The Defining Decade. Мэг Джей
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Название: The Defining Decade
Автор: Мэг Джей
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Личностный рост
isbn: 9781782114932
isbn:
Ian looked at me blankly, so I went on.
“You’ve spent more than two decades shaping who you are. You have experiences, interests, strengths, weaknesses, diplomas, hang-ups, priorities. You didn’t just this moment drop onto the planet or, as you put it, into the ocean. The past twenty-five years are relevant. You’re standing in front of six flavors of jam and you know something about whether you prefer kiwi or black cherry.”
“I just want things to be great,” Ian said. “I just want things to work out.”
“You’re keeping it vague,” I challenged. “You’re avoiding knowing what you know.”
“So you think I already know what I should do?”
“I think you know something. I think there are realities. Let’s start there.”
“So this is like the lottery question,” he said.
“What’s the lottery question?” I asked.
“You know,” Ian continued, “it’s when you ask yourself what you would do with your life if you won the lottery. Then you know what you really want to do.”
“That’s not the right question,” I countered. “That’s not about reality. The lottery question might get you thinking about what you would do if talent and money didn’t matter. But they do. The question twentysomethings need to ask themselves is what they would do with their lives if they didn’t win the lottery. What might you be able to do well enough to support the life you want? And what might you enjoy enough that you won’t mind working at it in some form or another for years to come?”
“I don’t know anything about that.”
“That cannot be true.”
Over the next months, Ian told me about his experiences at work and in school. For a long time, I just listened. Ian talked, and we both listened to what he said. After a while, I reflected back specific information about what I heard and saw. There was an early interest in drawing. A childhood love for LEGOs and building. An architecture major he started, but didn’t finish, because it felt too archaic. He earned his degree in cognitive science because he liked technology and perception. I saw Ian talk easily about his wish to create products of some kind.
Eventually, Ian thought through all of the options that seemed available to him. He assembled six tangible flavors of jam, six things he might do next.
“I could keep working at the bike shop, but it is kind of gnawing at me. I know it’s the wrong thing to do. My manager is in his forties and something about that really bothers me. . . .”
“I could go to law school. My parents are always telling me I should do that. But I don’t want to take the LSAT and I hate reading and I hate writing and I guess there’s a lot of that in law school. . . .”
“Now that so much design is happening online, that interests me. The interface between design and technology interests me. I applied to a digital design apprentice program in D.C. a couple of years ago. It was at a company that takes a lot of postgrads and sort of develops and launches them. I wanted to do that but I didn’t get in. . . .”
“I could take Arabic lessons and do something with, you know, international relations or something, and maybe get sent overseas somewhere. But that’s just an idea. I enrolled in a class a while back but I never went. . . .”
“I could go visit my buddy in Cambodia to buy some more time, but my parents are getting sick of me doing that. . . .”
“I could go to St. Louis and hang out with my old girlfriend. She watches Grey’s Anatomy all the time and says we should both get post-bacs. But I only took two hard science classes in college, and I didn’t do so well in them. Anyway, this probably sounds bad, but I cannot even deal with her until I get somewhere with this whole work thing on my own.”
(It didn’t sound bad. Work before love. I’d heard that from twentysomethings—and especially twentysomething men—many times before.)
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