Ten Ultimate Essays About Career
E1-'The Long-Term Game': Curated Readings To Help You Set Your Legacy
Welcome to the Fiction Emailer: A newsletter on Writing, Thinking, Reading for Founders, Entrepreneurs & Professionals. Find long-form essays and interviews that will help you imagine an optimistic FUTURE and leave a solid LEGACY behind. Join My WhatsApp Channel to get curated readings.
Brand New Series: ‘The Long-Term Game’.
If we choose to focus on how we want to be remembered after our death, our perspective changes on a lot of worldly things.
This is why I started ‘The Long-Term Game’. Every Monday, I offer you curated readings to help you set your legacy. This is Edition One!
I handpick pieces written by global experts and their practical frameworks on how to grow in creative endeavors and live a fulfilling life. I start by saying why you should read it, and then I highlight the best sections from the essay under ‘punchy quotes’.
This series is my conscious effort on how we can build our values and develop skills that will outlast the rapid changes happening around us from AI to gloom & doom.
Welcome aboard! Do invite your family and friends.
Ten Ultimate Essays About Career
I have high ambitions for my writing career. You’ll find me often reading about writing, learning about writing, and thinking about writing.
As a newsletter writer, my goals include growing a large reader base/paying subscribers, attract inbound ghostwriting leads, and tap into unexplored opportunities. So my brain constantly keeps braining about jobs, careers, and impact.
How do I make the odds in my favour when things are so shitty?
What should I do in age of AI?
How do I find purpose and meaning?
These are some questions I ask myself and try to find answers by reading a trillion essays. I have read some high-quality practical pieces in the past few months. I filtered the best ten for you to get the whole picture. Let’s go!
Essay 1: ‘The Death of the Corporate Job’ by Alex McCann for ‘Still Wandering’. Read Here.
Rayaan Writer’s Why:
My new job after moving away from journalism was boring. There were unnecessary meetings and protocols to follow. It was then I stumbled upon this essay by Alex McCann. It inspired me to focus more on my newsletter project ‘The Fiction Emailer’.
Reading this essay also reminded of my eldest brother’s role at an IT firm. As a team lead, he struggled with colleagues who whiled away their time and did a mediocre job, hoping to do something else. Alex’s writing is for such individuals dreaming to make sense about their job, and understand why the corporate job is dying (or is dead).
Punchy Quotes To Sip:
The most honest person I've met recently was a VP at a tech company who told me: "I manage a team of twelve people who create documents for other teams who create documents for senior leadership who don't read documents. I make £150k a year. It's completely absurd, and I'm riding it as long as I can while building something real on the side."
Your corporate role doesn't need to be meaningful. It needs to be useful. Useful for building skills, for funding your real projects, for buying time while you figure out what matters to you.
… you can stop pretending your corporate role is real. You can show up, do the tasks, attend the meetings, but you don't have to believe in it. You don't have to tie your identity to your email signature.
Essay 2: ‘You’re Wasting Your Potential. It’s Not Your Fault’ by Alex McCann for ‘Still Wandering’. Read Here.
Rayaan Writer’s Why:
I have a confession to make: When I started experimenting with newsletters during Covid days, I spent a lot of time learning how to build a newsletter instead of practically doing it. Was I lazy? Was I procrastinating? Was I worried that I should publish only when it’s perfect? Maybe yes or no for all this.
Alex, in this essay, talks about why it is vital for us to first get the overall picture of what we are looking to do with our work life. We should have the openness to accept that none of our plans are set in stone. There’s always iterations to be done.
Punchy Quotes To Sip:
“I just can’t get motivated to figure out my career.” But when you dig into it, the issue is rarely motivation. It’s that people are trying to make what is essentially the biggest decision of their lives with remarkably little data. They don’t know what kind of work suits their personality. They don’t know what problems they find genuinely interesting. They don’t have an accurate picture of what they’re good at versus what they’ve simply been told they’re good at. And they have almost no understanding of what the market looks like through the lens of who they are rather than what happens to be hiring. When you give people that information, the motivation takes care of itself. The paralysis most people feel is a rational response to being asked to make a high-stakes decision with almost no useful data.
… careers are long and the process of understanding what kind of work suits you is lifelong. The people I’ve spoken to who seem happiest in their work are the ones who got comfortable with the process of revisiting the question, regularly and honestly, throughout their lives.
…You don’t need to have your career figured out before you start moving. You just need to care about a problem enough to keep showing up, and be willing to learn as you go.
Essay 3: ‘The 5 Types Of Bullshit Job’ by Alex McCann for ‘Still Wandering’. Read Here.
Rayaan Writer’s Why:
A friend from Mumbai spoke. She’s working at a large insurance company and ranted about her junior trainee colleagues. They haven’t been assigned any tasks yet for months. They are just coming to office to sit idle in their desk and go through mandated corporate workshops that serve zero purpose.
I wasn’t surprised to see a large organisation failing to optimize its workforce. Our phone call soon made us discuss about David Graeber’s book ‘Bullshit Jobs’, which Alex incidentally cites in this piece.
Punchy Quotes To Sip:
A bullshit job is defined as a form of paid employment so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence, even though they feel obliged to pretend that this is not the case.
Flunky jobs exist only, or mostly, to make someone else look or feel important. The people in them are given minor tasks to justify being there, but the real reason for the role is to serve as a prop for somebody else’s status
Goons are people whose jobs have an aggressive element to them, and who exist mainly because other people employ them. The clearest example is armies: countries need armies only because other countries have armies.
Duct taper jobs exist because of a glitch or fault in the organisation. These people are there to solve a problem that shouldn’t exist in the first place. The clearest examples are people whose whole role is to clean up after sloppy or incompetent superiors.
Box tickers exist to make it look like something useful is being done when it isn’t. Survey administrators, in-house magazine journalists, corporate compliance officers. One of the examples in the book is a woman hired to coordinate leisure activities at a care home. Her real job was to conduct elaborate surveys of the residents about what entertainment they wanted. She compiled the surveys into reports. The reports were filed. The residents got the same entertainment regardless. The whole exercise existed so the care home could show, on paper, that it was consulting its residents.
Taskmasters come in two forms. The first type are people whose entire role is to assign work to others, where they themselves believe there’s no real need for them to be there… The second type are worse. Their main role is to create bullshit tasks for others, or to supervise bullshit, or to generate entirely new bullshit jobs. They’re the ones producing the strategic vision documents and mandatory reporting frameworks that fill other people’s calendars with work that everyone privately knows is pointless.
Essay 4: ‘The science of career anxiety. (With Anne-Laure Le Cunff)’ by Alex McCann for ‘Still Wandering’. Read Here
Rayaan Writer’s Why:
I lost my job during the COVID days. For nearly four months, I was looking for opportunities. It was quite difficult because the entire world went through an unpredictable phase.
I was fortunate that my mother and brothers supported me no matter what. So reading this essay on career anxiety naturally threw me back to the lockdown days that I somehow sailed through with my family’s love. Here, Alex speaks to Anne-Laure, a former Google employee turned neuroscientist, the founder of Ness Labs, and the author of Tiny Experiments.
Punchy Quotes To Sip:
“Implicit Theories of Interest: Finding Your Passion or Developing It?”: The question Anne-Laure prefers is a much more manageable one. Not “what is my one true calling,” which tends to produce either paralysis or a confident guess dressed up as certainty, but, in her words, “what are you curious about?” She extends it a little when she describes it: “what is something that, even if it fails, you’ll be happy that you gave it a try?” Curiosity asks far less of you than passion does. It does not demand a lifelong commitment before you have collected any evidence at all. It just asks you to run the experiment and see what comes back, which is the only way anyone has ever found work they love, including the people who will later tell you they simply followed their passion.
Work is one of the main ways a modern adult signals to everyone around them that they are a contributing member of the group, that the tribe is better off with them inside it than outside it. Anne-Laure put it more bluntly than I would have dared to: “being productive is a way to say, don’t kick me out. You need me, and we need each other.”
Post-industrial modern society handed each of us a single title and asked it to do all of that work alone. Your worth to society now arrives compressed into one line, one role, one answer to the question people ask within thirty seconds of meeting you. When that line is missing, or unimpressive, or recently lost, the brain does not file it as a neutral administrative fact. It reads it as the early warning of exclusion, the same signal our ancestors got when the group began to turn its back, and it produces a fear that feels enormous because the machinery generating it was built for a matter of life and death. The fear makes complete sense once you see where it comes from. An ancient and accurate survival system is doing exactly its job, in a modern situation it was never designed for.
Essay 5: ‘Should you love your job? (The Jay Pritchett story)’ by Alex McCann for ‘Still Wandering’. Read Here.
Rayaan Writer’s Why:
I am a huge fan of the Modern Family series. I love it for its writing, sharp dialogues, and of course, the cast performances. My brother, who is an equal fan, loves Jay Pritchett, the patriarch of the series. Jay is a successful businessman who is retired and lives in a grand home. Every time we watch the show, my brother and I often promise each other to build such wealth for ourselves.
When you speak about wealth, you think about how you want to do it. When you think about how you want to do it, you think about which job (or business) will make you reach that. As a writer, I certainly do think of achieving financial freedom, and magnetting opportunities. This essay is a good reminder on love and work, and work and love. Do give it a shot!
Punchy Quotes To Sip:
Telling someone to do what they love often gets heard as “make a living from your hobby,” which is why so many people end up trying to monetise their love of skiing or photography or sourdough and finding the experience considerably more painful than they expected. The passions worth building a career on are almost always one level deeper than the hobby.
…I think being good at something is incomplete advice on its own. You can’t outwork people who find the work natural. For them, the hours don’t feel like hours. The thinking happens in the shower and on walks. The hard problems get worked on in the background, while they’re doing something else, and the answer arrives later without anyone having to force it. Mastery accrues from those unrequired moments, the small obsessive optimisations they make because the work feels like play and they can’t help themselves. Galloway’s advice tells you to pick what you’re good at, and that’s good advice as far as it goes. What it under-prices is that two people can be equally good at something on paper, and the one for whom the doing of it feels natural will, over twenty years, leave the other one in the dust.
In an economy with four hundred thousand niches, falling barriers to entry, and AI rapidly dissolving the boundary between what counts as “a job” and what doesn’t, the calculation changes. The intersection between what you’re good at and what you find rewarding to do has more entries in it than it used to.
So should you love your job? Duh, yes, of course you should love your job. Or at least aim to. You have one life, and spending the majority of your waking hours on something that doesn’t bring you joy is a great shame. But for most real people, the ones who aren’t celebrities or lottery winners or the rare child who knew at nine what they wanted to do at forty, getting there requires a deep understanding of yourself, what you’re capable of, what you actually love doing once you separate it from the hobbies you do to escape work, and where there are opportunities in the market for someone with that combination. Those are the three corners. The work of finding the overlap, and finding it again as you change, is some of the most worthwhile work you’ll ever do.
Essay 6: ‘How to Start a Career When AI Is Doing Your Entry-level Job. Four pieces of unsolicited advice from an AI-pilled millennial’ by Katie Parrott for ‘Every.to’. Read Here.
Rayaan Writer’s Why:
“Won’t AI take your job?”
“Can’t I do my writing with AI?”
“What makes your writing different than AI?”
I’m often asked these questions by clients, friends and work acquaintances. I reply:
“Nope, I protect myself from AI by learning to read and write everyday.”
“Yes, you can write with a $20 Claude subscription but it won’t look nice to your personal brand if your reader gets to know that you offloaded your thinking and your story to an AI bot.”
“I work as a not just a ghostwriter but your SaaS partner (Socrates-as-a-Service). As your in-house co-thinker, I ask complex questions, which will make you go through your memory shelves and share with me detailed anecdotes of your work-life experience. This in turn will be converted into writing that drives leads and offer value to your target audience.”
I say something along those lines every time I have a discovery call with a client.
Katie’s piece gives a picture of how the job market is reacting today. It’s a practical guide for graduates stepping out from college post-ChatGPT era. Don’t miss!
Punchy Quotes To Sip:
Pick a problem you want to help work on—something happening in the world that you find yourself thinking about, even when nobody is paying you to. The role of “content marketer” or “data analyst” may shrink, split, or even vanish, but the problem behind those titles—how to get a stranger to pay attention to something they didn’t know they cared about, how to make sense of a pile of messy numbers—will still be there, and somebody will still be paid to solve it
Choose one discipline to protect: Once you’ve picked your problem, pick your craft, whether it’s writing, building, researching, designing, strategizing, or operating. You’ve probably heard the truism that it takes 10,000 hours to gain mastery of a skill. The actual research is more complicated than the popularized version, but the underlying idea is right. You don’t get any good at anything until you’ve done it many, many times. If you want to write for a living, write your own sentences. If you want to be an engineer, write your own code. Protect this craft from AI at all costs. AI can find resources, explain things, quiz you, and point out where your reasoning has gaps. But if you let it write your sentences or do your research, you won’t get the hours of doing things badly that you need in order to do them well.
Essay 7: ‘Why your nonlinear career needs a personal brand. How to stop explaining yourself and start attracting the right opportunities’ by Hannah Zhang for ‘NonLinear News’. Read Here.
Rayaan Writer’s Why:
It is easy and hard to build a career in the age of AI slop and the internet.
It is easy because all you need is just a day or two to set up a website, a Substack, your LinkedIn profile, and update about the things you want to do or things you have been doing.
It is hard to stand out because a million other folks are doing the same thing, covering the same bases, following obvious tips from more experienced builders.
If you truly want to have an edge so that people recognize you before you apply for a job or an opportunity, then this is a guide that can offer you a good start.
Punchy Quotes To Sip:
A personal brand brings you more opportunities so you can attract, not chase. And people with nonlinear careers have the most to gain from building one. When your career path follows a straight line, your title and your resume explain you. You show up in LinkedIns searches for “Product Manager” or whatever job you want because it’s already the title you have. Or you look like a star founder when fundraising because you have years in an industry. When your career zig zags, you’re left to do the explaining yourself, over and over. You don’t show up on recruiters radars because they can’t search for you by title. When you’re starting a new venture you look completely inexperienced in your field or function. A personal brand fixes that.
Essay 8: ‘How to Build a Fulfilling Career and Not Get Replaced by AI. On when quitting a job feels to early, figuring out what’s next, and how to build a personal brand in 2026’ by Hannah Zhang and Alex McCann for ‘NonLinear News’. Read Here.
Rayaan Writer’s Why:
It is indeed scary to read headlines that say, “AI will take your job.”
So what do you do? How do you AI-proof yourself? What can you offer? What are the systems you build? What is your moat?
These are some questions that are answered in this essay.
Punchy Quotes To Sip:
One of my favorite books on this is Range by David Epstein. He goes through history and shows all these examples of people who, because they had experience in different fields, went on to make great inventions or discoveries because they brought something in from a different domain. His idea of the spiky generalist — someone who can do a lot of things but is quite good in one or two specific areas — that’s the sweet spot. Because it is so hard to be number one at one single thing. But if you can be great across a bunch of different things and particularly good at one or two, that’s a real edge. And here’s what I figured out about my own path: my day job is product marketing for a technical fintech startup, which means I’m learning how to tell a story, reach an audience, and sell something. My content does the same thing. The newsletter does the same thing. The speaking does the same thing. It’s all building the marketing muscle — I want to become so good at this craft across different parts of it. On paper, it looks like my eggs are in different baskets. But it’s the same basket. These things compound.
In the context of AI, being high agency comes down to this: some people are never going to open Claude or ChatGPT until someone forces them to. Then they’ll use it like a chatbot and never take the extra step to figure out what it can actually do. That’s where the gap is going to widen — between people who learn these tools and people who just sit and wait.
Essay 9: ‘How to enter side doors. a field guide to jobs, cold emails, and making yourself legible to the right people’ by Maja for Velvet Noise. Read Here.
Rayaan Writer’s Why:
During my college days, I ran a blog. I would reach out to authors, engineers, scientists, and so many interesting individuals, asking them to sign up for a Q&A session with me. I would record our conversation and put it out as an interview on my site. This helped me secure a first job at a local newspaper, and the rest is history.
The ones who get a job or land a role that does not exist yet are folks who are proactive to reach out with decision-makers. If it fails, they have a thick skin to know that it is part of the game. They get back on track and keep repeating.
This is a heartfelt long-form that tells you how you do it.
Punchy Quotes To Sip:
The job market can be brutal. It can make intelligent, sensitive, capable people feel like ghosts, sending pieces of themselves into portals and receiving only automated silence back. It can make you forget that the economy is not actually made of hiring portals. It is made of people. Confused people, busy people, kind people, distracted people, people with problems, people with budgets, who are sometimes willing to take a bet.
All it takes is one person. One person who sees the signal and who has the problem you can solve. One person who reads the essay, replies to the email, takes the call, forwards your name, invents the role, opens the side door, says, yes, come in, let’s see.
If someone takes a bet on you, honour it. Do the work. Become worthy of the luck. Make them glad they trusted their instinct. And when you are in a position to do so, pay it forward. Open doors for other people and reply to the overly earnest email when you can. Notice the student with the bright eyes and remember that almost every career contains, somewhere in its origin story, a person who did not have to help but did. The world is dazzlingly big.
Essay 10: ‘🌻 the old world is dying. opinionated advice for c/o 2026 graduates’ by Jasmine Sun for @ Jasmine’s Substack. Read Here.
Rayaan Writer’s Why:
There are a million creators yapping advice on a million things online. Sometimes it is practical, sometimes it is pure AI slop mixed bullshit. Sometimes it is actual advice. It is soul-sucking too when we are consistently slapped by the algorithm with such reels or posts. This essay reminds us of the abundance of info age and why it is a requirement to be self-aware; to know how to thrive when things are so uncertain.
Punchy Quotes To Sip:
The people who will win are those who can remake themselves again and again: to summit one peak, descend it, and then hike up the next. Know your fallback plans.
I am admittedly worried about AI making people stupid. AI makes it too easy to lie to yourself: to self-congratulate for the illusion of learning, thinking, and productivity. It turns hare-brained notes into grammatical sentences, doing the cleanup for you (and the mental processing too). It takes meeting minutes and you assume it’s like listening; it’s not until later that you realize you don’t recall a thing. You’ve got to actually know: Am I being more productive, or just tokenmaxxing? Am I upskilling myself with AI, or letting it do the hard part for me? Does my essay/business/product idea make sense, or did I let an LLM convince me it does?
Advice is context-dependent, and often looks like survivorship bias or bootstraps moralizing. Caveat: privilege check: I know that I’m lucky; there’s a reason I usually talk about systems instead. But now some are too down on the whole agency enterprise—they assume all abilities are baked in from birth. I often ask AI folks what they’d tell a normal 22-year-old. Don’t know, they’re screwed, is the non-answer I get most. In that response, I hear depressing defeatism: What can anyone do in the shadow of the technocapital machine?
Faced with such fatalism, self-help seems essential. Disruption is real and it’s hard and we’ve made it through before. You can do more than you think you can; you are more malleable than you think you are. You don’t choose the game board but you choose how to play it. Relish the pivots; ride the waves; recite the Serenity Prayer every morning and chase sunsets at night. I won’t tell you that the future’s smooth sailing. But what a thrill to be alive!
And that’s all for today!
Did you like reading this edition? Should I do better? Please don’t hesitate to offer me your feedback. I am open to ideas and suggestions.
Feel free to reach me at rayaanjournalist@gmail.com or you can simply reply to this email or comment below. See you soon! 😊❤️