STICK TO YOUR KNITTING
When you pursue something systematically and relentlessly, you build up a body of experience that gives you an advantage over competitors. You can work faster and more accurately. You know what to do and what not to do.
The case for staying with a career for decades is that your cumulative experience gives you profit opportunities. I mean "profit" in Kirzner's sense: a positive return on alertness. It's not a salary. It's not a rate of interest. It's not rent. It is what remains after all other factors of production are paid for.
One of the problems that Americans face in the first decade of their careers is that they bounce around. They have several jobs. They do not get into a long-term career and stick to it.
If a person's skills are technical, such as video production, and he moves from job to job doing video production, this may not be a problem. He is developing his skills. He is applying these skills to a wide range of markets. He is finding out what works and does not work in several markets.
A similar skill is writing advertising copy. A copywriter can work in several media: catalogues, direct mail, Internet, display ads for magazines, classified ads, and radio. These competing media offer the copywriter different challenges. Nevertheless, the basic skills remain the same. Time spent in each of these areas is cumulative. The opportunities for an above-market rate of return are high, because the practitioner is practicing routinely every day.
This is the peculiar aspect of entrepreneurial alertness. It is a combination of routine and unpredictable awareness. The long years of routine performance lead to an increase in profitable alertness.
We hear praise for getting a wide range of experiences. I agree, if these experiences are bounded by patterned performance. It is the framework of our work that provides the working capital for our breakthroughs in life. We recognize the familiar, so we can better assess the importance of the unfamiliar that is a product of or an intrusion into our pattern. Someone has said that the two greatest words in science are "that's odd." This applies to every field.
I recommend to young people that they identify their calling early. Their employment may shift, but they should stick to their knitting with respect to their calling: the most important thing they can do in which they are most difficult to replace.
I saw a movie recently about a man who identified his calling in his mid-thirties. He is an African American who worked for 35 years in a factory that made cans. But when he got home every evening, he began working in his yard. Over the years, he created a topiary garden like nothing ever seen. He used cast-off plants that were not supposed to grow in the region. His South Carolina topiary became famous. Busloads of people come from as far as New York to see it. His name is Pearl Fryar. The movie is called A Man Named Pearl. It is on Netflix.
When he dies, he will be difficult to replace. He was not difficult to replace in the can factory.
CONCLUSION
I have learned over the last half century that if you stick to your knitting, you will get very good at it. The opportunities will appear, and you will be alert to them.
Lew Rockwell and I spent decades publishing, editing, and writing. Then came the World Wide Web through Netscape Navigator. As the New York politician George Washington Plunkett said of his career in the 19th century, "I seen my opportunities, and I took 'em." Through the Internet, we expanded our audiences to hundreds of thousands of people. That would have been inconceivable in 1993.
Right time. Right place – the "no place" of the Internet.
It should happen to you. (That was Jack Lemmon's first movie. A year later, Mr. Roberts made him a star. It happened to him. I saw it at age 12. It was about a self-funded billboard in New York City that made an obscure woman famous. Right time. Right place. That was my first real encounter with the logic of display advertising. I never forgot it.)
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