How to Choose a Career

General principles for the choice of a career path

As many young men in our society are clueless about what they want to do in the future, and, more often than not, go to college without any specific career plan, we wanted to provide some advice on how to choose a career, especially if your goal is to be a father and have a large family, which means you would would prefer to have an above-average financial situation. This goal is unlikely to be achieved if you just pursue some generic education and randomly pick whatever job is available.

This is mostly based on common sense and experience, and on things I wish I had been told sooner in my life. Hopefully it can apply to your personal situation, and help you make a smart move.

1- The law of supply and demand (or the principle of scarcity)

Having a job, or having a business, is being a part of the overall economy. You produce goods or services that have a market value, your work itself has a market value. It has a price, which is your salary, or your fees; i.e. what people are willing to pay for benefiting from your work.

In modern economies, market value is mostly determined by the law of supply and demand.

Here are different job situations depending on the balance between supply and demand:

High demand, scarce supply: there are not enough people who do your job, and your job is perceived as important. Your market value is high, you make the rules. This is the best spot to be in.
- Examples: specialized roles in vital industries like IT, accounting, healthcare, construction, transportation.
High demand, high supply: the market is bursting with activity, but the competition is fierce. Wages will not be so great. You may have to set yourself apart from the others to get the better jobs.
- Examples: most entry-level IT/engineering jobs, customer service, delivery jobs.
Low demand, scarce supply: you are in a niche market, your job is not perceived as vital. People are unlikely to pay you well. The market is slow, there are not many jobs, nor business opportunities.
- Examples: non-luxury handmade items or specialty food & drinks, antiquated industries like bookbinding or wool weaving.
Low demand, high supply: this is the spot of misery. If you’re part of a pool of numerous people who compete for a small number of jobs, or if you’re a business competing in a saturated market where there’s insufficient demand, you will soon file for bankruptcy.
- Examples: artists, entry-level positions in cool-looking industries like video games or entertainment, teaching positions in social sciences and humanities, or jobs that social sciences/humanities graduates typically apply for. All cool-looking and non-vital jobs.

Think of something where the demand is high, and the offer is insufficient. Or, at least, think of something where the demand will stay high forever, and which has some barrier to entry.

2- Barrier to entry

The principle of supply and demand, specifically applied to career paths, is usually linked to this other principle: the barrier to entry.

If only a few people are able to do a specific job, because of some special difficulty, while this job still needs to be done, you have scarcity: the price goes up.

The higher the barrier to entry is to your specific career, the more likely you are to be successful.

A barrier to entry is anything that might discourage most people from engaging in this specific career, and/or which makes this specific job impossible to perform for most people.

Here are some examples:

Need for long and difficult training: the classical, timeless barrier to entry. Not everybody’s willing to take the 5, 8 or 10 years of education and/or practical experience it takes to be qualified for some specific jobs.
Need for above-average intelligence: not everyone can be an engineer, a doctor, or a lawyer. There are some natural gifts required to excel in these careers, or even to simply pass the exams.
Physical effort and danger: there are jobs people don’t want to do because they’re especially dangerous and physically taxing.
Difficult social interactions: there are jobs people don’t want to do because they rely on difficult, tricky, unpleasant, or humiliating social interactions. Not everyone has the kind of “thick skin” some jobs require.
Low social status: if given the choice, people pursue careers that have more prestige or social appeal, and are reluctant to take jobs that would make them look boring or somewhat dishonorable.
Relocation and/or frequent travelling: people usually want to be able to have a stable life, where they can keep seeing their family and friends week after week. Having to live a significant part of the year away from your household is a burden not everybody wants to carry.
Irregular shifts: not everyone wants to work the night shift, or have a scattered schedule.
Potential for boredom: some jobs have an especially repetitive or boring nature, and if given the choice, people would pursue more exciting careers.

Of course, the most accessible jobs have low social status and high potential for boredom. These are not barriers to entry anymore when you have no other option for making a living. These are jobs anybody can do: that’s why their price (their salary) is so low, because there’s no serious barrier to entry, therefore no scarcity of the ressource. But these two factors combined with another barrier (e.g. the need for training) usually make your market value go up.

If you combine several of these barriers, if you are willing to accept some specific hardships or inconveniences which repel most people, you will have less competition, and your market value is likely to increase. One significant barrier to entry might be enough to be successful, depending on the specific market you are aiming at. The employers will usually propose a better pay to somewhat compensate for the inconvenience or difficulty.

If I could advise a younger version of myself I would go for route #1, and go for a long and tedious training which is guaranteed to have high rewards. It’s so important to tell kids to consider such a path while they still can. Later in our lives, we are unlikely to have eight years available to spend on launching a cool new career. The younger you are, the smartest moves you can make. It’s not necessarily about college education: it can be working ten years in a specific trade, doing something you are very good at, so as to become invaluable to your market because of your expertise. Realize that there are plenty of ordinary people with a high-demand skill, like plumbers, electricians, carpenters, trimmers, butchers, or bakers, who encountered more financial success after starting their own business than mediocre engineers or lawyers do in their corporate job. I know an electrician who owns a fancy house in a nice neighborhood, thanks to the business he runs with only one employee.

Remember, the law of supply and demand is still what determines price. Barriers to entry are not so good if the demand is low: it only makes your life worse, if you have to make a lot of efforts to end up receiving low rewards because of the low demand.

3- Providing value

Not every job provides the same value to the world.

Value can be difficult to measure. There’s a spiritual value to some things which is impossible to measure in terms of money or even in terms of material and visible outcome. It’s true that the economy does not reflect this kind of intrinsic value by rewarding jobs or occupations that have the highest spiritual value. You should not assume, when choosing a career, that the world will reward you because of the spiritual value you provide. You need to think about another kind of value, which can be measured in a more material way.

The more tangible and measurable the value you provide is, the higher your income potential.

Here are some of the best ways to provide value, economically speaking, that is to say ways that are very tangible and measurable:

Fixing urgent problems: the best opportunities lie where you can remove pain and make people’s life easier. Some careers will never go away, because the kind of problems they solve will always be there and these kinds of problems are significantly painful.
Offering awesome experiences: people are willing to pay a big extra if you can offer, compared to the competition, a significantly better experience in whatever product or service you deliver. Beyond urgent problems and basic needs, people care about having an exciting and/or comfortable experience.
Helping other people/businesses make more money: there’s no easier way to prove your value in the economical system than being able to say (and prove) that you can bring X revenue with Y means in Z amount of time. People sometimes wonder why the salesmen have a better pay than the people who actually make the products they sell. That is because the value of the salesman is much more easily measured: he can demonstrate that his activity generated X amount of profits for the company.

Successful businessmen’s No. 1 concern is finding ways to provide more value to the customers. Successful investors are looking for the businesses that provide the most value.

Even if you don’t want to start a business, you have to somewhat think of yourself as a businessman, think in terms of problems to solve and revenue to bring, and think of your employer as a customer whose needs you have to understand and satisfy.

In some specific career paths, which have a potential for a clear and tangible demonstration of their value, you can go past the classic pricing system of “pay me X for the Y hours I’ve worked,” and start operating on a quite different system, which is “pay me X in proportion of the Y value I provide:” that is usually more interesting.

4- Knowing yourself

Not everyone is cut out for just any career.

You need to honestly assess your strengths and weaknesses to make a smart decision about what career you want to pursue.

If you’re introverted, clumsy, socially awkward, it’s probably best not to think about being a salesman: while it could be a great personal experience to overcome your fears and become competent in something you were supposed to fail at, the fact that you had this initial reluctance probably means that you will never excel, and that you’d only become competent through much suffering. Similarly, you don’t want to pursue a career which requires a 5+ years college education if you have always struggled with sitting still for hours and focusing on very specific and abstract topics. You may end up being good, but competing with people who were naturally gifted for the job, and ended up being much better than you.

You rather want to look at something you’re naturally good at, and then work on that natural strength, develop and perfect it.

Even though you don’t need to be excellent to be successful, the smartest way to develop a career is to become excellent at something which is in high demand. And not everybody can become excellent at anything.

The path to excellence

The jobs anybody can do have a low price, because the resource (potential workforce) is plentiful. In order to have the most value, in order to become an especially scarce resource, the best way is to be excellent at what you’re doing. Smart and successful companies are willing to pay extra for excellence.

To become excellent at something, you need three things: 1- Natural gifts, 2- Passion, 3- Work ethic.

Natural gifts

You need to know yourself well and be honest about yourself to know what you could or should specialize in. Look at your temperament, your interests, the things people usually praise you for, the things people appreciate in you, the good things adults noticed about you when you were in school, etc.

Beware of the natural tendency to exaggerate our abilities and take pride in things, thinking we are “the best” or “among the best,” when in fact we could be just a little above average, and sometimes even blatantly incompetent. We all have come across people who think they are much better at something than they really are: it’s embarrassing. You don’t want to be one of these people. If you overestimate your own natural abilities, you may encounter bitter disappointment and failure, and make other people suffer in the process.

Beware of the opposite tendency: self-depreciation, low self-esteem, untapped potential never used. It’s hard to realize your own value if nobody encouraged you or supported you in your childhood, or if you have encountered many failures and rejections throughout your life. But there’s no way God left you without some gifts to share with the world.

The question you need to ask yourself is not: “am I the best at this?” but “can I do this with more ease and speed than most people? Am I above average in this?” — if yes, then there is potential for becoming very good in a career related to that activity or that skill.

Passion

“Following your dreams” or “living your passion” is a very overrated motto. Cold hard reality is that if your dreams or your passions don’t fit with some tangible market need, you will not encounter success. If there is a market, but too many people are “following their dreams” and trying to make a living in that market, you may have a very hard time setting yourself apart from them, or fail entirely in that process because the competition is too harsh.

Yet, in the process of choosing a career, passion has to be factored in. There’s no way you can become excellent in something you are not passionate about.

You need to love the grind, the time spent learning, training yourself, doing the thing, for hours and hours on. It has to set you on fire, in some kind of way. You want to experience what modern psychology calls “the flow,” this state in which your focus is so intense that you don’t even feel time passing while you are working. You want the feeling that you were “made for this,” even if it's kind of weird to be so passionate about that specific thing.

Hardwork

Anybody who happens to be competent in anything knows it: you cannot achieve this competency without some serious work, and you never stop learning as you keep working. The most excellent people know it the best. It took them years to achieve excellence, and their training is not finished yet. You always hear that from the most skilled and passionate craftsmen: everybody is impressed by their awesome skills, but they are still focused on improving themselves. Only a very delusional person could think of himself as excellent while he has not put in the hard work.

Among a pool of very good people, in some specific skill or trade, the most excellent ones happen to also be the ones who worked significantly more than the others. Gifted people who don’t work enough might still be above average, but they’ll never be excellent.

That being said, some people have a low potential for excellence, in the sense they are not passionate enough about anything, or passionate about too many things at a time, to start the process of becoming excellent. That’s ok: you can be successful and have a good financial situation even if you’re average in what you do, provided that you operate within the principles we talked about (supply and demand — barrier to entry — providing tangible value). You can be successful if you can do many different things and have a diverse set of skills and interests, even though you are not excellent in any of these. You would just have even more value if you specialized in something you’re excellent at doing.

5- Stability: beware of bubbles and fads

As supply and demand is the most important factor when one has to determine a specific career path, you may think the smartest move is to get trained in the most trendy skill of the moment, the thing which appears to be most demanded by recruiters. Many people took on this approach, and ended up disappointed. That is because they overlooked an important factor in their decision: the stability of the demand, and the speed of the adjustment between supply and demand.

A mere lookout at the opened job offers and the current salaries is not enough to determine the quality/profitability of a career over time.

Sometimes companies and executives make stupid decisions for the sake of giving into a fad, or for the sake of looking innovative and modern, and they hire people based on that instead of some hardcore business need. If later their business is not doing well, they will end up cutting these kinds of expenses.

You need to think deeper about it, and think about what companies and people really need. If your skill is not fulfilling some kind of important and permanent need, you may encounter huge difficulties later on.

Beware of anything that is very new,or newly in-demand, and which has plenty of online courses, certifications or bootcamps to get trained in. This is probably an unstable market, changing rapidly, and possibly a bubble which could end up exploding at some point. Even in case the demand stays stable: if the barrier to entry is too low, that means the market will become saturated soon. People who have enrolled in web development bootcamps in the past two years know what I’m talking about.

If you are interested in this kind of path anyways, you should have some kind of strategy to set yourself apart from the competition, and have a fallback plan in case things go wrong in terms of demand.

6- Flexibility

All things above considered (supply and demand, barrier to entry, value, personal fit, stability of the demand), there are still career paths that are objectively better than the others, and should be preferred if given the choice.

These are the careers that offer the most flexibility. The more options you have, the better it is for you and for your family.

I would describe a career path as flexible if fulfils one or several of these conditions:

1) it offers many options when it comes to vertical or horizontal growth
2) it offers many options as to where you could live if you work in that specific industry
3) it lets you as free as possible to set your own schedule and work in autonomy
4) it does not take absolutely everything from you, and allows for some spare time
5) it doesn’t 100% require your physical presence and physical activity, therefore can be performed remotely

I use the term “vertical growth” to describe the possibility of taking more and more responsibilities over time. You don’t necessarily want to become a manager or an executive, but it’s good to know that this is an option in case you want to reconsider that later. “Horizontal growth” is the possibility of changing your position inside your specific industry or company without taking more responsibilities. Indeed, you might get bored after doing a specific job for more than a decade. It’s good if your career path has many potential options for this kind of change, without requiring you to completely start from scratch again.

Some career paths can seclude you in some specific areas: big cities, places of heavy industry, etc… The more specialized the industry is, the fewer options you are likely to have: all the jobs will be in some specific place, and you cannot choose to live somewhere else. All things considered, it may be better to be in a less specific industry and have more location freedom, because your skills are needed all over the country.

Some career paths are great when it comes to pay, but they take too much from you. The most successful people, according to worldly standards, are people who work 80+ hours a week, never take time off, and never see their family. From a Catholic standpoint, this is not good: if you are a husband and a father, your primary duty is to your family, you have to spend time with your wife and children. Of course, you also need time dedicated to God only, times of prayer, sanctification of Sundays and holy days of obligation. Your career is only a means to an end, that end being the good of your family (which is more important than the good you can do to other people through your job) and the glorification of God (through the fulfilment of your duties of state in life). You cannot let any of that on the side.

The ability to work remotely, and to set your own schedule, is such a great freedom that many people are willing to accept a huge trade-off in pay for the sake of having that maximum flexibility. It certainly has value. You could then choose to live in a place where real estate is much cheaper, compared to big cities.

Flexibility is the only valid reason not to specialize too much. Specialization is usually smarter and more profitable than the reverse: we have previously talked about excellence, and it’s unlikely you can achieve excellence if you are not focused on some very specific thing that you invest all your efforts in. Yet, there is a negative aspect to specialization: you will probably have fewer options when it comes to who you can work for, where you can work, and how you can grow in your career, compared to someone who is more generalist, or has a very diverse set of skills. It’s up to you to decide, according to your specific situations and your specific gifts, if it’s smarter to specialize or generalize. Maybe you can choose a mixed approach: specialize enough, and stay flexible enough; grow some main skills, and also some secondary skills which may help you in other situations, and perhaps allow you to switch careers if needed.

7- Morality

Even though in theory you can glorify God in any kind of career, in a world which has departed so much from the law of God, there is often a risk of getting involved in immoral activities or behaviors in a professional context. As a Catholic, you cannot just choose any kind of career without seriously thinking about the potential of moral corruption such a career path may carry.

Every kind of job may carry some moral “gray zones,” where you have to cooperate with certain things that are bad or probably bad, though in an indirect way. This is called remote material cooperation to evil, and you should not worry about that provided that you don’t cooperate directly to the evil your company does or your job permits in some kind of indirect way. Remote material cooperation is possible when you have a serious reason for it: in that case, having a job to sustain yourself and your family is obviously a serious reason. You should ask a priest in case of doubt, but working for a big company that is somewhat woke, provided that you don’t get involved directly in the promotion of wokeness, is morally justifiable.

What is not justifiable though is to get involved directly in the promotion of something bad, even though you do it unwillingly. If you’re an executive of a big company and have to make speeches and meetings to promote wokeness, no matter your internal intention, you cannot do it, and should rather resign or get fired than having to say and promote evil things. It would actually be an honor and a great merit to sacrifice career success because you fear God. But you might as well maximize your chances of avoiding such a difficult situation to begin with.

In my country, pharmacists are absolutely required to sell condoms, and if they don’t do it, they might get denounced and sanctioned to the point of being banned from the profession. Thus, you cannot be a pharmacist in France and live in accordance with the law of God. Doctors are also practically required to prescribe abortion pills to whoever demands it. If it is known that you refuse to comply with such demand, you might also get sanctioned and banned from the profession. You don’t want to invest so much time in getting a medical degree if you end up being banned from the profession for moral reasons. This may depend on which country you are in, but it’s probable that most Western countries make it difficult to have a regular medical career, when contraception and abortion are legally considered as “healthcare.”

There may also be careers in which lying is such a common practice that you can struggle to compete if you’re honest, in a market where everybody lies. You may even be required by your boss to lie. Some sales jobs have a bad reputation for that: real estate, car dealerships.

It is never ok to do evil for a good purpose, to do evil for being able to provide for your family or something along these lines. In order not to get stuck in a morally dubious job or career path, you have to think seriously about the possible moral issues occuring in the specific field you are interested in.

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By combining all these principles, with specific attention to the 1st principle (the need for a high demand) and the 4th principle (knowing yourself, your strengths and weaknesses), you should end up, God willing, having a profitable career and having the means to provide for your family without much stress.

It’s not too late if you’re currently stuck in a subpar career: getting some training in your spare time, for the purpose of acquiring skills that are in high and stable demand, has proven to be a way for many people to successfully switch careers. It might require patience and an exceptional amount of work for a few months or a few years, but you have to think long-term. It’s better to make efforts now that you are still relatively young, rather than having to make a dramatic career shift in your 50’s just to make ends meet.

May God help you in your way to find a good job and a good career.