I’m writing this specifically for people that tell me they have a desire to “do their own thing” but don’t have the boldness of Elon Musk.  I write this for normal people like me that have the desire to take a chance on themselves but might be a bit scared or are terrified of going into debt. I write this as a reminder of the many good things the corporate world taught me and that if I had appreciated them and looked for them more actively, I might have been able to bet on myself a bit sooner.

A bit of caution before diving in.  This is not your grandfather’s guide to the working world.  Part of the reason people caution against entering the corporate world is that if you just float through the experience you won’t end up in a good spot.  I’m going to nudge you to take a bit more of an unconventional approach…

#1 Full-time employment enables you to develop skills you might not have the discipline to develop

People often say things to me like “don’t you think you are able to be successful in self-employment because you worked at X?”  To someone that has spent time in the corporate world, it seems as if this is the way things work. You often need certain titles or experience to get access to the next job. But working on your own the only thing that really matters are the underlying skills you learn at those jobs.

In my time in consulting, I spent thousands of hours doing research, conducting interviews, learning how to communicate clearly, and working in teams.  In the moment this often seemed pointless but looking back I’m glad I did a specific kind of work for a long stretch of time. The deliberate practice helped me develop a set of foundational skills that has given me the confidence to experiment in new areas like 1-on-1 coaching, online course creation, podcasts and writing online.

Almost every type of job will offer the opportunity to develop these kinds of foundational skills and it’s easier to find something that is enjoyable to do with a skill you already have than trying to develop a skill around an interest.  This is why finding your passion is misleading.  Once you find it you then need to do the hard work of learning a skill to activate it.

In full-time work, there are endless opportunities to learn new things. You just need to look for it. In a large organization, almost everyone will know about something that you don’t know about. It would be impossible not to have people in your organization that could teach you something about marketing, finance, accounting, communication, managing others, or resolving conflict.  Not to mention broader life skills like parenting, dealing with health challenges, or relationships.  You just need to stay curious and keep asking questions. 

Steph Smith, who is a prime example of someone who gets the best out of the corporate world, talks about this in a similar essay,

Working in my “day job” allows me to continuously learn from people who are smarter than me, and get paid for it. I’m also faced with challenges that I simply wouldn’t encounter with my side projects and I often need to learn how to solve these challenges alongside others.

The key to all of this is to make sure that you are in an environment that has a culture of learning and helping people out. If you aren’t in one of those environments you need to make a change as soon as possible.

#2 Figuring out what you like doing is hard but there are more opportunities in a company than you think

Figuring out what you like doing while also trying to build your own business is hard.  The uncertainty and fear of failure will steer you away from things you might enjoy doing over the long run and towards things that can make money or are in fashion. 

Yet people still advise this route because they have created a false comparison between a dull corporate path and a dynamic entrepreneurial path. There are downsides to both paths but with the right amount of ingenuity, you can use your full-time job as a way to explore all different types of work.

The first step to this is to quickly build trust with your core team.  Find out what kinds of behaviors cause everyone to worry and become good at those things.  Even better if you volunteer to become the go-to person for those tasks.  If you take away someone else’s pain and anxiety you will usually end up with a lot of freedom in how you are able to spend your time at the company.

Next make a list of all the things you might want to learn about and make a list of people who can teach you those things.  Curious about facilitating and public speaking? Get coffee with the training manager.  Ever wonder how marketers think?  Reach out to the marketing director.  To do this, literally just email them and ask.  I have given this advice to many young people and they were always surprised that you could just do this.  But think about it.  People that have been in their job for a long time often don’t have a lot of people who are curious to learn about their path or journey unless they are very senior.  Ask people that are senior enough to control workflow but not too senior that people are constantly asking them for favors already.

Next, if you are still curious and might want to try out some of the work make a small offer of help.  Most people in mid-level roles in organizations have too much work to do and can always use some help, especially if you do it without a need for a lot of direction.  While I was working in consulting, I volunteered to create training materials for the learning manager in my office.  This had nothing to do with my job but I had a passion for mentoring others and wanted to learn more about how her team thought about training.  After helping her do an hour of this busy work on top of my “regular” job, she saw I was serious.  This led to me being asked to join the learning faculty to help facilitate trainings around the globe.  The links between this work and some of the things I do with online learning now would be impossible to dismiss.  I just wish I had sought out more of these opportunities.

In some cases, this strategy can even lead to you discovering a job you want to be doing and the desire of doing you “own thing” might fade away.  This is the story of many of the people in full-time jobs that enjoy their lives.  They created their own path.  Its worth finding out if this might work for you too.

#3 You can get a good understanding of how things happen in modern institutions, including how power works

Young people seem to be a bit more clear-eyed than my generation was graduating in the mid-2000s. I naively thought that in a big organization, most people were focused on doing good work and wanted the best for each other.  On the surface, this seems true but as I spent more time in multiple organizations I started to realize that who succeeds in a company is often just as much tied to results as it is political abilities and an understanding of power.  I am terrible at those games but when I became aware that there were different games than just being good I became a bit less frustrated with what was happening around me.

In addition to understanding power, organizations are a great way of understanding how the world works or doesn’t.  People who have been watching the bungled pandemic responses of many countries are often outraged and react with their version of how things “should be.”  It’s great to have ideals and a vision but even better to pair that with an understanding of how things fail, why four-week projects can take years, and how incentives can create all sorts of unintended consequences.  

The key is to observe all of this with a healthy detachment.  This is easier said than done.  Many people end up distraught by unfairness and other shenanigans in the workplace.  Observe the dynamics and learn why people are doing what they are doing but don’t make it your own purpose.  As I’ve written before, learn the game, don’t become the game.

Another situation worth experiencing but escaping as fast as you can is working with a bad manager.  Use this for inspiration for what you hope to avoid.  Think about the incentives at play and try to understand why this person might behave a certain way (there often aren’t that many incentives for people to be better managers) and then make sure you don’t fall into the same traps when you have your own team.

It’s popular in the corporate world for senior people to praise these experiences as something worth seeking out.  “Everyone should find a job for two years where you can really struggle.”  This is terrible advice and has more to do with this leader’s own confirmation bias than a deep truth about the paths people should take.  Learn from it.  Try to understand it.  But get out of it as fast as possible.

#4 There are a lot of people that live fulfilling lives and have full-time jobs. You might be one of them.

There are many people that are living fulfilling lives and have full-time jobs.  It may be a surprise to some people but many of these people don’t have a secret monetizable side gig nor a dream to start one.  These people typically have a range of activities at work and out of work that bring them meaning.  They may spend some of their day job mentoring people or even acting as someone that others can vent to.  They may focus on things outside of work like spending time with their family, learning things for fun, volunteering in their community, or on a hobby once a week.

One of the best things I did throughout my career (though I wish I did more) was to go up to people that seemed to be thriving.  These are the people that everyone loves working with and that people admire.  They stand out from the others with a certain “aliveness” that is hard to deny. They may not be the actual leaders of your company.  In fact, they may be some of the lowest level people at the company.

Go talk to these people.  Tell them that you admire their positive energy and ask them where it comes from.  Without fail, there is always an interesting story.  These people always have an experience that changed their life, a mentor that helped them approach life with a new perspective or a deeper purpose that drives them in their life.  Try to spend time with these people.  Ask them for book recommendations.  Keep asking questions about their story and surround yourself with these people.  

They are the role models you need no matter which path you take.

#5 Building a life off the default path takes time.  Stable paychecks enable you to build savings so you can buy more time to figure it out

One of the biggest traps of entrepreneurship or self-employment is mistaking the whole purpose of the journey for making money.  Money can be a good motivator but when you are pursuing something on your own you need a lot more motivation than if you were doing the work as a job.  Most people want to do things that they actually like doing. Sometimes it takes entrepreneurs decades of work and eventual burnout to figure this out.  Having some savings from the corporate world can help you experiment for a couple of years without the pressure of needing to make money as soon as possible.

This is the path Kyle Kowalski took as he explored uncertainty and meaning through his writing after leaving the corporate world in 2018. He is grateful that he was able to build some “runway” that has enabled him to explore without the immediate pressure to monetize:

There is no question in my mind that I would not be doing what I’m doing right now if I hadn’t worked in the corporate world for a decade. Saving some money from that time is also buying me “solopreneurial runway” for a few years.

I always tried to be frugal no matter how much I made.  Perhaps this was me knowing deep down that I wanted the option to walk away down the road.  I’m glad I saved a lot of money and invested aggressively in all my jobs.  Many people suggest investing 5-10% of your income in your 401k.  I did 20-30% every year.  I used this as a way to artificially lower my salary so that I could learn to live on less.  

When I did quit my job I was able to commit to at least a year of self-employment because of the savings I had.   This enabled me to experiment with a variety of different types of work not to mention extended breaks of non work.  It sounds crazy but if I spent all my money and only wandered around for a year and read a bunch of books I still would have considered it a success.  To me there is more to life than work.

I’m always grateful for the money I was able to save in the corporate world because I’ve been able to take a slower and more interesting path than if I had to focus on making a lot of money immediately.  Some people think of it as “losing” their savings but I re-frame it as a gift from my past corporate self telling me, “go explore and see where you end up Paul!”

#6 A lot of jobs are not that hard and you can stay energized by limiting the amount of hours you work

There is a famous study run at a consulting firm that looked at the link between hours and promotions.  There were three groups. Those who worked the most, those who negotiated fewer hours, and a third group of people who worked less but never told anyone.

Who got promoted the most?  Predictably the first group but also at similar rates were the people that worked a lot less and didn’t raise attention to this fact.  The moral of this story?  Don’t ever accept that “this is the way things have to be.”  Many in the corporate world are good at conforming and look around for cues for what they are supposed to do.  Instead, you should always start with the question, “what is possible?”

This question drove Diania Merriam to negotiate a two month leave of absence to go on a pilgrimage across Spain instead of a pay raise.  She was a bit scared to ask but surprised when her boss said yes right away.  In 2020, many companies have finally woken up and even formerly stuffy companies like Citigroup are offering 4-weeks paid to work with a non-profit and 3-month sabbaticals after five years.

Working shorter workweeks are also much more possible than people realize, even at some of the most hard-working companies.  I spent long stretches at companies like McKinsey, BCG, and GE working 35-40 hours a week while still doing great work and not dropping the ball.  I was just obsessive about doing the things that mattered and doing them well.

Corporate norms can also drive perverse incentives such as keeping people glued to a desk surfing the web rather than reading a book they might be interested in.  You can make the case that many books will help you at work so never be afraid to pull out a book and read at your desk.  If anyone asks why you’re reading a book just respond, “aren’t we here to learn?”  In my final full-time job, I used to block off a private “freedom hour” meeting each morning to spend on writing before I started my “real” work.

The lesson? Don’t create prisons for yourself that may not exist. Look for ways to do the things you want to be doing. It may be easier than you think.

The Bottom Line: Defend Your Energy & Cultivate Possibility

Blindly following the norms of the corporate world and working long hours every week on something that you’re not excited about is one of the fastest ways to destroy your energy, numb your imagination, and convince yourself that you can not do anything other than stay in your current job or path. 

This is why some people advise against this path. However, with a little creativity on your part, I believe that you can get a lot of good out of your time in the corporate world. 

The key is making sure you stay focused on the right things.

The most useful metric I’ve found is not your title, your career progress, or compensation.  It’s your energy.  Defend your energy at all costs.  It’s good practice to have some regular reflection in which you can assess you energized you are about life.  I recommend setting a calendar reminder once a month and tracking it over time.  If it starts dropping it’s time to change things up.  It’s the only way you will be able to keep experimenting and staying open to the possibilities of life.

It may be hard to believe but the biggest barrier to carving a path that works for you is not access to opportunity or money, but your own imagination for what’s possible.

41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

The post Don’t Follow Your Passion, Work In The Corporate World First appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

What follows are some thoughts from 22 year old Thompson who was responding to a friends request for life advice (you can read the full letter here). At the beginning he questions whether or not anyone is even qualified to give advice:

For to give advice to a man who asks what to do with his life implies something very close to egomania.

Thompson argues that all life advice boils down to swimming or floating:

And indeed, that IS the question: whether to float with the tide, or to swim for a goal. It is a choice we must all make consciously or unconsciously at one time in our lives. So few people understand this!

Ignore Goals & Design A Life That Aligns With Who You Are

He meanders a little and reflects on the fact that many people seem to get caught up in pursuing goals and re-shaping themselves to fit those aspirations without figuring out who they are and who they want to be at an essential level:

In every man, heredity and environment have combined to produce a creature of certain abilities and desires— including a deeply ingrained need to function in such a way that his life will be MEANINGFUL. A man has to BE something; he has to matter.

Put more simple, one must design a life they actually want to live:

In short, he has not dedicated his life to reaching a pre-defined goal, but he has rather chosen a way of life he KNOWS he will enjoy.

How should one do that? They should actively choose a path to follow. Instead of “swimming” they should find a path and follow it and learn from it. If they aren’t happy with the paths presented before them, they need to dream bigger:

Let’s assume that you think you have a choice of eight paths to follow (all pre-defined paths, of course). And let’s assume that you can’t see any real purpose in any of the eight. THEN— and here is the essence of all I’ve said— you MUST FIND A NINTH PATH.

Thompson says to “beware of looking for goals: look for a way of life” and I believe at its core, any career advice worth a lick start with advice on how to navigate life. Here are some advice I think is worth revisiting throughout your journey:

• Scott Adams
• Marc Andreessen
• Debbie Millman
• Paul Graham
• Barry Ritholtz

They don’t overly prescribe but identify things to avoid, systems to develop and highlights patterns to be aware of.

Scott Adams Talent Stack

Scott Adams argues that trying to be the “best” at one specific thing is a terrible career strategy. Being in the top 1% of a certain domain is incredibly challenging.

Instead, a better strategy is to try to become the top 25% in a number of areas of domain knowledge and expertise.

He uses the example of his own career where he doesn’t think he is the best at anything, but a certain combination of skills has led him to be a successful successful cartoonist.

Everyone has at least a few areas in which they could be in the top 25% with some effort. In my case, I can draw better than most people, but I’m hardly an artist. And I’m not any funnier than the average standup comedian who never makes it big, but I’m funnier than most people. The magic is that few people can draw well and write jokes. It’s the combination of the two that makes what I do so rare. And when you add in my business background, suddenly I had a topic that few cartoonists could hope to understand without living it.

One of the skills he believes everyone should develop is public speaking. Since so few people are good at public speaking, its pretty easy after some practice to be in the top 25%.

If you were trying to become one of the best coders in the world, it is going to be pretty hard and you’ll probably come up short. If you, instead, you focused on becoming a top 25% coder who can also work well with others, understand design thinking and knows how to build good PowerPoint presentations, you’ll probably have a lot of opportunities.

For Adams, the key is to always be adding to your stack to become less competitive with others and become one of a kind:

Capitalism rewards things that are both rare and valuable. You make yourself rare by combining two or more “pretty goods” until no one else has your mix.

Debbie Millman On Taking Leaps

Debbie Millman is a successful designer, lecturer, author and podcaster and has had a fascinating career which she detailed in an amazing interview with Tim Ferriss.

She shares how her whole life she had this dream of taking a more creative path in her career:

And here it was. This was the big decision of a life. Do I become the CEO and have this amazing continuation of money and career and security and everything else that is conventionally approved of, or do I say no, actually, I am not going to double down; I’m going to live the way in which I have been saying I wanted to with more freedom and more opportunity to do more personal projects, and pro bono projects, and give back.

She realized three things:

#1 Anything that takes months to decide probably is something you don’t want to do:

And I had to decide. It took me four months to decide. Simon Williams finally said to me, “Debbie, anything that takes you four months to decide probably means you don’t want to do it.” And it was the hardest decision of my life but I turned it down. I turned the CEO job down. And then, two things happened.

#2 There is never a “right time” to do something

if you’re waiting for something to feel right before you do it, if you’re waiting for a sense of security or confidence, that those things are sort of like being on a hedonistic treadmill. If you think you need enough of this before you do that, when you achieve whatever that is you think you need, you’re going to then up the ante and you’re never, ever going to be satisfied with whatever it is you think you need before you do something, if it’s not something that is real.

#3 Courage is more important than confidence

But in order to take that first step you need courage, and that’s much more important than confidence. So, for anybody who’s waiting for the confidence to show up, take the first step in a moment of courage, even if it’s aberrant courage, to come full circle in this conversation.

Marc Andreessen Guide To Career Planning

Published in 2007, he immediately argues against the notion of planning. with the warning that you can’t predict the future:

The first rule of career planning: Do not plan your career. You can’t plan your career because you have no idea what’s going to happen in the future.

Here are six takeaways from his guide

#1 Develop Skills & Pursue Opportunities: Similar to Adams, he suggests that people focus on “developing skills and pursuing opportunities” and that they should look at their career as a portfolio of different skills and experiences over a long time horizon:

Once you start thinking this way, you can think strategically about your career over its likely 50+ year timespan.

#2 Take Risks If You Have Big Goals: He also argues that people need to take risk and that if you have big goals, you probably shouldn’t prioritize a comfortable life:

The issue is that without taking risk, you can’t exploit any opportunities. You can live a quiet and reasonably happy life, but you are unlikely to create something new, and you are unlikely to make your mark on the world.

#3 Surround Yourself With “The Best”: One of the interesting arguments he makes is that you shouldn’t worry about being a “small fish in a big pond” – something Malcolm Gladwell argues against in his book Outliers. Andreessen feels you want to be in the “best pond possible” so you are surrounded by other curious humans:

Don’t worry about being a small fish in a big pond — you want to always be in the best pond possible, because that’s how you will get exposed to the best people and the best opportunities in your field.

He echoes the same advice for identifying which industry, city and companies to target in your job search:

Optimize at all times for being in the most dynamic and exciting pond you can find

#4 Learn How To Mess Up (Especially if you’re from an elite background): A bit of a warning for the types of people that were “tracked” from top school to top school and have learned how to be achieve and be successful by performing well in school, he advises getting exposed to “real world” environments where you can fail and learn.

If you have lived an orchestated existence, gone to great schools, participated in lots of extracurricular activities, had parents who really concentrated hard on developing you broadly and exposing you to lots of cultural experiences, and graduated from an elite university in the first 22 or more years of your life, you are in danger of entering the real world, being smacked hard across the face by reality, and never recovering.

#5 Work in industries where the founders are still engaged: If you want to be on the cutting edge, avoid companies that are run by 3rd or 4th generation managers

If not — if the industry’s founders are dead, or old and out of touch — beware. That industry is now dominated by companies that are being run by second or third or even fourth generation managers who inherited their companies pre-built, and are serving as caretakers.

#6 Target younger, higher-growth startups: These companies will offer more opportunities, challenges and autonomy early in your career and give you a strong reputation which you can bring with your to other companies.

Paul Graham’s “Do What You Love”

Paul Graham has an incredible collection of essays he has been writing for years that offer career, life and business wisdom. His essay “How To Do What You Love” is great for becoming more aware of some of the traps of career thinking and still offers a lot of wisdom more than a decade later.

His central message is:

To do something well you have to like it. That idea is not exactly novel. We’ve got it down to four words: “Do what you love.” But it’s not enough just to tell people that. Doing what you love is complicated.

#1 Beware of the fact that many people pretend to hate their jobs and not know why they do what they do: Graham shares a belief with me that many people seem to pretend to tolerate or enjoy what they do:

The main reason they all acted as if they enjoyed their work was presumably the upper-middle class convention that you’re supposed to.

He places part of the blame on the fact that our work beliefs are derivative – they are hand-me-down beliefs from decades, if not centuries ago:

Just as houses all over America are full of chairs that are, without the owners even knowing it, nth-degree imitations of chairs designed 250 years ago for French kings, conventional attitudes about work are, without the owners even knowing it, nth-degree imitations of the attitudes of people who’ve done great things.

#2 Beware of Prestige Warping Your Thinking: One of the things he calls out and one of the things I’ve grappled with personally is chasing prestige. I believe that we need to be more aware of the prestige hierarchies we play in and if we really want to be good at the things we get prestige from. For many, including me, prestige warps your brain early in your life as the fast path to social approval and sometimes riches.

Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy

#3 Would you do it if you weren’t paid?: Many people would likely not keep doing their work if they were not getting paid:

“The test of whether people love what they do is whether they’d do it even if they weren’t paid for it—even if they had to work at another job to make a living. How many corporate lawyers would do their current work if they had to do it for free…

#4 Your parents tell you to make money because they love you: Many people get frustrated by the narrow career advice they get from their parents (“be a doctor or lawyer”), but parents are likely on the hook if you go broke and don’t experience a lot of the upside (or misery) if you are making enough money to support yourself.

The advice of parents will tend to err on the side of money. It seems safe to say there are more undergrads who want to be novelists and whose parents want them to be doctors than who want to be doctors and whose parents want them to be novelists. The kids think their parents are “materialistic.” Not necessarily. All parents tend to be more conservative for their kids than they would for themselves, simply because, as parents, they share risks more than rewards. If your eight year old son decides to climb a tall tree, or your teenage daughter decides to date the local bad boy, you won’t get a share in the excitement, but if your son falls, or your daughter gets pregnant, you’ll have to deal with the consequences.

#5 There are two good strategies to molding work to fit your jobs: I love how he frames these two routes because they mesh well with how many people end up creating a life they actually want to live

1. The organic route: as you become more eminent, gradually to increase the parts of your job that you like at the expense of those you don’t.

2. The two-job route: to work at things you don’t like to get money to work on things you do.”

In addition to these, I’d probably add a third way which is to experiment with creating your own business after several years in the working world and embracing living cost arbitrage by living abroad or embracing minimalism.

#6 Find Jobs Where You Can Work On Many Things: While we may be pushed to pick “one thing” it can be beneficial to work in environments where you can work on many things:

to seek jobs that let you do many different things, so you can learn faster what various kinds of work are like

Overall, Paul Graham thinking finding work you love is damn hard:

It’s hard to find work you love; it must be, if so few do. So don’t underestimate this task. And don’t feel bad if you haven’t succeeded yet. In fact, if you admit to yourself that you’re discontented, you’re a step ahead of most people, who are still in denial. If you’re surrounded by colleagues who claim to enjoy work that you find contemptible, odds are they’re lying to themselves. Not necessarily, but probably.

Barry Ritholtz – The Learner

I’ve been reading Barry Ritholtz’s blog for over ten years and I love how he’s succeeded in a traditional field (finance) while following an extremely unconventional path. You can read his whole story here, but here is his

#1 Be multi-talented; Be genuinely interested in many things, including those that may not be related to your career;

#2 Work harder than everybody else (Coaches know that hard work beats talent most of the time).

#3 Find something you are good at, then hone that skill until its razor sharp;

#4 Read voraciously. Build a library, learn from the masters.

#5 Your academic background matters less and less the longer you are out of school.

#6 Create something of value that others want — and are even willing to pay for;

#7 Meet as many people in your field as you can. Learn from them, and when possible, be genuinely helpful.

#8 Develop a specialty.

#9 “Once in a lifetime” opportunities come along more frequently than you imagine; Be prepared for when those opportunities presents themselves;

#10 Be lucky.

41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

The post The best career and life advice from Scott Adams, Debbie Millman, Hunter Thompson & Others appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

April 22, 1958
57 Perry Street
New York City

Dear Hume,

You ask advice: ah, what a very human and very dangerous thing to do! For to give advice to a man who asks what to do with his life implies something very close to egomania. To presume to point a man to the right and ultimate goal— to point with a trembling finger in the RIGHT direction is something only a fool would take upon himself.

I am not a fool, but I respect your sincerity in asking my advice. I ask you though, in listening to what I say, to remember that all advice can only be a product of the man who gives it. What is truth to one may be disaster to another. I do not see life through your eyes, nor you through mine. If I were to attempt to give you specific advice, it would be too much like the blind leading the blind.

“To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles … ” (Shakespeare)

And indeed, that IS the question: whether to float with the tide, or to swim for a goal. It is a choice we must all make consciously or unconsciously at one time in our lives. So few people understand this! Think of any decision you’ve ever made which had a bearing on your future: I may be wrong, but I don’t see how it could have been anything but a choice however indirect— between the two things I’ve mentioned: the floating or the swimming.

But why not float if you have no goal? That is another question. It is unquestionably better to enjoy the floating than to swim in uncertainty. So how does a man find a goal? Not a castle in the stars, but a real and tangible thing. How can a man be sure he’s not after the “big rock candy mountain,” the enticing sugar-candy goal that has little taste and no substance?

The answer— and, in a sense, the tragedy of life— is that we seek to understand the goal and not the man. We set up a goal which demands of us certain things: and we do these things. We adjust to the demands of a concept which CANNOT be valid. When you were young, let us say that you wanted to be a fireman. I feel reasonably safe in saying that you no longer want to be a fireman. Why? Because your perspective has changed. It’s not the fireman who has changed, but you. Every man is the sum total of his reactions to experience. As your experiences differ and multiply, you become a different man, and hence your perspective changes. This goes on and on. Every reaction is a learning process; every significant experience alters your perspective.

So it would seem foolish, would it not, to adjust our lives to the demands of a goal we see from a different angle every day? How could we ever hope to accomplish anything other than galloping neurosis?

The answer, then, must not deal with goals at all, or not with tangible goals, anyway. It would take reams of paper to develop this subject to fulfillment. God only knows how many books have been written on “the meaning of man” and that sort of thing, and god only knows how many people have pondered the subject. (I use the term “god only knows” purely as an expression.) There’s very little sense in my trying to give it up to you in the proverbial nutshell, because I’m the first to admit my absolute lack of qualifications for reducing the meaning of life to one or two paragraphs.

I’m going to steer clear of the word “existentialism,” but you might keep it in mind as a key of sorts. You might also try something called Being and Nothingness by Jean-Paul Sartre, and another little thing called Existentialism: From Dostoyevsky to Sartre. These are merely suggestions. If you’re genuinely satisfied with what you are and what you’re doing, then give those books a wide berth. (Let sleeping dogs lie.) But back to the answer. As I said, to put our faith in tangible goals would seem to be, at best, unwise. So we do not strive to be firemen, we do not strive to be bankers, nor policemen, nor doctors. WE STRIVE TO BE OURSELVES.

But don’t misunderstand me. I don’t mean that we can’t BE firemen, bankers, or doctors— but that we must make the goal conform to the individual, rather than make the individual conform to the goal. In every man, heredity and environment have combined to produce a creature of certain abilities and desires— including a deeply ingrained need to function in such a way that his life will be MEANINGFUL. A man has to BE something; he has to matter.

As I see it then, the formula runs something like this: a man must choose a path which will let his ABILITIES function at maximum efficiency toward the gratification of his DESIRES. In doing this, he is fulfilling a need (giving himself identity by functioning in a set pattern toward a set goal), he avoids frustrating his potential (choosing a path which puts no limit on his self-development), and he avoids the terror of seeing his goal wilt or lose its charm as he draws closer to it (rather than bending himself to meet the demands of that which he seeks, he has bent his goal to conform to his own abilities and desires).

In short, he has not dedicated his life to reaching a pre-defined goal, but he has rather chosen a way of life he KNOWS he will enjoy. The goal is absolutely secondary: it is the functioning toward the goal which is important. And it seems almost ridiculous to say that a man MUST function in a pattern of his own choosing; for to let another man define your own goals is to give up one of the most meaningful aspects of life— the definitive act of will which makes a man an individual.

Let’s assume that you think you have a choice of eight paths to follow (all pre-defined paths, of course). And let’s assume that you can’t see any real purpose in any of the eight. THEN— and here is the essence of all I’ve said— you MUST FIND A NINTH PATH.

Naturally, it isn’t as easy as it sounds. You’ve lived a relatively narrow life, a vertical rather than a horizontal existence. So it isn’t any too difficult to understand why you seem to feel the way you do. But a man who procrastinates in his CHOOSING will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance.

So if you now number yourself among the disenchanted, then you have no choice but to accept things as they are, or to seriously seek something else. But beware of looking for goals: look for a way of life. Decide how you want to live and then see what you can do to make a living WITHIN that way of life. But you say, “I don’t know where to look; I don’t know what to look for.”

And there’s the crux. Is it worth giving up what I have to look for something better? I don’t know— is it? Who can make that decision but you? But even by DECIDING TO LOOK, you go a long way toward making the choice.

If I don’t call this to a halt, I’m going to find myself writing a book. I hope it’s not as confusing as it looks at first glance. Keep in mind, of course, that this is MY WAY of looking at things. I happen to think that it’s pretty generally applicable, but you may not. Each of us has to create our own credo— this merely happens to be mine.

If any part of it doesn’t seem to make sense, by all means call it to my attention. I’m not trying to send you out “on the road” in search of Valhalla, but merely pointing out that it is not necessary to accept the choices handed down to you by life as you know it. There is more to it than that— no one HAS to do something he doesn’t want to do for the rest of his life. But then again, if that’s what you wind up doing, by all means convince yourself that you HAD to do it. You’ll have lots of company.

And that’s it for now. Until I hear from you again, I remain,

your friend,

Hunter

41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

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However, I am incredibly lucky in that I was able to attend one of the top schools in the world – MIT Sloan. Given this, people ask me about business school all the time. Should I go? Do I need an MBA? My answer is nuanced, complicated and is more focused on getting you to think more deeply about what you are trying to achieve, but I’ll attempt to walk you through my thinking…

Let’s first look at some of the trends from my school, MIT (MIT Tuition). Here is the approximate two-year tuition cost of an MBA over the past 20 years:

• 2000: $47k
• 2005: $77k
• 2010: $98k
• 2015: $128k
• 2018: $142k
• 2020: $154k

What the hell is happening!?

When I look up the tuition every year, I have a harder time recommending that people go get their MBA. Part of this is my guilt for suggesting someone take on hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt and part of this stems from thinking there may be better options.

The money equation (ROI) still works

A typical way to assess the “value” of an MBA is to focus on salaries.

Let’s say you have a job making $65k and you earn modest salary increases that raise your salary to $70k. This would mean by going to a full-time MBA you would be forgoing $135,000 in salary over two years. This type of analysis is fraught with flaws but stick with me.

Given that few people pay full sticker price, let us assume even a 50% tuition cost of $71,000 and living costs of $25,000 a year. Also, let us assume you are able to land an internship over the summer that pays you $25,000. This puts the opportunity costs at $135,000 and the real costs at $96,000. The traditional ROI analysis says that your investment is $231,000.

Next, analyze what you can make after graduation. Top-tier MBAs can usually find jobs paying them impressive salaries that can quickly offset this investment within five years. Let’s say that you make about $150k for 3 years after graduation. The incremental $240k (3 years x $80k more than the $70k you would have been making) covers your total investment. Then you are also looking at the intangible cost of the two-year educational process. There is obvious value in this, and I’ve always thought there was a lot of value in stepping outside of the working world – not to mention being exposed to new people, new ideas, new industries and new cultures.

ROI Analysis: Worth it ✔️

However, this logic can be flawed

Looking solely at salary is short-sighted. It makes a bold assumption that your sole goal for the rest of your career is to maximize every salary increase and promotion. This does not align with reality and increasingly, is harder to do as our business world becomes more fragmented and less dependent on full-time labor.

I am almost six years out from graduating from an MBA and I talk with my classmates often. Many are a bit lost – they have had had one or two promotions but have quickly realized they have no desire to be the CEO or even a senior executive. What was the rush? Priorities have changed – other things like health, family or kids have taken over importance. So the ROI analysis that many people do is deeply flawed.

Second, looking solely at money avoids a hard look at the underlying learning transformation you are paying for. Most people expect that they will undergo some amount of improvement in their ability, skills, and expertise over the two years. It is easy to look at the success of MBA graduates and assume that the MBA had some role in the process. However, the research on this is pretty damning. Professors Jeffrey Pfeffer and Christina Fong (who both work in business schools!) published an extensive review of the evidence in 2002 and found:

What data there are suggest that business schools are not very effective: Neither possessing an MBA degree nor grades earned in courses correlate with career success, results that question the effectiveness of schools in preparing their students. And, there is little evidence that business school research is influential on management practice, calling into question the professional relevance of management scholarship

In many ways, the types of people that go to top business schools are already incredibly driven and would likely reach the same levels of success with or without the degree and dare I say, perhaps in a shorter time. I often run the thought experiment of wondering where people I know would end up with or without an MBA. My hypothesis would be that If I were to run a simulation of a driven person’s career over the next 35 years, I would guess 55 times out of 100 you might be more successful getting an MBA and 45 times out of 100 it would have had little or no impact on your level of success.

Deeper Reflection: ❓

So how do you get ahead? Is there a better way?

A question that is really bothering me lately given the massive sticker price of an MBA:

Is there a better way to transform yourself with that $150k you intend to spend over two years? Why are we so tied to a 300+-year-old way of learning in classrooms?

Design Your Own: Tim Ferriss had always wanted to go to Stanford Graduate School of Business but challenged himself to think about alternate options. He decided to not pursue an MBA and instead use the money he would be spending on tuition to build a “Real World MBA.” He decided to take the money he put aside for tuition and use it to invest in startups. On his podcast, he talked about how he lost $50,000 in his first investment, but at least he had “skin in the game” as Nassim Taleb would say.

Online Intensive Programs: Another option I have seen emerge is Seth Godin’s altMBA – when you get accepted in the program, you become part of a global online learning community of driven and passionate people and focus on “shipping” 12 projects over 30 days. Tuition for this program? $3,500. That’s less than the deposit for many of these full-time MBA programs. I spoke with Cody Royle on my podcast about his experience with the altMBA and he said the best benefit was “not a credential…but a real-world transformation” that has enabled him to write multiple books, become a freelancer and become an influential sports coach who helps people with talent management. 20 years ago he would have gotten an MBA but now he took 30 days, $3,000 and bet on himself.

One-Year MBAs: Business schools are not oblivious to the shifts happening in the market and many have added one-year MBA options in the last year. This includes schools like Cornell, Babson, Northwestern, Bryant and Miami. However, business schools are not completely ready to disrupt themselves and are charging much higher fees for the one year program – at Northwestern, the one-year program tuition is $103,316 versus $149,742 for each year in the two-year program.

Skill-Specific Programs: Georgia Tech has a one-year business analytics program that can be completed for less than $10,000 online through edX – not to mention the immediate usefulness of the skills, this seems like a steal for your effort.

Screw it, just travel: Finally, a lot of the value I found in the two-year MBA was putting myself in a different environment and pushing myself out of my comfort zone. Could you take one year off and travel through the world, potentially work in some different industries, learn languages, develop skills for less than you would spend on tuition? One of my close friends did that for a mere $24,000. He could have kept going for six years for the full sticker price of a top-tier MBA.

So challenge yourself – how could you design your own “top-tier” MBA experience?

Is the MBA still relevant?

Judging by the high placement rates of top-tier MBA graduates, I would judge that the MBA is still relevant. As long as people want to hire graduates of the school and as long as people keep attending, it will continue to remain relevant.

However, the top-tier MBA seems shakier than ever. It faces two risks, an increasingly homogeneous customer and a disconnect from the skills needed in our economy.

As tuition continues to skyrocket, it seems that demand is largely inelastic when it comes to two parts of the population:

1. people who are working for companies that will sponsor their attendance (consulting firms and investment banks) and
2. rich people and international elites

For these people one could argue that the current prices are way too low and that schools could double or triple the price and they would still attend.

This is the biggest risk of business school because one of the biggest secrets of these elite schools is that most non-sponsored student do not pay sticker price.

This is why I tell people to apply. On the off chance that you end up getting a full-ride? Then definitely go.

However, this fact is not well known and increasingly the MBA is attracting a certain type of student that knows how to jump through hoops and perform in a certain way rather than attractive a diverse set people people and a diverse set of background and experiences.

I grew up fearing debt and no one in my life really cared what schools I went to. The program I attended at MIT had a generous fellowship at the time, but if I were to do the same program today, I would pay at least three to four times more out of my pocket. In only eight years, I would likely have to take another $75,000 of debt. Just writing that sentence terrifies me a bit.

The second risk MBA’s face is an increasing disconnect between the real skills and experiences that enable people to thrive in today’s world. Top-tier MBAs are highly dependent on a symbiotic relationship with powerful, high-paying employers. As Godin stated when he launched the altMBA in 2015:

This is a small-group process that works online, designed to help people move from here to there—to stand up and become the leaders and the game changers they want to be.

I originally wrote this in 2017 and now in 2020 it seems that this gap has continued to widen with more and more cohort-based online courses like the altMBA filling the gap as well as other emerging alternatives like On Deck and even just “creating in public” on twitter as a way to enter a new industry.

The MBA may unintentionally help people make a transformation in their life, but the “job to be done” of the MBA is to groom students to work at a select group of finance, consulting, Fortune 500 companies and now, tech companies.

This is a job it does exceptionally well, but as technology and digital platforms continue to shape our economy and as creativity, experiments, original thinking and building a diversity of skills become more important, we may see many more options like the altMBA emerge to “disrupt” the top-tier MBA.

Do I regret it? (and some exercises to do before you go)

Short answer – no. I’ve written about some of the benefits I’ve gotten from an MBA – but they may not be what you would expect (full article here: Should You Go To Business School? The Only Reason That Matters):

• Lifelong friends
• Global perspective
• Taking a step out from the working world
• Contagious optimism / Overcoming self-limiting beliefs
• Thinking like a leader
• No-risk learning lab

These are not the conventional benefits you think about – because a lot of them are specific to me and were unexpected. With anything, I think you need to expect similarly. These type of experiences also have the confirmation bias effect of making it really hard to regret going to business school.

Some exercises I usually have people do when I chat with them about going to business school:

• Write down 25 ways you could get what you expect from business school now for $25,000 or less. If, after you write this list, you still want to go to business school, you should go.
• Write down what you want to do for work after business school. Now brainstorm at least one alternative to make that career shift without going to business school.
• Brainstorm five ways you could grapple with the insecurity of having an MBA-sized hole in your identity? Where does this insecurity come from? Is there a way to grapple with that insecurity directly?

I always give the rather worthless advice of “go to business school if you want to go to business school.” I’ve found that most people already have their mind made up – they are just looking for reassurance for what they have already decided!

41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

The post Should you try get an MBA from a top-tier school? Its complicated. appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

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Janet is one of my favorite people. We have a similar belief that people are capable of more than they believe and that alternative paths are more realistic and the reality than people realize.

Not a fan of default paths from an early age, one quote stood out from Janet that she has continuously asked herself throughout her life:

“The conventional path is not going to work for me, what can I do instead?”

Life Hacking From an Early Age

Janet first started “hacking” life in high school when she decided that the standard curriculum wasn’t for her. Despite pushback from parents, teachers and peers, she followed her curiosity and negotiated an alternative path — avoiding things like Math to go deeper with teachers in social studies, religion and politics.

Her next “hack” was to apply to college in Canada. Starting with the constraints that she wanted to avoid debt and that her parents would support the equivalent of in-state tuition she looked for different options and found a way when her uncle convinced her to look at Canadian universities.

Although taking a non-conventional path, she learned a lot about being able to adapt that would help her later on in her career.

But first, a normal job….

In her first job as an oil spill responder, she found she enjoyed the work but felt something was missing. This led her to pursuing a masters degree in education where she learned about the path of career counseling. She felt it would be a perfect job for her because she had often struggled with making sense of her career herself and wondering “how she could do things differently”

Paul’s Side Note: In many people I’ve worked with, I’ve found that they often stumble upon work they are passionate about by addressing their own needs, much like Janet did — she wanted to figure out how to navigate a career for herself, which led her to be really valuable to others

Putting her story into the world, aka starting a blog

In college she “decided not to become a teacher” after talking to teachers and realizing that many of them were not as happy or energized as she expected. Yet it was pursuing a masters in Education which led her to her freelance career.

While working in her first job as a career counselor, some colleagues recommended that she start writing and she started a blog. She started a blog, found she had a following and then decided she would start offering career coaching services.

By putting her learnings on navigating her own career and her work with students, she found that it resonated with people and she was able to turn it into a business.

Chaos and Planned Happenstance — Two theories of how careers actually work in the real world

I have to credit Janet with introducing me to two awesome academic theories of careers that seem to address the issue of what actually happens (versus what we pretend careers look like).

They are Planned Happenstance theory and The Chaos Theory of Careers. As Janet summarizes these ideas: “we can only plan so much in our lives and the successful lives come by planning for coincidence — putting yourself in the right place at the right time”

How to make a shift

When working with clients, she starts with helping them think about three main things. The core questions are:

1. Whats wrong with your current situation?
2. What’s working with your current situation?
3. What are your values (she recommends this survey)?

Then, she gets people to think more creatively about what they could bring their skills into the world. Her general advice to people, especially students is “get out of your own head, get out from being under expectation” and connect and create out in the world to see what might happen.

If you want to learn more about her work, check it out here.

How she defines success now

Success for Janet is all about “her energy and her levels of joy.” She knows that when her energy is low, things need to change or she needs to change what she is working on in her business. She finds that doing work that is meaningful and helping other people helps lead to the unintended side effect of being happy, which attracts others to want to be around you and work with you. She finds that people who are happy “see more opportunities” and that this mindset is actually the key that leads to real financial or business success.

Links:

• Janet: www.careerjanet.com
• Planned happenstance theory
• Chaos theory of careers (video) and research paper
• My Life Values (assessment)

41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

The post Janet Matta, Rock Star Career Coach On The Alternative Paths We Fail To See appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

Asking someone “what do you want to do?” is a terrible question. Yet we ask this question over and over to young people.

If I were asked this question, my response would be complicated:

“Since the half-life of skills is rather short and I can’t predict what types of work will exist ten years from now, I am going to work on a wide range of challenging problems, focusing on work that enables me to learn on the job and exposing myself to risks such that I will be more comfortable with change when I get older so I can stay energized throughout my career.

Cue the eye roll. It’s easier if someone just says, “I want to be a lawyer” right?

I spend a lot of time talking to people trying to make sense of their careers. I talk with college students, young professionals and even people at the tail end of their career trying to figure out what’s next.

For many, career choices have never involved much thought. You pick a major and take a job in that field. You stay within a department at a company. You stay within a certain industry. You follow the default path.

However, default paths are mostly an illusion. Even people who may have a resume that looks linear will likely tell you about their many speed bumps, rejections and course corrections along the way.

Given how fast our economy is changing, more people are having to take a step back and take a different approach that just following the default path. In my experience working with people as a career coach and mentor, I have found three approaches that help people take a different approach to planning their career:

Lens #1: What skills do you have?

You have two choices in all career decisions:

1. Strengthen current skills
2. Build new skills

The first step is to understand what your current skills are. People often do not give themselves credit for some skills that they have. I like to break down skills into two categories. First is “fundamental” skills — these are the ones that would have been relevant 200 years ago and will be relevant 200 years into the future — and are things not traditionally thought of as skills. These are things like listening, problem solving, adaptability, compassion and energy. Second is “technical” skills — these are abilities that are more relevant in today’s world and can be things like coding, language skills, software skills, writing & synthesis skills and video production.

When you take an inventory of these two types of skills you can look back on previous jobs and often figure out why you were so frustrated (the environment did not help you strengthen those skills) and also look forward to figure out what environments will work best with your current skills and help you develop new ones.

What is your unique combination of skills?

I was recently speaking with someone who had written a book, had a masters in engineering and was good at coding and data analytics. There are not many people with that combination of skills. If you are able to identify an environment that helps you maximize a diverse range of skills, you will be well on your way to carving out a meaningful and energizing career.

Doing this inside a large organization can often be a challenge, especially at junior levels where employees are expected to specialize in one function or task. More and more people are realizing that achieving personal growth and challenging themselves in new areas is harder and harder to do within a big organization and instead are pursuing “side hustles,” creative projects and freelance careers with a portfolio of different projects and responsibilities.

If you assess your fundamental and technical skills and combine that with your curiosity, you can often identify areas to further push yourself to learn and develop new skills and unlock new opportunities. This doesn’t have to be a full-time job, but can be getting involved in a club, volunteer opportunity or side hustle. Since there often isn’t the pressure of keeping a job, I’ve seen many people’s passions explode into something bigger that eventually replaces their former “career” on the default path.

Lens #2: What is your definition of success?

In the corporate world, if you do not have a personal definition of success, you are accepting a default definition of success. Whether you like it or not, this means you are valuing making more money, getting promoted and attaining authority positions. When asked, people rarely say they value these things and research shows that these type of extrinsic rewards can be demotivating at worst.

Developing a definition of success is not easy and you may face backlash if you start making decisions based on it. Early in my career I decided that personal growth, learning and working with inspiring people were my guiding decision making principles and definition of success. This meant taking pay cuts, leaving jobs before I could have been promoted and quitting jobs where I was working with people who were not inspiring (brilliant jerks). Based on the defaults of the corporate world, I was insane. Based on my own definition of success, everything was according to plan.

Lens #3: Re-define risk — What is your worst case scenario in 10, 15 & 25 years?

It is useful to visualize your worst case scenario ten or more years ahead of time. For me, I pictured myself sitting in a cubicle, slightly overweight, staring at the off-white color of the office and so distraught that my boss had criticized my work and counting the hours until I was allowed to leave.

If you know what you fear most, you can avoid it. You don’t need to know what you want to do, but by knowing what you don’t want to do, you can use that to make decisions.

Jim Koch would have never started the Boston Beer Company if he wasn’t able to re-frame risk. He had been working at Boston Consulting Group for six years in what he described as “a great job.” However, he reflected:

“I asked myself do I want to do this for the rest of my life? The answer was no. If I don’t want to do it for the rest of my life, I don’t want to do it tomorrow.” — Jim Koch, Founder of Boston Beer Company

41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

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However, in terms of maximizing long-term sanity and career success, achievement chasing will not help you get anywhere. Since there is always another thing, it is a fool’s mission to ever think the chase will end.

By shifting as early as possible in your career to thinking about the how such as how you like to work (with numbers? with people?), how you want to interact with people (is it collaborative, is it solo or a mix?) and even how you want to spend your time (in the office, traveling or even perhaps, with your family instead of working?).

We tend to avoid these deeper questions about work because we crave the external validation that comes along with achievement chasing. Other people place praise on us not because it is these things that make us happy, but it is actually easier for them to assess. It is quite hard unless you get to know someone really well to understand the “how” of their life. Instead, we look for big moments — that new job, promotion or acceptance into a school — to place praise on others.

What if we praised others instead:

“Congrats on shifting two hours a day to creative work!”

“I’m so proud of you for saying no to working with jerks as a freelancer”

“I’m impressed by how much more time you have been spending with your kids this year”

I’m not sure how to think about praising the “how” for others, but at least we can choose it as a new way of thinking about our career and path in life.

41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

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Lawyers price their work at absurd sums, so why can’t you set an equally ridiculous rate for your own time?

No one goes into their career or job and says “my number one goal is to destroy my marriage, my friendships and relationship with my children.” Yet many people do just this.

There are no performance reviews outside of work. With humans need for security and approval, we tend toward structured rewards and clear career paths. If we do X, we will get Y. After many cycles, people end up in jobs they hate, questioning “what the hell happened?”

This is why I propose valuing your personal time at $1,000,000 an hour. Lets say you are working at a pretty good job, but your boss says to you “you know, you could switch jobs to X and really be on the fast track to a successful career.” This new job X means a higher salary (lets say $10,000) and better job prospects down the road (at least in someone else’s eyes). However, you remember what you value that time at. Those hours are worth $25 million, so it is pretty easy to say no.

If you are working in the hedge fund industry, you might need to up your model to $1 billion / hour but I am sure you already have your own issues well beyond the wisdom of this post.

41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

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People love STEM — Science, Technology, Engineering and Math. The New York Times wrote an article earlier this year talking about efforts to incentivize people to pursue STEM fields and stay away from liberal arts.

It passes the conventional wisdom test. In a time of rapid accelerating change and more technology, we surely need more people going into these jobs right?

It turns out that STEM alone is not the perfect path to jobs in growing fields with good wages. Research by David Deming has shown that more importantly, social skills, are a leading indicator of fields of jobs that are growing and paying higher wages. His research looked at two factors — how math intensive the job was and the level of social skills required for the job (full paper here). His results found a clear hierarchy of the jobs that have been growing in the economy:

He found a similar pattern for wage growth, except with less of a gap between different types of high social skill jobs. In his research he found that many “STEM’ jobs are actually shrinking, which throws into question any policy aimed at incentivizing people to major in said degrees on that basis alone. While nobody would be surprised to learn that computer science jobs have been growing, many STEM jobs have not fared as well such as biologists and architects:

Deming discussed these findings in a fascinating podcast with Jacob Morgan and I was left with more questions than answers about what we should be doing given these findings. Deming’s own paper leaves the questions of policy to others, but his research challenges a lot of the conventional wisdom over the past fifteen years. Pushing someone to major in engineering may not be the path to a success that it was in the past.

One positive from this research is that one could make the argument that humans will not be replaced by technology as many are prone to fear. As technology automates more and more routine tasks, the value of highly cognitive and social tasks seems to be increasing. Deming’s research found that as routine tasks are decreasing, non-routine analytical tasks and social skills are becoming a higher and higher share of knowledge jobs:

So should you drop out of engineering and change to a degree in communications? I’m not sure I would go that far — but a STEM degree alone is not the path for a vibrant career that it may have been in the past.

41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

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The job I have now didn’t exist then and nor did the previous one. How do you plan landing your dream job if it might not exist yet?

Predicting the future is hard, so I’d like to offer a better approach:

#1 MANAGING YOUR ENERGY

When you are energized, you have energy throughout the day and even when you get home from work. People feed off this at work and come to you with interesting ideas, problems and opportunities. At home, you’ll have energy to read and explore other interests — not to mention having the energy to invest in relationships.

For me, I used this lens to slowly (really, it took years) figure out what excited me. I came to the realization that I didn’t like working for jerks or managers who did not invest in creating high-performing teams. Early in my career I took extra steps to avoid them and said to myself during business school that I would not compromise on this — life is too short.

So in one of my first jobs after business school, they replaced the President and installed a jerk. It was not a healthy atmosphere. Micromanagement, low team morale etc… This led me to quickly jump at an opportunity that was offered to me. Once I had some space from it — I realized I want to contribute to positive work environments.

#2 TELL YOUR STORY

Once I had figured this out, it really helped me channel my positive energy towards the workplace in and out. I started reading more about the workplace, organizational behavior etc… I realized I was really passionate about people, talent & culture.

At my next job, we were writing a report on organizational change. Part of that included content on leadership and talent. I threw myself at that area of research with my entire energy. I went out of my way to call the Senior Partner and share my passion (he was pumped to connect with a like-minded person despite my tenure). I volunteered to get involved in projects for several partners in the talent and culture space in addition to my own work. This helped me stand out and win some friends along the way.

#3 EMBRACE THE JOURNEY

One thing I’ve learned is that there really isn’t a dream job. There are 840 specific job categories in the BLS. What are the odds I am going to find the perfect “dream job”? Not likely at all.

I’ve learned to embrace the journey. One book that made me appreciate this was Mastery. I learned that Stephen King wrote every single day for NINE YEARS before selling a single book and that Leonardo da Vinci didn’t have his big break until he was 46. For me — the takeaway was that it was a little selfish to expect to land my dream job at 30 years old.

#4 BEGINNER’S MIND

In business school, we had to write down a list of leadership principles. I tried to think about this a little more broadly. I came up with a list of nine principles that would help me guide how I thought about my career. #6 was this:

6. Don’t settle for a comfortable job, always be learning

For me, learning is core to who I am. If I am not learning — and learning fast, I am not optimizing my energy.

Because of this, I’ve always tried to push myself to constantly be moving — whether this means getting a new job, experimenting on the side or even just reading something completely outside my comfort zone.

This symbol above is pronounced shoshin and represents the concept of Beginner’s Mind. This was introduced to me in the The Art of Learning another great book. The magic of this is that putting yourself at the start allows you to put yourself in a humble position where you don’t know what you are doing, you don’t have full confidence and you need to rely on others.

Through making a number of moves in my career, it has actually made me more confident and more adaptable, not to mention emotionally calm when reacting to new situations

#5 EXPERIMENT

In some of the career coaching work I do, I often see people get overwhelmed by the idea of a “dream job.” If it does exist (I hope, one day?) it seems like a massive undertaking. If you define success by landing that dream job, you are setting yourself up for failure by essentially creating 734 failure points and one potential successful outcome (not good!).

For me, I actually realized I wanted to get my feet wet with career coaching. One way was for me to quit my job and do it 100% from the start. Thank god I didn’t because I learned so much about what aspects of it I liked and didn’t like (I mostly learned I would never want to do this 100% of my time).

The approach I did take was to experiment on my free time, take a minimum number of clients and then to adjust my approach and focus as I go. As I’ve done this, I’ve shifted away from career transitions towards helping startup founders and also shifted more towards writing and speaking to college student than spending a ton of time coaching.

#6 DEFINE SUCCESS

Last of all, this picture sums up my thoughts:

I’ll let you cheat and steal my definition of success. No surprise that it has to do with energy.

This is pretty much what it looks like. Here are a couple scenarios:

My health goes downhill and everything else suffers:

My Career is struggling and everything else suffers:

You get the point. The takeaway here is to define success and then manager it.

To summarize:

1. Manage your energy
2. When you find what excites you, share it
3. Embrace the journey
4. Stay hungry, keep learning
5. Experiment
6. Define Success

41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

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The post Planning a Career is Insane — Here is a better approach appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.