All right. I think we have time for one more deep work question. And this one comes from Michael1729. I always like when people use their birth year as part of their name. So it's good to see you here, Michael. He asked about the importance of plan B rather than focusing all efforts on one career path.

There's a detailed elaboration here that I think is kind of important. Let's get some context. Michael is from South Africa. He's an undergrad. So he's studying mathematics at a quote unquote "little known university" with no option to do undergrad research or take advanced courses. He loves pure maths. I love how UK and other places, other English speaking places, it's maths, by the way, not math.

And I fantasize about doing research one day. So he's identified a career path of being a maths professor at a research university to be their ideal pursuit. By the way, if you apply to an American university, don't call it maths professor. We don't use that terminology. He has a lot of pressures on himself to get top grades.

But anyways, he's worried. Here's the crux of his elaboration. He's worried that this particular plan he's hatching for somehow escaping from this little known university in South Africa and making it to a top university and being a maths professor is not going to work out. And he's saying, should I have a plan B?

He feels that having a plan B might lead him to slack off his ambitious vision of being a maths professor. But also he's very worried that that might not happen. And then is he going to just be stuck? All right, and then he says at the end, your books have changed my life.

And you're the reason I got into my degree from failing in high school. Thank you for everything you've done for students around the world. So I just threw that in to make myself feel better. All right, Michael, this is a good question. And I think one way to approach it is to go back to my book, So Good They Can't Ignore You, and extract out of there the main framework I give for thinking about careers.

Because the whole point about the framework I give in that book is to move you conceptually away from thinking in terms of specific jobs as the primary unit that you're dealing with in your planning. This is how most people think about careers. This is how you're thinking about career.

You're saying, OK, I'm looking at this option, which is being a maths professor at this type of school. Is that the wrong option? Should I have a second option that I'm working on? The framework in my book says that's not the right way to think about career satisfaction. The things that make up career satisfaction, that meaning, passion for your work, that's going to come from elements of your job, attributes, things like autonomy and impact and mastery, connection to other people, impact on the world.

The exact mix of attributes that would make a particular career really meaningful for you could be quite specific to you. But it's not specific to a particular job. These are non-job-specific career attributes. How do you get these attributes? Well, you have to think about them in a financial market metaphorical sense, that they are valuable attributes.

Lots of people want them in their job. So you have to have something valuable to offer in return. And so the idea I give in that book is that you want to acquire what I call career capital, which is my term for rare and valuable skills. So as you develop skills that are valuable to the marketplace, you can then, in essence, exchange that career capital for attributes in your working life that make that working life something that resonates more, that makes it something that's more enjoyable and satisfying.

So the whole game in this framework is acquiring as much career capital as possible in strategic ways so it's as valuable as possible, and then having the courage and foresight to invest that capital to keep taking control of your career, moving it towards what resonates and away from what doesn't.

That's what you're focusing on. Now, in that particular approach, the actual job you end up doing or how that unfolds could change. Maybe this doesn't work out, that works out better, you see a better opportunity over here, and in some sense, that's not the point because your focus is on these are the attributes I want in my career.

And what is my current levels of career capital I can apply towards that? How do I get more? So when you think about it that way, what you're doing now at your university where you're trying to get top grades, you're trying to specialize and be a star student in your program, don't think about it as this is my swing to get this one particular job.

Think about it instead as I am trying to acquire as much career capital as I can at this early stage in my career. Now, one of the things I might be able to invest this in is in getting a graduate student position at a really good university, and that's going to be, again, that's going to be interesting job.

It's going to be intellectually demanding of autonomy, and if I can really stand out there, then maybe I'll have enough capital to get a professor job. But you know what? Maybe that doesn't happen, but then you can apply the capital you have towards something else that resonates and move away from things that don't.

You're going to have unpredictability on how this path unfolds, but if you keep coming at it from the perspective of I know what resonates with me and what I don't like, and I'm constantly trying to get more of the good stuff in my career and less of the stuff I don't like in my career.

If I hate the idea of having a boss telling me what to do and deadlines, then all of my focus is going to be on how do I build up skills that I can keep leveraging to get away from that environment. Or maybe if what you want is high excitement and to be involved in big deals and to have high stakes money on the line, and you don't care about deadlines, you like that, then you're building up skills and applying them somewhere differently.

What type of job can I get with my current skills that gets me closer to that? How do I build up more skills there to move to something even better? But the key thing that unifies all these approaches is you're looking at the attributes you want, you're building up skills, you're leveraging the skills.

It's fine to have particular ideas in mind, like, well, why don't I aim in a professorship type direction? But then if that doesn't work, it's not a failure, you're building up capital. Oh, that particular investment opportunity to invest it in a professorship career is no longer available, but I still have the capital, so why don't I take it to go over here and do a startup where we're doing whatever, I don't know, hedge fund analysis or something like that, and go live somewhere interesting and make a lot of money by the time I'm 27, and then open a surf shop.

You have all these different options. And they will present themselves as you get better at things are valuable, and as you continue to reflect and be clear about what it is that resonates with you, what you actually want in your life, what attributes you really want in a job.

So don't be so specific about this is the job, and what if that job doesn't happen? Instead, be, these are the things I want in my life, what skills am I building now that might help me get closer to them? What next steps are open to me right now?

Great, let me take the best one that's open to me right now. Build more skills and repeat. Build more skills, then repeat. I can't tell you where you're going to be in 10 years specifically, but if you follow this path, I can be pretty confident that wherever it is, it'll be a place that's pretty cool.

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