Investing in work systems
What I think people at the start of their career should think about
Let’s say you want to plant an orchard to provide you with fruits for the rest of your life. There’s a lot to think about: what kinds of fruits do you want? How many trees should you plant? How should you water and care for them?
You would probably invest a reasonable amount of time learning about fruit trees, planting practices, and care procedures. You’d want fruit year-round, enough for a growing family, and maybe softer fruits in your old age.
Now let’s say you want to build a career that will provide you with various rewards: money, respect, purpose, meaning, connection, growth, accomplishment, and contribution.
How do we achieve all these through our careers? As young people, what can we do to ensure our careers meet our needs throughout our lives?
I didn’t think about this question much in my early 20s. I was told: get good marks, get into a good college, and somehow get your first job. After that, everything will be okay.
After working for 10 years, and having built my career anew a few times, I’ve now thought about this question a lot.
There are three levels on which we can think about careers - Outcomes, Process, and Systems.
Outcomes
Outcomes are what we get, the end result we’re aiming for: money, respect, status, recognition. People tend to focus on outcomes because they are easy to understand and provide immediate satisfaction. The advice to focus on getting good grades and a ‘good’ job comes from thinking at the outcome level.
Examples of outcomes:
Getting a job at a prestigious firm
The salary we earn
The admiration and respect we get due to our jobs
However, focusing on outcomes alone doesn’t help you achieve them. For that, you need to take action.
Process
Process are the actions we take to achieve outcomes. It’s the time we invest in learning skills, writing resumes, doing jobs, or internships. Thinking at this level positions us to improve our outcomes.
Examples of process:
Spending time learning a new skill
Performing tasks at work
Networking
Many educational courses focus on processes—they teach you data science, marketing, project management, or another skill.
But how do you decide what skill to learn? Which courses to take, how to study for them, how to prioritize between doing your existing job and preparing for new ones?
Work Systems
Work systems are the how and why of our actions. They determine how we decide what outcomes are important, which processes to pursue, and how to pursue them. We all have ways of making these decisions, but we are often not conscious of them.
Examples of work system thinking:
How should I plan my weeks?
What skills should I learn, and how?
How do I differentiate myself in the job market?
What do I want out of a particular phase of my career?
How should I balance learning versus earning?
Should I work at a startup or a big company?
In the orchard analogy, outcomes are the fruits. The process is planting, watering, and caring for the trees. Work systems are how you decide which trees to plant, how many of each, when and how to water them, and where to locate your orchard.
So where should we focus our attention?
Often people think about outcomes and focus on process, but I believe its best to focus on systems for a few reasons -
Deeper impact than process
Work systems are the foundation of process and outcome. Changing systems can have a deeper impact than either. Having planted apple trees, you can’t produce mangoes by changing how you water them.
We have them anyway, often unconsciously
We develop work systems under the influence of our workplaces, our peers, our schools, our families. We all make decisions about how to spend our time.
Recognizing and taking ownership of our default patterns allows us to change and improve them.
Everyone decides which trees to plant. If you take your cues from those around you, your orchard may end up looking a lot like theirs, even though you like different fruit than them.
Something for you
Being responsible oneself gives you a much greater chance of building a system that works for you, rather than the alternative of picking up components of whatever system we are exposed to. Each person is unique, and so the system that best serves each person is also unique.
Our goals change through our career. Initially, money and prestige will often outweigh meaning. We have loans to pay, parents to support, partners to attract, perhaps children to send to school. But if you do this part well, a time will come when you will need more from your career. Having conscious systems will allow you to plan for this transition.
Why now
It’s important to focus on systems at the beginning of your career because with time your work patterns will start to ossify. You sense of comfort and discomfort will harden, and it will become harder to change.
So its a really good idea in the beginning, when you have the most to learn from them, the most to gain from them, that you take advantage.
The environment is changing at an increasing pace. AI is the big obvious change agent right now, but the reality is we cannot predict what will happen, and how we will need to adapt. If we are conscious of our work system it gives a lot more flexibility to deal with whatever changes happen. B
What investing in work systems gets you
Once you have a work system that you own, you are free. You are free to work with or without a job, with or without a team. You are on a path where you can define your values and vision, and work towards them without needing permission from anyone else.
In the end you only have 2 things you can invest in order to get returns. Money, and time. This is a framework where you get to decide how best to invest your time, and time is the principal advantage we have as young people.
So the choice is to build your system, and your own career, or rely on the paths laid out by employers. But remember, the economy is changing so fast that what has worked even in the last 10 years may not work for the next 10. You need to be flexible, extensible, and highly independent to capitalize on all the opportunities that the new economy offers.