A lot of professions have a very distinctive feature. Your effort is directly proportionate to the reward you receive. Your income is pegged on your physical appearance. Your pay is billable by the hour. These are non-scalable careers.
If you are a dentist, the more mouths you open, the more cash in your pocket. If you are an events organizer, the more people who book your space, the more headway to pay yourself. The flipside is that there’s an upper limit to how much money you can make, because you can only have a finite set of clients, energy and hours.
If we were to get together, the richest set of professionals in a non-scalable career, and combine their income with the average professional, and derive a mean it might not look like a true bell curve. It would likely have a longer tail towards the richer professionals – but you won’t see any one of the richest professionals making 10 million dollars a year – at least not legitimately.
Now, instead of dentists, bakers, event organizers, the freelance illustrator, let’s take an author, actor, musician, software entrepreneur, and e-course seller. If you were to pin the total income of the richest against 1000 random professionals would you be surprised to find that the average professionals’ income combined is a rounding error to the richest professional income? These are scalable careers.
Consider:
97% of book sales are made by just 20% of the authors.
The Wilfredo Pareto’s 80/20 Principle can be broken down further into 64/4, and 50/1, which means that 1% of the players can reap something to the order of 50% of the rewards in most domains.
Scalable careers don’t follow a normal distribution. Instead, they follow a power law distribution earmarked by grotesque inequalities. It doesn’t matter how good you are, how hard working you are, most of the wealth is aggregated around very few players.
Compared, scalable careers produce extreme outcomes and non-scalable careers produce mediocre outcomes with lower variance. One is predictable, non-scalable and certain, a property called mediocristan. The other is extremistan charactised by uncertainty, non-predictability and scalability.
In Mediocristan, players gamble dollars to win pennies. Conversely, extremistan players gamble pennies to win dollars.
Foreknowledge that success in scalable careers is a heavy concoction of randomness and luck, doesn’t stop ambitious people. But is a scaleable career worth the risk?
For fitness enthusiasts, there is a good reason why we avoid the centre of a barbell. It is unstable. Likewise, taking the middle is only an illusion of a successful building block.
Remember, if, in a scalable career for ambition, there is no average. There is only success or failure.
Nassim Taleb recommends ditching the golden middle and pursuing the two extremes at once.
Take one safe “9 to 5” gig with “few intellectual demands, and high job security, the kind of low risk job that ceases to exist when you leave the office.”
Work destroys your soul by stealthily invading your brain during the hours not officially spent working. Be selective about professions.
After work, specialize on the speculative side-hustles.
Examples:
- Write online.
- Start an online business.
- Invest in futuristic skills.
- Join a rock band.
- Create an e-course.
The barbell strategy is not limited to careers, but can apply to investments, psychology and health.
Remember, there are positive swans and negative swans. This asymmetric strategy curtails the downside – you have to stay alive – and positions you to maximize the upside.
