Early career advice

2 November 2022

I get asked for career advice quite a bit. This is written from my perspective - American citizen from a middle class family, with educated parents with blue collar jobs. I’ll endeavor to add to this as I learn more and get more context.

Pay attention to and learn the social signals of the group(s) you want to crack. For example, Silicon Valley values conciseness and a specific brand of nerdiness (a different type of nerd from the classical scientist/academic). Learning these signals is important to getting into the right rooms and not getting immediately labeled as an outsider.

Get context for different socioeconomic classes, especially the ones ‘above’ you. Understand the social signals, values, norms. This will also give you better context for how the world works.

Dive extremely deeply into one area. Even if you do not end up working in that specific area, building deep context for the facets of one field will help you more quickly calibrate to other fields (by having a better idea of how deep a field goes, how much you don’t know, how to learn new things quickly, etc).

Don’t stay too long in that area. Unless you are looking to be a technical expert, understand when further depth in one specific area is too much of an opportunity cost.

Build combinations of competencies that are not usually found in one person. At this stage of your career, your advantage will never be depth of context. You can however build unique context at the intersection of fields that rarely touch. Build and own your own niche.

Understand which fields and areas require extreme technical competence, and which are hackable. Respect fields where you are incompetent and where years of experience and expertise are king. Learn to identify fields that seem like they are this way, but are actually hackable/learnable with effort and diligence.

Build quiet confidence. Figure out what drives your confidence and your insecurities. Build your confidence and work on your insecurities. Understand when you are making decisions based on your insecurities.

Understand the various career paths. Many people are only aware of doctor, businessman, lawyer. Dig into different fields and understand the variety of career paths. Talk to people in those careers and understand how they got there.

People will advise you to do what they did. College drop outs will advise you to skip your Bachelor’s, PhD drop outs like me will advise you to skip your dissertation. Take in the advice and normalize for this bias.

Understand why you are doing something. Many classic paths and desires are socially imprinted on you, such as management consulting being prestigious. It might still make sense for you to go to college, or do that graduate degree, or take that job, but understand why you are doing it and check in on those metrics.

Optimize to be the least competent/smart/ambitious/accomplished person in the room. Most importantly, realize when you have grown past one room and have the guts to move into the next one.

Ask for feedback constantly. Give people permission to give you brutal feedback. In my experience, everyone has a few brutal pieces of feedback that were key to them unlocking their next level of growth. Learn how to react well to feedback in the face of the giver.

Don’t become emotionally attached to who you are currently. Become attached to your goal, ideally one very far out. E.g., I am extremely emotionally attached to building “The Aging Pharma”, and try not to be emotionally attached to my current view of myself.

Aim to have such a high growth rate that you cringe looking back at yourself a year ago.

Understand your personality flaws, facets, and patterns. You don’t need to tackle all of your flaws - it’s often less efficient than doubling down on your strengths - but you should be aware of them so you can hedge against them/normalize your instincts.

Build a model of how busy people think. Minimize activation energy and effort for other people to help you.

Write, think, and ideate publicly. Public comms forces faster growth, and it will facilitate other people taking fliers on you.

Put in the hours. When you are low context and experience, your main advantage is speed & effort.