3 Ways to Build a Better Career as a Bionic Jellyfish Pirate

In the future, employees will be redesigned in labs and will resemble their jellyfish overlords. [Photo Credit: Janna Nawroth (Caltech)]

Some day, my children will be able to tell their grandchildren how they’re old enough to remember a time before the oceans were dominated by hyperfast bionic jellyfish that escaped from a lab, started hacking AI programs to make themselves smarter, developed a cunning strategy of stealth piracy to seize control of global shipping lanes, and stole the wealth of nations.

But from the perspective of the present, you are probably wondering how you can use this kind of innovation to boost your career. I know you’re probably wondering about that because the average sentient lifeform on LinkedIn sees everything as a way to boost one’s career, especially if it’s a platitude about leaders needing to embody the miraculous personal qualities of a savior who will inspire and heal.

Fortunately for you, I used an advanced machine-learning algorithm driven by a powerful neural network to analyze the latest research and can now reveal the three secrets of career success that will be used by intelligent predatory jellyfish with superfast swimming speed.

1. Pulse Faster Than the Losers in the Other Tanks.

Let me explain that last point first. In the dystopian future dominated by bionic jellyfish pirates, cubicles will be replaced by tanks filled with water. Workers will be able to look through the clear glass walls and see how fast the other workers are pulsing. Management will expect this arrangement to simulate healthy competition, although there is a risk that it will lead to more harassment lawsuits against senior-level sharks. It’s hard to say for sure because the slimy squids down in legal declined to comment for this report.

Remember: if you don’t pulse fast enough, the bionic jellyfish pirates will have already won.

Now back to the main point: The thing about jellyfish is that they don’t exactly swim. They pulse. Jellyfish have no real idea where they are going (mostly because jellyfish don’t have brains capable of generating ideas), but pulsing faster is better than floating helplessly when it comes to survival. And a faster-pulsing jellyfish will be more likely to survive than a slower-pulsing jellyfish.

This basic biological principle can teach us an important career lesson. In the blind race for success, doing things faster without any idea where you’re going might be just enough to get ahead.

This fact would explain a lot of things about who gets promoted, wouldn’t it?

2. Don’t Blunder into the Tangled Tentacles of Office Politics and Get Stung.

Even though jellyfish have no idea what they’re doing, some species make a living by catching hapless fish that swim into their dangling tentacles and get stung. This is pretty much how office politics works too.

How many times in office life have you suddenly discovered that, without knowing it, you swam into the long tentacles of a power struggle and got paralyzed?

Well, that never would have happened if you were a faster-pulsing jellyfish because jellyfish are immune to jellyfish stings or something like that. Bionic jellyfish are not only immune but probably can shoot lasers. Also, the slower-pulsing jellies in your department would have been more likely to get caught. And think about getting yourself a weaponized laser.

This is a painting that my first-born daughter did when I asked her to imagine what office politics looked like. That was back when she had an innocent fascination with jellyfish and before she had any idea that she would grow up to live in a dystopian future controlled by bionic jellyfish pirates. (Illustration credit: Claire Mitchell.)

3. 90% of Success Is Determined by Powerful Currents.

No matter how frantically jellies pulsate, they aren’t going anywhere very fast (unless they’re the bionic laser-shooting pirate kind). But if they can get into a swift and powerful current, they can be carried along and go a lot farther and faster than the loser jellies who get left behind in the depleted feeding ground.

Likewise, for humans, most of our professional success depends on pulsing into the right current at the right time. Consider the story of Michael Bloomberg. Despite allegedly being an insufferable jerk, he became a billionaire by pulsing himself into the strong current of selling technology to the poisonous jellies at investment banks who thought Bloomberg’s terminal would help them pulse their investment decision-making process a little faster than other poisonous jellies in their habitat. He was in the right industry current at the right time.

Of course that was before he became mayor of New York City and made the strategic error of protecting city residents from the evils of carbonated sugar water instead of focusing on the future bionic jellyfish menace.

OK, Seriously, about the Cool Science Stuff.

One cool thing about the bionic jellyfish research is that, in a way, the researchers are doing exactly what they are engineering artificial the jellyfish to do. In measurable terms, getting a synthetic jelly to move a few millimeters faster than a natural jelly is literally a small thing. But the researchers weren’t primarily interested in accelerating jellyfish into a dystopian future. That would just be an amusing side effect to talk about at conferences. Rather, they were trying to pulse bioengineering in a different direction, which could lead to big things (possibly armed with lasers and advanced intelligence).

“We’re reimagining how much we can do in terms of synthetic biology,” said John Dabiri, who is one of the researchers and also director of the Caltech Biological Propulsion Lab as well as professor of aeronautics and bioengineering. “A lot of work these days is done to engineer molecules, but there is much less effort to engineer organisms. I think this is a good glimpse into the future of re-engineering entire organisms for the purposes of advancing biomedical technology.”

Another study coauthor, Kevin Kit Parker, sees it as the beginning of a potential transformation in how bioengineering is done. “As engineers, we are very comfortable with building things out of steel, copper, concrete,” said Parker, a professor of bioengineering and applied physics at Harvard. “I think of cells as another kind of building substrate, but we need rigorous quantitative design specs to move tissue engineering from arts and crafts to a reproducible type of engineering.”

So, basically, that’s one small pulse forward for a human researcher and one giant leap forward for jellyfish pirates.

In other words, get out there and pulse yourself to a better career working for messianic leaders in the corporate bureaucracy who believe all the aspirational gobbledygook they read on LinkedIn. And watch out for dangling tentacles in the office.

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