On Choosing a Profession (en)

2025-06-25

career

There’s a simple idea:

In youth, accumulate expertise, and later – implement it. If you start implementing your weak expertise while young, you’ll waste time, earn almost no money, and end up with nothing.

Imagine we’re choosing between ML and business. Both are more or less interesting to us.

ML appears more complex and fundamental than business. Especially research trajectories, like ML-Research. Learning to draw Excel tables can always be done later. Your own business might not even require any specific skills. Of course, there’s complexity here too; it requires expertise, understanding business processes, and so on. But still, the level of abstraction and the fundamentality of the concepts are different. Descending to a lower simpler level is always possible, but ascending – no.

Furthermore, lifespan today allows you not to dedicate your entire life to one career. Nothing stops you from working in ML for 20 years, achieving success there, and then, if you feel like it, going into business for another 20 years to reach high positions there too.

Now, it’s time to discuss the most significant aspect of this question.

Any logical arguments and reasoning on this matter weigh nothing compared to pleasure, interest, and fire in the eyes. Life cannot be meaningful and happy when split in two:

• From 9 to 19 – work; life begins in the evening
• 5 days a week – work; the remaining 2 days to “live”
• 6 months – work; the vacation month – finally living for yourself

Jack London’s book “Burning Daylight” serves as an excellent illustration. The main character there wasn’t some capitalism-chained office rat, forced by life to slave away at a job he hated and escape to his dacha on weekends. He’s a successful businessman with multi-million dollar wealth. Still, his life split into alcoholic oblivion in the evenings and daytime hustle. And his state of being was, accordingly, lost and clouded.

Therefore, the factor that outweighs any arguments of reason is interest, it’s passion, it’s the fire in the eyes and the thrill of the process. The choice must favor the profession that your soul gravitates towards. And if there isn’t one, you need to search.

And here, by “search,” I mean not just trying as many different things as possible, though that is also necessary. But the point isn’t to exhaustively sift through dozens of professions hoping one will turn out to be “the one.” Such things need to be sought not from the outside, but from within.. You can try every occupation in the world and find nothing. What matters is only how something resonates inside. That childlike passion isn’t hidden in the subject of study, but in the prism of inner perception. In childhood, we built dams out of snow and directed streams in spring. This, of course, is not ML research or Strategic Management, but how different the state was: joy, happiness, feeling alive, fullness. You can discover the prism of your life’s perception within yourself; that’s what I call “searching.” And you can work on it.