Giving advice to the rising generation is always fun and sometimes even useful. The most interesting piece of advice I ever heard was from a woman working as an American diplomat in Beirut. My research associate was traveling with me at the time—healthy, single and in his early twenties, he was clearly itching to explore the legendary nightlife of that fascinating town.
The diplomat had learned that the associate was thinking about a career in government work; she took him aside at one point and said that if he really wanted to get into the kind of government work where you might need a security clearance of some kind, there was a good rule to adopt.
Enjoy Beirut, she told him – but if you want to get ahead, “Sleep NATO.”
I’m not sure how true that actually is; I’ve met people who are married to non-NATO spouses who have extremely interesting and important jobs with the government.
But whether or not it’s true, it’s memorable and it’s clear – and it kept the kid on the Embassy grounds overnight which, given the security situation in Beirut at the time, might have been what the diplomat had in mind.
A couple of weeks ago I posted about the advice I gave to another twenty-something: when assessing where you stand in life you should always subtract ten years from your age. Ben Skinner (who is not, by the way, the kid in Beirut) emailed to remind me of something else I once said to him: you should have your twenties in your twenties.
A lot of people don’t do this – and it often turns out to be a big mistake.
I think the root problem is school.
Young people spend entirely too much time in school and they pick up bad habits as a result. Like prisoners who get so used to institutional living that they lose the ability to survive on the outside, lifelong students often have a hard time breaking with the institutional mentality.
Life in school is predictable and goal directed. The first grade leads to the second grade; doing well in middle school helps you get into a good high school. Doing well in high school gets you into a good college. Doing well in college gets you into a good professional school. Doing well in professional school gets you into a good job – and now the cycle repeats as you and your equally well-qualified spouse start brainwashing a new generation.
That’s the theory, and a lot of bright young people bet their lives on it before they really know what life is.
School also encourages you to believe that the older generation knows what it is talking about, and that pleasing your elders is the key to success. The older I get the more I wish this were true – and the less I believe it.
Ten years ago when I first told Ben to have his twenties in his twenties, I meant that he should go out and explore the world and try living out his dreams before he ‘settled’ for a relatively stodgy and predictable form of success like a career in the law. My point then was that I knew a lot of people who went right ahead with a conventional life program right through their twenties – going to professional school, never really trying to write that novel, start up that soup kitchen, or make that one-person sailing trip across the Atlantic.
For a while, it worked pretty well, but then someday, usually in their forties, they felt that life was passing them by. Suddenly they were ditching careers and spouses to go out and paddle that kayak, live in a yurt, start that women’s collective, run off with that sympathetic lover who was much more engaging, vibrant and understanding than that boring and inadequate spouse, or whatever it was that they suddenly felt they had to do.
Sometimes things worked out; more often, these mad dashes for freedom led to disaster. Kids were abandoned, the new relationships weren’t any better than the old, and the new careers often had all the frustrations and much less money than the old ones.
So my advice to Ben was to run off and join the circus when you are 18 or 21, rather than waiting around until you are married with kids and a mortgage at 45. Live the dream early, live it well – and then see where you are. You may decide that you don’t have the Great American Novel inside you, or that while the views on the Appalachian Trail are spectacular, there’s nothing, really, you hate more than granola and mosquitoes. On the other hand, it may turn out that you really can make a living doing something totally unconventional – and that you love the life and never want to go back.
Either way, you come out ahead. You can still get into law school after three years as a Park Ranger or backpacker if you want to come back from the wild side; at least this way you have made an informed choice and you won’t be haunted all your life by the Road Not Taken. Or, on the other hand, you just might find your own way to the kind of career you once dreamed of – as, in fact, Ben Skinner has done.
That was the advice I gave ten years ago, and it makes even more sense now than it did then.
Ten years ago the system was still working pretty well. If you graduated from a good law school, you would get a job offer from a good law firm. If you did well at that job, you’d likely make partner. Investment banking worked that way, too. And while the university job market has always been a tricky place, there was a pretty good chance that a doctorate from a good university would lead to a decent tenure track slot in the end.
None of that works as well now. It’s partly due to the recession, of course, but to some degree the recession is just speeding up a process that was already under way.
The professional world in America is going through an accelerating revolution. A combination of productivity increases, outsourcing of high-end work and cost squeezes is transforming the legal, medical, financial, journalism and university teaching professions.
It’s likely that the professionals of the future will live in a much less stable world. There will be fewer and fewer safe jobs; while some lawyers, teachers, journalists and others will be very rich, many others will have incomes below what professionals today take for granted.
In a way, the professions are going to be more like show business: there will be stars and there will be waiters, with fewer and fewer people earning steady upper middle class incomes on long term contracts. In this kind of world, what you can do – and how well you can sell it – often means more than where you come from. Most kids who graduate from the top drama schools end up unemployed. Most of the kids who get M.F.A.’s from top schools never publish a novel or have a gallery show of their own work.
The coming change in the intellectual professions is a subject to which I’ll return in this blog more than once. Politically, culturally, intellectually and economically it’s one of the most important issues facing the United States.
But for now let me just close by observing that these coming changes make it more important than ever for those of you in your twenties to use that time to experiment, grow and learn.
The old ‘safe’ method isn’t so safe anymore. I know more and more smart people who are coming out of prestigious schools with six figure debts – and no six figure jobs that can pay them. There are more and more people in their forties who are having to go out and reinvent themselves not because they are having a midlife crisis, but because their old professions are breaking up and the jobs they once counted on have disappeared.
On the other hand, the skills you can learn on the wild side are going to be vital for professional success down the road. Learning to assess and live with risk, being creative and entrepreneurial about your career, functioning with competence and integrity in the face of financial uncertainty: these are going to be mainstream skills going forward – and this isn’t what they teach you in graduate school.
As for where and with whom to sleep, I’ll just leave you with this thought from St. Augustine: Love God and do what you will.