The highway and the wilderness: why your professional career is a dying concept
The traditional concept of work is disappearing in favour of something much more messy, and our ability to think beyond it is key to finding meaningful, fulfilling and gainful work in the future
What do you want to be when you grow up?
So, what do you do?
For years, these two questions have intrigued me. They’ve felt discordant with modern life somehow. The reason, I have come to conclude, is that they point to a concept of work that’s dying out — the concept of a ‘single professional fate’. A notion that you are your job. Not only is this traditional concept of work disappearing in favour of something much more messy, but I believe our ability to think beyond it is key to finding meaningful, fulfilling and gainful work in the future.
It’s sort of like a highway, right?
This idea of a single professional fate has always made me think of a highway — a smooth, commonly-travelled path, laid down by past generations and supported by shared knowledge, infrastructure and measures of progress. On-ramps in the form of education. Off-ramps in the form of a retirement. And only a finite set of them.
Traditionally, such an approach to work made sense. The Victorian management innovations of specialisation and the division of labour did well to cement the benefits of clear and defined career paths. However, I think the highway’s time in the sun is up. It’s become an increasingly irrelevant (and possibly dangerous) paradigm for the world of work.
That’s because of an enormous impending spike in the scale of opportunity and threat surrounding each of our working lives. We are standing at the foot of an explosion in the scale, insecurity, diversity and ambiguity of highways around us.
What does this spike look like?
In the coming years, we’re going to experience more ‘careers’ than any previous generation, as a growth in fulfillment-seekers means highway-hopping becomes the norm. Thanks to the impending risk of automation and outsourcing, we will no longer be able to rely on any single career for an entire lifetime’s worth of gainful employment. We’ll need to dodge between them to stay employable.
Meanwhile, we have within arm’s reach a growing and dazzling array of new potential career options. Powered by financial, crowd and creative platforms, we are now able to share and profit from our own work, skills or assets in new and profound ways.
For example, did you know?: FirstBlood raised $55m in under a minute. 22% UK eBook revenue is self-published. Freelancers earn over $1bn a year on UpWork. 75 people earn $1m+ a year on AirBnB. And pewdiepie has as many daily viewers as Game of Thrones has weekly.
Mind. Blown.
All of this points to a foggy and ambiguous future world of work where, apparently, 65% of today’s school children will be employed in jobs that don’t exist yet. Holy.
So, while we may not know exactly what the future world of work has in store for us, it seems clear that a finite number of predictable, well-trodden paths of employment that last a lifetime… are almost certainly not it.
Instead, we are entering a world where career highways shorten, explode in number and fade in and out over time. In this world, rather than a series of clear paths, these highways form a sort of mess. Or, to me — a wilderness.
In the wilderness, the game changes completely
Rather than walking a well-trodden path, in the wilderness we’re each on our very own, personal voyage of discovery and development. There will be no other journey like ours and there are little to no predecessors. To me, our experience in this wilderness feels much more like a ‘personal crusade’ than a ‘professional career.’
In the wilderness, there is no pre-built map, and no one to guide you. ‘Progress’ and ‘success’ have personal definitions. Authority is internal, not external. As a result, you sacrifice autopilot, the lessons of past generations, the smooth ride, the common language and the supporting infrastructure. So, it’s a struggle. There are huge highs and lows. But in the wilderness, you’ll realise you have the opportunity to find truly meaningful and fulfilling work as you make decisions every day that navigate you toward it.
I believe that this wilderness is our new ‘default’ paradigm. Thus, ensuring we each know how to embrace it and manage it feels fundamental to finding fulfilling and gainful employment in the future.
Rebuilding ourselves to survive in the wilderness
For many of you, this all sounds obvious and easy. You’ve been doing it for years. But for most of us, this concept is daunting, to say the least. This is a huge mindset shift in the way we have educated ourselves and invested in our professional lives. It necessitates a whole new set of behaviours, habits and rituals for our daily professional lives. It’s scary too, as this personal journey is unfamilar, unproven and often lonely. Plain old exhaustion is common — the wilderness requires a lot more energy than the highway.
So here are five skills that I believe we need in order to thrive in this new world of work, yielded from the years I have grappled with this topic myself.
1. Audacious Goals
We’re all used to professional goals, right? Well now it’s time to set personal goals. They define what success means to you and give you your north star in the wilderness. That means they’re not about money, seniority or title. And you can’t inherit them from your boss. Instead, consider this: What do you want to do with your time? Also, consider the intersection between what the world finds valuable and what you love to do. If you can identify how you wish to spend your time within that intersection, you’ve found a clear guide for the wilderness.
But these goals can’t be ordinary. In a world where you can build and become almost anything you can imagine, you can’t let your imagination be the limit. Audacious goals are key to ensuring that your north star is bold enough to navigate and motivate youat every stage on your personal crusade. The age of proven pragmatism must make way for one of authentic audacity.
While you don’t need to dream of colonising Mars and creating a multi-planetary species, you do need to start pushing yourself to think about dreams that delight you and make you grin from ear to ear. After all, as it’s been said, the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do. Right?
2. Flow
The concept of ‘flow’ comes from an actual neurological state identified by researchers that describes an optimal state of consciousness where all aspects of performance go through the roof. (For example, it’s the state state artists like improv musicians and free-style rappers enter when they’re delivering a live performance.) During these peak moments of total absorption, self vanishes, time flies and the brain is intensely creative and productive. Ideas flow freely and easily. Artists describe their time in this state not like work, but simply as pleasure.
While we are not all improv musicians or freestyle rappers, I do believe there is a flow state for all of us. I believe it sits somewhere between our instinct and our intellect. And whether it’s in customer research, visual design, financial accounting, childcare or running community projects, we each have one.
The trick in the wilderness is finding your flow and understanding it. For if we know our flow, then we can use it as a sort of compass on a daily basis to make decisions that take us toward more fulfilling and meaningful work
Ask yourself, does this decision move me closer or further away from my flow?
3. Perspective
On the highway, we tend to look externally for confirmation of our progress — a new job title or a pay increase, perhaps. But those measures don’t cut it in the wilderness. They provide a misleading, false sense of security. Instead, in the wilderness, we need to regularly pause to take personal stock of our location and the progress towards our North Star. To achieve this, we must juggle two contrary perspectives:
Our wolf: This is the perspective we carry with us on a daily basis. It’s aware of our immediate surroundings and protects us from them. It aims to increase pleasure and remove pain. Our wolf is narrow-minded and aggressively effective in solving immediate challenges around us.
Our eagle: This is the perspective that zooms out. It sees a more long-term path and considers the macro situation. It is concerned with your progress and journey toward your audacious goals. Unlike your wolf, your eagle is concerned with increasing a sense of purpose and meaning.
This concept isn’t new, of course, but the challenge is striking a regular balance and creating a blended perspective somewhere in between the two. Try scheduling regular reviews of progress toward your audacious goals or meeting with mentors who provoke you.
4. Grit
In an episode of Reid Hoffman’s wonderful Masters of Scale podcast, he explores the concept of ‘Grit.’ As Hoffman explains, grit is not just about persistence, it’s actually one part determination and one part ingenuity. While we are not all entrepreneurs, I believe we need the same kind of grit in the wilderness. Grit, in the wilderness, could be explained as perseverance as we strive for our imagined future
One of the first and most significant hurdles in establishing grit is the transition from extrinsic to intrinsic motivation. In the wilderness, the latter is the very basis of your personal drive and motivation. It marks a shift from working hard because some external authority mandates or rewards it, to working hard because you want to. Grit is a hardening of your intrinsic motivation and developing it into a tool that brings you energy and persistence through the tough and tumultuous times ahead.
Another hurdle is a system of self-belief. All those who thrive in the wilderness possess what those on the highway would consider to be an almost sickening amount of it. (Consider successful artists, musicians and entrepreneurs.) It’s an internal confidence that what we are doing or pursuing is right and true. When the world squints at your necessarily unprecedented choices, it’s this self-belief that empowers you to resist the urge to doubt yourself and resist returning to the highway.
Your intrinsic motivation and self-belief together formthe grit that drives you in the wilderness.
5. Curiosity
In the past, it was possible for graduates to pick a profession and expect to benefit from a life-time of employment from it. (If you played your cards right, that is.) In the wilderness, such security is a luxury. The expected lifespan of any career highway that you choose is shrinking rapidly. So rather than be held at the mercy of automation or outsourcing, we must embrace a notion of professional curiosity and constantly and proactively seek out new and tangential skills that help to mitigate the possible demise of your current work.
No one put this necessary skill better than Alvin Toffler when he said:
“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”
Some employers are helping here. Proactively retraining their staff in light of such inevitabilities. Most, however, won’t. So, it’s up to each of us to spot upcoming opportunities and threats and embrace the process of re-training and re-learning in order to stay employable and relevant.
Daunting, yes. But remember that never before has our collective knowledge been easier and cheaper to access. Services like TED-ed, HarvardX, Lynda, KhanAcademy — and, of course, plain old YouTube — have made previously exclusive and expensive education and training accessible to anyone with an internet connection. Shame on us if we don’t recognise this potential and use it to better our chances of staying gainfully employed through our lives.
A few disclaimers…
First, of course, I am not suggesting that the Highway is a dead concept. Stable, well-known, predictable paths of employment that have been shared with our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents will persist for generations to come. However, we are going to experience a shift in the norm and a change in the default way we think about work.
Second, this is not a call to drop whatever stable work you have in favour of a life in the wilderness. No. Instead, we must simply appreciate that a life in the wilderness is okay and, in fact, inevitable. We must understand it, embrace it and prepare to spend as much (if not more) of our working lives in the wilderness as we do on the highway.
Third, while this may feel like a fair-weather and first-world problem at the moment, it’s a growing issue. Millions will face this professional and personal crisis in decades to come. Therefore, it’s important to start considering your own crusade and acquiring the skills listed above today! Consider what your employer, friends, family or colleagues can do to help you on your journey, and consider the crusade of others. How can you support them in their own personal voyage of discovery and development?
Finally, as employers, we must consider how to help a workforce grappling with these issues. At Fjord and Accenture, I’m pleased to say we are already actively embracing these conversations and tackling these challenges with open minds and innovative approaches to performance assessment, skills development and career progression. Organisations looking to retain talent must recognise that these topics are as much the responsibility of the employer as the employee.
In the end, if you’re going to take one thing from this ramble, let it be this: Simply embrace the wilderness. Build on some of these skills. Lean in. It’s your key to finding fulfilling, meaningful and perhaps even gainful work in the future.
