Solicited Career Advice
Phil’s seven rules for career success
Ask an executive how to succeed in a corporation, they’ll tell you to work hard in school, get an entry level job at a top firm, ruffle no feathers, and work your way up the ladder.
Ask an entrepreneur how to build a business, they'll tell you to follow your passions, eat ramen noodles while bootstrapping, keep grinding, and product/market fit will come.
And if you ask a lottery winner how to get rich, they'll tell you to buy lotto tickets.
In other words, life advice tends to follow the same template: do what I did.
I’m thinking about all this because I got an invitation from Wolf Financial to join their Twitter spaces event tomorrow. I love doing these spaces and podcasts because I get to pontificate about markets without seeing the people around me roll their eyes and reach for their phones. Show me any brilliant or funny public commentator, and I’ll bet you a million dollars they’ve got a spouse and kids at home completely exhausted by what they have to say.
Anyway, I got invited onto this twitter spaces event and I asked what the topic was, assuming it would land somewhere in between investing and entrepreneurship. But, surprise! The topic is career advice.
I’m used to giving all kinds of unsolicited advice. But solicited career advice, this is new to me. So this post is me organizing my thoughts for the talk tomorrow. Let’s see how this goes.
Ok, here they are. Phil’s seven rules for career success:
Earn then burn your cred
Sell wire hangers
Fail
Get Shit Done
Know them when they’re down and out
Become intellectually immature
Turn up the megaphone
Earn then burn your cred
You need to earn your credibility. Then you need to burn it, but I’ll get to that. First you gotta earn it.
Ben Hunt calls this getting your passport stamped. Here is how he describes it:
We live in a world of credentials. I’m not saying that’s a good thing or a bad thing. I’m just saying that it IS. The most important credential you can have today is some sort of degree from an elite university. It doesn’t matter if it’s an undergraduate or graduate degree, and I’m not going to argue with anyone about whether a school is “elite” or not. The second most important credential for a young person is a 2+ year stint with an elite institution in an elite city. Again, don’t @ me. There are work-arounds and effective substitutes for both of these credentialing mechanisms. But your path will be immeasurably easier if you get your Team Elite passport stamped NOW.
Sound advice. And if school ain’t for you, there are plenty of other ways to earn your credibility. You can add Comma, Space, CFA to your name. You can self-publish a book. Be creative, there are a million things you can do to stand out. But you gotta do one of them.
Remember this lesson from Crash Davis:
Your shower shoes have fungus on them. You'll never make it to the bigs with fungus on your shower shoes. Think classy, you'll be classy. If you win 20 in the show, you can let the fungus grow back and the press will think you're colorful. Until you win 20 in the show, however, it means you are a slob.
Earning your credential, getting your passport stamped, winning 20 in The Show, it’s all the same thing. Do it, and then you can be yourself.
I got my passport stamped by spending six years as a Managing Director at NYSE. Does it matter that their job title hierarchy had VP above MD back then? No, it doesn’t. I still get to drop that title at meetings, and drop it at every chance is what I do.
Get it done and get it out of the way so you can become who you are. And then burn those credentials down.
Graduating from Harvard is cool. Dropping out of Harvard to build a startup is cooler.
Winning 20 in The Show is cool. Doing it on LSD is cooler.
You can’t stay stuck in time. You can’t cling to some credential you earned early on. You can’t stop growing. Evolve, and burn those credentials down.
Sell wire hangers
My brother Aryeh has this theory. You want to make real money? Sell wire hangers.
The theory goes that every smart and ambitious overachiever goes into finance or law or whatever. They crowd into these super competitive arenas and fight to the death for scraps.
At the same time, in every city, there’s some lazy slob who inherited his father’s wire hanger business. He sells wire hangers to every dry cleaner without any competition, makes a killing, and works twenty hours per week. Be that guy.
I’m not that guy. I’m killing myself for sixty basis points. This is the life I’ve chosen. My advice to anyone else: don’t sell ETFs. Sell wire hangers.
Anyway, it turns out that just last week I was talking to Aryeh about his wire hanger theory. My friend Jared Dillian wrote an excellent book, Those Bastards, and in it he has a chapter called Play the Tuba.
It’s the same idea. Nobody plays the Tuba. But for those who do, they’ve got an open field to join the band of their choosing.
Play the tuba. If you want to be successful, do something nobody else is doing.
-Jared Dillian
Fail
A brilliant friend of mine is launching a startup. It’s going to be huge. And just yesterday she texted me, asking for a pep talk to help her click send on her first public email announcement. Fear of failure has killed more would-be businesses than lack of capital, ideas, or anything else.
Fuck fear of failure. Just fail. You’ll be fine. Fail and fail again. Get comfortable with it.
You can’t do something new and skip the step of being a beginner. You can’t speak a new language without sounding like an idiot the first time you say foreign words. You can’t learn a new skill if you’re afraid of asking dumb questions. You can’t grow unless you can fail.
Be willing to look foolish, be willing to be mocked. Just get out of your own head and give zero fucks. Embrace that state of mind. And if you can’t get past it, read this.
Get Shit Done
One of the best things I’ve ever read came from twitter user demonetizedblog. I think about this constantly, and I’m just going to republish his words:
How do you construct an aura of irreplaceability?
Get good at stuff other people don’t want to do (because it is hard or unpleasant)
Get good at stuff other people can’t do (at least not without significant training)
Really this is simple supply and demand stuff.
Early in your career the most important thing (the ONLY important thing) is to demonstrate to anyone who matters that you have the ability to Get Shit Done.
When you have earned a reputation for Getting Shit Done among the people who control access to money and opportunity in an organization, you are on the road to freedom.
When you sincerely believe, deep down inside, that you have the ability to Get Shit Done, you are Free.
Freedom is realizing everything around you in business and life is built and operated by human beings who are about as intelligent and creative as you are, and therefore that you, too, have the power to build, create and destroy.
Freedom is about acquiring agency, in an almost spiritual sense.
That’s just perfect. I have nothing to add.
Know them when they’re down and out
My father was an actuary who became somewhat well known for managing insurance company demutualizations. How does one get into actuarial demutualizations? Good fucking question. And I asked him that once.
He told me that when he was young he went to an actuarial society conference. There was some other young actuary from France who flew in for the conference and didn’t know anyone there. My father met him, and sensed his discomfort at being the only foreigner at the event, so he made an effort to invite him to some events and introduce him around. And after that conference he forgot about him and didn’t hear from him again for 20 years.
And wouldn’t you know it, twenty years later, the French actuary was an insurance company CEO and needed an actuarial consultant in America, remembered my father, and hired him to consult on a complex transaction.
“Everything of note that I did after that was thanks to him. And it all happened because I was kind to him twenty years earlier one night at a conference.” That’s what my father told me.
We all know that business is driven by relationships. And it’s great to be kind to people and to help them out. But the fact is that when someone is on top they just aren’t going to notice it. And when someone is on the ropes, when they are looking for a job, when they ask for help out of need or desperation, that is the time to help! Don’t be a front runner. Don’t jump on bandwagons. Help them when they’re down and out.
Once I lived the life of a millionaire,
Spent all my money, I just did not care.
Took all my friends out for a good time,
Bought bootleg whiskey, champagne and wine.
Then I began to fall so low,
Lost all my good friends, I did not have nowhere to go.
I get my hands on a dollar again,
I'm gonna hang on to it till that eagle grins.
Cause no, no, nobody knows you
When you're down and out.
In your pocket, not one penny,
And as for friends, you don't have any.
When you finally get back up on your feet again,
Everybody wants to be your old long-lost friend.
Said it's mighty strange, without a doubt,
Nobody knows you when you're down and out.
Become intellectually immature
Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature.
-Tom Robbins
The key characteristics of immaturity are curiosity, and a disrespect of authority. And Man, what a time for that. There is so much information available on any topic, at any time, from any place. A curious person can learn about anything. More so than ever before. Experts are accessible. Source materials at your fingertips. If you are starting your career and not spending your evenings mastering ChatGPT, I don’t even know what to tell you. Be curious. Experiment. Learn. Disrespect the way things are done. Break down conventions. Figure it out.
Turn up the megaphone
Anyone can put up a twitter feed. Anyone can create a podcast. Anyone can write a substack. There are no barriers, there are no gatekeepers.
You know who has barriers? Corporations do. They have downside. They have businesses to protect, customers they can’t offend. They have to play defense. You don’t.
Get on offense. Learn to communicate. Learn to turn your voice into a megaphone. If it feels crowded now I promise you it will never again feel as uncrowded as it does today. Find an outlet for your voice, and work on mastering a form - any form - of communication.
And the size of your audience doesn’t matter. Whether you are anonymous or using your own name, it doesn’t matter. No doubt, it is hard to rise above the noise. But you owe it to yourself to practice, to figure it out. Because the rewards outweigh the risks by a factor of a million.
Everybody is one exceptional essay away from a flood of career opportunities
-David Perell
I’m not saying that building a social media following is a cheat code. It is not. It takes hard work and a long time of consistent content. But communication is the most vital business skill, and creative thought is one thing that AI will never be able to replace. Use those muscles, train those muscles, put your voice out in the world. Say what you gotta say. Define your brand. And do it at scale.