Climbing the corporate ladder seems like a dream.
When I spent time with people who got to the top of the ladder, I realized a hard truth: they were deeply unhappy.
For smart, young, ambitious people, climbing the corporate ladder in the traditional fashion doesn’t make much sense anymore. The threat of mass layoffs is now a daily occurrence.
Some people make the mistake of thinking I’m some lucky white guy.
Wrong.
I’ve been threatened with job loss, and been laid off more times than I can count. The most famous time? They called me into a meeting room for tea and chocolate cake. It ended in a redundancy.
Then there’s my wife. She got laid off at 7 months pregnant for being pregnant. They figured her productivity would decline so they got ahead of the curve.
They called it cost-cutting to hide their tracks.
But the all-male, grey-haired board actually doesn’t value women at all (that’s why there are no female leaders). So she copped the job loss and decided to have our daughter while unemployed.
Working in corporate has changed. There’s now a whole new way to navigate your career that you must understand. Here’s what it looks like.
1. No boss will ever give a f*ck about you
Incentives run the world.
While no boss can truly care about you because you’re a number in a spreadsheet and their livelihood depends on you being a profitable resource… if you help your boss get what they want, you can get an unfair advantage.
Find out what their KPIs are. Be a high performer. Make your boss look good in front of the leadership team.
Working for a well-known company logo no longer matters. It’s smarter to choose the right leader instead because they shape your career the most. They decide if you get time off, a bonus, or even a promotion.
Most of these privileges aren’t merit-based anymore either.
It comes down to whether they like you and they believe you can help THEM get another promotion.
Bonus: choose a leader who also loves entrepreneurship & has hopes of building a business. These leaders are built differently.
2. Career gaps mean you’re awesome
Career gaps used to be taboo.
One recruiter famously said to me, “Not being in a job for 6 months means you’re sh*t.” I’ll never forget that b*tchy witch. If you had a career gap, it meant you weren’t in high demand or you were unemployed.
Along with this mindset, you worked neat little 5-year stints at each role on your resume. Now things have changed again.
Career gaps now signal high IQ.
Smart people take sabbaticals, regularly change roles or industries, build businesses, and have employment gaps to care for children.
If you come across a recruiter or hiring manager who has an issue with career gaps, they’re a moron. Run.
3. Job hopping is smart
Working the same job at the same company until you’re 65 and retire with a bottle of wine and a gold watch is way out of fashion. No one does that anymore.
Job hopping is now the better strategy.
It’s how you:
Learn faster
Get pay rises faster
Work in multiple industries
But the main reason to job hop is to keep work interesting. Because the typical career is more boring than watching seagulls eat pasta by the ocean.
Job hopping is also a survival skill. No company truly cares about employees. They’re all replaceable. Most bosses are total knobheads. And HR lie about their thriving culture which actually looks like the photo below.
Change jobs like you change underwear.
4. Never trust any employer
Employers hold all the power.
If you defy them, they can just fire you. You might think HR is there to save you. Not really. HR is there to protect the business, not take care of employees. They’ll screw anyone over who doesn’t conform to what “the business” wants.
The solution is simple. Have multiple employers. This means either becoming a freelancer/contractor, or constantly cheating on your current employer by interviewing with new ones.
Just assume you can get fired at any time and you’ll do fine.
5. Graduate from employment to self-employment
Workplace = Daycare
Business Owner = Adulthood
Start in the daycare but don’t stay there. When you work for yourself you become an owner. This is a different way of living. It means you:
Take calculated risks
See opportunities instead of scams
Have multiple sources of income
Can do your own sales/marketing
Being a business owner makes you self-sufficient, and this is how you access personal freedom. The first stage is to become a freelancer or contractor. The second stage is to become a solopreneur where you get your own leads and sell to them. And the third stage is where you build a startup and have other people do the work.
All models of being a business owner work. Just depends on your situation as to which one you choose.
When you run a business the biggest advantage is tax. You can claim a lot of expenses on tax. And you pay taxes after you make money instead of having tax taken out of every paycheck. This one small detail will make you a lot wealthier.
6. Corporate life is mundane compared to the real world
Corporations are masters of propaganda.
Their marketing campaigns make you think that working for them is a dream. But those campaigns are failing. Movies like the Matrix and TV shows like “Severance” have helped awaken people to the reality.
Most work you do at a job isn’t exciting. It’s boring as f*ck. It lacks creativity and imagination. And the people telling you what to do are normally clueless.
Example: a bank in my part of the world recently said its 2030 vision was to be “customer first.” LOL. Another buzzword. Another BS strategy. Every business should be customer first by default. If they’re not, well, they’re stupid.
Building real things yourself and traveling the world is way more fun than any 9-5 job that involves endless meetings, being a professional email forwarder, and looking at boring old Excel spreadsheets.
The corporate dream is dying. Hard.
7. Invest your leftover salary (or stay Just Over Broke)
Most people get a pay rise, then increase their cost of living.
This is why they have no freedom. One sickness or unexpected expense and they’re homeless. It’s sad. What I did was keep my expenses low. This isn’t s*xy by the way. I had to live with family during certain points to save on rent. And I had to sell my car and catch public transport.
The money I saved from my salary went into investing into financial assets – stocks, Bitcoin, etc. This is how I eventually broke free.
It’s not how much you earn, it’s how much you compound your income yearly.
8. Self-promote
The average employee hates self-promotion.
That’s why their career stagnates and they experience multi-decade-long plateaus. If no one knows who you are and how you can help them, you’ll miss out on all the opportunities.
You must self-promote every day if you want to be successful in any field.
No one else will do it for you. Writing online is a cheat code to do it. I started on LinkedIn. Then I migrated to platforms like X and Substack.
Your goal: for opportunities to come to you.
Otherwise, you have to apply for opportunities and ask for permission for the rest of your life. That’s the definition of hell. It’s modern slavery.
Write.
9. Self-educate after hours
The traditional career path is to go to university and get a degree.
Then once you have it most of your learning is over. You now have specialization in one skill and you can milk it like a moo cow for the rest of your career.
Not anymore.
The world now moves too fast. Being a hyper-specialist is dying. Generalists can do more and be more. And to be a generalist you must self-educate every day.
Those who learn faster are seen to be smarter. They understand shifts like AI & harness it. Read newsletters and books. Network on social media. Study history. Write to help you join the dots in your mind between different ideas. Teach others what you know so it reinforces your learning.
10. Never resist change (like 99% of people)
Employees hate change. They fight it.
If you embrace every change and find a way to turn it into a positive... you will climb higher, faster. It’s a simple career hack. Being open to change makes you appear smarter. And it helps you solve more problems.
Staying stuck in your ways is the fastest path to poverty. AI can change in a matter of milliseconds and will replace slow movers. AI is bringing efficiency to every industry and job. So you either adapt or your career slowly dies. Harsh but true.
11. Do everything you can to work from home as many days as possible
Commutes waste precious time.
Working in an office is so early 2000s. I can’t imagine going back to sitting in traffic for 3 hours every day just to plug my laptop in and do the same work I can do at home.
The trouble with working in an office is you need to live close to the office. Offices are typically located in highly populated areas so the homes near them are usually expensive. When you don’t need to live near an office you can live far away and save money. Or go rural and experience the peace and quiet of country life.
Working in an office no longer makes sense.
Face-to-face meetings are the same as Zoom. Breathing in my smelly breath and seeing my yellow teeth isn’t going to improve the conversation.
What makes work better is when you’re not away from home for 12 hours at a time and can actually see your family.
Go remote.
12. Workplaces aren’t families
“The culture feels like family.”
Sounds cute when you hear it. Many companies explain their culture like this. But when pandem!cs or recessions happen you realize the truth. If times are tough, employees are the first to go.
Don’t get fooled. A real family doesn’t abandon you. And they don’t lay you off. Only corporations do that which is why you must look after yourself.
13. Job security doesn’t freaking exist
So stop embracing company loyalty. Look after yourself. Be nice but fair to you. The days of 30 years at one company are dead. Choose 1-2 year-long sprints at different employers, then exit the rat race to work for yourself.
14. Mentors are overrated
Dude says to me last week, “I don’t need paid help to start a business. I prefer mentorship.”
This is a corporate mindset. Mentors sound smart. But a mentor is free. “I want a mentor” is code for “I want free help.”
A mentor has little incentive to help you. The sort of mentor you get while working in a corporate job does it for extra points on their annual review. It means they catch up with you every 90 days and give you some inspiration. They might talk a lot about themselves and their career too.
But that mentor will do little to boost your career.
Seeking a mentor is often just the hidden desire to have someone else do the work for you and open up doors. It’s entitlement. It’s privilege.
Forget $0 mentors.
Build cool sh*t online that attracts successful people who want to help you.
15. Diplomas / MBAs are irrelevant
The professor is often teaching something they don’t do anymore.
Or the professor is unsuccessful in life which is why they’re on minimum wage teaching people in the first place.
No one looks at qualifications much anymore because anyone can buy one (obvious exceptions may be doctors, lawyers, etc). I can get a student loan tomorrow and buy any degree I want. Without scarcity, qualifications lose their value. And in a world of AI, memorizing information isn’t a valuable skill anymore. What matters is real-world experience, not theory.
The #1 skill: Being high agency (resourceful).
Can you create results and find answers without being told what to do or without a strategy?
Final Thought
If you died tomorrow a new person would be in your office chair within 14 days. And none of your company would be at the funeral.
Choose yourself.
