Chapter Eight: Written by Eric Gan

Name: Eric Gan
Age: 26
Ethnicity: Chinese-American
Occupation: Software Engineer
Location: Seattle

Bio: I am a software engineer and a follower of Jesus, always looking for ways to connect my faith with my tech skills to help others.
You can find me at ericgan.com or on Instagram at @ericflips!

 HIT RESET (2020 REVIEW)

If you could rate 2020 out of five stars, how would you rate this year? If you said one-out-of-five, most people would agree with you. We lost Kobe Bryant, Chadwick Boseman, Ravi Zacharias, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. We found ourselves in a global pandemic. Riots, injustice, and unrest flooded many city streets with little resolution. Restaurants, hotels, and small businesses are struggling to survive with little relief under governmental shutdowns.

The list goes on, and everyone was affected by the pandemic in some way. My trip to visit my sick grandfather was cancelled by the pandemic, and he passed away a month later. My vibrant social life — weekly volleyball league games, dinners and late night with friends, volunteering at a food shelter — crumbled before my eyes as everything was cancelled and businesses closed. I found myself, an extrovert, staying at home under the lockdown orders, feeling lonely and bored, weighing on my mental health.

If I focus only on the negative, the list can be endless. I will always find a way to victimize myself and perpetuate my sense of despair. While I could not control the circumstances around me, I realized that I can control how I respond, that I can try my best to win a bad hand dealt to me. Thus, this year was the season where I hit the refresh button: I created a new five-year goal, started a new real estate business, and scaled up a project for a faith-based start-up.

How did I get to where I am today? In the beginning of the year, I had five different commitments: leading small-group at church, leading worship at church, leading a faith-based volunteer start-up called BasilTech, leading a team for a volleyball league, and starting an initiative at church for homeless outreach. My days were full and exhausting, yet fulfilling and meaningful; however, I felt empty and lost. I was looking through a camera that was focusing on five different objects, and all I saw was a blurry picture of where I was heading. I was going too fast and trying to do too much, and then the pandemic hit.

When COVID first hit and the lockdowns started, I was more annoyed than scared. My tempo has stalled, my many commitments vanished, and I lost motivation to do anything. Adjusting to the pandemic lockdown lifestyle was hard, and I often would wallow in my self-deprecating thoughts of loneliness. In the first three months of the pandemic, I lost my grandfather, got rejected by a woman I was pursuing, and struggled to fill my emotional and social needs. I prayed to God, what season are You putting me through? How can I thrive, not just survive, during this pandemic? Not long after I prayed this prayer did I feel God answer: Preparation. This is the season of preparation. And that’s where it clicked: time was what I gained. The pandemic bought me time to reorder my priorities and slowed down time in my life to focus on new goals. It was a reset button.

And so time was the resource I gained, and I now could invest it. Not too long after did I begin leveraging my time to look into real estate investing — talking with friends about buying new properties, reading books on remodeling houses, cramming the real estate course material to obtain a license, learning about different strategies to build wealth through real estate. It became my new quarantine hobby, eclipsing my frustrations over the quarantine lifestyle. I was gaining momentum again, complaining less about the pandemic and sharing more with others about my newfound interest.

But it didn’t stop there. The momentum continued during a late August BasilTech retreat in Portland. The BasilTech leaders from San Francisco drove up to Portland for a project with 1MillionHome, a non-profit whose mission is to reunite one million displaced orphans with their biological parents. While I didn’t participate in their design sprint, I met up with them during the weekend to bond, to hang out, and to talk about how BasilTech is doing in Seattle. It was during that retreat when I realized: BasilTech is what I want to do for the rest of my life. I want to use my gifts and talents to build the kingdom of God. I want to use my tech skills to assist non-profits like 1MillionHome to hit their goals. So much tech talent gets wooed by large tech corporations offering large compensation packages, which leaves the non-profit and humanitarian organizations little knowledge on tech. After sharing this vision with the BasilTech leadership team, they prayed over me and anointed me. I then drafted a five-year plan to volunteer for BasilTech full-time, which includes making enough passive income through real-estate investing to fund my own salary.

Preparation. That’s the season God placed me. 2020 was a hard year, yet I was not the only one affected by the pandemic lockdowns. I do not have control over my external circumstances, but through prayer to God, persistence in finding a solution, and support from amazing friends, I found a path that allowed me to not just survive, but thrive in a pandemic.