Credibility through communication

Sunday Serendipity - Volume 17

After I quit my job and moved to Barcelona, I remember updating my resume and feeling so much resistance.

I didn’t like that I had to sum up my entire existence on a one-page document. I spent way too much time making it look pretty and adding all the credentials I gained over the years. Once I finished, I didn’t even want to send it out because reading the job descriptions made me want to gag.

I realized I didn’t want another normal job just to pay the bills. I wanted to find something more unique and aligned with my values. Nowadays, if you want to find work like this, it’s possible to create credibility in any particular field, you just have to master the art of communication.

Credibility through communication – that’s the theme of this week’s Sunday Serendipity…

Art for Serendipity Lab by Jace

One of my favorite things to do is time travel through my journal.

It’s a way for me to look back to different points of my life and see if I’m on track towards my goals or if I’m stuck in a loop. I traveled back to 2017 and found an entry from my time in the corporate world:

Another day, another dollar. I really do not belong in the work environment that i’m in. It’s not the type of work I enjoy. I’m not making connections with people I would normally associate with. I feel like I have a very different personality than everyone else.

I feel fortunate to have landed a job like this straight out of college, but if I could go back and talk to my younger self I would tell myself to read more books. I feel like i’m just now becoming enlightened with what I could be doing with my life.

I’m reading this book called the End of Jobs. It talks about how we’re moving toward an economy where more and more people are going to be independently contracted.

After reading books like the End of Jobs, I realized that the walls of credentialism have been permanently cracked and they continue to be torn down on a daily basis.

Credentials still hold some value, but they’re no longer the only standard of evaluation. They’re just one piece of the puzzle.

Demonstrated results matter the most now.

The reason I got an engineering degree is because I knew it would give me credentials to secure a decent job. At the time I was so focused on getting the degree and finding a job that I didn’t spend time much time reading and educating myself on alternative ways to make a living.

I was going through the motions and following the traditional career path that society tells us to follow. After I started working my job, I quickly decided I didn’t want to do that for the rest of my life, so I started self-educating.

On the internet anyone can showcase their expertise in any domain that exists. You can create credibility without having to get a $200,000 degree from an institution.

An example of this is James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits.

He isn’t credible to talk about habits because he has degree in science from some university. He’s credible to talk about habits because he built an audience of a million people who followed him for ideas, advice, and science on habits prior to him selling a book that has sold 10 million copies on habits.

None of the startups I’ve worked with have asked where I went to university or what kind of degree I have. Having a masters in engineering is a nice bonus and it shows my work ethic, but what they care about more is my current performance.

Paul Graham wrote about this back in 2008:

In a world of small companies, performance is all anyone cares about. People hiring for a startup don't care whether you've even graduated from college, let alone which one. All they care about is what you can do. Which is in fact all that should matter, even in a large organization.

The reason credentials have such prestige is that for so long the large organizations in a society tended to be the most powerful. But they don't have the monopoly on power they once did, precisely because they can't measure individual performance. Why spend twenty years climbing the corporate ladder when you can get rewarded directly by the market?

In the past, if you graduated from university you were almost guaranteed a secure well-paying job with a predictable path to upward mobility. This is no longer true.

Recent graduates are struggling to find work and wage growth has been stagnant across the globe. Earlier this year, a LinkedIn executive warned that “the bottom rungs of the career ladder are breaking”.

In a sense, this is great news. If you’re a young ambitious person, you no longer have to climb the corporate ladder to be successful. Another example that comes to mind is Pieter Levels. He’s an excellent communicator who’s built a bunch of fully-automated businesses which generate over $200k/month in revenue.

He even lists all the different ventures and revenue numbers in his bio, another way of creating credibility through communication.

A few decades ago it was nearly impossible to achieve that level of success by yourself, let alone without any credentials. Now with the Great Reshuffle, you can create your own credentials through communication.

I’m a believer because ever since I started creating stuff and communicating my thoughts and ideas, I’ve had more opportunities come into my field of orbit. I started with writing and now I’m having a go at YouTube.

If you’ve ever felt like communicating your ideas but are not sure where to start, this video might help:

To make living these days, you don’t need credentials, you just need to get good at communicating your ideas.

See you next week,

<3 B

P.S. - If you want to practice communication together, I’m hosting a cycling and writing retreat in Spain next Spring. If this is something you’d be interested in, fill out this form and I’ll be in touch with more info. 🚴🏼