Why am I writing this?

It’s heartbreaking to see people I care about, people with whom I’ve spent good moments, people that are way smarter than I am - struggling with building a career. I’m not someone who has it all figured out either but I know what helped me. It bothers me what I’m about to share isn’t common knowledge and there are people who exploit this lack of information. I’ve also mentioned beliefs and the various plans I’ve seen most people use that I strongly disagreed with. It’s not meant to be a golden guide but it’s meant to be a thought process that I’ve used and that I believe is worth sharing.

Philosophical elements

Needs vs wants.

A few centuries ago, people used to work only for their needs and struggle to meet them. We live in a much better world today- we still have people struggling for their needs but that number is much smaller than it used to be. Although, the world is much better today, we’ve blurred the lines between need and wants with modern economics.

There’s a societal pressure on kids(as early as when they turn 10 years old) to figure out their future needs and wants- they’re asked to pick career paths in forms of education they pick. For what it’s worth, grown-ups themselves are bad at differentiating with needs vs wants. To make matters worse, education isn’t free in most countries. Kids need to win the birth lottery to get one. Birth lottery is being born in a country either the education is free or you’ve parents who can afford it. A few choices have been made for them depending on their birth lottery to what they can pursue. For example, if you wanted to be a doctor and you haven’t won the birth lottery in your favor, it’s time to get a reality check of whether being a doctor(since the education for it requires a lot of money typically) is a need or a want. It’s important to realise a few things:

• It’s not end of the road but it’s possible for you to switch careers in the future. You’re only increasing your odds from here on out.
• You might discover that your dream job is good in your dreams but not in reality, there’s some aspect of the job that you won’t like.
• It’s possible that there are other career paths you might fall in love with.

As said in BoJack Horseman:

“Well, That’s the problem with life, right? Either you know what you want, and then you don’t get what you want. Or you get what you want, and then you don’t know what you want”

When facing a critical situation that can define the trajectory of your life, it’s best to optimise for needs because without it, you’ll jeopradise your survival. Without survival, you cannot aim higher as shown in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. You will have to work for your needs, you do not get a choice and it’s not the end of the world.

Everything sucks, time to suck up and deal with it!

It’s surprising how many people blame their parents or college or other societal factors for why they haven’t figured out their career. It’s good to realise things suck, you know what won’t help you. Once you’re done talking about why it sucks multiple times, it’s time to take the driver’s seat and deal with it. For example, most people realise their college sucks and complain about it- I did too. It’s okay to end up in terrible colleges but you need to plan out your career path without relying on them. As much as your heart feels relieved after blaming someone else, you’ll have to make plans for your hungry stomach.

Don’t be disappointed playing the odds to find your worth

There are examinations that are designed to test what a person’s value is based on the decisions they make before they even turn 18. If you actually like the subjects you’re studying, it’s a no brainer for you to play the odds. If you don’t and if your parents will struggle paying for coaching fees, etc for you to find out if this will work, consider skipping it if if you’re not sure you can fully commit and be successfull. It doesn’t overly matter if you do or do not crack such exams. It’s an opinionated way to have a process to determine who in society can provide most value (there’s very little innovation on how to improve such processes), it is no by means the only way for you to prove what you’ll be worth.

Illegal career paths

I’ve had this conversation more than once, so thought it’s worth bringing it up. I’ve noticed once people realise that the world isn’t helping them, they start to think of illegal activities to earn their income. There’s a burning sensation in such people to stop caring about what society thinks of them. It’s the right kind of energy to go against what society thinks to provide value but breaking the law or making morally questionable choices is a bad idea. It’s never worth the risk of getting caught, especially when there are lots of good options out there that won’t risk jail time or make you feel guilty about your hard work. It is proven with Game theory that the world is a better place when we help each other, don’t make rash decisions when you’re a teenager.

Stop looking for shorcuts

If there is a shortcut to provide value and you being paid as a result of the service without much to learn, it’s likely that it won’t end up being a high income gig, let alone building a career out of it. It’s likely that you’ll be replaced by a machine or someone who’s willing to do it for less.

Time is a scarce resource

As Paul Krugman said, “Productivity isn’t everything, but in the long run it is almost everything”. Everyone heard this and it sounds a cliche but practically, people make up these excuses.

Oh, but I plan for masters abroad!

Lots of people end up in college and one of the biggest mistakes I’ve seen people make is delaying taking action. If you’ve reached this point, you get 3-4 years of time to figure out your career- it’s likely you’ll never get so much amount of time ever again to build skillsets that will help your career. Most commonly, I’ve seen people think they’ll figure it out when they go to a master’s program, when they move out of the country. That’s basically, buying more time to figure out what you want - sometimes with risking lifetime debt and jeopardising life savings of your loved ones. Your loved ones, typically will not hesistate to risk bank for you but it’s irresponsible of you to ask it of them without making an effort upfront. Looking at my friends, I really wish moving out of country worked for higher education worked as well as it did a decade ago but it doesn’t anymore. You’re playing a different lottery system by doing this and the odds aren’t in your favor with how developed nations like US give out work visas. Moving out of the country to upskill your career is very different than moving out to figure out what you want. That ticket isn’t worth it.

College takes up most of my time

It’s tricky and painful to deal when college comes in your way when you know their plan for your career sucks. Try to negotiate with college to give you time and space but put a mental deadline for their actions. Optimise the time by reading a book silently or working out of a corner in the class. There’s also tons of time after college to learn. If it comes to it, you can analyse the punishment system and see if it is worth taking the punishment(typically a day or two per semester around dean’s office or ocassional angry phone call to your parents who love you ).

My current job is draining me and I need to upskill to get a better job

Typically, people end up here because their plan has always been to “learn on the job” or they had some other poor plan that landed them here. If you do not have any skillsets and plan to learn on the job, you do not have any negotiation power for the time you’re selling. You’ll be stuck with a job that gives you no time to learn. It’s a vicious cycle. Also, the tougest one to crack. Finding time after office and on weekends might not be enough but worth using it. Try to see if you can cut down the commute time in some way by working from home a few days. If nothing, try to aim for a temporarily better work place where you’ve fixed hours to get more free time.

Avoid competition by being yourself, unapologetically

There’s a lot of societal pressure on what you should be doing with your life. Most advice is terrible and doesn’t work. You will need to figure out your own path. In fact, I believe the conventional wisdom will make you take average life choices and end up with you being miserable. If you feel teaching people makes you really happy, hold on to that. Its likely that your needs or wants may not be enough if you get a teacher’s job but you’ve found something that you that brings you joy. There’ll be more such things you’ll discover about yourself as time goes on, track these mentally and someday, you’ll find a way to make a fancy cocktail of all these things and be able to get the job you want. The Japanese call this Ikigai.

Money as the only motivation

Money is a byproduct of the value we deliver to society with our time and skillset. In barter system, people could trade without money. Look at money as logistics for how we get what we want and use time to evuluate. Modern economics and the jobs it created make it hard us to realise the mapping between time and money. Just remember, the end goal is the time we buy for ourselves and our loved ones with the money we earn. Everything else is a luxury.

Having said that, it’s completely okay to have money as your sole motivation. Some might call it a luxury to love what you do. It’s definitely a nice-to-have. Some think it’s luck. Maybe it is and you need to increase the odds of getting lucky. If you know a certain path will get you the money you need , go for it. It doesn’t hurt if you don’t love you what you do but it definitely will help if you’re happy with what you do. As long as you’re intrinsically curious and motivated to learn and do better, it probably doesn’t matter. At the very least, you’ll discover yourself when you’re earning and providing value, and find your Ikigai some day.

Practical steps

What’s not step one?

It’s not easy to know what to learn and when to learn it. It’s practically useless to ask advice on what to learn. More often than not, if you do that:

• You’ll end up annoying someone or get a generic answer that doesn’t help you.
• Someone will sell you a course that you don’t need. If not in terms of money, they’ll earn your trust to build a distribution network with follower count, etc and earn money from the distribution you’ve helped them with.

There might be exceptions but you reduce the risk of being scammed to be average by avoiding such people. It’s best to understand the problem spaces by looking at what’s trending and what people are excited about. That’s your starting point. Knowing no one is interested in spoon feeding you the path to glory.

Understanding problem spaces

You might have heard of “Work smart, not hard”. In reality, you’ll always have to work hard but if you plan smart, you’ll likely end up being pleased with yourself and the results you bring. This is where it gets fun and one where you’ll be the most anxious. You need to figure out what problems excite you. You’ll end up learning a lot in the process. You might even get excited about a problem space, spend an year on it and decide it’s not for you- that’s completely normal. Don’t opitimise for what you’ll learn, just learn. As a chess amateur, I often hear- “A bad plan is better than no plan”. Lot of the times, you’ll end up connecting dots as most problems have common themes.

Absorb information

We live in an era of information overload. You do not need to rely on paying for content to learn. It’s also better if you try to learn from the source material to understand what the original authors were thinking. You cannot have the luxury of missing out on information by having preferences on how you consume content. For example, if you don’t find a YouTube video on the topic, go and read the book or the manual. There’s always some information that resides in some form, dig it up yourself and absorb it. If you don’t do this, you’re reducing your odds of being successful.

Socialise with the crowd you want to be in

Humans are social creatures and the reason we survived as a species is because we shared knowledge so from purely a survival standpoint, you’ll be losing out if you don’t socialise with the crowd you want to be in.Socialise at meetups to realise what problems people are facing and try to discover/discussions solutions with them. People like to talk about their problems and the solutions they’ve discovered. Grasp as much knowledge as you can from them and do your research in the areas that interest you. There are tons of online forums you can be a part of.

Multi-Naitional companies vs Startup

At this point, you probably have some level of understanding of problem spaces and potentially, some that interest you. In order to determine which skillset you need to develop, you should have target companies in mind. They’re the companies that’ll pay for your services. Developing generic skills will only get you so far, you need to go the extra mile to prove you can deliver value. Job descriptions have good details of what skills you’ll be needing, prepare for that before you join the company. When you interview, pay attention to what skillset people are looking for, ask them if they’re looking for any you don’t have.

Startups look for people who provide value immediately and their interview processes are aligned that way. If you know you can provide value and you can prove it to them, they will hire you as soon as possible. Multi-national companies have a lot of bureaucracy and it’s hard to prove you can provide value in their interview processes. There’s a lot of leeway when applying to a startup- it doesn’t matter if you don’t exactly have the right kind of education, years of experience and you can cold email/DM to get in touch. Startups also get you lot of visibility within the company to let you prove your worth. In a multi-national company, as an entry level employee, it’s a long road to even be visible for the decision makers of the company, the farther away you are- the tougher it’ll be to demand what your worth or increase the value you could potentially deliver to demand it. Even if you really want to work at a multi-national company for some reason, I believe it’ll be worth it to work at a startup for a few years and then apply to a multi-national company for a higher position.

Certifications

If the only way for you to prove your worth to your employer is by certifications, go for it. Lot of fields do not have an obvious way and usually, certifications have higher value to get started in career. Certifications, like degrees are proxies to prove someone you may be valuable. It is always better to prove it by showing that you can do it. If you’re in tech, there’s a very low cost entry to prove what value you can deliver by doing it unlike other fields. There’s no equivalent of Open Source Software in other fields, use it to your advantage if your employer values it. This is also why it’s preferable to pick startups as they use less of proxy measures.

Understand the company

Ideally, you should be able to understand the business a company is in- you do not want to get onboard a sinking ship(example: crypto companies being clear red flags). Understanding business also helps you help the company to grow their worth and let you increase yours. It’s important to also check if you’ll culturally fit in the company. If the skills you’ve developed are in alignment to help the company grow, it’ll be a no brainer for company to promote you , if it is culturally good or for you to explore other options as you’ve proven to yourself that you can deliver value.

Don’t diverisfy your skillset

Warren Buffet famously said, “Diversification is protection against ignorance” . I think that’s amazing advice to follow with your skillsets too. If you think, “it’s a good compromise if I learn few skills required to get in MNC and few for startups”- that’s a bad idea (In tech world, this is the popular leetcode vs open-source debate). You’ll end up being average at both and not be able to provide value to either. It’s better to be really good at one thing. It does matter what you pick so take your time before you pick as it’ll depend on where you want to want. Have an endgoal of what problem you’ll want to be solving when you start your job and try to figure out what skillsets you’ll be needing. It’s good to understand landscapes but do not do it at the expense of the skillsets you’ll be needing at your job.

Do not be afraid to aim higher

There’s a famous saying, “Dress up for the job you want, not the one you have”. The same applies for jobs you’re applying for. Once you know that you meet the skillset laid out in the description, ignore the line about years of experience. Worst they can do is say no- you’re not losing anything.

Fail fast

If you’ve targeted couple companies, you’re confident in the skills you possess and are able to demonstrate value you can provide to them- you might still be rejected for some reason. It’s okay, don’t take it personally. It’s a good idea to fail fast and move on to the next company. It’s likely that you’ll be rejected by a lot of companies before you get hired. It’s a good idea to keep track of the reasons you’re rejected and work on them. Also, never go for the first offer you get even if it sounds perfect. That’s the first time you’ve heard your perceived value in the market. It’s a good idea to keep interviewing until you get a few offers and then pick the best one and negotiate the terms.

Closing thoughts

Hope this helps you feel less lost and question common practices and advice. Good luck and remember:

“It’s not the destination, it’s the journey”- Ralph Waldo Emerson.