Choose an “Outside the Box” Career on Career Talks with Sawan Kumar

Most people choose careers the same way — pick what pays well after graduation, follow what their parents did, or copy whatever their friends are doing. I did none of those things. When I built my career as an AI consultant and business automation trainer in Dubai, most people I spoke to had never used a tool like GoHighLevel, let alone considered it a profession. Friends questioned it. Family wondered when I would get a ‘real job.’ That moment of doubt — I see it now in almost every person I meet at Career Talks events — is exactly where the right decision and the easy decision part ways.An ‘outside the box’ career is not simply about doing something unusual. It is about identifying a real skill gap in the market, building expertise around it before the crowd arrives, and packaging that expertise into something people will pay for. In my case, that meant learning AI tools deeply, training real estate agencies and businesses in Dubai to use them, and eventually creating courses that let me scale that knowledge to thousands of students on sawankr.com. The path was not obvious at the start — but the logic behind it was always practical.The single biggest thing I see holding people back is waiting for permission. They wait for a university to validate the skill, for an employer to recognize it, for the market to fully mature before they step in. By the time a market matures, early movers have locked in their positioning. I started teaching GoHighLevel when fewer than 200 instructors existed across the entire platform. That timing was not luck — it was a deliberate choice to move before the opportunity became obvious to everyone else.One of my clients — a real estate agent in Dubai who had been in the industry for six years — came to me completely stuck. She was generating leads the old way: cold calls, property portals, word of mouth. Within three months of learning GoHighLevel automations and AI-generated content for her listings, her lead response time dropped from 12 hours to under 4 minutes, and she closed two additional deals that quarter she directly attributed to the follow-up sequences we built together. That is what an outside-the-box skill set looks like in practice: not theory, not potential — measurable results.If you are reconsidering your career path, the Career Talks episode where I share my own journey covers the honest version — the early months without income certainty, finding the first paying clients, and what it actually takes to build authority in a field without a clearly defined career ladder. The framework I use: choose a skill with growing demand, build proof before building an audience, and price your expertise based on the result you deliver, not the hours you work.