Many young people feel cheated in the job market.
You may have spent four years accumulating a nauseous amount of debt but have to work multiple jobs to pay your bills.
But it won’t be like that forever. Even in work that seems pointless, you’re building career capital — rare and valuable skills that will increase your worth and job opportunities in the future.
Cal Newport, an associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University details this concept in his 2012 book “So good they can’t ignore you.”
Newport explains why young people shouldn’t blindly chase their passion without the financial resources and career capital to back up their plan.
Control and freedom are seductive. Most people envy those who can travel the country and aren’t tied to a cubicle from 9-5.
But control without capital is useless. You control every hour of your day if you have no job, but you can’t eat or pay rent.
There’s an inverse relationship with time and value. When you’re young, you usually have much time but little capital.
Older people have more capital but less time and energy.
When you work fast food, you learn customer service and how to deal with unfriendly people.
You learn how to show up on time, work hard when you don’t feel like it, and eventually build up responsibilities and the foundation for your career.
Every day should teach new lessons and bring new partnerships that you can leverage in the future.
Walking into the job market without valuable skills expecting a six-figure paying gig is akin to surmising you, as someone who is overweight, awkward, and jobless can walk up to a 10 on the street and schedule a date.
Both cases require an immense amount of preinvested labor, as do professions like lawyers and doctors.
But the time spent isn’t wasted. Career capital doesn’t depreciate, but it can work against you if you gain negative capital, meaning you burn bridges of former employers and mentors, of people who otherwise could have opened gates to more opportunities for you.
The older you are, the vaster your network should grow. That means you can tap into a wider array of resources and opportunities, and provide the same services to others.
That’s the secret of many successful people. Other than investing their life honing their craft to become so good that others can’t ignore them, they know everyone.
It’s an invaluable superpower in life.
Steve Jobs probably wouldn’t have gotten far without Steve Wozniak or their list of contacts.