I wanted you to think about yourself, and I mean REALLY think.. What are you good at? What do you suck at? And then I wanted you to put it down on paper, and not so I could see it, and not so anybody else could see it, but so that YOU could see it. Because ultimately you don’t have to answer to me, and you don’t have to answer to Kelso, you don’t even have to answer to your patients for God’s sake! You only have to answer to one guy Newbie, and that’s you!
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In two weeks I will be starting my first full-time office job – the start of my career. When’s the next time in my life that I’ll be able to go to Pizza Hut at 3pm on a Wednesday? The prospect of being chained to a desk for the next 40 years is, frankly, one that I find terrifying. I’m 22 now. My working life will likely be twice as long as that again. I can’t even fathom a time period that long.
On top of the whole “what the fuck am I doing in life”, there are a million other different worries. What if I suck at my job? What if there’s an asshole in my office who, for whatever reason, just doesn’t like me? What if I get ousted in some sort of office coup, despite my love of Robert Greene? I can easily rationalise these as the standard going-into-a-new-place worries, the same worries that every fresher or new kid at school has, that almost always prove to be either unfounded or irrelevant.
But that large, looming worry, the fact that I am slowly transitioning from being a child to an adult, is unavoidable. All my life I’ve thought of myself as a smart kid, someone with “potential”. Now comes the time when I have to actually do something. And I’m scared.
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One of the books on my reading list in The Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. It’s a fantastic book, and I’ve read it probably 7-8 times since I got it a few years ago.
One of the simplest lessons you can take from it is this: complaining about anything is ultimately pointless. Any problem will fall into one of two categories. There’s either something you can do about it, or nothing you can do about it.
If there’s something you can do about it, stop complaining and go and do it.
If there’s nothing you can do about it, then complaining about it is a waste of energy. In typical stoic fashion, use this to your advantage. Use this problem as an opportunity to practice humility or patience.
Once you start framing problems in this way, they become much simpler to deal with. Note: simple does not always mean easy.
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An entrepreneur has a positive, flexible and adaptable disposition towards change, seeing it as normal, and as an opportunity rather than a problem. To see change in this way, an entrepreneur has a security, born of self-confidence, and is at ease when dealing with insecurity, risks, difficulty and the unknown. An entrepreneur has the capacity to initiate creative ideas…develop them, and see them through to action in a determined manner. An entrepreneur is able, even anxious, to take responsibility and is an effective communicator, negotiator, influencer, planner and organiser. An entrepreneur is active, confident [and] purposeful, not passive, uncertain or dependent.
- OECD, quoted in Ball, Knight and Plant, “New goals for an enterprise culture”.
I decided to email someone I admire. I found James Altucher‘s blog a couple of months ago and have since devoured pretty much everything he’s written. He’s made (and lost) a ton of money, and has some incredible stories to tell. His best post is How to be the luckiest guy on the planet and he’s also just self-published a book of the same title, which you can and should download for free. Then read all his other stuff.
Here is the exact email I sent to him, and his exact response. Note: I mean every word I say in my email.
Me to James:
James,
I found your blog a couple of months ago. It’s absolutely fantastic. I really admire the honesty you display in your writing.
I wanted to ask you a couple of things. I’m about to graduate with a BS Economics degree from Leeds University, UK. I don’t have the best grades in the world, but I’m pretty confident, I’m smart, and I’m ambitious.
Do you have any advice for someone who is just graduating and doesn’t want to go into a traditional graduate scheme-type role? I genuinely don’t know what I want to do with my life, apart from start a company at some point. I’d love to work for a startup or something, but I have very few technical skills, so it might be a bit harder for me to get involved in that sort of area.
I really appreciate any advice you can give me. And I’ve bookmarked your ebook online – the daily practice advice is brilliant. I’ve only been doing it for a couple of weeks and already I feel better about the future.
Thanks James
Andy
And his response:
There’s some good news and some bad news.
The bad news is you’re stressed. How come? You’re 22 or so. You have about 10-20 years before you need to figure out a career. There’s no reason to get rich so fast (what would you do with the money except guarantee your future?). I’m not saying “how come” flippantly, by the way. Are your parents stressed about your future? Were they stressed about their own futures when you were younger? Is your girlfriend shaky? Your other friends? Not that you need an excuse to be stressed. Its reasonable at this stage also to wonder, “What’s next?”
What if nothing was next? What if you worked as a waiter for a year and took painting and photography classes for a year? Write a comic book script based on a spiderman and submit it to marvel comics? Work in a factory? Go to India for a year and study yoga (you would get in shape, feel spiritual, make great friends, see the world, etc) while giving English lessons and “getting by”. Like young people do.
Next level: find something your mildly interested in and work for a mega corporation. What’s your favorite TV show? Who produces it. Work for them. They are obviously good at what they do. Its never bad to be the janitor at the best company in the world. You learn how to clean up their shit. Which makes you CEO-level for just about any other company. This is really true.
Next level: startup world. You’re obviously self-motivated and good at sales (you wrote to me. I’m responding. I got 1500 emails today). Go to any startup and tell them you’ll work for free until you get them a $1000 in revenues. And then go out and get them revenues. This focuses you on finding a good startup that you know you can sell their product. You become like a venture capitalist of sorts.
Next level: start your own company. I don’t like that. Maybe you need experience and something you’re a bit more passionate about.
Keep with the daily practice. Start stretching that idea muscle out a little bit more. Make lists of the craziest things you can do. I wasted the ages of 22-26. Or did I? In other words, nothing you do those years will be that important for later on. Meaning, you can explore yourself, make sure you have the right values and know how to be happy, make sure your brain is as big as possible (the mental practices), make sure you know how to save lives by surrending to whatever force you can help.
These are more important than finding the exact right job now. I made the equivalent of 14k euros a year from the ages of 22-26. I lived like a king because I lived cheap. Then I made more and it ruined my life.
This might’ve been a bit of a ramble. But there might be a few things here useful. Thanks for writing me and I’m glad you are doing the daily practice. Please keep in touch and let me know what happens next?
- James
EDIT: We sent another couple of emails back and forth. Here they are:
Me to him:
James,Thanks, I really appreciate the advice. I think the reason I’m feeling stressed right now is that there seems to be pressure from my parents and my credit card company to get a job and start earning money RIGHT NOW or the world will end. I guess I feel like I’ll be a failure if I’m not earning good money by the time I’m 25, which I know is ridiculous. I feel like I have the ability to do great things and that I’ll be wasting it if I take even six months of my life to do nothing. I feel like I have to do something impressive right away, or else the chance will be gone forever.
Does that sound stupid?
Andy
And his reply:
It doesn’t sound stupid at all. But it does sound like something that might not be the best way to be happy right now. A lot of that pressure is external. I was really a miserable failure at 25. And then again at 32.
Why don’t you take a day off from parents and credit card companies. Make lists of what you love. It might be hard at first. You’ve been a bit programmed to think about things you don’t love. What would you if everyone was dead and you were free from the stresses you have? Are you worried you won’t meet girls if you dont have a great job? What if you were a famous painter? Or a juggler? You dont have to do nothing for six months. What if you stopped all alcohol and worked out for six months. Become a hugely healthy person? WOuld that be a waste?Parents are hard. Mine were disappointed in me. but it worked out in the end. Sort of. Because in the end I had to stop caring what they think (although I still do a little with my mom). The only thing you really need to do righ tnow is survive, save a life every day, and continue that daily practice so you can be a superhero. I mean it.
Recently it seems that I’ve been reading nothing but stories about how degrees are worthless and that the job market for new graduates is terrible. Today, from the paper of record:
Employment rates for new college graduates have fallen sharply in the last two years, as have starting salaries for those who can find work. What’s more, only half of the jobs landed by these new graduates even require a college degree, reviving debates about whether higher education is “worth it” after all.
The people profiled in the article aren’t the only ones struggling. I have tons of friends (subtle brag) who either graduated last summer, or are about to graduate this summer, and have few, if any, job prospects. I’m one of them.
So is the economy to blame? Partly, sure. It’s a hell of a lot harder to walk into a £30k a yearjob straight after graduation than it was in 2006. Any foray into the job market will likely mean competing either with literally hundreds of other graduates, or people with 5 years of experience who have been laid off recently. And if you just want to earn some spare change while you look for your REAL career, say, as a temporary receptionist, you’re competing with over 80 other people for one spot. Good luck!
But why should anyone hire me over anyone else? Are my grades that much better? No. Do I have incredible work experience that gives me social proof and is a clear indicator that I know what I’m doing? No. Do I have high-value skills that no-one else has? No.
Sure, companies are still hiring people, but you have to be exceptional to cut through the swathes of candidates with identical CVs and land that coveted graduate scheme role. Are you exceptional? I know I’m not. Fuck it, if you were really brilliant, you wouldn’t even have a CV.
So what’s the solution? I’m not sure, because I’m one of the unemployed people at the moment. But from stealing the ideas of people smarter than I am, I can guess it has something to do with:
I’m having trouble finding a job at the moment, and it’s because I haven’t done any of these things. None of these have any barriers to entry: if you want to learn to program, there’s probably a thousand different sites to teach you how. If you want to start a company, the government will walk you through the process. It costs nothing to send an email to someone you admire and offer to work for them. The only barrier to entry is having the motivation and the desire to try something different, to challenge yourself, to follow a difficult path without knowing exactly where you will end up.
Or there’s always law.
University life has but 3 weeks left in store for me. My last exam is on June 1st, and after that, assuming everything goes OK, I’ll be done with education (at least for now – I’m still on the fence about whether I want to do an MA in a year or two).
At the moment, it doesn’t look like I’ll have a job to walk into as soon as I graduate. I’m still applying for things, but at the moment no firm offers. Just like a ton of other graduates.
So, rather than sit around for six months, working part-time at a bar and praying that someone walks in and hands me a job, I’m going to get proactive. On 1st June, I’m going to start working towards these ten goals:
