On choice
And an insight that has bettered my youthful perspectives
I have made many mistakes in my life so far. We all have. The truth is that we won’t always be able to do things perfectly the first time around — we are bound to fail sometime.
For a lot of us failure has happened a few times already. The real challenge is learning how to pick ourselves back up, dust off, and push forwards, remembering any lessons that we have learnt along the way. I am fortunate to have discovered a valuable lesson relatively early in life: own your choices.
When I came out of school and was deciding on what career path to pursue, I was completely overwhelmed by the sheer volume of choices that I faced. I had a variety of interests from engineering, to accounting, to mathematics, to history. You name it, I wanted to do it.
After a few hints by my parents and gran on the earning potential of an accountant, and with no other strong ideas of my own, I ended up doing a Bachelor degree in Accounting Science. I learnt a lot during that time, but I had to push through every single minute of it. Not because it was technically challenging, but because I had absolutely no passion or enthusiasm for it. Every single day got harder and harder to face, and I found myself blaming everybody but myself for the choice of going down that path in the first place.
With hindsight, the best choice in the moment would probably have been to take a “gap” year and given myself a bit more time. Youthful pride, a healthy helping of stubbornness, and the fear of failure were the only things that got me through that degree.
But I had learnt a valuable lesson on perseverance and determination along the way, and figured out a valuable insight: at the end of the day, *I* had made that choice to go into accounting — not my parents, not my gran, but me.
It was a tough pill to swallow, and it took a while for it to settle. I had to
learn how to admit to-, deal with-, and own my choices.
It has been a while now since that time and believe it or not, I now find myself with a smile on my face whenever I chat to accountant friends and hear all about their work. A piece of me wonders what would have happened if I had gleaned my insight earlier on and embraced the degree to the max; but I have no regrets, for I have lots of new things to talk about since moving into Software Engineering.
It’s a diverse field with lots of opportunity; I get to flex my creative muscles
and solve problems; and I get to grow and learn from a diverse team of like-minded colleagues every single day.
On parting, a final word of advice. Wherever you end up, just remember one thing: every single move you made to get to where you are at this present moment was a choice that *you* made. Nobody ever forced you to do it.
Own it, because you will be stronger for it.
