Confusions in Generic Career Advice
You can notice which kind of person you are:
You don’t really care what you do and you want a way to find money.
You have something you want to do and want to find a way to make money doing that thing.
There are some funny things here that complicate it.
For 1, a lot of people who do this route enjoy the way they make money. Maybe they like building things, or doing ops, or selling things. Or working with a crew that already has money and they want to help them make even more money. Or maybe they are enjoying building a large company that does logistics.
The point is, there is a complication because most of the people that seem like they are doing option 1, are actually just doing what they want to be doing. They do not hate their job. They really like the game. They do not see it as a necessary evil.
For 2, there is a complication in that a lot of people would do the thing they want to do regardless of if it makes them money or not. They really want to be doing that thing. Maybe it’ll make money and maybe not, but making money is not the mission. Sometimes even, monetizing the passion distorts it in a way. Even if they are open to monetization, they are not thinking about how to fit in the market generally speaking.
And so the advice of “noticing if you are person 1, or person 2, and then picking a strategy” doesn’t seem like it actually works super well.
Hmmm alright. What now?
I guess that schema doesn’t work. Are there other trades that you have to pick between?
Because underneath all this, there are a few different trades:
“I will tolerate a bunch of nonsense in exchange for a lot of money and some interesting problems. The nonsense doesn’t feel bad because it’s in a pipeline that’s generally lucrative, and that feels good.”
“I will tolerate being broke or precarious in exchange for doing this one specific thing. I really want this specific thing to exist in the world and really want to be the one doing it.”
“I will tolerate feeling a bit underused or underpaid in exchange for stability and time. The job isn’t making the full use of my talents because I don’t want it to be. I’d rather put my most emotional self somewhere else.”
That seems a little bit real.
It seems both in the original, and in this revised schema, you can’t really escape this question of want. What do you want to have, where do you want to be, what do you want to be doing?
Even if you decide to “pass the marshmallow test” and not do what you want to be doing until later in life, and swallow a lot of annoying stuff now, you still have to choose what that entails — what train you’re trying to ride to get somewhere later, and what the good things later you are hoping to get.
Maybe it can be hard to see because people are generally already making trades, in real time, and not talking much about it. And then when these questions come up, the real question is “which way to turn the knob” on certain parameters.
You can move up or down on:
money
autonomy
social approval
stability
personal feeling of aliveness
I am not sure if these are the real parameters.
Maybe there are other things like
time spent in metabolic stress
time spent meeting demands of other people
that are really quite important.
Hmmm