Here’s a deceptively simple question: why would a person be at the wrong place in the wrong time?
People who use this sort of description about places and times to describe “luck” in the business world. Someone’s success is written off as, “he was just in the right place at the right time”. I’m starting to doubt that this can really be ascribed to a lack of merit. Some people know where “right places” are, and some people don’t. It’s not pure luck. There is skill in it; it’s just a very difficult skill to measure or even detect.
I’ve had to contend with this myself. I’m almost 30, and I was one of those people about whom, when I was younger, everyone said that I’d either be successful or dead by 30. Well, I didn’t get either. Breakout success was the gold, noble death was the silver, and I’m stuck with the bronze. Well, that’s depressing. Something I realized recently when looking over my career choices is that I made a lot of decisions that would seemed good taking a timing-independent approach, but that I often made the worst choice for the given time, almost as if it were a habit. So I have to ask myself, because I’m too old to pretend these things aren’t showing a pattern, why would I be in the wrong place at the wrong time?
I’m pretty sure this is a common issue for people. Timing is just very important. Living in Detroit in 1965 is dramatically different from living there in 1980. However, in society, we tend to evaluate peoples’ choices morally. People who are successful made good choices (and vice versa). The problem is that we also view morality in absolute terms, and quality of choices (especially economic ones) is extremely time-dependent. That often leads us to make inaccurate conclusions about ourselves but also about the decisions we must make. Ignoring timing is an error that’s often catastrophic.
For example, choosing to work at Google is one of the biggest mistakes I’ve made; but it would have been a great choice in another time. I’ve wasted a lot of emotional energy being angry at my (truly awful) manager when I was at Google. However, bad managers are a fact of life, and people survive them. What really went wrong is that I joined Google in May 2011. If you join a company while it’s great and have a bad manager, there’s a way to move around that problem. You’re in a company that wants to succeed and will make a way for you to contribute something great. If you join a company in decline, however, you’re stuck. The firm’s demand for greatness is minimal; now it wants stability, and the game is about using social polish to compete for dwindling visibility and opportunity. In technology, closed allocation is the surest sign of a declining firm. In truth, I shouldn’t be angry at my ex-boss (for being awful, but some are) or at Google (for declining, even though no company wishes to decline) but at myself for picking that company while it was in decline. That’s on me. No one forced me to do that.
What attracts people like me to decline? I think there are four explanatory causes for why people tend to put themselves in formerly-right places at wrong times.
1. Prevailing decline
This one’s not our generation’s fault. Most of American society is in decline. Perhaps one wouldn’t know it from the Silicon Valley buzz, which trumpets successes while hiding failures. Plenty of people say things like, “Why should I care about Flint, Michigan when software engineer salaries keep rising? There will always be jobs for us.” Doing what, pray tell? We’re much more interdependent than people like to believe, so this attitude infuriates me. Decay often ends up hurting everyone. Rural poverty in the 1920s turned into the 1930s Great Depression. Poverty isn’t wayward people getting bitter medicine; it’s a cancer that shuts a society down.
It’s easy to end up picking a string of declining companies when there’s so much decline to go around. That’s a big part of why it’s so hard for our generation to get established. That said, this is the least useful place to focus because no one reading this can do anything about the problem, at least not individually.
2. Nostalgia
People are more prone to nostalgia than they like to admit. This leads people to attempt to replicate former successes and sprints of progress that are no longer available. Businesses change. A person who goes into investment banking based on the movie Wall Street is going to have a rude awakening, because the Gordon Gekkos aren’t taking 24-year-old proteges underwing, but trying to protect their own asses in a harsher regulatory climate. The same is true of Silicon Valley. Is there money to be made there? Of course there is, but the easy wins of the 1990s are gone. It’s no longer enough to be “in the scene”, and people who are just getting established will probably not find themselves eligible for the best opportunities until those are gone, leaving scraps.
What’s unusual in the case of suboptimal career moves is that it’s often oblique nostalgia. People aren’t trying to relive their own good times, but to get in on a previous generation’s golden age (when that generation, having long ago recognized the closed opportunity window, has mostly left). This can actually be one of the more effective ways to play, for reasons explained in the next item.
3. Risk aversion and prestige.
Most things that are “prestigious” are actually in decline. For example, most of the smartest undergraduates attempt graduate school. It’s what you to do to show that you’re not one of those pre-professional idiots. Academia has been in brutal decline for almost 30 years! Those tenured professorships are not coming back. Wall Street and VC-istan are also very scarce in opportunities for those who aren’t already established, yet have a lot of prestige. Prestige, alas, matters. If you were an analyst at Goldman Sachs, every VC will go out of his way to fund you; even though analyst programs have very little value (except for the proof that a person can survive punishing hours) at this point.
If you look at the opportunities for new entrants, Wall Street, Google, and VC-istan are all quite dry. There are plenty of people getting rich, but it takes years to position oneself and the opportunity will probably have moved elsewhere by the time one is able to take advantage. However, prestige offers a benefit. No one can predict where the real prize (true opportunity) will show up next, but prestigious employers help a person find some kind of position– a consolation prize– in whatever comes next by offering social proof. They provide the validation that a person was smart enough. If you got into Google or Goldman Sachs in 2007, you’re probably not rich, but you’ve proven that you’re good enough to be rich; i.e. you’re not a total loser. People will often tolerate these second-place finishes while they build up the credibility to be in the running when real opportunities come about. But is that a good strategy? I’m not so sure that it is, anymore. If you join a declining technology company, you’ll face closed-allocation and stack-ranking and bland projects, which will hurt your career. Prestige is important, but so is quality.
4. Saprophytism
Some people, but very few, have a knack for turning decay into opportunity. When they see decline, they turn it into profit. This is not a socially acceptable behavior, but it exists and for some people it works. Is it common? I have no idea. For a worker, it’s very hard to pull off. Since the worst fruits of organizational decay always fall onto the least established (“shit flows downhill”) it’s unclear how a low-level employee would be able to reliably turn decay into a win. I’m sure some people have that talent and motivation, but I’m not one of them.
How would a person profit from the decay of Corporate America? Some people answer, “A startup!”, but that’s a really bad response. VC-istan is Corporate America with better marketing, and non VC-funded startups are reliant on clients which means they’re still dependent on this decaying ecosystem. No one wins when there is so much loss to go around. I’m sure there are some financial plays (informed short-selling) that would work, but I can’t think of a great career play for a young person trying to get established. Perhaps it’s a great time to be in the so-called “tech press”; they seem to enjoy themselves when things go to hell.
Concluding thoughts
The above are small explanatory features of the problem. Why do so many intelligent people consistently put themselves in wrong place/wrong time situations that inhibit success? What’s the systematic problem? I think that risk aversion and prestige are major components, worthy of further study, except for the fact that we all cognitively know this. We know that reputation is a lagging indicator of low value in a dynamic world, but we cling to it because other people do and because we rarely have better ideas.
I don’t think that individual nostalgia is a major player, but the collective form of it is prestige, and that often creates bizarre inconsistencies. For example, the prestige of the Ivy League has nothing to do with the adderall-fueled teenagers applying to twenty colleges and test-prepping at the expense of a normal or healthy adolescence– decidedly unprestigious behavior by people who are (but very slowly) eroding the prestige of those institutions– but, rather, that prestige exists because of things that happened long before those kids were even born. The prestige of those places comes out of a time when the psychotic ratrace around admissions didn’t exist, but those colleges were accessible only to a well-connected elite, because what our society really values is legacy and wealth, not talent or striving.
Prevailing decline makes this whole game harder, of course. What I think is really at the heart of it is that it’s hard to impossible to predict the future. People go to places of past excellence for the association (prestige) in order to take advantage of the halo effect and gain social superiority in the beauty contests necessary to win at organizational life. It works, because of the nostalgia held by most people now in power, but not well enough to counteract the overall tenor of decay. Even the people who succeed find themselves bitterly unhappy, because they compare what they get out of their path to what those who traveled before them go; it turns out that a Harvard degree in 2013 is still powerful, but not the golden ticket that it was in 1970, and that joining Google now is not the same thing as joining it in 2001.
So where is the future? I don’t know. If I did, I’d be somewhere other than where I am right now. Alan Kay said, “The best way to invent the future is to create it.” I like this sentiment, but I’m not sure how practical it is. None of us who need to know where the future is have the resources to do that. Those resources (wealth, connections, power) all live with citizens of the past. It’s this fact that keeps drawing generations, one after another like crashing waves, toward the false light or prestige: the hope of getting some scrap metal out of decaying edifices so as to have the right materials when the opportunity comes to make something new. But where (and when) is the time for building?
