There is wonderful speech given by Mr. Adrian Tan in 2008 titled “Life and How to Survive It”. It can be found here and I encourage you to read it.
Some key quotes:
Do not waste the vast majority of your life doing something you hate so that you can spend the small remainder sliver of your life in modest comfort.
I want to start by giving one piece of advice to the men: when you’ve already won her heart, you don’t need to win every argument.
Modern society is anti-love. We’ve taken a microscope to everyone to bring out their flaws and shortcomings. It far easier to find a reason not to love someone, than otherwise. Rejection requires only one reason. Love requires complete acceptance. It is hard work – the only kind of work that I find palatable.
Its always refreshing to hear someone on the other side of the fence, whose established himself with a successful career, family, and optimistic view of his own life and the world around him.
But I also like to consider the flip side: how to get there, and how to mitigate risk and increase chances for success. Not every waiter in Hollywood will become an actor, yet they all view acting as “their talent.” Many entrepreneurs will fail. Mr. Tan says to avoid work; anything that you are compelled to do. But Mr. Tan was also lucky in certain ways – he had a talent and passion for work thats valuable in an established, stable, and common profession: law.
People might have talents in other areas, that are more risky ventures. Becoming an actor, or a professional athlete, has orders of magnitude more risk of failure, partly because so few of those jobs exists, and partly because the level of skill needed is hard to obtain. Being an entrepreneur is less risky, but still orders of magnitude riskier than a stable career such as engineer, doctor, or lawyer.
I’m interested in the relationship between pragmatism, expected value, and hack-ability of certain careers. Certainly a majority of folks would consider becoming a professional athlete impractical and improbable. They come to this conclusion by assessing what they consider the “average” person’s ability to become a professional athlete to be. If someone is physically fit, it might still be improbable, but their chances do indeed go up, certainly higher than the average person’s. And if you’re fit enough to hit the same numbers the college athletes do in things like the NFL Scouting Combine, it might not even be reletively all that difficult to break in. And that demonstrates how pragmatic something is a random variable: the riskiness/practicality of a venture varies based on how closely aligned your level of skills are with those already successful in that domain.
Expected value of a career is also varies, person-to-person, and in different circumstances. Someone with a family, mortgage, and paying his/her children’s college tuition might have a lower expected value in pursuing the same risky venture as someone who has nothing, or relatively little to lose. The potential downside (losing house, stress on family, debt) must been subtracted from the potential upsides of success – and so at different points in someone’s life, these values are in flux.
Lastly, hack-ability I’ll define as the possibility to short-circuit the process. Many careers might have a streamlined process for career progression. Being able to get around this, or reach a point faster/or with less effort is something worth studying.
