When 21-year old Adam is home over the summer before his senior year of college, he talks to his Uncle who gives him the same advice that has been given to young people for 50 years.
“Find a good company and pay your dues buddy, it will pay off!”
Before Adam walks away he adds:
“Remember…The real world’s not easy”
Even if Adam might roll his eyes a bit, he knows that he doesn’t have another plan. While he sits with his friends at the bar that fall on campus, they make dark jokes about their fun being up after this final year. There is a certain dread at the table that no one can really articulate.
Adam and his friends are about to enter the real world with the same assumptions his Uncle had when he graduated 30 years ago.
It’s time we abandon some of those beliefs. Here are two we should retire immediately:
Belief #1: Learning is something that is done in school and classrooms
For decades, going to college meant a golden ticket to the middle class and the types of jobs that could comfortably support one’s life for the next several decades. MIT Economist David Autor calls these jobs “middle-skill” jobs and they have been dying a slow death over the past 30 years.
Maybe Adam’s uncle even has one of those dying “middle-skill” jobs. He hasn’t really learned anything new in the past ten years, but he kept showing up knowing that no matter what happened, he still had his pension.
Trust is all but gone for big employers and no one in their right mind expects a pension, but there is some good news. While middle-skill jobs are disappearing, there has been a big increase in “high-skill” jobs. These are knowledge work jobs which require you to develop all sorts of “soft skills” like feedback, managing others, advanced PowerPoint presentation skills and all sorts of other skills relevant to your field.
Universities are giving people a “middle-skill” mindset for a world which demands a lifetime of learning and growth.
Our mindset is still stuck with the idea that learning is what happens at a high-priced school in a classroom with 20 other people (only 15 if you pay enough!).
The reality is that learning is going to happen continuously, on the job, through a wider range of experiences like travel and will involve developing “meta-skills” like learning how to learn and mindfulness.
Belief #2: I need to get a job doing X before I can start doing X
In conversations with many college students, they will articulate a vague dream of working for a number of years and then “starting their own thing.”
This comes from the pre-corporate era, when that just what people did. From the book Cubed:
“Being middle-class in America used to mean starting your own business; by 1950, it meant, almost invariably, that you put on a suit and tie and went to work in an office, alongside millions like you.”
What many people don’t realize is that corporate jobs, consulting jobs or other similar paths are terrible preparation for starting your own thing. In addition to the steady pull of increasing salaries and promotions, the small compromises you make in the name of “culture fit” eventually zap all semblance of drive to go “out on your own.”
In one of my former jobs, I proposed using a new software tool that cost $10 a month.
“We’re not allowed to use that software, it’s not approved”
I would love to sit here and tell you that I used it anyway and it made a huge impact on our client. It wouldn’t be true. Instead, I did what most people did and gave up and moved on.
Every couple of months I’d have an idea like this and get shot down with one excuse or another. At my year end review, my boss told me that I needed to learn how to “be more patient.”
A year later, I realized I spent way too many years in the corporate world before going out on my own. I had an enormous amount to learn and I was just getting started. I’m 2.5 years into the journey and I still feel like a beginner.
That finance job isn’t going to teach you how to run a business. It’s just going to teach you that taking a chance and carving your own path is pretty scary.
We need more people to carve their own paths
Enough people have changed their mind on these beliefs, yet their behavior has not shifted. Many people might accept that the best learning doesn’t happen at school, yet still opt for an MBA. Many people might also accept that the business world isn’t the best place to learn to start their own thing, yet they still tell people that’s their dream…one day.
So many people are stressed with the current state of work, yet they don’t want to do anything differently. It’s time we start abandoning old beliefs and start taking action in new directions. Instead of the MBA, why not travel around the world for a year and try to start a new company?
I didn’t expect to close this essay like this, but I’m feeling inspired and fired up by all the people I meet like Ted. He’s brave and every day he spends figuring it out, we can learn from him. Self-employment and carving you own path means dancing with many of the emotions we seek to avoid.
The mainstream “future of work” conversations too often turn into an expression of insecurity of a lot of people who have it pretty good at work. Yet they know that the future will likely become more uncertain.
We don’t need any more articles about the future of work. We need you to be brave and bet on yourself.
Paul Millerd writes on Boundless about the future of work without the BS and helps make sense of what it’s actually like to carve your own path in today’s world without resorting to magical promises of “hacks to get rich quick.” He built a course called Reinvent to help people make sense of the future of work, meet other people carving their own path and create their own work.
