The biggest problem is that we are too reliant on jobs for our careers.

There are three things you need from your career -

1) An income - a way to keep a roof over your head, and food on your table

2) To engage with the world - to be seen, to be recognized, and to be appreciated.

3) Meaning and purpose - to develop skills that align with our natural talents, to live our lives according to our values, and work on moving the world in a direction we want it to go.

When we get our first jobs, we are trusting them to gets us all three. But without being independent first, this is often a bad solution.

Relationships cannot flower if one person is reliant on another. It lead to power imbalances, exploitation, and an inability to walk away when its no longer working.

This, too often, is the relationship we have with our place of work. We rely on them to give us work, money, training, and respect. But being dependent on having a job for all these things, we are prey to the uncertainty of the economy, the whims of our bosses, the luck of the draw in getting someone who cares about us, and trains us, and teaches us.

What no one tells us is - in order to have an effective relationship with our employers, we need to be independent.

Once we are independent, we become much more attractive candidates, we can take our pick of suitors, and we can wait to find the right one.

Right now though, we are just told - study hard, have a good gpa, and once you get your first job, you will be happy.

But whether we like it or not, we are now all entrepreneurs. When we decide to join a company, we hope they will pay us well, hope they will train us, hope that the work we do will be a reflection of our natural talents, and align with what we to happen in the world. This is by no means guaranteed.

So the problem is, we’re playing poker with our time and money, but we’ve always been told is - its a race - reach the end and you win.
The reality is, the game only starts when we get our first job, and then its a 40-50 year game we’ve entered without knowing the rules.

So now what?

The solution here is to take control of our careers.

Not leave to chance developing skills that are valuable and joyful. Not leave to chance building a strong network that will propel us and that can be built upon. Not leave to chance working on things that align with what we wish to see in the world.

At the end - not only are we trying to make careers for ourselves, we want to move the world in a way that we want it to go. We want to be effective in the world, to be respected, to be rememebred. To leave the world a better place than the one we inherited.

The key to doing this, is to be independant - to be able to make money, train ourselves, work, and move the world without waiting for permission from hiring mangers or VCs with anyone else. To be able to forge your own path, if nothing on offer leads to where you want to go.

And here’s how you do it….

Is this only for entrepreneurs?

No. But I’ll ask you a question - why do people value consulting and investment banking so much?

What does having McKinsey or Google on your resume accomplish? Why do people want that so much?

The reason is because hiring manager are strapped for time, and these big brandnames become a quick signal, that this person has been exposed to good process, that they have previously been rigorously been screened, that they have been trained in a process that has produced billions in revenue.

But even that process can become a hinderance - many times people from big consulting or enterprise companies struggle in startups. Because they have taken their system wholesale from someone else, they are less able to adapt to the work process of startups, which in contrast are highly flexible, require high agency and a sense of ownership over your work.

Cause you signal competence, and a good system. People who go into consulting undoubtabley are taught a good system for getting work done. But still I would say they are reliant

So the choice is to build your system, and your own career, or rely on the paths laid out by employers. But remember, the economy is chaging so fast that what has worked even in the last 10 years may not work for the next 10. You need to be flexible, extensible, and highly independant to capitalize on all the opportunities that the new economy offers.

Is it all that bleak?

Why do people want to become MBB consultants?

mastery autonomy purpose tribe

Lack of a tribe

But what about the systems?

At many institutions in India, we are required to do internships, and founding something is no substitute.
The message there is - we trust some random employer to do a better job than you of training yourself.