Optimizing Career Path Given An Uncertain and Ever-changing Future

[dao]

Why I'm writing this post
This is primarily me thinking out loud and forcing myself to make my swirling thoughts concrete, but I would also love to hear any insights and wisdoms from anyone with similar thoughts or experiences.

The Context
I graduated in 2018 with a bachelors in a STEM degree, spent my 2019 working at a quantitative trading firm on a six figure salary and have begun 2020 by leaving my job to clear my head and realign my life trajectory. I am currently 24.

The Vision
The toughest part about optimally planning for the future is my awareness that what I consider 'optimal' is always changing. Even in a single year, I feel like I learn so much that the goal post keeps moving. Given this, this is my best guess (as of Jan 2020) as to how I want to manifest my future:

1. Be financially independent (ie. have the means to spontaneously switch careers, start a business, go on a holiday etc.)
2. Start/lead a business or startup
3. Have strong networks/friendships with high quality human beings, who are world class in areas/skills that I admire and value
4. Have the skills/network to make meaningful impact on the world (the kinds of ideas that the guys from 80000hours.org talk about)

At a glance, it seems like achieving 1 will give me the confidence to start 2, and having 3 in conjunction with 2 will be the ideal setup for achieving 4. The idea behind these goals is that they provide good optionality should things change in any event.

I've intentionally left the type of business, and the nature of my impact on the world as ambiguous for the time being, as I'm not 100% sure at this point what it would look like. The type of business/impact I make would depend on what I am capable of, what the economic landscape looks like, and what unattended problems exists in 10 or so years.

The Career
Whether it be a game, a business or your life, the quality of the outcome is strongly correlated with the quality of the decisions.

In the realm of quantitative decision making, I think that the data scientist's toolkit is king. Knowing how to parse copious amounts of data to build predictive and analytics models is an absolute boon to empirically driven decision making. Consider:

• Bill Benter's eventual 120 parameter model that helped him win nearly $1B on horse betting
• DeepMind's AlphaGo defeating a world champion at a game which has combinatorics greater than the number of atoms in the universe
• The efficacy of YouTube, Neflix and Amazon's suggestion algorithms which optimize customer retention at insane economy of scale

However, there are still scenarios where data science is not (yet) fully equipped to handle such as leadership/organizational/management matters and other situations where it is not possible to collect enough data for modelling. There will be plenty of situations where decisions must be made in the absence of data and your decision making heuristic would have to come from first principles. To cover these scenarios, I think an effective skill-set to cultivate would be that of a management consultant.

As businesses are constantly trying new things and have invariably unique setups, the art of being a management consultant is quickly learning about a particular company's industry and helping upper management make key decisions that optimally drives that business forward.

The Path
There are a few routes I could do down:

• Work as a data scientist at a consulting firm (eg. Quantium, Accenture, BCG)
• Spend a few years as a dedicated data scientist at a tech firm, then spend a few years as a dedicated consultant at a consulting firm

And of course, there are more minor subvariants within either route.

Either route should offer a relatively above average salary that will (in conjunction with being frugal a la FIRE movement) move me towards Vision 1. The line of work and nature of the job should give me the skillset to optimize likely success at Vision 2 and the time spent at quality companies with quality employees may grant me access to Vision 3. Having sufficiently fulfilled Vision 1, 2 and 3 would be the ideal recipe to start cooking with Vision 4 (but I must remember not to let perfect being the enemy of good enough).

Questions to the Audience (if you happen to give a shit)

• What ideas do you agree with, and more importantly, what do you disagree with?
• Do you see any traps or dead-ends I may be leading myself toward?
• Am I being too hyper-focused on career and what are some non-career areas of life that I must remember to also cultivate?
• Am I romanticizing data science/consulting and what are some things I should be wary of?

[iamnotahumanbeing]

** I offer a perspective that does not have anything to do with data science  **

 

You have the gift of being able to project into the future with a degree of discernment. This is a great skill to have, some people can't think about next week. Don't let this lead you down a narrow, rigid path of box-ticking and goal setting/achieving, though. The future doesn't exist and never will, so don't get too caught up in it. 

Life is far too complex and throws may too many curveballs for us to reliably and accurately plan for and forecast the future. Life is also not about ticking boxes either. Even if you succeed in points 1 - 4 perfectly, you likely won't arrive there totally fulfilled if you've been obsessing over 'achieving your goals' too much, because you would have had to trade something very dear to your heart - your humanity. There's nothing wrong with setting goals (big ones, and many of them) but it's the way we go about them that creates our experience of them, not the goals themselves.

“Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.” - John Lennon.  

The path that we imagine will lead us to our vision is never the one that actually does. Any path you take is the right one so long as you're following your compass.

The questions you have asked are all very good ones, and many people will have many different answers, but the thing that sucks is that the best answers will come only from you after you have already made the 'mistake' (I use that word lightly, it's not a mistake if you learn from it, it's a sharpening of your knife) and learned the lesson. 

I came across this definition in Wikipedia of maturity the other day - "...maturity is the ability to respond to the environment being aware of the correct time and location to behave and knowing when to act, according to the circumstances and the culture of the society one lives in.".

Anyone can follow a step-by-step guide, but they'll probably end up somewhere they didn't intend on being. Be fluid and open to change, even if it means heading back the way you came. 

Go out there and do it. Screw up, burn out, realise you were wrong about X or Y wasn't what you thought it was going it be.

It will be an incredible journey. 

Edited February 5, 2020 by iamnotahumanbeing

[dao]

I appreciate the write up.

You raise some very good points. I can be somewhat prone to overplanning and whatnot, and it looks like I've found myself in such a trap once again.

One of the first traits that come to my mind when I think of someone who is "immature" is someone who does not plan ahead, but perhaps I've swung too far to the other extreme and adopted the mindset of a neurotic who constantly thinks about the future, and has lost sight of the gift that we call "the present".

I suppose what's left is that I take solace in my current belief that this will be my path for now, while staying flexible enough to adapt to whatever curveballs that life will throw at me. Because you're right. Life cannot perfectly be planned and forecasted. Nor would I want it to be. Where's the excitement if everything just falls perfectly to plan. It'd be like watching a movie I've seen a million times; I already know what will unfold.

[iamnotahumanbeing]

I'd say 'over planning' comes about from planning that; leads you to be neurotic and obsessed with sticking to the plan and/or takes exorbitant time away from execution. You might be in this situation... but you might not. Someone that goes into things guns ablazing without a clue of what he's doing isn't a good thing either.

So it's just about balance... few have the ability to do this innately, so most must learn what that balance is over time. Counterintuitively, finding balance starts with imbalance. Hence why I'm all about getting out there and making mistakes. 

 

On 05/02/2020 at 0:38 PM, dao said:

staying flexible enough to adapt to whatever curveballs that life will throw at me

 

On 05/02/2020 at 0:38 PM, dao said:

Life cannot perfectly be planned and forecasted

 

On 05/02/2020 at 0:38 PM, dao said:

Where's the excitement if everything just falls perfectly to plan

 

These are all very healthy attitudes! These combined with your ability to plan -- ??.

[Average Investor]

If you are doing that for some big company, then you could do that kind of work independently to do that for other businesses. Since you mentioned starting a business I figured I would mention that. If you are really after the pursuit of having the time to do whatever. But I can see why you would want to just work for the big company if you were making a high enough income plus you already have the degree. If you were frugal enough it would be pretty easy to ween off of that. It all depends on the route you want to go personally though. A business like that is most likely not going to produce six figures fast, but it could produce more in the future. 

Your post made me think about Andrew Grove, who was able to lead Intel from making memory and switched them into processors. He had the same kind of ability as you to see what the future might hold and how the industry would be in the future. Intel would likely not be around if he were to not make that change. So like you said you could do that with any other business too. It does not have to be aligned with my first suggestion. 

Clearly you enjoy the data science and you have a mind geared towards that kind of stuff. I would keep focusing on that. But be open to anything else that might come your way, or other opportunities that might open up to you. 

It's something that I need to work on more for myself. I have a lot of stuff going on and don't really plan things out piece by piece. Granted I spend time to think about improvements and ideas to the business, but to see the forecast a bit more is nice. I am mostly on the side of just doing the stuff I do because I really like doing it right now. 

Edited February 24, 2020 by Average Investor