Layer cake

"You're born, you take shit. You get out in the world, you take more shit. You climb a little higher, you take less shit. Till one day you're up in the rarefied atmosphere and you've forgotten what shit even looks like. Welcome to the layer cake son." -Eddie Temple from Layer Cake

I think the above quote summarizes life pretty well. The core thing here, in my opinion, is the fact that to get anywhere in life you need to take shit and shovel shit. You can't get around that fact. How much shit you need to shovel, in turn, is something you can affect. The smarter you are, the less shit you have to shovel. But you always have to shovel, so you better get used to the idea.

Now, why is this relevant? Over the past few years I've often come across situations where people seem to think that they can just jump over the step that was mentioned above. But it doesn't work that way. Even if you are able to temporarily see what life could be like in what Eddie calls the rarefied atmosphere, you won't stay there for long if you haven't served your time. I have to admit, even I occasionally forget this, but life has a funny way of knocking you back down to earth and eventually you learn to keep your nose to the grindstone.

Based on this, I would extend the above by suggesting that you can, at times, take a short leave from the treadmill. But every time you do, there is a discontinuity. If the discontinuity becomes longer than a certain threshold allows, you fall back down. The threshold is very subjective and depends on many different things. For the sake of conversation I'll simplify it and say that it depends on how much shit you've shoveled previously. Typically the more you shovel the more you learn and the more competent you become. But while becoming more competent, you also need to ensure that you're in an upwardly mobile trajectory. So the threshold also depends on your position in the layer cake. As a sidenote, it's interesting how as you mature, it appears that your technical competence, to an extent, becomes less relevant, but only if you've been upwardly mobile and have replaced your technical competence with another type of competence, which is essentially something related to understanding how the world and the systems that make up the world actually work. You can essentially, at some point in your life, replace the heavy lifting with cunningness.

All of this is essentially very obvious. But the implications are huge: my biggest gripe with younger people these days is the assumption that you simply don't need to shovel shit, that you don't need to learn hard technical skills, and that you'll just be handed everything on a plate. That combined with the situation that most young people are doing the wrong things and then creating holes in their CVs by doing wrong things and dropping themselves down in the layer cake again. Granted, during the past few years the recession has meant that life has become slightly more difficult, but I would still argue that having more spare time should enable youngsters to train and practice the skills that are relevant for them. In software participating in Open Source projects, for instance, is a brilliant way of making sure that despite not getting paid, you're still maintaining your technical competence and keeping yourself on the treadmill, thus keeping you from falling back down in the layer cake. Entrepreneurial activities are another way to achieve the same effect.

And finally: embracing opportunities. While grinding away with your shovel, one should always be on the lookout for opportunities to sieze. Opportunities that open up offer brilliant vehicles to demonstrate your competence and move up in life. But that's assuming that you don't make a hash of things. If you do, then the effect is negated, i.e. down you go.

Now, add network externalities to the soup and this becomes quite an interesting topic. Is your shoveling affected by others around you? Can someone help you with your burden or do the exact opposite? Is the world a zero-sum game or are you able to tap into synergies?