51: Passion won't pay the rent
Figuring out your future starts early and it never ends
What are you going to be when you grow up? Heard the question often so of course I thought about it as a kid. The 'man-jobs' Fireman, Policeman, Mailman didn't seem to be my thing, but what was my thing? Did I have a thing?
Concerning. After consulting with my father I decided I wanted to be a dad. That stopped the questions. It's a great answer because it removes the premise that you have to be something that you work at 5 days a week and that thing defines you.
I went with the dad answer to shut the adults up as much as wanting to be a dad but I did love babies back then. But the job thing is inescapable - society is constructed around what you do. Doctor, Lawyer - now we're talking right?
In elementary school someone's dad came into my class to and showed us a prototype for a video phone. I suppose he worked for AT&T. It was basically a rotary phone of the day with a video screen stuck on top. Blew my mind! Why didn’t anyone tell me about the future!? What would the future bring? What would my future bring?
Once I achieved real dad status, I got my moment of grade school glory in one of my kids classroom as the adult talking about their amazing job. I brought props - an old motherboard, a hard drive I had taken apart so you could spin the platters and a mouse with a removable plastic ball. My plan was to teach the little suckers how everything was encoded into zeros and ones and how much stuff you could fit on a disk.
I suspect I turned off an entire classroom of 2nd graders from going into computer science that day.
In high school my brain evolved from thinking about what I was going to be when I grew up to what I wanted to do. That's a better way to think about it. Do you want to do good? Do you want to make a lot of money? Do you want to save the world from one if it's many existential crisis?
After high school, the luxury of changing your mind tapers. You've had 18 years of musing, now choices must be made and they start to feel bigger. Grab a job? Go for a trade? Off to college? I was lucky to get another 4 years in college to figure it out. However, in college the pressure is on from day 1 to declare your major.
The video telephone and aspiring to do grand things and my love of science fiction all came together in one word: astrophysicist. Super impressive word right? That was my going in plan when I left home in LA to attend UC Berkeley.
Things did not go as planned. Physics at Berkeley was HARD. I tried hanging out with some physics majors, not my tribe. Going with the tribe vibe I moved on to Engineering. A bunch of my freshman dorm friends were engineers. I drew an awesome belt buckle in a drafting class only to then discover Calculus at Berkeley was HARD.
I entered a contemplative phase interlaced with no small amount of panic. Did Berkeley have a major with classes I could pass and graduate? How about Anthropology? Took a class, interesting but I was not Jane Goodall material.
Architecture! Those dudes were interesting and artsy and the architecture building looked like Godzilla. Took a class. Architecture was really engaging and it changed my writing to this day (small caps), but I wasn't wired for constant creativity that was also oddly … constrained?
Getting desperate, I took a computer programming class. The professor wrote the book - Oh! Pascal! and he was a great teacher. He passed his hat around the lecture hall to buy a boom box we put in the basement and we pulled all nighters working on our final project with Motown blasting. Computer Science classes at Berkeley were … EASY?! That turned out not to be the case over time, but I logged my first A in CS50 and I was hooked.
Found my cheese yay! Computer Science got me through college, but then I graduated. What am I going to even do with this degree?
Had I gone to work as a waiter right out of High School maybe I would have become a manager at some point and then got promoted to corporate and had a career path guided by immediate experience. If I had pursued a trade like a plumber - same straight path hopefully to journeyman and maybe running my own company before my back gave out.
Choose college and your opportunities expand which is amazing but also leads to what feels like a very big decision of that first job after you graduate.
Here's where the intersection of my degree and what I wanted to do clouded my future. I wanted to help people so I looked for a career path that did that directly. I found a non-profit in Berkeley off University avenue a mile south of campus that provided a range of local community services to folks in need. It felt like a really good thing to do. But the pay wasn’t enough for rent in Berkeley never mind doing other stuff I wanted like taking my girlfriend out to dinner.
So I decided to follow in my parents footsteps and go into the public sector. I found a county job at the Social Services Agency. You can see my shockingly cute ID card here. I quickly grew to hate that job. So many politics, so many levels to the bureaucracy, so many ineffective people. I didn't last a year - you couldn't get anything done! I wasn't helping anyone.
I found my way. It took a few job hops to shake the stigma of public sector and I made it to a place with room to grow in a company called Microsoft that was just getting into the Enterprise Software business. I got paid enough to go from buying dinner to buying a house while helping people out along the way.
First you have to take care of yourself. The world - especially the pinnacle of capitalism most of us live in - is not a fun place at all if you don't have enough money for dinner.
It's college graduation season - a time for motivating commencement addresses and career thinking and career launching and this piece from the New York Times caught my eye: Selling out is ok
While in typical New York Times-ey fashion they focus on new graduates from the Ivy league, it's the same dilemma for every graduate and it’s not new. How do you stay true to your ideals but still want that paycheck? Take care of yourself, stay the good person you are, and navigate from there. Don't go work for a soulless hedge fund on Wall Street or a Crypto King in the Bahamas, but do pick a path that will let you enjoy your life doing something you’re good at. Starving artist is overrated.
While I'm here, there is something I must vigorously debunk:
Follow your passion - that's BAD advice1
Typically this is dished out by someone wildly successful and it's their trite response to some question like 'what's the secret to your success?’ Sounds good at first blush, but it's not good advice.
It feels right though! It’s easy to latch onto it and dismiss any career opportunity that isn't aligned directly to something you are passionate about. What better thing to spend your time and effort and life on then something you feel at your very core? I've been passionate about a lot of things - Legos, baseball, photography, motorcycles, comic books. Write now (hahhaa) I'm pretty passionate about writing, but I’m not depending on it to pay the bills.
My college experience is a good example. I started with something I was achingly passionate about - Space! My focus evolved as I hit capability and interest plateaus. When I finally landed on Computer Science - I can't tell you how amazing it felt to get that first A at Berkeley. There is much joy in being good at something where the effort you put in yields continuous gains.
Find something you’re good at. You're never good at things you hate so at worst they will be passion-adjacent. Work on your craft, get better, put in the effort and you will takeoff.
You will spend a chunk of your life on your career but take a moment to pan out and think about it more broadly. Like a puzzle, you need to fit your career into the rest of your life.
A framework to think of your journey is Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. In your lifetime you’ll work your way up from the bottom of the pyramid covering the basics like food, shelter, security, besties and then reaching for something Maslow called self-actualization. Think of self-actualization as reaching your potential which kind of sounds like a commercial now, thanks Microsoft, so maybe instead think of it as feeling fulfilled and content or living your best life while also helping others.
It wont all be linear. Most life experiences move you forward, but they don’t all do it in the same way, so if you feel like you’ve plateaued or even dipped in a job, make a move. Move again if it doesn’t work. See if you can move within the same company - lowers switching costs. Don’t burn any bridges. I went through half a dozen majors, a dozen companies and at least 20 jobs and I’m still figuring it out!
Here’s a fabricated visual of my path to self-actualization with Maslow’s pyramid for reference.
Plot your best future - that’s your only job.
best, Andrew
I searched this exact term and apparently I am not the first person to get worked up about this. Check YouTube for more takes on this.
Last week I wrote about the brilliance of bundling and also Happy Meals:
Loved this read, thank you!
Excellent read, great advice! Well done Andrew!