There are no plans only scenarios
The other day I was speaking with a dear friend of mine, and we were reflecting on our careers to date. We're both in our mid-30s. He's a recent father. We're both quiet enough individuals but quite ambitious too. And yet, it felt like the nature of our conversations had changed.
Let's go back to 10 years ago. I had moved to London and he had plans to move to Berlin. We had a different narrative. Yes, we wanted to make it big time. And moving abroad was going to be a big part of it. We had our own versions of a masterplan. Now was the time to execute them.
But in 2025, our conversation was different. We didn't have plans. We only had scenarios. We realised this when I reflected on how, with kids, you can only plan ahead so far. You can have a general direction of travel, sure. But kids have a funny way of introducing new variables out of nowhere. And so, your perfect plan falls apart. It seemed to me careers were a little bit like this.
Look around you. Do you feel safe? I don't. Talk to people about this and you get to some disturbing conclusions. It's quite hard to predict the next year, two years, five years. This is true for both employees and self-employed. We caveat all plans with "but let's see how things go".
Assumptions, then, became our new modus operandi. Everything's a bit conditional because you never know what shock will come next. Many people have gone into self-employment by necessity. What I see now is more people wanting to do it by choice as well.
The paradox? It feels safer to do so. I have a few working theories about why that might be.
It's the portfolio, stupid. When you work in an agency, you don't want 80%+ of your revenue to depend on one single client. It's too risky, you end up too exposed. So, like with an investment account, you diversify. Self-employment is this, but for your career.
Trust tariffs. Of course there is a tariff analogy here, but I see people trusting their employers less. As well as any semblance of 'job stability'. And so, we retreat into a sense that only we can be responsible for our own paths, or at least we want this to feel true.
Autonomy over stability. Countries react to global instability by adopting protectionism. Surprise, people do the same. Another useful analogy? Self-employment is like practising economic survival skills. Useful to know, in case the apocalypse shows up uninvited.
These might be all connected. I'm still painting a picture by reflecting on it, and talking it out with others. But one thing feels certain. We're all in more 'thinking in bets' mode than we thought we needed to be. And definitely more than our education systems trained us to be.
Which means what we learn needs to change. We will always need domain expertise. But, on top of it, we need to learn things like portfolio strategy and adaptive thinking. We don't trust institutions because they've let us down, so this is one way to better absorb those shocks.
This doesn't mean everything's going to be about self-employment. That would be a very strange and unsustainable economic reality. But it does mean that you might want to practice some of these skills before you have to. Positioning, pricing, negotiation. Being ok with failure.
Not because you plan on not having a stable job. But it's not an impossible scenario.
