Arthur Brooks

Now, the two big careers that your audience are going to have are what we call the linear career and the spiral career.

The linear career is one where you're always going up.

You change jobs only when it's promotion, only when it's more money, when it's more power, when it's more

prestige, whatever it happens to be, and then you'll move.

You'll stay if you can make advances where you are.

You'll move if you can make advances, but you're staying in more or less the same field and the same discipline, same set of skills, just getting better and better and better.

A lot more people than they think are actually the spiral career.

Well, you'll take

a hit in salary to do something that's very, very interesting to you and you can develop new skills.

These are people that go from, you know, I'm going to go work in a presidential administration, then I'm going to go work on Wall Street, and then I'm going to take a big salary hit because I'm going to go work at a think tank.

You know, I'm going to do this interesting stuff where I have this basket of skills that I take from thing to thing to try to create value, which is very meritorious.

Now, it looks like you're not going to get better at a particular job.

What you're getting better at is particular fungible skills that

In a whole world of different kinds of jobs, more people, I've got the data on this, most people who are ambitious think they're linears.

A lot of them are actually spirals.

And when they're willing to say, I'm going to walk away, I'm going to have a 10-year career, and then I'm going to go back to graduate school and I'm going to change.

And then I'm going to go to a different kind of a sector and it's going to cost me a bunch of money, but guess what?

I saved up.

Or maybe I'm just not wasting all my money having three cars when I can use one because I want to have a more interesting life.

So that's worth giving people in their 20s and 30s.