• Part 1: 👋 Introducing the Career Strategy Series

• Part 2: 🪜 Ladder Climbing as a Strategy

• Part 3: 👩‍🎓 Controlled Supply as a Strategy

• Part 4: 🥇 Excellence in a Power Law Field as a Strategy

• Part 5: 🔍 Niche-ing as a Strategy

• Part 6: 🧱 Skill-stacking as a Strategy

• Part 7: 👷 Be A Generalist as a Strategy

• Part 8: 📊 The Portfolio Career as a Strategy

• Part 9: 📣 Building a Platform as a Strategy

• Part 10: 🌊 Wave-surfing as a Strategy

• Part 11: 🏗️ Adding Leverage as a Strategy

• Part 12: 🌏 Proximity as a Strategy

• Part 13: ⏱️ Sequencing as a Strategy

• Part 14: 🧪 Optimising for Discovery as a Strategy

• Part 15: ⚡ Do What Gives You Energy as a Strategy

• Part 16: 💹 Arbitrage as a Strategy

⚡ Introducing… arbitrage as a career strategy.

A career arbitrage can transform your quality of life more quickly and dramatically than any other strategy we’ve discussed in this series 🚀

Let’s illustrate with a story (Lucy here, by the way!):

A couple of years ago, a friend of a friend approached me for one-on-one coaching to support a salary negotiation. They had extensive experience in the charity sector, running highly effective programs for these mission-driven (often cash-strapped) organisations. Now, they were transitioning into their first role outside the sector: overseeing similar programs at a large bank.

But they made a critical mistake.

When the recruiter asked about their salary expectations, they panicked and named a figure - $90,000 - that was higher than anything they had ever earned. It seemed like a bold move at the time.

They aced the interviews and reached the salary negotiation stage.

But after speaking with a friend and doing some research, they realised the corporate market rate for their role was $150,000 - over 60% higher than the amount they’d initially proposed.

This points to the insight at the heart of career arbitrage:

The same problem solving skills can be worth dramatically different amounts depending on the market you sell them in 💸

We eventually worked together to help them walk back their initial ask, reframe the negotiation and secure the full $150,000 salary.

But the big takeaway was this: achieving that kind of pay increase overnight would be nearly impossible using most other career strategies, but by changing markets, you can achieve a dramatic uplift in one move.

This principle of arbitrage can be applied in a number of ways - where you sell your skills, where you spend your salary, or how you allocate your time.

In this post, we’ll explore three forms of career arbitrage that can revolutionise your relationship with work - and dive into a fascinating case study with Steven Bartlett.

So let’s get started!

⚙️ How it works.

In essence, arbitrage is about working smarter, not harder, by leveraging differences between markets to your advantage.

What is arbitrage in the traditional (financial) sense?

The term ‘arbitrage’ originally comes from a kind of trade people make in financial markets: the simultaneous purchase and sale of an asset in different markets to exploit tiny differences in their prices.

Here’s an example of a financial arbitrage 💰

The stock of Company X is trading at $50 on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), while, at the same moment, it is trading for $50.10 on the London Stock Exchange (LSE).

A trader can buy the stock on the NYSE and immediately sell the same shares on the LSE, earning a profit of 10 cents per share.

The trader can continue to exploit this arbitrage until the specialists on the NYSE run out of shares of Company X’s stock, or until the specialists on the NYSE or the LSE adjust their prices to wipe out the opportunity.

In the meantime, they could run that trade one million times, and make a $100,000 profit, with almost no risk.

So, typically arbitrage trades in financial markets are about 👇

• Creatively spotting a small pricing difference (or ‘market inefficiency’),

• Acting quickly to exploit it and make a profit before the window closes.

And arbitrage can be even more powerful in the markets where we sell our time a.k.a. ‘labour markets’ 👷‍♀️

While there are traders all around the world dedicated to spotting and closing even the tiniest financial arbitrages, there are many structural factors that keep labour market arbitrages open indefinitely - and few individuals who are out there taking advantage of big market differences.

💹 3 types of career arbitrage.

1. Skill arbitrage ⚒️

Solve bigger problems, because they pay better.

• What it is: Change problems you solve to earn more with the same skills.

• Why it works: Different organisations work on different problems, for different customers - and the value you create by solving those problems is linked directly to the value you can generate for them.

• What can it look like:

  • Changing from non-profits or government into the private sector,

  • Changing from working for a cash-strapped small business to a large enterprise with millions of customers,

  • Identifying critical moments of value creation in a company’s life & positioning yourself to unlock them with your skills.

Case study: Steven Bartlett (Diary of A CEO podcast host)

A note from Lucy: the Diary of A CEO podcast can have clickbait-y episode titles, and it is not a reliable source on health information, but I think the story which Steven Bartlett, the host, tells in this episode is a fantastic example of a skills arbitrage. It has stayed with me since I first heard it, and I think you might benefit from it as well.

Go to 01:36:20, where he begins explaining how he re-applied his digital marketing skills from helping small e-commerce businesses acquire customers, to marketing the IPOs of biotech companies about to go public to millions of potential retail investors, with dramatically different results.

2. Geographic arbitrage 🌏

Live somewhere cheaper, because your money goes further.

• What it is: Increase your quality of life by moving geography 🧳

• Why it works: The internet. If you have the ability to work remotely and continue earning your current salary while living in a low-cost jurisdiction, you can dramatically lower your personal expenditures which living an equivalent or better quality of life.

• What can it look like:

  • Moving within a high-income country or between high-income countries e.g. shifting from a shoebox apartment in an expensive city like San Francisco to a multi-bedroom house in a cheaper city like Portland or Berlin,

  • Moving from a high-income country to a low-income or middle-income country e.g. from San Francisco to Bali or Nairobi, where you can live in on the beach for a fraction of the cost, or

  • Moving cities to spend less time earning - freeing yourself from needing to work 5 days a week to maintain your lifestyle, and allowing yourself 3-4 extra days per week for your passions.

3. Time arbitrage ⌛

Allocate your time to higher-value tasks & outsource the rest.

Every hour of your time has a cost:

1. An obvious per-hour cost, which is your wages divided by number of hours worked, and

2. A less obvious cost in terms of opportunity - the uplift you could have created by using it on the most valuable activity or task instead.

Getting more from your time is the point of time arbitrage!

• What it is: Allocating your time to the highest value activities you can, while outsourcing or delegating low-value or less specialised activities.

• Why it works: The same underlying drivers for skills and geographic arbitrage create opportunities here - differences in pricing between markets and geographies - as well as technology and tools.

• What can it look like:

  • For example, let’s say you run a small business.

  • You could do your own business admin (e.g. sending invoices, paying bills, doing data entry and the like), but it’s a low-value use of your time compared to winning big clients or growing the business.

  • Instead of doing it yourself, you could:

    • Hire a local assistant, working on a more moderate hourly wage, or

    • Hiring a remote assistant based in a lower-cost jurisdiction, working on a good hourly wage for their market, or

    • Automate the process using a software tool, paying a small monthly subscription fee.

If there is one person most associated with the idea of time arbitrage, it is the productivity and lifestyle design expert Tim Ferriss - who first became famous for his book advocating this approach, The 4-Hour Workweek. More on that book and similar recommendations at the end of the post!

🧠 Keep in mind.

A few considerations to note before you choose this strategy.

• ⏰ Not all arbitrages last forever: Exploiting market inefficiencies drives those markets closer to efficiency - so think about how you and your labour markets might evolve over a multi-year timeline.

• 🌞 Long-term career development: Prioritising arbitrage opportunities may yield quick wins, but may undermine the kind of long-term career growth you receive from being present at a head office with mentors who are invested in developing your skills.

• 😥 Paradise can be lonely: Remote work can lead to isolation, cultural disconnection and time zone issues with teams or clients.

• ✅ Quality control matters: Outsourcing key tasks, even if it saves you time, may compromise quality unless you engage in proper oversight.

Interested in reading more about concepts of lifestyle design? 🎨

Tim Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Workweek. Ferriss advocates designing a fulfilling career and life by leveraging the principles of automation, delegation, and lifestyle design. Read here.

A few of his key recommendations 👇

“Ask yourself: What can I delegate? What can I outsource? What can I stop doing altogether?”

“Don’t spend time on something that someone else can do better or for less money.”

“If you can hire someone to do a task (even 95%) as well as you for $50 an hour, and your time is worth $100 an hour, you should outsource it.”

“Never automate something that can be eliminated, and never delegate something that can be automated or streamlined. Otherwise, you waste someone else’s time instead of your own.”

Rolf Potts’ Vagabonding. Potts emphasises long-term, budget-conscious travel as a way to experience freedom and self-discovery. Read here.

Jacob Lund Fisker’s Early Retirement Extreme. Fisker advocates for drastically reducing expenses and high early savings rates to achieve financial independence. Read here.

Cal Newport’s So Good They Can’t Ignore You. Newport advocates developing scarce and valuable skills which enable you to negotiate for autonomy, flexibility and higher pay. Read here.

Found this helpful?

We created this series to help people realise their best careers - so if a post really resonates with you, we’d love you to share it! ✉️

Share

Leave a comment

Keen for more? Check out the other posts in the series 👇

• Part 1: 👋 Introducing the Career Strategy Series

• Part 2: 🪜 Ladder Climbing as a Strategy

• Part 3: 👩‍🎓 Controlled Supply as a Strategy

• Part 4: 🥇 Excellence in a Power Law Field as a Strategy

• Part 5: 🔍 Niche-ing as a Strategy

• Part 6: 🧱 Skill-stacking as a Strategy

• Part 7: 👷 Be A Generalist as a Strategy

• Part 8: 📊 The Portfolio Career as a Strategy

• Part 9: 📣 Building a Platform as a Strategy

• Part 10: 🌊 Wave-surfing as a Strategy

• Part 11: 🏗️ Adding Leverage as a Strategy

• Part 12: 🌏 Proximity as a Strategy

• Part 13: ⏱️ Sequencing as a Strategy

• Part 14: 🧪 Optimising for Discovery as a Strategy

• Part 15: ⚡ Do What Gives You Energy as a Strategy

• Part 16: 💹 Arbitrage as a Strategy

• Part 1: 👋 Introducing the Career Strategy Series

• Part 2: 🪜 Ladder Climbing as a Strategy

• Part 3: 👩‍🎓 Controlled Supply as a Strategy

• Part 4: 🥇 Excellence in a Power Law Field as a Strategy

• Part 5: 🔍 Niche-ing as a Strategy

• Part 6: 🧱 Skill-stacking as a Strategy

• Part 7: 👷 Be A Generalist as a Strategy

• Part 8: 📊 The Portfolio Career as a Strategy

• Part 9: 📣 Building a Platform as a Strategy

• Part 10: 🌊 Wave-surfing as a Strategy

• Part 11: 🏗️ Adding Leverage as a Strategy

• Part 12: 🌏 Proximity as a Strategy

• Part 13: ⏱️ Sequencing as a Strategy

• Part 14: 🧪 Optimising for Discovery as a Strategy

• Part 15: ⚡ Do What Gives You Energy as a Strategy

• Part 16: 💹 Arbitrage as a Strategy

⚡ Introducing a surprising strategy: do what gives you energy.

Let’s be real - this series can sometimes feel like a downer.

We’ve often rejected the classic advice to ‘follow your passion’.

In fact, we kind of started out by demonising it.

But there is an alternate view, which is epitomised by this week’s strategy:

Optimising for activities that give you energy can actually fuel career success, more than forcing yourself into jobs which don’t suit you.

When you ask high-profile leaders, many give this advice 👇

• From billionaire investor Warren Buffett: "In the world of business, the people who are most successful are those who are doing what they love…"

• To iconic talk show host Oprah Winfrey: “Passion is energy. Feel the power that comes from focusing on what excites you…"

• And entrepreneur Richard Branson: "There is no greater thing you can do with your life and your work than follow your passions…”

• Even the author Mark Twain: "Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life”.

In this post, we’ll dive into the science behind energy and motivation - plus share tips on finding what gives you energy and using it to make career decisions. Let’s get started!

⚙️ How it works.

We all have different personalities, meaning we are all energised and drained by different kinds of work.

For example:

• You might love spreadsheets but find writing an email takes forever,

• You might love working in teams but procrastinate like crazy when no one else is keeping you accountable,

• You might find a demanding boss with high standards to be motivating (or alternately causes you sleepless nights),

• You might stay up until midnight working on a project that connects with your values, while doing a slapdash job on tasks that don’t excite you.

Whatever your preferences - this career strategy is about working with them, not against them, by choosing tasks which gives you energy.

This allows you to work (cough) harder-better-faster-stronger, produce better outputs and make quicker progress in your career.

What does that look like in practice? 🤔

• For example, if you’re someone who studied a technical field but actually gets energy from teamwork —> can you focus on becoming a people manager within that field to maximise the amount of time spent doing tasks which suit you?

• Or if you’re someone who enjoys analytical thinking, but struggles with tight deadlines and occasional all-nighters in your job —> can you find a role in a different industry or part of your company which uses the same skills at a more thoughtful, predictable pace?

🧠 The why: what’s happening inside your brain?

Why do different tasks have such powerful impacts on our motivation?

Well, there’s a ton of fascinating neuroscience behind it, but let’s focus on a couple of examples from opposite ends of the energy spectrum.

📈 The positive end: flow states.

The term ‘flow state’ was popularised by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, to describe deep immersion in an activity.

In flow states, people report feeling a loss of self-consciousness and a distorted sense of time (feeling sped up or slowed down), as well as a sense of intrinsic reward (enjoyment for its own sake, not for the end result).

Activities like surfing, gaming, trading, acting, cooking, painting, hiking, dancing, reading, rock climbing, music and problem solving in an area you enjoy (for example, mathematics) often produce this sense of ‘being in flow’.

And in terms of what’s happening in the brain, flow states correlate with:

• Reduced prefrontal cortex activity, leading to less self-criticism and greater immersion,

• Release of dopamine, boosting motivation and focus, and

• Increased alpha and theta brain waves, associated with relaxed alertness and heightened creativity.

So if we spend more of our working hours experiencing a sense of flow, we’re much more likely to feel energised and be effective at our jobs.

📉 The negative side: toxic workplaces.

From micromanagement to bullying, favouritism, gossip, harassment, blame-shifting, ‘busy work’ and burnout cultures, modern workplaces can be psychologically stressful in a number of ways.

And while we might want to adopt a mantra of professionalism and just ‘shake it off’, our ancient brains haven’t caught up enough in evolutionary terms to handle chronic negative working conditions.

Why?

Our brains spent a long time evolving to rapidly spot physical threats and outrun the threat.

Let’s say your ancestor is being chased by a tiger.

Your brain spots the threat, and activates the sympathetic nervous system, pumping your body full of hormones like adrenalin to increase energy and blood supply, and cortisol to maintain a steady supply of fuel to our muscles and brain while we avoid the tiger.

But while a chasing tiger might be gone within minutes (or you might be eaten, so it’s a moot point!), the modern workplace brings chronic stress.

The slow-drip of a never-ending inbox pinging at us or a bad boss doesn’t achieve the same rapid resolution as the tiger chase, so our bodies are experiencing a constant low level of this ancient stress response.

Over time, this stress response can have dramatic effects on our motivation & effectiveness, like:

• Chronic cortisol exposure keeps your brain in a "survival mode," focusing on immediate threats rather than long-term goals. This makes it harder to find joy or satisfaction in challenging, growth-oriented work.

• Cortisol can suppress the release of dopamine, a neurotransmitter associated with reward and motivation. This makes it harder to feel energised or motivated by work achievements or future goals.

• Chronic stress impairs the prefrontal cortex (responsible for executive functions like decision-making, planning, and focus). This can make it harder to stay organised, concentrate, or complete tasks effectively.

• When under chronic stress, everything may feel equally urgent and we experience difficulty prioritising, leading to procrastination or decision fatigue.

• Prolonged stress might lead to depersonalisation, including a sense of detachment or apathy toward your work, colleagues, or clients.

Bottom line: while it may feel ‘fluffy’ or non-strategic to take into account what brings you energy at work, it can actually have a huge impact.

🌈 So how could I actually use this strategy?

1. Spend time understanding your unique energy fingerprint.

There are obvious signals of what brings you energy, like:

• The hobbies you choose to pursue in your free time,

• The types of people you choose to be around, and

• Past experiences that have led to peaks or troughs in motivation.

But you might be surprised by what comes up if you track yourself too.

Try keeping a diary of what drains or energises you across every area of your life for a number of weeks - and be as specific as possible, observing yourself without judgment as you are, rather than as you would like to be.

You might end up with a list which looks like this (but probably longer):

Compare it to your work - and other possible careers. Does it feel like you should make a shift to something which better fits your energy profile?

2. Consider energy AND your likelihood of success in a field.

   

It’s all well and good to say that singing gives you energy - but there’s a very small number of professional singers in the world compared to the number who want to be professionals (this earlier post is a great read on these kind of ‘power law’ careers like sport, media & entertainment).

So how should you proceed?

Imagine if you placed all of the potential jobs you could do on two axes.

• One axis ranks them from draining to energising.

• The other from low to high likelihood of success (however you define it).

And together, they make a matrix with 4 quadrants 👇

🗻 The ideal.

Jobs that fall into the top right quadrant are probably a no-brainer. You’re likely to see a positive feedback loop emerge between feeling energised, succeeding, feeling more energised, succeeding more, and so on.

🔚 The dead end.

Jobs that are draining with a low likelihood of success are not worth your time, unless you have no better options available.

🤩 The dream.

When it comes to energising fields with long odds of success, it can be useful to impose a time limit, think about Plan Bs where you can use transferable skills and be conscious that you need more than effort and talent - you might also need to create an edge to succeed in hyper-competitive fields.

🏃 The grind.

Jobs with a high likelihood of success that diminish your energy might be worth thinking of in terms of sequencing or as part of a portfolio career.

For example, can you do this for a number of years to build financial security, a portfolio, a reputation, a network or a set of skills, which you can then use to transition into roles which you find more energising?

🧠 Keep in mind.

A few considerations to note before you choose this strategy.

• 🎨 Turning a passion into a vocation: Sometimes, turning the thing you love into a job you need to monetise can make you fall out of love with your hobby and your work. For example, if you enjoy unfettered creativity, and instead find yourself working on client briefs which feel commercial and constrained, you might wish for a career that’s ‘just a job’.

• 🥱 Being energised doesn’t mean enjoying every minute: Every job has pain points and occasional boring moments - make sure the search for a perfect job doesn’t turn into inertia or an inability to commit.

• 🔋 Energy sources evolve: You might find yourself motivated by intellectual challenge and more responsibility at one point in your career, only to find that your priorities shift to spending more time with family, friends or hobbies - or vice versa. Keep observing & tweaking as you go.

• 💥 We don’t hear as much about the failures: We are over-exposed to stories of improbable success against long odds, but failed career moves receive little attention - a variation of what is known as ‘survivorship bias’. Even the celebrities who are quoted urging us to follow our passions can be found highlighting the importance of multiple factors in career success. For example, the full quote from Richard Branson above actually reads, "there is no greater thing you can do with your life and your work than follow your passions—in a way that serves the world and you".

• 🥇 Excellence can also breed enjoyment: We often think of passion as needing to exist as a precondition for motivation, with a chain of causation which looks like: passion —> effort —> mastery —> success. But there’s interesting emerging evidence that becoming good at something actually makes it enjoyable, meaning the chain of causation can also look like this: effort —> mastery —> success —> passion!

Found this helpful?

We created this series to help people realise their best careers - so if a post really resonates with you, we’d love you to share it! ✉️

Share

Leave a comment

Keen for more? Check out the other posts in the series 👇

• Part 1: 👋 Introducing the Career Strategy Series

• Part 2: 🪜 Ladder Climbing as a Strategy

• Part 3: 👩‍🎓 Controlled Supply as a Strategy

• Part 4: 🥇 Excellence in a Power Law Field as a Strategy

• Part 5: 🔍 Niche-ing as a Strategy

• Part 6: 🧱 Skill-stacking as a Strategy

• Part 7: 👷 Be A Generalist as a Strategy

• Part 8: 📊 The Portfolio Career as a Strategy

• Part 9: 📣 Building a Platform as a Strategy

• Part 10: 🌊 Wave-surfing as a Strategy

• Part 11: 🏗️ Adding Leverage as a Strategy

• Part 12: 🌏 Proximity as a Strategy

• Part 13: ⏱️ Sequencing as a Strategy

• Part 14: 🧪 Optimising for Discovery as a Strategy

• Part 15: ⚡ Do What Gives You Energy as a Strategy

• Part 16: 💹 Arbitrage as a Strategy

• Part 1: 👋 Introducing the Career Strategy Series

• Part 2: 🪜 Ladder Climbing as a Strategy

• Part 3: 👩‍🎓 Controlled Supply as a Strategy

• Part 4: 🥇 Excellence in a Power Law Field as a Strategy

• Part 5: 🔍 Niche-ing as a Strategy

• Part 6: 🧱 Skill-stacking as a Strategy

• Part 7: 👷 Be A Generalist as a Strategy

• Part 8: 📊 The Portfolio Career as a Strategy

• Part 9: 📣 Building a Platform as a Strategy

• Part 10: 🌊 Wave-surfing as a Strategy

• Part 11: 🏗️ Adding Leverage as a Strategy

• Part 12: 🌏 Proximity as a Strategy

• Part 13: ⏱️ Sequencing as a Strategy

• Part 14: 🧪 Optimising for Discovery as a Strategy

• Part 15: ⚡ Do What Gives You Energy as a Strategy

• Part 16: 💹 Arbitrage as a Strategy

🧪 Introducing Strategy #13: Optimise for discovery.

Careers are long - we spend approximately 50% of our waking hours at work.

In fact, if we work full-time from 20 to 60 years old in a 9-to-5 job, we’ll spend 80,000 hours of our lives working.

And many of us make the decision at 18 (or even younger) about what our profession will be, with limited knowledge of ourselves and the world. 

So our odds of getting our career right the first time are low.

Yet when people inevitably experience feeling stuck or lost, even a few years into a career, many conclude that it’s “too late for them to change” - even if they have tens of thousands of hours left in their working life. 

So how do you increase your odds of getting it right - or course-correct when you get it wrong? 

Optimise for discovery!

In this week’s post, we’ll dive into this career strategy - and explore a case study which is close to home (the author!).

🤔 Why optimise for discovery?

Conventional wisdom tells us that the earlier you start investing in your chosen career path, the faster you can make progress.

But there’s a problem with the race to pick something and commit.

1 Limited exposure.

This is you in high school, when you first start making choices about what to study and what career you’ll follow.

Maybe you’ve seen doctors and lawyers and teachers on TV.

You’ve dreamed of being a musician, influencer or athlete.

And through your direct experience in family and community, you’ve seen a few more professions.

But there are thousands of potential careers you have no idea exist until you start experiencing more of the world.

2 Limited self knowledge.

You might just be starting to have a sense of who you are as a person.

But you probably have more limited knowledge who you are when it comes to the world of work.

You’re still learning what your strengths are, what brings you energy, and what tradeoffs you are happy making around money, lifestyle and purpose.

So let’s say that of all the possible careers, you suit about 10% of them.

If you are only aware of 10% of the possible careers, and only suit 10% of those, you’ve got to get pretty lucky to pick the golden 1% career that’s in your purview at age 18.

Wow, that’s a bit depressing.

Don’t worry - it’s actually fine!

But knowing those odds, you have a couple of options 💭

1. Make a hard-to-reverse series of choices at 18 with limited information and hope for the best, OR

2. Focus on gathering more data about possible careers and your own preferences first to increase the odds of long-term satisfaction.

This is where ‘optimising for discovery’ comes in:

There are things you can only learn by direct experience, or by learning from those with direct experience.

• Maybe you discover that you actually love working in small teams.

• Or that you prefer analysing numbers to working with words all day.

• Or that the day-to-day culture of an organisation is actually more important than the content of what it works on.

Whatever it is, by taking a bit longer to fill in knowledge gaps you can make a better decision about when to go all-in and commit to a career path.

For example, using our simple diagram:

If you understand 50% of all possible jobs, you’ve increased the number of jobs you know that suit you by 5X, and dramatically increased the odds of finding something that really works for you.

If you think about your career progression, optimising for discovery often looks like an S curve instead of a linear path:

Initially you might feel like you’re not moving as fast as your peers on a linear set-and-forget path, but once you make a better decision based on higher quality information, you see rapid growth 🏃‍♀️🏃‍♀️🏃‍♀️

After all, you have 80,000 hours to spend at work - why not invest a small portion of them in making the others dramatically better?

💡 Tips on optimising for discovery.

Not sure where to start? Here are a few of our favourite techniques 👇

• Start with an audit of what you DO know:

  • What are my skills?

  • What are my natural abilities?

  • What brings me energy?

  • What lifestyle do I want?

  • What careers am I aware of?

  • How do they fit with all of the above?
    

• Do exercises that deliberately broaden your perspective

  • We like tools like government jobs reports for exploring the full range of careers available. And we love tools like ChatGPT for brainstorming!

  • Try a prompt like:

    • Here is what I know about my skills and preferences… (insert yours). Suggest 100 career paths / job titles which could be possible for me, in a table, rating each by salary, work life balance and exit options.

  

• Like a scientist, make a series of hypotheses or assumptions that you would like to test based on what you know now.

  • e.g. I think I would enjoy working in a social impact organisation with a focus on big public policy issues.

• Test your hypotheses with a series of low-cost reversible experiments & investigations e.g.

  • Do the work in a short-term paid, intern, volunteer or self-directed project capacity, or

  • Learning from those who have done it by reading, podcasts, outreach to people in the career path for quick coffees and the like.

• Keep a career diary and note down your observations as you go, building a richer profile of what’s available and what suits you.

🧪 Case Study: say hello to Lucy.

Hey folks!

Lucy here, the author of this series 👋

I’ve used a few of the strategies we cover here, but optimising for discovery is the strategy I feel most passionate about advocating for.

And that’s because I have seen so many people who feel prematurely trapped in their careers, and don’t know what to do to get unstuck.

So I wanted to share my experience using this strategy - I hope it’s helpful to you, and if you have questions or comments, feel free to get in touch!

No job, who dis?

After I left my job at the management consulting firm McKinsey, I felt a lot of self-imposed pressure to be visibly ‘on the right track’ and figure out what I was going to do with my career right away.

I was privileged to have a lot of lucrative exit options - but I wasn’t keen on the corporate strategy and private equity roles recruiters were sending.

What helped me get unstuck was taking about 18 months (all up) to run a series of structured experiments, before throwing myself 100% into the world of startups for the next phase of my career.

So here is a non-exhaustive list of all the things I tried:

• Short-term projects with a boutique consulting firm in the energy sector, which paid the bills and helped me learn more about energy issues,

• Writing half a movie, which helped me realise I enjoyed running dialogue in my head more than the lonely experience of writing for the screen,

• Pro bono projects helping civil liberties and human rights organisations, which helped me realise I enjoyed combining a strategist’s mindset with problems I cared about,

• Writing reports about the venture capital world for corporate readers, which helped me realise I was fascinated by the startup industry,

• Working on an academic project at the intersection of philosophy & public policy with a friend, which helped me realise I loved these topics but wanted to be able to see tangible, large-scale impact from my work,

• Joining a very early-stage healthcare startup, which helped me realise I enjoyed the pace and culture of startups but wanted a different team,

• And so on, and so on.

Did it confuse my family?

Sure.

Was it hard to explain my choices at parties?

Definitely.

Was cash flow a challenge?

100% - until I figured out how much consulting work I needed to subsidise my unpaid experiments.

But was it extremely helpful for understanding my preferences and the worlds I wanted to join?

Absolutely!

🧠 Keep in mind.

A few considerations to note before you choose this strategy.

• 🎰 Know when to go ‘all-in’: It’s easy to spin your wheels forever, so keep in mind a level of conviction or threshold for when to commit and work at a career path.

• 🎰 No-regrets moves: There are probably still skillsets and credentials you can acquire which unlock a wide range of likely careers, and you can invest in these in parallel to running a discovery process.

• 👀 Watch out for peer pressure & FOMO: Admitting uncertainty and taking time to discover what you want can be psychologically challenging, especially if you’re in a peer group where others project a high degree of confidence in their work. Remember that it’s your journey, most people think very little about you, and ultimately you’re the only one who needs to live each hour of your life, so don’t live it for someone else. 

Found this helpful?

We created this series to help people realise their best careers - so if a post really resonates with you, we’d love you to share it! ✉️

Share

Leave a comment

Keen for more? Check out the other posts in the series 👇

• Part 1: 👋 Introducing the Career Strategy Series

• Part 2: 🪜 Ladder Climbing as a Strategy

• Part 3: 👩‍🎓 Controlled Supply as a Strategy

• Part 4: 🥇 Excellence in a Power Law Field as a Strategy

• Part 5: 🔍 Niche-ing as a Strategy

• Part 6: 🧱 Skill-stacking as a Strategy

• Part 7: 👷 Be A Generalist as a Strategy

• Part 8: 📊 The Portfolio Career as a Strategy

• Part 9: 📣 Building a Platform as a Strategy

• Part 10: 🌊 Wave-surfing as a Strategy

• Part 11: 🏗️ Adding Leverage as a Strategy

• Part 12: 🌏 Proximity as a Strategy

• Part 13: ⏱️ Sequencing as a Strategy

• Part 14: 🧪 Optimising for Discovery as a Strategy

• Part 15: ⚡ Do What Gives You Energy as a Strategy

• Part 16: 💹 Arbitrage as a Strategy

• Part 1: 👋 Introducing the Career Strategy Series

• Part 2: 🪜 Ladder Climbing as a Strategy

• Part 3: 👩‍🎓 Controlled Supply as a Strategy

• Part 4: 🥇 Excellence in a Power Law Field as a Strategy

• Part 5: 🔍 Niche-ing as a Strategy

• Part 6: 🧱 Skill-stacking as a Strategy

• Part 7: 👷 Be A Generalist as a Strategy

• Part 8: 📊 The Portfolio Career as a Strategy

• Part 9: 📣 Building a Platform as a Strategy

• Part 10: 🌊 Wave-surfing as a Strategy

• Part 11: 🏗️ Adding Leverage as a Strategy

• Part 12: 🌏 Proximity as a Strategy

• Part 13: ⏱️ Sequencing as a Strategy

• Part 14: 🧪 Optimising for Discovery as a Strategy

• Part 15: ⚡ Do What Gives You Energy as a Strategy

• Part 16: 💹 Arbitrage as a Strategy

⏱️ Introducing Strategy #12: Sequencing

Have you ever heard of the musician John Roger Stephens?

Probably not.

But you may know him by his stage name, John Legend - the artist and producer who shot to fame in the early 2000s, with his first record winning three Grammies.

And did you know…

John Legend didn’t just spend his early career focussed on auditioning and performing while struggling financially, like many musicians do.

He actually started his career as a management consultant in New York City, spending three years at the top-tier firm Boston Consulting Group!

And he’s an incredible example of a career strategy known as sequencing.

We’ll unpack later more of John Legend’s story later, but for now let’s dive in and break down how this strategy works.

🤔 The eternal career problem: trade-offs.

Most of us have multiple career goals: money, fulfilment, learning, positive impact, flexibility and so on.

And we can’t have 100% of them, 100% of the time - so we make trade-offs.

Making those tradeoffs can often feel paralysing. For example:

• Should I prioritise financial security by working in a job I don’t love?

• Should I go all-in & try to make a career out of my passion?

• Should I work hard to be promoted faster or prioritise work-life balance?

• Should I go for the prestigious role, or the best learning opportunities?

There are several common ways to respond to this dilemma:

• Some people give up on having it all and lower their expectations.

• Some people try to find the unicorn role that will perfectly meet all our goals on day one - which often means getting stuck at the search phase.

• Some pursue, in the words of Bo Burnham, ‘a little bit of everything, all of the time’: a little bit of money, learning, passion and balance, but not making decisive progress towards any at once.

💡 Enter: sequencing.

Think of sequencing as rejecting these responses, with a very different answer to the trade-off question.

Yes, you want it all right away.

But similar to choosing to save and invest now to build future wealth, by delaying career gratification on some dimensions and investing heavily on others, you can achieve better overall results.

In essence - treating your career like a ‘multi stage game’, and making big tradeoffs early on to unlock dramatically different possibilities later.

⏰ Sequencing in practice.

This can take a few forms, but here are 3 examples:

You want to be a musician eventually, but you…

👉 Take a high-earning job (e.g. management consulting) for a few years and invest a lot of your income, to create the financial security to have more free time and pursue your passions later.

You want to produce movies or found a company eventually, but you…

👉 Take a low-paying job (e.g. joining a startup, being an assistant to an influential dirctor) with a focus on learning, make connections & build a reputation which can unlock financial rewards later.

You want to dedicate your career to a social cause, but you…

👉 Take a corporate job in which you can build transferable skills in business & operations, then transition to a nonprofit organisation where your skills can have a bigger impact.

🎷 Case Study: From consulting to multi-hyphenate musical powerhouse with John Legend.

Most musicians’ stories begin with a period of honing their craft and practising in obscurity, often in financial insecurity, before being ‘discovered’ and finally making it.

Not John Legend.

He attended the University of Pennsylvania, and majored in English with a focus on African-American literature.

While in college, he directed and performed with the co-ed jazz and pop a cappella group Counterparts.

After graduating, Legend took a job as a management consultant at Boston Consulting Group (BCG) in New York City (for those unfamiliar with the industry, it’s a high-paid, high-intensity job which typically involves working with big corporates on business strategy & operations).

He worked in his corporate job to support himself while pursuing music in his free time, honing his skills as a performer and networking in the music industry.

He was eventually spotted by the (then) up-and-coming rapper Kanye West in the early 2000s, who helped him break into the music industry by featuring him on tracks and introducing him to key contacts.

He signed with Kanye West's label and adopted the stage name "John Legend," a moniker friends had given him, releasing his debut album, Get Lifted, which included the hit single "Ordinary People."

The album received critical acclaim and won him three Grammy Awards.

Since then, John Legend has released more albums, dedicated a portion of his time to working on social justice causes (especially criminal justice reform, racial equality, and education), produced Broadway musicals and films, become one of the few people to achieve an EGOT (winning an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony), invested in a number of ventures and more.

Ultimately, John Legend’s early career in consulting helped him build the foundation and stability to pivot into music from a position of strength - as well as teaching him many skills that allowed him to make an impact across a wide range of fields.

As he says:

“It’s not the traditional route to becoming a musician, but I think it served me well… it was such a high quality of colleagues and peers, and it made me just realise that these are the types of people who I want to surround myself with, even in the music business which may not be as known for that.

Want to learn more about John Legend’s career transition? Check out the interview below!

🧠 Keep in mind.

A few considerations to note before you go all-in on sequencing.

• 😔 Trade-offs involve sacrifice: Be ready to miss out on things you enjoy, and to endure things you don’t, in order to make this strategy work.

• 🍂 Current self ≠ future self. A sequencing strategy relies on deferring gratification in the present, on the assumption that you understand well what your future self will want. But many people find that their life paths and visions of themselves evolve over time. At its worst, a sequencing strategy could lead to tunnel vision and missing out on important signals about what you actually want along the way!

• 📈 Unintended consequences: Pursuing a sequencing strategy can have unplanned secondary effects - for example, many people who prioritise earning over passion early on find themselves experiencing ‘lifestyle inflation’ when surrounded by peers earning & spending at high levels - and may find it difficult to save as they intended, or ever return to a lower-earning passion-driven career.

• 💭 Are your goals actually inter-dependent? There’s good psychological evidence that a sense of learning and mastery brings fulfilment and greater motivation - which might well lead to more success, money and flexibility. Trading off what gives you energy for other goals may end up being a short-term win, but a long-term loss.

Found this helpful?

We created this series to help people realise their best careers - so if a post really resonates with you, we’d love you to share it! ✉️

Share

Leave a comment

Keen for more? Check out the other posts in the series 👇

• Part 1: 👋 Introducing the Career Strategy Series

• Part 2: 🪜 Ladder Climbing as a Strategy

• Part 3: 👩‍🎓 Controlled Supply as a Strategy

• Part 4: 🥇 Excellence in a Power Law Field as a Strategy

• Part 5: 🔍 Niche-ing as a Strategy

• Part 6: 🧱 Skill-stacking as a Strategy

• Part 7: 👷 Be A Generalist as a Strategy

• Part 8: 📊 The Portfolio Career as a Strategy

• Part 9: 📣 Building a Platform as a Strategy

• Part 10: 🌊 Wave-surfing as a Strategy

• Part 11: 🏗️ Adding Leverage as a Strategy

• Part 12: 🌏 Proximity as a Strategy

• Part 13: ⏱️ Sequencing as a Strategy

• Part 14: 🧪 Optimising for Discovery as a Strategy

• Part 15: ⚡ Do What Gives You Energy as a Strategy

• Part 16: 💹 Arbitrage as a Strategy

• Part 1: 👋 Introducing the Career Strategy Series

• Part 2: 🪜 Ladder Climbing as a Strategy

• Part 3: 👩‍🎓 Controlled Supply as a Strategy

• Part 4: 🥇 Excellence in a Power Law Field as a Strategy

• Part 5: 🔍 Niche-ing as a Strategy

• Part 6: 🧱 Skill-stacking as a Strategy

• Part 7: 👷 Be A Generalist as a Strategy

• Part 8: 📊 The Portfolio Career as a Strategy

• Part 9: 📣 Building a Platform as a Strategy

• Part 10: 🌊 Wave-surfing as a Strategy

• Part 11: 🏗️ Adding Leverage as a Strategy

• Part 12: 🌏 Proximity as a Strategy

• Part 13: ⏱️ Sequencing as a Strategy

• Part 14: 🧪 Optimising for Discovery as a Strategy

• Part 15: ⚡ Do What Gives You Energy as a Strategy

• Part 16: 💹 Arbitrage as a Strategy

🌏 Introducing Strategy #11: Proximity

Lucy here, from Fuzzy 👋

Normally I don’t share personal experiences in these posts, but I want to kick this one off with a story:

A (very smart) friend at Cambridge once told me he was optimising for people and learning in the early years of his career.

This was a revelation to me. In fact, it was probably critical to my long-term interest in career strategy.

I hadn’t ever thought about it in those terms, but he had put into words an impulse that many of us understand instinctively - the desire to be where the action is in your chosen career.

Silicon Valley for tech. Hollywood for media. New York for finance. And so on and so on.

What was interesting to me was that my friend wasn’t targeting a specific outcome, like wanting to be a Law Partner by 30, or becoming Steve Jobs’ PA.

Rather, he was making a bet that his rate of professional growth and opportunities would be highest in a specific environment.

This career strategy is known as proximity.

And it’s behind the outstanding success of groups like the PayPal Mafia, who went on to grow companies like Tesla, SpaceX, Palantir, LinkedIn, Reddit, Yelp, YouTube, Yammer, Affirm & more, after being early employees of the payments company PayPal in the early 2000s.

We’ll unpack later that story later, but for now let’s dive in and break down the strategy!

💡 Defining proximity.

This strategy is about maximising your proximity (closeness) to opportunity.

In practice this means maximising your proximity to interactions which bring opportunity a.k.a. to people who can unlock opportunity for you.

🧳 Moving to a place like Silicon Valley to pursue a career in tech is a perfect example of proximity as a strategy.

As the undisputed #1 region globally for tech startup creation, it combines a leading university (Stanford), established tech companies, tech startups and a large pool of venture investors, all condensed in one place & continuing to compound in value as an ‘ecosystem’ over time.

🙋 How might proximity create advantages in a place like this?

• You’re surrounded by colleagues and potential mentors who are ambitious and high-performing, which leads you to lift the level of your own performance.

• You work in a place where the cutting edge of technology is being developed, so you understand new trends first & can capitalise on them.

• You join a leading startup or tech company, which acts as a training ground to build skills, understand markets & find future co-founders.

• Each new person who joins your network brings a new set of potential ways to create value for you and others within it, leveraging their insights, experiences, connections, complementary skills and more.

• You have a chance conversation at a party, which leads to an exciting new role or spotting a gap in the market for a great new business idea.

• People who have made money in tech become early employees, investors and advisors in each other’s new business ideas.

↔️ A good way to understand this concept is to compare two extremes:

• Say you’re hoping to pursue a career in technology.

• You’re choosing between moving to a town of 100 people in a rural area OR moving to Silicon Valley.

• The rural town has a lower cost of living and a nicer natural environment - and maybe there’s one other person in town working as a software engineer remotely. You can still work, launch businesses & network.

• But in a rural town, you and the other software engineer might be just two dots in a career ‘box’ - occasionally bumping into each other and interacting, probably in similar ways.

  

• Whereas in Silicon Valley, the volume, diversity & quality of interactions you have is much higher, and your career box looks a little more like this:

So it’s not that moving to Silicon Valley guarantees that you’ll experience career-changing opportunities… but it dramatically increases the ‘surface area for luck to strike’ by exposing you to more opportunities.

🕸️ Case Study: how proximity fuelled the PayPal Mafia’s success.

The "PayPal Mafia" are a group of former employees and founders at the early online payments company PayPal - a staggering number of whom went on to become influential figures in Silicon Valley and beyond.

💸 The origins of PayPal.

• In 1998, Max Levchin and Peter Thiel co-founded Confinity, originally a security software company, which soon pivoted to developing digital wallet software. Around the same time, X.com, an online financial services company founded by Elon Musk, was established.

• Two years later, X.com acquired Confinity. After a power struggle and a series of disagreements over the company’s direction, Musk was ousted as CEO, and Peter Thiel took over. The combined company began focusing exclusively on Confinity’s digital wallet product, rebranding entirely as PayPal.

• Under Thiel’s leadership, PayPal quickly became popular on eBay, gaining traction as a preferred online payment method. PayPal went public in February 2002, raising $61 million, and just four months later, eBay acquired PayPal for $1.5 billion, leading to significant payouts for early employees.

📈 Post-PayPal success.

Many early employees used their new wealth and experience to start or invest in other tech ventures, becoming known as the "PayPal Mafia."

• Peter Thiel: After PayPal, Thiel co-founded Palantir Technologies in 2003 and became an early investor in Facebook.

• Elon Musk: Musk went on to found SpaceX, buy and become CEO of Tela, and fuel the growth of a number of other high-profile ventures, becoming one of the world’s most influential entrepreneurs.

• Reid Hoffman: Hoffman co-founded LinkedIn in 2002, which went public in 2011 and was later acquired by Microsoft in 2016.

• Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim, created YouTube in 2005.

• Yishan Wong: Worked as CEO of Reddit from 2012 to 2014.

• Jeremy Stoppelman: Co-founded Yelp in 2004, where he continues to serve as CEO.

• David Sacks: Founded Yammer, an enterprise social networking service, in 2008, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2012.

• Max Levchin: Levchin founded Slide, a social media app company, and later Affirm, a fintech company in 2012.

🪴 How proximity contributed to their success.

What was it about the experience of being part of an industry-changing startup early in their careers that led to so many PayPal alumni going on to shape the tech landscape themselves?

There are a few mechanisms here.

1. Scaling & tech expertise 📈
   
   Working at PayPal during its period of breakneck growth provided deep exposure to high-stakes, high-speed software development and customer acquisition.
   
   The experience taught PayPal alumni how to build scalable systems, manage rapid growth, and hire top talent, which helped them launch companies that could grow into major players.
   
   These skills were especially useful as they entered new fields - for example, Yammer (David Sacks) and LinkedIn (Reid Hoffman) both involved scaling online networks, while YouTube (Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, Jawed Karim) leveraged video technology to launch a scalable video-sharing platform.
   

2. A trusted network 🤝
   
   At PayPal, early employees built a unique camaraderie and trust, which they carried forward into new ventures.
   
   Many PayPal Mafia startups involved multiple former PayPal colleagues who knew each other’s strengths and shared a cohesive vision. For example, Yelp was founded by Jeremy Stoppelman with early support from Max Levchin, and YouTube was founded by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim, who were also former PayPal employees.
   

3. Access to capital 💰
   
   PayPal’s acquisition by eBay gave its early team financial resources to either invest in new startups or launch their own.
   
   Additionally, the group’s early successes earned them credibility with top venture capitalists, helping them secure funding for projects like LinkedIn, SpaceX, and Palantir.
   
   Peter Thiel, in particular, became a prominent venture capitalist, establishing Founders Fund and becoming one of Facebook’s first investors. His connections allowed him to both mentor and fund ventures from other former PayPal colleagues.

👉 Inspired by the story of the PayPal Mafia?

They’re also great examples of other strategies profiled in this series, like wave-surfing, leverage, platform-building and controlled supply.

🧠 Keep in mind.

A few considerations to note before you go all-in on proximity.

• 🌐 The anti-proximity case: Especially since the jump in remote work during the Covid-19 global pandemic, many knowledge workers have more flexibility than ever to work from anywhere.

• 🔻 Proximity has trade-offs: Proximity is often expensive - working from places like Silicon Valley, New York, Hollywood & other hubs can be expensive, hyper-focussed on professional growth & follow their own forms of groupthink. Through a more thoughtful lifestyle design, you may actually be able to create more financial freedom, time and space to accomplish what’s important to you in work and life.

• 🪞 Mimetic desire traps: Do you actually want to be at the ‘centre of things’, or is your motivation driven more by FOMO? Reflect on what you truly value and what career strategy you want to follow, to ensure you’re making decisions that serve you best.

Found this helpful?

We created this series to help people realise their best careers - so if a post really resonates with you, we’d love you to share it! ✉️

Share

Leave a comment

Keen for more? Check out the other posts in the series 👇

• Part 1: 👋 Introducing the Career Strategy Series

• Part 2: 🪜 Ladder Climbing as a Strategy

• Part 3: 👩‍🎓 Controlled Supply as a Strategy

• Part 4: 🥇 Excellence in a Power Law Field as a Strategy

• Part 5: 🔍 Niche-ing as a Strategy

• Part 6: 🧱 Skill-stacking as a Strategy

• Part 7: 👷 Be A Generalist as a Strategy

• Part 8: 📊 The Portfolio Career as a Strategy

• Part 9: 📣 Building a Platform as a Strategy

• Part 10: 🌊 Wave-surfing as a Strategy

• Part 11: 🏗️ Adding Leverage as a Strategy

• Part 12: 🌏 Proximity as a Strategy

• Part 13: ⏱️ Sequencing as a Strategy

• Part 14: 🧪 Optimising for Discovery as a Strategy

• Part 15: ⚡ Do What Gives You Energy as a Strategy

• Part 16: 💹 Arbitrage as a Strategy

• Part 1: 👋 Introducing the Career Strategy Series

• Part 2: 🪜 Ladder Climbing as a Strategy

• Part 3: 👩‍🎓 Controlled Supply as a Strategy

• Part 4: 🥇 Excellence in a Power Law Field as a Strategy

• Part 5: 🔍 Niche-ing as a Strategy

• Part 6: 🧱 Skill-stacking as a Strategy

• Part 7: 👷 Be A Generalist as a Strategy

• Part 8: 📊 The Portfolio Career as a Strategy

• Part 9: 📣 Building a Platform as a Strategy

• Part 10: 🌊 Wave-surfing as a Strategy

• Part 11: 🏗️ Adding Leverage as a Strategy

• Part 12: 🌏 Proximity as a Strategy

• Part 13: ⏱️ Sequencing as a Strategy

• Part 14: 🧪 Optimising for Discovery as a Strategy

• Part 15: ⚡ Do What Gives You Energy as a Strategy

• Part 16: 💹 Arbitrage as a Strategy

🏗️ Introducing Strategy #10: Adding Leverage

We see laziness as a moral failing in our culture.

But when it comes to careers, laziness can be a very helpful impulse.

As Bill Gates says:

“I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.”

And lazy people love this week’s strategy - adding leverage - because it’s ultimately about getting maximum results for minimum effort.

When you combine this strategy with actually working hard, like the luxury real estate agents who work on Selling Sunset & Luxe Listings, who we’ll profile later, it can truly supercharge your career 🚀

So there’s no time to waste - let’s dive in!

💡 Defining leverage.

Some people have negative associations with the term ‘leverage’.

Whether it’s using leverage against someone to force them to do what you want, or leverage that conjures up financial crises & over-extended banks, it can produce an instant ‘ick’ reaction.

But we’ll adopt a more morally neutral definition here.

In the world of physics, leverage is simply using a tool (a lever and a fulcrum) to lift something.

With the right leverage and placement of a fulcrum, you can lift a heavy object which you could never have lifted on your own.

Leverage essentially acts as a multiplier of your efforts.

And in the world of careers, the principle of leverage operates as follows:

By working on higher value things, you can earn more value for yourself with the same amount of effort.

Or as Caterina Fake, the founder of Flickr, puts it:

⚙️ How it works.

Careers with high leverage fall into at least three categories:

1 Commission 💰

• How: Earning a percentage commission on transactions or assets, instead of a flat fee - meaning your commission scales in proportion with the value of the assets, rather than relying on greater effort from you.

• Who: Luxury real estate agents, executive recruiters, investment bankers, fund managers with large AUM (assets under management).

2 Influence 👨🏻‍💼

• How: Influencing the direction of, or decisions which affect, significant amounts of resources (large organisations of people, financial resources, etc) - where influencing a slightly better outcome creates a lot of value for your client or employer.

• Who: Management consultants, barristers, mediators, corporate executives, etc.

3 Physical Assets 👷🏽

• How: Doing manual work which unlocks or protects the value that comes from high-value physical assets allows you to charge more for your labour before it becomes un-economic for the owners to pay it.

• Who: Longshoremen (or dockers/stevedores, who load & unload cargo from ships in ports), crane operators, luxury car repair specialists, haul truck drivers (operating large off-road trucks on mine sites), etc.

🙋‍♀️ Why you should use leverage, no matter what you do.

There is a broader principle which applies to all of us - beyond choosing to work directly in careers like the ones suggested above.

💭 Whatever effort you put in, ask yourself - can I get more leverage here?

• If you’re doing a job, can you outsource, delegate or use tools to automate the low-value tasks you’re doing to focus on high-value ones?

• If you’re working hard to get promoted, are you in the right place?

• If you’re working hard to start a business, are you aiming high?

• If you’re working hard to make a positive social impact, are you directing your energy to the most effective place?

Don’t just fall into the ‘hard work = great work’ trap: remember to be strategically lazy as well!

🎙️ Case Study: why is selling luxury real estate so lucrative?

In case you’ve been hiding under a rock (or for some reason don’t watch as much reality-TV-based-real-estate content as the Fuzzy team)…

The commissions you earn selling prestige real estate are hefty 💸💸💸

So hefty that they provoke intense competition between extremely glamorous people in beautiful locations…

Which has led to hit TV shows like Selling Sunset & Luxe Listings going behind the scenes of how multi-million-dollar property listings are sold in markets like LA & Sydney.

And even if you don’t watch these shows (what a shame), everyone can learn from how the protagonists use leverage to their advantage 🤓

Let’s do the maths on a $10 million home sold on Selling Sunset:

• 5% commission on $10 million = $500,000.

• If the agent represents both buyer and seller (dual agency), they may receive the full 5%.

• If only representing one side, the agent's share would be half: $250,000.

• After brokerage fees (an individual agent operates under the licence of a broker, like the Oppenheim Group in Selling Sunset), the agent might take home 70-80% of their split, meaning around $175,000 to $200,000.

• And an individual agent would hope to be making a number of similar sales across a given year (10-20 for a prominent agent, 5-10 for a mid-level agent, a few for a newer agent), meaning take-home commissions can easily reach the millions of dollars.

The most experienced agents also tend to receive higher-value properties, with some values up to $30-40 million, meaning commissions for a single sale can hit millions of dollars once you reach the top.

The bottom line? Being a luxury real estate agent or broker is one of the highest-earning professions that doesn’t require a university degree.

And it’s a great example of the power of leverage to influence your career 🏗️

Why?

• Yes, you need to study & get a real estate licence.

• Yes, you need to learn the craft.

• Yes, you need to build a track record.

But so does every real estate agent - and the median real estate agent in the United States makes $60,000-80,000 per year.

Do the agents in top firms in luxury markets work hard? Absolutely.

But do they work 10, 20, or even 50 times harder than the median real estate agent in the United States? Probably not.

By getting to a position where they can apply their effort with the right leverage, they make a huge difference to their outcomes.

🧠 Keep in mind.

Adding leverage can be a powerful career strategy - but there are a few considerations to note before you jump in.

• 🤺 Increased returns can mean increased competition: As the cast of Selling Sunset and Luxe Listings know all too well, there’s always someone else waiting in the wings with their eye on your spot. Other people will spot the opportunity you’re taking advantage of, and without barriers to entry as strong as in other fields (see our post on controlled supply for examples), you will have to work hard to get to the top & stay there.

• 🪜 Earning the right to play with leverage: Most people don’t just get handed responsibility for huge transactions, decisions or asset pools. In many careers, this is a medium-term strategy - you need to understand what the path is to being in the position to enjoy leverage, like networking your way to the firm with the right relationships & brand.

Found this helpful?

We created this series to help people realise their best careers - so if a post really resonates with you, we’d love you to share it! ✉️

Share

Leave a comment

Keen for more? Check out the other posts in the series 👇

• Part 1: 👋 Introducing the Career Strategy Series

• Part 2: 🪜 Ladder Climbing as a Strategy

• Part 3: 👩‍🎓 Controlled Supply as a Strategy

• Part 4: 🥇 Excellence in a Power Law Field as a Strategy

• Part 5: 🔍 Niche-ing as a Strategy

• Part 6: 🧱 Skill-stacking as a Strategy

• Part 7: 👷 Be A Generalist as a Strategy

• Part 8: 📊 The Portfolio Career as a Strategy

• Part 9: 📣 Building a Platform as a Strategy

• Part 10: 🌊 Wave-surfing as a Strategy

• Part 11: 🏗️ Adding Leverage as a Strategy

• Part 12: 🌏 Proximity as a Strategy

• Part 13: ⏱️ Sequencing as a Strategy

• Part 14: 🧪 Optimising for Discovery as a Strategy

• Part 15: ⚡ Do What Gives You Energy as a Strategy

• Part 16: 💹 Arbitrage as a Strategy

• Part 1: 👋 Introducing the Career Strategy Series

• Part 2: 🪜 Ladder Climbing as a Strategy

• Part 3: 👩‍🎓 Controlled Supply as a Strategy

• Part 4: 🥇 Excellence in a Power Law Field as a Strategy

• Part 5: 🔍 Niche-ing as a Strategy

• Part 6: 🧱 Skill-stacking as a Strategy

• Part 7: 👷 Be A Generalist as a Strategy

• Part 8: 📊 The Portfolio Career as a Strategy

• Part 9: 📣 Building a Platform as a Strategy

• Part 10: 🌊 Wave-surfing as a Strategy

• Part 11: 🏗️ Adding Leverage as a Strategy

• Part 12: 🌏 Proximity as a Strategy

• Part 13: ⏱️ Sequencing as a Strategy

• Part 14: 🧪 Optimising for Discovery as a Strategy

• Part 15: ⚡ Do What Gives You Energy as a Strategy

• Part 16: 💹 Arbitrage as a Strategy

🌊 Introducing Strategy #9: Surfing A Wave

How do you become the most feared & respected journalist in tech?

One option: follow the example of Kara Swisher…

Who turned down prestigious opportunities covering politics in Washington to follow her instincts, move to Silicon Valley three decades ago and document the rise of the modern tech industry from the beginning.

This one is a career strategy known as wave-surfing.

Swisher’s ability to spot the rise of Silicon Valley - and many other waves across her career - has set her apart, and we’ll unpack her story later.

But first, let’s dive in & learn more about the strategy!

💰 Defining wave-surfing.

Joining a 'wave' involves joining a field where the demand (for goods & services being produced) is growing rapidly.

This often happens by spotting a new cultural shift or economic boom early, then positioning yourself to catch and ‘surf’ that wave to success 🏄🏄

For example, training as an AI software engineer several years ago would be excellent positioning to take advantage of the explosive growth in demand for those skills since the launch of generative AI tools like ChatGPT and the rush to explore their many potential uses across the economy 📈

⚙️ How it works.

Many strategies we’ve already discussed in this series focus on how demand and supply affect your ‘odds’ in a career - like controlled supply, power law excellence, niche-ing & skill-stacking.

And the power of wave-surfing also comes from the interplay between supply and demand in a field ⚡

When demand sky-rockets suddenly in an industry, it creates opportunities for accelerated career growth in several ways:

• Faster growth within companies🏃🏽: Less existing hierarchy within companies means new joiners to a field can gain experience early, advance more quickly, and may even have a better ‘finger on the pulse’ of cultural and technology changes.

• Build influential networks 🤝: At the beginning of new industries & ‘golden eras’, early entrants often build close networks which give them future access to information, opportunities & allies - like the famous group of company founders who came out of the internet payments startup Paypal, known as the Paypal Mafia.

• Capture value for yourself 💸: If an industry’s total revenue or influence is growing rapidly, there is more opportunity to create new companies or entities which can capture some of that growth (like starting a digital marketing agency when high-speed internet, smartphones & social media shifted an enormous amount of marketing dollars from traditional media to online).

• A rising tide lifts all boats 🚣‍♀️: The opposite of hyper-competitive power law fields like acting or professional sport (where the supply of aspiring superstars vastly outstrips demand), the broader upwards trend in growth industries means that you can still experience rapid career growth without having to be #1 or exceptional!

Spotting The Big Waves Coming 🌊

History is full of dramatic cultural & economic shifts which created opportunity for individuals to ‘surf the wave’ 🏄

And whether you think on a timescale of decades, like… ⏱️

• The post-WWII economic boom, when the U.S. economy grew at an average annual rate of 4% during the 1950s and global trade increased by over 600% from 1948 to 1973,

• The global telecommunications boom, when mobile phone subscribers globally grew from 11 million in 1990 to over 700 million by 2000, laying the foundation for today’s mobile-connected world,

• The globalisation boom, which increased world trade from $6.5 trillion in 2000 to $19 trillion by 2019, fuelled by emerging markets and global supply chains,

Or a timescale of centuries, like… ⏱️

• The medieval Agricultural Revolution, which doubled the European population from 38 million in 1000 to 74 million by 1300 due to increased agricultural output,

• The Song Dynasty Economic Boom, involving technological innovations like gunpowder, compasses and paper money, which meant that by the 11th century, China had the world’s largest economy and first urban centres with populations exceeding 1 million,

• The First Industrial Revolution, in which steam engines and mechanised production increased Britain’s textile output by over 50 times from 1780 to 1850,

• The Second Industrial Revolution, which increased steel production in the U.S. from 68,000 tons in 1870 to over 10 million tons by 1900, fuelling infrastructure growth,

• The 19th Century Telegraph & Telephone Boom, which meant that by the late 1800s, telegraph cables connected Europe and North America, revolutionising global communication (by 1900, over 1.4 million telephones were installed in the U.S.)…
  

… these waves often have a few common features.

🔍 So how do you spot a coming wave? 

Well, there are a few common ‘sparks’ which often catalyse a big wave of opportunity to watch out for:

• A scientific discovery,

• A new technology and its knock-on effects,

• A demographic shift and its knock-on effects 

• A realignment of the social order, freeing up capital and resources for new purposes, or

• The opening of links with new cultures & markets, finding new buyers or uses for products

The double-edged sword of wave-surfing: the hype cycle 😟

Especially when it comes to new technologies, hype and excitement about the limitless potential for transformation are common.

But so are the let-downs that sometimes follow.

And this is known as the hype cycle.

The hype cycle is also a visual model that captures how new technologies or innovations go through five key stages - from an initial phase of excitement and inflated expectations, followed by disillusionment when the technology doesn’t deliver as hoped, to eventual understanding of its real-world benefits and adoption.

It helps explain why some technologies are overhyped early on but can still succeed after going through a period of skepticism.

And if you’re thinking about going all-in on an emerging technology or trend, it can be a helpful and sobering exercise to check out a few years worth of Gartner Hype Cycles - which show emerging technologies and where they sit on the journey!

You’ll see some technologies turn out to be truly revolutionary - but also many which under-deliver on the sky-high expectations of their early days.

🎙️ Case Study: Kara Swisher surfing the wave of tech journalism.

Never heard of Kara Swisher before?

You can check out this profile, this podcast and this interview - and you should, because she’s fearless, hilarious and incisive.

All you need to know for now is that since the dawn of the internet in the 1990s, she’s become seen as the leading journalist covering one of the most influential industries of our age - the world of tech, and Silicon Valley.

So what drove her success?

🔭 1 Spotting the Silicon Valley wave early.

Swisher graduated from Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service in the mid-1980s, after realising she couldn’t pursue her first career choice (being a spy!) because of her sexuality - and started her journalism career at The Washington Post as an intern.

But instead of following a conventional path of ‘paying her dues’ by taking prestigious assignments covering politics in the capital, she decided soon after that she wanted to move to The Wall Street Journal and cover what was then seen as a nerdy backwater - technology and the rise of the internet.

By being first to the Silicon Valley wave, Swisher got to know many of the future titans of the tech industry - like the founders of Google, Apple, Amazon, Tesla and more - before they were famous.

And by the late 1990s, consumers were connecting en masse to the internet and the dotcom boom was taking off in earnest, which left Swisher in perfect position to chronicle the story of the industry - as one of a few mainstream reporters with deep sources and relationships within Silicon Valley.

From there on, her reputation only grew, with influential books, podcasts and positions covering the rise of tech for Wall Street Journal, New York Times, New York Magazine & Washington Post.

"Few journalists have been covering Silicon Valley as long as Kara Swisher. And even fewer are as respected, liked, and feared by the tech industry and its most iconic leaders." - The Atlantic

🔭 2 Always looking for the next wave.

Not unlike the tech founders she covers, Swisher has never been satisfied with ‘the way things have always been done’.

Instead of being passively impacted by the broader decline of media business models like many journalists, Swisher has effectively spent her career operating as both a journalist and a media entrepreneur.

By spotting new mediums & formats early, and being willing to ‘disrupt’ her own career to avoid being disrupted, she repeatedly created outlets which defined the wider conversation in tech coverage and created career security on her own terms - from creating the tech website AllThingsD in 2003, the All Things D conference in 2007, the publication Recode in 2013, the podcast Recode Decode in 2018, and more.

Career Advice from Kara Swisher👇

• "Taking risks is essential. If you’re not willing to step outside your comfort zone and embrace uncertainty, you may miss out on incredible opportunities that can propel your career forward."

• “Be your genuine self. Don’t edit yourself. Women especially do this because we’re raised to be people-pleasers.”

• “Live life so you don’t have regrets. My dad died when he was 34, and I saw early on how ephemeral life can be. So I always try to do what I think is the right thing to do—I don’t try to screw people—and I live without apology.”

• “I’ll walk away from anything, I always feel like I can make something else.”

Want to learn more about Swisher & the history of Silicon Valley?

Get a great overview of her time covering tech from the 1990s to now in her memoir Burn Book: A Tech Love Story.

🧠 Keep in mind.

Wave-surfing can supercharge your career, but there are a few things to consider before you follow this strategy:

• 💣 Hype vs. reality: Is the industry you’re considering a true boom, or just a mirage built on hype?

  • From 3D printing, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, bitcoin and cryptocurrency, to the stalling of Japanese economic growth in the 1990s or the explosion of the US housing boom that catalysed the Global Financial Crisis in 2008 - economic history is littered with much-hyped technologies & economic trends that haven’t delivered the expected growth (or at least not on the expected timeline).

  • Do your research and try to build a realistic probability-weighted view of the scenarios that can unfold, rather than just following the hype.

• 👔 Personal fit: Sure, an industry might look prestigious, attractive, or like it’s about to experience huge growth - but is it something you will actually find satisfying to work in? Or are you just following the crowd into something you won't enjoy?

• 🧘🏿‍♀️ Optionality: You can hedge the risk of a boom crumbling, or of not enjoying the work in an industry, by building skills and credentials which can easily be transferred in other fields a.k.a. optionality.

Found this helpful?

We created this series to help people realise their best careers - so if a post really resonates with you, we’d love you to share it! ✉️

Share

Leave a comment

Keen for more? Check out the other posts in the series 👇

• Part 1: 👋 Introducing the Career Strategy Series

• Part 2: 🪜 Ladder Climbing as a Strategy

• Part 3: 👩‍🎓 Controlled Supply as a Strategy

• Part 4: 🥇 Excellence in a Power Law Field as a Strategy

• Part 5: 🔍 Niche-ing as a Strategy

• Part 6: 🧱 Skill-stacking as a Strategy

• Part 7: 👷 Be A Generalist as a Strategy

• Part 8: 📊 The Portfolio Career as a Strategy

• Part 9: 📣 Building a Platform as a Strategy

• Part 10: 🌊 Wave-surfing as a Strategy

• Part 11: 🏗️ Adding Leverage as a Strategy

• Part 12: 🌏 Proximity as a Strategy

• Part 13: ⏱️ Sequencing as a Strategy

• Part 14: 🧪 Optimising for Discovery as a Strategy

• Part 15: ⚡ Do What Gives You Energy as a Strategy

• Part 16: 💹 Arbitrage as a Strategy

• Part 1: 👋 Introducing the Career Strategy Series

• Part 2: 🪜 Ladder Climbing as a Strategy

• Part 3: 👩‍🎓 Controlled Supply as a Strategy

• Part 4: 🥇 Excellence in a Power Law Field as a Strategy

• Part 5: 🔍 Niche-ing as a Strategy

• Part 6: 🧱 Skill-stacking as a Strategy

• Part 7: 👷 Be A Generalist as a Strategy

• Part 8: 📊 The Portfolio Career as a Strategy

• Part 9: 📣 Building a Platform as a Strategy

• Part 10: 🌊 Wave-surfing as a Strategy

• Part 11: 🏗️ Adding Leverage as a Strategy

• Part 12: 🌏 Proximity as a Strategy

• Part 13: ⏱️ Sequencing as a Strategy

• Part 14: 🧪 Optimising for Discovery as a Strategy

• Part 15: ⚡ Do What Gives You Energy as a Strategy

• Part 16: 💹 Arbitrage as a Strategy

📣 Introducing Strategy #8: Building A Platform

The world of work has changed.

OK, sure Seth!

💼 Once upon a time, we built our career capital vertically.

We earned credentials from institutions (education), joined an institution (employer) and climbed the ladder, usually for life. Our reputation with the people above us would determine the flow of opportunities - pay, promotions and references. Our ‘career capital’ was tied to that institution.

👨🏾‍💻 But technology has changed the playing field.

Everyone can network, learn, share insights and build followings horizontally - outside their current job - using digital tools. They can create a flow of opportunities based on this ‘platform’. And we can build career capital independent of our employers, which follows us beyond any single job.

💰 Defining career capital.

Remind me: what is career capital?

Think of it as the skills, experiences, and connections you build over time, much like financial capital, which you invest to unlock greater opportunities and ‘returns’ in your career.

We break this down into two types: vertical and horizontal.

🆙 How vertical career capital works.

Most of us are familiar with vertical career capital building - it’s effort directed upwards through your office hierarchy to put ‘credits in the bank’.

It looks like 👀

• Working harder to get a better performance review from your manager

• Getting involved in a visible way in company & team initiatives

• Networking with other departments & senior colleagues

Your employer benefits - but you can benefit too 🤝

Vertical career capital isn’t just a one-way transfer of our efforts to our employer - in addition to progressing within their company, many people get reciprocal benefits from their employer’s brand.

If you’ve ever walked into a meeting and been taken seriously purely because you work somewhere prestigious (like grads in top consulting, banking, accounting & law firms), you’ve effectively rented your employer’s brand for excellence, as a shortcut to having to demonstrate that excellence yourself.

And you may see a halo effect of that brand after you leave… as shown by everyone with ex-McKinsey, ex-Goldman or ex-Google on their LinkedIn 👼

But ultimately, it’s rented career capital - not something that you own.

And you also experience downside risks from your employer 😰

Your career ‘eggs’ are concentrated in one basket of workplace relationships - and a bad manager, a bad business cycle, or even a shift in strategy can suddenly erase all of the ‘credit’ that you’ve built up with those people.

↔️ What about horizontal career capital?

Horizontal career capital is portable and controlled by you, independent of your employer - and in the same way that financial capital can be invested to create cash flow, your career capital creates a flow of opportunities.

It looks like 👀

• Networking with people in your industry

• Building a portfolio to showcase your work

• Sharing unique insights & knowledge (a.k.a. intellectual property or IP)

• Building an audience and/or distribution channels for your ideas

And this personal ‘brand’ or ‘platform’ can bring opportunities like:

• Introductions

• Advice

• Freelance work

• Job offers

• Speaking

• Coaching

• Books, podcasts, TV shows and more!

Platform-building is already extremely common in some industries - for example, creative industries like design, acting & photography, where your portfolio and referrals from your network are how you get hired 🎨

It’s no coincidence that this strategy is most prevalent in industries which revolve around short-term projects - but given the general trend towards less ‘monogamous’, more short-term employer relationships, we can all learn something from the early adopters.

🤔 Why do we overinvest in vertical career capital?

For some people, building a portable platform (reputation, "personal brand", IP, network, credentials, skills) comes naturally.

You no longer need a specific employer or job title on your resume - or even a good reference! - to unlock the next stage of your career.

You can build your credibility directly by showing your work.

But for most people, a few factors hold them back 👇

1. ♻️ Habit: Vertical building is a habit we learn at school and home from a young age, seeking validation from the authority figures most proximate to us, like parents, carers & teachers.

2. 🔨 Lack of a playbook: We’re not taught soft skills like networking or sharing our insights publicly in a structured way.

3. 🧠 Psychological blockers: From LinkedIn humblebrag posts giving you ‘the ick’, to a sense of anxiety about ‘putting yourself out there’, / looking arrogant / looking silly, or feeling stumped by the ‘blank page’ and unsure where to start… we often need to overcome mental barriers to start investing in horizontal career capital.

⚙️ What’s right for YOU.

So… do I need to become a LinkedInfluencer? 🤢

Absolutely not.

Unless you’re looking to be a professional ‘platformer’ (see the Tim Ferriss case study below if you are!) it’s usually not a binary situation of choosing between building vertically or horizontally.

It’s about finding the right allocation of time and energy for your career, and given the risk-reward ratio, most people under-allocate.

Allocating 100% of your time to vertical career capital leaves you highly reliant on and exposed to the risks of your current employer - but allocating a small percentage of your time, like 10-20%, to hedging against those risks and building a flow of opportunities might be a better mix.

📈 Tips on getting started.

• 🌱 Start small: there’s a wide spectrum of activities in platform-building, and you don’t need to leap from zero to a hundred overnight.

• 🤝 Focus on how you can create value for others: If you feel a sense of imposter syndrome about centring yourself, can you suggest resources instead? Make an introduction? Be a sounding board? Can you start synthesising or resharing or collating ideas instead of doing original writing? Can you join existing organisation instead of having to start one?

• 🧱 Platform building ≠ sharing everything: Total authenticity & vulnerability can be an extreme and unnecessary bar to set for yourself. It’s OK (and in fact, vital) to have boundaries between your professional and private self. Focus on being intentional and clear on which side/s of yourself you want to bring forward when you share.

• 💪 Like building a sustainable exercise habit, make it enjoyable for you: Think about what opportunities you actually care about creating a flow of, and what activities you enjoy doing. If you love connecting with others, focus on networking. If you love coaching people 1:1, do that. If you love thinking and writing, do those.

📣 Case Study: Building a World-Class Platform like Tim Ferriss.

Most of us only ever want to be ‘amateur’ platform-builders.

But for those who do want to make the leap and build a large personal brand which becomes the heart of their career, the hugely popular author-podcaster-investor Tim Ferriss is a common inspiration.

Over two decades, Ferriss built perhaps the biggest personal platform in the world around topics like productivity, lifestyle design and personal growth - creating a flow of future opportunities that have compounded over time to bring him influence, financial rewards and significant social impact.

For those who haven’t followed his work, we’ve created this quick visual overview of Tim Ferriss’ career:

What can we learn about platform-building from someone like Tim?

1. He scaled his platform step-by-step, with each stage unlocking new opportunities that wouldn’t have been possible before 🪜

   
   Beginning with direct experience (in his business BrainQUICKEN)…
   
   Which he synthesised into insights on productivity and lifestyle design…
   
   And shared those via his first books…
   
   Which built him a cult following among an audience of techies and ambitious professionals…
   
   Which gave him the ability to launch other more profitable revenue streams than book publishing (podcasts, newsletters & speaking)…
   
   And a flow of investing opportunities from top tech investors…
   
   Which gave him even more resources & influence to direct into causes he cares about, like mental health advocacy & psychedelics research.
   

2. He scaled his audience by focussing on genuine learning & creating value for others. To quote Tim directly:
   
   “I always thought of my podcast as a learning tool for myself first”

   
   “I gave away as much free value as possible. That’s how I earned people’s trust.”

   
   “I started my podcast with zero expectations, just an experiment. And that’s why it worked — because it was a genuine curiosity.”
   
   “By showcasing the best minds in the world, I could serve my audience and also learn from my guests. It was a win-win.”
   
   “If I had one piece of advice for creators, it’s this: focus on depth, not breadth. A thousand true fans are worth more than a million passive followers.”
   
   “The podcast exploded when I stopped caring about downloads and started focusing on meaningful conversations. When you follow your genuine curiosity, the audience will follow.”

If you’re curious to learn more about his work, go here.

If you’re interested in professional platform-building, we also highly recommend checking out an earlier post from this series - because becoming a professional creator IS a power law game! 👇

Found this helpful?

We created this series to help people realise their best careers - so if a post really resonates with you, we’d love you to share it! ✉️

Share

Leave a comment

Keen for more? Check out the other posts in the series 👇

• Part 1: 👋 Introducing the Career Strategy Series

• Part 2: 🪜 Ladder Climbing as a Strategy

• Part 3: 👩‍🎓 Controlled Supply as a Strategy

• Part 4: 🥇 Excellence in a Power Law Field as a Strategy

• Part 5: 🔍 Niche-ing as a Strategy

• Part 6: 🧱 Skill-stacking as a Strategy

• Part 7: 👷 Be A Generalist as a Strategy

• Part 8: 📊 The Portfolio Career as a Strategy

• Part 9: 📣 Building a Platform as a Strategy

• Part 10: 🌊 Wave-surfing as a Strategy

• Part 11: 🏗️ Adding Leverage as a Strategy

• Part 12: 🌏 Proximity as a Strategy

• Part 13: ⏱️ Sequencing as a Strategy

• Part 14: 🧪 Optimising for Discovery as a Strategy

• Part 15: ⚡ Do What Gives You Energy as a Strategy

• Part 16: 💹 Arbitrage as a Strategy

• Part 1: 👋 Introducing the Career Strategy Series

• Part 2: 🪜 Ladder Climbing as a Strategy

• Part 3: 👩‍🎓 Controlled Supply as a Strategy

• Part 4: 🥇 Excellence in a Power Law Field as a Strategy

• Part 5: 🔍 Niche-ing as a Strategy

• Part 6: 🧱 Skill-stacking as a Strategy

• Part 7: 👷 Be A Generalist as a Strategy

• Part 8: 📊 The Portfolio Career as a Strategy

• Part 9: 📣 Building a Platform as a Strategy

• Part 10: 🌊 Wave-surfing as a Strategy

• Part 11: 🏗️ Adding Leverage as a Strategy

• Part 12: 🌏 Proximity as a Strategy

• Part 13: ⏱️ Sequencing as a Strategy

• Part 14: 🧪 Optimising for Discovery as a Strategy

• Part 15: ⚡ Do What Gives You Energy as a Strategy

• Part 16: 💹 Arbitrage as a Strategy

👷 Introducing Strategy #7: The Portfolio Career

As a society, we assume that we should diversify in some areas of our lives - like our investing portfolios - to maximise growth and minimise volatility.

But we assume that we should go ‘all in’ in other areas, like our jobs.

Working a 9-to-5 for one employer is seen as the norm - and other patterns of work are often seen as risky, a signal of failure or in need of explanation.

In fact, we often put pressure on our 9-to-5 jobs to meet all of our career needs, all at once - whether it’s money, a great team, work-life balance, learning, social impact, or other benefits.

And not unlike the modern tendency to expect our romantic partners to be everything to us - lover, friend, counsellor, co-carer - this tendency to expect one job to meet all of our needs can also be an unrealistic expectation.

But what if you could treat your career the way you treat building wealth - diversifying where you invest your time to create a better overall outcome?

Welcome to the portfolio career - our career strategy this week!

⚙️ How it works.

The metaphor of an investment portfolio is actually a good one here, so let’s start with a simple question:

Why shouldn’t you put all of your money into a single asset?

Well, most financial advisors recommend spreading your money across a range of assets for a few reasons 👇

1. Reducing volatility: A portfolio spreads investments across different asset classes, sectors, or geographies, reducing the impact of any single investment's poor performance. If one asset declines in value, others may hold steady or rise, helping to balance losses. By diversifying, you can smooth out the ups and downs that come with market fluctuations.

2. Liquidity: Having investments across various asset classes ensures that some assets may remain liquid and easy to cash out quickly if needed (e.g. stocks) while others (e.g. real estate) may take longer to sell.

3. Tailored to your risk appetite: A portfolio can be customised to suit your financial goals and risk tolerance. You can adjust it over time as your needs change, whether you're seeking aggressive growth as a young person or steady income as you move into retirement.

🤔 A portfolio approach to your career.

Meet Anil (our hypothetical example):

Anil has a few career needs, which he sometimes feels are in tension:

• He really enjoys design, building spreadsheets and mentoring others,

• He wants to feel emotionally connected to his work, and is passionate about climate change activism, and

• He wants to be well-remunerated and build financial security, and

• He wants to be be able to flex his workload up and down over time to accommodate caring responsibilities, since he and his partner are planning to start a family in the next few years.

The traditional career.

Anil’s could try to meet all of these needs within a single job - and ending up switching jobs frequently without making progress towards his goals because he always feels like ‘something’s missing’.

And another version looks like a career portfolio - where he invests his time in different areas, to create a more well-rounded, fulfilling and flexible mix.

• He volunteers at a climate change non-profit one day per week and mentors young activists,

• He has his own small freelance consultancy business, where he earns a high hourly rate consulting on strategic design projects,

• He has a part-time role as a financial analyst in a corporate, which gives him a stable wage for when his first child arrives - and allows him to use the numbers side of his brain,

• When he takes parental leave, he decides to maximise time with his family, so he takes a couple years off his corporate and volunteering roles, and increases the hours spent on his consulting business to make up the financial gap - allowing him to work flexibly half the week from home.

Putting that in terms of our investment metaphor - by taking a portfolio approach, Anil can:

1. Reduce volatility 🫣
   
   Anil is able to smooth out the ups and downs of different jobs to meet many of his career needs at once - financial stability, enjoyable work, family time and a mission he cares about.
   
   He’s also better prepared for external shocks - for example, if much of the design workforce is rapidly made obsolete by changes in technology, or he ends up with a terrible boss in his corporate career, he has the ability to rebalance towards his other skillsets.
   

2. Increase liquidity 💸
   
   Rather than being locked in to a single job description and career path, by maintaining a few areas of skill he’s able to ‘cash out’ more quickly when it’s important to prioritise earning, or to buy back enough time to invest in building skills which might take a long time to build later on.
   

3. Tailor his work to his risk appetite 🏠
   
   When Anil’s appetite for growth and challenge at work shifts because he wants to invest his time in home and family, he’s able to make a transition without having to change careers or experience a dramatic reduction in his financial security.

🔋 Powering a career change with the portfolio approach.

Why a portfolio approach can also be an excellent tool for making a career pivot, transition or change.

Lots of people fall into the trap of thinking, “if I want to make a career change, I have to be fully committed”.

Actually, the opposite is often true.

Say you’re a lawyer, who wants to become a podcaster - or a carpenter who wants to become a lawyer, or a podcaster who wants to become a carpenter!

You have specialised skills that you can already command a high rate of pay with - and you want to acquire the skills & credentials for your new role.

Rather than putting pressure on yourself to make a 180-degree change overnight from one field to another, you can:

• Use the most highly-remunerated skills you’ve already built (e.g. switching from a full-time role to part-time consulting or contract work which pays a higher hourly rate), while

• Investing the time you’ve freed up into learning your new craft, volunteering to gain experience & doing projects to build a track record.

This actually came up on a recent episode of You’re In Good Company, a great personal finance podcast, where Lucy spoke about her experiences.

You can listen to a clip here and the full episode here.

Keep in mind 🧠

A portfolio approach can be a great fit for certain professionals, but you should also consider:

• 🤯 The costs of context-switching: Changing between jobs from day to day (or even minute-to-minute) has a cognitive cost - our brains need time to reset, call up the relevant information about the job we’re focussing on and settle into our new tasks. The neuroscience tells us that a little bit of variety can be good for our creativity and productivity - but too much context-switching can make us much less effective.
  

• 📈 Having ‘go all in’ criteria: Like in investing, sometimes there can be moments where the right decision is actually to commit 100%. It could be a business idea whose time has come, an invitation to take on a challenging new leadership role or realising that you found your passion and you do your best work when you have a single focus. Whatever the reason - if you’re considering a portfolio career, think about when and why you might decide to make a full-time commitment again.

🔮 Case study: the portfolio career expert, Anna Mackenzie.

Note from Lucy:

As a founder, I’ve had the pleasure of working with Anna Mackenzie in multiple capacities - as a consultant advising my business Normal on breaking into retail, as a great all-around operator I’ve pitched to top influencers we work with to help them build ecommerce brands around their followings, and as an early hire at a logistics startup supporting our brand’s fulfilment.

She’s already lived a portfolio career (check out her LinkedIn below):

In addition to those many roles, or perhaps because of them, Anna is also a leading expert on portfolio careers - what they are, how to get into them, and how to thrive in them.

And she shares her advice through her popular newsletter Anna Mack’s Stack.

So when we decided to cover this strategy, we knew Anna was the perfect person to share a perspective - and she’s given us excerpts from two of her most popular posts for you below!

Excerpt 1: defining a portfolio career.

A portfolio career is defined as having several part-time jobs or multiple income streams rather than one full-time gig.

In my mind, it has two defining characteristics:

• It involves pursuing multiple passions, interests and types of work

• It’s never static and always evolving

To me, a portfolio career can be made up of many things:

• A part time job (eg. working 3 days a week for a company)

• A part time business (eg. working 3 days a week for your own company)

• A done-for-you service (eg. contracting, consulting)

• A done-with-you offer (eg. coaching, mentoring, advising)

• A do-it-yourself offer (eg. a digital product, online course)

• Creative work (eg. writing, podcasting, Tiktok-ing, playing music)

• Giving back (eg. volunteering, pro-bono work)

• A mix of any or all of the above

Want more from Anna about defining portfolio careers? Read this post.

Except 2: Big challenges & trade offs of the PC path.

1. Dealing with the perceived loss of status when leaving a fancy job to build something that others don’t understand.

When you decide to walk away from [insert sexy job title here], you’re probably going to face an existential identity crisis. Who am I, if not a CEO? What am I good for, without the backing of [insert high status company name here]? Where do I stand, without the status of my job? This is a hard one to overcome because there’s tension: we want to follow our heart and pursue our dreams, yet constantly compare ourselves to those we’ve left behind.

"I look at my friends who are high up at [brand] with good salaries and jobs and sometimes I wish I was there, even though deep down I know I don’t want to be. How do you escape the story that a portfolio career is a step back rather than a step forward?"

2. Believing a financially lucrative portfolio career is possible.

Multiple income streams sounds great in principle, but is it actually feasible? Is it really viable? According to my research, some (but not all) people are sceptical about whether they can replace their annual salary, let alone out-earn it. My thoughts: it’s not easy but is it possible? Absolutely.

“Financial stability is my main concern. Giving up a reasonably secure and well paid corporate career that I’ve built for 16 years is a scary proposition.”

3. Packaging up your skills and experience into a clearly defined offer.

This one is such a struggle because it flips everything on its head:

• Current system: the employer scopes a role, creates a position description and may or may not put up an ad. You review the position description, make a judgement about whether you’re a good fit, and apply or put yourself forward. 

• New system: you’re the product. You have to scope out your capabilities and package them up with a price. You must communicate them in a way that makes sense. Prospects make an assessment about fit based on what you project, and decide whether or not to engage you. 

Don’t get me wrong, the whole ‘think of yourself as a product’ thing is tough, but a lot of people get stuck believing they need the perfect offer, perfect pricing, perfect tagline and perfect pitch before they start approaching others. But in my experience, conversations with prospects should inform your offer, not the other way around.

“I'm doing all these different things with different people who remember me for various reasons, but I don’t know how to articulate that as ‘this is what I do’. I think it’s the control freak in me that needs everything to be perfectly defined, and it’s keeping me stuck.”

4. Generating work beyond people that you know.

Your first few clients will inevitably be people you know. Your next few will likely be people who know people you know. But what comes after your network (hot leads) and your network’s network (warm leads) are exhausted? How do you win work from cold, hard sales? This question came up a lot.

“I haven’t had to do any formal sales yet because all my current clients have come through my network. But I need to have a plan for when I have to eventually go out and generate work beyond the people that I know. And I have no clue what that plan is meant to be.”

5. Loneliness.

The inevitable trade off of freedom, flexibility and autonomy is the loneliness that comes from operating as a silo. We all crave community, good conversation, feedback on our work and encouragement that we’re on the right path. The need for connection is universal.

“I don’t know anyone else who has a portfolio career, there isn’t anyone in my inner circle doing something similar. I sometimes find it lonely and struggle with the uncertainty of it all.”

Want more from Anna on the challenges of portfolio careers? Read this post.

Found this post helpful?

We created this series to help everyone realise their best careers, and we’d love you to share a post with your friends, family, colleagues and networks 📣

Share

Leave a comment

Keen for more? Check out the other posts in the series 👇

• Part 1: 👋 Introducing the Career Strategy Series

• Part 2: 🪜 Ladder Climbing as a Strategy

• Part 3: 👩‍🎓 Controlled Supply as a Strategy

• Part 4: 🥇 Excellence in a Power Law Field as a Strategy

• Part 5: 🔍 Niche-ing as a Strategy

• Part 6: 🧱 Skill-stacking as a Strategy

• Part 7: 👷 Be A Generalist as a Strategy

• Part 8: 📊 The Portfolio Career as a Strategy

• Part 9: 📣 Building a Platform as a Strategy

• Part 10: 🌊 Wave-surfing as a Strategy

• Part 11: 🏗️ Adding Leverage as a Strategy

• Part 12: 🌏 Proximity as a Strategy

• Part 13: ⏱️ Sequencing as a Strategy

• Part 14: 🧪 Optimising for Discovery as a Strategy

• Part 15: ⚡ Do What Gives You Energy as a Strategy

• Part 16: 💹 Arbitrage as a Strategy

• Part 1: 👋 Introducing the Career Strategy Series

• Part 2: 🪜 Ladder Climbing as a Strategy

• Part 3: 👩‍🎓 Controlled Supply as a Strategy

• Part 4: 🥇 Excellence in a Power Law Field as a Strategy

• Part 5: 🔍 Niche-ing as a Strategy

• Part 6: 🧱 Skill-stacking as a Strategy

• Part 7: 👷 Be A Generalist as a Strategy

• Part 8: 📊 The Portfolio Career as a Strategy

• Part 9: 📣 Building a Platform as a Strategy

• Part 10: 🌊 Wave-surfing as a Strategy

• Part 11: 🏗️ Adding Leverage as a Strategy

• Part 12: 🌏 Proximity as a Strategy

• Part 13: ⏱️ Sequencing as a Strategy

• Part 14: 🧪 Optimising for Discovery as a Strategy

• Part 15: ⚡ Do What Gives You Energy as a Strategy

• Part 16: 💹 Arbitrage as a Strategy

👷 Introducing Strategy #6: Be A Generalist

Much of this series has focused on career strategies which exploit the benefits of specialisation, like niche-ing, controlled supply and skill-stacking.

So how can the opposite - being a generalist - also lead to success?

☝️ Defining a generalist.

What do you think of when you hear the word generalist?

Is it…

1️⃣ The jack of all trades?

One classic definition of a generalist is a ‘jack (or jill) of all trades’ a.k.a. someone who has a little bit of many different skills, but is a ‘master of none’.

But a shortcoming of this definition is that it tends to focus on the value generalists bring by executing specific tasks themselves.

2️⃣ Or the orchestra conductor?

Many people will challenge this ‘jack of all trades’ definition as minimising the value generalists bring to organisations.

They see a great generalist as more like an ‘orchestra conductor’ or dot-connector, who can see the big picture, learn quickly, anticipate problems and successfully coordinate many teams across silos to create a symphony.

You could see this kind of generalist as unlocking the potential value created by many different specialists in an organisation - rather than adding lots of small pieces of value themselves.

3️⃣ Or excellence that goes everywhere?

From our perspective, we think of generalists simply as:

People with highly transferable skills not bound to a specific context - with the ability to deploy into different industries, problems and functions.

They often excel in areas like communication, people management, problem solving, project management, self management & more.

Building these transferable skills is often the promise of grad programs in fields like management consulting or corporates - but they can also be “school of life” skills, acquired by spending time in fields like hospitality where you have to handle a wide range of people and operational issues.

Ultimately there’s no correct definition - but it’s worth considering how you define yourself and others when you use the term!

🗺️ Where generalists play best.

Feel like a generalist, but wondering where you should work?

Whatever definition you adopt, there are a few environments that generalists tend to perform best in👇

• High heterogeneity of tasks i.e. not doing the same thing over and over, like a surgeon who focuses on one procedure

• Cross-disciplinary work i.e. bringing together many perspectives to come up with a holistic solution e.g. marketing, growth and operations

• High ambiguity i.e. frequently encountering novel challenges without textbook answers, which require thinking in a creative way

• High resource leverage i.e. working in a large organisation where decisions are hard to reverse and there are big coordination challenges, so the ‘orchestra conductor’ can create lots of value

• Skillsets needed > individuals available i.e. a team that can’t afford the luxury of all being specialists and people need to wear multiple hats, so the ‘jack of all trades’ can create lots of value

This speaks to an interesting paradox: some of most common careers for generalists fall at opposite ends of the scale spectrum 🤔

Founders & early hires in small organisations are often generalists, who can handle a high degree of uncertainty and execute to a ‘good enough’ standard across several areas until the organisation can afford to hire specialists.

But managers & leaders in large organisations are also often generalists - who know that once you reach a certain scale, the biggest problems are not technical ones but are about coordinating people, culture and decisions.

Another great way of looking at this is ‘structural hole theory’ - where each stage of an organisation’s growth (from 10 people to 100, 1000, 10000 and beyond) introduces a new ‘structural hole’ that can be filled by generalists.

We highly recommend this post from our friends at Generalist World - and all of their resources - if you’d like to dive deeper on this idea.

🔮 Generalist skills are the fastest-growing area of need globally.

The release of the World Economics Forum’s Future of Jobs Report is the equivalent of Christmas morning for career nerds like us 🎄

And the 2023 findings make for fascinating reading if you’re considering a generalist career…

Because the fastest-growing areas of skill are skewed heavily towards what we might call ‘generalist’ skills.

From creative and analytical thinking, to lifelong learning, resilience, systems thinking and even talent management…

These skills are not specific to an industry, field or function.

But they are essential to getting things done in a fast-changing world.

In other words - generalists actually might be the future of work.

And speaking of generalists who represent what modern careers can look like, we’d love to introduce you to the CEO of Chanel: Leena Nair.

🔍 Case study: Leena Nair

Leena Nair is the ultimate example of transferable skills.

In 2021, Leena Nair took the corporate world by surprise, when she was headhunted from being the first female, Asian and youngest ever Chief Human Resources Officer of Unilever, to become the CEO of iconic fashion brand Chanel - with no prior experience in fashion or luxury brands.

Nair originally studied engineering, but felt it wasn’t a good fit and went back to university to study a management degree. She said of the choice:

“When I told my dad I wanted to do an MBA in HR, he was so disappointed. ‘Why would you join a back-office function like personnel,’ he asked me.

But she persisted and joined Unilever, a global consumer goods company, in 1992 as a management trainee in India, rising through the ranks over decades.

After exposing herself to a range of roles across regions and functions, she eventually oversaw Unilever’s global workforce of over 150,000 employees as CHRO - becoming known for spearheading initiatives related to employee well-being, leadership development, and building an inclusive work culture.

When the opportunity of a CEO role came up, even Nair felt a sense of imposter syndrome.

So she called her mentor, the former CEO of PepsiCo Indra Nooyi.

“And I remember saying, ‘I don’t have this, I don’t have this network capability. I don’t have that capability.'”

Nooyi eventually asked:

“Do you know what you bring? Like, can you please list out everything you bring?”

So Nair began listing:

“I’ve been a global leader of a very large company [and so] understand [managing at] scale. I’ve run huge transformation programs. I’ve [managed] 150,000 people, I have been on very big mergers and investments”

And realised that by reframing her skillset in light of the role, she actually had many of the skills required of a modern global CEO already.

Reflecting on her conversation with her father later, she noted:

Today, I've gotten so relevant, because suddenly technology and people are coming together in today's world. People very quickly realise that digital transformation is about cultural transformation. So I'm geeky enough to understand the technology, and I know people enough to get cultural transformation – so that suddenly makes me indispensable! So I joke about it with people, that 26 years into my career, I have finally gotten relevant.”

Our (other) favourite career advice from Leena Nair 👇

• "Careers are not ladders but jungle gyms. Be ready to move sideways, diagonally, and up to learn and grow."

• "Be open to jumping into assignments which teach you the core of the business. Put your hand up for the jobs which are tough but will give you experience that others can’t match. I chose to work in three of our factories, stuck in the back of beyond with few buses or trains — something few trainees were willing to do.”

• "Always think about how you can contribute, rather than focusing on your position or title."

• “Create learning loops. You will never get it right the first time. So ensure you create learning loops- build, measure, learn, repeat”

🫣 How to overcome ‘generalist imposter syndrome’.

We recently posted about ‘generalist imposter syndrome’ on LinkedIn…

And it turns out, everyone feels it.

In fact, we saw such an overwhelming response that we want to share just a few favourite pieces of advice with you.

A massive thank you to Emma Earley, Harry Flett, Hayley Rose, Zezan Tam, Isaac Peiris and Mohana Prabhakar for these insights!

You can read the full post here - and we’d love you to add your ideas too! 💡

Found this post helpful?

We created this series to help everyone realise their best careers, and we’d love you to share it with your friends, family, colleagues and networks 📣

Share

Leave a comment

Keen for more? Check out the other posts in the series 👇

• Part 1: 👋 Introducing the Career Strategy Series

• Part 2: 🪜 Ladder Climbing as a Strategy

• Part 3: 👩‍🎓 Controlled Supply as a Strategy

• Part 4: 🥇 Excellence in a Power Law Field as a Strategy

• Part 5: 🔍 Niche-ing as a Strategy

• Part 6: 🧱 Skill-stacking as a Strategy

• Part 7: 👷 Be A Generalist as a Strategy

• Part 8: 📊 The Portfolio Career as a Strategy

• Part 9: 📣 Building a Platform as a Strategy

• Part 10: 🌊 Wave-surfing as a Strategy

• Part 11: 🏗️ Adding Leverage as a Strategy

• Part 12: 🌏 Proximity as a Strategy

• Part 13: ⏱️ Sequencing as a Strategy

• Part 14: 🧪 Optimising for Discovery as a Strategy

• Part 15: ⚡ Do What Gives You Energy as a Strategy

• Part 16: 💹 Arbitrage as a Strategy

• Part 1: 👋 Introducing the Career Strategy Series

• Part 2: 🪜 Ladder Climbing as a Strategy

• Part 3: 👩‍🎓 Controlled Supply as a Strategy

• Part 4: 🥇 Excellence in a Power Law Field as a Strategy

• Part 5: 🔍 Niche-ing as a Strategy

• Part 6: 🧱 Skill-stacking as a Strategy

• Part 7: 👷 Be A Generalist as a Strategy

• Part 8: 📊 The Portfolio Career as a Strategy

• Part 9: 📣 Building a Platform as a Strategy

• Part 10: 🌊 Wave-surfing as a Strategy

• Part 11: 🏗️ Adding Leverage as a Strategy

• Part 12: 🌏 Proximity as a Strategy

• Part 13: ⏱️ Sequencing as a Strategy

• Part 14: 🧪 Optimising for Discovery as a Strategy

• Part 15: ⚡ Do What Gives You Energy as a Strategy

• Part 16: 💹 Arbitrage as a Strategy

🧱 Introducing Strategy #5: Skill-Stacking

How does an Australian aerospace engineer like Kate Reid end up making the world’s best croissants at Lune Croissanterie?

She used one of our favourite career strategies - an approach known as skill-stacking - to approach the field of baking in an innovative way.

More on Kate’s journey later, but first - let’s explore the strategy.

⚙️ How it works

Skill-stacking involves stacking two or more different skills, to create more rare and powerful combinations, which allow you to generate outsized value.

🤔 Why?

• As you refine a specific skill, you eventually face diminishing returns to your efforts - which means you have to work harder and harder for each unit of improvement.

• For example, think about how long it takes to reach the top 25% in the world at something - say, Formula 1 engineering.

• It might take you a decade to get to the top 25%, and another decade of effort to reach the top 10% within the rarified world of F1 engineers.

• But for the same decade of effort you put into going from top 25% to top 10%, you could acquire and refine another skill to become top 25% in two areas - for example, combining people management and F1 engineering.

• With that intersection of experiences, you can do more than just refine a car’s mechanics - you can lead a team of engineers and drivers to a victory, with a much greater personal impact on that team’s success.

Essentially - for the same units of additional effort, you can develop a much more rare and powerful skillset.

By skill-stacking intelligently, you can bring a unique, differentiated approach to problems in your field - allowing you to add value in ways that people who’ve been trained to think in one field may not.

You can be in the top 10% of F1 engineers, or the top 1% of people leaders who understand F1 engineering teams.

In fact, many of the greatest innovators are skill-stackers and polymaths who combine two, three, four or more fields to have an outsized impact.

For example:

• Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel combined the analytical skills she learned as a physicist with her political skills,

• Stephen Colbert combined world-class comedic skills with a focus on politics to reenergise political satire, and

• Lin-Manuel Miranda combining a gift for musical theatre with a passion for American history to create Hamilton!

This concept of skill stacking can apply for all of us - and a useful way to think about by being intentional with where you invest your energy next, rather than just ‘go with the flow’ of deeper specialisation.

👀 A Note On Visualising Your Skillset

Keen to figure out what your skillset looks like?

Here’s how.

Start by listing your skills horizontally (known as breadth) and map out the depth of each one, from ‘beginner’ to ‘mastery’.

For example, you might find that your skillset is T-shaped: with a basic knowledge of a few areas, combined with depth in one area:

Or you might find that that you are more ‘I-shaped’ (a deep expert in one thing), or a generalist (with breadth across a number of areas).

Or even a Pi-shaped or comb-shaped skillset, with a mix of breadth and depth across multiple areas!

Many top skill-stackers take on Pi-shaped and comb-shaped formations like these - and in the case study below, we’ll explain how!

🥐 Case study: Kate Reid of Lune Croissanterie

• Kate Reid originally trained as an aerospace engineer, working for the Williams Formula One racing team in the UK, where she applied her engineering skills to designing and optimising race car components to enhance speed and efficiency on the track.

• But in spite her success in engineering, Reid was unsatisfied, and decided to pursue her passion for food, particularly croissants.

• She traveled to France, where she trained with some of the best bakers to master the art of the croissant, and honed her baking skills with a deep respect for tradition.

But rather than just be a great engineer or a great traditional baker, what makes Reid unique is the way she combined her mastery of tradition with an engineer’s mindset of meticulous refinement.

• After returning from Paris and failing in her initial attempts to replicate the croissants she had made there, Reid realised that the traditional method needed significant adjustments to work in a new environment.

• Instead of relying on conventional techniques, she began experimenting by modifying one variable at a time, applying the precision and problem-solving skills she had used as an engineer.

• Over the course of three months, she developed a unique three-day process tailored to her vision of the perfect croissant​.

• Lune Croissanterie, which opened in Melbourne in 2012, reflects Reid's unique combination of technical skill and creativity, and now attracts travellers from all over Australia and the world to experience their incredible products being made firsthand.

By stacking two skillsets many people would not think to combine, Kate Reid was able to innovate in a fundamentally new way.

Want to learn more about Lune? Check out the video below!

🚀 Maximise your chances of success

Like the sound of this strategy? So do we!

But here are a few considerations to keep in mind 👇

• Choose the right intersection: Remember that while some combinations of skills have a multiplier effect on the value you can add, while others may not have any applications where they can cross over! For example, rock-climbing & baking - not impossible, but difficult to picture 🤣

• Learn to explain yourself: We’re used to seeing conventional CVs from people who start in a single job and climb the ladder in a narrow way - so learn to communicate your experiences in a coherent narrative to show why you’re super-valuable rather than indecisive.

• Create leverage: One great way to skill-stack effectively is to go beyond being an individual contributor to increasing your ‘leverage’ i.e. getting bigger outcomes for the same inputs. A classic is often combining knowledge of a specific field (e.g. F1 engineering) with soft or generalist skills to work effectively with others and manage teams!

Found this post helpful?

We created this series to help everyone realise their best careers, and we’d love you to share it with your friends, family, colleagues and networks 📣

Share

Leave a comment

Keen for more? Check out the other posts in the series 👇

• Part 1: 👋 Introducing the Career Strategy Series

• Part 2: 🪜 Ladder Climbing as a Strategy

• Part 3: 👩‍🎓 Controlled Supply as a Strategy

• Part 4: 🥇 Excellence in a Power Law Field as a Strategy

• Part 5: 🔍 Niche-ing as a Strategy

• Part 6: 🧱 Skill-stacking as a Strategy

• Part 7: 👷 Be A Generalist as a Strategy

• Part 8: 📊 The Portfolio Career as a Strategy

• Part 9: 📣 Building a Platform as a Strategy

• Part 10: 🌊 Wave-surfing as a Strategy

• Part 11: 🏗️ Adding Leverage as a Strategy

• Part 12: 🌏 Proximity as a Strategy

• Part 13: ⏱️ Sequencing as a Strategy

• Part 14: 🧪 Optimising for Discovery as a Strategy

• Part 15: ⚡ Do What Gives You Energy as a Strategy

• Part 16: 💹 Arbitrage as a Strategy

• Part 1: 👋 Introducing the Career Strategy Series

• Part 2: 🪜 Ladder Climbing as a Strategy

• Part 3: 👩‍🎓 Controlled Supply as a Strategy

• Part 4: 🥇 Excellence in a Power Law Field as a Strategy

• Part 5: 🔍 Niche-ing as a Strategy

• Part 6: 🧱 Skill-stacking as a Strategy

• Part 7: 👷 Be A Generalist as a Strategy

• Part 8: 📊 The Portfolio Career as a Strategy

• Part 9: 📣 Building a Platform as a Strategy

• Part 10: 🌊 Wave-surfing as a Strategy

• Part 11: 🏗️ Adding Leverage as a Strategy

• Part 12: 🌏 Proximity as a Strategy

• Part 13: ⏱️ Sequencing as a Strategy

• Part 14: 🧪 Optimising for Discovery as a Strategy

• Part 15: ⚡ Do What Gives You Energy as a Strategy

• Part 16: 💹 Arbitrage as a Strategy

🔍 Introducing Strategy #4: Niche-ing

Do you know who these people are?

If not - you’re not alone!

Unlike many leaders in their fields, they’re not instantly recognisably faces or household names.

But they’ve achieved profound impact and success in their careers.

• On the right is Judy Faulkner: one of America’s richest self-made women who turned a $70,000 initial investment into a net worth of over $8 billion via her company Epic Software.

• On the left is Professor Claudia Goldin: one of the first women ever to win a Nobel Prize in Economics.

And they’re both great examples of using niche-ing as a career strategy 🔍

Read on for breakdowns of their journeys - but first, let’s explain the strategy.

❓What is niche-ing?

Finding a valuable, neglected niche (often perceived as ‘unglamorous’) and becoming great at it.

There are a few careers that every teenager can name - like doctor, professional athlete, lawyer, entrepreneur and of course, YouTuber.

Aaaand on the other hand…

There are a huge number of ‘unsexy’ industries and job titles that create huge value by solving important problems, but are not widely represented in our pop culture, and don’t attract a lot of talent 💔

Why? Low competition + high value creation = better remuneration.

In a neglected niche, you face limited competition from other latent.

This means you have more ability to set a high price for your services, in terms of money, lifestyle and whatever else you value 🌴

In fact, niche-ing is the opposite of the power law dilemma we described last week - where you try to outwork the competition in a hyper-crowded field 🥇

👀 What can a niche career look like?

Niche-ing can take many forms, but a few common ones are:

• 💭 Entering a high-value, low-awareness field, like becoming an actuary, a process engineer, a historical restoration architect, a trained operator of a specific kind of machinery, an import-export specialist for a particular good, and so on.
  

• 📈 Starting a business that ‘owns’ a neglected niche - like safety certifications for the mining industry, or visas for the tech industry.
  

• 👩‍🎓 Focussing academic work on an emerging niche which hasn’t received significant attention before - instead of trying to come up with new answers to ‘mainstream’ questions everyone else is focussing on.

🛣️ So how do people actually end up in niche careers?

Valuable niches are often discovered via direct exposure, like:

• Knowing someone socially or professionally who understands the field,

• Stumbling upon an unmet need while working on something adjacent,

• Inbound recruiting by an employer looking to attract more talent, or

• Taking a structured approach to breaking your career bubble and discovering a promising niche.

See the end of this post for a how-to guide on accelerating discovery!

Case study: Judy Faulkner, founder of Epic Software 🏥

Judy Faulkner is a great example of discovering a neglected need firsthand by being in a valuable niche - and becoming the best at meeting that need.

Faulkner founded Epic Systems, a healthcare software company, in 1979.

While working as a computer programmer at a medical institution (not typically seen as a high-demand or glamorous profession!), Faulkner noticed that medical records were being managed inefficiently using paper files.

She saw the potential to digitise medical records to enhance data accessibility, improve patient care, and streamline operations - and was able to found Epic with an initial investment of $70,000 from family and friends.

She built the company's software from scratch in a basement in Wisconsin, focusing on a user-friendly, integrated system that allowed healthcare providers to track patients' medical histories and streamline admin.

Over the next few decades, Epic grew steadily to become an industry leader in electronic health records (EHR) systems, valued at around $45 billion today.

💥 Why niche-ing can also have huge positive impact

Academic research can have enormous positive impact, through making scientific discoveries and deepening our understanding of ourselves. And it’s a domain where effective niche-ing can change the world.

When people first focus on a field or a problem, there will be many big questions still to be answered - and there will initially be a rush of progress made as the major ‘building blocks’ of fact and frameworks are laid down.

But over time, knowledge creation is also subject to the law of diminishing returns - perhaps the 1st, 5th and even 10th paper on a topic significantly add to it, but the 100th or 1,000th do not add as much.

And so the pace and scale of discoveries being made eventually slows, and people find themselves doing work which focusses more on synthesis, small extensions to an academic literature and re-litigating old debates.

If faced with the choice of adding one more paper to the pile on a ‘mainstream’ topic, or pursuing a promising but neglected niche, targeting a promising niche may allow you to have a bigger impact, because the ‘low hanging fruit’ of discoveries and theory to be made is still ‘on the tree’ 🍏

Like Claudia Goldin…

Case study: Claudia Goldin 🏆

When awarding Claudia Goldin the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2023, the Nobel Committee wrote:

This year’s Laureate in the Economic Sciences, Claudia Goldin, provided the first comprehensive account of women’s earnings and labour market participation through the centuries. Her research reveals the causes of change, as well as the main sources of the remaining gender gap.

Claudia Goldin is an influential American economist known for her pioneering work on gender economics and labor markets. Her research focuses on understanding the role of women in the economy, especially how gender differences in earnings, labor force participation, and career progression have evolved over time.

In 2024, understanding how over 50% of the population interact with the economy seems like a pretty important topic.

But when Goldin first studied economics in the 1970s, topics like the gender pay gap, and women’s labor force participation were traditionally seen as unimportant or marginal within mainstream economics.

Effectively, gender economics was seen as a ‘niche’ or backwater topic - not something to build a successful career upon 🤦‍♀️

But by choosing to enter what was seen as a ‘niche’ instead of a crowded topic, Goldin was able to make enormous contributions which shaped the field, and ultimately have an outsized positive impact through her work.

Super nerd? You can read more here about Goldin’s work here, here and here.

Putting it into practice: how to find a good niche 💡

People often stumble into direct discovery of a niche - and in taking a structured approach, you want to increase your likelihood of stumbling successfully and break out of the ‘bubble’ of careers you know.

1. Start with a self-audit: list out all the careers & job titles you know.
   

2. Compare it with a wide range of guides which can expose you to other careers and broaden your list of possibilities e.g.

   • 15 Best Jobs You’ve Never Heard Of (US News)

   • 100 Highest-Paying Careers to Consider (Indeed)

   • The Australian Government’ Jobs Report (tables at the end cover 350 professions with income, age mix, gender mix, growth trends & more

     

3. Understand the ‘pools of value’ in the economy better, and get perspective on how small the pool you swim in is!

   1. There are many ways to do this, but here’s one example: Google ‘Australian Economy GDP By Industry’, find the biggest organisations within those sectors, and go to their websites’ careers pages. Look at all of the roles they’re hiring, and dive in to the descriptions - which ones feel like they could fit with your inclinations?
      

4. Look within your network for people with interesting careers, and ask how they ended up there - but don’t rely only on your network!
   

5. Ask as many people as you can about what their biggest problems are. You might find someone tells you they need a better leasing agent, or that they’re paying a crazy amount to get their braces done, or that they just can’t seem to hire for a specific type of role.
   

6. Finally, check your blindspots: we are more likely to empathise with problems closer to our own experience, and miss opportunities.

   From preferring to B2C (business-to-consumer) over B2B (business-to-business) startups, to neglecting problems faced by under-served groups like women, people with disabilities & people of colour, great talent can easily get misallocated - so make sure you’re taking extra steps to expose yourself to experiences beyond your own!

Found this helpful?

We created this series to help everyone realise their best careers, and we’d love you to share it with your friends, family, colleagues and networks 📣

Share

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Keen for more? Check out the other posts in the series 👇

• Part 1: 👋 Introducing the Career Strategy Series

• Part 2: 🪜 Ladder Climbing as a Strategy

• Part 3: 👩‍🎓 Controlled Supply as a Strategy

• Part 4: 🥇 Excellence in a Power Law Field as a Strategy

• Part 5: 🔍 Niche-ing as a Strategy

• Part 6: 🧱 Skill-stacking as a Strategy

• Part 7: 👷 Be A Generalist as a Strategy

• Part 8: 📊 The Portfolio Career as a Strategy

• Part 9: 📣 Building a Platform as a Strategy

• Part 10: 🌊 Wave-surfing as a Strategy

• Part 11: 🏗️ Adding Leverage as a Strategy

• Part 12: 🌏 Proximity as a Strategy

• Part 13: ⏱️ Sequencing as a Strategy

• Part 14: 🧪 Optimising for Discovery as a Strategy

• Part 15: ⚡ Do What Gives You Energy as a Strategy

• Part 16: 💹 Arbitrage as a Strategy

• Part 1: 👋 Introducing the Career Strategy Series

• Part 2: 🪜 Ladder Climbing as a Strategy

• Part 3: 👩‍🎓 Controlled Supply as a Strategy

• Part 4: 🥇 Excellence in a Power Law Field as a Strategy

• Part 5: 🔍 Niche-ing as a Strategy

• Part 6: 🧱 Skill-stacking as a Strategy

• Part 7: 👷 Be A Generalist as a Strategy

• Part 8: 📊 The Portfolio Career as a Strategy

• Part 9: 📣 Building a Platform as a Strategy

• Part 10: 🌊 Wave-surfing as a Strategy

• Part 11: 🏗️ Adding Leverage as a Strategy

• Part 12: 🌏 Proximity as a Strategy

• Part 13: ⏱️ Sequencing as a Strategy

• Part 14: 🧪 Optimising for Discovery as a Strategy

• Part 15: ⚡ Do What Gives You Energy as a Strategy

• Part 16: 💹 Arbitrage as a Strategy

🥇 Introducing Strategy #3: Excellence in a Power Law Field

When surveyed, a huge number of young people (and adults too) want to become actors, athletes, musicians & social media influencers.

And no wonder - these jobs are highly visible, typically involve turning a passion into a profession, and appear glamorous from the outside.

But a tiny number of people are actually able to enter these fields and earn any kind of living, much less a good one.

We began this series by reviewing a large database of interesting and successful careers to find common themes (backstory here) - and many of them involved achieving outstanding success in a ultra-competitive field like professional sport, film, television, media or academia.

So in this post we’ll tackle the question: how do you actually get into these fields and succeed?

🧪 Hypothesis 1: Outwork the competition.

To quote Serena Williams on the source of her success:

"Luck has nothing to do with it. I have spent many, many hours, countless hours, on the court working for my one moment in time, not knowing when it would come.”

Or one of Ezra Klein’s contemporaries on his success:

“We all worked pretty hard, but he, far and away, had the most regular, strongest, most consistent work ethic.”

Or Phoebe Waller-Bridge on her approach:

“The hard work never stops. And as long as I keep that in mind, it keeps me disciplined and working towards the next thing.”

When it comes to ‘making it’ in competitive fields, the conventional wisdom of outworking the competition to become ‘so good they can’t ignore you’ has a rich history in how we tell stories of professional success 💪

And the basic intuition makes sense.

If you’re improving 10% - or even just 1% - each time you practise your chosen skill, and you do it more often than others, you’re going to reach dramatically higher levels of performance through compounding:

So “working harder than everyone else to develop excellence” can actually be a career strategy - especially if you think that ‘grit’ and tolerance for pain is an area where you have above-average capacities.

But is ‘working harder’ a sufficient winning strategy on its own in these super competitive fields? That’s what this post is about.

🎲 Analysing the ‘game’ of modern careers

Like a lot of human activities, developing good strategies often starts by describing the features of the ‘game’ you’re playing.

So let’s describe the ‘game’ that is modern careers 👇

• Careers are multi-stage games, not single-round games. In each new ‘round’ you face a new set of choices, and the results of those choices unlock a new set of possibilities the next time around.

• The playing field is evolving around us. Industries don’t stay static.

• The players have unique preferences. We don’t all want the same things from our careers in terms of work-life balance, team, type of work, etc.

• The players have unique abilities. Some people are strong natural communicators, some are physically gifted, some are creative, etc.

• In aggregate, players’ decision can affect each others’ options via supply and demand. The bar to enter and succeed in a field gets higher the more people who want to join, and lower the less people want to join.

The last two points are especially important when we’re thinking about outworking the competition as a strategy.

💡 The more popular the field is, the higher the level you need to achieve, and the more people with natural abilities you’ll need to outcompete to win.

🤔 The problem with power law fields

• In ‘power law fields’ like acting, music, sport & media, there is a huge imbalance between the large demand to work in those fields and the small supply of jobs available.

  • For example, millions of Americans want to be professional basketballers, but only a few hundred actually play in the NBA. The same goes for the movie business, where a small number of actors make millions per year while most struggle to make a living as actors.

  • And even within those fields, the ‘returns’ (salary, attention, sponsorships, awards, etc) are often concentrated among a small number of those players. For example, a quarter of total salaries go to the top 20 players in the NBA.

• This dynamic often develops when a valuable industry can reach a large number of paying customers using a mediated model i.e. using tools like social media, streaming & the internet to enable a large audience to consume the same ‘product’ - like sports, journalism or film.

  • Why? Unlike traditional professions where you need to deliver services one-to-one or one-to-a-few-at-a-time (like a theatre actor), these can achieve vast scale by shining a huge spotlight on a few top players, who then split the value created among a small group.

• This creates what is known as a ‘power law distribution’ - where if you lined up all the ‘players’ along the x axis, and showed the returns they receive from highest to lowest, you’d see a curve something like this:

  

• Essentially, this creates a winners-take-all field:

  • If you’re a super high achiever - top 1% or even 0.1% - you can receive more returns in these fields than almost any other.

  • But being an average player - better than 50% and worse than 50% - means almost no returns go to you.

  • And even being very good - like being in the top 10% of aspiring athletes, or journalists, or musicians - means you’re still probably not earning a living.

⚡ Power law fields versus. linear fields 🌈

• Compare power law fields with the more common linear distribution: for example think of accountants, public servants & teachers here.

  

• Yes, the strongest players in the top 1% or top 10% do get better returns (salaries, recognition, etc) than the average players - but more like 2-3 times better, instead of 100 times or 1000 times like in a power law field.

• Maybe you get promoted to a more senior role, with more responsibility, opportunity and compensation - but you don’t become a Nike ambassador like Serena Williams, a New York Times columnist like Ezra Klein, or get a $20 million deal from Amazon Studios to make whatever you want like Phoebe Waller-Bridge.

What does this mean for ‘outwork the competition’ as a strategy?

🌈 Linear fields: Outworking the competition can be a strong strategy.

• In a linear field, ‘outworking the competition’ - say to move from average to top 10% - will deliver consistent increases in your returns for every improvement in performance.

• And you are likely to face less extreme competition and less people adopting the same strategy of hustling harder - meaning the advantage you receive when adopting this strategy is more dramatic.

⚡ Power law fields: outworking the competition is a table stakes strategy.

• In a power law field, your returns don’t increase substantially until you hit the top-tier (top 1% or more) - meaning your journey on the way to that point can be taxing and demoralising, if you make it there at all. There’s a reason so many people in these fields talk about a ‘big break’ like being spotted by an agent and cast in a breakout role - these inflection points can suddenly give you access to that mediated platform to reach a large audience and change the trajectory of your career.

• Given the competitiveness, you’re likely to see many other people already adopting the ‘extreme work ethic’ strategy - so this becomes less of a differentiator. There are many aspiring actors, musicians, journalists and academics with incredible work ethics - it takes something more.

So coming back to our original question: if not just outworking the competition, how do you succeed in power law fields?

🧪 Hypothesis 2: Hard Work+ Formula.

Having researched a lot of careers where people found success in a power law field, a formula starts to emerge:

• Talent: Natural gifts which predispose them to success in the field.

• Luck: Timing, geographic proximity & social proximity to opportunities.

• Work ethic: Honing their craft over a long time.

• Changing The Game: Not merely mastering their craft, but innovating or reinventing how it is practised to achieve outsized success.

Talent and luck are pretty self-explanatory.

But let’s finish by taking a second look at those examples of power law careers, focussing on how they changed the game to win in their fields:

• Phoebe Waller-Bridge: When Waller-Bridge found she was being cast in stereotypical female roles that she found uninteresting after graduating from acting school, she created her own theatre company dedicated to boundary-pushing new writing and used live audience experiments to hone her craft - for example, testing new writing for the exact moment when audiences fell in love with a character by getting them to release a heart-shaped balloon. That led her to creating her one-woman show Fleabag, a raw dark comedy with an unforgettable female lead, which won the Edinburgh Fringe First Award and went on to be made into a TV series which won her Emmys for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series, Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series and Outstanding Comedy Series (as a producer and creator of Fleabag).

• Ezra Klein: When he was a university student in California, Ezra Klein didn’t seem like a super-nerd destined to be a public intellectual, leaving university with a 2.2 GPA and no special inroads into the world of political journalism. But through a combination of arriving early to the golden days of political blogging in the mid-2000s, adopting a divergent approach of going deep into health policy literature to establish himself as an authority while the Obamacare debates were dominating American political coverage, and leveraging that early momentum into creating his own media brands (from the pioneering Wonkblog policy analysis section at the The Washington Post to founding the explanatory journalism site Vox Media), he was able to carve out a uniquely powerful voice shaping American debates about politics, policy and more.

• Serena Williams: Though she is known for her superhuman perseverance in matches and in training, Serena Williams has also reinvented many aspects of play in women’s tennis in her image. She’s known for her powerful serve, which is often considered one of the best in the history of women's tennis, and her strength and athleticism give her a significant advantage on the court, allowing her to hit winners from almost anywhere and overpower her opponents. Her speed and ability to cover the court are also unmatched, which allows her to retrieve balls that other players might not reach, turning defence into offence with ease. She’s nearly impossible to beat because she can play a different game.

Other considerations 👇

• 🤺 Are you playing in the right field? The Olympics are inspiring - but every four years they also show us the dramatic difference in returns for professionalised sports which attract huge amounts of resources and amateur sports where Olympians who are equally skilled struggle to support themselves financially between Games. If you’re looking for power law outcomes, it’s essential to choose a field where you have natural strengths and where achieving excellence can bring you the rewards you seek.
  

• 💡 Have a Plan B: Pursuing a passion in a power law field can develop incredible transferable skills, from teamwork and resilience to communication, creativity and analysis. It helps to be aware of where you could find interesting exit pathways, and to go in with your eyes open to the long odds of achieving outsized success in your first chosen field.
  

• 🧠 Mindset matters: Many people find it emotionally confronting to throw themselves fully into something where they have a slim chance of succeeding. It can be helpful to proactively manage your mindset - for example, explore exercises like fear-setting, setting mental boundaries around how much time, money and emotional energy you’re willing to give, and focussing on what you can control with a ‘process over outcomes’ approach that prioritises intrinsic satisfaction.

Found this helpful?

We created this series to help everyone realise their best careers, and we’d love you to share it with your friends, family, colleagues and networks 📣

Share

Leave a comment

Keen for more? Check out the other posts in the series 👇

• Part 1: 👋 Introducing the Career Strategy Series

• Part 2: 🪜 Ladder Climbing as a Strategy

• Part 3: 👩‍🎓 Controlled Supply as a Strategy

• Part 4: 🥇 Excellence in a Power Law Field as a Strategy

• Part 5: 🔍 Niche-ing as a Strategy

• Part 6: 🧱 Skill-stacking as a Strategy

• Part 7: 👷 Be A Generalist as a Strategy

• Part 8: 📊 The Portfolio Career as a Strategy

• Part 9: 📣 Building a Platform as a Strategy

• Part 10: 🌊 Wave-surfing as a Strategy

• Part 11: 🏗️ Adding Leverage as a Strategy

• Part 12: 🌏 Proximity as a Strategy

• Part 13: ⏱️ Sequencing as a Strategy

• Part 14: 🧪 Optimising for Discovery as a Strategy

• Part 15: ⚡ Do What Gives You Energy as a Strategy

• Part 16: 💹 Arbitrage as a Strategy

Welcome back to the Career Strategy Series, sharing research-backed strategies to help you realise your best career.

• Part 1: 👋 Introducing the Career Strategy Series

• Part 2: 🪜 Ladder Climbing as a Strategy

• Part 3: 👩‍🎓 Controlled Supply as a Strategy

• Part 4: 🥇 Excellence in a Power Law Field as a Strategy

• Part 5: 🔍 Niche-ing as a Strategy

• Part 6: 🧱 Skill-stacking as a Strategy

• Part 7: 👷 Be A Generalist as a Strategy

• Part 8: 📊 The Portfolio Career as a Strategy

• Part 9: 📣 Building a Platform as a Strategy

• Part 10: 🌊 Wave-surfing as a Strategy

• Part 11: 🏗️ Adding Leverage as a Strategy

• Part 12: 🌏 Proximity as a Strategy

• Part 13: ⏱️ Sequencing as a Strategy

• Part 14: 🧪 Optimising for Discovery as a Strategy

• Part 15: ⚡ Do What Gives You Energy as a Strategy

• Part 16: 💹 Arbitrage as a Strategy

👩‍🎓 Introducing Strategy #2: Controlled Supply 👩‍🎓

👨‍🏫 Pop quiz: what are the highest paid professions?

According to the Australian Tax Office:

🙋 And what do they have in common?

Well, apart from there being a lot of doctors… the majority of them fall into ‘controlled supply’ professions.

🤔 But what is controlled supply, and why is it so powerful?

First up - a primer on supply & demand

Feel free to skip if you’ve studied economics!

As we said in our introduction to this series, several academic fields offer helpful but incomplete perspectives on the topic of careers.

One of those is the field of economics.

📈 Perhaps the most basic economic concept is that prices in a market are determined by two factors:

• Supply (people in a market who are trying to sell a good or service)

• Demand (people in a market who are trying to buy a good or service)

🤓 Without getting into the diagrams (deeper dive here if you’re curious), the basic idea is:

• If there is more demand than supply, prices will rise, as buyers bid higher,

• If there is more supply than demand, prices will fall, as sellers lower their asking prices.

🧠 In the context of jobs and employment markets, here’s two different professions as an example of how supply and demand affect prices:

• AI Software Engineers: the ‘gold rush’ in AI is on, with every tech company and corporation looking to get in on the action with talented software engineers who have relevant expertise. Demand has skyrocketed, and it takes a long time to train an AI software engineer - so companies in Silicon Valley have begun paying million-dollar-plus salaries to secure this scarce pool of talent.
  

• Copywriters: the rise of AI tools like ChatGPT has also led to mass automation of jobs in areas like copywriting, leading many to lose their jobs, or leave the field and diversify their skills.

⚖️ Over time in a well-functioning market, demand-supply imbalances should prompt a change in behaviour, as:

• More sellers enter the market if they see high prices (e.g. more people will re-train as AI software engineers), eventually driving down the price,

• More sellers leave the market if they see low prices (e.g. move from copywriting into other fields), leading prices to stabilise or rise again.

🙋So what is controlled supply as a strategy?

‘Controlled supply’ means entering fields where restrictions placed on the supply of talent limit competition and create artificially high wages.

• Controlled supply can occur via ‘hard caps’, like laws or regulations.

  • For example, licensing requirements like medical degrees and specialist medical college exams which tightly control the number of specialists, and help explain why Australia has less than 700 dermatologists to serving a population of 26 million in the world’s skin cancer capital, with an average wait time of over 600 days!

    
    This is not to say that licensing isn’t valuable - we all want someone skilled wielding the knife if we go into surgery! - but the net effect of a ‘tough door policy’ is to keep wages higher for those who have made it inside the door of a profession.
    

• Controlled supply can also take the form of ‘soft caps’ - where a policy or institutional choice limits access to a specific qualification. For example, you’ll see small class sizes in prestigious universities like the Ivy League and Oxbridge, with application acceptance rates of less than 4%, or small graduate cohorts in prestigious name-brand employers like McKinsey or Goldman Sachs, which increase the perceived value of those credentials and increase the price (wages) paid for those employees on the market.
  

• These financial outcomes can have secondary cultural effects which attract more people to these fields: When a profession is considered stable and high-paying for a long time, this often creates an added halo of social or cultural prestige attached to that profession.

  • Cue: your parents tell you to settle down with a nice doctor or lawyer!

💭 So should I follow this career strategy?

• Look: it has a lot of benefits. And full disclosure: both of our co-founders Harry and Lucy applied this strategy by starting their careers in management consulting, which gave them many of the skills that allowed them to create Fuzzy!
  

• Financial security can relieve a lot of other stressors, and the data shows that money does make people happier - up until a point somewhere between $75,000 and half a million dollars, depending on who you ask.
  

• Though we’ve focussed on wages here, these fields can have other important benefits - being intellectually stimulating, enabling you to work with talented colleagues, and having a positive impact through your work.
  

• Some people love the idea of an entrepreneurial career and negotiating aggressively on their own behalf - but for others, it can be reassuring to know that you’ll be financially secure by choosing the right degree at 18.

However, here are some other considerations to keep in mind 👇

• Figure out what type of relationship you want to have with your work a.k.a. the 3 Fs. Do you want your work to fulfil you, fund you, or just fit around you? And will this career choice serve that relationship, or not?
  
  You might also decide it doesn’t serve you long-term, but choose to sequence your career strategies - for example, spending a few years in a high-paying field to create the financial security to pursue other passions in the future (though be wary of lifestyle inflation on the way).

  

  
  

• Are you making a decision for you, or for others? For example, are you choosing a high-paying prestige career because you think the work will be genuinely satisfying to you, or doing something which saps your energy because you think other people will admire you? The latter may be a mistake in the medium-term: most psychological research suggests that we quickly adapt to positive social feedback and return to our pre-existing level of happiness, in a process known as the ‘hedonic treadmill’.

  

• Low-risk and low-flexibility: The more specialised your training or credentials, the more limited your exit options and transferable skills can become. For example, beginning your career at a prestigious university or a consulting firm can have more logical pathways than say, a high-paid intellectual property lawyer or a super-specialised heart surgeon. And you may find that you have limited choice in other areas - for example, having to move home many times to secure training, positions and promotions in your specialised field.
  

  

• Market dynamics matter - and they can change: For example, in Australia the historical perception of law as a safe, prestigious and high-paying field has led to larger and larger numbers of students studying the degree, without coordinated planning with the industry, resulting in an oversupply of law graduate relative to the ability of traditional legal jobs to absorb them. If the demand isn’t there, you might end up having to move into another field and transfer your skills. And the niche you work in matters too: specialised, high-value private cases will pay a lot more than legal aid if you’re a lawyer!

  
  

Found this post helpful?

We created this series to help everyone realise their best careers, and we’d love you to share it with your friends, family, colleagues and networks 📣

Share

Leave a comment

New here? Check out the other posts in the series 👇

• Part 1: 👋 Introducing the Career Strategy Series

• Part 2: 🪜 Ladder Climbing as a Strategy

• Part 3: 👩‍🎓 Controlled Supply as a Strategy

• Part 4: 🥇 Excellence in a Power Law Field as a Strategy

• Part 5: 🔍 Niche-ing as a Strategy

• Part 6: 🧱 Skill-stacking as a Strategy

• Part 7: 👷 Be A Generalist as a Strategy

• Part 8: 📊 The Portfolio Career as a Strategy

• Part 9: 📣 Building a Platform as a Strategy

• Part 10: 🌊 Wave-surfing as a Strategy

• Part 11: 🏗️ Adding Leverage as a Strategy

• Part 12: 🌏 Proximity as a Strategy

• Part 13: ⏱️ Sequencing as a Strategy

• Part 14: 🧪 Optimising for Discovery as a Strategy

• Part 15: ⚡ Do What Gives You Energy as a Strategy

• Part 16: 💹 Arbitrage as a Strategy

• Part 1: 👋 Introducing the Career Strategy Series

• Part 2: 🪜 Ladder Climbing as a Strategy

• Part 3: 👩‍🎓 Controlled Supply as a Strategy

• Part 4: 🥇 Excellence in a Power Law Field as a Strategy

• Part 5: 🔍 Niche-ing as a Strategy

• Part 6: 🧱 Skill-stacking as a Strategy

• Part 7: 👷 Be A Generalist as a Strategy

• Part 8: 📊 The Portfolio Career as a Strategy

• Part 9: 📣 Building a Platform as a Strategy

• Part 10: 🌊 Wave-surfing as a Strategy

• Part 11: 🏗️ Adding Leverage as a Strategy

• Part 12: 🌏 Proximity as a Strategy

• Part 13: ⏱️ Sequencing as a Strategy

• Part 14: 🧪 Optimising for Discovery as a Strategy

• Part 15: ⚡ Do What Gives You Energy as a Strategy

• Part 16: 💹 Arbitrage as a Strategy

👋 Reminder: what is a ‘career strategy’?

Everybody hates jargon! So here’s a quick explanation.

Definition: Strategy is your theory of how you’ll ‘win’.

In this case, how you’ll invest your finite resources of time, energy & money into your career to maximise things you care about (job satisfaction, money, social impact, etc).

• Strategy ≠ tactics. Strategy is high level - tactics is the execution. For example, a business might decide that a strategy of expanding into a new country will maximise their growth - and then execute it using tactics like viral PR stunts, hiring local experts and attractive launch pricing.

• Strategy ≠ a vision board. We love a vision, of course! But strategy is about developing the strongest ‘move’ based on the environment you start in, rather than wishful thinking without a plan to get there.

🪜 Introducing Strategy #1: Ladder Climbing 🪜

This is Pano Christou, the former CEO of Pret A Manger.

And this is his LinkedIn:

🙋What is ladder climbing?

• Joining an organisation and moving ‘up the ladder’ by being promoted.

• Historically the most common strategy! People used to spend whole careers demonstrating their value and being rewarded with bigger roles. But in many fields, employers and employees have become less ‘monogamous’ over recent decades - with less job security and less company loyalty.

• Ladder climbing is now most common in single-employer fields (like the police, military and public service, where the government is the only ‘game in town’), and in large hierarchical organisations like big corporates.

• Ladders can be formal or informal - with promotion pathways attached to strict criteria (e.g. passing your sergeant’s exam in the police), or more loose dynamics (e.g. moving up the ranks in a corporation when you’re ‘ready’ or when roles come up).

🤷🏾‍♀️ A lot of us might not consciously think “I’m following a ladder climbing strategy” - but then we realise…

• “My goals are focussed on advancing in my current workplace”,

• “My professional development is driven by my employer’s priorities”, and

• “My energy is going towards building a strong track record with existing colleagues (rather than external ‘career capital’)”…

… and then… “Oh, I actually am ladder-climbing! 🤯”

We all grow up in educational systems which train us to excel at tasks given by authority figures (our teachers) in our immediate environment, and encourage us not to get distracted by other tasks and interests.

So it’s easy to take the same approach straight into the workplace without pausing to consider: is this right for me?

So should I use this strategy? 🤔

We’re not saying ladder climbing is a bad strategy - far from it!

Especially if you value security, long-term relationships with colleagues and knowing how to succeed in your job, this can be a great strategy for you.

But you should also consider these factors:

• Ladder shape matters: Not all ladders are built the same. The ratio between the ‘width’ (number of people) at the top and the bottom will dramatically change your career. In a fat-bottomed ladder, like the one shown on the right, you might find yourself waiting for spots to open above you, or find you get ‘stuck’ in a career rut even if you’re ready for more. The closer you get to a 1:1 ratio, with a gently-sloped ladder like the one shown on the left, the easier it is to be promoted, but the less impact you can personally have through your role.

  

  
  

• Lower lifetime earnings: Research by LinkedIn, Glassdoor and even the Journal of Labour Economics confirms what you might already know: changing job frequently (every 2-3 years) leads to greater salary increases, as employers are more likely to ‘match the market’ when trying to hire you than when you’ stay put - and these increases can compound to be worth millions of dollars of difference over a career.
  
  

• Low risk in some ways, high risk in others: You might have minimised uncertainty and risk in one area, but you’ve now got all your eggs in one employer ‘basket’, so you’re over-exposed to all the negative risks of that employer, culture, industry, colleagues and more. In finance terms, this would be a lack of ‘diversification’. If something isn’t going well, you don’t have as many options to exit. Imagine being a ladder-climber at Kodak (or Lehman Brothers) - you might wish you had given yourself more breadth.
  
  

• Same employer, different jobs: Even if you’re working in one place, the skills you need to succeed as an early-career individual responsible for your own work are extremely different to the skills of a mid-level people manager who is responsible for the productivity of their team, or a high-level executive who needs to communicate priorities without being able to manage people directly. You might effectively need to learn a new job every few years, which draws upon very different strengths - and many people find these transitions challenging, and even can find they get more satisfaction from being closer to their work.
  
  

• Ladder climbing doesn’t have to be vertical: You can choose to make ‘lateral’ or ‘lattice’ moves within a large organisation, moving horizontally or diagonally to new functions, roles, countries and more to gather a wider set of experiences. You can also practise what’s known as ‘intrapreneurship’ a.k.a. leading innovative projects or new ventures within a larger organisation, creating opportunities for leadership and career growth without leaving the company.

  

• Great climbers are usually doing more than one thing: you won’t get different results by doing the same thing as everyone else. Great ladder climbers are often innovators in disguise, doing things differently and combining ladder climbing with other strategies to make an outsized impact (subscribe to get the whole series & learn about other strategies).

Our favourite highlights from Pano Christou 💡

1. On imposter syndome:
   
   Identifying him as a potential leader his bosses sent him to Harvard Business School in 2018.
   
   Initially, he felt elements of imposter syndrome until he realised he knew as much if not more than the theoreticians, as he’d actually worked double shifts and got up at 5am to open his store.

   “I found that so much that I’d picked up on the hoof over the years was verified in an academic manner. Maybe it professionalised someone who’d been a bit rough around the edges. It boosted my confidence hugely so it was worth it. And the networking was priceless.”

   Read more.
   

2. On saying yes to opportunity.
   
   On the surface, you could say that Christou's entryway to management was down to being in the right place at the right time.
   

   “Somebody was meant to go on a course to become a shift supervisor. For some reason, they were fired,” the 45-year-old London native says—so he took up the empty spot.
   

   Much to his manager’s surprise, he passed the test to become a supervisor at McDonalds and within a week, he says, he was “rushed” into managing others much more experienced than himself.
   

   “I was 16 and all of a sudden I was managing the person that was training me two or three months ago, who was close to 30,” he says.
   

   In Christou’s eyes, his big break all came down to saying yes to any opportunity that came his way—even if he didn't feel ready for it yet.
   
   Read more.

3. On not getting ahead of yourself.
   
   Despite having a clear hunger for success from a young age, Christou says he never envisioned becoming Pret’s CEO until “a few months before” he was offered the role in 2019.
   

   “A few months after I became an assistant manager, I said, ‘I want to be a general manager,’ and then when I became store manager, after a couple of years, I thought, ‘I want to become an area manager,’ and so forth,” he says.
   

   Ultimately, looking forward with his feet firmly on the ground, instead of dreaming too big with his head in the clouds, is what he feels has set him up for success.
   

   “I've watched people that have been so fixated on the next role that they really take their eye off the current job they're doing,” Christou says. “My philosophy has always been if you do a great job, people will notice you."
   

   By focusing on excelling in his current job and being the best within his cohort—without “shortcutting" his peers or "stabbing them in the back"—the promotions swiftly followed.
   
   Read more.

Found this post helpful?

We created this series to help everyone realise their best careers, and we’d love you to share it with your friends, family, colleagues and networks 📣

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New here? Check out the other posts in the series 👇

• Part 1: 👋 Introducing the Career Strategy Series

• Part 2: 🪜 Ladder Climbing as a Strategy

• Part 3: 👩‍🎓 Controlled Supply as a Strategy

• Part 4: 🥇 Excellence in a Power Law Field as a Strategy

• Part 5: 🔍 Niche-ing as a Strategy

• Part 6: 🧱 Skill-stacking as a Strategy

• Part 7: 👷 Be A Generalist as a Strategy

• Part 8: 📊 The Portfolio Career as a Strategy

• Part 9: 📣 Building a Platform as a Strategy

• Part 10: 🌊 Wave-surfing as a Strategy

• Part 11: 🏗️ Adding Leverage as a Strategy

• Part 12: 🌏 Proximity as a Strategy

• Part 13: ⏱️ Sequencing as a Strategy

• Part 14: 🧪 Optimising for Discovery as a Strategy

• Part 15: ⚡ Do What Gives You Energy as a Strategy

• Part 16: 💹 Arbitrage as a Strategy

Welcome to The Career Strategy Series👇

• Part 1: 👋 Introducing the Career Strategy Series

• Part 2: 🪜 Ladder Climbing as a Strategy

• Part 3: 👩‍🎓 Controlled Supply as a Strategy

• Part 4: 🥇 Excellence in a Power Law Field as a Strategy

• Part 5: 🔍 Niche-ing as a Strategy

• Part 6: 🧱 Skill-stacking as a Strategy

• Part 7: 👷 Be A Generalist as a Strategy

• Part 8: 📊 The Portfolio Career as a Strategy

• Part 9: 📣 Building a Platform as a Strategy

• Part 10: 🌊 Wave-surfing as a Strategy

• Part 11: 🏗️ Adding Leverage as a Strategy

• Part 12: 🌏 Proximity as a Strategy

• Part 13: ⏱️ Sequencing as a Strategy

• Part 14: 🧪 Optimising for Discovery as a Strategy

• Part 15: ⚡ Do What Gives You Energy as a Strategy

• Part 16: 💹 Arbitrage as a Strategy

If you’ve ever felt:

• You’re stuck in a career rut not advancing,

• You want to change careers but don’t know what to,

• You know your dream job but not how to get there,

• You want a different work-life balance,

• You’re not learning and growing at work,

• Or you just want a system to help you realise your best career…

Then trust us, you are not alone.

Business Development Executive: “I am feeling the constant need to change roles as have never specialised in one thing and lost at what to do”

Communications Manager for a Government Department: “Trying to decide on next steps & how I can do my best work, I am not doing it now :)”

Senior Management Consultant: “I've reached a point in my job where I am confident in delivering good work, but I'm not interested in this area long term, and keen to build skills that will keep me relevant”

Operations Manager: “Teach me tools, tips & techniques in career pivots - how to think about them, how to navigate them, how to put your best foot forward (and confidently!), how to discover your potential”

Senior Marketing Executive: “I'm looking to make a career switch but I'm not sure what industry to go into and what skills I have to switch with.”

Venture Capitalist: “[my role] in a VC firm is a narrow role, I'd like to explore where the skills transfer as a future-proofing exercise.”

Senior Corporate Counsel at a Major Consumer Brand: “I’d like to transition to more purposeful career”

Re-Entering the Workforce: “I'm looking to re-enter the workforce after spending 4+ years running my own business and studying for an MBA. I have a lot of skills but I'm finding it hard to know which jobs to apply for and at what level.”

Looking For Work: “I have had many jobs, and find interesting things but always opportunistically, and need to be able to understand what will suit me long term to craft decisions and directions.”

VP of Product: “Interested in hearing more about this in particular as I'm planning a shift in my career (from full time product leader position to more fractional engagements e.g. consulting, coaching, writing, advising)”

🤷🏽 Why isn’t the classic career advice working?

1. A lot of career advice is tactical, not strategic.

   
   There’s an infinite number of articles on how to ace the interview, write a resume, refine your personal brand or run a project.

   
   These can help you refine your low-level tactics - getting from A to B a bit more efficiently - but they won’t help you decide on high-level dilemmas like whether you want to go from A to B, C or D.

   
   And they don’t answer the questions that keep us up at night - like where to make our big, hard-to-reverse investments of time, energy and money.

2. A lot of career advice is anecdotal.

   
   Read any profile of a famous figure, and you’ll get the impression that there’s one ‘recipe for success’ which they alone perfected.
   
   But these narratives are often from a different time, based on a single person who might have different strengths & preferences to you, and try to shape a messy reality into a neat package with hindsight.
   
   They’re just one data point, not a complete answer.

3. Careers are actually an extremely modern phenomenon - much of the knowledge base on having fulfilling careers is still to be created.
   

   Cue: an extremely simplified history of labour markets.
   
   For most of human history, we had no choice about our place in the social order (born a peasant, die a peasant)…
   
   And then a lucky few got to become tradesmen and apprentices in a small number of available trades…
   
   And then with the rise of mass public education systems in the early 20th century, a wider group of (still mostly white dudes) could train in a chosen profession to join companies & climb the ladder until retirement.
   
   But it’s really only been in the last few decades that a diverse group of people have existed in a labour markets which are mobile enough to think about evolving and changing their careers.

   
   And so while ‘the workforce’ is studied in many academic disciplines, from industrial psychology to labour economics & education, there is a big gap around topics like the optimal career strategy for individuals.
   
   Especially compared to the quality of answers we have in fields like medicine - which can have an equally huge impact on our wellbeing - we’re still playing catchup in studying careers.

🚏 So how do you figure out the right career strategy for you?

I struggled with this for a long time.

My academic training was as a social scientist, which means I used real-world data to develop models that help explain everything from the politics of debt and gun control to predicting leadership spills in Parliament.

So after years of feeling overwhelmed whenever I thought about my career dilemmas, I did what I know best: build a data set and looked for patterns 🤓

I studied the careers of dozens of people I found inspiring & impactful, reading everything I could find about their characteristics, histories, time allocation, mistakes, advice and more - then turning into a huge spreadsheet.

A small selection of my data points👇

These strategies all had different upside and downside risks.

Some are great fits for certain fields and not so good for others.

Many people would layer strategies together, or deploy different ones at different points of their career.

But I found it incredibly useful to have a framework I could use to think through my career decisions and stop feeling paralysed by them.

And when we broke down a selection of 10 of the strategies at Blackbird’s Sunrise Festival, paired with stories of cool individuals whose careers embodied each one, we discovered that other people appreciated it too*👇

*while encouraging us to cram less content into a 30 minute talk, very fair 🤣

🎉 So we want to share them with you.

We’ve now had so many people reach out asking us for a copy of the presentation that we made the call to share it.

New here? Explore the rest of the series 👇

• Part 1: 👋 Introducing the Career Strategy Series

• Part 2: 🪜 Ladder Climbing as a Strategy

• Part 3: 👩‍🎓 Controlled Supply as a Strategy

• Part 4: 🥇 Excellence in a Power Law Field as a Strategy

• Part 5: 🔍 Niche-ing as a Strategy

• Part 6: 🧱 Skill-stacking as a Strategy

• Part 7: 👷 Be A Generalist as a Strategy

• Part 8: 📊 The Portfolio Career as a Strategy

• Part 9: 📣 Building a Platform as a Strategy

• Part 10: 🌊 Wave-surfing as a Strategy

• Part 11: 🏗️ Adding Leverage as a Strategy

• Part 12: 🌏 Proximity as a Strategy

• Part 13: ⏱️ Sequencing as a Strategy

• Part 14: 🧪 Optimising for Discovery as a Strategy

• Part 15: ⚡ Do What Gives You Energy as a Strategy

• Part 16: 💹 Arbitrage as a Strategy

And if you’re finding the series useful, we recommend sharing it with others!

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