The Best Career for Smart People

I did everything in my power to avoid a 9-5.

I did this because I realised that to get a job was to be assigned a state of living which would always be suboptimal.

No control over how 10 hours of your day is structured.

Every part of your life morphs around allowing you to keep that job.

But over the past couple of years I've figured a lot of things out :

• Entrepreneurship is the only path for long-term logical thinkers

• Humans have been removing labor work since the beginning of time (and we are on the horizon of complete removal)

• Sensible people get paid for doing what they enjoy doing

When done well, it is impossible to not get paid way more than any comparable job could.

“Entrepreneurship is overrated”

I get this thrown at me a bit.

People don't seem to realise that entrepreneurship is the only path to get full control of your life.

And full control is the only path to sustainable enjoyment.

It is increasingly difficult to find the “perfect” job which gives you this full control while allowing you to leverage all of the intrinsic drivers that make life good (curiosity, passion, purpose, autonomy and mastery).

“People hate what they don't understand”

People normally only see 5% of an entrepreneur’s life and assume that's enough to draw conclusions and close their mind.

Curiosity vanishes at this moment.

They think entrepreneurship is overrated because they aren't entrepreneurs.

“I'm tired of being called a wage slave”

Sorry, but your feelings aren't reality.

If your company let you go (happening more and more this year), you wouldn't be able to pay your bills.

You are forced to work for your survival. You don't have a choice.

You are by definition a wage slave whether you like being called that or not.

“What's wrong with me offering my skills to already developed corporations?”

Nothing.

But why let the skills you acquire be influenced by a repetitive and income-capped career?

Why not lean into your unique interests and sell those skills to a developed corporation AS a business?

Then you aren’t a slave to certain productivity metrics, create your own systems, take on more clients, and make 5X what you would at the job with less work.

All of this, as always, is coming back to a narrow perspective enforced by a socially conditioned identity.

Or, they have a narrow view of what entrepreneurship is.

“You're busy all the time”

No, you aren’t.

The entire point of entrepreneurship is to reduce how much you work and prioritize the better things in life. If you are working all day, it’s not because you’re an entrepreneur, it’s because you lack self-management skills.

I work a couple hours a day (most of the time) and cut myself off there. Because I know the quality of my work decreases.

The psychology of entrepreneurship

Now that we've disarmed the common excuses, let's go a bit deeper.

Our ancestors were entrepreneurs in their tribes.

And your psyche is not wired to remain stagnant.

You can do what you want, but I believe that the end goal for anyone is entrepreneurship.

Why? Because your psyche demands evolution for satisfaction. It demands an ever-increasing challenge without actually “winning the game.”

In a corporate power ladder, you will inevitably reach a point where challenge ceases to exist. You become docile, comfortable, and get used to mediocre living (and you will think that’s how it’s supposed to be).

The profound and meaningful lie in the unknown and entrepreneurship is your submarine into the depths of the ocean.

Work consumes about 25% of your life

If you don’t create a career, you will be assigned one.

If you aren’t passionate about your work, you aren’t passionate for 25% of your life. Most people aren’t passionate about the other 75% of their life either.

Our career, or purpose, or mission is how we engage our attention with reality in an impactful way. It keeps us from going insane.

And frankly, we can’t engage our attention with the breath, body, or nature for our entire lives as a mindfulness practice. There must be a balance, but our attention must be engaged with reality to prevent a chaotic state of mind.

A 9-5 is a stepping stone.

I have nothing against a 9-5, but it is a means, not an end.

Use your job to acquire skills, knowledge, and status that allow you to create what you want.

The Dissolution of Labour & AI

Aristotle condemned manual labor as harmful to the body and soul.

The Ancient Greeks saw work as a necessary part of life. But only as a means to leisure, creativity, and contemplation as they considered them the keys to happiness.

Without work, leisure loses its meaning and vice versa.

Life begins to lack balance and contrast.

Manual work isn’t always bad. But completing mindless tasks for the sake of survival or status makes you no different than a robot or animal.

A sense of mastery must uphold our endeavors to create meaningful work.

Your purpose is the source of suffering you accept.

First, there were slaves that were assigned most of the labor work.

Then, tools like tractors, windmills, and self-checkouts reduced the burden further.

Now, the majority of employees are tied to their cubicles to perform repetitive tasks that go against their nature.

My beliefs are that humanity has evolved to the point of not needing humans to perform the “dirty work.”

Automation and artificial intelligence have seen leaps in development over the years.

There have been many doomsday speculations on this, but I only see good coming from it.

A decline in labor work demands an incline in creative and knowledge work.

From McKenna: “Thought can only go as far as the language that paves the road”

If we want to expand the limits of what’s possible, we have to create the knowledge, ideas, and beliefs that permeate culture and influence language. That way, collective thought can expand and exponential progress can be made.

The future of work, in my eyes, belongs to the creative.

The writers.

The speakers.

The designers.

The creators.

Every person that we thought AI would “replace.”

Instead, AI will act as a tool that allows creatives to push the boundaries.