Now is the Time for Moonshots

A letter to Gen Z on planning a career in the age of AI

Flame by Rockwell Kent

"The decline of the free entrepreneur and the rise of the dependent employee on the American scene has paralleled the decline of the independent individual and the rise of the little man in the American mind." - C. Wright Mills

I know the hiring cycle is well underway at America’s universities. Some of my friends, just a year or two younger than I am, are thinking about the classic prestige paths: IB, consulting, quant finance, and law. Others are at the early stage of their career, planning their next moves. A few are established professionals who don’t know what they want to do next. Many of them are driven more by prestige than passion.

I think a reality check is in order. You are probably not going to be a junior consultant for three years, then a senior consultant for two, then a managing partner for five, and finally a partner. That pyramid looks more like a tomb every day. This pathway exists because we need bright people to do repetitive work – and then we need them to lead others in doing so. Very soon, we won’t need you to do that.

If you’re young, bright, ambitious, and planning or beginning a traditional corporate career, I think you should consider pivoting today. Not just because AI is coming for your entry-level role (and I think it is), but because it might shred your entire career plan. In its place will be one of the best windows for building, creating, and doing in history – and you should be at the forefront of it.

If you listen, you can hear the cry of ten-trillion task completers being born in tomorrow’s silicon. They call from the void of the near future – one where any menial, intellectual task is a button press away. They’re ready to work better and faster than you at the work you’re training for. Your experience doing busywork won’t help you in the next chapter of human history, but your taste and agency will.

So what should you do?

The good news in all of this is that you will have the chance to be a changemaker. Our laws will still require humans to own and control companies for the foreseeable future. On top of that, it’s possible that long-horizon planning, novel idea generation, and courage are traits that our most advanced AI systems will lack for a while even as they become the best programmers, scientists, and mathematicians in the world. Your ability to disrupt an old industry, challenge old ideas, and do important things will be greater than every generation before you.

It will be the few that take the leap today, while change is just behind the horizon line, that will define the twenty-first century. Those who know just enough about a space to do something differently will be positioned to quickly build better products than anything that currently exists, and those without expertise in a field will be able to learn about a domain faster than any human before them could have hoped to.

Now is the time for moonshots. The bold, unsolvable problems facing man are begging to be solved. An army of agents will soon await your targeting instructions. You could find the intellectual walls that locked the solutions away and force them to come tumbling down. Your future of work will not be five hundred billion dollar companies, each employing one hundred thousand people. It could be a hundred thousand companies, each employing just a few, commanding “a country of geniuses in a data center.”

Opportunities for moonshots are all around you. They’re for the problems your professor swears can’t be fixed. I’m sure you’d love me to tell you the ones you should work on, but the first skill you’ll need to master in this next era is deciding what’s important for you to focus on. You know the problem that keeps you up at night? That’s the one you should start with.

It could be big – maybe you’ve got what it takes to join a startup that wants to cure cancer, but you’re tempted to consult instead. It could be small – maybe you’ve always taken the default path, and you’re considering founding a club on campus. Whatever your moonshot is, make sure it’s something with an actual vision behind it. If you’re going to take a small step, pick the right staircase. Since taste and agency take experience to develop – you have to try, fail, and try again – the earlier you start the better.

I’m not giving you this advice blindly. If you’re anything like me, you don’t come from a background where you can sit in the wilderness without a salary. But you can still do big things, even if they can’t start as your full time project. If money is a barrier, you could:

1. Find a role that is actually meaningful with a salary big enough to pay your bills. You don’t need a penthouse, but you do need a roof. Make career decisions accordingly.

2. Start a small company focused on a specific problem. Don’t wait until you graduate – get it off the ground while you’re still in college. If you’ve got self-earned funding, you could create a runway for a bigger project. Remember, AirBnB’s founders sold cereal to make it work.

3. Raise money. Write up your vision for the world you want to live in and how you want to get it there. If it’s a company, build the prototype. If it’s a nonprofit, identify your first project and how you’d execute. If it’s a research organization, make the case for the research. Then share it with anyone in your network who could plausibly help you get started. Your friends, professors, and mentors know more people than you think. Most people will tell you no. You just need one yes.

4. Take the main job, and launch a side project. When you can afford to, make your side project your main job.

I suppose you could try to catch the last chopper out of Saigon. White collar automation could take a long time; I don’t think these jobs will vanish tomorrow. But be honest with yourself: do you really want to be the one of the last junior consultants? What a terrible thing to put on your tombstone. Will your obituary be any more memorable because you chose the last safe option? Even if all of my assumptions about where we’re headed are wrong (and I don’t think they are), will you regret doing the bold thing instead of the safe one?

In some cases, it could be the best idea to say yes to a traditional offer. If you land a job that you think will make you fulfilled, you should seriously consider taking it. If that role is one that’s built for you – even better. If it is your dream to be a lawyer or a doctor or a salesman, pursue it and work as hard as you can. If the job is one that you truly care about – one that lets you make the change you want to see in the world – give it your all.

But if you’re doing this to climb the ladder, I’d ask yourself if that ladder will have a destination in a decade.

When you find it doesn’t, here’s what you should do: decline McKinsey’s phone call, skip the Goldman interview, and tell Jane Street to find someone else. Start a think tank, join an early-stage robotics startup, or go try to solve alignment. Whatever it is, just go do something you actually want to do. A brief window is about to open, and it will be the best time to create in history. Do not wake up in ten years to find yourself irrelevant, wishing you had been braver. Ditch the helicopter and build yourself a rocket ship.

And for the love of God, please don’t use this as an excuse to launch a meme coin.

Thanks to Leila Clark, Luca Gandrud, and Rudolf Laine for reviewing drafts of this post.