Keagan Stokoe wrote an essay about staying on the credential path. This post is in response to his essay.
I’m sitting at nearly 54% of the 750,000 hours allotment. That’s kind of a wake-up call. I have been success-chasing for a while; I’ve worked at least 48,000 hours. About 2/3 of that time has been spent in my current career as a tax analyst. I didn’t come to this work in tax resolution until my 30s and was not actively seeking work in that industry.
If I look at the next 15 years, I estimate I would have about 31,000 work-hours left.
Career-wise, I started off believing in the credentialed path. Naively, I assumed that it was the only way to succeed. The credentialed path, to me meant doing well in high school, getting into a good college, and graduating into a good job. Maybe pursuing an MBA or law school down the road to continue the credential escalator, each step fighting for fewer positions wth higher prestige and income.
I believed it was a well-worn plan because it has worked for previous generations. The lifetime earnings of college graduates were higher than those who did not complete college. Sadly, this generation, saddled with extreme student loan debt, may break this trend.
If you’ve followed Peter Thiel, he explains quite lucidly why he decided to get off the credentialing escalator. I think he came to realize that he was competing with many qualified people for one prize; in his case, a clerkship with a US Supreme Court Justice, which he didn’t get. He did end up creating PayPal, and the rest is history!
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Keagan’s essay reminded me a bit of Cal Newport’s So Good They Can’t ignore you. Here’s a link to a useful summary. In essence, following your passion is not a good idea. Focus instead on gathering rare and useful skills. Getting good can get you some autonomy. Autonomy can make things a little easier (and therefore, better.)
I’m not really sure how I got started on the credential life path. I didn’t have many role models. I was the first to go college in my family. I guess it was inertia. A life in motions tends to stay in motion. (My cousin had gone to university and it was suggested that I would go to the same university.)
I woke up a bit in university. I thought I knew that there was a big world out there. You can know that conceptually, but until you understand your own role in it, your thinking won’t undergo an irreversible change.
Like many firsts that one encounters — first kiss, falling in love (or what one believes to be love at that time), losing one’s virginity, becoming a parent — there’s no going back after certain things happen. Your thinking must change.
This recognition always reminds me of one of the first and very few quotes I have ever memorized from The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. After kissing Daisy for the first time, Gatsby knew, his “mind would never romp again like the mind of God.”
It’s like eating fruit from the tree of knowledge. Irreversible. No going back to the bliss of ignorance, to the walled garden.
Maybe what I call irreversible changes is just another word for perspective. I’ll leave you with words from Steve Jobs from 2011 which appeared on a PBS show called, One Last Thing. Grateful.
When you grow up you tend to get told the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money.
That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact, and that is – everything around you that you call life, was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.
The minute that you understand that you can poke life and actually something will, you know if you push in, something will pop out the other side, that you can change it, you can mold it. That’s maybe the most important thing. It’s to shake off this erroneous notion that life is there and you’re just gonna live in it, versus embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark upon it.
I think that’s very important and however you learn that, once you learn it, you’ll want to change life and make it better, cause it’s kind of messed up, in a lot of ways. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.
Here’s a very short summary of my career path:
Graduated with an engineering degrees.
Summer in Japan.
Grad school for engineering.
Masters degree (and some luck, making a new friend) got me a consulting job at the Uni.
Started selling financial services part time.
More life skills.
Took a higher, prestigious, consulting position.
Started selling financial services full time.
Learned how to sell. Selling in a different industry.
Then, applied all those skills selling in the tax resolution world - for the last 15 years!
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Inadvertently following Cal Newport’s advice - I never followed a passion, but I just kept working. Inertia could have taken me somewhere else, somewhere less rewarding, but maybe I’m lucky. I got good at selling. Eventually, that allowed some autonomy which has provided some room to consider the future. I like to think of autonomy allowing for what Nassim Taleb calls the barbell strategy - where your current job allows you to some free time to try something riskier on the side and perhaps higher payoff.
I admire Keagan’s maturity and clarity of thought. I’m certain I wasn’t as mature at his age. Certainly, I had financial motives early on. I, too, made bold changes which, at the time, people thought were crazy.
And as I reflect on my own career and its evolution moving forward, I’ve tried to be grateful for what success I’ve obtained and hopeful to have more. Writing is a big part of that.
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