I Quit a Six Figure Job on Wall Street for a Striptease and I'm Quiet

As the son of immigrant parents, I was constantly reminded to work hard and do well to succeed in life.

My goal was always to get into the best university and get the best job. Otherwise I will be considered a failure.

My sister and I participated in a tutoring program, piano lessons, and numerous extracurricular activities. All because I was taught that hard work was the key to success in life.

So I did what I was told and truly believed that if I got a well-paying job, I would be successful and my life would be rainbows and sprinkles.

I attended Cornell University and spent over four years earning my bachelor's and master's degrees in mechanical engineering.

After graduating in 2007, he landed a job as a mechanical engineer in New York City, earning $65,000 a year. I thought he was successful.

I didn't.

Work was boring and miserable. I was at a construction site climbing ladders and measuring heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) equipment.

At the office, I was repeating the same calculations and reports. On days when I had less work, I was expected to look busy or look for work to do, which to me was ridiculous.

Looking at senior managers in their 40s and 50s, I thought it would be impossible for me to do this for the rest of my life.

Luckily, I was also able to find a part-time job at a local men's strip club on the weekends, which added a little more excitement to my life and gave me a break from my normal 9-to-5 life. is completed.

At the same time, my college friends on Wall Street were making a lot more money than I was, so I thought if I was going to be miserable all day, I might as well get paid more and be miserable.

So I quit my engineering job, went to business school at New York University, and managed to find a job on Wall Street that paid $150,000 a year. Once I graduated, I thought I had passed the exam.

I didn't.

My job was to analyze data to help traders and executives make better financial and trading decisions.

Reusing the same code and creating similar reports for different datasets quickly became repetitive. I knew I wanted to do something different with my life, but I didn't know what or how.

All this time I was moonlighting as a male stripper on weekends. Because that was the only thing I was looking forward to. It was easy money to make, a great way to meet new people, and there was an entrepreneurial spirit to it that I admired.

I was thinking of starting my own male striptease business, but I was too scared of failure to try. But of all the different jobs and career paths I've had, I was more passionate about stripping than anything else.

Male stripping has opened doors for me that no other industry has. As an introvert, I was able to return to my normal life during the week, while still being able to express myself and take on a different persona on the weekends.

It opened my eyes to business opportunities I didn't know existed. Over the years, I have helped male strip club owners grow their companies horizontally by expanding into different cities and vertically by expanding into different entertainment categories such as drag queens and burlesque shows. I have seen it grow in this direction.

I quickly realized that as a salaried employee working in the financial industry, this kind of growth was not available to me.

In the financial industry, the path to professional growth is filled with bureaucracy and red tape. Although I was able to work very hard throughout the year, external factors such as unfavorable market conditions, poor performance in other departments, and high expenses due to poor management decisions could prevent me from getting promoted. .

Simply put, there were too many factors out of my control for me to grow, but more importantly, I simply didn't enjoy my job.

Becoming a part-time entrepreneur put my future in my own hands, which is more important than a six-figure salary from Wall Street.

My successes and failures will be directly related to my own personal performance. There are still forces outside of my control, but I am much better able to cope with them on my path to professional and personal growth.

During the coronavirus outbreak, I had a falling out with my male stripper employer and made the difficult decision to quit and start my own male revue, Exotic Men.

Working from home has allowed me to focus more time and energy on male striptease. I had no idea what I was doing and always thought I would fail.

I went into a depression and spent days, weeks, and months trying everything to see what would help sell tickets and what wouldn't.

At some point, I realized that my brain had been conditioned to treat failure as something negative. Throughout my school days and career, failure meant redoing a class, not getting a job, or being fired. Failure had to be avoided at all costs.

However, once I started my business, I realized that I had to think differently. Failure was good because I got feedback on what worked and what didn't. I had to try different things, learn from my mistakes, and grow from those experiences. Our goal was to sell more tickets, and we knew the only way to fail was to give up.

We launched the Exotique Men website in January 2021, and for the first two years we had zero ticket sales. Everything I've done has failed. I was mentally distraught, but I couldn't give up because I had already put so much time and energy into it.

During 2023, we launched our first show. The show started out small and broke even financially, sometimes even making a small profit. These small victories kept me going. Because for the first time, I could see the light at the end of the tunnel. After two years of trial and error, it finally started to take shape.

This is when I began to understand the power of manifestation. As someone with a technical background, when I first heard about manifesto, I thought it was just an excuse for lazy people to get rich without doing any work.

But I realized that realization means always thinking about who you want to be: a successful entrepreneur. The reason it's important is because it helps provide a path to achieving my goals.

At school, I always had a syllabus for my courses, so I knew which path to take. When I started my business, there was no syllabus. I had to figure everything out myself.

By being clear about what I want to be and constantly thinking about it, I realized the strategies and opportunities I could implement to promote my business.

For now, I'm quietly quitting my Wall Street job while raising Exotic Men. I'm not at the stage where I can work on it full-time yet, but that day is coming soon. Two years ago it wasn't even on my radar.

I'm sure there are many other people who work 9-5 jobs and have dreams they want to pursue, but don't try because they're afraid of failing.

I hope my own dysfunctional journey inspires others to take the first step. We only have one life, so it's up to each of us to make the most of it and should never be hindered by the fear of failure.

Andrew Chan is the founder of Exotic Men, a male striptease show in New York City. He worked as a mechanical engineer for about seven years and spent the past nine years analyzing data for traders at a major Wall Street bank.

All views expressed in this article are the author's own.

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