Five College and Career Fallacies Young People Should Avoid

It’s possible you’re preparing for an economy that no longer exists. Let’s explore five common myths and mistakes when it comes to getting educated, building a resume, landing a job, and starting off on the right foot in the professional world.

Fallacy #1: You can’t turn down “free” opportunities

Things too good to resist can be dangerous.

So many young people suffer through stuff they don’t like with no clear future benefit just because everyone else calls it a great opportunity, or something they’d be crazy to turn down. “If you get in to an Ivy, you go!”, or, “If Goldman offers you a job, you take it!”, or, “If your parents will pay for this expensive education, you can’t walk away from that free experience!”.

But it’s not free. Every action has an opportunity cost – what other things you’re giving up in order to do it – and money is the least important. “Free” comes with strings attached, just like your parents money. Most unhappy young students and workers are unhappy because they feel like they can’t turn down something someone offered them. You can. In fact, you probably should.

The more skin you have in the game, the more likely you are to succeed. Watch students who are paying their own way through a school or educational program.

Watch people who pay to go to conferences or professional development trainings out of their own rather than their companies pocket. Consider books you buy for yourself vs. those gifted to you. Which do you get more out of?

There’s a reason Bruce Wayne couldn’t climb out of the prison until he tried it without the rope. There’s a reason Vegas is better than experts at predicting sports outcomes. When you have something of your own to lose, you sharpen your focus and perform your best. Place a bet on yourself. Put yourself in positions where you stand to lose or gain based on your failure or success.

Don’t do things you don’t like doing just because they are “free”. It can tether you to the expectations of others and make you a worse decision maker.

Make it a goal to become independent of the goodwill of others and dependent on your own success as soon as possible, even if that means turning down opportunities others would salivate over. They don’t have to live your life. You do.

Fallacy #2: You major matters

What you know matters. What you study in school not so much. (With the exception of legally required majors for heavily regulated industries).

All the most valuable things you’ll learn in life won’t come from a classroom. How to walk, talk, drive, use Google, navigate social situations, and creatively solve problems are learned by doing. The most important ideas you’ll deal with are more likely to come from your own experience, reading, and discussing than from assignments. You can’t outsource the development of knowledge to a department, program, or credential.

Studies and majors won’t automatically grant you useful knowledge, nor will they provide a deep and rich network. We all need one. A pool of people with whom we’ve established social capital, and who we can work with and call on for resources, expertise, and support is indispensable. It’s not uncommon for a university experience to provide you with some friends and future associates, but never assume just being around a bunch of other students with similar interests is enough. That’s a recipe for building a horizontal network, not a vertical one. You need both.

A network of people mostly the same age with mostly the same interests at mostly the same skill and experience level is a start, but only a very small start. You need to step outside the institutional setting and build a network that includes retired pros, middle-aged managers, young investors, old experts, and an array of people up and down the world of enterprise across a diverse set of industries.

Fallacy #3: “Leadership” is a skill

In the real world product beats paper every time.

I read a lot of resumes from people who clearly obsess over them. They are spattered with a diverse array of activities and list vague skills like, “Leadership”, and “Integrity”. These don’t indicate anything but an obsession with credentials and titles. You’ve got to demonstrate value creation.

Resumes and degrees are signals. Their only purpose is to let you broadcast that you pass some minimum bar of intelligence and ability. They can’t do much more, and increasingly, they don’t even do well at that minimum signal. Activities are not outcomes. Anyone can join a club or be named treasurer. Few can actually create value in a demonstrable way. The latter crushes the former every time.

Can you show something you’ve actually “shipped”? Do you have an easily verifiable reputation for getting stuff done? Show, don’t tell. Show them the website you built. Show them the number of new page likes your Facebook ad campaign generated. Let them see the customers you served, the money you raised, the newsletter you produced, or the app you launched.

Whether any of these tangible creations succeeded is far less important than whether you finished them. Everyone can sign up for stuff and spout about ideas.

Everyone can pass a class. Very few can deliver results on time. Almost no one can conceive an idea and bring it to life without being forced to be some authority figure.

Focus less on the resume and more on the product.

Fallacy #4: There is one right path

Most likely your future job doesn’t exist yet. Don’t stress about it, this is a good thing.

It’s ridiculously painful to decide what your calling in life is, and what educational and career steps you must take to live it.

Relax. There isn’t a single path that, if missed, will doom you forever. You’re travelling to a largely unknown destination.

How can you plan for that? Simple: don’t try to do what you love, just try to avoid what you don’t.

Make a list of things you really don’t like, aren’t good at, and don’t even really want to be good at. Anything not on that list is fair game. Go try it. When you discover through experience more things you dislike, add them to the list. Pretty soon the field of viable options will begin to narrow. Any step within that field is a step in the right direction.

Fallacy #5: You are an employee

Machines and software are better employees than humans. So what.

You’ve got one amazing advantage: humans are wonderfully creative and adaptive. Use it. You can’t afford the employee mindset, where you simply specialize, follow orders, and expect your company to do the heavy lifting when it comes to your financial support, happiness, and reputation. You are your own firm, wherever your paycheck may come from.

You’ve got to think like an entrepreneur.

Take ownership of the company vision, whether you created it or not. Understand that you’re not just laying bricks, but building a cathedral. Ask questions. Look for ways to improve, even things outside of your department or direct control. Do one thing to add value to yourself and your company every single day.

This doesn’t mean you should ever consider yourself too good for old fashioned grunt work. Ask any entrepreneur if they’ve ever done their own data entry or toilet scrubbing. They have. It does mean you have to adopt a big-picture mindset and don’t wait for assignments, but look for ways to create value. Whenever possible, just do them rather than asking permission.

As the market changes demand for whatever specialized skills you have may grow or shrink. The one thing that will always be in demand is creative problem solvers who think big and act swiftly.

Conclusion

What does combating all these myths have in common? You can’t wait around for other people to confer status, knowledge, or success on you.

You’ve got to take the reins and build your own education and career, and it all begins with a mindset shift.

Check Out the Monthly Media Email

Once a month I’ll be giving a review of a movie, TV show, podcast, book, or article.  I’ll go check out some stuff and give you the lowdown so you can decide if it’s worth checking out yourself.

These reviews will only be available in a monthly email.  You’ll notice the page on the site and the sign up box on the sidebar.  Either way will get you on the list.

I wanted a way to create some special value for regular readers and thought about things I don’t normally share on the blog.  I consume a lot of media, but I rarely do reviews of any kind, so it seemed a great place to start.  I want to ensure the email is not just a repeat of blog material, so it will always have exclusive content.

We’ll see how the experiment goes.  I’d love your thoughts on the idea, as well as recommendations of books, etc. that you’d like to see me cover.  Submit them via the Ask Isaac page.

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Ask Isaac: College, Books, Startups, and Unschooling Challenges

I take some great questions submitted via the website:

  • You went to college — when and how did you decide it wasn’t the best path for most people?
  • Reading list for someone who is interested both in philosophy and business?
  • Do you think startup is becoming a buzzword? Would it be better to just create a business?
  • Challenges you face as an unschooling parent? Surprises?

This and all episodes are also available on SoundCloud, iTunes, and Stitcher.

Investors, Gamblers, and Rules

Yesterday I was talking with my brother Levi who runs a highly successful financial services company about different types of investors.  As sometimes happens, a 2×2 matrix began to emerge.

This not only describes different investor types but also different types of gamblers.  If you know anyone really into either gambling or investing (this goes for both stock investors and VC’s) you’ve probably picked up some variation of these four basic types.

The types are about the way rules and systems are viewed.  I’ve spoken with a great many investors who live by them.  They tell me their sound rules built on solid theory and insight are the only thing that keeps them disciplined and keeps emotion in check to sustain long run returns.

Others say that if rules worked everyone could be rich.  It’s only by breaking rules and being unbound by rigid formulas that you can win big.

I suspect that both of these are true and the key might be to discover your own personality, risk tolerance, and unique intelligence or insight that you do (or do not) bring to the table.  Some people need rules.  Some people would be hampered by them.

Here’s a rough attempt to show some archetypes in the investor world that might illustrate the four categories:

Archetypes

If you don’t recognize some names or you’re not sure what is meant by them, here’s a chart that describes the characteristics of each:

Description

If you recognize these categories, which are best to work with?  Say you are seeking funding for some project or startup.  Some investors have very tight criteria for who they’ll work with.  It can be good and it can be bad, depending upon what you want and what the criteria are.  Many people imagine that the best case would be an investor with no rules, who they could win over on gut instinct and then have a smooth, easy process of getting funding and using it.  This may be true, but it could also mean a) you get no valuable insight from the investor or, b) you get weird, unpredictable phases of meddling and odd requests for pivots.

This chart gives a little description of what working with each category might be like:

Working with

I don’t pretend to have a lot of experience working with investors or gamblers, but I’ve been around enough to see these types pretty clearly.  I’m probably missing some big things and offending some people, and my descriptions may not be reflective of your experience.  This is the result of one short conversation, not a lot of study.

If you strongly disagree or see something I’m missing, hit me up with your take!

Sometimes Creating Stuff Sucks

I love podcasting.  It’s been a blast.  But it’s a huge pain sometimes.

Today I interviewed Penelope Trunk, and it was brutal.  She was wonderful.  The interview itself was great.  But my technology threw every wrench at me imaginable.  It was stressful and annoying to duct tape together an episode with all the fragmented sections.

She was cool about it, thankfully, and even gave me twice as much time as originally promised.  But it threw my whole day off.

Five minutes before we began I realized I’d never called someone’s phone via Skype, so I did a Google search and downloaded an app on my phone that records phone calls, just in case.  I barely had time to enter my info and set it up as a backup.

Then I go to dial her and realize Skype charges for calls to a phone.  I had to scramble to enter payment info (thank you Dashlane for quick form completion!).  We got started two minutes late, which already had me frustrated.  I hate tardiness.

Things were going great for 12 minutes, then the call dropped.  We dialed again.  It went well for about three or four minutes and then she couldn’t hear me anymore, though I could hear her.  Drop.  I dialed again and she still couldn’t hear me.  Drop.

I frantically grabbed my cell and called her.  We proceeded for another 18 minutes on the phone when I realized the app only allowed 20 minutes free and I never put in billing info to go longer.  She had to go anyway, so it wasn’t too bad, but still rushed at the end.

I just finished editing four clips into one and adding an intro and outro.  It got done, though the sound quality for the second half of the interview was pretty rough, even though that’s where the conversation was best.

In addition to the sound there were several points where I interrupted her in a pretty bad way.  It’s one of those things I sometimes do as a host and with some people it happens more than others.  She’s confident and straightforward so we kept plugging along, but man, I finished the interview pretty annoyed at the quality of the whole experience I created.

My goal is to make my show really fun and easy for guests.  I want them to shine.  I want them to come back on the show.  I want them to love it so much they forget the time.

Oh well.

I cranked it out anyway and it will go live Monday.  The content is great, even if the process wasn’t.

Sometimes I really get in a groove where my daily writing and weekly podcasting and everything else just clicks.  I really like what I’m producing and the process.  Days like today are a great reminder that, when what Steven Pressfield calls “Resistance” crops up, you’ve got to do your work anyway.

Once it’s done, you can’t look back.  Ship it.  Then put your head down and start working on the next thing.

Thanks Penelope for your patience!

Episode 29: Chris Nelson on Superhero Movies

Why have superhero movies gotten so good in recent years? How has Marvel managed to bring the genre to a mass audience while keeping comic purists (mostly) happy? Where is the trend going?

My good friend and comic book aficionado Chris Nelson comes back to the show to discuss these weighty matters.

This and all episodes are available on SoundCloud, iTunes, and Stitcher.

Two Tips for Public Speaking That Also Apply to Work

From the Praxis blog.

I was talking with one of the September 2015 Praxis participants during the opening seminar about public speaking.  He asked me what are the most helpful things for me when it comes to reducing nerves and getting in the zone as a speaker.  I told him the two most important things for me are:

  • Lots of Practice
  • Unique Content

Practice is obvious.  Public speaking, like digital skills, social skills, bike riding, creativity, or confidence, is not one of those things you can become great at by studying.  You have to do it.  A lot.  There simply is no substitute for doing it when it comes to gaining comfort and skill.

The second point is not actually about the content in any objective sense.  I don’t think there are right and wrong content decisions, topics, formats, tones, or structures that will consistently lead to success and enjoyment as a speaker.  When I say content matters, I really mean crafting a talk that is unique to you.

If I asked you to give a 5 minute schpeel tomorrow on the importance of accounting to business success, your first reaction would probably be to spend all night researching accounting and articles about this topic and trying to become as much of an expert as one can become overnight.  You’d feel ridiculous stress, and while giving your talk you’d constantly wonder if the audience would call you out or know more than you and think you a fraud.  That’s because you’ve approached it with the idea that your content must mirror what others have already done on the topic.  The truth is, you’re never going to be as good as they are at giving their content.  You’ve got to deliver your own.

Maybe you know nothing about accounting.  No problem.  Give a five minute talk that is completely, entirely unique to you and your life and perspective.  You’ll be the expert.  No one knows your story as well as you.  You can do this in almost any area if you’re creative.  For our example, you could tell us that you know accounting is important for business success because when you were a kid you had a lemonade stand and you thought you were killing it with your $10 in sales…only because you didn’t write down or track the $12 you spent on supplies.  That’s a story no expert could beat you at.  It’s your story.

When you pick content that flows out of you, that you know and live and breath, and work your topic around it, you’ll feel far more at ease and give a heck of a better talk than if you try to be something you’re not.  Your philosophy, hobbies, friends, upbringing, or any number of things truly and uniquely you are the place to start from when building a talk.

As I shared these two tips for public speaking I realized how true they are for entrepreneurship, or any kind of work.  You’ll do your best work and enjoy yourself and find your groove and create value the most when you have:

  • Lots of Practice
  • Unique Content

You can’t discover what makes you come alive or what you hate by thinking about it or reading books.  You can’t gain confidence and skill and self-knowledge by listening to lectures.  You can’t find out if your product or idea is a good one by merely polling people.  You’ve got to get out there and test some stuff.  You’ve got to practice.  A lot.

You’re likely to feel a lot of stress if you spend your time comparing your skills to others.  Just because you’ll never be the coder that you’re buddy is doesn’t mean you can’t succeed in the tech world.  Just because you’re not as good a salesman as your boss doesn’t mean you have no future.  Aping their style will only get you so far.  What do you have that’s unique to you?  What do you do better than anyone in your peer group?  What’s something you’ve got that others don’t?

It might be a skill or personality trait.  It also might be something really unglamorous.  When you’re young you often have something very few more seasoned people have.  Time and flexibility.  A low cost standard of living.  Geographical freedom.  Think about how to build on those far more unique assets rather than trying to compete with someone who has a ten year head start on you in something more generic.

Jump in and do stuff.  Do things that are true to you, and where the unique aspects of yourself can do the heavy lifting.  You’ll do better and have more fun.  Whether speaking to a crowd or working on a career.

Check Out A Few Changes to the Website

Thanks to Derek Magill I’ve got some fresh new changes here on the website.

First, signup for the new monthly newsletter which will include my take on a new movie, TV show, book, podcast, or article each month.  It’s content that’s exclusive to the email newsletter, so check it out!

You’ll also notice the Ask Isaac page.  This is a new way to collect ideas and questions for the podcast and blog.  I love getting interesting queries, so send some along.

There is some additional content in other places on the site as well.  Cut me a little slack as I tweak and fill in and update a few things.  Let me know if you notice any glitches.

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Tiny, Ridiculous Daily Challenges Work Better for Me Than Big Goals

I’m not big on goals and goal-setting.  I’ve done it at various points, and it’s had a few positive effects and can be somewhat fun, or at least useful in challenging me to think bigger.  Still, I find that I’m more of an opportunist than a planner.  I prefer to keep building things – myself, my project, social capital, etc. – and be aware and alert to opportunities to leverage those things.

This means creating and succeeding and finishing things in general is more important much of the time than any perfectly plotted sequence of what it is I’m doing.  I try to cultivate creativity as a discipline, while what I use my creative energies for remains flexible to seize opportunities.  I want to also cultivate opportunity spotting abilities and the willpower to act on them and see it through to completion.  “Be ready in season and out of season.”

What this translates into practically for me is a series of very small, daily (sometimes weekly) challenges.  Things that are a little difficult, but simple enough that I have no excuse for missing them.  My typical set of challenges is this:

  • Blog every day
  • Do one form of exercise every day
  • Walk outside every day
  • Consume ideas every day
  • Do one thing to add value to Praxis every day (in the areas of money, talent, and vision specifically)

Many days I do more than this.  I might write a blog post and a newsletter or book chapter.  I might go for a swim and ride my bike.  I might read several articles and listen to a podcast.  I typically do many things to add value to Praxis in a day.  The trick is, doing at least one form of each of these in a day, every single day rain or shine seven days a week.  The fact that they’re so easy is what makes it so hard.

If I had “Run five miles every day”, or, “Train for a marathon” on the list, I wouldn’t feel bad about myself if I missed a day or two.  You wouldn’t look down on me either.  It’s a tough goal, and you might be impressed that I even tried.  But doing one form of exercise every day is so damn easy – some days I literally do a handful of pushups and that’s it – if I miss a few days I feel like a loser, and you’d be a little confused as to how I was unable to complete something so easy.

For me, a big, grandiose, far-off goal like, “Be in peak physical shape”, or, “Make $X by 2017” doesn’t do a lot to help me optimize my days.  It’s too easy to slack and think you can make it up later.  It’s too easy to not push because no one will look down on you for missing your goal.  But blogging every day is totally visible to all and totally doable.  It might suck, but it can be done if you really want to.  I’ve even written some posts on tough days that were nothing more than a haiku about how hard daily blogging is (Salvation by Haiku!).  One day I wrote a post that was a single word.

But I did it.

By showing up and completing it every day, I learn to succeed.  I learn to create as a discipline, not in response to a mood.  I also add value to myself every single day by this practice.  Maybe only a fraction of a percent, but if you know the power of compound interest, you can see how much this can add up when you show up daily.

I recently tried a 30 day experiment going a little more abstract with my daily challenges.  I switched it up so I had to do one thing each day for my…

  • Body
  • Mind
  • Spirit
  • Company

It didn’t go well.  It was too easy to begin to define things in weird ways so that I could check the spreadsheet off (I love checking items off).  I mean, I walked outside, so that’s good for my body, and my spirit, and I thought about stuff with my mind, so I hit them all, right?  But it wasn’t a challenge and I never felt that pride for completing it.  I needed to go back to my tiny, silly, well-defined challenges.

Maybe you work well with bigger, longer term goals and plans.  But if they don’t work for you, try a 30 day challenge of a few small things that you have no excuse for skipping.  You might be amazed at how good it makes you feel to deliver, especially on the really hard days.

The added benefit of doing something creative like writing is that creativity begets creativity, and you’ll become a font of ideas for business, personal, and even other people’s use.  Give them away.  Act on them.  Ideas are infinite and the more you create the more you get.

Four Ideas I Don’t Think Are Crazy (but you probably do)

I think these ideas are so straightforward and unscary that the world wouldn’t even look that different tomorrow if we did this today.  Shortly after tomorrow, the world would look significantly better.

  • Stop funding the Post Office and replace it with nothing.
  • End the TSA and let airlines do security however they wish.
  • End the FDA and replace it with nothing.
  • Scrap criminal law and let civil law handle everything.

How Obsession with Options Can Blind You to Opportunities

One of the first steps in your personal emancipation is to realize that the world is full of options, and the few things currently in front of you are not the only from which to choose.  But there is a difference between options and opportunities.

Options are theoretical.  Opportunities are actual.  Options are statistical probabilities.  Opportunities are singular, concrete instances.  Options can always be added on, and the option set can always grow as an aggregate bundle, so there is no urgency or scarcity in options.  Opportunities are temporary and cannot be aggregated.  Each is too unique and cannot be replicated.

The finite nature of each individual opportunity can be scary.  It feels more comforting to stay in the abstract world of options than to jump in to a real opportunity, which immediately reduces the set of theoretical other options.

Options thinking can be useful to gain some big picture long term perspective, but it’s a dangerous mindset too because it can blind you to opportunities or limit the ways you can gain from them.  Here are three of the downsides to thinking about options instead of opportunities.

Too Good for That

Because options are a giant aggregate of all possible activities, the field will always look better than a specific, individual opportunity.  When you know that the field is available to you (in theory) real actions always seem a little less glamorous.  The problem is that the field is not available to you.  Your life isn’t like gambling.  You can’t pick the field.  You have to settle on specific actions.  Grumpiness can result when you do specific things but obsess about keeping your options open.  You’ll always think you’re too good for whatever you’re doing and never fully throw yourself behind it.  This will, paradoxically, further limit your options as those around you will tire of your attitude of superiority and belief that, if you wanted to, you could be doing something better.  It keeps you from entering in to the moment and doing your best work.

Myth of the Perfect Path

The purpose of options is to be able to choose one or more at some point.  But after spending a lot of time expanding your theoretical option set towards this end pressure can begin to build.  When you finally do choose something specific, you’d better get it right.  Options thinking can make you so aware of opportunity cost (or in many cases, imagined, theoretical opportunity cost) of foregone activities that it puts an unbearable burden on whatever you do choose to be perfect.  This short-circuits the best of all human learning techniques, trial and error.  No trial occurs when error is so feared.  The endless keeping of options open in search for the perfect assumes too much about your ability to know all variables – including your own changing desires and interests – and deprives you of one of the best discovery tools, failure.  All this stress about choosing the mythical one true path leads to another problem.

Paralysis by Analysis

The ceaseless break-down comparisons, the cost-benefit analyses, the consideration of these seemingly weighty matters can itself become an activity so consuming it prevents you from all others.  You can become bogged down in a quagmire of strategic planning and never take the definite actions necessary to achieve anything.  The real problem is that inaction is also an action.  Not choosing is a choice.  Waiting, watching, thinking on the sidelines has a cost that’s even higher than the cost of choosing an imperfect opportunity.  When you take opportunity B it means you can no longer take A or C.  That’s the cost.  But the benefit is you get whatever goodness is to be had from B, and the self-knowledge of how well B suits you.  Even if you fail at it you gain something.  When you get stuck analyzing all three options you not only miss out on A and C, but you forgo the benefits of B as well.

Expanding your options set can be intoxicating.  For a time, it feels so fast paced and exciting.  I could do anything!  Why would I do this one thing when I could keep entertaining all the possible things I could do in my mind?

It’s alright to play with your options and expand them and think about them from time to time.  But you’ve got to put options in their place as subordinate statistical playthings when compared to opportunities.  Options don’t change the world or the holder of them.  Actions do.

Unexpected Ways I’ve Changed in Recent Years

  • I now enjoy Twitter more than Facebook
  • I used to be an extrovert, now I’m an introvert
  • I now prefer cheap, lighter beers over fancy, heavier craft brews
  • I used to only take coffee black, now I quite enjoy cream
  • I now listen to new age type mood music as much as classic rock
  • I now prefer writing to almost any other activity
  • I once found Star Trek boring, now I love it
  • I used to hate politics, now I hate it even more