I know im young and stuff but i feel lost like i have no sense of what i want to do now or later. How did you decide what to do with your life? What free wisdom can you share?
My mom always said “you don’t need to know what you are doing for the rest of your life, just decide what you are doing for the next five years”.
Interestingly, this is basically the approach of some of the best management/leadership thinkers these days (e.g. Cynefin). I think the basic premise is “the world is changing so fast that any plans you make now might be meaningless in a decade, so focus on what’s knowable in the here and now, and your next step”. Dave Snowden from Cynefin points to Ana’s “The Next Right Thing” from Frozen 2 as excellent advice 😅
I’m almost 50 and still don’t know. The best advice I can give is to try lots of things. Very few people just know, and even they didn’t know until they tried.
By doing the next obvious thing until I’d tried enough things to be sure where I wanted to be. Took until my late 30s, but the stuff before that was fun and/or interesting too.
I didn’t.
I have no fucking idea. I just finished HS, still don’t know. So I’ll go to college. Something in IT, I didn’t even check the specifics or subjects until I was already accepted and signed up. All I know is the program is regarded as one of the hardest, described by past students as “Vietnam war”, with one of the first recommendations to pass being “Get a therapist.”
I’ll probably get kicked out after 1st semester due to math. I am not good at it, and it’s apparently quite hard there, though not the worst either.
Hopefully not. I don’t know what else to do.Now, if my future paycheck wasn’t a problem (i.e. not living in capitalist society), I’d know precisely what I’d want to do, and I known so since 1st year of HS. I wouldn’t even need college.
Step 1 is getting a driver’s license (just for regular cars), probably just due to bureaucracy. Step 2, sign up for train driver’s course at ZSSK. The course itself is 6 months, then 720 hours of practice and after finishing the state exam, you finally become an actual train driver. So around a year.
But it isn’t paid so well.In IT, preferably something around wireless telecommunications and networking. The faculty I’ll be going to apparently has their 2G, 3G and 4G networks students can play around with (from their website). But when I asked about it on open doors day I was met with “We have that? Maybe.”
Asking about telecommunications, I got ping ponged between 2 faculties of the same university. Students from faculty of electrical engineering told me that if somewhere it’s something offered on faculty of informatics. Staff of faculty of informatics told me it’s most likely to be found on faculty of electrical engineering.So I don’t fucking know what I am getting myself into.
Pretty good approach. Most of the most interesting people I know started adult life doing one thing, and eventually switched to another thing. Maybe after one or two years of an undergrad, maybe after 15 years of a career.
I’ve got one friend in his late 30s who has been a highschool teacher for over a decade, and is still thinking of switching careers to be a train driver. He does public transport activism a bit too. I reckon you could head into the train network with IT skills anyway - maybe as some kind of network operator. Not quite the same thing, but aligned…
I would say that you should absolutely take maximum advantage of any electives offered to get as broad a taste of what’s available as possible. That’s what will give you ideas about where to head next.
I realized I wanted to be a slave because I was born with no money.
It’s a really great life.
If I can ever save more than a few thousand I would love to stop paying half my income in rent and maybe one day own a home. Then I might be able to afford to take a little time off from work
Find what you love and let it kill you.
For me this was philosophy which is the opposite of convenient or helpful especially in our current era. It led to me consistently blundering my way forward but it serving as an initial point is the critical lesson to be learned, I think.It was an accident
Grandfather was a Firefighter. Older sister became an EMT. We watched lots of medical shows growing up. My favorite was a show called: Emergency. It’s about the beginning of the Paramedic program in California. (Not the original paramedic program).
I was hooked. I’ve been in EMS for 38 years. Army Medic '86-'89, EMT '89-'00, Paramedic '00- current. I’m still on the road. Trying to reach 50 years.
through k-12 i wanted to be a pilot because my grandfather flew a plane as a hobby.
in college, i bounced between pilot, music composition, auto mechanics, musical theatre.
dropped out of college and did hairnet & nametag jobs for a while and asked my uncle to get me a gig as an associate PA for movies (but he wouldnt even return my call).
a friend of mine worked for a video game company and said he’d hire me to be on the phones because i just needed work, so i decided to do that for a year or two…
i worked at that company for 14 years moving from customer service to QA to software engineering. now working as a software engineer for a boring non-game company.
its not necessarily what i want to do, but it pays the bills and i dont mind being bored with it for another 23ish years until i retire.
#adulthood :/
How did you decide what to do with your life? What free wisdom can you share?
Try things. Experience everything open to you. Seek out even more experiences. You will find lots and LOTS of things that you don’t like, but the more you do, you’ll start picking up pieces of concepts you like. Those will guide you to making the next set of choices. Rinse repeat until you have a partially formed direction, then follow that direction and see where it leads you. I am shocked how many little “dead end” skills or experiences allowed me to take a next step into something moving me forward. There’s no way in hell anyone could have given me a list and said “these are the experiences that will pay off”.
Also there are some hard truths to life and you identify skills/talents/affinities you have when talking about your career:
- You can be good/talented at ThingX
- You can like doing ThingX
- There is a market for ThingX and people will pay you good money to do it.
For a very few number of people, they get all three. Most people have to settle for two and muddle through. You cannot move forward with a specific ThingX if you only have one.
Also, trying to be the best at something professionally will be nearly impossible. Even if you get there for a moment, the world is just too big, and there will always be someone better than you at a specific thing professionally soon. Trying to scrap to stay at the peak is an unsustainable road to ruin. However, being just pretty good at two different things that intersect is VERY achievable, and you will be competing against a tiny handful of people that have those same two skills. Thats the sweet spot. Your skills and ebb and flow between your two specialties over your career and you can ride the wave professionally when one starts waning, you can lean into the other one. At times, both of your skills will be in demand, and you will be extremely valuable and employable. Cash in when that happens and take the work with the full knowledge that it doesn’t last. Save during the good years and your lean years will be an easy ride.
Some people are born with purpose, but for the rest of us, don’t be afraid to try different entry level jobs before deciding. Work in retail, food service, trades, factories, sanitation, whatever! I learned a lot on every job I’ve had, and it helped show me what things I was good at, and what I was really bad at. Some things I thought I would enjoy were torture, and others were better than I expected.
I’m finally somewhere I think I’ll be happy for a long time, but it took all the contacts and experience from my other jobs to get me here.
Good luck, and don’t forget to have fun!
The short answer is, whatever you want.
For the longest time I too had no idea, though I knew what I didn’t want to do. I just didn’t want to deal with anyone else’s bullshit.
So i made enough money to have my own place and make my own choices.
For now I recommend you take a Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs approach. Secure the Physiological and Safety Needs and the rest will follow.
In order to do P and S in western society you need to make enough money to pay all your own bills.
The only air conditioned room at my first duty station was a closet they called a server room… No one wanted to do the computer stuff when the cool toys were on the airstrip.
As for advice… Don’t be scared, every adult you meet is faking it to some extent and it took me a long time to realize it. Also, be wary of random advice on the internet lol.
College. You have no idea what jobs are even possible to do until you put yourself out there. Learn a couple skills, find an avenue that interests you and dive in. I’ve just stumbled into most things but wanted to do something that would be useful in everyday life too. Became a cook then a chef, went to trade school for auto mechanics. Now I run a marina?! PSA: Don’t buy a boat!
Go out and do things.
Anything, really, just don’t stay in. Try to do something fun and interesting. You’ll find paths through doing that you can’t get by applying for things.
