Just Start from Where You Are Today

Over the last three years, the biggest crisis I have had is making an irrevocable decision on the career path I’d like to chart.

But this is the most important thing I have learned this year: Just start. You’ll figure out along the way.

And I learned it after reading the following books:

The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter--And How to Make the Most of Them Now by Meg Jay, Ph.D.

Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know by Adam Grant, Ph.D.

Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein.

Before I read these books, I have always been a linear thinker: I want to know where a starting point will take me to before even starting the journey at all.

I wanted to have all my life planned out and commit to bringing it to reality through small daily actions.

When I was in 100L, I already knew what I wanted to be: a print journalist. Today, it's probably the last thing I want to be. Yet I didn't give myself the grace to explore broadcast journalism to know if it's something that I find particularly enjoyable.

Between the second semester of my first year and 300L, I changed my career plans multiple times—something I considered annoying (perhaps I considered myself irresolute and indecisive), but which in hindsight I have come to appreciate in light of my understanding of psychology of personality change and development.

This year alone, I have discovered so many things I am capable of doing and know intuitively that if I work hard enough, I will excel in it.

But after reading the books and synthesizing everything I have read, I discovered one thing: a career plan isn't something that should be set in stone for three major reasons:

1. You didn't know what/who you want to be when you formulated the idea of your perfect career plan.
As Sara C. Mednick, Ph.D., noted in her book The Power of the Downstate: Recharge Your Life Using Your Body's Own Restorative Systems, the critical part of the brain that is responsible for critical thinking and decision making—the prefrontal cortex—develops later in life.

For females, it develops and grows enough for making critical and life-defining decisions in their early 20s. For their male counterparts, the prefrontal cortex grows into its peak in their mid-twenties.

But you made the decision to become a doctor, lawyer, accountant, etc., when you could barely think and rationally make sense of things around you and reach a logical conclusion.

2. You haven't explored yourself well enough to know what you really want to be.
You made decisions based on your interests, but interests aren't cast in stone—and passion is developed, not discovered. Your interests are fleeting, and they will change with time.

The same things that interested you last year are of no interest to you again this year. Chances are that the pattern will continue until you are in your early 30s. So why settle for a path when it's so obvious that you will develop many other interests later? Why not keep exploring yourself and building what clinical psychologist Meg Jay called “identity capital” instead of getting frustrated with an identity crisis.

You might think you will not change, but that is exactly what psychologist Dan Gilbert called the “end of history illusion,” where people acknowledge that they have changed a lot in the past but still underestimate the extent to which they will change in the future. In his words, “we are works in progress claiming to be finished.”

3. Things change.
As Adam Grant beautifully captured it, “Choosing a career isn't like finding a soul mate. It's possible that your ideal job hasn't even been invented. Old industries are changing, and new industries are emerging faster than ever before: it wasn't that long ago that Google, Uber, and Instagram didn't exist. Your future self doesn't exist right now, either, and your interests might change over time.”

Notice that he also said your interests might change later. That's just a corroboration of Gilbert's theory on personality change.

I wrote an extensive essay on this topic more than a month ago and didn't publish it. I will revisit the draft, polish it, and publish it here before the end of the week.

Until then, hasta la vista.