Here is this article, written by a jaded but rich and successful programmer, trying to eradicate all the feel-good delusions we young people have about what it means to be a successful skilled professional. As an Audacious Young Person, I’m always inclined to roll my eyes a bit, especially at sentences like:

You’re in the business of unemploying people. If you think that is unfair, go back to school and study something that doesn’t matter.

But instead of reading it as putting limitations on what I can/cannot do in my future career, what if I read it as trying to inspire creativity? Maybe the thing I should be learning isn’t “Stop daydreaming now and face up to cold hard reality.” Instead, it should be “Here are the known constraints you must design your career around, now go crazy and have fun.”

For instance:

[Skilled professionals] are hired to create business value, not to [practice their skilled trade].

At first this sounds horrible. Designers aren’t hired to design beautiful things! They’re hired to make clients happy, which generates more revenue. 

But read another way, a bit of fun could be had: say you were hired to create Boring Wireframes all day for Famous Multinational Digital Agency (because that is how HR determined you will best provide value to the business) but you figured out a way to make FMDA more money by staging fantastic lion dances in the boardroom during critical meetings. If above advice were indeed true, this means you could spend the rest of your enviably fun career designing the most glorious lion dances for boardroom meetings, and make a ton of money while at it.

And I think I’m okay with that.

More and more, I’m realizing just how different my understanding of “career” is from my mom’s generation. It’s no longer about diligently training in a skill and then sharpening it down to a fine point over a lifetime. It’s about taking a toolkit of skills and choosing how to apply it to ever-shifting contexts. it’s about learning, adapting, and being flexible, broadening rather than narrowing. If this sounds less secure and more frightening, it is. But we’re humans, we’re good at doing just those things.