"Alvin, you have a talent for writing and you have a gift for the subject. You could probably do well in academia and get a PhD if you wanted," my professor and thesis supervisor during my undergraduate days told me.

So when the opportunity to do a masters degree in sociology was offered to me, I thought-why not? I loved the subject, I loved to theorize, and most importantly I was good at it.

But things were not to be.

As I spent the next 2 years reading about Niklas Luhmann's grand theory of society, tutoring freshies on sociology staples such as C. Wright Mills' (1959) The Sociological Imagination, I completed my masters' degree with the realization that I was screwed.

There was no money to be made pursuing this path.

And money was becoming more and more critical as I began to hit my mid-20s. I need money to pay the bills. Plus, there was no no real contribution or impact I could really make to society writing obscure journals and books that would probably have a readership of N=5.

So I made a desperate attempt to jump into the world of business.

I nearly drowned. It was hard at first. I struggled to change my mindset and reorient myself. It's been 8 years since I made that jump and here's what I've learnt.

Abandon all illusions of grandeur — no one cares about you or your ideas. It's about what you can deliver to others.

This was hard. It hit me like a brick launched into my brain. I graduated at the top of my cohort during my undergraduate days with First Class Honours with the best academic exercise. I did a lot of research and work to get there. 6 months of research, if I remember correctly. During grad school, I read a lot of books, devouring books ranging from urban theory to institutional theory to grand theories of society, economic sociology, and so on. I had to come up with original ideas. Ideas no one else had. My unique contribution to the social scientific literature!

In the world of business, no one cared about any of that. Instead, I had to develop marketing plans to drive sales (a dirty world in academia!), write sales copy to sell things to people they didn't really need but thought they needed (false consciousness through interpellation!). The worst was having to manage people. Tell them what they want to hear instead of what you honestly think, so that they do what you need them to do. Plan schedules. Schedules? The university administrator did all of that for me and now I have to do it myself?

Simplifying vs complexifying

In academia, your job is to talk about very complex stuff. Society. Economy. State. Globalization. Big theories. You throw a lot of big words around. Panopticon! Hegemony! "Rationalization driven by the institutionalization of norms centred around the modern individual as a constituted actor!"

I had to re-learn how I wrote. Simple words. Simple e-mails. To the point. Don't make the reader think. Make your e-mail effortless to read. That was a 180-degree transformation in the way I wrote. Note: I still miss writing academic prose. Sometimes.

"It could be X, it's inconclusive and we need more data/more research" vs let's go with X and see if it works

In academia, in the pursuit of academic honesty and "truth," the ideal is not to overstate our claims. We hedge our statements and make sure that they are probabilistic. Statements are often tentative and require further evidence.

In business, you can make a decision with just 50% of the facts (or sometimes less). And you're not even sure if the facts are correct to begin with. But you need to take a decision anyone. No one cares if it is 100% right or not. They just need to know enough to make a decision. Results are everything.

Time flows very differently

In academia, I took 6 months to produce an honours thesis (in fact longer if you include the time I spent thinking about topics), and 2 entire years to research, write, edit, and produce my magnus opus — the academic exercise submitted in consideration for my degree for Masters of Social Science. In business, I often have a few days or a week to submit a report/presentation deck. Time is relative, like Einstein said.

Things will feel sped up in business. Before you know it, you've practised your deck creation and e-mail writing and business meetings routine for 8 years.

Ideas are overrated, execution is more important

In business, you can be sure that every idea that you've thought of, someone else has already thought of. Ideas are easy to have. I thought that you would be able to speak to computers and hold them in the palm of your hand when I was only 12 years old (this was back in 1997, which was of course at least a decade before the first iPhone launch). You can have a lot of ideas, but ideas only work if they are executed and implemented. Half-baked ideas well executed are worth more than super good ideas that never get executed.

I still consider myself a thinker and a sort of philosopher first-and-foremost. I don't really enjoy the execution. You can say that I've had to sacrifice a lot to be in the business world. And was it worth it?

What did I gain?

I made some money. Not a lot, but more than I probably would have made had I gone on to a PhD. In the US, universities are mass-producing more PhDs in humanities and the social sciences than there is demand for them. In 2020, during the pandemic, PhD admissions had to be put on hold. (Note: potential paywall, the irony!).

Our society is over-educated. There was never a need to be this educated, not anyway from the standpoint of the economy (the reason why we are this educated is due to the institutionalization of norms surrounding what it means to be a modern citizen, but that is a topic beyond the scope of this discussion). Scholarly studies were not intended for the masses. Today, higher education is a mass commodity especially in much of the developed world.

I gained a new mindset by exploring the unknown. I left a safe space and went into a completely new field. People often say that academia is an ivory tower. You work with fellow academics. You speak in jargon no one else understands. It is a bubble world, an alternate reality. I loved it, but I knew that it was limiting. I stepped out of my comfort zone. I challenged myself. I became a doer rather than a thinker (still pretty much a thinker, so maybe I can never take the thinker out of me). Yet, the world is a big place. There's a lot more to learn out there.

Finally, I learnt a lot about society — what I wanted to study the most. I picked sociology as my major because I felt that I was always observing people or society from without. I never completely fit in. I found it difficult to identify with "mass sentiment" — buying the latest fashions and brands and status symbols. Buying a car because you had to commute to work, but then working your butt off to pay the car (this was pre-COVID19 of course). None of it made any sense to me. I thought capitalism was bollocks. It is thus quite ironic that I am right now in the centre of it all. And I've gotten up-close in a participant-observation sort of way. I wanted to observe society. And I think, in-a-way, I think observing society from the "inside" — going native — as it were, has been the best way to do it.

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