#1 Rule for Giving Career Advice to Young People

Maybe it’s the Brooklyn in him, but Julien has always had a knack for cutting through nonsense. And one night, over cheap pizza and even cheaper beer, he did just that.

I’d been excitedly rambling about my big career plans – my ambitions, my ‘passion’, and my inevitable rise to the C-suite.

“Pull up the org charts,” he said. “Count how many people at the top look like you.”

My finger hovered over the screen as the excitement drained from my face.

Two. Maybe three, if I squinted and tilted my head.

Out of dozens. In one of the Blackest cities in the country! ??

I’d always known the playing field wasn’t level, but looking at those org charts made the structural tilt undeniable. It was the bitterest of wake-up calls to see the data laid bare in front of me, as opposed to an abstract and faceless statistic.

Up until that point, I had been a hard-core careerist. But counting the few faces revealed the odds my experience taught me to ignore. Saying the number out loud made me confront how the rules I'd been following favored some dreams more than others. That night was the start of a fundamental shift in my relationship with money.

Former high-powered tech executive Francoise Brougher said, “by definition, the glass ceiling is hidden until you run into it.”

For some people, like Julien, the collision between their ambitions and the odds of achievement happens early. When they realize their dreams are unlikely to pan out, they’re young enough to narrow in on career paths that are more attainable even if they’re less exciting.

For people like me, who were raised on high doses of have-it-all, it requires a different type of intervention.

Whispering self-soothing stories like hard work guarantees success alone in our heads is easy. Maybe that’s why I see so many smart people getting stuck there, churning through myth after myth, hoping their blind faith will eventually pay off.

Sometimes it's not until we choose to say it out loud to another person, like I did, that the emperor’s new clothes are revealed. When we verbalize and explain our assumptions, putting them into words for someone else to hear, it opens our unquestioned ideas to scrutiny in a way that simply thinking them does not.

As commencement ceremonies wrap up across the country, a new crop of graduates are left wondering what's next. They did such a good job of preparing themselves for the workforce, and now we need to explain that they are graduating into a shrinking job market . We owe it to them to tell the truth about work, even if it means unlearning lies we've been telling ourselves.

The #1 rule for giving career advice to young people should be to treat it with the same level of care, skepticism and side-eye as we treat financial advice.

If a financial planner told us to YOLO our life savings in a random crypto coin, we'd see the red flags and run in the other direction. Yet when it comes to career advice, we swallow similar sized risks, then regurgitate outdated mantras that lack substance.

The “follow your passion” gospel has been preached to us for so long that it’s practically scripture. And like most scripture, it’s often misinterpreted.

If we care about the well-being of this generation, the responsible message is clear: get paid.

I’m not arguing for a passionless life. Passion is the inner compass that points us toward the things that make us feel alive and make those Monday mornings a little less soul-crushing. It’s important, and I get that.

But passion, in its purest form, is a terrible financial advisor. We’re not doing 2024 graduates any favors by encouraging them to make important decisions based solely on emotional desires. We should be offering a more grounded interpretation based on what we know to be true.

We need to teach them to approach 'follow your passion' advice with the same skepticism as an MLM pitch . Both present an oversimplified formula to earn income. Both play on our emotional desires while conveniently leaving out all the nitty gritty details about how it actually pays the bills. And, as it turns out, both have very real financial consequences.

Passion can be a powerful motivator, but it shouldn’t be the sole driving force when it comes to career choices. The cornerstone of any career advice should be financial security that allows us to explore our passions in a more sustainable way.

In this week’s podcast, I suggest forming a more strategic relationship with our passions. Something exciting, fulfilling, but with clear boundaries. For example, we can let them inform our budget. As we ruthlessly cut expenses that don’t align with our core needs, we free up capital to invest in projects that keep our soul happy, even if they’re not immediate money-makers. That’s cool.

We can also let our passions nudge us toward industries or roles that offer both financial stability and a flicker of that internal spark. But we shouldn’t expect our employers to be the sole providers of our passion-fueled fulfillment, just like we shouldn’t expect to get rich after joining our friend’s downline.

The work of adulthood is about finding that rhythm between the things that make us feel alive and the things that allow us to stay alive. Our willingness to help others by telling the truth out loud is one of the few things that checks both boxes.

We have an opportunity to help a new generation of workers become critical thinkers, to question the advice they receive, and to understand the hidden agendas at play so they learn to challenge conventional wisdom. But mostly so they don’t go broke by taking common career slogans like 'follow your passion' at face value.

Listen to episode 164 now or watch it on YouTube