How to Build a Career When Professions Keep Changing?

Artificial intelligence is changing professions, and career plans for 10–20 years ahead are becoming less and less certain. Does a person need to keep retraining and starting everything over so as not to fall behind?

In this episode, I look at how to view your own professional development, why age and social status do not determine a person’s path, and what is important to understand about your life before choosing your next step. How should you approach changing professions after 40 or 50? Should you follow technology trends? And is it even possible to calculate your professional life in advance?

Do you need to react to the changes taking place?

Today there is a great deal of talk about which professions will disappear, what you urgently need to learn and where to go at all so as to stay in demand a few years from now. I was asked: how should a person build their professional path today, if it’s unclear what will happen in ten or twenty years? What should someone do who is forty or fifty, who already has a profession, or more than one, and a certain amount of experience? Do they need to change everything and start over? And in general, does every person have to react to all the changes happening around them?

Here’s an interesting point. I have different channels, and among them is one devoted exclusively to technology and artificial intelligence. The core audience there is somewhere between thirty and fifty, but a very large audience is fifty to sixty-five plus. So there are a great many people who are not just in the second half of life but in its fourth or fifth part. And we get a lot of comments in which people talk about how they are jumping back into the technological world, trying to figure it out, to take a look at it.

A very interesting question arises here: does a person — regardless of age, by the way — need to react at all to the changes happening around them? And if so, to which ones, and at what age? Does age matter? It seems to us that at twenty-five or thirty you need to react, but at sixty you don’t. Or you can react, and you can also not react.

Everyone, of course, tries to tie themselves to a modern notion of being sixty — one that hasn’t arrived yet: “When I’m sixty, I’ll be a very active person, I’ll study everything, look at everything, know everything. It’s today’s people in their sixties and seventies who know nothing.” And there are some reasons for that. A person who is thirty now was born into a world where computers had already begun to appear more or less properly.

For example, someone was born in 1990, 1995 or 2000 — computers were already starting to appear, not in a big way, but they were. Telephony was gradually starting to appear. And by the time this person went to school or university, cell phones had appeared too. I’m not even talking about today’s children, the ones being born now.

Note this: twenty years ago there were no social networks. The ones that existed were just a tiny embryo, a micro-number of users. Twenty years ago there were no smartphones, no App Store — everything was only just beginning to appear. We also started building a mobile app for the App Store, in 2008, I think — it was the very beginning of all this. The first iPhones came out in, I don’t know, 2005 or 2006.

Of course, if a person is seventy now and was fifty then, their perception of technology is completely different. And it’s obvious that people who are ten or fifteen today will, fifty years from now, at sixty or seventy, be far more developed on the whole in terms of technology than people of that age today. In terms of access to technology. That doesn’t mean they’ll be able to use many things professionally, but in terms of access they will be developed.

Does everyone need to master tech professions?

And a really important question arises: if a person is fifty now, do they need to learn something? If they’re forty? And if they’re thirty — do they need to learn?

Clearly, there aren’t many people aged thirty or younger on my channel — it’s mostly thirty plus. But it’s very important to note here that everyone has their own life. There are people who, regardless of their age, will end up in a story of very strong professional involvement in the technological world. Clearly, if a fifty-year-old has been farming in a village, growing potatoes, say, and has never left the village at all, then getting involved in artificial intelligence at fifty or sixty is a very complicated story for them. Some crazy impulses would have to kick in, and a restructuring, a remaking of their whole life, would have to happen.

What’s more, if you look at karmic circumstances, spiritually, this is no longer a karmic process. Because at forty-eight a person’s karmic living-out of life has basically, more or less, been completed. Although in theory such things are possible too.

But if you take a younger age — thirty or thirty-five — it’s obvious that many people at that age will stay in the same professional zones of development where they already were. Let’s consider: a person works in a coffee shop or in the service sector, as a waiter, for example. Is he supposed to run off somewhere because artificial intelligence has appeared? Here we can take a very good look at what has happened over the past twenty years. Twenty years ago many people worked as waiters, but they didn’t run off to technology. A huge number of those people didn’t.

Many worked as drivers — and didn’t run off to become programmers, marketers or designers. Many worked as sales managers, sitting on the phones in a call center — and twenty years later they were still making calls in a call center. They even seem to be connected with technology: they know what noise-cancelling headphones are, they can use a CRM system, Word, Excel, send PDFs, edit files. But they were call-center employees, and call-center employees they remained.

Next. New people began to appear in today’s reality, finishing school and university — and these people went to work as loaders, in agriculture: driving a combine, digging the soil. They went to work in coffee shops as baristas. Fashionable words appeared. They went off to make coffee and told everyone that being a barista is a super-profession. Sometimes you walk in and think: the person making your coffee — what kind of super-profession is that? He just presses a couple of buttons. Modern equipment, of course, keeps getting better and better, the right settings are made, and all you have to do is press buttons. Although we know that with coffee, one person’s hand differs very much from another’s — in certain micro-movements.

The distorted perception of professions in the age of technology

But what matters is that many people in today’s world of technology have passed technology by. And many who have their own FOMO — their own impulse of lacking the technological world, or the feeling of not keeping up with something in their profession — think it’s like that for everyone. That everyone has the same story: a person thinks about how to launch a new project, how to build a business, how to develop in their profession, how to climb the career ladder or how to learn new technologies.

Even most people in modern professions have the illusion that they are modern.

Look at the enormous number of people in today’s world. As a young woman, you see how people talk about what fashionable, cool marketers they are, or what fashionable, cool IT people they are. They talk about it practically foaming at the mouth. And if you know that there is something truly cool in that area, you look and say: “You’re not cool at all.” But that person is sure he’s cool. He has an inner sense of significance, of rightness, including the coolness of what is going on.

I analyze this a great deal on another channel — I have a channel about meditation, the meditative and, of course, very much about spiritual development. We cover these topics a lot here too, but there it’s simply comprehensive and precise.

The causes and effects of professional development

The question is always about causes and effects. If for ten years a person earns money, his business grows, and then he is put in prison — is he bad or not? What kind of person is he? For twenty-one years, karma is formed. All the events that happen in a person’s life are aimed at realizing that karma further. That is, it seems to you that you are doing good or bad deeds and that they lead to a certain karma — but they create causes within this incarnation so that the effects of past causes can come about.

If you look into it, this is called the inverted space of cause and effect. What is it? I’ll give a simple example. A man killed someone and went to prison. We think and say that he went to prison because he killed someone. But what if you consider the following: according to karma, the man was supposed to end up in prison under certain conditions, and in order to end up there, he killed someone?

It turns out that the cause of the murder is precisely prison. And the effect of that cause is the committing of the murder. He kills a person in order to end up in prison. He simply doesn’t control it.

Although in the basic reasoning of the social, material world, we see a completely different pattern. From twenty-one to twenty-eight there is a period called the double period of the formation and living-out of karma.

And here it’s the same: the question is how well a person understands reality when he says he knows how to develop properly, knows what to do right now. What does he truly pay attention to in terms of life and understanding his own steps? How well does he see and understand that one chosen path of development will lead to some consequences, and another to others? And to what extent is he able to manage those consequences at all?

You know the Russian-speaking market quite well — what’s called the infobusiness. Look carefully at what ultimately happened to different people in that market. It’s notable not for what people say about it: “Ah, of course, it’s all successful success there, or some kind of dirt, or something else.” It’s notable for being the first market to become very open to the outside world — it laid itself bare in terms of its results. The oil and gas market, agriculture, food — that market is closed; it hasn’t laid itself bare. There weren’t lots of bloggers there — CEOs, company owners — telling how they work, what they do, where they are, and gaining millions of subscribers. But this market is open.

We see how people now simply lie in the open market of PR. Presidents of countries, ministers, famous people lie. Why? Because now all of this is easy to check. If you said something on camera or wrote something on some network, everything is recorded and checked. Then people come out and say: “Here you said one thing, here a second, here a third.” And the person replies: “I don’t know what went on there, but actually I think a fourth thing.”

So, in that market people have opened up a great deal, and there you can see a generation of people in terms of business realization or professional realization — what actually happened across a wide range. And to understand it not from the position of humiliating someone or saying that this one is cool, good or bad, but from the position of studying causes and effects, studying the laws of human life — the true laws of human life — and karmic interconnections, including — when we talk about professional development — social causes and effects. Because professional development is a very important story.

For example, my mother once enrolled in a polytechnic institute in Belarus. She had a plan in terms of a social career, and her parents had a plan. And then, in 1993 or some such year, she decided not to work — she decided to devote her life to herself, the children, the family. And she didn’t work. That’s her career. She was born in 1956; let’s say in 1970 or 1973 she planned one thing, and in 1993 something completely different happened in terms of career.

By the way, she never once in her life said that she wasn’t upset about not working. Being upset can take different forms, but that doesn’t mean you made the right or the wrong choice. It’s a choice that was predetermined.

But I want to show you this specifically from the standpoint of a career. Or take me: I went to study programming without understanding at all why I should go and study that in particular. And I do very different things. From time to time I take on various cases where people have some legal problems. Yesterday my wife and I were driving and saying that I would have made a good lawyer — in a normal market. I think in the American market, in America, I would have been a good lawyer. There are countries where political advocacy is very strong — that doesn’t interest me. But where the law is present, I would have done quite well in that market in terms of strategy, evidence, details and everything else.

Imagine how legal education connects to this. I remember: I studied programming, and many of my acquaintances studied in law faculties. To me they were some entirely different people — lawyers. What do they do there? Some other world. And if now, imagine, you put me into that child who is determining the path of his attention, what to do — I don’t know what I would suggest to myself now if I were told to change my life socially.

Again, back at university I had two job interviews in my life: one for a programming job at a French company, where I got hired, and the other I went to in order to get a job as a merchandiser. But they could have taken me there and offered me more money. I would have driven around stores checking whether the Pepsi-Cola was displayed properly — it was the Pepsi company. I remember very clearly the young woman at the interview saying: “Listen, you seem to be doing very well studying programming. Why do you need this field at all?” I got to that interview by chance, because I wanted to work and earn money — they simply invited me. Could my career have gone down that path? It could.

Or my friends and I decided to sell phones in 2001 or 2002. It didn’t work out for us: something broke, something didn’t sell. But what if it had worked out, and all these years we had been earning a lot of money? I would have been selling phones. Life can go very differently in terms of a person’s development, his professional development, his professional path.

Two important reference points when choosing your next step

And the question is: does the person actually choose this himself, and does he understand the full breadth of what is happening? Once again — here is what I want to emphasize.

• First — for many people this is the perception of their own present state, of where they are now. Not deceiving yourself about what you actually know and where you are, about what profession you are actually in, what you do.
• The second thing, incredibly important, is a person’s ability to treat different kinds of work calmly, his open, calm state. Even if today he works as a CEO or owns a business — to be calm about the fact that tomorrow he might work as a sales clerk in a store.

Not to set aside working as a store clerk as something bad. By the way, this morning I had to take the kids to school urgently. I hadn’t planned to do it — my wife was supposed to take them today. And as I drove, I once again noticed the American school bus. I thought about how strongly people here, in the community, regard school bus drivers, the people who deliver the mail — not to mention the fire service. How sincerely, strongly and well these people are regarded.

And I remember what attitude I had as a child toward those who do this supposedly simple work. It’s supposedly simple, not highly skilled work. Although the work isn’t simple, like any labor.

Because labor is incomparable; it can’t be compared. How can it be compared at all?

My wife can calmly play with a child for three hours — and rest while doing it. Someone else spends twenty minutes with a child and gets as tired as if they had been hauling sacks, and says: “I’d rather haul sacks.” How can you compare that? Who has it easier, who has it harder, which work is more difficult? It’s like measuring a person’s work in hours: how long he works, what time he gets up. That’s a fashionable trend: this person gets up at four in the morning, and that’s why everything works out for him — such efficiency. And another gets up at eleven in the morning, and everything works out for him too. He lived a hundred years, and everything worked out.

If you observe in yourself the points I’ve talked about, rely on them, remember them, it of course helps a person a great deal to take their next step better.

How to relate to your own professional activity

But once again: it’s important to understand that the next step in terms of professional development is just some micro-echoes. In some lives it matters seriously, in others it doesn’t matter at all: the person never lived what he was supposed to live.

Me, for example — all my life I’ve been drawn to some significant big projects, corporations or politics — to something big, to some kind of influence. And yet sometimes you watch a film, and it’s stated clearly there: if you’re a politician or work in such-and-such a company, then due to certain circumstances you never see your family at all. That an airline pilot or a flight attendant sees their family less often than a barista in a coffee shop — that’s obvious. Basically, they don’t have the opportunity: they’re flying in the sky, sleeping less. There are things that are understood very clearly, but that didn’t stop me from being drawn there.

Why do such energies arise in me? Why does one person treat this calmly, while another can’t even imagine how it’s possible? My wife and I were driving and discussing it: she was telling me she had met a man who had to go many years without seeing his child. And we say to each other: “Why go without seeing your child for many years for the sake of social circumstances? It would probably be better to see your child.” That’s from the standpoint of the impulse that lives inside, say, her or me. For us it’s like that.

But for another person it may be the absolute opposite. We don’t know what impulse was at work in that other person. Why do some mothers leave the family and leave the children with the husband? Why do some husbands leave the family and leave the children with the wife? What impulses are truly at work inside a person? What drives him? What state arises inside him? This, of course, is the basis for accepting at least some constructs for yourself in terms of your professional development, and not building illusions.

Building strategies in professional activity

Clearly, in professional development there is the notion of strategies. If you look at it socially and step away from the layer of a person’s true development, then of course there are strategies there, and you can build them. But to build any strategy at all in today’s world, you need to understand a very wide scope of everything that is happening. You also need to be ready to sustain that strategy, be ready to carry it out: not to fall ill at the wrong moment, not to meet certain people at the wrong moment, and so on.

My nephew and I were talking about what he likes. He says: “I’m studying everything to do with science, tech — technology, science, AI — but I like music. A month ago I put on a concert: there were four hundred and twenty people or however many, and I performed and even jumped into the crowd.”

I tell him: “Listen, if tomorrow you happen to meet a famous designer in Europe, some fashion designer, then the day after tomorrow you’ll be saying you like the fashion industry. If he pulls you into his environment, starts involving you, telling you how interesting it is, you’ll immediately forget about both music and programming. You’ll be interested in fashion, because on the whole you’re a person who can be carried away by various tasks if people show interest in you as a person. And you’ll drop any task if people don’t show interest in you as a person. In other words, you’ll make decisions based on certain motives.”

Some people make decisions from the standpoint of money. And there really are people who won’t change their current life, their current profession, for the sake of money. A person will say: “I won’t do this for money. I like this.” And, by the way, such cases are always really great, really interesting. For example, Walmart — the American retail chain, at one time one of the biggest and most serious companies in the world by number of people and by value. There were sales clerks there who had once received stock and kept working at the checkout, already millionaires thanks to Walmart stock. They didn’t buy themselves a little house in Hawaii — although back then, by the way, they could easily have bought little houses with that money — they didn’t stop working and didn’t start a garden.

There are a huge number of people who ran corporations, never made money, said, “I don’t need this at all anymore,” and went to work as salespeople. And there are people who have been in business their whole lives — I know some. They say: “We want to make money, stop doing this altogether, move to a warm country and live there.”

A friend of mine always used to say: “I’ll make a million dollars, move to Thailand, buy myself a house and live there.” I don’t know how he’ll live there on a million dollars, how long he’ll last in Thailand. I wonder how many years that million will last him? Even if he plans to live another ten years. And he said this about fifteen years ago. Even if he planned to live ten years, that’s eight thousand dollars a month. That’s not exactly super-money to live on. And you can also lose it.

All right, say he lives with his family on three thousand dollars a month and lasts twenty years that way. And then? Is that really what he wants to feel inside? What feeling does he want to get? He has a mythical sense of what will happen in Thailand. But what specifically will happen there? What do you want to get? An earthquake, a flood, a political conflict? Or do you want to open a business there? What specifically do you want to get there? Warm weather? Why do you want to do this? Why do you want to take this action?

Of course, most people don’t think this way, don’t see it, don’t reason this way and don’t look at things this way. And then, of course, it’s hard to understand all aspects of what is going on — even in terms of your own short-term strategy. So what should you actually do?

But what matters is that people have gone on living in illusion just as they did before. The illusion hasn’t changed compared with what it was, for example, in the Soviet Union.

In the Soviet Union there was less illusion in terms of professional development than there is now. “Study hard at school and you’ll have a good job.” How has that rule changed? It has been transformed a little here and there. And now we are in a time when it’s really completely unclear what you need to learn.

Because we are in a time when people really don’t understand what is going to happen. Even if you take programming. Although programmers are a fairly protected class of people because of their technological connectedness, their technological training. But if everyone is declaring that programmers won’t be writing code, then what will they do? They came up with calling themselves creators — creators of products. It’s like calling everyone a businessman. Which is actually what’s being done, if you look at the statements of a number of people — not everyone, but a number of them. By the way, I should check, but I believe Elon Musk, for example, doesn’t claim that everyone will be a businessman. Whereas Sam Altman says: “Great, everyone will become a businessman.”

And then there are political slogans too. For example, Satya Nadella, the head of Microsoft, released a huge document last week laying out his opinion about what is happening in artificial intelligence. It’s an exclusively corporate document, a completely meaningless corporate document. What’s more, he checked every step in that document against what can be said and what can’t, what is corporately correct in strategy and what isn’t.

What to do when it’s unclear what to learn

So what should you do now in terms of a profession? Those who have access to education — and not everyone has access to the internet, you understand that not everyone has the opportunity to watch everything — those who have access to the internet, to offline education or to a certain offline social environment, of course face a big dilemma. You only need to switch on your brain: you don’t even need to see spiritually, inspirationally or intuitively here — it’s enough to switch on your brain. The dilemma is very serious, Olya, a very serious dilemma. What do you do?

And we also need to understand that the modern person doesn’t want to live by understanding, by the laws of cause and effect and truth. He wants to live the way he wants to, the way the ego motives inside him act.

Just take food. Or the notion of deception. If everyone properly understood the effect of certain foods on health and told themselves, “Of course I won’t eat that,” they wouldn’t eat it. But people keep eating a huge amount of very specific foods. And they will keep doing so. Because people don’t perceive reality. They live in a state of closed defeat of perception by their own personality, ego motives and active impulses. A person lives like a robot.

And at this moment, if you expand your perception, everyone will say: “I don’t know what to do.” Even you don’t know what to do right now. I don’t know what to do. Not to mention a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old. The only thing you can do is look at his life spiritually. But that’s not what our meeting is about today.

Otherwise you will simply be in an endless infection of your own insignificance and lack of fulfillment, and you will pass it on to your children. What can you offer a child in terms of education? That’s a big question. What do you really need to study? What do you truly need to know in today’s reality? What do you need to know now, today; what should you teach? And should you even learn computers at all?

It’s like the lectures on “You need to teach a child about money” — there were a great many of them on my channel. My approach to raising children is this. I know that saving money has nothing to do with managing money in a healthy way; there is no dependence here at all. Having a lot of money in childhood isn’t connected with having a lot or a little of it later. And not having money isn’t connected with anything either. I know the following: on the whole I want my children to stay away from the energy of money for as long as possible. Everyone will learn to count money — just as all people living in a city, in our families, will learn to read. Everyone will learn simply to shuffle pieces of paper.

This whole story is so absurd: sending children to special courses, saying that a child wants to start a business, teaching them to count properly, spend rationally, save. It’s complete absurdity — if you do it superficially, without understanding the fundamental causes, without understanding that it’s only a very small part of life. Circumstances related to money are influenced by simply the whole cosmos. Simply the whole cosmos. If you don’t approach it this way — come on! It’s a serious loss of everything that is going on. A very serious loss.

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