“Choose a job you love and you will never have to work a day in your life.”
When I went home for Thanksgiving last week, this Confucius quote found its way into my family’s dinner conversation. It scared me.
My uncle, a farmer, asked me what I wanted to do after I graduated from college. My blank expression gave away the answer.
“Writing, I guess,” I said, as my family looked at me with concern.
Webster’s Dictionary defines “investment” as “an act of devoting time, effort, or energy to a particular undertaking with the expectation of a worthwhile result.”
The pressure I, and probably many other college students, feel to get a job and make good on the investment we’ve made by going to college is constant.
That type of pressure isn’t just augmented by the stress of maintaining a strong grade point average, but also by the fear that what we’re doing isn’t right for us.
With more specialized degrees being created all the time, how do we know we’re headed in the perfectly right direction? Not all that long ago, we still had to ask to leave class to go to the bathroom. Now, we need to make decisions we may have to stick with for more than double the amount of time we’ve been alive.
You can’t fast-forward to the middle of your life and see if you hate your job, so you rely on what you’ve done in the short time you’ve been alive to make these decisions.
I think the solution is not to be certain in your career, but to be certain in what you do that’s not work-related. I’ve taken several unpleasant courses while trying to figure out what I want to do with my life. Leaving my schoolwork for a few hours to ride my bike evens things out.
So I ride forward into the unknown, confident that I may have to work a few days in my life.
About David Talley
