You Majored in What? (16 page)

—JERRY SEINFELD,
SEINFELD, FROM THE OPENING MONOLOGUE EPISODE 42, “THE TRIP”

It’s time to revisit
THE QUESTION
. You’ve been wandering for a while now uncovering and developing your talents, and you’ve discovered that your major is just one element of your future plans. But even if you’ve told everyone to stop asking you what you’re going to do with it, you’re probably still running headlong into the condensed version of
THE QUESTION
: “What are you going to
do
?” And that one is almost as bad if you don’t have an immediate answer.

What do you find challenging about that question? Is it that you have absolutely no idea what you’d like to do? Or maybe you were interested in one career but something changed, so now you’re not so sure. Or you have a career dream you’d like to pursue, but everyone has warned you about how few people succeed in the field, so you prefer to keep it a secret. Or maybe, just maybe, you’re like a lot of students who don’t have
one
idea about what they’d like to do because they have
ten
ideas. And it’s starting to look like career chaos again.

And the chaos expands geometrically when you add in noncareer ideas you’re considering, such as taking a year off after school to volunteer, travel, or pursue hobbies. Sometimes it feels as if the only way to bring order to the chaos is to select one choice and go for it. After all, isn’t that what most people do? But that’s a lot of pressure. It’s like staring at a candy machine with twenty interesting options, and you just can’t make up your mind. But you know you have to pick one and only one. So there you stand in career paralysis, a state where you either wait for the aha moment of career inspiration, or where you just avoid thinking about it at all. Or worse yet, you just choose something because you’re “supposed to.”

Well, you can relax: life is not a candy machine. That metaphor won’t work for you. Because the candy machine approach to careers is very linear, and we’ve already established that you are not a linear person. Forrest Gump may be right: life is much more like a box of chocolates. It’s your box of chocolates and you get to select them all in the order you want, and in the form you want. And chaos theory tells you that some new chocolates will emerge that aren’t even in your box yet. But since you can’t sit around and wait for them to emerge, how do you move forward when you don’t know where you’re going?

Sounds like a good time to create another map to clear up the chaos. Remember the attractors from chaos theory in Chapter 2? Just like a point attractor, one career idea can pull you in a particular direction and become your focus. Pendulum attractors can have you bouncing between two disparate choices, like becoming a golf pro or working in advertising. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five, the average person will change jobs about nine times. Some individuals change jobs as many as fifteen times during that time period, so instead of forcing yourself to select one point attractor, maybe you need to find several. Instead of swinging back and forth between two choices, choose them both. Back in 1988, researchers coined the phrase “possible selves,” which referred to the multiple potential selves you could try on to design your future. Let’s call your potential choices Possible Lives, and in this chapter you’re going to map, mine, and design them.

So take a moment to assess where you are in your future planning process:

• Do you have a point attractor; that is, is there one job, field of work, or activity that seems to call to you?

• Do you have a bunch of attractors—so many interesting options out there that you don’t even know where to start?

• Do you have no attractors—nothing interests you because you don’t even know what’s out there? That can be particularly scary and stressful because it seems as if everyone else has a plan.

• Is your attractor something that seems unattainable? Why?

• Are you being “advised” by your parents, professors, or others to pursue a particular path? Do you agree with them? Is it
your
attractor or theirs?

• Do you have those pesky pendulum attractors pulling you in disparate directions with no middle ground to be seen?

Whatever your situation, Possible Lives planning will help you start finding the sense in this seeming chaos of your future. You already know from chaos theory that it’s pretty dangerous to assume that you will know exactly where you will be in five or ten years. But as you also recall from chaos theory, it is possible to make some general assumptions, and it’s also possible to make better predictions about the near future. So that’s what we’re going to do: we’re going to examine all those ideas you have right now to see if we can turn them from a chaotic jumble of thoughts, hopes, dreams, and fantasies about the distant future to form a plan for the immediate future.

You will start by identifying your Possible Lives: all the different careers or future plans you’ve considered in the last few years, no matter how wild, crazy, or seemingly impossible. If you want to, you can even list that firefighter job you wanted when you were five years old. We’re going to focus on where you
might
go, not where you have to go. And not necessarily even where you
will
go (don’t forget that the butterfly hovers nearby). In just a few minutes you’re going to create a Possible Lives Map that will help you identify and organize some future plans while still keeping the door open to lots of new ideas. You don’t need to know what one thing you’re going to
do:
you’re going to
do
many things throughout your life. The Possible Lives Map just helps you get your ideas down in one place so you can see them more clearly.

IDENTIFYING YOUR POSSIBLE LIVES

Possible Lives planning starts with you and where you are right now. So take a moment to consider your position. What year are you in school? What knowledge have you mined from your courses, your major, and other experiences? Or have you graduated and are working at your first real job? Are you in a job or field you like? What strengths and themes have you identified?

As you reflect on your current status, it’s not unusual to start thinking about regrets. Maybe when you look at where you are, you find yourself frustrated or unhappy. Maybe you wish you had pursued a different major. Maybe you wish your grades were higher. Maybe you . . .
it doesn’t matter.
That’s “if only . . .” and “should” thinking and if you recall the positive mindset in Chapter 3, you know that that kind of thinking isn’t going to help, so stop right now.
You are where you are
and you are just fine. It has to be fine—you can’t change it, right? The Possible Lives Map is about hope and possibility, not regret or blame. So pull out your Wandering Map and any lists you’ve created so far, and remind yourself of your strengths and interests. Think about Possible Lives you’d like to live. What careers or other ideas about the future have you considered?

Here are some Possible Lives other college students are considering:

Are you getting some ideas from this list? Are these interesting futures appealing to you? Notice that not all of them are jobs, certainly not those traditional linear jobs you’d expect from a particular major.

Want some more ideas? The chart on the next page shows common career fields that represent potential areas for your Possible Lives. Dozens of job titles can fit under each field.

For example, jobs under the Publishing category could include editor, researcher, technical writer, production assistant, marketing coordinator, agent, and sales representative. For the moment, just look at the chart and note any of the fields that sound interesting to you. You don’t need to make any decisions.

Another way to tackle the brainstorming process is to think about the types of people you’d like to be around every day. The list below will help you start thinking of possible colleagues or clients. Part of designing your future involves knowing whom you’d like to work with. And you won’t only be working with these people as colleagues—you may have lots of other roles with them. Would you like to teach them, consult with them, influence them, sell things to them, help them, support them? Can you identify careers that might help you do that?

This list is just a start. Add any additional people with whom you’d like to work:

1. __________________________________________________

2. __________________________________________________

3. __________________________________________________

4. __________________________________________________

5. __________________________________________________

Ready to create your future? It’s one blank piece of paper away.

MAPPING, MINING, AND DESIGNING YOUR POSSIBLE LIVES

The Possible Lives Map can be one of the most enlightening, helpful, and inspiring maps you create because it provides a chance to dream, fantasize, and examine your many thoughts, ideas, and plans for the future. Creating your Possible Lives Map is very similar to creating your Wandering Map in Chapter 2 except that instead of looking back, you’re looking forward. You will include the jobs or careers you are considering or have considered in the past, but you might also want to include other important parts of your life, such as travel, volunteering, raising a family, and so on. And as with the Wandering Map, you will be able to mine it for lots of career gold. And also like the Wandering Map, it is a work in progress, not a final statement. You can keep adding to it anytime you want.

Now, at this point you might be thinking, “I don’t need to do this map. I know what I want to do. I want to be a__.” That’s a great plan, but heed the warnings of chaos theory. Be careful about predicting too far ahead. Your career plan may be a wonderful dream you should pursue with all your energy and commitment. But life has a way of intervening in our plans and you might find that a year from now you no longer want to pursue that career. For instance, taking organic chemistry often changes medical school plans. Doing an internship in a law firm can change your mind about going to law school. Spending an afternoon on the trading floor can change your mind about that career on Wall Street. Of course, all of those experiences might serve to cement your determination to pursue your chosen career, but because
you don’t know what you don’t know,
go ahead and play along. Do the Possible Lives Map and see what shows up. If nothing else, you will discover terrific Plan B career options so that if your first choice doesn’t work out, you won’t panic or become discouraged. You’ll have another plan ready to go. So let’s get started.

MAPPING YOUR POSSIBLE LIVES

1. Take out a blank piece of paper. In the center, briefly write your current status. Keep it simple. “Junior: Marketing Major.” “Senior: Writing Theme.” “Graduate: Working at coffee shop.” “Theme: Helping others.” “First job in journalism. Want to move up.” Draw a circle around your status.