today on beyond six seconds,

telling my mom that, like, Hey, I'm not gonna take this job Offer was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do just because there was so much built up, basically like this is the dream job. This is literally the blueprint of what you're supposed to do upon graduation of college on, especially in like an immigrant's eyes. It's what you want your son to do.

Welcome to Beyond Six Seconds, The podcast pickles beyond the six second first impression to share the extraordinary stories and achievements of everyday people. I'm your host, Caroline Keel. On today's episode, I'm speaking with Justin Win, the CEO of ghetto grind up and co host of the young and Dumb podcast, with dumb standing for dedicated up and coming motivated and bold. He's a 22 year old who thinks in order to find out who you truly are, you have to try as many things as possible until you find the one that sticks. Justin is also one of the University of Central Florida's campus editors and creates content on LinkedIn last month is content had over 65,000 views. Justin, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you for having me. I'm excited.

Yeah, I'm really happy to have you here today. You know, I'd love to go back to the beginning. As I would say, you had a really interesting childhood, and I would love to learn a little bit more about you know how the experience that you had when you were growing up impacted the ah type of work and career that you chose for yourself and the type of projects that you're working on now.

Yeah, of course. So both my parents are Vietnamese refugees. So they came over from Vietnam to the U. S. Or around when they were, like, 10 or 11 years old. And it was after the Vietnam War. And their story of how they got here is simply amazing. But long story short, my mother's side. Basically, they were living very lavishly in Vietnam. My grandfather, it was a teacher over there, and they had a beautiful life.

But they decided that living in Vietnam wasn't a trajectory that they wanted to live. So my grandfather tried to escape, I believe three times and he got caught three times and you sent to jail each time before finally decided to split up the family, which I think when they came over there was eight of them and he split him into two groups of four. Came over. No food, no water. And they somehow more actually found each other. The two groups in the U. S. And ultimately raised the family. My grandfather went to college, graduated college in two years without knowing any English with an engineering degree. And he actually has a patent for one of the first, like computer fans of all time. Cool.

So Mother Side Crazy Dad's side is even crazier. They kind of lived off of the land in Vietnam. When they came over, they just took their boat and decided to come over. The story goes that there we ran out of food, ran out of water, didn't really know where they're going, and they were pushed to shore by killer whales and dolphins. Oh, so how they got over here and gave me all that literally coming over here with nothing and given me the life that I lived was crazy, and I didn't really appreciate it until I got to college. But growing up I grew up in a very traditional Asian household. I was really pushing down three careers. It was be a doctor being engineer or be a lawyer. Anything else and you're considered quote unquote kind of like a failure. And you needed to succeed academically because as an immigrant,

that's seen as your quote unquote way out. And that's kind of the pressures that I grew up with. And it wasn't until I reached college again when I had this realization of like, Oh, there's more to life than these three pillars of success Basically,

Wow. So your family, as you said, really came here with nothing and found incredible success through hard work and education, and you were actually able to find your way, which is incredible to be ableto open up your own pathways and find the way that was really right for you. How did you do that? Like, how did you break with the tradition?

Yeah, it was tough. It was definitely tough, but I'd always been that kid that wanted to try something new, like I'd always wanted to start a business growing up, but my parents never really allowed me, so I guess my way when I was younger to kind of break against the mold. So to say was by playing sports. And I love playing soccer, and I just happen to be really good at it. And I was spending probably like 30 to 40 hours a week playing soccer, whether it's practice after school, 2 to 4 games every weekend, et cetera. So I guess sports was kind of my outlet doesn't like my gateway into the non traditional path to success, so to say. But when I got to college,

I was an athletic training major my freshman year, and my roommate happened to be a business major, and we both played this game. This video game called FIFA and FIFA, is basically the video game of soccer. And on this video game there's this game mode called Ultimate Team and Ultimate Team is where you basically picked your favorite players and you create a team. But the only way that you can get these players that you wanted to is if you had the amount of coins and the way that you could get these coins as a similar way that you could get money on the stock market by trading So what I would do is I would buy players that were lower than the price. They're average price and sell it for either average or above price. And through that I would accumulate coins over time. And my roommate saw that I accumulated over a 1,000,000 coins within three months. And he was like, Dude used to look into, like, finance and economics. This is like What you're doing in this video game is what people do in real life, and they make a crap ton of money and to put into perspective,

like I didn't even know what finance was. I didn't know what stock market was. I didn't know any of these terms that my friend was telling me, but I knew how to make coins in this video game and, like how to identify patterns and stuff like that. When I started to research into finance, I realized it was the same exact thing, but with real money and again when I went to go tell my mom and my dad like, Oh, I'm thinking about changing it to finance. They didn't even understand how much money was in finance. They thought that if I changed it to a finance major. I would be broke. And I was like, Wait, wait,

wait. If you do research, most of the richest people in the world are in finance or real estate. But they just didn't know that again because in their mind set of the way that they have been raised in the way that they've brought up in the US it's like the only way that you can succeed and make a lot of money is by being a doctor, a lawyer or an engineer, right? So when I said finance, it didn't even make sense in

their mind. I say. So where did you go from there? Did you wind up pursuing finance or convincing your parents that there was potentially a good career in finance

GS? So it took a lot of convincing, and ultimately I just kind of went with my own cell phones, like, Okay, I'm gonna do this whole finance thing, but I tribute a Thanh of this motivation to Gary Vaynerchuk. I'm not sure if you're familiar with his work, but he like he truly opened up my eyes to like entrepreneurship and owning a business because I didn't know any of it existed before probably the end of my freshman into going into my sophomore year. So I changed my major going into my sophomore year when I transferred to UCF. And then I just graduated in December with my degree in finance, and I got job offers doing consulting with, like, the Big Four accounting firms. But I ultimately turned it all down because I wanted to pursue my own thing, which is get your grind up and then grow in the podcast

young and dumb. Wow. Yeah, it's amazing all of the different types of careers and really all the kinds of opportunities and different things that you can do in the world. And I think a lot of us come in with preconceived notions about what a good career should be back. And when. I was younger in the eighties, like you know, there till you should be a business major work on the stock market. You make all this money and you retire when you're 30 and you know, and so I think we all hear these things, depending on the perspectives of our families and friends. But it's a much bigger world out there and now you can find people online like Gary V and others who talk about entrepreneurship or other types of careers and jobs and work that some of us, you know, we never learn about when we're in school. So I think that's awesome that you were able to discover that in college and in the time that you were in school, really make that pivot and make that really also pretty bold and courageous decision to turn down a big for a job offer to go out on your own. You're really staying true to what you want to dio.

Yeah, trust me, it was tough on Dhe, probably telling my mom that, like, Hey, I'm not gonna take this job Offer was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do just because there was so much built up, basically like this is the dream job. This is literally the blueprint of what you're supposed to do upon graduation of college on, especially in like an immigrant's eyes. It's what you want your son to do, and for me to say no to that, I saw it in my mom's eyes. It wasn't failure. It wasn't despair but it was like, Okay, he's not doing it.

He's really not doing it. It was a little bit of a shock, but ultimately it was great. Like I think I made the right decision. And right now we're starting to move towards the right tracks of like what we really want to do, how we're gonna monetize everything and actually making it and come from everything. So it's looking up from here.

Wow, that's great. So, yes, so tell me more about your business is so you've got the young and dumb podcast and you've got get so grind up. So are those two related to each other? Are they kind of stand alone businesses?

Yes. So they're both related to each other. So if we take a step back instead of, like, my huge mission in general, my life mission Right now it's basically to help students who are in my same position of being in college and not necessarily knowing what they want to do. But at the same time, they're being told by either their parents, their friends, their family, friends, etcetera of what they're supposed to do. And I've always felt that pressure of like Oh, I should be a doctor. Oh, I should be a lawyer on when I talked to the friends. They have similar experiences.

So I've always wanted to figure out a way to help people along their journey, whether it's going down the traditional path of going to school, getting a degree, how to get good grades, how to get internships, et cetera. Or, if it's going down the non traditional path of being like an entrepreneur and EA sports gamer an influencer. So that's where you get your grind up and young and dumb kind of came out of, which was get your kind of focus is more on the traditional path to success. So we have a lot of my linking content is like how to get good internships, how to study, How to ace Those finals, how to get a job upon graduation, whereas young and dumb focuses on the nontraditional past, which is like we get to interview influencers with tens of millions of followers, startup CEOs who have raised a $1,000,000 in funding and professionally sports games. You get hey to play video games, so what we're trying to basically uncover is the blueprint to success, whether you're going down the traditional path or whether you're going down the non traditional path.

Wow, that's really cool. So for both of those, but imagine, it's a lot of content. Creation is ghetto grind up mainly written content, or is a community where people contribute. What does that look like?

Yes, so get your grind up is an overarching community, which myself and my co host, Gary, as well as my girlfriend, Michelle, are kind of running and curating content for Ah, we do produce a lot of native content of us either talking on video or me producing like Lincoln content as well as we have curated content where we're having, we have, like, a community blawg. So get your grind up. On medium is a community block where we asked people to submit articles about their success of getting interested or their success of climbing the corporate ladder, etcetera. So other people can hear people who have actually done it because we can talk to like the student aspect of it, because we've succeeded on the student side. But in terms of people who are 567 years into their business career or there work life. We don't have that experience that we don't want to speak on something that we don't necessarily know. So we leverage other people's credibility through our community. That

way you've kind of got the A zoo, said the traditional career paths through Get You Grind up. And then the podcast really features people who are blazing their own paths. I guess you could say so for your pop test. How do you find and select the people that you interview for your episodes?

So at the beginning, it was basically just friends, friends and family that we knew that we're kind of doing their own thing. And we're just basically hitting up a cz many people as possible because we wanted to create more content. But as we got more structured, I would say after about episode, like 40 or 50 we started utilizing the power of social media. So besides referrals that we get of other people that were on our show previously, we would use social media, specifically instagram and Twitter to kind of see like who's on the Forbes 30 under 30 whose interacting with Gary V's content that we when we click on their profile. They're doing great things. Who's interacting with Luis? House was interacting with Seth coated etcetera. So basically, my girlfriend handles a lot of it in terms of sending out D EMS, receiving Diem's back and then ultimately scheduling interviews. But the process is basically looking at the successful people was successful young people that we know and then looking at, who's engaging with their content, and they're reaching out to them and seeing if they would like to come onto the show.

That's cool. And do you find that reaching out to entrepreneurs and people who are like under 30 under 30 list? Is it the way that your most successful through like D. M ing on social media, or do you use other types of communications to get in touch with them?

So we use email as well, but I think our best way to communicate with people has been with D EMS through instagram, unless they don't create a lot of content. But instagram tends to be the number one place that people are spending the most time on, so if they're spending the most time on it, the chances of them seeing that little red number one notification of the top right hand corner is higher. So that's how we get some of their answers from our Diem's.

That's interesting, you know, for just a as an aside, because I find Instagram being a really great channel. I mean, even for my podcast, which I wouldn't have thought because I wasn't sure how an audio medium would play in such a visual social media platform. But it really does if you're creative and you can add that a visual content. But I always wondered with the d M ing, if you're not connected to someone, I know sometimes it goes into that, like sort of secondary message folder. So and it doesn't always light up is one. And it's great to hear that you have that success reaching people that way. So I'm gonna keep doing that for trying to get searching Cassis. And, uh, I think it's really

cool. Yeah, if a person is like mainly using instagram and they don't have to do too many followers would definitely suggest using D EMS or another unique way to do it is by commenting on their stories. Eso if you comment on their stories, they tend to respond a little bit better. That's probably your best bet. Or the last tip, I guess, would be reaching out to people on the social media that they used the least in terms of, like, the least amount of followers that they have. So it might take them a little longer to see the message, because they are on it as much, but and you might have the best way to reach them. Bye, D m. You know, maybe they have less followers on Twitter. Or maybe they have not that many connections on leaned in or something. That's another way that you can

go about it. Oh, wow. Oh, that's great advice. All right, I'm gonna file that away for later. Cool. Thank you. Perfect. So get your grind up and the young and dumb podcast, those air your major businesses that you're working on now, is that correct?

Yes. So those were the two, like content. Focus. Business is basically, but the problem is not much money really comes from. It s so we've been really struggling to figure out like how we do. We monetize everything. How does this all come together? And we had a little test event last month where we basically got a keynote speaker as well as a guest panel of four people and then wanted to see how many students would be willing to show up to this and over 100 students signed up and over 80 students showed up, and we're like, Okay, this is a thing. So now we're looking toe host a huge event next year, and I can't speak to too much on it. But basically think of an interactive career fair where you congrats, jobs like there's gonna be good cos I come in to offer jobs.

But instead of the traditional sense of OK, here's my resume on hopeful. You give me a call in like, two or three weeks, it's gonna be more engaging in that you can go to these boots for resume workshops you can go to. For instance, aerospace is big in central Florida, so we would have, like NASA, come in, and they would have like a V. Our setup, where you could see the culture basically of working at NASA by interacting with the engineers that work there as well is testing some of the things that they're actually working on at NASA. So it's gonna be more fun for off the students as well as the recruiters that air there and then also having like a Kino section. So it's not just again a boring career fair where students are just hoping to maybe get a job. There's some other value to it.

Wow, that's really awesome. And this is something that you'd host on campus

s. So we're looking at locations. It would either be on campus or it would be at one of the many resorts in Central Florida.

That's great. Especially now. I think it's so important for colleges universities to really help students think through their careers. And it sounds like the events and the content that you're creating is really gonna be able to help the students, you know, not just go to Ah, you know the traditional career fair where you walk around to the tables and hand your resume and hope you hear back, but just something really interactive that piques their curiosity and really encourages them to learn and be immersed and aware of all these different types of careers that are out there. So that's really exciting

Yeah, and I think like it works really well with my generation because we're a generation that, yes, you can tell us everything under the sun. But if you don't show us it, it's very hard for us to believe it. And especially with, like, company culture, every company's says. Oh, we have great company culture. Come over here. We're great to Millennials and Jen's ese, But the thing is, they never really show us that, or they tell us to go,

go watch our video online. But a lot of us can see through that, and we can see like, Oh, they're just acting for the camera. Or there's putting these toe check a box off the checklist, basically. So when they actually come in and like, for instance, again, defense is a big industry in Central Florida, and defense has a bad reputation of being like this boring industry, where you're just sitting there and just answering phone calls and trying to make the next deal, et cetera. Let's just say your big defense company and you come to the showcase and you have this really engaging, an interactive like workshop in the back corner of this career,

fair where you students can put on like a V r headset and see. Oh, this is the missiles that were working on. Or uh oh, this is the spaceship that is coming from this company and they can interact with it. It would be really cool for that student, too, to see it, to feel it and to really experience it more than watching it on a video at 10 o'clock at night if they go and do that. So it helps the company aspect of like showing them what our generation wants, as well as helping the students side of it, too, of like, Okay, this is way more engaging than just walking around 2 50 other companies and hoping that I can get a job offer from

Yeah, definitely. Yeah, I think a lot of companies, as you said, they're trying to say all the right things about being great for millennials and great places to work. But again, how do you define that? Does that just mean you have, like, free snacks in a ping pong table? Or like, does it mean that you offer meaningful work where people can really feel like they're making a difference? Absolutely. Wow. So in the time that you've been working on get you grind up and the young and dumb podcast, what kind of feedback have you received from either your listeners or your readers? And are there any kind of meaningful either pieces of feedback or anything like that That stick in your mind?

Yeah. Number one that pops up is one of the first D EMS that we got. I forget who sent it, but it went along the lines of like, Do you guys need to keep creating this content? Because what you guys did motivated me to, like, study for this exam. And I got an A on the exam. And when I saw that, I was like, That's crazy, like I'm just producing like, we're just producing a video on the Internet and the fact that we could motivate someone to not only study for an exam but for them to use the tips that we do and then they got an A on the exam and which is way better than what they've previously got in on other exams is crazy. Because when I look back on like my parents growing up even if they had this passion that they wanted to pursue, it was really hard for them to ever do it and get their voice or their message out to hundreds, if not thousands,

if not millions of people. And we can do that just through the Internet with the cell phone that we have. So when I saw that, I was like, Wow, this is crazy! And the other day I got a message from someone from Australia. So from the US to Australia, that's a whole day of flight travel, and the fact that we're reaching people on the literally the other side of the planet is crazy.

Yeah, it's amazing how technology has made the world so much smaller. And really, I would dare say almost everybody now can have a voice and put their message out and be seen by a much wider audience than ever before. It. It really is incredible, and it's great that you're able to also see that impact that you're having on people through that feedback loop of people telling you because they saw your content that they were motivated to study for an exam and get an A on it and you're really make a difference for people.

Yeah, thank you. Yeah, it's amazing. Honestly, whether it's reviews for the podcast, whether it's people sending a screenshot stuff there, I'm listening to the episode or sending us Diem's of like, Oh, this tip. Help me do this or this mindset Help me do this in school, et cetera. It touches my heart every time we get a d. M. So for anyone who's out there listening like if you do see her content and you do engage with us, we always answer back. And it's always us who answers, whether it's myself, Gary or Michelle, and it really makes our day whenever

we see it. That's awesome. And I just going back to young and dumb protest and get your grind up. How did you build your audience for that? What was that experience? Lee.

It was tough again. I have no marking experience. Prior to this, it was basically watching Gary Vaynerchuk videos, googling all the terms that I didn't understand whether he was talking d ROC was talking or anything other than that, and then just learning about different marketers from there. So I learned about Neil Patel's That's going in et cetera. And then I started diving into their work and seeing what they do and kind of molded my own, are our own, like content strategy from it. So right now basically will take the podcast and will produce Michael content from it. Probably 2 to 3 pieces of micro content, a quote piece 8th 10 to 1 minute clip that we can put on our instagram story or posted on instagram or posted to lengthen and just gear it towards whichever platform that we're doing it on. So instagram, obviously you have to make it really aesthetically pleasing. So we found a way to the mold our our logo into the background of one of our posts. So we have that as well as caption on the bottom and a picture of whoever our guest is for that week.

And then on LinkedIn, you have to give it towards the business so you can use that same clip that you used on Instagram. But just gear the message towards, like, business and professional career, and it'll work

that way. Oh, yeah. I mean, that makes a lot of sense to tailor your content and tweak it slightly for the different social media platforms because your audience on each platform probably is slightly different or is just interested in different types of topics. So, yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

Yeah, and it takes a ton of time. Create content I didn't realize, like how much time it takes to create content, but it tastes ho much time. And I give so much more respect to, like, YouTubers and, like twitch gamers et cetera, for the time. And after that, they do put into all this stuff that they create because I used to think like, Oh, I could do that. I could create a 5 to 10 minute video like once or twice a week, and it would be so easy. When you realize that there's 10 toe hundreds of hours that go into that 5 to 10 minute video, you'll respect them a lot more, and you'll realize, like how much it takes to actually succeed at the level of some of these huge YouTubers

and stuff. Oh, yeah, absolutely, definitely agree with that. How long have you been doing your podcast? And they get to grind up community

so they get your gram community probably started. It started off as a joke, I would say about two years ago. So the backstory behind the name of that was, since I'm Asian, kind of like stereotypes that I grew up with was like, You're just naturally good at school. You should just be guaranteed a CZ. And it's not a bad stereotype toe have, um, in no way shape or form complaining about it. But like when I was getting good grades and getting good internships of, some of my friends would jokingly say, like, Oh, you're just getting it because you're Asian, right?

Ha ha, That's funny. So on my Snapchat story, my instagram story, I would put like, Oh, just got off of work at 11 p.m. Gonna go home and study, get your grind up on then. So my friends started to like it. They liked a little bit of banter that I threw into it. So my girlfriend was like, Hey, you should change it from your choe so that it's something a little bit different and it rolls off the tongue a little bit better. So that's how you get your grind. It kind of started, so I think officially, it probably started about a year and 1/2 ago, and the podcast started maybe three or four months after that. So about a year, year and 1/2 a swell Ah,

very cool. What are your goals? Long term for your podcast end for Get your grind up.

Yeah, we really want to impact the education system, the education of systems not necessarily broken. But we don't think that it's focusing in on the right aspects of like career development because obviously times are moving so quickly and the education system was built way, way, way back when when technology wasn't really a thing. So obviously, if you try to change anything in education system, you have to work with the government, and that takes a ton of time and you need a lot of reputation. And as to 22 year old and a 1 21 year old, we don't have much reputation to give right now. So we're slowly building it with the movement as well as the podcast. And then that's why we wanted to start the event, too, because if we can show that 500 students 1000 students want to attend this event that gives us some credibility of like, Oh, these guys actually mean some business

to it? Oh, yeah, that's really cool. Yeah, I, um, definitely see the opportunity for you to impact education and even career development and career education and helping students ah, find their way into meaningful careers. That's really exciting. How can people get in touch with you if they want to learn more about the young and dumb podcast? Maybe take a listen and subscribe or if they want to Ah, read more on the get to grind up community.

Yeah, the best place to find us is on social media, so Atget show grind up. So that's a G e t c h o g r i N D u p on instagram twitter, Facebook. And if you want to connect with myself on Lincoln, since I do produce a lot of content, I'm really active on Lincoln. Just look up, Justin win. Last name is N G. You. Why e n and I'm the guy who has a photo with a big head and a microphone in it, So just connect with that Asian guy and just tell me that this podcast sent you and I would love to have

a conversation with a fantastic wonderful, and I'll put all of that contact information in the show. Notes of people confined it there, too.

Yeah, most definitely. And if you want to listen to the podcast, the links will be at the Get your grind up instagram page. But as well as you can look us up on any podcast platform just young and dumb. But dumb is an acronym, so d dot you dot m dot be

perfect. Thanks, Justin. I really appreciate you being on my show today and sharing your story and all of the great work you're doing to help educate and give guidance to students as they're starting out in their careers. As we close out, Is there anything else that you'd like our listeners to know or anything else that they can help or support you with?

Honestly, just interact with our content if you happen to follow us on. Any platform led us to know that this podcast sent you and then let us know how we were doing to. We love feedback. Whether it's good, bad, the ugly, we just want to know what we're doing, and we want to hear it. So whatever you guys want to and last but not least, just keep trying things. I wouldn't be here right now talking on this podcast if I didn't try things. So if you feel stuck out there, you have the Internet. Figure out a way to use it to try more things. And I'm sure you'll find whatever it is that you do love to do. You can find a way to make a living from

it. Great advice. Thanks again, Justin. Thank you. Thanks for listening to beyond six seconds. Please help us spread the word about this podcast. Share it with the friend. Give us a shout out on your social media or write a review on apple podcasts or your favorite podcast player.