The $45K Wake-Up Call That Changed My Career

I was 24 years old, working at the NBA in New York City, making $45,000 a year.

Sounds glamorous from the outside. The NBA. New York. I remember telling people at parties what I did and watching their faces light up. “That’s so cool,” they’d say. And I’d smile and nod while silently calculating whether I could afford both dinner and the subway ride home.

$45K in Manhattan doesn’t go far. My rent was $1,400 for a bedroom I could barely fit a full-size bed in. After taxes, health insurance, and student loan payments, I had maybe $200 left each month for everything else. Food, transportation, any semblance of a social life.

I was surviving. Barely.

The “Dream Job” Problem

The NBA hired smart, hungry people and paid them below market because the brand itself was supposed to be the compensation. And for a while, it was. I was 24, working for one of the most recognizable brands in sports. My LinkedIn looked incredible.

But inside the office, reality was different. Politics ran thick. Decisions moved slowly. I was doing data analysis work that I found mind-numbing. Not because the work was beneath me, but because it wasn’t aligned with what I was actually good at or interested in.

I’d stay late, not because I was passionate about the work, but because I wanted to be seen as a hard worker. Classic early-career mistake. Optimizing for perception instead of growth.

One day I came home, dropped my bag on the floor, and sat on the edge of my bed staring at the wall for a while. I remember thinking: if this is the dream, why does it feel like this?

My Uncle’s Exercise

I called my uncle, who’d built and sold two businesses by his mid-40s. He didn’t give me a pep talk. He didn’t tell me to be grateful or to “pay my dues.” He gave me an exercise.

“Get a piece of paper,” he said. “Draw two columns. On the left, write WHAT. On the right, write WHY.”

Then he told me to list five things I wanted in my next job. Not generic stuff like “good salary” or “work-life balance.” Specific qualities. And for each one, I had to explain why that quality mattered to me.

I sat with this for a week. Came back with my list.

One line stood out to me more than the others. Under WHAT, I’d written: “A role that combines data and creativity.” Under WHY: “Because data without storytelling is boring, and creativity without data is guesswork. I want both.”

That was the moment I realized I didn’t want to be a data analyst. I wanted to be in marketing.

How Clarity Changed Everything

Once I knew what I actually wanted, my behavior changed overnight.

I stopped networking randomly. I started reaching out specifically to people in marketing leadership. I attended marketing events, not sports industry events. I changed my LinkedIn headline. I rewrote my resume to emphasize the marketing-adjacent work I’d done at the NBA, not the data analysis.

I also developed what I later called the PCSB framework for how I talked about my experience in interviews and networking conversations: Problem, Cause, Solution, Benefit.

Instead of saying “I did data analysis at the NBA,” I’d say: “The NBA’s partnership team was losing renewal deals because they couldn’t demonstrate ROI to sponsors. The problem was that no one was connecting viewership data to sponsorship outcomes. I built a dashboard that mapped sponsor exposure to audience engagement metrics, which helped the team close $2.3M in renewals.”

Same experience. Completely different framing.

Within a few months, I’d connected with someone who knew someone at CBS Interactive. Six weeks later, I had an offer for SVP of Marketing. The title was a stretch. The pay was a massive jump. And the work was exactly what I’d written on that piece of paper.

The Content Chapter

I stayed in corporate for years after that. CBS, then Lucid Software, where I lead business development now. Each role paid more and taught me more. But the itch to build something of my own never went away.

In August 2022, I started posting one TikTok per day about communication skills. I figured if I was coaching my teams on how to present, pitch, and speak clearly, maybe other people would find that useful too.

Year one was slow. I posted consistently for months and had about 3,000 followers to show for it. Most videos got a few hundred views. It felt like shouting into an empty room.

Then one video hit 3 million views. A straightforward breakdown of how to organize your thoughts on the spot. Nothing gimmicky about it. The algorithm just decided to push it, and suddenly I had 50,000 new followers in a week.

That single video changed the trajectory of everything. Within the next year, I grew to 396,000 on TikTok and 283,000 on Instagram. I launched a coaching program. Revenue started flowing in.

But none of that would have happened if I’d stayed in the $45K job, telling myself the brand name was enough.

What I’d Tell My 24-Year-Old Self

Stop optimizing for how your career looks to other people. Optimize for alignment between what you’re good at, what energizes you, and what the market values.

Do the two-column exercise. Be specific. “I want a marketing role that combines data and creativity at a media or tech company” is useful. “I want a good job” is worthless.

Talk about your experience in terms of problems you solved, not tasks you completed. Nobody cares that you “managed a database.” They care that you “built a system that helped close $2.3M in renewals.”

And stop waiting for the perfect moment. I spent months at the NBA knowing I needed to leave but telling myself “after this project” or “after this review cycle.” The pain of staying stuck always hurts more than the pain of making a change. I just couldn’t see it at the time.

The $45K wasn’t the problem. The lack of clarity was. Once I got clear on what I wanted and why, everything else followed.

Preston