See, the thing is
To whoever’s attention this may hold,
See, the thing with meeting this version of me now is that new people — staff, clients, acquaintances — assume that because I now drive nice, fly nice, eat nice, wear nice, and talk nice, that my upbringing and early professional career must've been a walk in the park: private schooling, German-car school drop-offs, university professors for tutors, and extracurriculars that require a uniform.
When really, I went to James Busby High School — a coeducational, low socioeconomic-status, public high school in South-Western Sydney. If my memory serves me right, 80 out of the 120 original students graduated with their HSC in 2014. About 15 of us made it to university, and maybe 10 of us have graduated. Maybe.
After high school, I got a job as a junior marker at a tuition centre earning $15 an hour — about $20 an hour today, accounting for CPI inflation.
In the spring of 2017, I volunteered for a fun, unpaid summer internship at a Public relations and marketing start-up owned by the same boss who owned the tutoring centre. I wanted a new experience as a university student, completely tangential to what I was studying — I wasn't really worried about money.
That same spring, I simultaneously got promoted to tutor at $28 an hour. Life was pretty good… until it wasn't. That December, I got into a huge — professional and personal — disagreement with said boss at the tutoring centre. It was related to that email screenshot which a long-time friend of mine had dug up recently — the one I had been dissociating from after all these years.
But long story shortened, I resigned… and then I came back… after six weeks… because I needed money.
[Enter: Early onset quarter-life crisis]
I spent the Autumn of 2018 applying to 20 to 30 different schools for work while finishing up my final unit for my Bachelor's in English Literature from Western Sydney University — my final unit was ‘Bilingualism and Biculturalism’; got a high distinction and I really enjoyed it.
I did eventually get a job as a part-time teacher's aide at a school in Parramatta that winter. Apparently, the hiring manager was really impressed with my photography, interpersonal and graphic design skills — random skills I had picked up and honed from that internship back in the spring of the previous year.
[Did you know: I actually met Emma at this school. We didn’t like each other at first. I guess I grew on her.]
It was still mid-late 2018, and I spent this new spring working at the school while also studying my Master of Teaching (Secondary) degree — I graduated from my Bachelor's in September but had started the Masters in July — no intermission.
By Christmas, however, I discontinued my Master's because the veneer of wanting to be a high school teacher had faded, and I just wanted to "see where life would take me.”
[That disagreement with my boss from early in the year had a lot to do with it].
So, for the first half of 2019, I spent my days and weeks absolutely stacking payslips from the tutoring centre and the Parramatta school. Absolutely loved it. But after six months, I wanted more. And more I got…
[Context: I was also trying to simultaneously distract myself from the end of a best-friendship-turned-situationship which lasted four years, but that’s not important to this narrative].
Around Autumn/Winter of 2019, I spent two to three months applying for 70 to 100 office jobs – think data entry and customer service. Plenty of "your application has been unsuccessful" and "we're sorry to inform you" flooded my inbox until the universe handed me my entrée, main and dessert all in one sitting:
Car Accident June, 2019 | $4,000
On a random Thursday in Liverpool, as I was heading home from job #1 and heading over to job #2, I ended up totalling my dad's car which I was frequently borrowing at the time (and two other cars involved in the accident).
To my shock, my dad had not ticked yes to "any driver under 25" on his car insurance policy because he wanted to save money on the monthly premiums so AAMI refused to cover me. I was fuming — at AAMI, and at my dad.
[In hindsight: I am so glad I didn’t hit a Mercedes-Benz or something like that. I don’t know what I would’ve done.]
However, the week after, I got an email from a 'Sam' at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia. I had scored myself a full-time, permanent job at the, then, new South Eveleigh office — built by Mirvac — as a customer rep, starting in the August of 2019. I sadly parted ways with the Parramatta school and kissed teaching goodbye.
After signing the employment contract with CBA, I bought my first car — the brand new Mazda 3 — on finance, and applied for a credit card under my own name as the primary cardholder of their ‘low-fee gold credit card’. It didn't earn any points, but it did make paying for my own clothes, food, electricity, gas, phone, internet, and fuel (on top of board and car repayments) a little less boring when I got to whip out a gold plastic credit card.
There, I also formed genuine connections with some funny, inspiring, and down-to-earth people, as much as I did also bumped heads with a few weirdos and try-hards. Considering it took half a year worth of job hunting, I had initially planned to stay at CBA for two years — again, to "see where life would take me.” But in true David fashion, I lasted two months (during which training alone took six weeks)
It took three moments to tip me over the edge:
one where where my manager pulled me up for "wasting time" reading the Australian Financial Review while at work — at a bank;
another where I read emails from former students of mine during my lunch break;
and a third where I had to explain to my regional manager why I decided to take an “unapproved” leave to attend a high school graduation — one I had cleared during the job interview.
Those three moments were enough.
I started working on my co-founder pitch to Emma to launch Foci Education — no outside investment, no bank loan. I spent my morning and afternoon train rides working on the operations and systems; polished the branding and taxation/legal documents during lunch breaks. Constantly called Emma using the CBA work telephone which sat on my desk in my final days of off-boarding to look like I was still on the job. She never turned down calls fearing it was the bank calling about her accounts — in my defence, it was the bank ;)
That November of 2019, I handed in my resignation to both The Commonwealth Bank and my boss at the tuition centre. It took us nearly 3 months from signing our partnership agreement to get families in the Berala centre and students in google classrooms.
After launching during the summer bushfires, losing my grandfather, and then eventually hogging the ground during the pandemic, I never once stepped on a plane or a boat, went on a road trip, or set foot in a club or music festival. It was only until 24 months after my business had launched, earned itself its first $100,000 in revenue, that I took my first vacation. That was my solo trip to Singapore in December 2021.
I was 23 years old at the time. The rest is - as they say - history.
My point is: you can find one million and one reasons why your life doesn't look the way you want it to — plenty of complex, socially constructed and biologically determined socio-political-economic reasons to go around. But the truth is this;
the world doesn’t owe you anything -
It doesn’t belong to you
It does, however, belong to the people who are brave, stupid, and reckless enough to try — the ones who keep getting back up, the ones who never shrink themselves to stay rooms that they don’t belong in.
Sincerely,
David Truong
Co-founder | Foci Education
