Americans Lose Faith That Hard Work Leads to Economic Gains, WSJ-NORC Poll Finds

Pretty much all of the good stuff I've done in my life have resulted from going off the beaten path. AP courses and SAT scores are the core of the beaten path, so everyone is competing for the same stuff. But the world is big, actually, and there's incredible opportunities for meaningful work once you start looking around more broadly. These sorts of jobs aren't necessarily "stable" employment, but I've never once felt precarious. Rather, I find that doing meaningful work with concrete impact tends to create more opportunities dynamically - if you can demonstrate that you get shit done, people will want your help getting their shit done. And if the work you choose is meaningful, it is very easy to make the case that you've done good and important things.

Capitalism allows trading money for solutions to problems: The massive problem in this system is that people and groups with less money end up with a surplus of problems. There are schools that need help with their tech stacks. There are legal aid groups who need better ways to process massive amounts of text. There are kids all over the world who need better ways to learn math, languages, etc. Plugging in and helping people solve their concrete problems is IMHO the best way to get started.

Your CV indicates you graduated in 2006, so effectively into a different world. You should consider carefully how the world has changed for young people entering the workforce before dispensing advice, because they find themselves in a very different landscape to you and advice like "Plugging in and helping people solve their concrete problems is IMHO the best way to get started" is trite and frankly insulting.

While I agree with you on everything, this doesnt really work for everyone

1. It requires a level of maturity and wisdom most recent graduates do not have (I certainly didn't have this when I graduated). Despite all my entrepreneurship courses in college, working at a dot-com startup, etc, I wouldn't have been able to do this out of college.

2. Not everyone is going to be enterprising. Historically, we've provided a path forward to smart people who just want a line job, not start/sell a business

So when did you graduate?

Sorry you feel insulted.

Lemme try to put it another way, because I am suggesting a different way to think about the idea of work, which /also/ was not the dominant way of thinking about things when I was a student. The notion that you go get credentials in order to get a job standing in a spot and doing a thing and get paid is... perhaps fine, for the trades. But, as I mentioned above, the beaten path is saturated, and you will find yourself in what is essentially a lottery system. (Perhaps most of what has changed since 2006 is that the odds of the lottery have gotten worse...)

Alternatively, you can think of yourself as a problem-solver for hire. You might be more or less specialized as a problem solver, but ultimately, you're asking someone to pay you money in exchange for regularly engaging in creative problem solving to make their business/NGO/whatever run better. Plenty of people come out of school or whatever and have no problem solving ability. And some people create more problems than they solve.

How do you prove that you're worth hiring then? With a portfolio of problems that you have successfully solved. How do you get that portfolio? By plugging into some area you're interested in and solving people's concrete problems.

You note "the beaten path is saturated" - how do you reconcile that with two facts:

1. Fact 1: There is unusually high unemployment rate for new STEM graduates, including those with advanced degrees like MS and PhDs

2. Fact 2: Our politicians and business leaders are noting there is a "massive shortage of workers in STEM" and thus we need to import hundreds of thousands of foreign workers to meet the demand.

How can both be true and in line with your position?

These are perfectly consistent with what I'm saying. There is a market for labor, and if what you're selling is your credentials, you're in a flooded commodity market and will have a bad time.

Fact one says, yes, the beaten path is saturated. Fact two says that business leaders and politicians will happily look for the cheapest variety of the commodity available to them.

My point ultimately is that you'll have a better time if you don't act like a commodity.

> Lemme try to put it another way, because I am suggesting a different way to think about the idea of work, which /also/ was not the dominant way of thinking about things when I was a student.

You don't need to restate your point. I understood and it's what's trite and insulting to new grads.

> Alternatively, you can think of yourself as a problem-solver for hire.

This isn't the alternative and hasn't been for a decade. It's absolutely mainstream thinking among students and new grads that the traditional career is dead and that they need to take alternative routes, one of the most common being to present themselves as "problem-solvers for hire", with personal brands, turning friends into networks, etc.

It's so common it's a trope, and of course the market of businesses who need problem-solvers for hire is absolutely saturated. It's a segment exploited by employers for cheap labour and terrible opportunities for progression as you're competing against so many people, many in LCOL areas.

So after their entire youth being told the same thing you're saying by podcasters, influencers, slightly older peers, etc and then arriving into a labour market which is absolutely barren, your advice is trite and it is insulting.

It's even worse than when challenged, you assume I must not get your profound advice and choose to reiterate it, instead of reflection on the possibility that the world and opportunities you enjoyed 20 years ago simply don't exist any more. Not that there aren't other opportunities.

> But, as I mentioned above, the beaten path is saturated, and you will find yourself in what is essentially a lottery system.

The irony of this comment.

> By plugging into some area you're interested in and solving people's concrete problems.

Yes, you and literally everyone else. It's almost ridiculous how out-of-touch this is.

> perhaps fine, for the trades.

As an aside, this is an absurdly arrogant comment.