Most career advice is a big old pile of horseshit.
Not because the people handing out advice are numpties (although I’m sure some of them are).
But because by the time they hand out their advice
(based on what worked for them – that’s what advice is, after all), the goalposts have shifted.
Perhaps this wasn’t the case in the 1960s. But what worked in the halcyon days of the 1990s or even 2020 is like ancient history today.
I’ve split the last century into 7 eras and 7 questions. And I hereby present my back-of-a-napkin guide to the last 100 years of careers via the question that dominated each era.
Starting with the question most employees were asking 100 years ago:
*** Can I find work? We’ve hopped in our time machine to 1920s – 1940s. These two decades were ravaged by war and depression and work was all about survival. After World War 2, things looked a bit different though and up popped employers who could offer longer term security. Which meant the question then became:
*** Will my work keep me? i.e. the worker gives loyalty to their job and gets stability in return. The classic job for life. All well & good until it wasn’t. Which in the late 1970s led to:
*** How high can I climb? This is when employers stopped rewarding loyalty and started to
reward ambition. So what mattered was your job title and climbing the ladder. That lasted until mass lay-offs began about 20 years later. So naturally, the question became:
*** How do I stay valuable? Then in 2008 a tiny financial wobble came along called the Global Financial Crisis which seriously dented society’s trust in companies
and the system itself. So people started asking who they could trust. Unsurprisingly, they decided the only entity they could trust….was themselves! So post crisis, the next question became:
*** What can I build? Enter the era of the side hustle, gig economy and creator economy. But then another global curveball called “Covid” came
along which got people pondering big topics like time, family and what life was actually for. And so the post-Covid question became:
*** How does work fit my life? And how can I protect my time, my energy, my family, my wellbeing, my health and everything else that matters to me?
Which brings us to 2026.
Yes, the previous questions are still floating around the dusty office corridors.
But there’s a new and
more deliberate question on worker’s lips today:
*** How can this all work together?
This is NOT the model where life collapses into work. Instead, it’s the model where our job, our interests,
our skills, our knowledge, our experience and our way of making a difference all coalesce into one.
This is something I’m figuring out in real time.
In fact, my writing, my coaching and my day job feel like they’re
in symbiosis with one another more than ever. It’s almost impossible to separate them. My job feeds my writing/coaching and my writing/coaching feeds my job. And my colleagues, my readers and my clients are all the better for it. All boats are rising with the tide.
Of course, I’m not saying everyone will want to ask how they can make their work
regenerative.
But I am saying that if you want a greater return on the hours you work, if you want work to stop feeling like “lost time” and if you want to make the most of your job without having to fall in love with it, this is now a very real option.
Lots to chew on here.
And while there’s no big takeaway or pithy one-liner to wrap things up today, I do think it pays for corporate bods to keep questions like these in mind.
Not just so you can help the colleague sitting next to you make sense of their career if they ever ask for a spot of advice.
But so you don’t spend your career chasing the answer to a question you never wanted to ask.
If you’d like some help figuring out the right questions for you, you might like this:
https://waitinglist.followingfulfilment.com
To fulfilment,
Tom