Locating opportunity in the world to do the things you like
I started writing this newsletter in early 2019 when I was about to graduate from the University of Michigan. At the time, I had a return offer in tech, and I would sometimes bring it up with friends or family or professors. Occasionally I would feel kind of stupid because the interactions would go something like this:
“So the company is about, like, politics. But so what do you sell?”
“Ooooooo.”
I understand this reaction because software doesn’t sound like something that would be cool even though it has been eating the world:
“Six decades into the computer revolution, four decades since the invention of the microprocessor, and two decades into the rise of the modern Internet, all of the technology required to transform industries through software finally works and can be widely delivered at global scale.”
Marc Andreesson wrote these words in 2011; others saw these developments coming in 2001. They are something we all feel in 2019: software has wholesale changed the way we go about our day-to-day lives (think Google Docs, Instagram, Uber). For some reason, it hasn’t changed the way most of us think about our careers. Instead, the job advice we do get is to spend 40 hours editing typos out of cover letters, as though anybody reads them, and as though that’s what would make the difference anyway.
I started to write 4 Cool Jobs in an effort to think about how some of the changes happening in tech could apply to our careers—beyond pondering whether robots will take our jobs and the idea that we should all get a computer science degree. I also wanted to make something that would connect people with the absolute maximum scope of opportunity—the boldest, broadest view of what they could spend their time on Earth being interested in.
That’s why I’ve been ranting about things like sneaker jobs and new media jobs and sex toys and quantum computing. Over the next week, though, I will be sending out a few newsletters that talk more directly about:
locating career opportunity in the world
locating opportunity in the world to do the things you like
how new tech is changing the kind of career opportunities that exist in the world
how looking for a job should be more about finding the way you want to contribute to the world than writing a cover letter
the overall ideal of positively contributing to the world by being yourself within it and by giving your talents to it, whether those talents are crochet or complexity science
Stay tuned. See ya then.
Xoxox,
Lea