How to get a job in 2032 (and maybe sooner)
A top-secret communication for people under 21-years-old
👋 Hello to the 879 Intentional Wisdom subscribers receiving today's newsletter.
Wow—knocking on the door of 900—that is pretty cool. Appreciate all of your support as always! What's the over/under on when this little newsletter hits 1000 subs? I'll say March 1st. But maybe I’m not being ambitious enough…
A few orders of business to get to today.
First, I need to tell you about a podcast episode that I've just released that I really feel is worth your time. I'm not going to lie. I'm proud of it. Mostly because I think it provides tangible value to listeners (thanks almost entirely to my guest, Dave Kline).
Second, I'm going to tell all the young whippersnappers out there how to get a job—in about 10 years. Or maybe right now. I'm not sure. So read on for that. Actually, please don't read that part. It's for your kids' eyes only.
Episode 2 of the Intentional Wisdom podcast has just been released!
My guest is Dave Kline. I like to call him "The Career Whisperer." He's recently rocketed from a few hundred followers on Twitter to more than 12k by sharing incredible insights on the topics of careers, leadership, and management—areas where he has built deep expertise over the last two decades. Dave spent 10 years shaping the minds of managers at Bridgewater Associates, the world's largest hedge fund, known for its "radically transparent" culture, forged by the philosophies and ideas of its visionary founder, Ray Dalio.
In the conversation, Dave and I talk about:
How to be a better manager
How to stand out in a crowded job market (and how to find & hire great talent)
How to give and receive feedback
How to build online communities
And how to get to the “root cause” of problems—Dave uses the magic “5 Whys” method to diagnose one of my problems
You can listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or most other popular platforms.
Programming Note: I've finally got my Apple Podcasts link sorted out. If you already subscribed on Apple Podcasts, you might need to do it again. Sorry about that. User error, by me, AGAIN. Just click here and you should be golden 👉 Apple Podcasts
How to Get a Job in 2032 (or maybe sooner)
The following section is only meant to be read by people age 21 and below. So if you're older than that, please stop reading NOW and immediately forward this email to your children or niece or nephew or little cousin. You see, the secrets I am about to divulge are just too powerful for you to consume at a tender old age like yours. Are you familiar with the term cognitive dissonance? You are likely to experience a severe case of it if you keep reading. Kind of like George Washington getting dropped into a modern-day Times Square... it's just too much to wrap your head around.
Okay, phew. Now, we're rid of THEM!
I promised you young whippersnappers that I was going to tell you how to get a job and now that's exactly what I'm going to do.
Remember when I told you that it's getting harder to keep up because the world is moving faster and faster? And remember when I explained to you how NOT to be a dinosaur?
Of course you don't because you were too busy with your TikTok dance moves and <insert: age-appropriate cultural reference> to pay attention.
Don’t worry. It’s fine. I get it. Short attention span. TikTok generation and all of that. I'll just deliver you the goods now.
A career guide for the future
The world is changing at exponentially fast rates right now—and things are only going to get crazier from here. The jobs your parents had are going away. The jobs you're going to have don't even exist yet. So how can you prepare? Simple. Just follow the steps below. But please remember, DON’T TELL YOUR PARENTS.
1. Build a Skill
You need to get good at something. Strike that. You need to become f'ing amazing at something. Your world is not going to be one that allows for skating by on connections or last names. Those days are gone. That's bad news for the untalented silver-spooners, but good news for the scrappy upstarts. I'm assuming that's you. So what skill should you build? I'll get to that. But first, I've got great news for you.
Despite how much your parents and the evening news complain about how expensive college is these days, everything you need to build a skill already exists—for FREE—on the internet. Seriously. You want to code? You want to cook? You want to create (literally anything)? The smartest and most talented people in the world in these fields are GIVING AWAY everything they know on the subject on Youtube, on podcasts; heck, probably even on TikTok. Sorry, I'm behind on that one.
Also, the world of online learning in the form of extremely high-quality cohort-based courses covering everything from “pottery to Python” is EXPLODING right now with the likes of Maven, OnDeck, AltMBA, and more. Listen to the podcast above to learn more about this and to hear where I stole that pottery quote from.
2. Follow Your Curiosity
You might think that you need to find your passion at 18-years-old. Good news. That's B.S. In fact, passions aren't even found. They're manufactured! But, of course, you didn't read that article either.
Don't worry, here's the TL;DR (Eh, excuse me, but if you were born before the Clinton administration, I told you to stop reading about ten paragraphs ago! I love ya, but these types of abbreviations are not for you!).
It's impossible to know what you're interested in at such a young age—much less know what your passion is—because you simply haven't been exposed to enough yet. The best you can do is to follow your curiosity.
Is something intriguing enough that you want to at least learn more? That's a clue. Chase down those curiosities. Many will be dead ends. But some will be pots of gold. Ideas or businesses or academic pursuits that light you up. And the way to become an expert in one of these (see #1) is by chasing it down and immersing yourself in it.
Here's a clue: If you find something that you’d do for free that most others would need to be paid handsomely to even consider, do that thing.
And by the way, your areas of interest change as you go through life. What lights you up at 45 probably isn't the same as what did it at 25. That's okay and that's what keeps it interesting.
3. Make $1 on the Internet
In my day, besides walking to school uphill both ways in the snow, we worked for a living at 15-years-old! You probably wouldn't know anything about that with all the Fortnite you've been playing.
But back in the day, I was a CVS cashier, a convenience store manager, a landscaper, a pharmacy delivery guy, and obviously, an Abercrombie & Fitch "greeter."
The point is only slightly to brag about the last one but more to tell you that it's okay to make money, even at your tender young age.
These days, even if you lack the keen eye for carpenter jeans that some were blessed with, you can still easily make money on the internet. How? I don't know. Figure it out!
Seriously. Virtually the entire world is now connected to the internet. You have an endless amount of potential buyers. So, sell them something! What do you know that they don't? Nothing? I doubt that.
Even if you have been spending all of your time playing Fortnite, you can at least write a 10-page guide to everything a beginner would need to know about Fortnite and put it up on Gumroad or even Amazon for ten bucks.
Guess what? Someone will buy it! Guess what else? You will learn a new skill—how to sell something online. And you'll learn what people want and what they don't. And you'll get better and better and better at it.
Until your mom says, "What are you doing on Youtube?" and you can honestly say "I'm making like $40k a year, Mom, and I can't even see rated-R movies yet. Any more questions?"
4. Build Your Audience
Of course, it gets easier to sell things on the internet when we have followers. I also have good news for you on this front. The market is not yet saturated. Why? Because your parents' generation is too damn shy to actually capitalize on the opportunity.
Who could blame them? They're not digitally native, like you. They pine for the old days when social media wasn't infecting people's brains. They say things like "I don't really DO social media" without even realizing that it's akin to saying "I don't really DO the internet."
You, of course, are much less bashful and much more savvy. You've been trained to recognize and avoid creeps and scams and thought bubbles. And you realize the idea of a traditional resumé is becoming passé. You can see the future—and increasingly the present—where it matters little what school you went to, or even IF you went to school. But it matters a heckuva lot what type of following you've accumulated based on sharing your beautifully intelligent thoughts.
Of course, you're too smart to cheapen yourself or your reputation gathering the type of followers who only want to see you in a bikini on TikTok or Instagram. Rather, you understand the value of building an incredibly smart, high-quality following by regularly and openly sharing your thoughts on physics or marketing or finance or rocket-building or whatever CURIOSITY lights you up. You realize that such a following will open up an untold number of doors for you and create opportunities that never could have existed if you hadn't invested in building your community and finding YOUR PEOPLE—and certainly never would have existed if you constrained your world to the 20-mile physical radius around your home.
5. Be Authentic
Your generation has the most finely tuned BS sensors in human history. You recognize that people follow people and that people are LOYAL to people, not glossy-imaged brands.
Since your entire life—warts and all—has been documented in digital images and videos on the internet, you realize that to have faults is to be human. It was your parents' worst nightmare to have those late-night images from college resurface in a professional setting—for you, it's just a normal Tuesday.
So you recognize already that to build your reputation, your following, and ultimately your career, it’s okay to be vulnerable. In fact, it’s necessary. You need to be REAL. What a 180 the world has taken! Your parents had to fool people into thinking they were something they weren't. And they were forced to put on faces at work in an effort to be something they thought others wanted them to be.
You realize this world is dead. You realize that honesty and transparency—again, warts and all—is the future.
But let's be honest, you also realize that having racy pictures of yourself on the internet is still a really bad idea—so don't do that.
Hey - I am still a dad.
6. Ignore the Haters
Finally, you probably don't know this yet because it's one of the hardest lessons to learn in life but it really doesn't matter what other people think about you.
I'm not saying you should be an a$$hole. Quite the contrary. I think to succeed in this new world you need to build people up. You need to realize that the near-infinite scale of the opportunity before you means that life is truly becoming "positive-sum" and you will be much more successful by supporting others in their journeys as opposed to trying to tear them down. This idea was paid lip service in your parents’ generation; now it’s legitimately true even if most people don’t realize it yet.
What’s important for you to know is that the bigger you dream, the more people around you are going to tell you that you're crazy. And the more ambitious you are, the less you'll fit the mold of what others expect from you.
There's a saying that "you're never a prophet in your home town"—originally from the Bible, I think—someone correct me if I’m wrong. The point is that no one knows what you are capable of except you. And along the way to becoming the best possible version of yourself, there are going to be a lot of nay-sayers ready to knock you down.
Remember, the only people who don't have any detractors are the ones not doing anything bold. So forget the haters, the non-believers, and the nay-sayers, and do YOUR thing.
—
Well, that’s my advice. Got all that?
Oh, wait a minute. I think I forgot to tell you how to get a job.
Well, honestly, if you follow all of this advice, one of two things will happen:
1. You will not NEED to get a job because YOU will be all the business you'll ever need to get by economically; sorry, but your parents will not be able to wrap their heads around this idea for another twenty years, so good luck explaining it.
2. You will write your own ticket. You'll handpick whatever company or person or DAO you want to work for or with because your value will already be proven a thousand times over.
So that’s it but remember, with all of this advice, whatever you do... DON'T TELL YOUR PARENTS.
I will see you in two weeks but before you go…
🎙📚Content Diet
Kat Cole with Sahil Bloom & Greg Isenberg — I loved this conversation. Kat has such an impressive background in shaping consumer brands and advising CEOs; it was fun to hear her jam with Greg and Sahil on everything from coaching to giving and receiving feedback.
Andrew Huberman on Managing Stress and Anxiety. I’m a little late on this one, but another episode full of super, science-backed health and wellness insights. Are you familiar with the physiological sigh? I learned about it from this episode. Here’s what it is:
Finally, fellow kids, I’m going to leave you with this trendy new “music video” that I believe sums up this edition of the newsletter quite nicely.
See you in two weeks. And let me know what you think of that podcast! Extra points for leaving a review!! — Greg