Have you ever felt lost?
I don’t mean you took a wrong turn on your way to a wedding in an unfamiliar town. GPS and smart phone have all but done away with that. I mean lost in your own life. You half way know where you came from, have only the most tenuous handle of where you are now and have no clue where you are going. Maybe you have an idea where you want to get to but no idea how to get there. You probably don’t think about it all the time because every time you do think about it you become over-whelmed with anxiety and never seem to get closer to a plan.
I know how you feel. Confused, angry, even depressed. You probably have a personal idol that you look up to and would like to emulate. Maybe you want, loosely speaking, the life that person has, but how do you get that life? Asking your idol for direction isn’t that helpful because they either have a different set of strengths and weaknesses than you do and even if that isn’t the case their path has been washed away by the shifting winds and sands of time. Your friends are lost too, whether they know it or not, so there is little value in asking them.
Your life is full of people who loudly and even aggressively tell you that they know the way you need to go but all of them simply are seeking to take advantage of you. In your teen years everyone, most notably your loser high school guidance councilor, tells you the way is an expensive college degree, but how do you choose what degree to get and what school to go to? Is taking on massive student debt worth it or does the educational industrial complex just need you to take the loans and pursue a degree, any degree, just to keep itself growing? Will you get the skills you need to start a fulfilling career or are you mortgaging your future to keep some professors employed? You look at the list of available majors and degrees and intuitively know that few of them have any chance of leading to a job that will even enable you to earn enough money to pay off your loans. Of course, if you ask these questions out loud to the people around you, you will be branded a closed-minded asshole.
Then there are the people that will tell you that they have a “business opportunity” for you that will change your life and lead you to financial freedom and personal fulfillment. These people will lure you into their direct marketing trap with unbridled enthusiasm and intoxicating positivity. These people seem so nice, so wonderful and so happy. But are they really though? Any so called opportunity that requires you to buy your own product and lure in more desperate people to work under you so that you can perhaps predate on their misguided enthusiasm isn’t really an opportunity at all. Instead these are well-baited traps. Of course, if you point any of this out to the people that are currently in the snare and begging you to join them they will also brand you a close-minded asshole.
If you want to make it. If you want to succeed. If you want financial freedom and professional fulfillment be prepared to lose a lot of friends and be called an asshole on a regular basis. Real business opportunities will involve high barriers to entry that you need to be uniquely able to overcome. After all, if anyone can do something then there will be so much competition that you wont be able to make a good living. The key is not to be positive and enthusiastic but rather to be cold and calculating. You are about to embark on a long and difficult road that is full of diversions, hard work and potholes and utterly devoid of sex appeal. You are going to do what nobody else is willing to do so that someday, someday sooner than you may think but certainly further away than you want, you will be able to liver better than the sheep you find yourself surrounded by now. You are about to embark on step one of your journey and it will be YOUR JOURNEY. Nobody else will have a story quite like you.
STEP ONE: Self Evaluation
There are many tools available to you in your quest for honest self evaluation. Your family will provide many clues. Not consciously mind you as asking them what to do will be useless for the reasons laid out above. Instead you will find that you will share a great deal of strengths and weaknesses with your family for a complex combination of reasons involving both biological and environmental determinism. Through genes and shared life experiences you are perhaps more like your parents than you will be comfortable to admit when you are 18 or 22. Your fore-bearers will have found many ways to take advantage of your shared strengths and shed light on a litany of potholes and landmines that they stepped on due to your shared weaknesses. You don’t need to pick the same career as your parents but ask yourself what about them makes them good or bad at their jobs? How many of those attributes do you share? What should they have done differently to better leverage their strengths and minimize their weaknesses? Research what those personality quirks and qualities would do for you or to you in various types of careers.
Once you have exhausted your family history as a source of personal understanding its time to take an uncomfortably close look at the one person who will make or break your dreams. You. Nobody on this planet can know you better than you can know yourself if you are honest with you. What types of classes do you get good grades in, how do you work in groups, do you solve problems abstractly or systematically, are you musical or mathematical, are you more inclined towards jobs that involve people or things, are you smart or are you a little slower. Boil away your fear of heights, love of international travel and your affinity for a particular breast size and reduce yourself to a set of attributes that combine uniquely to make you able to offer something to the world that nobody else on the planet can offer the way you can.
There are a number of tools at your disposal. Meyers Briggs, The Big 5 Personality Traits and IQ tests are not voodoo or fun little things you can take to make you look better than your friends. These are tools that can help you understand how well you will likely be able to function in various environments and what things you need to work on in your quest. Research what types of careers match well with your level of conscientiousness, orderliness, neuroticism, intuitiveness etc. Then most uncomfortably you need to get honest with yourself with your IQ level. What types of careers fit your IQ level? Remember that IQ isn’t a measure of what you know but a measure of your ability in abstraction and critical thinking. You can’t study your IQ level up and by the time you reach adulthood your IQ will almost entirely be determined by your genetics. You can’t change it so don’t try. Rather let it shed light on what types of careers you can be successful in and how hard you will have to work to get started and advance.
STEP TWO: Pick a Heading
At this point your own interests, abilities, attributes and weaknesses will be pointing you toward a particular career or maybe a few careers. Pick the career that will be both doable and challenging. You will feel the most professionally fulfilled when you reach a position in which you can both perform effectively and have to use your full mental capacity. You don’t want to be promoted to a level above which you are able to succeed and you don’t want to waste your self doing something that is beneath your abilities. You don’t want the first challenge to be beyond your capability or be able to get to the top spot in a field without challenge. Don’t worry about feeling locked in either. Inevitably as you traverse the road to success you will learn more things about the world and yourself and new information will enable you to make better new decisions. If you find that you need to course correct do not be afraid to do so.
STEP THREE: Tool Up
If you understand yourself and the field that you want to get into then you are almost certainly staring down some high barriers to entry. They stand before you like great walls of a city that you seek to conquer and anyone who seeks to scale a wall, let alone conquer a city, needs the right tools so TOOL UP! This is where you need to think objectively about education. Research what degrees will be most likely to help you get into the field of your choice and how much debt you will have to acquire to get that degree. Compare the debt level with average entry-level salary and what it will be five years later. Now, be honest with yourself about how much debt you will acquire. A degree that will get you into a challenging field will also be difficult and if you are academically challenged then you probably won’t be able to work full time while in school. If the debt level will be several times your first year salary then don’t go to school. There are exceptions like lawyers and medical doctors of course but in general you should be able to get a degree with less debt than your first year of salary when you finish. If that isn’t the case then most likely school will not be a tool for you but rather a trap.
If you are reading this and the degree you are pursuing will net you $150k in debt and get you a job that pays $30k per year, for instance, if you are pursuing a degree in History at a private college and you are NOT at the very top of your class then you need to quit. Seriously quit. Don’t fall victim to the sunk cost fallacy. I spent many years surrounded by people pursuing degrees in Africology or Art who racked up tremendous amounts of debt and when they finished the best thing on their resume was the crap job they worked during school to get by. Also, if you are pursuing a degree that involves more ideological indoctrination than learning foundational job skills you need to get out. Today. Leave. Now. If you are sitting in a class right now and reading this while ignoring your professor you need to stand up and leave NOW.
Your education that you are choosing now will give you a credentials and skills to get into the career you want and it doesn’t matter if that degree has sex appeal or not. Going to Tech school and getting into the trades is a great option that not enough people avail themselves of. For the most part nobody cares where you got your degree or even what your degree was once you are started in your career.
Work, work, work. Yes I know you probably wont be able to work full time in school but its important that you work as much as you can. Choose jobs that help build the skills and resume you will need later. Note that these jobs may not be the best paying jobs available. I know bar-tending is fun and you can make good money at it during school but it can be trap. You don’t want to be stuck bar-tending once you finish your degree and nobody wants to marry a 30 year old bartender.
STEP FOUR: Get a “Real Job” but don’t be defined by it
By this point you are in your early to mid 20s, you have a girl that you are in love with and you are sick of being poor. Take a moment to feel sorry for yourself. Ok moment over, never feel sorry for yourself again. You may need to get rid of the girl. She will probably leave you anyway so just get it over with. The road you are on will be miserable for another five years and she probably wont have the patience for the path you are on. Plus you need to be able to move for a job if you need to. Unless of course she is on the same path you are and is fully willing to sacrifice for another five years to maximize your, and her, potential. If that’s the case marry the queen right now. Today. Seriously go and do it.
Your first real job or three will get you all the skills that you don’t have any idea you need to be really successful later on. Working at a big company with a comparatively high starting salary will be tempting and have sex appeal but resist the urge. Work at a small or even struggling company. You will have to wear more hats and learn how to do more things well to be successful. The pay will likely suck but get over it. You are at that job to get ready for the next job and not make the most money today. Sacrificing some pay and prestige at this stage will force you to learn how to do your job faster as well as learn how to do other people’s jobs and you won’t have a safety net. Learning without a net will force you to learn on the fly and survive in the most difficult of situations. You are also going to work alot of hours. Think of a 40 hour week as a vacation. The kind of thing you will get every now and then but most of the time be willing to put in 50+. You may decide to get another degree part time at night while you work to round out your credentials and back up the skills you are gaining. Its OK to do so but keep paying your debt and take as many classes as you can afford while doing a pay-as-you-go scheme. Traveling the world in your 20s will almost definitely not be in the cards. You will almost definitely need to change jobs at some point. Once you have learned all you can in the first job pick up sticks and jump into the next fire that will serve as a crucible to strengthen and refine you into someone that everyone will fight over.
STEP FIVE: Profit
Once you go through this process you will probably be in your late 20s or early 30s. You may have a gut and not be able to touch the rim anymore. Your alcohol tolerance is probably not what it once was. You will also have a a skill set and a resume that will make the employers you really want to work for compete for your services. You will have the personal confidence that only comes with knowing how far you can really push yourself without breaking. You are either debt free or close to it and able to command a better salary than any of your friends. You can now travel, buy a house that isn’t ancient, buy a car that doesn’t suck and even start dating seriously. Your sexual market value has never been higher.
P.S.
There are a thousand and one self help books and get-rich-quick schemes out there. Don’t buy into them. I am not saying that they wont work for some people but they usually offer blustery positivity and no real plan with any robustness to it. Put the books down and follow these steps. It will suck a fair amount of the time and be down right difficult but if you are willing to do what nobody else is willing to do today, then you will be able to live like nobody else is able to live later.
-Nick Huftel-
Medicinal Masculinity 