Real talk about career trajectories

Almost every time I scroll through LinkedIn, I run into one or more posts with some variation of the following:

• You're wasting your life working for someone else, start your own business...
• Invest in yourself, not traditional investments, so you can be super successful...
• [literally today] Don't save for retirement, spend that money on household help so you can spend your time learning new skills...
• etc.

These all generally follow the same general themes: investing in yourself allows you to start your own business, and that allows you to get wealthy, and if you're working a 9-5 and doing the normal and recommended financially responsible things, you're doing it wrong, and will always be poor. I'm going to lay out my opinion on this advice, and relate it to the career/life path I'm on, and what I would personally recommend.

Let's talk risk

The main factor that most people gloss over, when recommending this approach to a career, is the element of risk. When last I read up on this, at least in the tech sector, roughly 1/20 startups get to an initial (non-seed) funding round, and roughly 1/20 of those get to the point where founders can "cash out" (ie: sold, public, profitable, etc.). That's a huge number of dead bodies along the way, and the success stories in the world are the outliers. When you hear about anyone's success with investing in themselves and becoming wealthy, there's a very heavy selection bias there.

This is where personal wealth comes into play (eg: family wealth, personal resources, etc.), and why people who succeed at starting businesses usually come from money. As someone without financial resources, not working a steady job is a large financial risk: you usually won't make much money, and if your endeavor doesn't pan it, you might be left homeless (for example). People with resources already can take that risk, repeatedly, and still be fine if it doesn't work out; normal people cannot. Starting a business is expensive, often in outlay costs in addition to opportunity costs. Personal resources mitigates that risk.

There's also an element of luck in starting a business: even if you have a good idea, good skills, good, execution, etc., some of the chance of overall success will still be luck. This is something where you can do everything "right", and still fail. This risk is random, and cannot really be mitigated.

The other risk factor in terms of owning and running a business comes later, if/when the business becomes viable. As a business owner, your fortunes go up or down based on the value of the business, and often you'll be personally liable for business debts when the company is smaller. In contrast, an employee is hired for a specific wage and/or compensation agreement, and that is broadly dependent on just performing job functions, not how successful that makes the business overall. Moreover, employees can generally ply their skills for any business, so if the business become bad to work at, they have mobility, whereas the business owner does not. Again, this is the risk factor.

But you still want to be wealthy...

Okay, so here's my advice to put yourself in the best position to be wealthy:

1. Get really good at networking
2. Buy rental property

 #1 is the most important factor in overall wealth potential, in my opinion. In addition to being the primary factor in many types of jobs (eg: sales, RE agent), networking will get you opportunities. Also, being good at networking will make you good at talking to people, which is the primary job skill for managers. Since managers are typically compensated better than skill workers, and almost always the people who get elevated to C-level roles, this is the optimal career path in general for being wealthy, even if you don't start your own business.

#2 is the best possible investment type, at least in the US, because the government has made hording property the single most tax advantaged investment possible. It is an absolutely awful social policy in general, as it concentrates wealth among the very rich while creating durable wealth inequality, and making housing unaffordable for much of the middle class. The tax policy is the absolute pinnacle of corruption and/or stupidity in government policy in the US... but rental property is unequivocally the best investment class as a result of the policy, and unless you're in a position to compromise your own wealth for idealism, this is what you should invest in.

Parting thoughts

Most people will be employees (vs self-employed or business owners). If you are in a position and of the mindset to start a business, and are comfortable with the risk, that is a path you can choose. If that's not for you (as it's not for most people), but you still want the best chance of being reasonably wealthy, get really good at talking to people and maintaining social connections, and go into management: it's significantly easier than skilled or manual labor, and happens to pay significantly better also. But at the end of the day, keep in mind that you don't have to luck into the 0.001% who are in position to and are successful in starting a successful business in order to make enough money to have a comfortable life, and there is more to life than just making lots of money.