✳flâneur — a map of the web's best reading

The Heuristic Entrepreneur | Oscar Moxon

oscarmoxon.com · 2,353 words · saved by 1 readers

All jobs are exposed to natural selection; at work, if you do not evolve, you are doomed to be replaced by the intern, by the market, by new technology, or all three. But some jobs are far more exposed to creative disruption than others, and the champions of these professions exhibit a pattern worth studying. Take academia; around 4% of the population of the UK and US embark on a PhD, yet 50% fail to receive a doctorate, 70% won’t stay in academia for five years, 97% do not achieve tenure or permanent positions, and 99.6% won’t become professors. One in two hundred of those who start manage to persist—let alone have a significant impact on the profession. Take sports: every European seven-year-old is forced onto the football pitch, yet only 572 persist to the premier league. The same principle applies to music, comedy, acting and software engineering. For those who try and fail to do something great, falling short is rationalised as some deficiency of either hard work or “natural talen

All jobs are exposed to natural selection; at work, if you do not evolve, you are doomed to be replaced by the intern, by the market, by new technology, or all three. But some jobs are far more exposed to creative disruption than others, and the champions of these professions exhibit a pattern worth studying. House Odds Take academia; around 4% of the population of the UK and US embark on a PhD, yet 50% fail to receive a doctorate, 70% won’t stay in academia for five years, 97% do not achieve tenure or permanent positions, and 99.6% won’t become professors. One in two hundred of those who star

Explore this link on the map →

related reading