What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up?
One Career for One Life: The Belief That Doesn't Serve Us
A couple of years ago, my stepdaughter reached the first big milestone of her life; kindergarten graduation. At the graduation ceremony, all the kids were asked to talk about what they wanted to be when they grew up. My wide-eyed stepdaughter waited for her turn, listening carefully to what her classmates presented. When the teacher finally passed the microphone to her, she stood up and spoke in a clear and loud voice. “When I grow up, I want to be a ballerina in the morning and the evening, a gymnast in the afternoon, and a paleontologist, ice skater, and many other things, too.”
With a big smile on her face, she strode back to her seat to a round of applause. As a parent, it was such a memorable moment of pride, joy, and love for her. What fascinated me most was her idea about work. There were so many things she wanted to try out and do; why not say them all?
Think about it. All of us were like that when we were little. To the classic question by grown-ups, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”–my answer as a kid has changed multiple times, from being Madonna (I wanted to be literally her) to an Olympic swimmer, a diplomat, and ten other things. I wasn’t tied to a single career track, nor did I identify myself with a single job, until I got older and went to college.
I don’t deny that it takes a lot of time and effort to build each career, and it is challenging to work in multiple careers at the same time, of course. But why do we assume that we should work in only one career from the moment of graduating college until we retire? What has this single-career perspective done to us?
There is nothing wrong with focusing on building one career. Working in marketing at Apple, every time I saw the joy on the faces of people as they played with iPods or iMacs for the first time was priceless. What about those times when I was analyzing and forecasting demands of the new iPhones that no one knew about yet? There were countless moments I got to see the power of technology, too.
On one research trip at Meta, I got to meet a woman living in the rural area of Brazil with poor cellular connection. She was so thankful for Whatsapp voice message, because that was the only way to stay in touch with her son working in Sao Paulo. She was illiterate, and she couldn’t depend on phone calls due to the poor cell service in the area. Technology was a lifesaver for her to stay connected with her loved ones.
Working on the forefront of the latest technologies and seeing how they changed the lives of people was exhilarating and meaningful, but that sense of meaning with my tech career didn’t last. Yet, I kept going on with my career track for two reasons. First, I had already invested so much time and effort into it, so it seemed irrational to start over. Second, I had no idea where to start and what to do to change to a different career. It seemed like an insurmountable task so I kept pretending my career was still meaningful to me and everything was fine, although in reality I had to drag myself to work everyday.
In one way, I followed my “passion” to build my career in the tech industry and I don’t regret it. This “Follow Your Passion” mantra makes sense on the surface. It restates the main purpose of work as to satisfy individuals, not to treat them like a cog in a wheel to maximize profits, as it was for factory workers in the 19th century.
But can you say things got really better, if you continue to feel stuck with your career, under the name of “the passion?” Before we further contemplate this, it’s worth tracing back how the obsessive focus on a single career originated in the history of work.
The History of Specialization
In his magnum opus in 1776, The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith introduces the concept of division of labor, which has become a critical foundation for the manufacturing business during the Industrial Revolution. Factories needed better efficiency with workers. To produce more, the owners of factories couldn’t run it like an artisan shop from the medieval times. Smith took a pin factory as an example; a factory could produce forty-eight thousand pins a day with only ten workers when each of them focused on a single task. This was such a contrast to the twenty pins the same number of workers of an artisan shop could make in a day.
By dividing labor into different parts and giving one part to each worker, factories could maximize productivity. But why would anyone want to work in that pin factory, doing the same job such as cutting the wire or putting heads on pins every minute, hour, and day, repeatedly? It sounds awfully boring.
Adam Smith agreed; of course, people wouldn’t enjoy working in that pin factory. In fact, he assumed that people wouldn’t enjoy working anywhere, anyway, because people were lazy by nature. The only reason people would do any kind of work was for what they would get paid in return. Smith argued it didn’t matter which work they did, as long as they got adequate reward.
In the early 20th century, Henry Ford further amplified this doctrine with his innovation in the manufacturing model. He implemented the assembly line for the first time in the Ford factory for the mass production of automobiles. What made this assembly line unique was that it was moving. The moving assembly line was much more efficient because it took the job to workers who specialized in a single, repetitive task, rather than the worker moving to and around the vehicle. This method dramatically increased the speed and efficiency of production, embodying the principles of the division of labor Adam Smith had identified more than a century earlier.
So we continued to adopt this doctrine of specialization for the maximum efficiency in everything we did. It’s applied at the societal level; when everyone performs their role (a job or a career) well in their place, society runs like a well oiled machine. It’s applied to higher education and career–get a job for the degree you earned, and focus on building your career with it.
The question we ought to ask is if this still holds true in the 21st century knowledge industry. Does it serve us in a world where new technologies like artificial intelligence and advanced machinery automation are used for the maximum efficiency? Should we continue to apply the same principle of efficiency to humans? Shouldn’t we reassess the old assumptions that we need to specialize in one career?
What if what we need now more than ever is the ultimate flexibility to change and create the work unique to each of ourselves as we are evolving? Are we teaching ourselves and cultivating such an adaptable capacity?
These are the questions we need to ask ourselves and one another.
* This is an excerpt from my upcoming book, The Placeholder: The Place to Go To Create Your Own Noble Work.