From Law School to Tech
First blog!
Hello friend. So, recently someone from law school wrote to me on LinkedIn asking for thoughts on how to pivot from a law degree to an alternate career - in tech. There’s lots of tactical answers to that, but I thought I’d start with laying out the context in this post. Why is it worth considering?
The world is changing at an unprecedented rate.
Technology and smartphones are changing the world around us at an unprecedented rate. This directly manifests itself in business and careers. The average age of an S&P 500 company is under 20 years, down from 60 years in the 1950s.
If the state of the world changes, then knowledge (and therefore ‘years of experience’) is rendered redundant at the same pace. In fact, those who are shorting traditional knowledge/beliefs are winning. Let’s take a look at what technology has done in the last 10 years.
Trump won against an elitist, unwilling-to-change Democratic Party with better media spend and data mining;
Netflix put Blockbuster out of business with no physical cinema infrastructure;
Airbnb is worth more than Hilton - a 100 year old hotel chain;
Facebook and Google have eroded over 60% of advertising revenue from traditional media in under 20 years.
Uber didn’t just disrupt taxis; and bitcoin didn’t disrupt traditional money. They are disrupting governments -- one of the most robust human institutions.
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change."
- Charles Darwin
In this new world, athletes will outperform the experienced. Fast learners and generalists who demonstrate wide cross-functional aptitude and are able to adapt to ambiguous real life situations will win. They learn to reason from first principles rather than relying on the shorthand of previous experience (see Elon Musk’s description of this thinking for more). To quote Naval, learning how to learn is the ultimate meta-skill. This is not to be confused with being a “jack of all trades”, rather someone who constantly challenges their static knowledge and seeks truth from first principles.
What’s the takeaway?
Learn how to learn over gathering specific knowledge. The former has a longer lifespan and wider relevance. There’s lots of great resources out there depending on what kind of media you consume. Here’s my favourite go-to article on mental models from the FS Blog.
If you’re looking to make a career shift or move away from your law school or engineering degree -- now is probably a great time to do it.
But how will I compete with all those people who have been doing this for many years?
An individual who relies on their knowledge alone in an exponentially changing world is less effective because their experience is from yesterday - a markedly different world; and they’re walking into today’s problems with potentially dangerous assumptions about how to solve it.
The Farnam Street calls them “empty suits”. Empty suits share three things in common. First, they are blind to the limits of their own knowledge. Second, they oversimplify the problem. Finally, they never utter the phrase “I don't know.” Trust me, they will be easy to beat.
When everything is changing, nobody knows anything. So, come join the tech party.
PS - I will write another installment to this post that has more tactical suggestions on how you can pivot. This blogging thing is new to me. So please free to leave feedback!
