I lived the first 23 years of my life as an “excellent sheep.”

William Deresiewicz, former Yale English professor, coined the phrase to describe a generation of young people produced by elite institutions who couldn’t stop collecting credentials and being overachievers. I started on this path young: at age 8, I scored first place in the Beijing Mathematics Olympics; at age 10, I enrolled in a selective program for gifted children and won third place in the city’s Go competition; by age 14, I had skipped four grades and entered China’s best engineering college, The University of Science and Technology of China, before eventually getting a Master’s degree at Yale University.

I later learned about the Pygmalion Effect, the phenomenon wherein children internalize their positive labels and perform accordingly. Unknowingly, I had become hard-wired to collect one gold star after another. Whenever I was making a life or career decision, I considered how this choice would be perceived by others before all else. “External expectations, pride, fear of embarrassment or failure,” everything Steve Jobs realized weren’t all that important after his near-death moment, was everything I held dear.

My most trying time as an “excellent sheep” was when I joined Uber alongside my ex-manager from LinkedIn. My career move was largely based on Uber’s brand recognition and generous compensation. The change, from a company that advocates the value of relationships to one that preached “toe-stepping”, left me unsatisfied. At first, I tried to blend in, but I soon realized that Uber’s competitive employee stack ranking system is designed so that for one person to get ahead, another must fail. The worst thing is, when I voiced my concern about this “survival of the fittest” mantra between colleagues, most people dismissed me as cynical and they seemed to enjoy it.Holding a minority view while being correct is the definition of being a contrarian, but I wasn’t ready to become one. So I stuck around, worked hard, and ended my time there with stellar performance reviews.

A year later, I finally gathered enough courage to pursue my own passion on the side and leverage my tech training for a good cause. According to National Safety Council, there is a crash caused by cell phone use while driving every 20 seconds. I wanted to fix this. A friend and I co-invented Carloudy, a smart head-up display hardware that projects GPS information and directions onto the windshield. With this device, a driver’s likelihood of getting into an accident is reduced by 400%. When we launched our product at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last January, our inbox exploded. We found ourselves simultaneously negotiating with BestBuy, Ford, and Honda, fulfilling orders from thousands of customers on Kickstarter, as well as pitching our startup to top venture capitals including IDG and Y Combinator. Compared to my day job at Uber, Carloudy was so much more fun. What I loved most about our product was not its financial success, but its potential to save lives. That was my epiphany moment: I wanted to spend time doing what I love and what matters to the society, not what’s most competitive and lucrative.

Early this year, my colleague at Uber who witnessed my transition away from an excellent sheep, invited me to join Mobike, a Chinese startup that my friends in San Francisco had never heard of. I too felt uncertain: I had never worked in China, I would be responsible for building my own team, and there was no guarantee that the business would make it.

I went back to the basics: does dock-less bike share solve China’s transportation problem better than Uber? Is the business model profitable and scalable? Will I fit in the Chinese startup scene? Am I courageous enough to go against common belief and stand by my own view as a contrarian?

The answers were “probably yes”. I decided to take the risk.

So I ended my lease, sold my car, packed up everything I owned, and boarded a plane back to Beijing. Working for a Chinese company was harder than I anticipated: The founding engineers naturally resisted a new leader from a different background—until I wrote tens of thousands of lines of code that drastically improved the software architecture. As I improved my standing on the team, I was able to introduce many advanced ideas I learned in Silicon Valley, from A/B testing to iterative product development, from customer loyalty to user engagement. I spent a lot of time mentoring younger hires, while wearing many different hats: business development, product management, and user experience design. After many long nights and a few successful pivots in our product roadmap, the company asked me to be their Head of Mobile.

Six months later, I have grown the mobile engineering team from three to twenty-five and made our app the most downloaded and highest rated in China. China’s public transportation landscape has been forever changed, and Mobike even landed on Fortune’s Change the World list. All the while, I gained first-hand experience on growth, strategy and management - the risk I took was well worth it.

After my stint at Mobike, I decided to start my own business. I teamed up with my Yale and USTC alum Sen Hu and another brilliant engineer Jinwei to found MetaApp. When Mobike's CTO Joe learned about the news, he tried to keep me by giving me a big raise, 4 times my previous stock options and a position to run an entire business unit. He then asked me if we've received seed funding yet. I told him no. I knew that he's using my insecurity as an entrepreneur as well as a huge lure on the corporate side to make me stay. I was very appreciative of his gesture, but this time, I no longer needed confirmation. I leaped before I looked. Now, we've received ample funding, built out a small operation and things look very promising. No matter the outcome, I love the fact that I made this decision based on my own read of the people, the direction and the market. My resume looks so spotty now that I'm almost "unhireable" as an employee, but the shape of my resume no longer bothers me.

It’s easy to connect the dots in retrospect, from a child prodigy to an “excellent sheep,” I struggled to think independently. It takes strong conviction to stand by the truth and doing so is rarely easy. Now, I’m no longer chasing accolades because of my insecurity, and I’m ready to create my own path moving forward, with all the labels and credentials stripped away.