Shereen Kassam has built two careers in parallel - She works as a Marketing Manager at Disney, and has also built up a career as a standup comedian. As a comedian, she routinely performs in the US and internationally, has worked with comedians such as Arsenio Hall and Myq Kaplan, and was named as one of Orlando Business Journal's 40 under 40 in 2021. Most recently, Shereen gave her own TEDx talk titled "Chicken Wings Made Me Unstoppable". 

In this discussion, Shereen talks about:

• How she juggled two jobs - her full time job and comedy
• Tradeoffs she made and how she had to constantly remind herself what was important to her
• Managing her ego
• Her tips for those who might be trying to manage a full time job and a side business
• The idea behind her TEDx talk
• Her tips for those who might want to give their own TEDx talk one day

An excerpt from the discussion:

"I do have this push and pull at work with my ego per se because on the one hand, we're educated, we're ambitious, we want to make it to the top, we want be promoted. But then I have to step back and say - but if you do all that, then will you have time to invest in all these other passion projects that you have? I always tell myself, No, I want time to spend on my passion projects. But then when I see people at work getting promoted, I think “that could have been me”. And that's where I kind of have to really step back a lot of times and ask myself - where do I really want to be in my life?"

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Resource corner

Curious about how levels and comp vary across companies in Tech, for various functions? Levels.fyi is a great tool that gives you a rough range for how levels in one company map to others, and how the comp varies.