there is so much noise. People will tell you this career sucks, or that company is great, etc, etc, but the most important thing is for you to make your own, informed decision.
A really helpful mental model is the ikigai framework (see the book by Francesc Miralles and Hector Garcia) – find something that
You love
You’re good at
The world needs
You can be paid for
The best way to do that is to start with online resources (eg. Youtube, Glassdoor, Forage, The Aussie Corporate, Ikigai Network), and then when you have a better sense of what you want to do, network.
Find people on Linkedin, cold email, ask people you know – and ask them about their jobs, those four questions above, and if you like it how to get there.
Whatever you do, don’t get swept along by what others are doing. Be informed. Take control.
I hope this Q&A has inspired you to find your Ikigai, or at least check out Ikigai Network!
You can connect with Jason here:
You can find Ikigai Network here:
And as always,
Keep dreamaking.