Someone made a forum post about taking several months off work to hike, claiming that it was a great career decision and that they gained lots of transferable skills. I see this as LinkedIn-style clout-seeking behavior.
I am curious why you think this i) gains them clout or ii) was written with that intention?
It seems very different to the other examples, which seem about claiming unfair competencies or levels of impact etc.
I personally think that taking time off work to hike is more likely to cost you status than give you status in EA circles! I therefore read that post as an attempt to promote new community norms (around work and life balance and self-discovery etc) than to gain status.
One disclaimer here is that I think I know this person, so I am probably biased. I am genuinely curious though and not feeling defensive etc.
Sure, I’ll try to type out some thoughts on this. I’ve spent about 20-30 minutes pondering this, and this is what I’ve come up with.
I’ll start by saying I don’t view this hiking post as a huge travesty; I have a general/vague feeling of a little yuckiness (and I’ll acknowledge that such gut instincts/reactions are not always a good guide to clear thinking), and I’ll also readily acknowledge that just because I interpret a particular meaning doesn’t mean that other people interpreted the same meaning (nor that the author intended that meaning).
(I’ll also note that if the author of that hiking post reads this: I have absolutely no ill-will toward you. I am not angry, I enjoyed reading about your hike, and it looked really fun. I know that tone is hard to portray in writing, and that the internet is often a fraught place with petty and angry people around every corner. If you are reading this it might come across as if I am angrily smashing my keyword simply because I disagree with something. I assure you that I am not angry. I am sipping my tea with a soft smile while I type about your post. I view this less like “let’s attack this person for some perceived slight” and more like “let’s explore the semantics and implied causation of an experience.”)
One factor is that it doesn’t seem generalizable. If 10,000 people took time off work to do a hike, how many of them would have the same positive results? From the perspective of simply sharing a story of “this is what happened to me” I think it is fine. But the messaging of “this specific action I took helped me get a new job” seems like the career equivalent of “I picked this stock and it went up during a decade-long bear market, so I will share my story about how I got wealthy.”
A second factor is the cause-and-effect. I don’t know for sure, but I suspect that the author’s network played a much larger role in getting a job than the skills picked up while hiking. The framing of the post was “It was a great career decision. I gained confidence and perspective, but also lots of transferable and work-applicable skills: persistence, attention to detail, organization, decision-making under pressure...” And I’m looking at this and thinking that those are all context-dependent skills. Just because you have an eye for detail or skill with organization when it comes to your backpack, it doesn’t mean that you will when you are looking at a spreadsheet. Just because you can make a decision when you slip down the side of a mountain doesn’t mean you can make a decision in a board room.
And I think a third factors is general vibes: it felt very self-promotional to me.[1] It struck me as similar to LinkedIn content in which something completely unrelated to work and professional life occurs, and then is squeezed into a box in order to be presented as a work-appropriate narrative with a career-relevant takeaway.
So I’ll frame this in a way that is more discussion-based: how context dependent are these kinds of general/broad skills? Taking attention to detail as an example, I can be very attentive to a system that I am familiar with and pretty change blind in a foreign setting (I notice slight changes in font in a spreadsheet, but I won’t notice if a friend got a new haircut).[2] Persistence (or determination, or grit) is also highly dependent on the person’s motivation for the particular task they are working on. How accurate is it to claim to have gained these skills on a hike, to the extent that they benefit you in an office job?
According to some IO Psychologist contacts (this is two quotes smushed together and lightly edited from when I was chatting about this topic):
Personality traits generally only have significant change in such a short period of time (and six months counts as a short period of time when looking at a human life) when there are severe or sudden life events; my impression is that such change is very rare. I struggle to believe a six month hike is going to change a personality long-term. I’m definitely skeptical… To me, the author saying it was a great career decision either means A) they were burnt out and this was a chance to take some time to recover, or B) they’re overselling it, maybe for online clout or maybe to justify taking six months off work. For any life lessons/soft skills learned in six months on a trail my perspective is it would be difficult to link them directly to a job (unless it is an outdoorsy, trail guide kind of job).
I think that I tend to be more averse to marketing and self-promotional behavior than the average person, so it is possible that 100 people look at that post and 80 or 90 of them feel it isn’t self-promotional.
I’ve actually had colleagues/managers from two different professional contexts describe me as extremely attentive to detail, noticing things that nobody else did and insufficiently attentive to detail, to the extent that I am not competent to do the job (these are not direct quotes, but rather my rough characterization). The context matters a lot for how good we are at things. Determination is an easy example to illustrate the importance of context: think of doing a dull, mundane task as opposed to one you find inherently interesting and engaging.
Thanks for writing this, Joseph.
Minor, but I don’t really understand this claim:
Someone made a forum post about taking several months off work to hike, claiming that it was a great career decision and that they gained lots of transferable skills. I see this as LinkedIn-style clout-seeking behavior.
I am curious why you think this i) gains them clout or ii) was written with that intention?
It seems very different to the other examples, which seem about claiming unfair competencies or levels of impact etc.
I personally think that taking time off work to hike is more likely to cost you status than give you status in EA circles! I therefore read that post as an attempt to promote new community norms (around work and life balance and self-discovery etc) than to gain status.
One disclaimer here is that I think I know this person, so I am probably biased. I am genuinely curious though and not feeling defensive etc.
Sure, I’ll try to type out some thoughts on this. I’ve spent about 20-30 minutes pondering this, and this is what I’ve come up with.
I’ll start by saying I don’t view this hiking post as a huge travesty; I have a general/vague feeling of a little yuckiness (and I’ll acknowledge that such gut instincts/reactions are not always a good guide to clear thinking), and I’ll also readily acknowledge that just because I interpret a particular meaning doesn’t mean that other people interpreted the same meaning (nor that the author intended that meaning).
(I’ll also note that if the author of that hiking post reads this: I have absolutely no ill-will toward you. I am not angry, I enjoyed reading about your hike, and it looked really fun. I know that tone is hard to portray in writing, and that the internet is often a fraught place with petty and angry people around every corner. If you are reading this it might come across as if I am angrily smashing my keyword simply because I disagree with something. I assure you that I am not angry. I am sipping my tea with a soft smile while I type about your post. I view this less like “let’s attack this person for some perceived slight” and more like “let’s explore the semantics and implied causation of an experience.”)
One factor is that it doesn’t seem generalizable. If 10,000 people took time off work to do a hike, how many of them would have the same positive results? From the perspective of simply sharing a story of “this is what happened to me” I think it is fine. But the messaging of “this specific action I took helped me get a new job” seems like the career equivalent of “I picked this stock and it went up during a decade-long bear market, so I will share my story about how I got wealthy.”
A second factor is the cause-and-effect. I don’t know for sure, but I suspect that the author’s network played a much larger role in getting a job than the skills picked up while hiking. The framing of the post was “It was a great career decision. I gained confidence and perspective, but also lots of transferable and work-applicable skills: persistence, attention to detail, organization, decision-making under pressure...” And I’m looking at this and thinking that those are all context-dependent skills. Just because you have an eye for detail or skill with organization when it comes to your backpack, it doesn’t mean that you will when you are looking at a spreadsheet. Just because you can make a decision when you slip down the side of a mountain doesn’t mean you can make a decision in a board room.
And I think a third factors is general vibes: it felt very self-promotional to me.[1] It struck me as similar to LinkedIn content in which something completely unrelated to work and professional life occurs, and then is squeezed into a box in order to be presented as a work-appropriate narrative with a career-relevant takeaway.
So I’ll frame this in a way that is more discussion-based: how context dependent are these kinds of general/broad skills? Taking attention to detail as an example, I can be very attentive to a system that I am familiar with and pretty change blind in a foreign setting (I notice slight changes in font in a spreadsheet, but I won’t notice if a friend got a new haircut).[2] Persistence (or determination, or grit) is also highly dependent on the person’s motivation for the particular task they are working on. How accurate is it to claim to have gained these skills on a hike, to the extent that they benefit you in an office job?
According to some IO Psychologist contacts (this is two quotes smushed together and lightly edited from when I was chatting about this topic):
I think that I tend to be more averse to marketing and self-promotional behavior than the average person, so it is possible that 100 people look at that post and 80 or 90 of them feel it isn’t self-promotional.
I’ve actually had colleagues/managers from two different professional contexts describe me as extremely attentive to detail, noticing things that nobody else did and insufficiently attentive to detail, to the extent that I am not competent to do the job (these are not direct quotes, but rather my rough characterization). The context matters a lot for how good we are at things. Determination is an easy example to illustrate the importance of context: think of doing a dull, mundane task as opposed to one you find inherently interesting and engaging.
Thanks for the detailed response, I appreciate it!