Two Roads: 2 Critical Life Choices That Affect Your Future
There are two roads. Society and many people encourage you to take the traditional road. But the unconventional path may be a better option.
Society wants you to be mediocre. People have been told from a young age that there is only one way to achieve success. The traditional path has been graduating from high school, going to college, and then applying for jobs. The unconventional approach is learning to utilize the Internet to become an Internet entrepreneur.
College continues to be marketed as the best option for people to experience success. The problem is the 21st Century is different from the 20th Century. The higher education system and how most employers hire people are still by the dated rules of the 20th Century.
You can go down the outdated traditional path. Or, you can embrace the unconventional way of the 21st Century.
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Road One: The Traditional Path
The traditional path tells you that to succeed, you must attend college. You must work a nine-to-five. You must always be an employee.
There are many reasons to choose this road:
You want to work a job or work your way up in a career that you believe may be secure.
You want to use it as a stepping stone to get somewhere else.
You want to use it to make money while working on starting your own business.
The traditional path is the safe path. It may not yield the best results, but at least it says you can live a comfortable life. As with anything, the results will vary. The problem is that the traditional career path is slowly dying away.
The Changing Nature Of The Traditional Career Path
But finding jobs you can move up in is becoming more challenging, if not impossible. Deloitte writes:
“Today this model [the traditional career] is being shattered. As research suggests, and as I’ve seen in my own career, the days of a steady, stable career are over. Organizations have become flatter and less ladder-like, making upward progression less common (often replaced by team or project leadership).”
The point is that the role that colleges have marketed themselves has mostly no longer applied. There may be certain circumstances where attending college may be beneficial, but for the most part, it will not help you get a traditional career.
I experienced this myself. I spent nearly a decade in the higher education system. My undergraduate degree was in political science. I then took some classes at a community college to learn the basics of computer programming. I later decided to go to graduate school for information and cybersecurity.
When I was getting close to graduating with my master’s, I was starting to apply for jobs in information technology and cybersecurity. No employer would hire me because I did not have the right work background on my resume. The best I could do was to get stuck working a dead-end gig and service jobs.
Inside Higher-Ed found that 41% of recent college graduates work in jobs that do not require a college degree. If nearly half are unemployed or underemployed after college, the higher education system is failing because it markets itself as the gateway to a successful career.
The good news is that the Internet now provides many opportunities for those who want to embrace the unconventional path.
Road Two: The Unconventional Path
The unconventional path requires that you embrace discomfort. It would be best if you learned to take calculated risks. You must learn to read the marketplace. This is the entrepreneurial path.
This is the path to being self-employed or being a business owner.
As an entrepreneur, you can increase your income. You can learn to scale your business. You can learn to develop systems to increase your company’s productivity.
You can use social media and the Internet to grow an audience. You can start a website and build an email list. You could create your own email list.
As you build an audience and email list, you can later sell products and services to your audience. You will want to play to your strengths for your first product or service. Once you have money coming into your business’ bank account, you can hire freelancers and scale your business.
You can provide several different products and services to your audience and customers. It could range from free content to books to digital courses. Today, you can sell physical and digital products.
The non-traditional path is not for everyone. That is all right. But with the changing landscape and the decline of the traditional career path, you may need to choose to take more risks to get ahead. That may require you to learn to become a solopreneur.
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Summary
You are the only person who knows yourself. It would be best to determine which of these two paths makes the most sense for you. The first requires you to work for someone else and may have limited upside depending on the career field. The second choice has more risk, but you can grow your income faster.
Become A Secure Single.
Which of the two paths will you take? Why have you chosen that path? Let us know in the comments below!