What do you do when you start feeling like you’re just going through the motions? How do you optimize around your strengths to make the biggest impact? Who are you without your day job?

Heidi Lim has been there, and in this episode, she’s sharing with us what she’s learned. Heidi is a queer Chinese American who grew up in Las Vegas (yes, that Vegas), and was a first gen college student at Harvard, where she studied environmental engineering and policy. It was there that she decided she wanted to pursue work at the nexus of sustainability and business. However, realizing that dream took a whole lot of intentionality. Between Harvard and her career today as a full time environmental technologist, Heidi worked in enterprise software as a product manager. In 2018, she left this cozy job to dedicate time to building the bridge towards working on what she sees as the world's most pressing issue, climate change. After 10 months of self-discovery, which included time living alongside monks in Thailand, she made it happen and became Chief of Staff at Opus 12, a California start-up that has developed a technology to recycle CO2 into valuable chemicals, materials, and fuels. There, she is focused on commercializing the technology, working with companies across many sectors to defossilize their supply chains and spark the move from a fossil-based economy to a CO2-based circular one.

In this episode, we get real about what people don’t tell you about the emotional journey to finding purpose in your work, how to make an outsized impact in your community, and what farming can teach us about playing the career long-game.

More Heidi:

Chasing a Job with Purpose Article

Carbon Removal 101 Article

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Hot & Sour Soup for the Soul: Asian American StoriesBy Hot & Sour Co.Mar 12, 2020