Choosing a career: J. K. Rowling or baker

 

A profession that is scalable is one in which you are not paid by the hour and thus subject to the limitations of the amount of your labor. It is a very simple way to differentiate among professions. Some professions, such as dentists or massage professionals, cannot be scaled: there is a cap on the number of patients or clients you can see in a given period of time. You work by the hour and are (generally) paid by the hour. .Furthermore your presence is necessary for the service you provide.  Your revenue, no matter how highly paid you are, depends on your continuous efforts. Moreover, this kind of work is largely predictable: it will vary, but not to the point of making the income of a single day more significant than the rest of your life

 

Other professions allow you to add zeroes to your output (and your income), if you do well, at little or no extra effort. This is an idea person who sells an intellectual product in the form of a transaction or a piece of work and the former is a labor person who sells you his or her work. On Wall Street, a trader does the same amount of work while buying hundred or a million shares. J.K. Rowling does not have to write each Harry Potter book every time someone wants to read it, while a baker needs to bake every single piece of bread to satisfy each additional customer

 

The idea person’s job sounds like a better choice than the labor person’s job but is there a downside. Most dentists, massage professionals and bakers (labor types) can do reasonably well, or even very well, over a thirty years career. They will never get rich in a single day. Hard to find a dentist who is consistently without patients. It’s a totally different story (pun intended!) with the ideas types like authors. For every J.K. Rowling, selling millions of books, thousands upon thousands of wannabe writers have tried and failed.

 

This is not to discourage bold choices but to know the odds. About twenty five years ago, my two kids were in their teens and we were living in India. They were both in school and getting good grades. They were also were good at their favorite sport, tennis.  Good enough to play in India’s junior national circuit. I dreamt that I would find the resources so that, someday, one of them would hold the trophy on center court Wimbledon! Then one summer, I took my wife and kids to Mumbai for our summer vacation. There, we visited an outlier friend. He had quit school to become an entrepreneur and became so successful that his brother and he are extraordinarily wealthy. Conversation turned to plans for my kids and I expected him to encourage me to go all out to support my kids becoming the next Federer or Serena.  After all he did not get to where he was getting paid by the hour! Instead, he said “Consider the odds of their becoming the champions you are hoping for. They are very good students so focus on their studies.” I took that advice, we migrated to America, and today they pursue successful careers in computer design and medicine.

 

Do dream and pursue those dreams. Just be smart about it. How about having your cake and eating it too! Pivot to being an idea person writing a book, after securing yourself financially by working as a labor person?

This post was mostly an idea from Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book The Black Swan