Career Advice for My 20-Year-Old Daughter
Tags: Work, Parenting, Entrepreneurship, Self, Career Advice

Prioritise being happy in what you do, because a career is a long time

We spend a lot of time working and while this sounds like a cliché, it’s true that happiness is what matters. You don’t necessarily get to choose where you work or who you work with. You’d better believe that even the most ideal-seeming job is going to be a drag at times.

With all this in mind, you’d better ensure that you choose work that makes you happy for most of the time, otherwise you’ll spend a lot of days struggling to get up in the mornings.

Money is just one reason for working — Don’t make it into the only thing that you pursue

I was convinced when I started working, that I could do anything asked of me as long as the pay was good. I completely underestimated just how fleeting the sense of fulfilment is from getting a big pay-cheque. What’s more enduring is the sense of worth you get from the work you do, and how you feel about doing it.

Creativity, a sense of meaning, a belief that your work is of value and service of others, being able to express yourself and your values through what you do and freedom to choose how you do your job, all count massively.

Having autonomy about how and where I work has also been an enormous factor for me. When I’ve had to commute daily to a certain location and have had to clock-on and off at set hours, I’ve found the structure to be constraining and frustrating. Having the freedom to be able to work at home when I’ve wanted and being trusted to get the job done while working the hours it requires, have both made me feel empowered and valued.

Money can quickly become an assumed part of life rather than a motivating factor. After a certain point money ceases to be a motivator for many, once their living expenses are met. Freedom, favourable working conditions and the ability to direct time as you see fit all count for much more.

I’ve written extensively about why I enjoy working from home. I don’t waste time commuting, I can fit in my side-hustle around my day job and it’s easier to fit in things like exercise around work which also enriches my quality of life. It won’t be for everyone, but I mention this as an example of where working conditions can outweigh the perceived importance of merely striving to make more money.

Don’t extend your living costs and become too dependent upon your income

Nothing strips work of enjoyment and meaning more than feeling like you’re stuck in a job and have to keep doing it whether you want to or not, merely because you are dependent on the paycheck to meet your commitments. I spent many years of my working life treating each payrise as an opportunity to increase my standard of living and my committed outgoings as a result. Bigger houses, fancier cars, hire-purchase agreements and indulgent spending meant that I became more and more reliant on my salary as it increased through my career.

If I’d realised earlier that ‘stuff’ doesn’t equate to happiness, and that there are few pleasures as great as knowing that you are financially stable and have a decent chunk of money saved and invested, then I would certainly have invested more and spent less.

Beyond a certain basic level we don’t really need more in life. When we get a pay rise this is an opportunity to start saving more with the goal of accumulating enough money that we can theoretically retire from work earlier. If I had my time again, I’d prioritise that over consumer spending. Being free of work earlier in life as a result of having built up a solid financial buffer is about as close as we can possibly get to buying more time in our lives.

Photo by Saulo Mohana on Unsplash

Don’t underestimate the value of boring old stability and safety

Safe and stable will mean different things to different people. The definition evolves as we get older, and when we’re young we might value this less than we will once we start a family.

When I started working, exhilaration and excitement were all I really wanted (besides money of course). I quickly found out that what I actually needed was a degree of stability and comfort in my life; the sort of stability that comes from having a lifestyle that I can comfortably afford, and enough money to save and invest regularly. Unfortunately it’s taken most of the last 20-years to achieve that state and I spent most of that time craving and chasing it.

If you can turn that on its head and build that stability from the ground up, I think it will serve you well.

Not everyone wants to be married with a home and 2.4 kids by the time they’re 30. Whatever level of stability you require, whether that’s enough money saved to fund your basic living costs for a year, or enough money for a plane ticket home from whatever corner of the world you decide to make home, prioritise putting that in place from the off.

Your income doesn’t have to come from a single source

I believe it will become more commonplace and more widely understood in future that people build portfolio careers and generate income from multiple sources rather than relying on one job for all their income.

My parents always advocated saving and investing as well as the power of property to generate income, but for many years into my early adult life I didn’t appreciate that this was about more than just making a provision for retirement. Had I embraced the idea sooner I might have been less dependent on my day-job than I remain to this day.

I’ve established a few small sources of income that now generate money for me regardless of whether I do anything with them or not. I’ve written and self-published books on Amazon, launched online training courses on sites like Udemy and I write regularly here on Medium. All of these generate evergreen passive income and I’m working hard to grow these. I also have my day job and do a small amount of freelance writing and ghost-writing in the evenings, to make extra money.

There are new opportunities to make money emerging all the time via technology, and there’s no better time to leverage and exploit these trends than when they first come about — be an early adopter. In recent years, trends that I’ve dabbled with have included:

Podcasts using Anchor.fm

Self-publishing on Amazon

Amazon Merch

Becoming a Fulfilled By Amazon retailer

Blogging on Medium

Creating a YouTube Channel

Email Marketing

Not all of these have been successful or made money. The key thing is to give them a go though, not just to dabble but to pick one of the many business opportunities that exist and to give it a good few months of effort to see what is possible. Each one that contributes $1 every month has the possibility to grow and scale over time.

Success takes a long time

Reviewing and retracing the steps taken in my career and in my side-hustles it’s difficult to identify any landmark moments when my fortunes radically changed. Success on even a small scale has taken time.

Progress is reflected in the compounded results from many average days of work put in over many years. There are many failures that have been necessary to yield the results that eventually lead to success.

This isn’t like the world of celebrity, where stars seem to rise from nowhere. Interestingly though, while those who are famous just for being famous seem to become so overnight (and fade away just as quickly), those who are genuinely successful and accomplished in their field, have usually taken many years to reach that state:

“I start early and I stay late, day after day, year after year. It took me 17 years and 114 days to become an overnight success” -Lionel Messi

Very few people start out in their career without a desire to progress, improve and succeed on at least some level. Unfortunately, many of us do underestimate how long it will take and how difficult it is to make this happen.

I think it’s unfortunate that for my daughter’s generation there are numerous factors conspiring against them to get what they want as quickly as they expect it. This video from Simon Sinek puts it better than I ever could:

It might be tedious and demoralising to think of the time it will take to succeed and to notionally ‘make it’. With lengthening lifespans and growing competition in the global workforce, this trend seems more likely to increase rather than decrease the time and effort that success demands. It would be as well to prepare for this.

Summing up

As I consider the advice for my daughter, while on one hand the situation could seem bleak (for the increased competition from a global workforce for example) I think the possibilities and opportunities for making money in unconventional ways, make this an exciting time to be entering the world of work.

I have at least another ten years (or more likely, twenty) before I hope to be able to stop working. I will be exploiting as many of these as I can for myself too.

I’m excited to share this journey with her.