The pressure starts when you’re a kid. “What do you want to be when you grow up?” It seems like an innocent enough question, but it’s quite loaded.
The question implies that you should know what you want to do with your life when you are still a kid. That pressure to know only increases with time.
Entering college, you are faced with a less direct but more serious version of the same question. “What are you studying? What’s your major?”
If you answered firefighter, NBA player, or actor when you were a kid, you might answer computer science, economics, or physics by this point.
You’re on the precipice of knowing what you want to do for the rest of your life, studying the subject that will best prepare you to succeed on that path. Or at least, you feel that you should be.
You enter the working world and begin your career. It’s not what you said you wanted to be when you grew up when you were a kid because it’s one of those jobs that you wouldn’t have known how to describe even if your father did it. You’re a software engineer for a human resources SaaS company, or an equity research analyst in the healthcare group at a global financial institution. No seven-year-old has ever aspired to such things. But here you are. You have a good job. You’re making good money. Your learning and you even feel at least a little useful. But something’s wrong, or so you think…
This doesn’t feel like the thing that you want to do for the rest of your life. I have some good news for you:
That’s fine.
You should not be expected to be doing what you expect to be doing for the rest of your life in your 20s or even your 30s. You should not expect to know what you want to do for the rest of your life by then either. Nor should you have known when you were entering college, nor when you were seven years old being asked what you wanted to be when you grew up, obviously.
For you to know what you want to do for the rest of your life, at least two things must be true. First, it must be true that there is something that you will do for the rest of your life starting at some point. This, in fact, is not true for a lot of people, and increasingly so as the universe of jobs and possible things to do is changing faster than ever and people’s careers are trending towards being more dynamic and evolving than ever. Second, in order to know what you want to do for the rest of your life, the thing that you want to do must be something existing and known. As such, encouraging an early answer to this question encourages people to pursue existing paths which tend to be less uniquely suited to their strengths than something less easily label-able which they might be able to create for themselves over time. Those two issues alone are enough to make this a relatively bad question, and probably not the one worth trying to answer first and foremost above all other questions when it comes to figuring you what you want to work on and get paid to do.
Let me propose a different question. Rather than asking yourself at every step you take in your career whether this thing you are going to do next is going to be what you are going to do for the rest of your life, or at least has a chance to be, ask yourself the following instead:
“Does this seem like a worthwhile experience?”
This includes considering aspects of the experience outside of the job itself — where you will live, what you will do outside of work, how it might impact your health, relationships, etc.. You are not looking for the end all be all here and you are not focusing on the work experience in a vacuum without considering the many other important elements in life. You’re aware that a perfect solution of something you will do for the rest of your life may not even exist. If it does exist, you’re aware that it may take a long time to get there. You’re fine with that. For now, you are simply looking for a worthwhile experience. You are looking for improvement, even it is incremental. It feels good to improve and it feels good to do things that feel worthwhile. Go for that. A life of worthwhile experiences is a worthwhile experience, and isn’t that more important than finding some societally encouraged straight-forward career to follow for your whole life? Doesn’t that sound more worthwhile?
