Starter Career | What To Do When You Don't Know What To Do In Life

Hey Everybody,

Marcus here.

One needs to learn to follow before one can lead. No one starts as a general in the army. No, you start as a rank-and-file private. You are taught the ropes over years of mentorship by more experienced people and then eventually, with sufficient experience, you attain a rank where you are allowed to make decisions.

Where this seems obvious in the context of the army, I think this has been forgotten in the online space.

The YouTube hustle culture pushes the entrepreneurial mindset as if this is some sort of viable starting point. Few and far between are people who possess anything resembling leadership skills when they are young.

But today, unless you are your own boss, you are painted as a slave of the system. There is implicit shame built into hustle culture. You are made to feel like a loser if you are not immediately some sort of business owner straight out of school.

The notion of a dead-end job is also a damaging concept. I worked a dead-end job when I was in university. I was a washroom attendant. That dead-end job provided me with enough money to hold me over until I brought up my skills to be able to pivot to software.

Then, I worked for other people for years before I attempted my own business. My first software business in some sense succeeded. I managed to sell it and cash out for a non-trivial amount. But it was not fuck you money.

I went back to work for others after that. Looking back on that software company, I see a massive missed opportunity. It could have been much bigger than what my leadership skills and experience allowed at the time.

Simply put. I was only good enough to achieve a certain scale on my own. Reinjecting myself into employment for someone else bought me time again. It was a holding pattern. I worked for others until I figured out where I wanted to go next.

I hated my job in software, but I had not yet decided on what else to do. However, the money I was making was sufficient to, over a decade, accumulate a war chest. This war chest had no specific designation. I saved because I could. I saved with the hope I would find a purpose for that money sooner or later.

Then, finally, I pivoted to music. Music turned out to be where I should have been all along. However, I was never allowed to do it. Being a musician is a joke in my family. When I switched to music, I had to also go to war with my family. No one supported me.
When I was 16, I was told I was just a stupid teenager who didn’t know anything about life and music was just be throwing my life away.
When I was near 40, I was told I am too old to switch to music and I was just throwing my life away. It seems like there never could come a time where anyone in my family would ever accept the idea of me being a musician. However, the difference at 40 was that I was no longer under the shame-based control of my parents.

There was no version of this story where I could have psychologically won this war when I was 16. It was only near 40 that I had grown sufficiently armed in inner strength to fight that battle and win.

I knew since I was 16 I wanted to be a musician. But due to the environment I was in, I was forced to push that out of my mind. It took me over 20 years to remember that it was always music I wanted to do.

That's the crux of it. I knew what I wanted to do with my life all along yet somehow it was still possible for my life circumstances to suppress this awareness from me and set me on a different . Had I forced the issue at 16 it would have most likely resulted in failure. Even today, with the experience of someone past 40 and a decade of leadership experience, running a band is tough. But the conditions for achieving success have never been better for me then they are today.

On YouTube, we see hustle culture gurus pushing their own way of life onto the masses like my parents pushed their way of life onto me. They use shame to hawk their wares. Shame masked as encouragement and motivation. Their masked message is: “You are a loser unless you live as we do.”

No, you don't need to run your own business or be your own boss. It's a pain in the ass. It's an enormous sacrifice that requires a great deal of up front risk. Being your own boss means being responsible for the survival of the business. As a rank and file employee you could care less about the enormous amount of details a business owner needs to worry about. You need only concern yourself with the narrow scope of your responsibilities. You get to keep a great deal of mental space for other things. Things not connected to your job.

Why are so many youTubers burning out? Because they are living the dream of being their own boss. Yet somehow the dream is not as sustainable as they imagined. The costs have exceeded their perceived value of the occupation.