On his podcast Akimbo, Seth Godin recently fielded a question (at 20:53), from a 35 year old lawyer contemplating a career change, and beholden to the prior investments he made to reach his current role.
Seth's answer tied together the main ideas of two of his recent podcast episodes.
Sunk costs explain our tendency to allow spending in the past to invade our thinking about what's best in the present and for the future. The difficulty arises for us because it's personal.</strong> Because we've already spent our money or time on something, we have a harder time letting it go when further investment in it is no longer the best decision than if we had no prior investment in it.
You're It (The power (and the myth) of getting picked
The old way you succeeded was to get picked by a gatekeeper, by someone who had the power to let the few in and keep the masses out. What's obvious is this: It's hard to get picked. Another thing that's obvious: It feels good and validating to get picked. And so we still have people forming lines in order to get picked. What's slightly less obvious: The people doing the picking don't have the power they used to. Because of the internet, there are more channels than ever before. Because of the internet, there are more creators than ever before. This creates a new set of real opportunities and real challenges, but because of these new realities, trying to get picked these days makes the least sense.
Highlights of Seth's response with commentary from me:
"The twin curses of our century are the curse of freedom and the curse of choice. We have the ability to connect to more than a billion people. The question of "So what should we do?" is daunting.” "We have to choose where we will put ourselves on the line and be able to say, I made this”.
How and why does this happen? At a subconscious level, we take the past of least fear. For book smart people, grad school was the easy way out of undergrad because for most people, you're not sure what to do. "You look the freedom in the eye and you blink and so the thing to do is the thing you're good at, which is school... three or four years later you're done with that and now you have to go earn back all of those hundreds of thousands of dollars of tuition money that you have spent. But that's okay because you can go to the placement office and get picked."Whoever picks you gets something in return. For a law firm it is billable hours. You bill over 2,000 hours each year and after 7 years of grinding it out, you still may not make partner. Then what? It's all a sunk cost.
So what are we to do?
This is where Godin's brilliance comes in. You have to deal with reality. You have to make sense of your story in a way that deals with reality and is kind to yourself, and you have to change. In his own words:
"You did it, it happened to the you of yesterday. It is a gift from the you of yesterday to the you of today and now what will you choose to do with it? What you can choose to do with it is embrace it tightly and continue to do it more even though it doesn't feed your soul, even though there isn't any growth in it for you. There might be for some but not for you. Or you could look at it as the gift that it is the one that gave you some savings. So, when they gave you some reputation and the one that gave you some wisdom, so with that gift from your past self, what will you do with that wisdom? Because if you have the freedom to use it any way you choose, how will you choose?”
And last, the connection between certainty and taking responsibility. For a season, you can trade the negative feelings of taking responsibility for the positive feeling of living off the certainty some else provides, but eventually something has to give. To take responsibility is to give up certainty. And you will feel exposure, discomfort, and fear. The alternative is to take certainty and avoid responsibility. The only problem is this: "It's getting more and more difficult to find worthy work where someone else owns the means of production and simply tells us what to do."
Godin concludes by saying:
”So if your question is, “How can I be sure?” The answer is you cannot be sure you weren't sure when you went to law school, but someone else took responsibility. They said, give me that money and we will be sure, but now you have to take the responsibility, the responsibility that comes from not knowing, of simply choosing to serve, serving an audience, a group, people who will pay you for the work you do in the process of serving them. You might find your calling, but if you don't look for it, you never will.”
