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I often say to young people that to stay productive, they should not listen to people over 40 who have achieved prestige and are ever complaining and condemning “structures” in society.
Most of these people’s favourite topics are race and gender.
Why should you not listen to them? These people knew the societal challenges when they were 25.
By 30 they knew the “structures” existed still. Until, 40 they did nothing about it.
Until 40, they did anything and everything to arm themself to succeed and gain career prestige – acquiring Masters’s Degrees (MBA) and all sorts of technical competencies through education.
At 40, they should be the ones with solutions – implementing and funding them.
They should not be condemning what they have known since they were 25.
However, they are here condemning the so-called structures they succeeded within.
The point is they are using activism to create content to advance themselves and/or to virtue signal cheaply. Your gender and race are their target market.
At other times, people over 40 use feminism, socialism, politics and marxism as an excuse not to be the adults in the room (aunts and uncles).
You see them on TV shows and YouTube podcasts debating 20 plus-years-olds. They call them names and all manner insults such as ” trash.”
They scream and overtalk everyone they don’t agree with. I call them adolescent adults. At 40 one should have mastered conversational decorum.
Why you should not take career advice from these activists?
Activists blame someone or something for everything. They add triggering labels to every notion they choose to criticise.
I once heard someone say the internet is patriarchal. Listen, if the internet disappeared – dismantled as they say (not that it’s possible): Millions of non-masculine jobs will disappear.
Apple, Samsung, Facebook and Google will disappear.
To be technical, the internet emerged from advances in transistor and microchip technology. Transistor technology enabled thousands of different gadgets to be possible and become smaller, e.g. smartphones, calculators, flat-screen TVs, etc.
The internet now works hand in hand with these devices.
The internet and microchips democratise economics for all genders, races and those of disadvantaged backgrounds. The poor have access to the same information as everyone – even educational videos on YouTube. It makes starting a business cheap – check out my new book “90 Days to Create & Launch.”
Someone will say the internet is racist. It does not end. I once heard someone say, “A man eating porridge he did not cook is patriarchal and misogynist.”
Listening to such drivel is not good use of your time.
A career needs specifics and technicalities. Its dynamics need to be understood
Usually, gender or race activists use averages to make arguments, e.g. they rely on arguments like ‘on average men earn X higher than women.’
Such averages are illogical mathematically and distort what can be an opportunity. Say one woman earns R5000 and another earns R45 000. Their average is R25 000. It neither represents the two women – it overestimates one lady’s salary and underestimates the other’s. One could be a cleaner and the other a chartered accountant. These people are incomparable.
So it is asinine to use averages for denominators with varying scales. Imagine a young black lady in Grade 11 who is good at maths and physics. She loves teaching and also would like to earn a lot of money one day.
She is wondering what to study at university. The activists on TV keep pounding in her head that the world is unequal but never how she should navigate it to gain prestige like them one day.
Let’s tackle it in the following way.
If she goes to study computer engineering, she will earn way more than if she pursued teaching.
Why? Computer engineering (programming) scales. Imagine she later works for a software company that has 1 thousand paying clients. The company can grow clients to 20000 subscribers within months – and without much further capital investment. Software stays and is maintained in the cloud.
Therefore they can afford to pay her more.
However, if she was a teacher, her students can’t go from 20 to 100 in months. If it does, it’s a strain on her and the quality of education. Where will the capital to build new classes come from? Also, her salary won’t go up that much as compared to an engineer – 20 to 100 is a 5 times increase whereas 1000 to 20000 is a 20 times increase.
There is also the issue of supply and demand. More teachers graduate than engineers yearly. Therefore what is supplied more gets paid less, than what is produced scarcely.
Engineering is a tougher curriculum to be accepted into.
Perhaps she should study computer engineering, and, later toy with the creation of teaching videos on YouTube. Maybe she can start a school, or, teach after work, in person or online. Videos are scalable.
Sequence
Whatever your narrative of progress in South Africa is, a 20-year-old female in 2023 has more opportunities than a 20-year-old male in 1994. In 1994 compared to today: There were fewer tertiary institutions, lesser career options and the GDP was lower than today exponentially.
Policies have had their contribution. However, above that, technological advances have created a lot of jobs and careers exponentially. The jobs don’t require masculinity as the first jobs in the majority of the early industrial revolutions.
Retail and government are the major employers in most countries. Retail sells innovations on the front line. In the backline, still, most of those office jobs are democratised due to the democratisation innovation has had. The government has been able to increase the number of employees because the tax base has gone up due to retail expanding also.
This era of the 4th Industrial Revolution is the most democratised in the world ever – for gender, race and social class.
There is no single career that a woman or black person cannot aim at. If you have to be the first person to do that, so be it. If you are scared, go do something less scary. Someone will come to be the first, just not you.
This other young lady once came to me seeking business advice. However, her starting conversation was filled with ‘black women this and that.’ I stopped her and asked her to tell me what she wanted to do.
She wanted to make a certain product. I pointed her to where it can be made. I showed old quotations I had on my drive. Someone I worked with wanted to do the same thing.
She relied so much on the race and gender story because she thought it was expensive and hard to do that thing. Maybe 15 years ago it was expensive as most manufacturers had Minimum Order Quantities of about 1 thousand. Competition and innovation have enabled quantities of 50 units.
For most things you want to do, only you can hold yourself back. Not gender and race.
You start where you are and work the way up. The key word is ‘work.’
Race and gender content take away from your career
Say you are an apprentice photographer. You consume 90 minutes of feminist content and 30 minutes of photography YouTube content daily.
You are stealing away from you becoming a great photographer. Turn this around.
Career skills have specifics. The feminist content won’t give you career specifics. E.g. above illustrated they label everything patriarchal without even understanding what that particular innovation does.
Being skilled gives you options. You can always find another employer if the one you have is sexist, even abroad.
Those who hire you want the specifics you can deliver. They want great photography.
Progress is specific and needs you to focus on those specifics
Let’s say you did bad things in the past. You’ve cleaned yourself up and want to progress.
If the people you hang out with always remind you of your past, it will take away from your productivity.
So lose them.
The same as when you want to lose weight. You need to cut out the body positivity people.
The same as you want to be an entrepreneur. You don’t want to hang out with those people that say things like ‘black people should start a black bank.’
They won’t start it or anything. Be with fellow entrepreneurs who are building things. They will refer you to specifics that will help you, e.g. a cheaper web store designer.
Reduce or cut out this gender, race and politics rhetoric you hear all day. Replace it with content that teaches you the technicalities of your career.
The majority of the content you consume should not be about what other people and things need to change, e.g. government, this gender or that race.
The majority of the content you consume should be about what you can change about your circumstances and prospects.
That’s a winning mindset. We are in a democracy.