Steve Wozniak will die a happy man. He got lucky, his dream job is in a very lucrative field.
However, not everyone is lucky to have preferences that perfectly line up with the labor market. Many want to pursue careers in oversaturated fields, where supply exceeds demand by an extreme degree. Careers such as dance, religious studies, or professional basketball all come to mind.
What does a kid do here? Does he do what he wants or do what’s reasonable? In giving advice, some take a highly optimistic approach and tell you to “follow your dreams,” reasoning that happiness should be pursued at all opportunity costs. Others tell you to be more rational and pick a flexible and lucrative major, such as CS + Stats. They will tell you that very few people succeed in following their dreams and it is not worth taking these chances. You may not enjoy your job, but you’ll be able to bring food to the table.
Both of these positions suffer from suppressed information. The first only focuses on payout, the second focuses on probability of failure. The most optimal decision comes from the these two things combined.
I will tackle the problem by addressing the second claim. First off, this argument takes a near zero probability of success as equivalent to a zero probability. If I ask them “should I buy a lottery ticket?” They will reply “no because you have a zero chance of winning.” Though the chance of winning is low, it is not zero. “Nobody wins the lottery” is an easily disprovable statement.
This means that buying a lottery ticket is not necessarily a bad idea. The chance of winning is very low, but the payout is high, and a ticket doesn’t cost much. Different people have different risk preferences, so it is not improbable for some to buy a cheap ticket for a slight chance at a huge payoff. And this is what we observe: people usually just buy a couple of tickets. Investing a couple of dollars for a slight chance of a payout of over a million is hardly an “irrational” thing to do.
Here’s the thing though: choosing a career isn’t like playing the lottery. Buying a lottery ticket puts you at an equal chance of winning as everyone else. But choosing a career isn’t like that, different people have different skills from the start. Someone who is 6’4” will obviously have a better chance of getting drafted for the NBA than me. They have a natural advantage which I will never have. Of these people, some are in fact really good at basketball, good to the point where they feel that they have a non-negligible chance of getting drafted. The probability of getting in is much higher for this group of people.
Of course choosing a career isn’t as cheap as buying a lottery ticket. There are risks involved; you could end up wasting years training just to not make the cut. As I’ve stated before, different people have different risk preferences, so for some the payout is worth the risk of failure.
Both of these things combined should factor into the decision of choosing a career. Are you legitimately really good at basketball? Are you open to the risks of failing? If one has a high proficiency and is willing to take the risk, then it is perfectly reasonable to go down their dream path.
My logic here also applies to the first claim: looking at payout and not at skills or risk preferences is an incomplete analysis. There is a chance that you can fail, and some would rather not take that chance.
Both of these problems ignore skills and preferences because they are both overgeneralized pieces of advice. They loosely run into a collectivist fallacy, where they assume everyone has the attributes of one person, probably a projection of the guy making the argument.
In reality people are unique. They should take in the facts that face them directly and make decisions accordingly, not listen to some overgeneralized rule.
Sources: None. Just me this time bois.
P.S. People often point to various celebrities and tell you not to take their “chase your dream” advice, since they are experiencing selection bias. This may be true, but the “selection” isn’t just pure luck. Many musicians have had high proficiency from a young age and it became clear to their parents that a career in music is what’s for them (see Kanye West, Stevie Wonder, Paul Gilbert). Many actors and dancers are born into their field, and through their parents they have gained skills from a young age AND have connections to the industry (see Micheal Jordan’s sons). Others have worked extremely hard and took every opportunity to get a gig. They may be “selected” by luck to some degree, but in every case a high degree of skill is required. In the case of field connections, the information that the employer gets is an asset that the child has (Micheal Jordan’s recommendation means a lot). These fields have high supply and low demand, so the individuals that make bank are in a position where their labor is of very high quality and has no close substitutes. The luck of getting a studio’s brief attention doesn’t mean shit if you are bad at what you do.
Updated 2020-06-05 (small edits)