Comment by peterlk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by peterlk | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of one of my favorite talks of all time[1].

Applied to careers, I take the talk as implying that trying things is the secret. After a certain level of experience in your career, you'll know whether you like it. Branching off of that, it might even be the right thing to do to find a new career.

One of the best pieces of advice I have ever received is "successful people do stuff. It doesn't matter what that stuff is, just do stuff and you'll eventually be successful". Some people will be luckier than others, and be successful at their stuff at a higher ratio, but overall, the ratio is about the same, and you just need to keep doing stuff.

Also, one of my favorite illustrations/cartoons of all time[2] speaks to this point. Basically, if you pursue the same career for your entire life, you're probably wasting your time. once you have your x,000 hours of work in, do something new where you can cross-apply that knowledge into domains that need it.

[1]https://youtu.be/l_F9jxsfGCw

[2]http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2722

Edit: sloppy link formatting

> Applied to careers, I take the talk as implying that trying things is the secret. After a certain level of experience in your career, you'll know whether you like it.

You'll know whether your like it, but it may be too late to change. And some careers require a long initial investment. Let say I graduate in CS/Math at 23 and that I work 3-4 years in a company, is it too late to become an MD? or start a PhD? some people manage to do it but it's difficult.

I interpret it like so: there are careers which require a very particular training path and careers which do not. Additionally, many training paths are widely applicable to several distinct industries.

If you graduate with a degree in math or computer science, you can work in just about any division of tech, you can work in just about any division of finance (maybe not traditional investment banking, but most analyst/trading/quant roles), you can work in certain applications of biology, chemistry, physics, astronomy, genetics or other sciences, you can work in many areas of advertising, you can work in many areas of marketing...you could start your own company, you could publish a novel...frankly you could do just about everything other than be a lawyer or a doctor.

Writing all this out, it actually sounds like the optimal career path is to get formal education and training in the most difficult or restricted fields, because you'll still have so many options anyway. Then you can cross-pollinate your knowledge in other fields.

I worked for 3 yrs (as a joint EE/CS engineer) after finishing my Bachelors degree in physics at age 21.

I went back to school at age 24, for PhD (in experimental condensed matter physics). On one hand it was hard going from earning a nice salary to very little stipend. But on the other hand I came in freshly determined, where some of my fellow incoming students just in from their undergrad days weren't as into it.

I was certainly above average age for the incoming student class, but there were a few other students in similar situation, and some had worked even longer before coming back to school.

I also changed fields again afterwards. Towards the end of my PhD I got a bit fed up with he daily realities of life as an experimental physicist, and almost by chance found my way into an internship as a quant in the financial sector. I enjoyed the internship greatly, and afterwards wrote up my thesis and then started working at the same company.

It's interesting because up until around 1-2 yrs before that internship, I never would have thought I'd work in finance. I had no interest from the little bit about finance that I knew. But one day in supplementary course notes during a many-body field theory class, there was a little aside where the prof derived the Black Scholes equation using a Feynman path integrals and it just blew my mind. I had no previous idea there was so much formalism underlying financial products.

> is it too late to become an MD? or start a PhD?

There was a grey haired PhD student in my department. He told me he had built and run an investment bank in Los Angeles for most of his life then moved to Cambridge (UK) to pursue a PhD in engineering and he was having a blast. It was probably easier for him than the young ones since his kids were grown up and he already had a career and money.

Post-scarsity, I can't help but be excited at the fact the people will work on what they really want, instead of what they are pushed towards for $$ reasons.

Yes, a guy who ran an investment bank for most of their life probably had a lot of options available to him.

There's a section in the article about to try explore while minimising the costs.

My wife's uncle had a successful if unassuming career as a civil engineer. Then one day, shortly after his 50th birthday, he decided that he never really wanted to be a civil engineer and that his real passion was social anthropology. By 62 he had a PhD in social anthropology, 3 or 4 published books in the field, was generally considered an authority in his niche and split his time between writing and lecturing part time at the university. He worked until he was 70 and enjoyed every minute of it far more than his previous career. Even at 50 it's not unreasonable to assume that you have anywhere from 25-50% of your working life ahead of you, don't let a decision you made as a kid get in the way of getting the most out of those years.

I like to hear such stories, it's inspiring. Sometimes we don't really know what's possible until we see other people doing it.

"Trying things" is good advice for most of the major decisions in life.

For example, buying a home: if you've rented a bunch of places, it becomes clear what you want. You may notice that choosing a flat gets easier as you get older.

This also explains why so many people find relationships so difficult: most people only have a few (some only 1 or 2) serious relationships in their life. There's little opportunity to work out what you like.

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