The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [129]
“But it’s similar to what happened in the housing insanity in the last decade. People talked about housing as though it’s an investment. But really, if you have a huge house, with a huge swimming pool, and lots of extra rooms, and so forth, probably it was just a consumption decision, and a bad one at that. I think formal education in many cases is more consumption than investment.”
I interviewed Thiel toward the end of writing this book, and to my surprise, he referenced the very scene from The Graduate with which I opened the book. “Nineteen sixty-nine was The Graduate. The advice was, ‘Plastics.’ That was actually really good advice in 1969. If you followed the advice in the movie, you would have done really well in the seventies and eighties. That was the tracked career type thing then.
“Thematically, the United States has been, for many decades, a very stable place, where the right thing to do has been this supertracked, predictable path. It’s worked really well. But that’s no longer the case. The kinds of skills you want to have are ones that are better adapted to a more chaotic world.
“The people who did really tracked careers in the late sixties, who didn’t drop out of college or go to an ashram in India, who just went straight through and did the tracked things, who went into ‘Plastics,’ etc., ended up having very successful careers. Because we had this very stable society, there weren’t as many people competing in those professional careers, and so forth.
“Today, it’s the exact opposite. Everyone is trying to do something that’s hyper-tracked, and yet the reality is that we’re in this much more chaotic, crazy world in the next few decades. You want to do something where it’s not tracked, and you can be adaptable.
“It’s this weird generational thing from the baby boomers to the millennials. The baby boomers were too different, at a time when that was the wrong strategy. Now the millennials are too conformist, at a time when that’s the wrong strategy. We’re now in a chaotic time, where people need to have skills that are adaptable.”
Thiel is pointing out something which I think is incredibly important, and cuts to the heart of my whole intention with this book. If we only know one thing for certain about the future of work, business, and careers, it is this: the future is not going to be anything like we predict. The only thing we can be certain of is uncertainty.
I say that, not as some pseudo-spiritual poetic notion, but as a cold, hard, objective fact. Systems theorists have known for decades that the more complex any system gets (whether it’s a physical or biological system, a social network, an organization, or an entire economy), the more unpredictable its behavior gets. The more elements of a system there are (people, businesses), and the more interconnections between those elements (cheap global transportation, global media, and the global Internet), the less useful predictions about the future behavior of that system become.
Why does increasing complexity breed increasing unpredictability?
For a very simple reason. The more interconnected a system such as a global economy becomes, the more changes in one part of the system can have effects that cascade throughout the entire system.
Nineteen terrorists armed with box cutters provided the spark to start a bonfire of events that included a major global economic downturn and two massive wars.
In a more positive example, a few kids sitting in their Harvard dorm room (before they dropped out) launched a venture that changed, within a few years, the way much of the world socializes and communicates.
That’s the globalized, interconnected world we live in now. Changes in one part of the system impact the entire system. Prepare for many more interruptions, shocks,