How will your professional toolkit allow you to be eternally relevant?

Eternally relevant? That’s a big ask. Not even prokaryotes have managed that, and they’ve been at it for 3.8 billion years. In the Paleolithic era, covering 99% of human technological history, careers were divided into ‘subsistence hunter’ and 'corpse’, neither of which are particularly desirable today. Perhaps we should restrict our search to recorded historiography, covering the past 2700 years. If my career is to be eternally relevant in such terms, it must have existed then, right? In Classical Greece, we can identify a number of careers, all but two of which no longer exist in their Classical form. There were soldiers, for example, but so far removed from today’s professional forces fighting wars of choice as to be barely recognizable.  There were bankers, but these men held no relation to the money makers of today.

So, what is eternal? Human nature. We have the amygdala, which provides our baser instincts, and the neo-cortex, for higher concepts. The two careers which existed in Classical Antiquity, and remain fundamentally unchanged today, each stem from one of these brain centres: philosophers, and prostitutes.

Before you ask, no. I’m not telling you to do a PhD in metaphysics, or move to Nevada. Think of the two professions as shorthand. A 'prostitute’ exchanges some trinket, most often money, for momentary pleasure of that value. Each side gets what they want, but no surplus value is added to the world. Marx would not be best pleased. The 'philosopher’, on the other hand, refers to creative professions. These take resources, such as ink, paint or clay, and turn them into projects worth orders of magnitudes more than their materials. This is a process worth aspiring to. How can you be a philosopher of the business world, and so become eternally relevant? Knowledge, and critical thought.

Knowledge, as Plato explained it, is a “justified true belief”. These conditions importantly differ knowledge from mere data: unprocessed collections of variable attributes. Computers are the masters of data, with a modern Sun database dealing with the entry of a quadrillion variables. Critical thought is the process of breaking a problem into its formative concepts, in order to understand their linkage and analyze the problem. It requires knowledge as a foundation, but is a creative process, which computers are (again) rather poor at.  Combine knowledge with analysis, and you will be eternally relevant. Investment banking, a career which barely existed in its current form 50 years ago, may be rendered extinct in the next 50 by computer-driven 'quant’ trading. Thinking will not be rendered extinct in the next 50, 500, or 5000 years.

Take the recent economic troubles for an example. How would you explain them? Greedy bankers stealing wealth with complex CDOs, or American house-owners cheating their way to dangerously-leveraged mortgages? Neither are particularly compelling critiques. Could you instead tie to the story to the effect of Fannie and Freddie Mac on the US mortgage market? Or how the Fed dealt with the aftermath of the Tech Bubble bursting in 2000? Or the handling of LTCM in 1998? Mexico in 1995? Continental Illinois in 1984? Or, perhaps most importantly, the Great Depression of 1929 and its lasting impact on the study of macroeconomics? If you haven’t heard of these events, keep learning. If you can’t see how they’re connected, keep thinking.

The prostitute need not care, for he or she will be eternally relevant however the economy flows. For the rest of us, our eternal relevance will come through our minds.