We do a lot of fretting over this stuff, but I think too often we’re wrestling with the wrong questions and not asking the right ones loudly enough. I’ve got a few ideas of my own, but rather than just grinding my peculiar little axes, I thought I’d try to distill and combine some of the insight that people who I’ve asked for advice have laid on me. So, here are three considerations to chew on:
Don’t bail on what makes you happy.
We talk like where we’re headed after college begins and ends with the workaday world. It’s easy to forget that work isn’t life. My friend Charley talks about how what she’s most psyched for next year has nothing to do with the nine-to-five she’s bound for. Very few of us are going to wind up with jobs that make us tingle with satisfaction. Mostly, we’ll be somewhere near the bottom, taking orders and learning. So Charley’s making sure she’ll get her nights and her weekends to herself for romping and stomping and reading. We’ll all be hobbling our chances at a rich, happy first couple years out of school if we sacrifice what keeps us smiling and sane. I’ve promised myself I’ll find something to do that lets me fish sometimes, read a bunch and stick dollars in a jukebox whenever the mood strikes. For me, that means no ninety-hour work weeks and no Manhattan. For you, maybe it’s killer museums and a good club scene. Manhattan all the way, then! You love stuff that’s not work. Don’t bail on it.
You’re not the only best and the brightest.
It’s easy to get into the habit of believing we’ll be painfully bored if we ever wind up in a room full of people who didn’t go to good colleges. Recruiters and interviewers sell this idea hard—“You’ll be surrounded by really brilliant people at …(Bridgewater, Google, Goldman, the IMF, the Atlantic)” That can be a toxic criterion. I’ve only ever worked jobs with people who never read Proust or stepped inside a wet lab—cook, busboy, ranch hand, landscaper, warehouse grunt—and my coworkers have, without fail, been a howling far-cry from boring. There’s a whole other breed of wisdom happening in the brains of human beings who never drank the liberal arts Kool Aid we’ve been chugging for years. I got all my good jokes from cowboys, drank the best beers I’ve ever had with waiters, listened to a brilliant defense of the free market from a line cook and was schooled on three or four resounding truths about girlfriends from the dude I spent a summer unloading tractor-trailers with. It’s good medicine and a much needed wakeup call to learn from and laugh with people who are unfamiliar with ivory towers.
You ain’t getting any younger.
Do the wild shit now! If you’ve been dreaming up a six month wander in Southeast Asia or a year on a farm, pull the trigger. From here on out, it’s only going to get harder to pick up and dip out. A couple weeks ago, I was talking to the director of a San Francisco food-think tank—the kind of guy who’s got exactly the job I want—and, when I asked him what he thought about taking a couple years to work on fishing boats and ranches after school, he hit me with some blunt and sound advice. “I don’t know about all that. But you’re not going to be able to buck hay forever, that’s for sure.” Our bodies are up for some abuse now that they won’t be able to handle in a few years, and we’re only going to get more and more tethered to the ground as the years wear on. Right now, we don’t have to walk away from a $60,000 salary with a looming promotion, or make insurance payments. We can just walk to the bus station with a backpack, tell your mom where you’re headed and get there.
Unless we’re med school bound, it’s anybody’s guess where age thirty will find us. In all likelihood, we’ll be working jobs we like and trying to find jobs we love, the insatiability that got us this far still gnawing and egging us on. This isn’t the first time we’ve made a tough call, and it sure as hell won’t be the last—might as well figure out the best way to go about choosing.