It's Okay to Admit You Didn't Know Everything at 18
Photo by Michael Dziedzic on Unsplash
When you need advice, how likely are you to ask a 6 year old or an 18 year old? And if you’re above 30, how often do you ask 21 and 22 year olds? My guess is the answer is “not often.” But how old were you when you selected your current career path? If you wouldn’t rely on a child or teenager for your current decisions, why do you feel like you have to stick to something you chose when you were that age?
Right now, society pressures us to pick a path when we’re young. As Adam Grant points out in Think Again, well-meaning adults love to ask young children “what do you want to be when you grow up?”, even though most kids only know of a handful of professions. Our idea of what we want to be may change a bit as we learn more about the world, but then we get to college and have to pick a major before we’re even old enough to drink. College is supposed to introduce us to new people and broaden our views, yet picking your major early means that your choice is anchored around the influence of your parents, the people you grew up with, and the people you looked up to as a teenager. And perhaps a bit of pop culture from the time.
Maybe you’re privileged and able to go to graduate or professional school, but you make that choice at 22, well before your brain has finished maturing at 25. You probably know more about yourself than you did before going to college, but that still means you likely let a college student commit you to a profession, or the immense pressure of admitting that you don’t want to do the thing you spent many extra years in school for.
It’s understandable why we need to make some choices at 18 or 19. We need to be ready to live on our own and support ourselves. Employers need trained people to fill roles. But we should stop forcing ourselves to live with those choices if they aren’t working anymore.
There are many reasons why we might feel “stuck” and unable to change. The sunk cost fallacy means that we don’t want to “give up” all the years (and dollars) we spent training for a career. Our parents and their peers grew up in a different world and may have, consciously or unconsciously, taught you that you should do one thing your whole life. Maybe your parents or high-school/college career counselors told you it looks bad to be at a job for less than two years, or to change roles too many times. So you worry that if you make a change, you’ll lose respect. Or worse, that you’ll make an irrevocable choice that plunges you into ruin.
Maybe rationally you know this isn’t true, that almost everyone who leaves one role eventually finds another, regardless of how long they were in that role or if they had another job lined up when they left. But it’s still hard to go against the grain of beliefs that you learned when you were very young. So we need to 1) start normalizing questioning our choices and 2) start teaching our kids that it’s ok to change careers.
I love Adam Grant’s advice on this. He suggests calendaring a reminder to ask yourself, twice a year, “When did you form the aspirations you’re currently pursuing, and how have you changed since then? Have you reached a learning plateau in your role or your workplace, and is it time to consider a pivot?”
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If you try asking yourself these questions, please let me know how it goes. If you want support in this process or you want to learn more about coaching, you can schedule a free session with me here.