The Ultimate Guide to Career Design [Are You a Bucket Hauler or a Pipeline Builder?]

9 min readAug 12, 2020

I’m sure like me, you would like to do what you love, get compensated well for it and have the freedom to choose your own direction in life. In other words, have the ideal career if you will.

Your career is one of the most important aspects of your life. But most of us approach it with a broken lens. Which is, study hard, get a good job, get a promotion, map out the road to the top, switch companies and engage in politics until you get there at age 55 and then retire with a pension.

But, there’s a big problem with this mindset. It doesn’t work anymore.

The Biggest Mistake You’re Making

You see, our education system was designed from a colonial era where conformance to standards was a necessity for the mother country to continue its reign on its subjects. So school produced identical bots that could read, write and do arithmetic.

This made them “portable” from one country to another — you could ship one from Bangladesh and take him to Australia and he would be instantly functional. But unfortunately, this system is outdated today. It is not optimized for the internet connected, globalized world that we have now.

Here’s Sugata Mitra’s TED Prize winning talk on the subject:

And this education system still leads millions of us to believe that study hard — get job — retire with a pension is still the safest and most honorable way to work. Except it’s NOT.

Most jobs are no longer what they used to be. Namely,

Safe

Technological innovation means more companies are laying off workers. There are no “guarantees” that your department won’t be trimmed, restructured or downright closed down.

Financially Rewarding

In yesteryears, undersupply of educated folks kept the wages agreeable. But as time went by, and the education system produced an increasing number of bots, this went down drastically. So employees find the more accomplished they get, the more time they need to dedicate to their jobs — a vicious cycle of work.

Intellectually Stimulating

As an employee, you seldom have control on what you work on. This changes somewhat as you get higher up in the organization but you are still constrained to the requirements of the company you’re employed in — which is not always what you want. As a result, you tune out, making the quality of your work suffer. This makes you feel unfulfilled and eventually leads to burnout.

So what’s the solution?

The Solution: Career Design

Career design is about a holistic approach to how you apply your expertise to earn a living. This involves changing our mindsets regarding 3 pillars.

Fig: The 3 Pillars of Career Design

Change from a bucket hauler to a pipeline builder

So the story goes,

“A village with a water shortage gave two people, Ed and Bill two contracts to supply it with water. Ed ran out as fast as he could, got a bucket and started hauling water from the river to the village and started making money immediately — albeit one bucket at a time.

Bill on the other hand disappeared for 3 months and came back with a construction crew to build a pipeline from the river to the village. By this time Ed had involved all his sons and they worked day and night to supply the village with water.

But, as soon as Bill completed his pipeline and started hauling water through it — Ed’s business was destroyed. He lost on volume, quality as well as frequency (the pipeline ensured a 24/7 supply of water to the village)”.

The moral of the story is this.

Most of us think arithmetically. You provide your services for one hour and get paid USD 15. You provide it for two and get USD 30 and so on. But people who are financially free and are able to do what they love set up systems instead. Systems that allow them to work on the business, instead of in it. Systems that allow them to scale at will.

Change from a low leverage thinker to a high leverage thinker

Thinking high leverage means you only concentrate on the tasks that yield the highest impact. These are the things that make everything else easier or unnecessary. This is how successful entrepreneurs like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk think and prioritize their work.

It’s doing the hard work of planning out your website before building it. It’s the time spent with your kid at his football game that turns out to be an investment for life. It’s the day to day endeavor to build your professional network even though you may not need it right now.

It’s basically about operating in quadrant 2 of the Eisenhower matrix (Learn more about the Eisenhower Matrix and more with our FREE 3 step Guide to productivity.

Source: Eisedo

Start minimizing downside, while maximizing upside instead of the other way round

Always protect your downside and maximize the upside, instead of the other way round. When starting businesses, most people jump in with a ton of investment, while not properly studying their prospective market. This is an example of maximizing your downsides (defaulting on your debt) and minimizing your upside (uncertain revenue potential). This is a mistake.

Successful investors like Benjamin Graham, Warren Buffet and Ray Dalio have used these principles to consistently beat the stock market over the years by investing in companies with low downside and high upside. And entrepreneurs like Richard Branson use it to make business decisions.

Whether in career, business, investing or life in general, you can use this mindset to make decisions on whether to pursue something or not.

Thinking About Career Design

Now that we have the mindset to think about career design in an effective way, it’s time to plan for it. To this end, my thinking has been influenced by a number of incredible resources like the 4 Hour Workweek, Freedom Fast Lane podcast and Rich Dad’s Cashflow Quadrant. The last one especially stands out because in his book, Robert Kiyosaki outlines a framework for thinking about career design, albeit inadvertently.

The sources of cash flow (which double as your career quadrants) are broken down into four quadrants comprising of employee, self-employed, business owner and investor.

It looks something like this.

Remember Ed the bucket hauler and Bill the pipeline builder from earlier? The first two quadrants are inhabited by the Eds — the bucket haulers. The second two are where the Bills live — the pipeline builders.

In quadrant form, this is what it looks like.

Employee

This is the first rung in the bucket hauler segment. Here, you haul someone else’s bucket. This is the quadrant preferred by those who want security above everything else. If you take a doctor as an example, working at a hospital would fall under this quadrant.

Now there’s nothing wrong with working as an employee. But not being involved in any of the other three exposes you to risks — making your job the only thing you can fall back on.

Self-Employed

This is the next step in the bucket hauler segment. Here, you haul your own bucket and become a freelancer. In other words, you start your own medical practice, instead of working for a hospital.

You have more freedom than in the employee quadrant, but your income is still tied to the number of hours you work. Basically, your income goes on vacation whenever you do.

Business Owner

This is the first quadrant in the pipeline segment. This is where you become an entrepreneur and start your own hospital employing other doctors. it’s where you apply the second pillar of career design; high leverage thinking.

This is the first quadrant that divorces your income from your time — which is the holy grail of career design. Its where you can use your talents to 10X your efforts and magnify results. The scale of your operations is no longer limited to your time and capabilities. All that’s required is to build the right processes and put the right people in charge. Then scale.

You see, many of us can make a burger better than McDonald’s. But none can do it at the same scale.

Investor

This is the final rung in the pipeline segment. This is where you invest money in someone else’s hospital and buy a share of it. It’s where you apply the third pillar of career design, minimizing downside while maximizing upside.

No matter which quadrant you choose to operate in, you have to be involved in this one to have a hope of succeeding. Investing in fundamentally strong businesses like Warren Buffet does minimizes risk, gives you great returns on investment and lets you do what you love; whether for pleasure or for profit.

Figuring Out Your Quadrant

Now for the fun part. Figuring out your quadrant(s). The thing is, you don’t have to confine yourself to one quadrant. You can operate in multiple ones if required — according to your age, ambitions, industry, type of work and opportunities. Here’s how people like Daphne Koller, co-founder of Coursera have done it.

So in summary, you can be the doctor who owns the hospital and treats patients as well. You can be the corporate manager who also owns a business and invests in companies. You can basically be whatever you want to be. The quadrant is yours!!

Career Quadrant Exercise

Now it’s time for action!!

To make it easier for you, we have made a printable one-page exercise with the quadrant drawn out so that you can find your own career quadrants.

Here’s how it works.

Download the printable career quadrant worksheet and fill it up by following these 5 steps.

Print 3 copies of the page
On the first copy, fill out what you are doing in each quadrant right now
On the second, fill out what you want to ideally do in each quadrant
On the third, write the top 3 to dos in each quadrant to achieve your ideal quadrants
Execute!!!

Executing Your Career Design

So now that you have the 3 pillars of Career Design, the Career Quadrant and the DIY Career Quadrant Worksheet printout, you can get on your way to designing your ideal career. Whether it’s in the employee quadrant or the business quadrant or some combination of all four.

But remember. It’s always best to divorce your income from your time. To set up processes and people to make yourself redundant and move on to bigger things. To things that matter to you. To things that matter to the world. And in that, you will find your ultimate career.