All Thoughts Career
This is an article I've felt conflicted writing, for I have found advice to be vastly unhelpful. However, I couldn't resist writing this for a younger version of me who was lost about careers. This is written for 21-year-old me.
Disclaimer: Read this not to follow but to refine your own career beliefs Here is what I've understood so far about career. (subject to change)
- Career is a substantial chunk of adult life (250 days * 8 hours * 35 years is 70000 hours). If you are going to spend a lot of time working anyway, it's good to know what you want out of it. Time spent optimizing for a career is well spent.
- That said, don't be a career student -- people who study and analyze other people's careers but don't take action themselves.
- Likely, the job or degree you end up with is not the best fit for you. The choice of degree and career in younger years is greatly influenced by societal factors and parental influence. There is very little agency if you look back on your decisions. Don't feel like you have failed in life if you don't enjoy your job or degree. (I can't stress how many people have told me that they feel like they are forever stuck in a career/degree)
- Default paths have a strong pull. You can see it everwhere -- kids of doctors becoming doctors. In school, the options were doctor, engineer, lawyer, CA, etc. Even in college, I saw predominantly 3-4 default paths: consult, software, trading, and grad school. Before you know it, you are already on some treadmill and can't stop running now. People who have not seen failure find it extremely hard to get off default paths. Be aware if you are on one of the paths you did not choose.
- Finding a better-fit job for yourself has immense value. It's alright to take 5 to 10 years to try out many things and find a better fit. The consolation is that the lost years will be covered because you'll learn/grow much faster if you are naturally inclined toward the job.
- If you want to explore careers, you need a strong will. Treat the exploration as an experiment. Failure of an experiment is not your failure. If you try a job and don't enjoy it, it doesn't mean you should return to the default path. It might take more than 1-2 attempts to find something great. You need to be okay with your decision to explore while seeing your friends going linearly up (salary or promotion) in their careers.
- The media shows us examples of people who knew what they wanted and had a linear path to success. This is a tiny minority. Search for examples of people who took courageous steps to change their careers. This will help make the decision.
- When searching for jobs to explore, personality is a factor, but don't label or box yourself. Labels hurt more than they help. (I'm an INFJ, and my suggested career prospects are librarian, psychologist, writer, etc.)
- Don't attach a strong identity to the path you have been on so far, be fluid. No, you are not an engineer, lawyer, or doctor; you just studied engineering, law, or medicine. Even if you took that decision yourself, know that you are not a slave to your own decisions.
- Maximizing for optionality is good only in the short term. Pedigree helps open doors to many jobs. Be it going to IIT/IIM, working at Google, McKinsey, or Goldman, or going for MS/MBA abroad. But you only need 1 or 2 of them to open most options. Don't be the person who collects these as stamps. Pedigree only raises the floor and not the ceiling. It's like proving I'm not bad multiple times. But it doesn't prove you are or could be great.
- Being a generalist too soon might not be a good strategy. A lack of weakness is not a strength. When forming a sports team, you don't want someone who can be a goalkeeper and striker. Schools get this wrong. The better student at school is someone who gets all A's, but in jobs, you are valued for being A+++ in one thing.
- When changing jobs, optimizing for maximizing more than one variable {salary, title, status, learning} most likely leads to a stuck-in-the-middle loss-loss situation. It's better to go all in one variable at one job. The worst result of an experiment is not failure but indecisiveness. You don't want to explore careers while not forming views about what variable is the most important for you. (The analogy with ML here is models learn the most on outlier points than average points)
- Learn to think about impact in a more holistic way. Not everyone is saving lives as a doctor but doesn't mean other careers don't have a significant impact (Link)
- Happiness from a career is correlated not only with the inherent goodness of a job but also with how far you will go in it. You will be happier being in the 99th percentile of X job vs. the 80th percentile of Yth job. Most rewards (financial, status, recognition) are concentrated in the 99th percentile.
- Don't choose a job for a higher average trajectory (similarly, don't choose a job with a higher starting salary). If you are ambitious, you will not be happy with an average trajectory. Choose a job in which you can have an exponential trajectory. Most of the reward is towards the later half of the career. So, all of the career exploration is for you to find something to stick to for the long term.
- Hard-working people think they can do anything solely through hard work. They can set a goal and backtrack on how to reach there. It may be valid for a few people, but long-term commitment to anything is more emotional than it is discipline. You may be in the highest paying career, but if you are gonna quit in two years, it won't make that big a difference to your net worth. You don't always want to tread the path that is the hardest, but the one that feels easier to you and not others.
- When you are young, it's cool to hate your job because that makes you fit in. I have been guilty of this. Bad-mouthing the company I worked at or the career itself. Don't hate what you do on a higher level, too. Otherwise, it will make you feel hollow. If you work at a fintech, it's easy to say that you are helping the top 1% of people live easier lives. You are not solving "real" problems. But if you really don't believe you are adding value to society as you would want to, don't do it. (the analogy with self-improvement here is you can't hate yourself into becoming a better person)
- Intellectualizing decisions is quicksand. I've wasted too much of my life on this. There is no optimal decision. And even if there is, you won't find it by shutting off the world and thinking harder. The only way is to hit and trial with recalibrations. Optimization becomes too much too soon. And you'll be paralyzed and overwhelmed. Don't kill serendipity in the process of optimization. Best decisions sometimes come after a single conversation or incident.
- Work on harmful patterns of thinking you've inherited from childhood/surroundings. Read up on fixed vs growth mindset. Work seriously on overcoming perfectionism to stop you from moving ahead. Fear of commitment will prevent you from committing to PhD / startups.
- Be aware of subconscious barriers that make you self-sabotage. You may want success or to be rich or famous but subconsciously detest it. For me, these thoughts bothered me a lot -- that successful people all have broken families or that you will regret not having enough fun / making memories with friends. You may not be able to overcome these blockers, but at least become aware of them.
- Don't beat yourself up on making sub-optimal decisions. You will never have enough information to make the optimal decision. So have a higher level of confidence that while some of your decisions will go wrong, you'll be able to correct course. (Link).
- You need to radically change the way you look at risk. Understand that fear and anxiety are part of human evolution. Many of my friends with extreme academic backing (top colleges or companies) worry about not finding a job if they quit and try something else. If students of IIT/IIMs can't take risks, who can? Risk-taking shouldn't be limited to people with generational wealth. Being academically accomplished is good enough backing to take risks.
- Question your relation with time, money, and work-life balance. Did you form the thought yourself, or did you inherit it from others? Do you really want money? Do you really want to retire early? Do you really want balance? I have realized I am not someone keen on retiring early. I find balance also a little overrated. It's fine to live a life on intensity/extremity.
- Understand how the economics of the job market works. Why are certain roles paid more than others? What leads to disproportionate rewards. Hard work isn't rewarded equally.
- Emotional resilience is the missing chapter at schools and colleges. Learn how to manage jealousy, envy, and comparison in careers.
- A quarter-life crisis is good. In fact, the crisis might be the compulsory step before clarity. You can't force clarity sooner. I went through this phase for 2 - 3 years, consuming 1000s of articles on planning your career/life. (Link, The Defining Decade book)
- Explore if your dissatisfaction with your career is part of a bigger dissatisfaction with life. Maybe you haven't found friends to hang out with, or you've not gotten used to city life, or you are still learning adulting. Therapy helps in this.
- In the end, work is not rosy all the time. You'll always hate parts of it or sometimes even completely. Everyone feels that way, perhaps. On some days, you will find it pointless.
- Being a fast learner and dependable is the most important skill early in your career. It can override not having a hard skill (such as coding)
- You have to play two roles in your career -- the actor who does the job well and the agent who goes out searching for the best opportunities. If you only do the acting and not the agent role, your chances of success will be limited. It's important to understand the macro trends. Your career growth is a product of personal growth X company growth. If your company or industry isn't growing, you won't grow. (Think people who joined Oracle vs Google in the 2000 - 2010 period)
- When thinking of deferring a career goal for the future, think about whether you are making a pseudo-goal to avoid risking real failure (Link)