> I am getting more and more convinced that to have a sustainable and fulfilling career you need to be honest with yourself and find out what you like to do not what you'd like to be.

I think the vast majority of people in the world do not have this luxury. They should be working backwards by figuring out what their goals are, prioritizing them, figuring out how much they cost, and then figuring out what they can sell (including type of labor) to make that requisite income happen with the highest probability.

For example, do you want to write about science more than you want to have children and be able to purchase a home in a high end neighborhood? Do you want to be not working in the evenings and weekends and find and marry a spouse who also is not?

For most people "what their goals are" is just "high social status".

So it's a dead end to start with this because you just end up with "earn a lot of money" without any more information about how to reach the goal.

It also assumes that people are very good at career planning. If not, then it might be better to just follow the main stream.

That is lack of parental guidance. For example, if a kid has dreams about living in LA and becoming an actor, their guardians should show them the data about the chances of being able to afford various lifestyles. Not that there is anything wrong with that goal, but the kid’s expectations should be in line with reality.

If they’re coming out of high school and their goal is “high social status”, something went wrong in the parenting. I would hope that does not apply to the majority, but I guess it’s not out of the realm of possibilities.

I think is more nuanced than this. Parental guidance is often the source of the issue: you convince yourself your dream is to be a good student to please or impress your parents, teachers, friends, bosses.

There's nothing wrong with that, as long as you build a satisfying life for yourself.

But make sure that you live your own dream not your parents'.

And to avoid that risk, you need to think long and hard how you want to fill your time. This means focusing on what you like to do instead of being miserable being someone you're not.

> Parental guidance is often the source of the issue: you convince yourself your dream is to be a good student to please or impress your parents, teachers, friends, bosses.

That sounds like a different issue. By parental guidance, I mean offering your experience and resources as a parent to the child to help them model their world. For example, if my kid came to me and said their goal is to make and sell clay art full time, then I would not dissuade them. I would, however, ask them if they have other goals like buying a nice house or living in a certain area or attracting a certain type of spouse, and let them know of the various probabilities of that. A parent is a cabinet member, the kid is still the president.

> This means focusing on what you like to do instead of being miserable being someone you're not.

The purpose of my original comment was to point out that most people do not have the luxury of not being miserable just because they do not want to be. A plumber does not spend time in crawl space because they like to. But the plumber has multiple goals, and compromises have to be made to accomplish various portions of various goals. Such as not being able to do what you like to do for x hours a week, but in exchange, you get a high probability of being able to feed and house your family to your acceptable standards. And then having a couple days a week where you do get to “be someone you want to be”.

Yes, it is important to try and teach your kids that compromising is part of life, that you can't always get what you want, and that you should try to secure financial security before 'shooting for the stars'. But parents alone don't do everything. I feel our whole society is strangely wired to tell people to follow their dreams, not to listen to naysayers, etc. Try telling kids that they'll have to do mindnumbing tiring shit 5 days a week to be able to afford 2 days of rest where they can be 'someone they want to be' is a losing proposition.

I'd feel better as a parent if they liked a lot of stuff (manual, intellectual, artistic, helping, electronics, clothes, cooking, selling, building, repairing, teaching), had an open mind and excellent work ethic, so that when they find themselves doing any job, they'll try to excel, find something in it, and 'be who they want to be' in their job too. Office politics, the way you treat others, helping colleagues, improving your skills, taking responsibilities, being a responsible and helpful member of a team or a society, keeping ethics standards high... You name it. They can also be achieved through work, while not really being fond of what you're doing. CPA, blue collar jobs (or plumber for you) don't seem to be dream careers, but there's many opportunities to be a productive, impactful, helpful and happy member of society while working those.

What makes plumber not a dream career?

I think there’s a lot of bias and assumption about what people want behind your comment.

No assumption about what people want, I just cited back GP's career example. My point was about finding something you're happy with in any setting, and to 'be who you want to be' whatever job you chose or choses you...

And, to be clear, most of my family and ancestry have been manual workers, laborers, in construction, fields, and they all wished dearly for us never to have to work such jobs. Maybe it's their bias, and even though they probably liked their jobs, may have some better insight (than me or you) as to why they wouldn't want their children to go the same way. My family always smirks at the modern romantic vision of manual work. 'if you have a chance to stay behind a desk doing intellectual work why would you ever want for shit working conditions, outside in the cold or heat, or doing something that breaks your body'. Their bias, doing the work is 'do something else if you can'... Who am I to say I know their life better than them?

And yes, CPA is a great career too for them. Just not anything back-breaking if they can convince you otherwise. And if you like the manual stuff, they're ready to have you take up the family business! They'll open all the doors for you. But they'll worry for you.

It may be strange, as the manual-job part of the family is far wealthier than us engineers or diploma-ridden grand-children, but they still think we're better like this...

That may be a 'stupid' view from a build-multi-generational-wealth perspective, but we're mostly 2 generations removed from starving farmers, so knowledge work seems better from their life. I only wish they'd have been as serious about teaching us practical skills and construction, home maintenance and all their manual skills, as teaching their work-ethics (Portuguese descent here, may be different in other cultures I don't know).

My experience with most students majoring in Business in undergrad is exactly that. They desire a successful career, and so assume that this requires a business degree to become a manager.

The outcome for most who do not go into finance is a rude awakening that most high paid individuals in a business have a technical skill which allows them to produce. There is a very limited market for entry level people managers who lack the skills of employees.

One acquaintance of mine discovered his business degree qualified for a job managing the schedules, incoming deals, and pricing of HVAC technicians at roughly half the income of the HVAC technicians with a comparatively limited career advancement route. Considering that this management position also cost twice the education time the business degree had a highly questionable ROI.

The hurdle to get a “business” degree is low, so it is a poor signal of drive/intelligence/network, hence the poor ROI.

That’s why there is such an emphasis on STEM education for those looking to maximize income. The higher the hurdle, the more valuable the hurdle is as a signal to others. Hence the competitiveness of entry at some schools.

Even many STEM majors have terrible outcomes. Science? Most of those you’re going to need a PhD and you’re still going to be paid shit. Maybe an industrial R&D scientist with many years (perhaps decades) of experience can make it ok, but that’s a gamble. Technology? This one seems to be the he safest bet, software developers ofc can make nearly unheard amounts of money as a wage worker and IT work seems to pull in an ok amount once you’ve established enough experience. Engineering? Ok I guess, admittedly I’ve been very disappointed by the salaries I’ve seen out of a lot of engineering fields though. Math? Not a particularly valuable field in itself. I doubt there’s any employment for mathematicians outside academia, however I will admit the skill set can be widely applicable and even useful to other industries (including some aforementioned) so I won’t discount it too much.

In order to have negotiating power as an employee there must be scarcity of labor for those skills. Considering that debt is effectively free, any seemingly lucrative field can be quickly inundated with additional supply of skilled labor.

The only way out of this is to have skills which are extremely rare owing to lack of training paths, rapidly changing execution skills, or demand which rapidly outstrips training capacity.

e.g. Software Engineer with experience in the latest X, NeuroSurgeon, Software Engineer with experience on hyperscale services etc.

Internships are pretty much required in this day and age. Almost to where the whole point of college is to intern. Those companies are going to be how you get hire, no one cares that you got a degree - Almost every ambitious person nowadays gets a degree, so the only differentiator is if i can see you work.

Most children aren't data-driven.

I’m not sure if you mean the decision to have the kid for most kids was not data driven, or if you mean most high schoolers are not receptive to data when making decisions.

If the former, then I would say that is changing and see plummeting fertility rates in developed countries as proof.

If latter, then yes, teenagers can be extra prone to making non data driven decisions due to various reasons, but the hope is maybe it can instruct them in the future if not today?

> Most children aren't data-driven.

Most people aren’t data-driven.

Parents, teachers, guidance counselors etc are also part of the problem.

> For most people "what their goals are" is just "high social status".

My suspicion is that this is only an auxiliary goal to get something else - which might be some degree of material security. Especially in societies where social security is weak or non-existent. A high social status can sometimes be helpful because it increases negotiating power. And this might be one reason why people might buy expensive cars and such. But I think it is rarely the end goal, because it is so unspecific and has little to do what an individual /is/.

> an individual is

An individual is a highly social primate that saw reproductive gains from status (for both sexes) during its evolutionary history.

With status being 'cash in the bank' for so many desired things including security and mating success, why wouldn't accumulating enough of it be an end goal, at least in the mind of an individual?

Doesn't your theory predict that as people get richer/more secure they'd care less about social status? I tend to see the opposite, and people care very much about relative vs absolute wealth a lot.

"I always wanted to be somebody, but now I realize I should have been more specific."

-- L. Tomlin

this is very true. I kinda realized this early on. I wanted to be a physician. When I did the volunteer time in a hospital, I realized for the most part I did not want to do what doctors did.

I agree. This is the biggest misunderstanding about what “follow your passion” means.

It doesn’t mean “I want to win Wimbledon so I should follow my tennis”

It means “I love playing tennis. I should pursue that and make it my vocation.”

The attacks on “follow your passion” really annoy me, because they’re based on a straw man that says - you need to blindly follow what you enjoy and ignore all other concerns. Which is stupid, and no one would ever advocate for that. We’re just saying - life is short, do what you love, and aim to make it your main vocation. All within reason, which shouldn’t need to be said.

And now all these people are saying “don’t follow your passion follow the money” and it’s just the worst advice, because at least if you follow your passion you’ll enjoy what you do some of the time, even if that time is around a day job.

It's a helluva lot easier to wake up and do something every day that has a lot of meaning/appeal for you. IF that something is really social status, OK. But that means nothing for a whole lot of people. (In my experience, it's the majority.)

If what you really care about doing quickly eventually liberates you from laboring at it, you'll not stop - you'll have a lot more liberty to expand outward from that core and build on it. No matter how little most people appreciate it (set theory, for example) ... who cares? there will always be a least a few others.

There is something to be said for the therapeutic value of failing miserably, when it comes to helping you move on and live without any more regrets about it.

The problem with a dream like marine-biology-professor in particular is it can take so many years to find out you have failed due to the tantalizingly low rung of grad school admissions and postdoc jobs.

>I am getting more and more convinced that to have a sustainable and fulfilling career you need to be honest with yourself and find out what you like to do not what you'd like to be.

This was a huge shift in mentality for me. I wanted to do exploit dev, I wanted to (and for a while, did) teach computer security online, and the list goes on. There was always this huge dissonance when I didn't do those things.

Then I sat down and looked at what I did do. I program obsessively. I defined that as what I enjoyed doing, rather than conflating what I wanted to do or be with what I enjoyed doing. I don't reverse engineer or create content for 10 hours a day. I do sit down and work on problems I'm excited about though.

So basically what you're saying is it's about the journey rather than the destination... I like it

It's interesting that the perspective change seems to involve switching from a future projection (of what you want to be[come]) to in-the-moment (what makes you happy as you do it.)

This doesn't work in the medical field. Physicians are the wealthy king's and every layer under asks for permission.

A high school grad may be vaguely aware of this, but the reality is that many people choose to be a nurse and find out later the realities of the job.

There's no research, there is little growth. You don't get to change your job. Your title is exactly what you do.

Same story for the various lab techs.