Issue #8

Uncertainty is not the enemy of a great career.

Ancient Roots: The 'Impossible' Bird

To the Romans in the 1st - 2nd century AD, who had only seen white swans, the idea of a black one was nonsensical. Until 1697, when Dutch explorer Willem de Vlamingh sailed into what is now the Swan River in Western Australia, he observed actual black swans! This discovery had some profound philosophical implications:

• Proof of existence: It is proven that no matter how many millions of white swans you see, you can never scientifically prove that all swans are white.
• The power of one: However, seeing just one black swan is enough to instantly disprove the entire theory.

Finally, in 2007, Nassim Nicholas Taleb adapted the term for his theory on high-impact, rare events, using the historical shock of the bird's discovery to mirror the way sudden events (e.g. World War 1, Black Monday, Rise of the Internet, 2008 Financial Crisis) upend our established systems of thought.

Read: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb​

Samantha, Career Futurist - I CANNOT tell the future

During the COVID-19 pandemic, one of the things that I deep dived into was understanding trends and learning forecasting techniques. I believe it is important because no amount of employability skills and mindsetting are complete without having clarity of the world we live in. So when I rebranded myself, many initial conversations will sound something like, "You can predict the future? Tell me what it will look like!"

Unfortunately, it can be hugely difficult to anticipate black-swan moments given their randomness and rarity. What we want to achieve here is to study them and learn from them in ways that make us more robust and better equipped to deal with uncertainty.

Read: Happenstance Learning Theory​

What makes an event a Black Swan?

In his 2007 book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Nassim Nicholas Taleb identifies three defining characteristics of a Black Swan event.

1. It is an outlier, sitting outside the realm of regular expectations, with nothing in past experience convincingly pointing to its possibility.
2. It carries an extreme impact.
3. Despite its unpredictability, human nature compels us to construct explanations after the fact, making it appear explainable and even predictable in hindsight. We call this retrospective narrativity — or more simply, the "I knew it all along" effect.

Think about it:

Yet today, it all feels rather obvious.

This is the paradox of the Black Swan: Invisible before, Inevitable after.

Career Management: Building Robustness, NOT Prediction

Over-engineering your career plan around current conditions, betting everything on one industry, one company, one role title...

Here is the hard truth:

The professionals who navigated Covid-19, the 2008 financial crisis, or the rapid rise of AI were not the ones with the most detailed five-year plans. They were the ones with the most adaptable foundations. In his book, Taleb introduced the term "Antifragile", referring to things that actually get stronger or improve when exposed to volatility and shocks.

The Antidote

• Diversify your skill portfolio. Specialisation has value, but transferable skills such as communication, critical thinking, and stakeholder management are your hedge against disruption. They travel across industries and survive market shocks.
• Maintain a wide and varied network. A network confined to your current industry is a single point of failure. Cultivate relationships across sectors, functions, and career stages.
• Protect your optionality. Avoid over-committing to a single path too early. Don't burn bridges and close doors prematurely, or define yourself so narrowly that an industry shift renders your identity obsolete.
• Build a financial runway. This is the unglamorous but powerful truth. When disruption hits, the people with savings have choices. Those without them have urgency. We do know that urgency rarely leads to good career decisions.

Reframe your mindset: Stop asking "What will my career look like in five years?" and start asking "How resilient is my career if everything changes tomorrow?"

Read: Stop Beating a Dead Horse: Revive Your Career Strategy with the Dead Horse Theory​

Career Development: Positioning for Positive Black Swans

Taleb draws a critical distinction that most people miss:

The commercialisation of the internet. The explosion of the creator economy. The sudden, mainstream legitimacy of remote work. These were all Black Swans too, and for those who were adjacent and ready, they were career-defining windfalls.

Besides asking, "how do I survive the bad ones", we can also ask ourselves, "how do I benefit from the good ones?"

The Antidote

• Stay curious at the edges of your field. You do not need to be an expert in AI, sustainability, or whatever is emerging next. But you need enough awareness to recognise the wave before it becomes a tsunami.
• Invest in learning ecosystems, not just tools. Specific software becomes obsolete. The habit of learning does not. Build the muscle, not just the skill.
• Take the "random" opportunities seriously. The side project that goes nowhere. The introduction to someone outside your industry. These may not be distractions — they are how positive Black Swans find you.
• Document your transferable wins. As you grow, keep a living record of problems you have solved and value you have created, framed in language that travels across industries. Update your resume at least once a year!

Job Search: The Hidden Job Market IS a Black Swan Factory

Here is what the Black Swan lens reveals about job searching: the role that changes your life is probably not sitting on a job board right now. It will emerge from a conversation that leads to a referral that leads to a coffee chat that leads to "actually, we have something that might suit you perfectly." Your job search strategy must deliberately create the conditions for that chain of events to begin.

The Antidote

• Show up consistently and visibly. On LinkedIn, at industry events, in professional communities. You are not just building a network, you are becoming visible. When a Black Swan opportunity surfaces, decision-makers think of the people they have seen recently and repeatedly.
• Invest in informational interviews. Not to ask for jobs, but to be remembered when jobs are looking for people. There is a profound difference between the two, and most job seekers miss it.
• Treat every "no" as signal, not verdict. Each rejection narrows the field. Each conversation, even one that leads nowhere immediately, plants a seed. Black Swans often bloom from seeds you forgot you planted.
• Tailor ruthlessly, apply selectively. A targeted application to ten roles will almost always outperform a generic application to a hundred.

Reframe your mindset: You cannot force a Black Swan. But you can make yourself impossible to miss when one arrives.

A Personal Reflection

Recently, I was corrected when I used the term AI (artificial intelligence). A more accurate term would be LLMs (large language models). It is a worthy discussion because when we use the word "intelligence", how do we actually define it?

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No doubt that we have more tools than ever to enable us to be more efficient, more productive; however, I also believe that we can be irreplaceable if we start to position ourselves, build skills that travel, cultivate relationships that span, stay curious at the edges, and remember to be human.

Samantha Ng​
​Career Futurist