What’s terribly wrong with the most common approach to career building?

What are my career options after… (this school/ major/ degree)?

It is the kind of question that tells you you have no freaking idea why you went to that school/ college in the first place.

And unfortunately that’s the kind of question young people frequently ask in places like Quora.

Clearly, we have it backwards.

We choose a school or college major in our early 20s (because we think it is absolutely necessary that we major in something) and then we go to Quora and ask “Now, I’m this or that. What am I supposed to do with it? I majored in X/ went to X school and now I guess I should make use of it, but I haven’t figured out yet what it is that I can do.”

If you ask yourself those questions (or if you ask others) something went terribly wrong with the way you approached your career building. Or, I should say, something went as it always does, meaning you chose the conventional/ most common approach to career building which is ‘choose something in your late teenage years (because that’s what everybody else does) and then adjust everything else to what you already have/ are’.

Millions of young people still choose this model of career building and I’m pretty convinced that the lives of majority of those people will suck.

Their lives will suck because instead of asking the fundamental question “Right now what it is I would love to do every day of my life?” or, if they don’t know the answer, at least trying a bunch of different things and having a shot at figuring out what it is, they choose a school at random (because that’s what well-meaning adults told them to do) and as soon as they have this damned college degree / finish that school they ask themselves or others “I majored in X/ have this particular college degree so what’s next? Where do I go from here?”

This is like boarding a plane to a random destination, say Johannesburg, (because you are supposed to pick some destination — later there will be no tickets available), and upon landing there saying to yourself “Ok, I never really asked myself whether I want to live in Johannesburg but since I’m here I’d better find out what kind of jobs a person like me can do here.”

There is one catch however. Unlike normal travelling, most of us will think we’re stuck in this place forever and can’t move to new places because the cost of swapping those places will seem unreasonable to us. So whether we like Johannesburg or not, we will stay there.

And although choosing some random destination and going there may sound like a great adventure, you realize how much it really sucks when you are stuck in this place and can’t even go back to the starting point.