Making Your Career More Deterministic

/** Putting this here as I’ll reference it in my next post “Quick Notes on Career” and it is helpful.

I’ve had this belief for a number of years that in the current internet era, people are able to have more deterministic careers and have better resources to prepare for their career given the wealth of information/connectivity enabled by the internet. What do I mean?

Background: I’ve listened to a number of podcasts of people talking about their career journey/work, where they would generally be considered “successful.”

Definition of successful: peers would say they are successful, people look up to them, they are in select/rare positions of leadership/prestige, they are financially successful, they have accomplished something and generated value for society…with most having some combination of these attributes.

…I have heard by far more stories similar to “I fell into what I’m doing” vs. “I have actually prepared/planned out how my life is roughly going to look like, or I knew what I wanted to do, and I did it.” I noticed this podcast after podcast and confirmed my prior conclusion that there is a significant amount of luck/randomness in career, both positively and negatively. This may be obvious but it is worth stating.

There are other topics of discussion around this, like the competitive dynamic today being radically different in accessing opportunity than it was in the late 20th century (interestingly enough I don’t think it is always better nowadays, depending on your background, which may be non-obvious), but we already are on too much of a tangent.
In the context of luck/randomness, availability of what people really do day-to-day across industries/professions is generally more accessible now vs. before (from LinkedIn messaging to day-in-the-life videos to people discussing niche subspecialty matters online).
So, with more access to higher quality information, people can better prepare for the future and “make their own luck.”

There is some notion that that saying is an outcome of excess hard work/effort but I would add to it that increased preparation with higher quality resources further adds to your “luck.”

I think that covers it.

Side note:

This relates even to my second post “One Of My Top 5 Youtube Videos of All Time” which revolves around what one should do in their life work-wise, which now that I think about it just reflects my personal value system albeit a pretty popular value system…where:

you care about personal financial stability, purpose/value of work, and personal achievement rather equally.

This is in contrast to other value systems where…

you could ONLY care about accumulating money and not care at all about if your work means/does anything for yourself (like an intellectual challenge) or society, this could even mean compromising ethics/morals?
you could solely be driven by utilitarian/mission/serving the community (NOT SAYING YOU DON’T CARE ABOUT financial achievement but it is not the STRICT priority).
you might care only about personal achievement and not about value to society or maximizing personal capital.
some combination of the two (read: not equal shares of all three).

I’ll leave examples of which value systems align with what types of professions as an exercise to think about for the readers.

tl;dr How one goes about figuring out what they want to do…works differently now than it did 10, 20, 30 years ago.

Cheers,

Vishal

Published on May 28, 2023.