The Second Half of Your Career
If you are in your thirties, you don’t have much of a career left. Whether AI will replace your job or not, your willingness to work for a company will certainly diminish. There is also a possibility that you will be replaced by people younger, smarter, and more energetic than you—people who still have more hunger to succeed, and more years to offer than you do.
I am thirty-six, and I don’t imagine myself being employed after fifty. And I am being very optimistic on the page. The supposedly fifteen-odd years of career that I have left cannot be wasted on random companies. I am no longer in my twenties, when I could jump ship for a salary hike. I come with baggage and a hefty package tied to responsibilities.
So my strategy is to pick two or three good companies and spend the rest of my career there, divided equally. Three to four years in each company. I don’t have this constant urge to jump ship. I have a family to take care of. This might sound like a poor strategy, a bad bargain for my potential, but it is not.
When you think like this, you force your mind to focus on selective opportunities. Randomness bores you. While you don’t want to become predictable, you want growth that doesn’t come with an adrenaline rush. Constantly fighting a war to justify your place in a company is a war you are eventually going to lose. The better strategy is to rise above the need to fight that war.
Instead, become so valuable that whichever company you pick wants you there for the very thing you hold in abundance: experience. Because empty tenure is boring, tenure in which you have lived through an organisation’s transformation is far more valuable. It means you have solved more problems there. Ideally, I would want to be in a place where I am solving increasingly complex problems for the company. Problem solvers will always be more valuable, and the more tenured they are, the better.
If you are in your thirties, you have to think strategically about which side you want to pick to rise. You need to identify your strength first, test it in a low-stakes environment, and then choose the path that rewards that strength.
The constant battle is futile and, to be honest, childish. So let the children fight those battles. Let them be the gladiators. I, for one, would prefer to be the military general steering the battles rather than fighting in the middle of them.