The Best Career Advice I Ever Got

“Have you ever dreamt of making money while you sleep? Not having to work every day to earn money? Not having to trade your time for money? Well, then its time you take the hard decisions. It’s time you quit your boring, soul sucking job and started your own business! It’s time to start living and chase your dreams. If not now, then when?”

I am sure we have all come across these kinds of motivational videos on YouTube or some motivational rant by a marketer trying to sell you a course on how to build an online business and travel the world or on how to become an influencer by building a huge social media following etc.

I have seen a fair few of them. They do pump you up, make you question things especially if you are dissatisfied with your financial situation or if you are stuck at a dead end job. They urge you to examine what your priorities are in life and to realign your life in a way that ensures that you are moving towards them. But the problem I feel arises in what they endorse as the solution to get out of this conundrum and get the life that we truly desire. If you look closely, all these motivational gurus have a similar story of how they ‘made it big’. Generally, the stories are all sensational and involve them taking huge risks, going through years of struggle during which they were broke or close to being broke, facing a lot of ridicule from everyone they knew but still persevering until they finally hit gold and found great success. They urge you to do the same and follow in their footsteps so that you also attain the kind of life you want.

Their advice leans heavily towards the “go big or go home” philosophy exhorting people to go all out and follow their dreams whatever they may be and sometimes even going so far as to suggest not having a Plan B or a safety net in case things do not work out, as the mere existence of a Plan B in their view shows that a person is not fully committed. Almost all of them urge people to quit their “boring”, “mundane”, “monotonous” jobs and do things that are exciting and would bring them a lot of money and a great lifestyle such as starting a business, writing a book or creating a YouTube channel. I have to admit that I was completely bought into this idea and believed that this was the best and most practical way to go about designing one’s life and career until I chanced upon some great career advice in Nassim Taleb’s book “The Black Swan”. Funnily enough neither was the book written with the objective of dispensing career advice nor was its author a business guru or a coach selling a program to help one get rich or start a business. Taleb starts off by first describing two kinds of professions or kinds of work or activity that a person can engage in i.e. a scalable profession or activity and a non-scalable profession or activity.

Non-Scalable Profession

A Non-Scalable Profession is a profession where you are paid according to the number of hours that you work, as it is an activity which cannot take place without your presence. Examples of a non-scalable profession would be being a hairdresser, a doctor, a massage therapist etc. (It does not include owning a salon, owning and running a hospital as those would fall in the category of being a business owner which is scalable.)

Scalable Profession

Scalable Profession or Activity is an activity which allows you to make money, without additional effort. For example an author would fall in this category. An author may spend 1 year writing a book, but then he can sell it to 1 person or to a thousand people, but the author does not have to write the book again each time a new person wants to read it. Similarly an actor in a movie shoots all the scenes in the movie just once and the movie maybe a failure and be watched by hardly anyone or it might end up being a great success and be watched by millions. But regardless, of how many people watch it, once the actor finishes shooting the movie, he does not have to work again when more people want to watch that movie.

Looking at the above classification it makes sense that if one wants to be rich, one must engage in an activity that is scalable. But there is a big catch!

What Taleb explains is that in a non-scalable activity there is a more symmetrical distribution of rewards. For example if we take a random sample of 500 hairdressers you find that their average income does not vary too much. There may be some who earn more than others, but generally their incomes do not vary too much from the average. You don’t find many hairdressers who are a complete failure not being able to survive in the profession nor do you find hairdressers who are millionaires or billionaires. They mostly tend to earn a reasonable compensation and there is not much variance in their income.

However, this changes completely when it comes to scalable activities, if we take a random sample of 500 authors, you find that their income and success varies a lot. There are several authors who are broke and having to work second jobs to make ends meet and are not able to get their works published. But then if we add one successful author like J.K.Rowling into that sample her income and wealth may constitute more than a 100 times the income of the other authors put together. Thus we can see that the distribution of rewards is very asymmetric when it comes to scalable activities. Scalable professions have the “Winner Takes All” effect. From this we can perceive that scalable professions and activities are only good if you “make it”, if you are one of the “big winners”. But also the nature of these activities are such that only few winners take the majority of the loot leaving hardly anything for those who do not make it.

So what does all this mean? Does it mean we either have to play it safe and engage in a non-scalable activity, which ensures a steady flow of income but has no potential to makes us rich? Or should we put all our efforts to try and make it big in a scalable activity while risking being a failure and struggling to make ends meet if it does not work out? Do we just have to choose one of these paths or is there another way to go about it? To find out stay tuned for the next article….