Four career tips for your twenties

Here are four lessons learned from a Strategy class as your guide to making more effective career decisions:

Lesson 1: Seek careers with high variance. No one ever became successful by being like everybody else. If you want to win big, you have to play big. Much like investing, you have to pick the riskiest bets to earn the highest reward.

Lesson 2: Make meaningful tradeoffs. When we think about career tradeoffs, we often think things like choosing between careers that are cash-rich/time-poor or time-poor/cash-rich. What we don’t often think about are the tradeoffs we’re making every day. If you have dreams of starting a company, every hour you spend watching TV instead is an hour not spent on building your company.

Lesson 3: Get comfortable with uncertainty. Our twenties is a time when most of us are cash-poor and time-rich. Our biggest and only real responsibility is our job. We have no idea what shape our story will take. And this ambiguity can be scary. But opportunity is usually masked in uncertainty.

Lesson 4: You are on a fact-finding mission. What I find interesting is how often we, as humans, ignore patterns. We are much more likely to follow the crowd than follow the data.