Getting Over Other People’s Advice
Larry Webster and I appear to share the same thoughts about young adults and their career choices. And surprisingly, that isn’t a bad thing. Larry is editor of Hagerty Insurance’s Driver’s Club magazine, which just happens to be the world’s second largest car magazine (rated by circulation). It’s estimated over two million people read each issue.
Now that I’ve established Larry’s the real deal, let’s understand why Larry is so smart and why Average Joe me just happens to agree with his ideas. First, it’s good to know Larry is in somewhat the same position I was some years ago. We both have three children; mine are all in their thirties, Larry’s are college age. I went through what Larry’s witnessing now.
He is lamenting the pressure put on college students to choose a career. We all know this one: choose a major and be quick about it; find something you can be enthusiastic, even passionate about; pick one that promises a stable, well-paid career, satisfies your overly concerned parents, and gets you the proper accreditation to corner a job when you get out. I agree with him. To my mind, way too much credence is placed upon this baloney.
The companies that hire based solely upon the where-and-what-kind of degree you have are missing out on a lot of really smart, motivated people. I, like Larry, ended up with the 50% of college graduates who found a career in something other than their college degree. What does that tell us? Well, at least two things for sure – one, that as twenty-year-olds, most of us don’t know what we will end up finding interesting or rewarding, and two, picking a major doesn’t mean as much as all those academic advisors and big company HR departments would have us believe.
Larry got a degree in engineering. He confessed it nearly bored him to tears, but he loved cars and tinkering with mechanical things. That engineering degree helped him get an internship at Car and Driver magazine, which not coincidentally turned into a career. I got a degree in General Studies and ended up as an aerospace engineer and entrepreneur. In a way, we went in opposite directions, but I think he would agree our paths are related by our curiosity and passion for cars.
So what does that say about all the young people who are forsaking the college con, entering trade school or going right into an apprenticeship or the unaccredited garage down the street? They may be smarter than we were. They haven’t fallen for the hype of a four-year degree as the only way forward.
Don’t get me wrong, I think college is a good route for learning discipline, managing the path to meeting a goal, and the overall process of maturation with relatively low risk. But it isn’t the only way to find and move forward with your goals. It seems we are only now slowly coming to realize this.
This whole charade of having to choose a major in college is repeated over and over again. I saw my boys and their friends agonize over which college to go to – their school advisors told them that picking the right college was a very important decision. Then they asked me about it. My answer was, “Look, essentially they’re trying to tell you which college you go to is a decision that can’t be undone. That’s baloney. Every decision in life can be changed, you just have to make the choice to do it. You can change colleges anytime you want – at the end of a quarter, the end of a school year; anytime.”
When my oldest was trying to decide on a major, he asked me, “What should I do?”
“Pick something that interests you,” I said. “If you can’t think of anything that really grabs you, major in business. It will teach you practical skills you can take with you wherever you go.” So, that’s what he did. Now he’s a project superintendent for a structural concrete company. My middle son majored in English; he’s now a college basketball scout. My youngest majored in Communications; he’s now a broker for a commercial real estate development firm.
You could say we’re 0 for 4. Or, you could say we found our niches because we refused to be pigeon-holed by our advisors and our degrees. All of us like what we’re doing, and I think all of us believe our careers are a better fit than the direction those majors were pointing. We are using what we learned, just not in the ways people may have originally thought.
There is that nonsense out there about “doing what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.” Everyone and everything have bad days. And if you do something as a job, there are days when it will be drudgery, when nothing will go right, when you might think about quitting. Life is like that.
If you are responsible and committed, anything you must do leaves out the choice of being able to bag it when the going gets tough. But that’s also what makes the successes so rewarding. Nothing worthwhile is achieved without work. Hard work makes us understand, appreciate, and savor any victory, no matter how small. Those wins come as a result of staying on the success road, adhering to the principles that guide us to getting better every day.
That’s learning. That’s education. Not the classroom, where you’re only risk is a grade. The classroom is a test tube, a petri dish. If you’re paying attention, a job, especially the job you like, is where the real growth takes place, where the wins come, where you ultimately find your place. Who knows, you might invent something, or inspire people to do things of which they never thought themselves capable, or be the concept and idea guy, or have days when work is just plain fun. Maybe you’ll even end up being an engineer…
It’s all out there to try. Don’t limit yourself by always following someone else’s rules – it’s just not a lot of fun. Half of life is exploration and adventure. Learn to use it well and you will have lived a life worth celebrating.
