Navigating The New Reality (Start Here)
We’re living in a new industrial revolution. The precise nature of this is yet to be revealed, but one thing is for sure: this isn’t the world your parents grew up in. It’s even less like the world your grandparents grew up in.
Assuming you’re in the West, past the Second World War, the various economies have moved from manufacturing bases to service-based economies. You’ll have heard this from many political folks of all stripes: from, “Bring Manufacturing Back” through to the advice that everyone should, “Learn to Code.”
The real problem isn’t the job that you do. It’s that the fundamental contract of employment has changed. Manufacturing effectively turned people into workhorses, both skilled and unskilled. Generally, there was a place for everyone and so long as you were a cog in the machine, you will have had access to solid, guaranteed employment over the course of your career.
Fast forward twenty years, and the West was into a service-economy model. The general gist of a career had carryover. Except now, you weren’t necessarily tied into physical performance, soft-skills were essential and apprenticeships to learn a trade were replaced by the University system and the various credentialed-workforce mimetic structures of the late 20th Century. If you were part of that old system, you lost out as the times changed.
Now, we go forward another generation into now. There’s a very large chance you’re like a miner of old; you’re still tapped into an old value system which won’t prepare you for what’s to come.
This isn’t just about business, but we’ll get to that. Let’s talk business first though.
A Very Quick Overview of the 21st Century Economy
Credentials are mostly irrelevant assuming you have them. You get a degree. It’s worthless except as a minor stamp of authority that you’re mostly not a moron. Obviously, you can cheat the system and some morons have degrees, and some geniuses don’t have degrees. This brings me to an important point.
If you’re new to this site or my writings, I use various forms of the phrase, “You have to play the board you’re given.”
In terms of going to University or not, I’ll say this: a University education still averages out to earn you more in the long run than not having a degree. This is the board we’re given and the pieces we play. Most arguments about going to University versus not going to University are a waste of time; charged by those who have their various horses in the race.
Elsewhere on the site, I’ll talk about getting the most out of higher education. For now though; the general take is that it’s easy enough to get a cheap education and you should do so not for the education but so that you can open more doors.
Because optionality is vastly important in the 21st Century.
Stability has been largely replaced by optionality, and if you play your cards right, opportunity.
You are, assuming you are a Millennial or younger, unlikely to have a stable, 40-year career where you work your way up, go from dishwasher to senior manager and retire with a pension and a gold watch at the end.
That’s not to say “Don’t have a career.” It’s to say that when you’re in a “Choose Your Own Adventure,” it’s up to you.
Choose Your Own Adventure?
You are unlikely to work for the same company your whole career.
Note: When I say, “Career,” I mean the span of your working life. “Career” in the above sense is yesteryear’s term.
You might have a business of your own. You might work for other people. And you might have a fusion of the two. Most people will – the Gig Economy, as we’ll talk about soon – is a means of fusing the two in a form that future employment will likely take.
If you assume you’re going to work for a handful of companies, think you will work for more.
If you plan to work at a single occupation or across a single career-ladder, assume that your CV might be a little more chaotic.
And if you think that you’re going to have one income stream at a time, you’re missing out on a lot of the opportunity that is available now.
At the moment, international flights are cheap. You can start multiple businesses from a computer or mobile device. You can work on the side for extra money, invest in any conceivable market across the world digitally, and network for job or business opportunities with an unlimited amount of people across all walks of life.
Your working life consists of the above, whether you like it or not. I suggest you start liking it, because that seems to be the likely way the economy will shift.
Of course, here’s what’s going on over the course of our working lives, assuming you have a significant portion of yours in the next 20-40 years.
The Economy
The Gig Economy is the current big buzzword so far as the economy goes. Well, that and the ever-present Capitalism vs. Communism debate, governments and individuals floating the idea of digital currencies, and, if you’re reading this sometime in the future, a looming recession caused mostly by overleveraging and exacerbated by Coronovirus Covid-19, which has us all currently locked down as of March 2020.
Let’s talk about those things.
The Gig Economy
The gig economy is effectively a Silicon Valley invention; Venture Capitalists create digital marketplaces and then skim the top on every order between an outsourced, self-employed workforce, and a global client-base that has effectively cut out the middleman of modern retail, services and landlords.
This has huge repercussions that are outside my pay-grade, but it’s how I got started in online business and remains an effective way to get started with either side-income or your life in business.
That’s on the positive side.
On the negative side, the Gig Economy effectively takes ownership of vast swathes of the economy and makes them no longer subject to traditional laws, taxes, etc. This affects how governments operate and it also contributes to less regulated working conditions, as well as depressed wages in the traditional workforce.
For instance, as a traditionally employed delivery driver, you would get a pension, benefits, fixed working hours and more. As a gig economy delivery driver, you are responsible for all of the costs and there’s no protection provided because you “run your own business.”
Time will tell as to the responses that this will prompt. But it will prompt changes.
Let’s quickly talk politics in terms of what you can and should think about, career-wise.
Politics; What You Need To Know
The above mentioned things; gig economies, increased opportunities abroad, digital currencies, and the like, all contribute to the political climate.
The problem with the current political climate is that a lot of the models it uses are outdated. People debate Communism vs. Capitalism as though it’s Rocky IV: To various extents, both of the models have proved they can’t operate unfettered.
Communism has failed every time it’s been given the baton, and Capitalism seems to work until it doesn’t and other measures need to be taken to keep the wheels turning.
None of this is particularly helpful to you. If you’re part of those debates, you’re wasting your time.
Politics is best viewed through a lens of highlighting potential issues that’ll cause you to either succeed or fail.
If a politician gets elected and gives you a Universal Basic Income deal, that’s great – take the money and use it for something – but it doesn’t ultimately fix the sinking ship that that entails. On the flip side, if you live in a Dystopian nightmare where you’re provided no basic services and there are places elsewhere that’ll provide you with those, that’s a data point that suggests you might be better off there.
Navigating The Map
I float the above ideas because, to go back to our metaphor, you have to play the board you’re given.
You can’t do that without knowing what the board looks like, where the pieces are and how many of those pieces you have available to you.
Chances are, you have reliable access to the internet. This means you have access to a huge amount of knowledge on pretty much every subject you can think of. You can make money. You can arrange to move to new places or meet people in new fields.
Across this site, we’ll talk about all of those things in time. But the point of this section of the blog is to give you what you need to know so that you can make the right decisions.