What Is a Job Exactly?

If we want to know if your job is going to be taken, we must ask the question, what exactly is a job? Every job is exactly the same whether you're a nurse, writer, programmer, chef, whatever. We take something in and we output something different. Something goes in one side and something new comes out the other. The nurse takes in an unhealthy patient and outputs a healthy one. A writer takes in information and in the output an article.

The programmer takes in a process and outputs a more efficient one. Chefs take in vegetables, meat. Outcomes. Dinner We push buttons, one button after another to steer our ship through the mode of complexity that sits between what we have and what our customers want. Building PowerPoint decks and copying data from one spreadsheet into another is a true, mind numbing grind. For 80 hours, a week. And exactly what those that enter the consulting or investment banking world do for 2 to 3 years before being allowed to do any client facing work.

Learning how to make PowerPoint decks in very specific styles, flow the right fonts. The pyramid principle to 20 rounds of revisions per slide. An employee is given the task they're given either because someone else doesn't want to do them doesn't have time to do them. The question isn't do they want to do this? It's what needs to be done to turn the input into the output. So that is how people see their job. Uber drivers watching Waymo pick up the customer they want programmers watching ChatGPT run laps around their handwritten code.

Lawyers watching Gemini surfers case law they didn't even know existed. Warehouse workers watching the Fisher robots sport for 200 straight hours. The pain, the agony, the horror. Or is it a horror? Do you even like your job? Uber drivers do not. Just four out of every 100 new Uber drivers are still driving. After one year, every tool ever built and sold to help coders was either directly or indirectly, about having to write less code assembly to compile languages, keyboard shortcuts, autocomplete, open source packages.

The lawyer didn't know the case law related to their case existed, because they didn't want to spend the time searching and compiling thousands of pages of documents. To keep 100 rolls staffed at a warehouse, Amazon has to hire 150 new workers every year, not just newly opened warehouses. No, no, every year for every warehouse, 150 new workers will need to be hired to keep 100 positions full. So most people watching an AI tool do one of the things they have to do.

That's not the job that is the current required task that helps complete the job. These are quite often not tasks people actually like. Let me ask you a question. If you want $10 million in the lottery today, you continue to work or would you stop working? Go ahead, take your time. Think about it for a second. Ready? It's an age old question that's been asked in many surveys, so we know how people respond to this idea.

More than half of people would, at minimum, not stay at their current job. Less than 25% say they wouldn't stop working for any amount of money. Money is this funny thing. Pieces of paper with faces printed on them. So we can get something to eat without killing each other. It's not evil. It's not divine. It is simply the physical representation of infinite choice, what some would call optionality. $20 bill will pass through the hands of a thousand people without being spent on exactly the same thing.

Once it reaches your hands, you can choose to acquire infinite number of things or experiences or. And this is the critical part, the ability to say no. Because clearly, from the decades of asking people number one thing people want money for so they can say, no, I don't want to spend my time like that, which means this saying is wrong. Benjamin Franklin got it backwards. Putting time first to emphasize that you should trade time to get money.

That's what the whole paragraph you can find the saying in is about when really we know that humans work to obtain time. You want money to buy a house so you don't have to build it to buy food, so you don't have to grow it to buy a car. So you don't have to walk that gap between the input. You're given and the output you need to get is largely time spent doing things no one likes doing menus, clicking buttons, steering.

Tapping. Messaging. Sorting. Waiting on hold. Hammering a nail. Your job is to get the output from the input. The question most of us have right now is really not the title of this video. It's this. And the answer to that probably.