Career Fear (and how to beat it) summary

Frederick Taylor, the first-ever management consultant, was a late nineteenth-century engineer who believed that humans could work just like machines. He conducted experiments to improve industrial efficiency while working as a foreman in a Philadelphia steel factory. 

Eventually, he found that breaking down the steel-making process into smaller tasks allowed him to hire unskilled workers to master one small piece of the job. Collectively, they performed work that normally required engineers. Using a stopwatch to time how long it took to complete a given task, Taylor set a standard for output based on the best workers. 

Have you ever heard of color grading in the context of film editing? It’s the process of creating a mood for a scene by altering its exposure, saturation, and color tones. Once a filmmaker lands on the look she likes for one frame in the scene, she creates presets to create the same desired look for all other frames. 

The way the author sees it, everyone’s personalities are defined by similar presets. For people, though, each preset represents where you are on the spectrum of a specific personality trait. And when choosing your career, it’s important to think about what kind of work culture is the best fit for your unique blend of traits. 

Imagine you’re a musician who’s composed many beautiful songs, but somehow you can’t seem to get any recognition. One day, a band covers one of your songs, and it breaks a bunch of records. The song’s a hit! You know that it will touch many lives over generations, but nobody else will ever know you wrote it. How would you feel? 

As harsh as that scenario might sound, it makes you look at the real questions: Are you pursuing your career because you believe it’s your true calling? Or are you simply motivated by the prestige and recognition? Knowing your true motivations will help you make the right decision for your personality. 

When psychologist Jennifer Aaker of Stanford University analyzed 72 studies performed between 1979 and 2009, she found a sharp decline in empathy over time. Although there’s a lot we don’t know about the exact impact of modern technologies on empathy, there is sufficient evidence that our reliance on gadgets and online exchanges might be making us less emotionally intelligent. 

This is partly because of the nonphysical nature of many modern channels of communication. We can’t connect with people’s smiling faces or distraught voices when interacting via text message or social media. According to sociologist Daniel Goleman, social media usage may be weakening links in emotional relationships because of this disconnect.

Picture a house and a tent. What do they have in common? Well, they both have a base, columns, an interior, and a roof. But, obviously, their architecture is completely different: one is designed to stay in place, while the other is meant to be portable.

Sociologist Yuval Noah Harari uses this analogy to differentiate between old and new work identities. The future of work is still an uncharted frontier, so rather than the stationary house, you need to be a tent – always ready to pack up your career and move along the next path. 

Let’s say you’re an editor at a publishing house. One day, your company decides to introduce a machine-learning algorithm to proofread manuscripts. You set up an algorithm on your computer to track your patterns and learn when you make changes. Essentially, you’re training the algorithm to take over that part of your job. 

The upside to productivity is easy to see – with more time on your hands, you can focus on other aspects of your work. But now imagine there were thousands of other human editors training the same algorithm. The larger the scale of machine learning, the scarier it can be to imagine just how quickly algorithms can take over a human task.