The Bad Parts of Career Advice
Career planning meets life’s unpredictability
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In a business class in college, we would often have guest speakers visit. This person would tell us about their background and current work. It was a way for students to learn from people in the industry and expose us to different ideas. Usually, the presentation started something like this:
“Hey guys. I graduated from xyz college, didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, so I applied to a few jobs. Turned out my uncle’s friend knew someone at the company who gave me a shot. I worked really hard, got bounced around to a few different teams, and ended up in my current role.”
A Q&A session followed, where bright-eyed students siphoned as many platitudes from the speaker as possible in our final minutes. In the speaker’s defense, how are you supposed to provide actionable career advice to a group of 50 kids? Everyone is different. And that’s the point.
So few have a “normal” career path and advice largely boils down to personal experiences. A modern career path is often a series of events steered by change - interests change, priorities shift, and industries evolve. Trying to reproduce what someone else did will most likely not get you to the same place.
But we certainly try. Sometimes in the form of using CEO quotes as blueprints for career navigation. Even worse, studying their routines. How often do you see headlines like, “Tim Cook’s Morning Routine Revealed”?
It suggests that what he is doing now, as Apple CEO, is what the average person should emulate for similar success. As if Tim was waking up at 3:45 AM during his days at Auburn.
Living in the digital age comes with an overwhelming amount of information. If you spend enough time consuming career advice, you're bound to hear both sides of every opinion.
In investing, Morgan Stanley currently has a Buy rating on Snap Inc., while Merrill Lynch expects the stock to underperform. Each bank has a convincing argument to back its prediction. Investors would be hard-pressed to feel confident about any decision.
Although less binary than a stock prediction, “follow your passion” is a commonly debated piece of advice with well-respected supporters on both sides. The phrase gets applause at graduations, but does it pay the bills? Is work your vehicle for self-actualization? The truth is, most people don’t know what they want until they find it.
There are tons of personal variables to consider. And everyone has a different mixture of luck, acquired skill, natural talent, and interest. A different mixture that we can’t calculate.
Someone may be stupid and luck got them places. They’ll say, “Don’t study, being smart is overrated. Just look at me.” Or we may listen to a PhD for advice simply because they are smart - ignoring their unique mixture of attributes. It’s difficult to not let your experience have a tyrannical influence on what you say.
Circumstance has an enormous impact on goals. As we move through life, our tolerance for risk changes. That’s why portfolios gradually move from 80% stocks/20% bonds to 80% bonds/20% stocks.
Your grandpa may think you joining a startup after college is too risky because he’s in capital preservation mode. Risk avoidance is all he knows right now. But grandpa forgets that his risky entrepreneurial days provided a nest egg.
Although it’s worth noting that outcomes are highly unpredictable and aren’t necessarily correlated to the effort expended. There are a lot of hardworking people out there. No one tells you about happenstance when you’re going to school because it’s not quantifiable.
“Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance.” - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
We often aren’t conscious of the small things - the inflection points that seemed insignificant in the moment, then compounded and had an outsized impact. For example, learning a new leadership skill. The culmination of these moments may be retroactively packaged as “hard work” to advice-seekers. Unfortunately, advice like this tends to be too abstract to be useful, further stressing the importance of specific advice.
So much of what transpires across a career is impacted by the randomness of life. Thousands of decisions are at play daily, across decades. It’s more random than we think. But there are always ways to sway randomness in your favor, and Paul Graham provides a great way here:
Being a good person who’s open to opportunities is always a good idea. Beyond that, there is no one-size-fits-all approach. Life is fluid and what worked for a guest speaker may not work for you. Seek advice from a broad set of people and apply what’s best for you. Owning your future requires active questioning of advice and coming to your own conclusions. The choice of how to spend your career comes down to one person — you.