"Mistake 2: Not building flexible career capital that
will be useful in the future" (80000hours.org Career guide). My question: What are the reasons behind this mistake?
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Background
I'm trying to understand what the reasons that lead people to this mistake are. Maybe after we understand the reasons, we would realize that they're not mistakes after all. Or if we still believe they're mistakes, we'll be much able to solve them.
Here are some general reasons:
1. Trade-offs: Advice often neglects to address the trade-off that comes with this advice: For example, "be flexible" ignores the disadvantages of being flexible and the advantages of being "inflexible" (keeping your eye on the goal, avoiding distractions, persistence etc…) and vice versa with persistence advice like "never give up".
2. Unclear evidence or debatable positions
Often contrary or seemingly contrary positions both have evidence.
Do we underestimate or over-estimate the differences between us and others? The "False Consensus Effect" suggests that we under-estimate while the "Fundamental Attribution Error" can imply that we over-estimate the role of personal differences.
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So even though the position behind the advice has evidence, it can also be true that the position contrary to the advice has evidence too.
3. Lack of knowledge or effort.
4. More pressing issues
The question then becomes: is : Does the advice that comes with "Not building flexible career capital that will be useful in the future" suffer from general reasons 1+2?
Here are the sub-mistakes of the main mistake:
Some of the reasons that cause people to fall into this mistake (based or influenced by the 80k section though not exactly how they say in all points):
1* Short-term thinking.
2* Not giving career choices enough thought (e.g. English PhD sounds nice so I’m just going to go with it).
3* Underestimating soft-skills: Not Investing in transferable skills that can be used in any job like
A- Deep Work by Calvin Newport. The example given in 80k career guide is writing your daily priorities. I would prefer something like "how to avoid distraction).
B-Learning how to learn
C- Rationality
4* Lack of awareness about automation threat.
5* Inaccurate predictions about one’s future interest/opportunities in the chosen career. (e.g) "The End of History Illusion":
So for example, for 5*, it could be the case that General reason 2 "unclear evidence" is implicated it could be (and I don't know it is) that in contrast to the "End of history Illusion", there is a group of personality theorists who claim that we under-estimate how stable our personality is. Or for 3*, general reason number 1 "trade-offs" is implicated. For example (and again I don’t know), it could be the case that the more you focus on developing general skills like "learning how to learn", you become less competitive in non-transferable technical skills because you have less time to focus on that now.
network or neighborhood that could provide any possible career contribute how flexible one’s career choices
Christopher Steinman
I actually wrote a piece about the generalization vs specialization debatehttps://goo.gl/GH3poV
The interesting thing is that if you read the background of why I started this piece, you'll find that I thought that it touches significantly on this debate even if it doesn't mention it explicitly " I was preparing for a workshop on 80000hours.org. There’s a section in their career guide about the two mistakes people make in regards to building career capital. The second one was “Mistake 2: Not building flexible career capital that will be useful in the future”. I was trying to really understand what makes people fall into this mistake. I thought to myself: “Maybe there’s a good reason people fall into this “mistake”, which is that those people opt for specialization and niche areas, which really has it’s advantages. So really the question is: what is the optimal trade-off between being a generalist and a specialist?” "
Christopher Steinman
Very good points! I want to add them to the blog post as a comment. Are you ok with that? I'll quote you ofcourse.- Badges
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