I'm twenty-something and tired of advice

I'm twenty-something. I'm not tired of work, or business, or people. I'm tired of advice.

From people who know which profession I should pick, how much I should earn, when to get married, which books to read and how to build a personal brand so that by thirty I become a person with a personal brand. A special pleasure is getting this advice from people who haven't yet worked out how to pay for their own subscriptions.

Advice is a wonderful thing. It costs the person giving it nothing. It sometimes costs the person following it several years.

So I'm starting a journal. Not because the world needs one more opinion, it has plenty. I just like figuring things out, and sometimes I want to say out loud what people usually keep to themselves.

Everything by twenty-five

At twenty you're supposed to know who you'll become. At twenty-two, have experience. At twenty-five, earn decent money. At twenty-seven, buy a flat. At thirty, found something, sell something, or at least call it a startup.

If you haven't launched a business by twenty-four, the internet considers you late. Late for what, nobody says.

Youth has been turned into a race to achieve everything early. Someone shipped an app at nineteen, someone became a manager at twenty-one, someone bought a Porsche at twenty-three, someone sold a company at twenty-four. And today you're having an ordinary Tuesday.

We see the result and miss everything else: parents, connections, money, the team, chance, luck, and the failures nobody posts. We see the caption "I'm 22, here's how I made my first million" and feel we skipped an important class. Even though nobody ever signed up for that course.

Work and talking about work

A new profession has appeared: looking promising. You have to be productive, read, learn English, know Python, understand marketing, understand business, use AI and build a personal brand. Ideally all at once.

Simply doing good work is no longer enough. You also have to tell everyone exactly how well you work. A photo of a laptop, a coffee, a caption: "today I understood one important thing about leadership".

I'm not against personal branding, I'm building one myself. But work and talking about work have started to blur. One person can spend three years making something great and say nothing. Another can learn to talk beautifully about things in three months and become an expert. The second isn't necessarily worse. But the first isn't obliged to turn every working day into an ad campaign.

Sometimes you just want to do something well. No post, no case study, no five takeaways, no building in public.

So who's paid already

I work with products, so I watch the cult of product management from up close. According to job ads, a product manager has to understand the user, the market, business, design, technology, analytics, strategy, marketing and the CEO's mood. They're not hiring an employee, they're hiring Leonardo da Vinci with Jira experience.

And the product can still turn out to be something nobody needs. You can run twenty interviews, draw thirty prototypes, assemble the perfect roadmap, sit through five strategy sessions and discover that nobody is going to pay for it.

I'm not tired of product management, I'm tired of how it's sold. As if after one course you see the market straight through and can explain any failure with the word "hypothesis". No. Sometimes the hypothesis was just crap. Sometimes the decision was stupid. Sometimes the user turned out to be smarter than the team.

Business is the same. It used to be that you had to build a business. Now sometimes a presentation about how you're going to build one is enough. Problem, solution, a fifty-billion market, we'll take one percent, the team, the investment, we haven't earned anything yet but the market is huge. Somewhere between slide six and slide seven the product itself gets lost.

I like business. I like it when a person takes a problem, builds a solution and makes money from it. I don't like it when the plan sounds more convincing than what's been built. Someone talks strategy for an hour and can't answer the question "so who's paid already". It's a primitive question. Money is a primitive thing.

AI won't think for you

Now, supposedly, without AI you've already lost. You write, use AI. You draw, use AI. You sell, use AI. You think, preferably with AI too. Soon there'll be a course on how to wake up properly with a chatbot.

I use AI every day and consider it the best tool of the last few years. The problem is elsewhere: people have started mistaking the tool for a brain.

A model will write the text but doesn't know what it's for. It will propose a strategy but doesn't understand why the client won't buy. It will give you twenty ideas and won't tell you which of them isn't shit.

That's not the model's flaw, it's ours. We want it to think for us, then we're surprised that what comes out is the quality of our own thinking, just faster. AI doesn't remove the need to think. It makes it obvious whether you did. No question, and no model will help.

Why everyone's running

The strangest advice goes like this: you're young, you have time. It's usually said right after five minutes on how you urgently need to start. Urgently build a career, urgently earn, urgently grow, urgently find your purpose.

Curious why everything is urgent if there's time.

There's a huge difference between "don't put your life off" and "get it all done by twenty-five". But the accepted view is that whoever isn't running is standing still. Whoever isn't growing is degrading. Whoever isn't earning more is losing. And whoever is simply living is apparently not ambitious enough.

I like working, making products, building and trying things. But I don't want to live my whole life in deadline mode. A person has the right not to know what will happen in five years. That's not a lack of ambition, that's honesty.

The one piece of advice I'll take

There's one piece of advice I like. It sells badly and won't fit on the cover of a business book.

Figure out what genuinely interests you, and do it long enough to see a result.

You don't have to turn an interest into a business right away. You don't have to build a brand around it. You don't have to explain to everyone why you're doing it. You can start. Then get it wrong. Then change direction. Then start again. On the internet it looks unimpressive, but it looks like life.

I'm interested in why some ideas work and others don't. Why some companies grow and others disappear. Why people pay for one thing and ignore another. Why some people can build and others can only talk. I don't have the answers, and I'm not going to pretend I do.

I don't know where I'll be in five years, what business I'll build or how much I'll earn. Sometimes that feels uneasy. But I'm not going to spend ten years in a row living up to someone else's idea of the right life.

Work, try, get it wrong, earn, learn. And sometimes sit and do fuck all without feeling guilty about it. Not much of a strategy. But it's mine.

I'll leave the advice to others. They're doing just fine with it.