A young friend of mine called me up the other day. He is in the venture capital business and feels he has reached what young people call “a career plateau.” Maybe he has, though in my experience, people his age — he’s about 30 — have outsize ideas about where they should be in their careers at that point, and how many underlings they should have scurrying around them in fear, and especially what they should get paid.
What young people call a “career plateau” is what a lot of older people call, simply, a “career.” But when you’re young, you don’t always realize that life isn’t just one big promotion after another, either in the career sense or the metaphorical sense.
“So I was hoping,” he said, “to get some career advice.” I have to admit I was sort of flattered by this. “Well,” I said with an avuncular chuckle, “I’ll do my best.”
“Not from you,” he said. “You don’t know anything about finance. I just know that you and (here he mentioned the name of a friend of mine who is a very successful financier) are friends, so I thought maybe you could connect us and I could ask him for some advice.”
Honestly, I wasn’t insulted. Instead, I was relieved. As a rule, I hate giving young people career advice. In the first place, they’re almost always ungrateful. And in the second, they inevitably ask the same question after you’ve finished delivering your wisdom. “Hmmmm,” they’ll say, “is that what you did?”
“No,” I always admit. “I didn’t do it that way, which is why I am talking to you from the inside of my Subaru Outback instead of my Gulfstream 5.”
And who needs to be reminded of that? So I was glad to steer him to my investment banker friend, who promised to connect with him. He’s the kind of person, I guess, who loves to give advice to young people. Sometimes, I think that everyone over 50 can be divided into two basic categories: You’re either dreading the moment a younger person asks for counsel, or you’re brimming with life and career wisdom and will explode if someone doesn’t ask soon.
Some people, of course, don’t even wait to be asked. “You should cut your hair shorter,” a successful editor and publisher friend of mine told her protégée. “Your long hair makes you look less powerful and imposing.” And then she turned to me and asked, “Don’t you agree?”
Along with never giving career advice, my other firm rule is never to talk about anyone’s hairstyle, ever. If you just got a complicated or concerning haircut and you ask me how it looks, I will chirp merrily, “It looks fine!” Even when, maybe especially when, it doesn’t. But in this case, the protégée’s hairstyle was fine. Suitable, even, for a woman of her age. And it didn’t escape our notice that the older woman was sporting the exact hairstyle that she was advising her underling to get.
That happens a lot with older advice-givers. They end up suggesting a course of action — a career move, a haircut, it doesn’t really matter — that’s just a cut-and-paste version of themselves. There’s something in our nature, I guess, that compels us to try to fill the world with a lot of Mini-Mes.
A few days later, my young friend called me to report on his career conversation. As I feared, my banker pal had spent the entire time suggesting a career path that was a perfect duplication of his own.
“I’m really sorry,” I said. “I guess that wasn’t too helpful.”
“Are you kidding?” was the reply. “It was great! Just what I needed to hear. He just started talking about himself and his career highs and lows and everything he’s learned along the way, and at the end of the conversation, he offered me a job.”
“So it was a job interview?” I asked.
“The best kind,” was the reply. “Because I didn’t have to say anything. I’ve found that, in general, people your age like to talk about themselves. The smart move is to let them.”
Which is probably the best career advice I’ve ever heard. My guess is that there will not be too many more career plateaus in his future.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.