Gain Career Capital

 Gain Career Capital

How many prodigies did we have over the centuries?

by

Antonis Antoniou

Throughout the annals of history, a select few have demonstrated prodigious abilities from a tender age. The likes of Mozart, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg are celebrated for their precocious achievements, a sentiment echoed in honors such as Forbes’ “30 Under 30.”

However, these tales are captivating precisely because they are not the norm.

The pinnacle of influence for most individuals is reached in their middle years. Income typically peaks in the 40s, suggesting a two-decade journey to peak productivity for many.

Professionals often hone their expertise between the ages of 30 and 60, a window that seems to be widening over time. Fields like theoretical physics, lyric poetry, and pure mathematics see peaks around age 30. Psychology and chemistry are around 40, while novel writing, history, philosophy, and medicine peak around 50. In the business realm, the average age of S&P 500 CEOs is around 55, similar to the average age for politicians reaching the presidency.

Delving deeper, research indicates that mastery in established fields often requires 10 to 30 years of dedicated practice. K. Anders Ericsson, a leading researcher, after 30 years of study, stated:

“I have never found a convincing case for anyone developing extraordinary abilities without intense, extended practice.”

Mozart’s youthful triumph required an early start, with his father, a distinguished music teacher, providing rigorous training from his early childhood.

This realization might be sobering: success takes time. Yet, it also suggests that significant skill enhancement is possible beyond one’s current level.

Many worry about their lack of marketable skills, particularly new graduates who have spent years studying topics unlikely to be directly applicable to their initial jobs.

However, Ericsson’s research suggests that with focused practice, most people can improve their skills substantially. While certain physical attributes may confer advantages - like height in basketball - it doesn’t mean those without them can’t also improve.

This means that even if you currently feel under-skilled, there is considerable scope to develop expertise over time, with the potential for continuous improvement over decades. Early career development should prioritize skill acquisition.

Career capital comprises everything that improves your prospects for making a difference or securing a fulfilling career in the future, including skills, connections, credentials, character, and financial stability.

To accumulate career capital, it’s recommended to:

• Focus on learning skills that are highly valued for solving critical problems.
• Learn skills that suit your strengths.
• Engage in long-term practice with effective mentorship.
• Identify opportunities to increase your likelihood of being in the right place at the right time, such as working in new and rapidly growing fields.

Gaining career capital, especially early in your career, is essential as it enables you to be much more productive over your lifetime. In your first few jobs, it’s rare to make a significant impact, so the focus should be on building career capital.

Some common ways to gain career capital include:

• Working with organizations or individuals known for high performance in your field, like tech startups or top AI labs.
• Undertaking graduate studies in subjects relevant to our priority paths, such as economics, machine learning, or synthetic biology, which also offer good fallback options outside academia.
• Taking entry routes into policy careers, like certain congressional staffer positions, joining a congressional campaign, or working in specific executive branch roles.
• Doing jobs that build useful skills for addressing pressing problems and also provide good backup options, like management, software engineering, data science, information security, understanding China or other emerging economies, or marketing.
• Pursuing opportunities that allow you to achieve something impressive, such as founding an organization or reaching the top of a field.

If you’re in a position to make a significant positive impact in the next five years, that’s often a great choice. Not only is it impressive, but it also provides you with connections and skills that are highly relevant to the problem you’re working on.

While career capital is usually the top priority in your first few jobs, later on, it becomes harder to know how much to prioritize career capital versus impact. It depends on the specific opportunities at hand. The decision of how much to focus on specialized versus transferable career capital also depends on the circumstances.

Career capital is about building assets that put you in a strong position for impactful and satisfying future work.

Career capital consists of five main components:

1. Skills and Knowledge: What will you learn, how useful will it be, and how quickly will you learn it? The best jobs for learning push you to improve and offer lots of feedback.
2. Connections: Who will you meet and work with? Will they be potential future collaborators on impactful projects, supportive friends and mentors, influential people, or those who can help you break into new circles?
3. Credentials: This isn’t just about formal qualifications like a law degree but also includes your achievements and reputation, which act as signals to future collaborators or employers.
4. Character: Will this option help you develop virtues like generosity, integrity, and good judgment? These traits are crucial for trust, collaboration, and making the right decisions in high-stakes situations.
5. Runway: How much financial security will you have? Your “runway” is how long you could live comfortably without income, based on your savings and how much you could cut your expenses.

The best way to build career capital is by acquiring valuable skills that are in demand in the job market and necessary for addressing significant challenges.

Once you have these skills, it’s important to learn how to market them and make connections. This might involve gaining credentials or networking. But these activities are much easier when you have something valuable to offer.

Building career capital usually involves:

• Choosing useful skills to learn.
• Finding skills that fit you well.
• Practicing - becoming good at most jobs takes years, and you need good mentorship.
• Increasing your chances of being in the right place at the right time.

In short, aim to maximize your rate of useful learning.

There’s also a lot you can do within your current job to invest in yourself and improve your career capital. This includes building character, networking, saving money, and becoming more generally effective. How to sell your existing career capital effectively is another story! It is a story of personal development and job acquisition.