The Parent Trap
Many well-intentioned (but misguided) parents have given their children similarly bad career advice. One 80-something CEO who's just now stepping down from his place at the head of a multimillion-dollar electronics company remembers the worst advice his parents ever gave him. As a college student, electrical engineering was his first love and his unequivocal choice for a major.
His parents convinced him that chemical engineering was the better choice. Why? Because they were sure that Thomas Edison had already accomplished everything there was to be done in the electrical field.
Fortunately, he wised up and went back to his first instinct. But it took him awhile to realize that his parents were wrong.
In How To Help Your Child Land the Right Job (1993, New York: Workman), career counselor Nella Barkley offers some myths children learn that interfere with their ability to make personally satisfying career choices as adults. To find your way to a more fulfilling work life, you may have to unlearn some of that flawed advice you got from Mom and Bad.
Myth: A Job That Pays Well Will Make You Happy
Depression-era parents passed this myth on to their baby-boomer children en masse. It's not hard to understand why so many adults who lived through the Great Depression harbor such an inordinate need for financial security. Their children, who live in different economic times, however, are discovering that salary potential isn't the only factor worth considering when selecting an occupation.
Kids turned to their parents for career-choice advice and were pointed firmly in the direction of better-paying jobs. That's how someone who was better suited to being a chef ended up in accounting, an aspiring fashion designer wound up in banking, and a would-be photographer chose law. It's also why so many successful professionals decide to change careers in their 30s and 40s.
The initial emphasis that parents and their offspring place on money is quite reasonable. After all, as a young adult, you were probably cast from the family womb without an apartment, a car or a charge card, and you needed to establish your financial independence posthaste.
Plus, you likely were anxious to meet the timetable that society had conveniently laid out for you: graduate from college, get a job, get married (or, in some cases, get married, then get a job), buy a house, have kids.
And after have kids?
Raise kids. Pay the bills. Save for college tuition.
After that, your kids can do the same thing all over again: live your life, that is.
It's all very predictable.
It's also unrealistic.
Every individual has to make his or her own way in the world. There's no single right formula that works for everyone. Behind every successful and satisfied careerist is a process of self-discovery and a journey down a personally meaningful road, not a simple prescription for happiness that didn't work then and doesn't work now.
No one is denying the importance of money. It has the power to relieve financial stress and make life infinitely more comfortable. But when you trade in your soul for a paycheck, you give up too much. The key is to avoid "either-or" thinking. Stop believing that if you do what you want, you'll have to starve, and start thinking more creatively about ways to make money doing things you love.
Tom Peters, a noted author and management consultant, has said that when it comes to career choices, it's inconceivable to him that ambitious and talented people would do anything other than follow their hearts toward things they love. How can you possibly expect to be successful, Peters asks, if you don't care about and value the work you do?
Myth: Other People Are in Charge
When columnist Bob Greene asked, "How old are you supposed to be before you become a grown-up in your own head?" he was reflecting on the consequences that come from living your life according to someone else's (or society's) agenda. Taking on the conventions of adulthood may make you a "cultural adult," but it can also keep you one step removed from your real needs and desires.
Author Tom Clancy remembers the moment when he reached that epiphany.
He was in his mid-30s at the time, living the traditional American Dream. He had a wife, two kids and a fairly successful (if uninspired) career in the insurance business. He also had a car (and car payments), a house with a mortgage, and other trappings of middle-class respectability.
But he knew something was missing when he found himself asking for the umpteenth time, "What do I want to be when I grow up?"
Says Clancy: "The stunning and depressing realization hit me that I was grown up, and ... I might not be what I wanted to be."
What Clancy lacked was a dream of his own. He was so busy following society's agenda, he hadn't realized he was programming himself for unhappiness. The type of success he'd been taught would make him content turned out to be surprisingly unfulfilling.
To come to a more emotionally satisfying resolution, he needed to make more self-directed choices. He needed a different kind of connection to his work and a way to express himself more fully. The result has been a bonanza for millions of readers and moviegoers.
Today, we know Clancy best as the writer of such military thrillers as The Hunt for Red October, Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger.
Many dissatisfied careerists can recognize themselves in Clancy's dilemma. Surrounded with middle-class responsibilities, it isn't so easy to "follow your dream"-or even to find it under all the layers of conventional adult choices.
