Think Past the Trend

A while back, a friend of mine picked a career because everyone said it was the future. The field looked hot, the salaries looked amazing, and every article pointed at it as the safest bet a person could make. Years later, the field had matured, the excitement had faded, and the early promise turned into a smaller, different job than most people had signed up for. Around the same time, another friend picked something that looked boring and risky, the kind of choice most people skip because it promises little immediate reward. Years later, her work looks steady, valuable, and hard to replace. The gap between them came down to timing and thinking, more than talent or luck, and that gap is really the whole argument of this piece.

A career feels safest when it shows the strongest demand today. Real safety actually comes from somewhere else. It comes from staying valuable once today's demand turns ordinary, once the crowd catches up and the advantage of being early wears off. Choose a career for its aftermath, rather than its trend. That single idea is worth more than every resume tip and skill list combined, and everything that follows is really just an argument for taking it seriously.

Most people choose a career by looking at what is popular right now, chasing job openings, salary numbers, and whatever skill everyone online says to learn this year. It feels smart because it rests on real data and real demand. But by the time a trend becomes obvious enough for everyone to notice, most of its early advantage has already faded. Herd behavior works the same way in careers as it does in markets. Once a skill shows up on every job posting and every course platform, the easy gains are largely gone, and what remains is a crowded field of people who all learned the same thing at the same time.

Every trend moves through the same rough cycle. It rises, it peaks, and then it settles into something calmer and more realistic than what people imagined at the start. The dot com wave once promised that having a website alone would make anyone rich. That excitement cooled into a mature industry where actual skill, product sense, and patience mattered far more than simply being online early. Crypto followed a similar arc, rewarding the smaller group who stayed through the slow years over the much larger crowd chasing quick returns. Asking what a field looks like once it settles tells you far more than asking what it looks like today, while everyone is still talking about it.

AI is the trend everyone is watching right now, so it works well as the live example. Many people are pushing hard into AI and data science roles because the demand looks huge today, and that logic makes sense on the surface. My honest opinion is that some of these roles carry real risk, especially the ones built purely around today's specific tools rather than around deeper judgment. AI systems are improving quickly, and it is reasonable to expect that some tasks people do today will become steadily more automated. How far this eventually extends into AI systems improving AI systems themselves, an idea often called recursive self improvement or RSI, remains a genuinely open question, and experts disagree sharply on the timeline. Given that uncertainty, my actual opinion runs narrower than avoiding AI as a career altogether. Roles built mainly around executing a fixed process with a tool are the ones most likely to get absorbed by a more capable system within a few years. Roles built around judgment, context, and applying AI output to a real problem that requires taste, accountability, and trust tend to hold up, since those qualities stay valuable even as the tools underneath keep changing.

There is an old line people love to repeat: "it comes down to who you know, more than what you know." Most people nod at it and move on. I think it deserves far more weight than that. The deeper argument running through this whole piece is simple: rather than optimizing for whatever skill is scarce today, optimize for what stays valuable as scarcity shifts to something else. Relationships are one of the few things that do that reliably. A strong network gives you information before it turns public, and it opens doors that a resume alone rarely reaches, since most real opportunities move through a private conversation long before they become a job listing. It also gives you room to pivot when a field shifts under you, because people who trust you will pull you into rooms that a stranger with sharper technical skills might miss entirely. Technology changes every few years. A relationship built with honesty and consistency can stay valuable for decades, through multiple waves of trends and multiple versions of whatever technology happens to dominate at the time.

So when you are picking a career, a few honest questions help more than chasing whatever is trending this month. Picture what the field looks like once the current excitement settles down, and be honest about whether you are drawn to the work itself or to the attention the field is getting right now. Ask whether the role rests on judgment and relationships, or purely on a tool that could look completely different in a few years. Ask whether you are actually building a network, meeting people, earning trust, staying in touch, or only building a skill in isolation. And ask what would still hold value in your work if this exact trend vanished tomorrow.

Trends will keep arriving, and AI simply happens to be the one everyone is watching at the moment. Being early to a trend matters far less on its own than people assume. Being early to the right kind of value is what actually matters. Someone who enters a field at its peak can have excellent timing by today's numbers and poor timing by a ten year horizon. My honest opinion is that the people who do well over the long run are rarely the ones who jumped fastest into whatever was trending. They are the ones who positioned themselves for what a field looks like after the noise fades, and who spent the trend years building relationships and judgment strong enough to carry them through whatever comes next.