[nostrademons]

These jobs exist. Corporate executives are obvious ones. Finance, particularly hedge funds and venture capital. Management consulting. Politicians. Tenured professors. Creative solitary professions like writers, comedians, and composers.

The problem is that almost everyone would rather think than do, so you've got a massive supply & demand imbalance. Everybody wants to be the one deciding what should be done; very few people want to be the ones actually doing it.

In practice, most professions deal with this by instituting barriers to entry. In rigid hierarchical organizations like the corporate world, this is done through a "pay your dues" culture. The people who become corporate executives get there through performing well at grunt work on an individual contributor level - well enough to attract the attention of an outgoing senior executive. The most likely path to becoming a venture capitalist is to found a successful startup yourself. Anyone can start a hedge fund, but convincing people to give you money usually requires a solid track record as an analyst or trader at an established firm. Associates at management consulting firms do things like count products on store shelves and make PowerPoint presentations before they get to call the strategy shots themselves.

In more fluid professions like novelists, the barrier to entry is simply that you have to be so good that they can't ignore you. There are millions of aspiring writers that want to get published; only a few thousand manage to do so, and only a few dozen become bestsellers. If you want to be one of them, you need to be willing to practice and revise enough that your work is better than all the other folks.

[j_baker]

> The problem is that almost everyone would rather think than do.

I'd disagree. I think that the majority of people would rather work with something more concrete (doing) than abstract(thinking).

[nostrademons]

You really think so? I think a lot of people become habituated to doing because that's what they need to do to put food on the table. And most of the time, they won't find anyone willing to listen to their thoughts anyway, so why bother spouting off?

But if you really listen to people, I've found that most can think pretty deeply about grand and overarching subjects. And it's people from all walks of life - auto mechanics, high school dropouts, civil servants, retirees, in addition to the engineers and executives and authors you'd expect. Look at how many people had opinions on the bailout, for example, or how many think they could do a better job than Ben Bernanke at steering the economy. Or look at the traffic to forums like Reddit, where people are invited to leave their comments about all sorts of stories. Most of them are wrong, but that's still an awful lot of thinking going on about pretty abstract subjects.

[eavc]

So I'm in the middle of working with a psychologist right now who is counseling me about my career.

I'm in the same boat as the OP, and like you, I figured that everyone would rather just think, so I kind of discounted that as an option.

What he told me is that while a lot of people like to spout off opinions, few people are as passionately curious and have the capacity for sustained and analytical thought.

I'm not bragging, but my point is that for some people, thinking type work really is their skill. The jobs available can be harder to find.

I'm in the process of considering a return to school for a PhD in psychology, for example, and it's going to really throw a wrench in my life because I'm already 26 and married.

[nostrademons]

The Ph.D is itself a long process of "doing", where you're apprenticed to an experienced researcher and do his grunt work while you prove yourself capable of original research. Writing a dissertation is work, and it goes along with a lot of unglamorous work (like a research/teaching fellowship).

I never disputed that it's possible to make a living as a "thinker", only that it's realistic to do so without first proving your worth as a "doer". The people who end up in those thinking positions are the ones who manage to slog through the doing.

[xtho]

A "thinking job" usually doesn't mean commenting on this or that without knowing what they're talking about (well, there are people who do that but those are in the top 0.1% of the population). Most "thinking jobs" require you to conduct tedious research, getting engaged in discussions, being flamed in front of an audience etc. And most "thinking jobs" limit your expertise to one tiny bit of reality which means that you spend the rest of your life with thinking about inane details hardly anybody really cares about. (Again there are exceptions because once you get famous you can easily pass as expert for everything.)

[j_baker]

I don't doubt that you hear a lot of people with opinions on these subjects, but I don't think that's a very good indicator of what people want to do. How many of them do you see really trying to get Ben Bernanke's job?

[nostrademons]

How many of the folks that you see posting here about how they'd rather do thinking-type professions are actively trying to get Ben Bernanke's job? ;-)

My point is that if you took out all the barriers to entry, walked up to someone, and said, "Hey, we want you to control the economy. Seriously. No, there are no strings attached. We want you for the job," I bet most of them would take it. The reason you don't see people actively trying for this job is because there are lots of hurdles in the way. After all, we want the people who do the thinking jobs to have proven themselves first, so we know that they're not just spouting off nonsense.

[xtho]

> Everybody wants to be the one deciding what should be done; very few people want to be the ones actually doing it.

I'm going to tell that a colleague of mine who wants to quit his current job because everything he does is talking and negotiating (i.e. deciding or rather preparing decisions) without ever getting anything done.