A chicken wakes up & starts another day.
Like every day, he steps outside, pecks around a little bit & is fed by a human.
The chicken expects to be fed every day because, well, the human has turned up every day of its life & fed him.
He even starts to think, “Wow, these humans seem so kind & caring.”
Then, one day, a shock:
The human picks him up, sends him off to be slaughtered &, the next day, appears on a supermarket shelf.
A shock because nothing in that chicken’s life points to the fact that it will one day be slaughtered.
It saw evidence that humans were caring, until they were not.
Bertrand Russell, a 19th Century philosopher, used this example to illustrate a key lesson for those (humans, not chickens) who want to better navigate the future.
He suggested we ask ourselves 3 philosophical questions:
How do we know what we know?
Does the past help us predict the future?
Why do we never expect unexpected events?
How To Plan Effectively For the Future
Using this framework, we can avoid certain mistakes or pitfalls to better direct our product careers.
Here’s how:
1/3 How do we know what we know?
One way to almost guarantee career stagnation is to fall into the trap of not questioning your beliefs; to follow “group think” & simply accept conventional wisdom unquestioningly.
A great example of this is the job application process. When a job posting says it requires “5 years of experience”, we shouldn’t just blindly accept that as truth. Instead, we should question it & understand what it really means: It means that a company is using “years” as a proxy for real experience. You may only have worked as a Product Manager for 2-3 years, for example, but, if you can demonstrate tangible results & a greater intensity of experience during those years, you will likely get the job.
And questioning convention like this might mean the difference between getting to Head of Product within 3-5 years, rather than 20.
A good habit here is to return to what we call “first principles”, a method of reasoning by breaking down complex ideas into their most basic, foundational elements and building understanding from there. That means asking, “Why? Does this really make sense?”.
For example, say we come into a new role & need to gain context about the target customer, strategy, product feedback, etc. Rather than blindly accept what others are telling us about our users & their needs, we can “trust, but verify”: absorb the existing data, but also go & speak to the users ourselves, look through the raw data ourselves, do some analysis from scratch about the state of the market, etc.
2/3 Does the past help us predict the future?
Another effective tactic to future-proof your career is this:
Never assume that every context is the same.
I’ve observed this mistake in many product leaders. For example, I worked for founders who had successfully exited their previous e-commerce business. The problem? They tried to apply the same strategy for this, their second business, despite a completely different product model, revenue model & target customer. What had worked before was not going to work in this case.
For your personal careers, remember: the past behaviour of your company will not predict the future. Just because you’ve enjoyed steady pay rises & promotions does not mean they won’t fire you in a moment if its in the interest of the business (see various examples of mass redundancies recently as evidence of this).
Therefore, leverage past experience to inform your thinking, but don’t use it to predict the future.
3/3 Why do we never expect unexpected events?
Unfortunately, a combination of blindly trusting convention & basing our beliefs on past experiences means we tend to believe the world is predictable.
On top of that, we suffer many biases in our thinking, such as “availability bias”, essentially a cognitive shortcut where we rely more heavily on immediate and easily recalled information to make decisions or judgments. Example: After seeing frequent news reports about plane crashes, a person might perceive air travel as more dangerous than car travel, even though statistically, this is completely wrong.
This means we are awful at predicting the future.
To illustrate this: 88% of U.S. large-cap investment funds underperformed the S&P 500 (US stock market) over a 15-year period ending in 2020 (Source: SPIVA U.S. Scorecard).
What does that mean?
It means most professional investment funds failed to beat the basic stock market returns over 15 years (i.e. predict future trends), suggesting an average person might do just as well or better investing in a low-cost index fund that tracks the market.
So what can we do about it?
Rather than trying to predict the future, you can focus instead on making yourself as resilient as possible. That means things like:
Diversifying income: Building a side hustle when working a full-time job, such as doing some paid consultancy work or launching your own product. Why? If you get fired, it won’t be such a shock. Plus you’ll be building up really valuable product experience
Networking: Go to at least one Meetup per week in person to build meaningful connection with others in your field. If you live in a city without many Meetups, reach out to people directly to meet for a coffee
Understand the market: Whether that means following salary trends to push for an increase, building specific skills to help you get to the next level (such as working on storytelling or data skills to help you get to Director/VP), or being aware of macro-trends (such as the currently consumer credit card debt increase, which will translate to lower consumer income &, thus, less spending), build a greater awareness of your macro-environment to make better-informed decisions
Even then, Black Swan events (unexpected shocks, such as the 2007/8 Financial Crisis) will surprise us. That’s why building resilience - whether mental resilience or resilience in terms of resources - is the only effective strategy.
Conclusion
It’s easy to think that the secret to career progress is to learn just one more framework, or gain a better understanding of product strategy, or to set career goals with one’s manager.
These are important, sure.
However, at times we also need to zoom out & question that thinking.
To question where our beliefs come from.
To question whether we are leaning on the past to predict the future.
To question whether we are blissfully ignorant of what may come in the future, or building resilience to prepare for the unexpected.
Without this, we can never set ourselves on the trajectory of long-term success.