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Point #2 means many of those graduating from elite undergrad schools were bright enough to anticipate Nassim Taleb’s advice about choosing a non-scalable career. Some careers, such as a dentist, are not scaleable since there is a limit on how many patients you can see in a day. In scaleable careers you can multiply your pay by 10x or 100x without doing much additional work. Some minor character may not work any less hard on a movie than Eddie Murphy does, but Eddie gets paid 1000x more. It takes no more time to write a book that sells 10 million copies than one that sells 10 thousand. In scaleable careers this characteristic has been termed “winner-takes-all”, meaning those at the top get a huge share compared to others in the same line of work. </p>
<p>So if you want to be absolutely filthy rich the way to get there is to be in a scaleable career, but Taleb’s advice surprises many. Rather than try to become the rare person at the top making a fortune but facing a high chance of being a much lower paid also-ran, Taleb advises choosing a career in which the rewards are pretty good and the odds of success are high. Like dentistry, medicine, and (for those who have elite backgrounds and can get jobs at top firms) law. The careers of those CEOs and others at the pinnacle are examples of Taleb’s Black Swans – unpredictable events paved the way for them to rise above the tens of thousands that started off along that same path. Whether it was impressing a mentor who had a bright future, being chosen to lead a division that ended up having a blockbuster product, or even landing a roommate in college that could later lend a hand (like “heckuva job, Brownie”), luck and chance played a huge role.</p>