Somewhere along the way, we started valuing credentials more than capability. We began telling young people that success looked a certain way and that anything outside that path was somehow a step down. We pushed college as the destination instead of one of many possible routes. Without meaning to, we created a culture that celebrates titles while overlooking the people who actually keep the wheels turning.

The funny thing is the real world doesn’t work that way. When you’re sitting on an airplane at 35,000 feet, you don’t care where the mechanic went to school. When the power goes out, you don’t ask the lineman what his GPA was. When a bridge is built, a refinery is operating, or a manufacturing line is running, nobody is thinking about job titles. The only thing that matters is whether the people responsible know what they’re doing.

That’s what I think we’ve lost. We’ve stopped admiring competence. Not completely, but enough that an entire generation has grown up believing that working with your hands somehow means you’re not working with your mind. Meanwhile, companies across the country are desperate for skilled people. Not because the jobs aren’t good. Not because the pay isn’t there. Because too many people were told those careers weren’t worth pursuing in the first place.

Gray Collar isn’t about blue collar versus white collar, and it isn’t about telling people not to go to college. It’s about restoring respect for people who know how to solve problems, build things, fix things, inspect things, operate things, and keep this country moving. The future belongs to people who can create value. It always has. The sooner we start celebrating that again, the better off we’ll all be.

Recently, I was working with my boxing coach and between rounds we found ourselves talking about goals, opportunities, setbacks, and perseverance. Somewhere in the conversation that Tyson quote came up, and the more we talked, the more I realized how perfectly it describes the working lives of most people. We all have plans for our careers, finances, retirement, business, our families, and so on. We map out where we want to go, how long it will take, and what success is supposed to look like. Then life throws a punch.

Sometimes it’s a layoff, a company restructuring, losing a promotion you worked years to earn, a difficult boss, a certification requirement you didn’t see coming, a major project that suddenly demands nights and weekends and having to choose between a work deadline and your daughter’s recital. Sometimes it’s a health issue or it’s simply realizing that the career you’ve spent ten years building is no longer the career you want. Punches come in all shapes and sizes. The problem is that most people who plan spend most of their time building and executing the plan and not enough time preparing for the punch.

Those who thrive over the long term aren’t necessarily the smartest, strongest, or luckiest. They’re the ones who can absorb a hit, regain their footing, and keep moving forward. That’s resilience. And resilience doesn’t magically appear when you need it. Resilience is built long before the punch lands through durable skills that remain valuable even when industries change, through continuous learning, by maintaining professional relationships, by managing your finances responsibly and taking care of your health. It’s built by developing the discipline to do difficult things when you don’t feel like doing them.

Most importantly, resilience is built by understanding that adversity is not an exception to the plan, rather making adversity part of the plan.

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Every meaningful career will eventually encounter setbacks. Whether that looks like a close friend’s disappointment, or failure by an entrepreneur, or criticism towards a leader, or something else that comes to mind based on your position and experience. Every professional has questioned whether they were on the right path.

Don’t question whether you’ll get punched. You will. Rather, question whether you’ve prepared yourself to take the hit. You must prepare mentally (Can you remain calm when uncertainty appears? Can you think clearly when emotions are running high? Can you separate a temporary setback from a permanent defeat?), physically (energy, health and strength all matter, fatigue has a way of turning manageable problems into overwhelming ones), and spiritually (Do you have a foundation to consistently conduct yourself virtuously? This is the sense of knowing who you are, what you stand for, and why you’re doing what you’re doing.).

People with a strong sense of purpose tend to recover faster when life becomes difficult because they have something deeper anchoring them. Over time, I have come to believe that careers are less about following a perfect roadmap and more about building the capacity to make choices and to adapt. Plans, goals and vision all matter. But resilience matters more. The people who succeed over decades are rarely the ones who chose to avoid hardship. Sustained success accrues to the ones who learned how to handle it.

Which brings me back to boxing. I’ve developed a tremendous appreciation for professional fighters. Until you’ve wrapped your hands, put on the gloves, and spent a few rounds moving, hitting, slipping, and defending, it’s difficult to appreciate just how physically and mentally demanding the sport really is. It’s exhausting, humbling, and frustrating; yet, I find it incredibly rewarding. Much like life.

You learn quickly that getting hit is part of the process. You learn that panic usually makes things worse. You learn that recovery matters. You learn that discipline beats motivation. You learn that confidence comes from preparation. Most importantly, you learn that taking a punch isn’t the end of the fight, rather just the beginning of the next round.

The same is true in our careers. Build the plan. Set ambitious goals. Work hard. Prepare diligently. But don’t make the mistake of believing that success belongs to those who never get punched. Success belongs to those who prepared themselves to keep going after they do. Because everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. The winners are the ones who are prepared.

Yet when it comes to careers, one of the biggest decisions people make in life, we often expect young adults to commit years of time and enormous amounts of money with very little understanding of the actual daily reality of the work. That makes very little sense to me although, until more recently, I didn’t see as clearly as I do now.

Too many people choose careers based on image rather than experience. Factors such as salary, prestige, social media “imaginery”, portrayals on TV, family pressure, or cultural expectations carry different weight and value for a variety of legitimate reasons, but often are over relied upon or overly considered with the needs of the one closest to this decision being least understood. Very few truly understand the pace, stress, lifestyle, emotional burden, or operational realities before entering a profession. With the best of intentions, we think we do, but then soon wake up to the fact that very little exists that is actually helpful (which is why we often default to jobs and careers that emulate those closest to us) – classic “devil you know” scenario.

This lack of resources and ultimate disconnect creates enormous personal and societal costs. As I have shared in other posts, people spend years pursuing careers they eventually hate. Students accumulate debt for professions they barely understood. Employers struggle with burnout and retention. All while entire industries face workforce shortages.

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Meanwhile, many Gray Collar professions and operational careers suffer from outdated stereotypes despite offering meaningful, stable, lucrative and highly satisfying work for the right individuals. The problem is that many are making life-changing decisions with almost no realistic exposure beforehand, not that people are incapable of making good decisions.

I believe the future of workforce development must become far more experiential and honest. More than simply, “What are you good at?” Rather, “What kinds of environments, responsibilities, and challenges are you naturally wired to sustain?” These are much more important and insightful questions. Technology and visual media platforms, AI, and other emerging career simulation tools have the potential to help people understand professions more realistically before major commitments are made.

In the spirit of my prior posts, this is not to eliminate hardship nor to make work easy. It is to improve alignment to increase general satisfaction and reduce burnout. Because, don’t forget, all jobs suck sometimes. So, find the kind of suck you are built to embrace and LOVE IT!

This sits at the core of one of the biggest problems with modern career guidance: we often steer people toward prestige instead of alignment, although we do seem to be getting a little better at this as Generations Z and Alpha bring a different perspective to work in general (a much healthier one than I as a Gen X-er).

I have known highly compensated professionals who were deeply unhappy. I have also known people working in the trades, operators of all ilk, nurses, mechanics, pilots, firefighters, and entrepreneurs who worked incredibly hard but found deep satisfaction in what they did because the nature of the work fit who they were. Most people do not burn out from hard work alone. They burn out from sustained misalignment. This is an important distinction.

A trauma nurse may leave exhausted but fulfilled. A field technician may enjoy solving real-world problems despite uncomfortable conditions. Meanwhile, someone in a climate-controlled office may feel emotionally drained every single day. One person’s dream job is another person’s nightmare. That is why simplistic advice like “follow your passion” or “chase the money” often fails people. Better questions are:

What kind of problems do you actually enjoy solving?
What kind of stress can you tolerate long term?
What environments give you energy even when you are tired?

Every career extracts payment somehow: physically, emotionally, mentally, socially, relationally. The question is cost or exchange is worth it to you. That is why understanding yourself matters so much before making major career decisions. The right career is rarely the one with the least hardship. It is the one where the hardship still feels meaningful.

“Embrace the suck.”

At first glance, it sounds crude, negative, or even cynical. But in practice, it is actually deeply motivating.

It means that when things get hard (physically, mentally, emotionally) resisting reality wastes energy. Complaining wastes energy. Self-pity wastes energy. Once you are in the middle of something difficult, the fastest path through it is often acceptance, commitment, discipline, and attitude. You embrace the hardship. You lean into it. You move forward anyway. You do it for others. You do it for yourself. Whatever it takes. It is an extraordinarily powerful mindset.

That mentality has served me well throughout my life. In difficult workouts or during my time in the military. Even in business, parenting and long nights building a business. In periods of uncertainty, exhaustion, pressure, and responsibility. Sometimes there is simply work to be done. And yet, I think we unintentionally misuse this idea when it comes to careers. Because while resilience matters, we should probably spend more time helping people determine what kind of hardship they are actually built to sustain before they commit years of their lives, massive debt loads, emotional energy, and personal identity to a particular path.

One of the greatest lies modern society tells young people is that there are “good careers” that feel endlessly fulfilling and “bad careers” that feel difficult or unpleasant. That is nonsense. All jobs suck sometimes. Every single one.

• The emergency room physician who saves lives also sees trauma, death, addiction, bureaucracy, lawsuits, exhaustion, and emotional burnout.

• The entrepreneur enjoys freedom and upside but also carries risk, uncertainty, payroll pressure, sleepless nights, and constant responsibility.

• The HVAC technician spends summers in unbearable heat inside cramped attics.

• The airline pilot misses holidays, family events, and sleep.

• The software engineer spends hours debugging invisible problems no one else understands.

• The roofer works in brutal weather.

• The nurse deals with bodily fluids, chaos, grief, and impossible staffing shortages.

• The attorney handles conflict for a living.

• The police officer sees society at its worst.

• The mechanic destroys his knuckles fixing problems created by other people who ignored maintenance for years.

All jobs contain friction. All meaningful work contains sacrifice. All careers contain moments that absolutely suck. PERIOD.

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However, the problem is not that hardship exists. The problem is that we rarely help people understand the type of hardship attached to a profession before they commit to it. And that matters enormously. One person would rather crawl through spider webs under a house performing a foundation inspection than work a trauma shift in a hospital emergency room. Another person would rather deal with blood, stress, and emergency medicine than spend ten minutes in a crawl space under a damp house. Neither person is wrong. They are simply wired differently. One person prefers tangible physical discomfort over emotional trauma. Another prefers emotional intensity over confined spaces and grime.

This distinction is critical, yet our educational and workforce systems barely discuss it. Instead, we often guide people using prestige, income projections, social status, family pressure, or abstract ideas about “success.” Very little attention is paid to lived reality.

• What does the work actually feel like on a Tuesday morning after five years?

• What type of stress does it create?

• What kind of people thrive in it?

• What parts of the work drain you?

• What parts energize you despite being difficult?

These are far more important questions than many people realize because the goal is not finding a career that never sucks. That career does not exist. The goal is finding a form of struggle that aligns with your temperament, values, personality, and wiring well enough that the difficult parts still feel meaningful. That is a very different pursuit. Work is still work. Responsibility is still responsibility. Difficulty never fully disappears.

But, there is an enormous difference between suffering through work that fundamentally misaligns with who you are and enduring hardship in pursuit of something that fits you deeply. One creates resentment while the other often creates pride, growth, resilience, mastery, and purpose. We should stop pretending the objective is comfort. The real objective is alignment. When people find the kind of “suck” they are built to embrace, work may still be hard but it becomes sustainable, meaningful, and often deeply rewarding. And in a society increasingly struggling with burnout, disengagement, anxiety, career dissatisfaction, and workforce instability, that distinction matters more than ever.

What does the job feel like at 10:00 on a Wednesday? What does it require when things are not going well? What does it look like when it becomes routine? That is what I would call frontline reality. It is the day-to-day experience of doing the work. Not the outcome. Not the title. Not the highlight moments. The work itself.

And it turns out that this is the part people understand the least before they commit to a path. We provide job descriptions and point them to marketing videos. We give them high-level overviews that sound good and look polished but those are not designed to show the full picture. They are designed to attract. So the incentives are different.

A company wants to recruit. A university wants to enroll. A program wants to fill seats. There is nothing inherently wrong with that, but it does create a gap between perception and reality. That gap is where a lot of the inefficiency lives.

If someone never sees the real work, they cannot make an informed decision about whether it fits them. They can only imagine it. And imagination is a poor substitute for experience. So the question becomes straightforward. How do we give people access to frontline reality earlier?

Part of the answer is obvious. We need more opportunities for people to experience the work directly. Apprenticeships, internships, job shadowing, rotational programs. These are not new ideas. They are proven, and they work when approached honestly and with authenticity by both sides.

But they are also limited in number as they require time, coordination, and access. Not every person can step into every role, especially early on. Not every organization has the capacity to support it at scale.

If we stop here, we will improve the system. But, we will not fix it.

This is where technology needs to step in. We now have the ability to create something that did not exist before at scale. Realistic, high-fidelity simulations of work. Not abstract training modules. Not generic learning environments. Simulations that reflect the actual decisions, pressures, and rhythms of a role.

What does it feel like to manage multiple deadlines as a junior analyst? What does it feel like to respond to a real-time situation in a public safety role? What does it feel like to work through the repetitive, detail-oriented tasks that make up a large portion of many professional jobs?

These experiences can be modeled. They can be interactive. They can be iterative. They can give someone a sense, quickly and at low cost, of whether a role fits their interests and temperament.

At the same time, we should be doing something even simpler. We should be documenting work as it actually happens. Not staged nor scripted. Not filtered through a marketing lens but real people doing real jobs, explaining what they are doing and why.

Short-form video. Long-form content. Day-in-the-life perspectives that show the full range of the work, including the parts that are repetitive, frustrating, or unglamorous.

There is a difference between hearing about a job and seeing it up close. There is a difference between seeing it and interacting with it. We should be doing both.

Because the goal is not to make every job look appealing. The goal is to make every job understood. When people understand the work, they make better decisions. They opt in with clarity, or they opt out early. Both outcomes are good. When I am recruiting for one of my companies, I tell all candidates that we’re having an honest conversation about what the job really entails. I make it clear that I aim to hire smart people and will not insult their intelligence to lure them into a role only for them to learn later that I made the opportunity appear that it is something that it’s not. That does not build trust.

Honesty and this type of transparency reduces wasted time and money while opening up opportunities for people to get better aligned. This is more than helping individuals find the right path, rather we are talking about making the entire system more honest and more efficient.

Frontline reality should not be something people discover after years of investment. It should be something they can access early, test quickly, and learn from directly. If we get that right, a lot of the problems we have been talking about start to solve themselves because people are no longer guessing. They are choosing based on experience.

Years of education, significant cost and delayed entry into the workforce are all significant costs. Barring a rare internship that provides a cursory “best face” experience, only after this do we get exposure to the actual work.

There is a better way to approach this. Before someone commits to a path, they should have access to real exposure. Not a brochure. Not a short conversation. Not a polished version of the job. Actual experience.

Time spent observing or participating in the work. Short cycles where someone can test whether a role fits. Honest conversations with people who are doing the job every day. Videos created by the practitioners themselves portraying an honest, transparent view revealing the good, the bad and the ugly. And where we stand today, why not some sort of career simulator that exists to guide this important learning. We can also further invest in creating more opportunities down the more traditional paths such as apprenticeships, extended shadowing, rotational programs and/or trial periods.

The specific model is less important than the principle. People should be able to understand the reality of a job before making a large commitment to it. When that happens, decisions improve. People enter roles with more clarity which means they stay longer and perform better with higher degrees of satisfaction.

At the same time, the system becomes more efficient. There is less wasted time and money due to better alignment between individuals and roles.

This is not about eliminating change or exploration.

This is about moving exploration earlier not eliminating change or exploration. Doing so when the cost is lower and the learning is faster. If we do that, we help both help individuals make better decisions, we also improve how talent moves across the entire economy.

This is the last of five articles in a series called “The Hidden Tax of Guessing Your Career.” We’re not just wasting time and talent, we are misallocating it at scale. I am hoping that I was able to put a better voice to this issue so we can find a better way to address it. I’d love your thoughts and ideas and any reactions to what we can do. How can we leverage advanced technology to do this, yet in a very human-centered way?

Instead, that time is invested somewhere that may not carry forward.

Opportunity cost does not show up clearly. There is no invoice for it and there is certainly no line item in your personal balance sheet that says what could have been. But it is no less real. Four years on the wrong path is not just four years lost. It is four years not spent becoming excellent at something else.

At the system level, this matters even more. We talk a lot about shortages of talent in critical roles, namely skilled trades and other technical fields; the operational positions that keep systems running. At the same time, we have people investing heavily in paths that they will not stay in.

That is not just an individual issue. It is a misalignment of talent across the entire system. The question is not only how many people choose the wrong path but how much progress is delayed because of it.

This is one of five articles in a series called “The Hidden Tax of Guessing Your Career.” We’re not just wasting time and talent, we are misallocating it at scale and it is time to put a better voice to this issue so we can find a better way to address it.

But here, we’re not just discussing a food or a hobby. We’re talking about a career, one’s livelihood that exists deeply integrated with others. Thus, there is often a broader effect that often goes unnoticed.

Every time someone enters a path that they will not complete or will leave shortly after, there is an impact beyond that individual. A seat in a program is taken by someone who may not stay. Another candidate who would have completed that path does not get that opportunity. Training resources are allocated, time is invested, and then that investment is lost when the individual exits early. Employers bring people in, spend time recruiting, onboarding, and developing them, only to see them leave before they can contribute at scale. Teams are disrupted. Work has to be redistributed. The process starts again.

This shows up in the military. It shows up in other public service roles. It shows up in corporate environments. It shows up in professional schools. It is not just one loss rather a chain of inefficiencies that build on each other. When you multiply that across thousands of decisions every year, across multiple industries, you start to see the magnitude.

This is not a small issue at the edges. It is a structural inefficiency that affects how talent flows through the system and it raises a simple question. How many opportunities are we unintentionally blocking or delaying because we are not helping people get aligned earlier?

This is one of five articles in a series called “The Hidden Tax of Guessing Your Career.” We’re not just wasting time and talent, we are misallocating it at scale and it is time to put a better voice to this issue so we can find a better way to address it.

A law degree. An MBA. A specialized certification. Each one comes with a real cost: tuition, time out of the workforce, and (more often than we can realistically continue to endure) debt that follows for years.

And here is the part that does not get enough attention. Many of these decisions are made before the individual has truly experienced the work they are preparing for. Not the idea of the work; the actual work. The pace. The pressure. The repetition. The tradeoffs.

So the investment is made first, and the clarity comes later. In some cases, it works out. In many cases, it does not. You see it with lawyers who leave the profession within a few years. You see it with people who complete advanced degrees and then pivot entirely. You see it with individuals who finish training only to realize they have no interest in doing the job long term.

The degree did what it was designed to do. It signaled something. But the system allowed a large investment to be made before the person knew if the role was right. That is the inefficiency. And the cost does not sit with just one person.

Families often help carry the financial burden. Employers absorb the downstream effects. Institutions continue to operate within a model that assumes this level of misalignment is acceptable. When you step back, it becomes clear. We are spending a lot of money to discover things that could have been learned much earlier.

This is one of five articles in a series called “The Hidden Tax of Guessing Your Career.” We’re not just wasting time and talent, we are misallocating it at scale and it is time to put a better voice to this issue so we can find a better way to address it.

We tell people to follow their passion. Then we give them almost no real understanding of what that actually looks like in practice. So they guess. Our kids choose a major, a friend selects a training path, or we pursue a new career direction based on what we’ve heard, what sounds impressive, or what they/we think one is supposed to do. Sometimes it is driven by family expectations. Sometimes it is driven by money. Sometimes it is the absence of better information. And far too often, it is simply the pursuit of fantasy. I have called this pursuing a romantic ideal or understanding of what something is.

No matter what it is, at the heart of it is a guess.

And then they commit years of their life to this guess. Not learning a trade in a real environment nor building momentum through doing. Merely, committing to an idea of a career without ever really seeing it up close. What does a junior lawyer actually do on a daily basis? Not in the courtroom, but at a desk at 9:30 at night. What does a first-year consultant actually spend their time doing? What does it feel like to be in the middle of a long shift as a firefighter when it is quiet, repetitive, and physically demanding? We rarely show this part. We show the outcomes. We show the titles. We show the highlights.

So people optimize for something that is not real. Then, eventually, they run into reality. Sometimes that happens during training. Sometimes it happens after years of education. Sometimes it happens after they have already entered the workforce. And when that happens, the realization is simple but expensive. “This is not what I thought it would be.” At that point, the cost is already there.

Years spent moving in a direction that may not fit. Years that could have been used to build skill, income, and momentum somewhere else. This is the first hidden cost; the time spent guessing instead of experiencing. And it does not just stay with the individual, it carries forward into everything that comes next.

Historically and to a large degree today, we talk about career changes as failures, detours, or reinventions. This is language that implies something went wrong when, often, nothing did. Merely an adaptation to real changes in one’s life and environment.

Our sytems and our language have not caught up. Education, hiring, and professional identity still assume linear progression. Pauses are penalized, transitions are questioned, and lateral moves are discouraged. Perhaps we could choose to view these as deliberate acts reflecting learning, growth, and matrutiy. Normalizing career switching is not celebrating instability. It means acknowledging that adaptability is now a core capability.

In a changing economy, the ability to change direction thoughtfully is a form of resilience.

Like a boomerang, here we are again.

So let’s retire the idea that there was ever a truly easy path. There wasn’t. There was only the illusion of one and for a time, that illusion was comforting and affordable.

Reading the Room

Nobody knows what the future looks like. Plenty of us love guessing. What we can do is read momentum and direction. Right now the momentum is obvious.

Easy, repeatable office work (or remote office work) is dying or shrinking. The jobs that survive are doing more with less. The market for average is becoming fiercely competitive in a way it has never been. People havent changed or gotten worse, the floor for “good enough” was raised by a machine that never sleeps, never asks for a raise (yet), and never has an off day.

The middle, competent, dependable, average, used to be a destination. You could build a life there. A career, a mortgage, a retirement- a white picket fence one could say.

The middle is now a waypoint. You cannot afford to stop there anymore.

Skill One: The Expert

The first person who thrives in this world is the one who goes deep.

Not just knowledgeable. Not just experienced. Credible. Genuinely, specifically, undeniably expert at something the world cannot function without. AI makes them more powerful rather than redundant.

Think about the ER doctor. The structural engineer. The master electrician standing inside a problem nobody else can diagnose. The risk is the high stakes. Their name is on the outcome. When they’re wrong, something breaks, someone gets hurt, the consequences are real and traceable back to them.

That accountability is their moat.

AI will not remove these people. It will make them more precise, more efficient, more capable. But the human stays in the equation because the cost of removing them is too high. You still need someone to own it when it goes wrong.

The expert isn’t safe because their industry is safe. They’re durable because they went deep enough that replacing them is genuinely hard and has real consqequences.

Skill Two: The Adapter

The second person who thrives looks almost nothing like the first.

They don’t own one deep skill. They own the ability to acquire skills. They read where things are moving, position themselves ahead of the curve, and build before the market tells them to. They’re not waiting for permission or a credential or a clear job title. They’re creating something. That something is a product, a service, a solution, and constantly adjusting as they go. There is no perfect.

This person doesn’t panic when the paradigm changes, the paradigm barely matters. Delta is their native environment.

In a world that keeps rewriting the map, the adapter doesn’t need the map. They navigate by feel, by momentum, by an instinct trained through years of building and failing and building again.

They are not a jack of all trades. That’s the trap. They are a master, the strategic generalist that’s wide enough to see around corners, focused enough to actually execute.

Here’s what few will say.

These two people need each other and the ones who truly thrive find a way to be both.

The expert without adaptability becomes obsolete the moment their domain slightly shifts. History is full of brilliant no-named specialists who couldn’t survive a technology change they never saw coming.

The adapter without depth eventually runs out of surface. You can only pivot so many times before you need something solid to stand on. Range without roots is just spinning wheels.

The unstoppable combination is depth in something real paired with the range to see where it fits in a changing world. Expert enough to be trusted. Adaptable enough to stay relevant.

A true apex human.

The North Star

So what do you do with this if you’re 18-24, staring at a job market that looks nothing like what you were promised?

Stop looking for safe or easy. It was never really there for anyone.

Read the momentum. Figure out what the world will always need or will need. What has real stakes, real consequences, real humans at the center of it. Then start, and go deep as you can. Commit. Or figure out what’s changing faster than people can keep up with. Become the person who can keep up, who can build in that chaos. Someone who thrives in the chaos. That’s ROI.

The one thing you cannot afford is to be interchangeable. Average expertise. Average adaptability. Easily replaced. Fragile.

The middle was a destination. Now it’s a flashing warning sign.

Pick a city. Build something real. Fail. Learn. Fail more.

The world will always have room for the person who went all in and learned something valuable along the way.

Education is most certainly valuable. I’m a big fan. It can broaden perspective, build foundations, and teach people how to think. But preparation is something else entirely. Preparation is about readiness for responsibility. It is about understanding how work actually functions in real environments, under real constraints, with real consequences.

For a long time, the distinction didn’t matter much. Roles were stable, transitions were slow, and credentials served as reasonably reliable proxies. Today, that gap has widened into a fault line.

Many people leave formal education having learned a great deal, but having never been accountable for outcomes that mattered beyond the classroom. They are educated, but not prepared. At the same time, many roles that demand judgment, adaptability, and responsibility remain undervalued because they don’t fit traditional academic pathways.

Preparation comes from exposure, practice, feedback, and responsibility over time. Education can support that but it cannot replace it. Confusing the two has left people credentialed but uncertain, and systems surprised when theory fails to translate into practice.

I was taught to wear a belt anytime a pair of pants had belt loops and not because my pants needed it. It was a small act that said: show up with care, pay attention to the details. That idea matters more today, not less.

Enduring Values in a Changing World

We live in a world obsessed with speed, shortcuts, and credentials. But most of the work that actually keeps the country running, fields like aviation, energy, logistics, manufacturing, infrastructure, tech operations still depend on something older and more durable than titles or algorithms. It depends on people who take responsibility.

Gray collar work sits at the intersection of hands-on skill, technical fluency, and judgment. These jobs don’t just reward what you know. They reward how you carry yourself:

• Do you take pride in the basics?

• Do you respect the craft?

• Do you show up prepared, even when no one is watching?

That’s the belt.

Craft Still Recognizes Character

You can’t fake competence for long in gray collar work. The system breaks. The plane doesn’t fly. The network fails. The line stops. And when things go sideways, what matters isn’t how you branded yourself, it’s whether you built habits that hold under pressure.

Wearing a belt is about discipline. About standards you carry with you, not ones imposed from above.

The best technicians, operators, and leaders I’ve known didn’t need to announce their values. You could see them in how they treated tools, people, time, and responsibility.

They wore the belt; literally and figuratively.

What We Owe the Next Generation

When I tell my son to wear a belt, I’m not teaching him about clothes.

I’m teaching him that some values endure even as the world changes:

• Take pride in your work

• Respect the room and the responsibility

• Do the small things right, especially when they’re easy to skip

Gray collar work is progress anchored to character. And in a world moving fast and forgetting fundamentals, those anchors matter.

Sometimes the most modern thing you can do is carry the values that still work.

That infrastsructure assumed that jobs are stable, roles are well-defined, and fit can be inferred from credentials, titles, and past experience. They assume that if we optimize matching speed and volume, good outcomes will follow. For a long time, that approximation was good enough. In the AI economy, it isn’t.

Work is changing faster, roles are more fluid, and the cost of poor matches is higher on both sides. Workers don’t want to churn through jobs that don’t fit. Employers don’t want to absorb the cost (financial, operational, and cultural) of constant turnover. Endurance matters now, not just placement.

Gray collar roles make this especially clear. These jobs often require certifications and relevant education, but they also depend on something harder to capture: judgment, interest, adaptability, and personal ethos. They succeed when the work aligns not just with what someone can do, but with how they prefer to work and what they are willing to be accountable for.

Today’s infrastructure struggles with this on both sides. Workers have little support in developing real insight into themselves and the kinds of careers that would suit them over time. Employers struggle to ask for, interpret, and trust anything beyond surface-level signals. Conveying this kind of insight, honestly and credibly, is difficult for everyone involved.

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We will try to retrofit existing platforms and processes. Some improvements will help. But these are partial responses to a structural shift.

The demands of the AI economy require new beginnings, new ways of understanding people, new ways of describing work, and new connective tissue between the two. Without that, we will keep optimizing systems that no longer match the reality they are meant to serve.

Let’s treat this as a signal that something new needs to be built.

Sniff and Scurry never really settle in. They spend a part of every day continuing to seek out new cheese - just in case. But Hem and Haw see no reason to leave. They believe after a time that they are entitled to this cheese. Of course, one day, they saunter back to their pile of comfort and abundance to find that it’s gone. The mice kind of shrug and just go looking for new cheese. Hem resists, complains, and wants things to go back to the way they were. Haw is afraid at first, but eventually realizes that adapting is better than staying stuck.

Don’t be Hem.

That’s the moral. You aren’t entitled to any cheese, and you should be grateful for the cheese you find, but don’t just take it for granted. You have to constantly be seeking new sources of cheese. There are so many examples of this in business - we get complacent about marketing because sales are strong. We stop upskilling because we believe our job will always be around. We don’t invest in innovation because we have a product moat. Then, inevitably, somebody moves the cheese. We lose a big customer, get displaced, or have a competitor come out of nowhere with a better product that takes our market share.

But the same applies to life in general. We make a plan, execute, and then life throws a curveball at us. I can’t count the number of times I’ve had to change course. It’s never fun, but to sit back and demand “why me!?” doesn’t change what needs to be done.

Adaptability is a learned skill. It’s a muscle you can exercise, and each time, it gets a little easier. Did I mention it’s never fun? It is, though, the one skill that is innate in us humans. We’ve been adapting to geography, ecology, economies, and culture. So, take some time to survey the landscape to predict what damage the AI tsunami will bring and expand your horizons.

We told factory workers, “Learn to code!” as though that was an obvious transition. It may be time to look at reversing that advice. Coders are quickly going to find themselves in three camps. The first will be those who know AI and how to work with it to create value for their employers. The second will be those who use their skills to start new companies on their own, now that bringing a viable product to market is MUCH cheaper and faster than ever before. The third will be those who need to reskill and find another way to create value. Maybe that’s a gray collar career. Maybe it’s something else, but employers are going to need 90% fewer coders. Anthropic just released this chart. (h/t, )

What it shows are the theoretical percentage of tasks that AI can do in 21 career groups in blue and the percentage currently being done in red. It shows the “AI resistant” careers in stark relief.

Opportunity no longer knocks

We al know the old saw. But it seems like it no longer applies. Opportunity isn’t out there knocking on doors anymore. Today, it’s doomscrolling Instagram and can’t be bothered. So, you have to knock on Opportunity’s door, and maybe it will answer.

For newer job seekers, I cannot stress enough how futile it will be to spam your resume to employers. There are hundreds if not thousands of applicants for each job. Your best bet is to choose some target companies and network your way in. “Sure, Don, just call the hiring manager and smooth talk her?” No - find employees doing the job you want. Ask them how they like working there. Ask them what their day is like. First, you may find that the company you thought was perfect is kind of a dysfunctional mess. Maybe that’s just in your department, or maybe it’s company wide. Talk to the salespeople. Talk to anyone in that company that you can find. It takes work. Finding a job is a full-time job.

One of my partners recently invited a recent aerospace grad that I know to a pitch event, just to network. I introduced him to an amazing guy doing really cool work in drone engineering, and Ryan wound up with a job the next day. I don’t even think it’s hit him how fantastic this opportunity is to grow, even though it’s not paying what he thought. He’s young and can pay his dues, but this experience will be transformative. All this after months of sending out resumes and following up by email. Times have changed.

was going to pursue an engineering career, and after she talked with someone about the job she wanted, she changed her mind, and so she founded a company called Perspectiv (getperspectiv.com) that teaches kids about what it’s really like to work in a given job. She’s passionate and dedicated, and she never looked back.

The big takeaway here is that the old rules are obliterated. The job market is tough. Times are changing. I know that creates anxiety, but one of the best ways to mitigate that is taking control. It’s not complicated - but it is uncomfortable and can be hard work. Part of that is assessing where you planned to be and whether that’s going to be useful in the future. If you’re in school for a subject that’s heavily blue above, ask yourself some hard questions.

• Do I even know what my job will be like?

• Am I suited for this work, and passionate about it, or am I pursuing pay or status?

• Would I be happier in a job where I’m creating a tangible work product - a physical thing?

• What could I learn to do with my personality and skillset that employers would pay me to do?

There are a lot of questions along these lines, but the cheese has been moved. Life is not going to come to you.

If you’re a parent coaching your child through these discussions, talk about this article with them. Wipe the slate clean of what ‘the plan’ was and look objectively at the landscape. Don’t be afraid to let go of the old paradigm, because it no longer serves.

I wish that weren’t so, but it is.

The hopeful message here is that there are tons of paths forward that can bring satisfaction and meaning - it just may not look like you thought it would.

That panel was the first time I articulated, publicly, the connection between the Industrial Revolution, its lasting impact on work and education, and what artificial intelligence might mean beyond efficiency and automation.

What struck me then and still does now was how deeply the logic of the Industrial Revolution had shaped our thinking. We talked about productivity, scale, and optimization almost instinctively. But very little was said about what had been lost along the way: judgment, craftsmanship, responsibility, and the human presence that gives work meaning.

I remember arguing that AI represented more than a technological shift. It represented an opportunity to reverse part of that legacy. If machines could take on what is mechanical and repeatable, whether physical or cognitive, then humans could move back into roles that are innately human. Roles that require context. Ethics. Empathy. Accountability. Judgment. True human creativity.

That idea was framed as an evolution versus nostalgia or resistance to progress.

The question I posed then is the same one I carry now: What if technology doesn’t dehumanize work further, but instead gives us the chance to re-humanize it? By being intentional about where humans remain essential and why. At the time, such a perspective felt early. Today, it feels unavoidable.

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AI has arrived faster and more broadly than many expected. The choices we make now in how we design systems, prepare workers, and talk honestly about work will determine whether this moment deepens the abstractions of the past or helps correct them.

That panel wasn’t a prediction or a waring, per se. But it most certainly was an invitation. We still get to choose what kind of future of work we build.

That narrow, moving boundary where speed meets control. Where you’re pushing the machine as hard as it can go but not one inch further. Cross the line and you lose traction. Blow the engine. End the race.

In the AI economy, there is also a line.

On one side is human judgment: context, values, accountability, ethics, creativity, restraint. On the other side is machine capability: scale, speed, recall, pattern recognition, tireless execution. Your job and your advantage lives on that line. But, you can’t find the line if you don’t understand the machine.

People who treat AI like magic never find it. People who treat AI like a threat never approach it. Only those who learn how AI actually performs (how prompts shape outcomes, how data shapes decisions, how automation amplifies both excellence and mistakes, etc.) develop the instincts to stay right on the edge. GET CURIOUS.

This is why gray collar work matters, now and well into the future as we see more displacement.

Accepting the Gray Collar paradigm is not about resisting technology. We love technology. Gray Collar is about pairing human judgment with machine capability in a way that endures. Gray Collar is about workers who know when to let the system run and when to intervene. When to automate and when to apply discretion. When to trust the output and, very importantly, when to question or challenge it.

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The faster you understand the machine, the faster you find the line. The faster you find the line, the faster you establish your role. And once you establish your role, you’re no longer replaceable. YOU ARE ESSENTIAL.

Learn how to drive and freedom abounds.

It began with a near mistake.

I dropped out of The Ohio State University as an aerospace engineering major with no real plan—just a vague sense that something didn’t feel right. In what I can only describe as a very arbitrary pivot, I moved into the film industry and spent over a decade working on big-budget movies in Hollywood. It was exciting, creative, and at times surreal—but eventually, I began asking deeper questions about purpose and calling.

In search of something that felt meaningful and more fulfilling, I decided to return to school to pursue engineering. Aerospace had always felt prestigious and important—the kind of career that served a greater purpose than what I had found in film. I was ready to commit years of my life and tens of thousands of dollars to what I had long thought of as “the road not taken.”

Then one conversation changed everything.

While applying to programs, I had the opportunity to speak with a young aerospace engineer working in the field. Her résumé was impressive. She had done everything “right.” The catch? She wasn’t happy. As she described her day-to-day work, I felt something shift. The reality of the job—the actual tasks, the rhythm of the work, the environment—was nothing like the story I had constructed in my mind.

I had romanticized the career. I had projected onto it everything I felt was missing in my own life. That’s when it hit me: I was preparing to pour time, energy, and money into a new career without truly understanding what the job entailed.

That brief, honest exchange saved me from making a costly mistake.

It also exposed a much bigger problem.

Most students never get that conversation. They choose a path based on prestige, pressure, assumptions, or incomplete information. They commit time, money, and identity to careers they barely understand. And when the reality doesn’t match the expectation, the consequences ripple outward—financial strain, dissatisfaction, burnout, fractured families, disillusionment.

Perspectiv was founded to interrupt that cycle.

At its core, Perspectiv is a career exploration platform built on authentic, in-depth interviews with real professionals. We don’t offer surface-level job descriptions or generic summaries. We sit down with people who are actually doing the work—plumbers, surgeons, ice farmers, taxidermists, entrepreneurs, blacksmiths, wind turbine technicians, FBI agents, lawyers (just to name a few)—and we ask them to tell the truth.

What does your day-to-day actually look like?
What misconceptions do people have about this profession?
What do you wish you had known before starting down this path?
What advice would you give someone who is considering this career?
What do you love most? What are the tradeoffs?

Students deserve more than vague encouragement to “follow their dreams.” They deserve clarity.

Perspectiv is not anti-college, nor is it anti-any particular path. It is pro-awareness. Pro-agency. Pro-purpose. There are countless high-paying, high-demand, deeply meaningful careers that don’t require a four-year degree—and many that do. The goal isn’t to push students in one direction. It’s to equip them to make deliberate decisions grounded in reality rather than assumption.

Along the way, I’ve learned that career decisions are rarely just about work. They shape identity, community, family life, and long-term fulfillment. When more people find work they feel called to do—not just a job—the ripple effect is profound. Families are stronger. Communities are more stable. Individuals are less anxious and more confident.

If a single honest conversation saved me from years of misalignment, imagine what access to hundreds of those conversations could do for a generation.

That’s the world Perspectiv is building.

Perspectiv and The Gray Collar share a core belief: people deserve the truth about work before they stake their future on it. Gray Collar is reshaping the cultural story around real-world, resilient roles. Perspectiv makes those roles visible through honest conversations with the people actually doing them. In a shifting economy, with growing concern over AI displacement, this conversation is bigger than any one platform—and I’m honored to be part of it. If this resonates, subscribe to The Gray Collar Collective, share this with someone navigating their next step, and explore the professionals telling their stories at getperspectiv.com.