How to Choose a Career Without Really Trying

Prior to meeting my first personal computer, I had no clue what I wanted to do with my life.  Lacking any better direction, my parents thought it’d be a fine plan for me to be a lawyer, presumably because lawyers made lots of money and I’m sure they wanted me to get a job where I made lots of money because that was better than the alternative.  So, until I got hold of that first computer, I was fine going along with the idea that, sure, I was going to be a lawyer.  When you’re 12 that doesn’t mean much.  I did well in school because I liked school and liked doing well.

My Dad had a grade system to pay us for grades that didn’t hurt, but probably didn’t really do much to motivate.  We got a dollar for an A, fifty cents for a B, nothing for a C and, well, just don’t bring home a D.  It was further understood that if you were going to bring home an F, it was probably better to just not come home.  Idle threat?  Probably, but not so idle that I didn’t at least wonder at the back of my mind.

So, through elementary school, I could count on six bucks, maybe five or five fifty each of the four quarters of the year.  Once I was big enough to mow lawns and babysit, that money lost pretty much any incentive, but at the time it was cash money!

Once, in Junior High, I did get a D for the quarterly grade and I was pretty sure I was going to have to consider moving to Canada.  I remember viscerally the feeling of dread.  In that particular class, we could sit next to whoever we wanted to and I sat next to my best friend, Mike.  So, as a result, we spent most of the time talking instead of trying to figure out how to type better and/or more accurately.  Additionally, at the time I was convinced that learning how to type was about the most useless skill imaginable.  Believe me, the irony that I would then go on and enter a career where typing was one of the most useful skills I could have is not lost on me in any way.

In any case, this would have been eighth grade, I think, so before personal computers existed at all.  It’d be another two years before I’d get my hand on my own computer.  So, I fooled around and talked in class and, as a result, I was amazed and terrified when it was clear I was going to get a D in ANY class.  This was unheard of for me and I was not happy to bring that home.

Surprisingly to me at the time, and partially perhaps because it was clear that I was far more distraught at the outcome than anything my Dad could have done on top of that, my Dad was very understanding.  He didn’t just say “Well, do better next time”, though.  No, he went right out and bought a used typewriter (manual, not even electric) and mandated a regular practice regimen at home until I brought my grade back up.

I found out after the typing class was over that my Dad had gone in to my school to confront the teacher over my grade.  I don’t recall that I had somehow prompted this by somehow claiming it wasn’t a fair grade, but that’s possible.  More likely, or at least how I think I recall it, my Dad just didn’t believe that *I* was capable of getting a D.  By that time I’d only had As and Bs and maybe one or two Cs in my entire grade career.  So, as I’ve heard the story, my Dad went in and confronted the teacher over the grade.  As I said, at the time, I was unaware this had taken place.

I practiced at home and was more diligent in class and talked less with my best friend in class and when the second quarter of the year rolled around and grades came out, I was very excited to find I’d brought up my grade to a B!  In this grading system, the two quarterly grades were averaged to form the semester grade.  I was pretty clear on how averages worked so I was flabbergasted to find that my D and my B had been averaged to become a B!  This made no sense and didn’t until the end of the year.  For some reason I asked the typing teacher, with whom I had at best a strained relationship (he wasn’t very likable) to sign my yearbook.  In it he wrote something along the lines of “Maybe you’ll come to understand that grades aren’t everything.  Good Luck.”  That was weird, I recall thinking.  I took it home and shared it with my Dad and that’s when he’d told me that he’d gone in to talk with the teacher.  In the course of the conversation, I came to the conclusion that my Dad had done more than “talk” with the teacher.  I was sure that somehow he’d made clear that HIS son didn’t get Ds and that I was going to work harder but that there better not be another D in the second quarter.  So, I’m pretty sure that my B in typing was a combination of my harder work and not a little arm twisting by my Dad.

Aside from that experience, grades were not an issue for me.  I retained things easily.  I could get away with studying Spanish vocabulary literally in the walk between classes and retain it well enough to avoid studying it at all!  And, of course, I totally didn’t understand that I was only hurting myself by not working harder on it, but I got the grades and that was the only measure that seemed to matter all the way through high school and graduation.

Later, in college, it would become clear that being able to memorize something was entirely different than being able to do critical analysis and actually add something that indicated that I understood what I was reading and could apply some of my own thinking.

I graduated from a Catholic university with a Bachelor degree in Electrical Engineering.  It was and is a good school known mostly for fielding a very, very good basketball team for its size.  Well, that and for having Bing Crosby as an alum.  As a result of being a Catholic University taught by Jesuits, philosophy and religion were required classes, even for the engineering students.  I had no problem with this, by the way, as they were a nice break from the hard science classes like Statics and Dynamics or Materials Science, two classes I have NEVER used in any way after school.

It was only one religion class and I was, at the time, at best agnostic but certainly was not Catholic.  We were reading a particular book and were required to write a paper applying some of what we read.  I’m embarrassed to this day to admit that I got the only A+ on a paper that I ever received in college on a paper where I espoused a philosophical position that was in line with Catholic doctrine, the teacher’s position and the University but was in no way in line with my own personal beliefs.  I took the entirely mercenary approach of writing exactly the paper that I thought the professor wanted and I got the best grade I ever received.  I even got stopped in hallway by my Philosophy teacher to congratulate me on the paper, so the professors were even talking to each other about it!

I hung on to that paper and still have it to this day to remind myself of how I felt making that decision.  I got the best grade in class.  I got a great grade out of the class.  Even my Philosophy class got easier, I believe in part because of that paper.  And I didn’t agree with a single word of it.  I’d certainly given up the opportunity to challenge the doctrine and authority of that institution for a better grade.  At the time I was absolutely okay with that because the grade was more important, but, as I said, I’ve kept that paper as a reminder of my immaturity and my lack of strength to say what I really believed in that circumstance.

Both of these anecdotes come together, at least in my head, to underscore a few things.

First, you never know when you’re going to be exposed to something that’s going to be critical to forming who you will be in the future.  I never imagined that typing would be so critical to my eventual career.  Because I can type reasonably accurately and quickly, I can get my thoughts out more quickly in front of a keyboard than anything I can approach with writing.  As a result, my hand writing is an almost unintelligible scrawl, but that’s okay so long as the technology persists and civilization doesn’t crumble.

Second, grades aren’t everything but it was all that seemed to matter at the time.  It wouldn’t be until university that I would actually learn to study and to focus and to apply critical thinking, so in that I was playing some catch up with my peers.  But I was able to catch up, though it impacted my grades for a while.

Third, and this is directed as much as anything to my daughter who is preparing to graduate from university with her degree and is struggling with what comes next for her.  As she explained to me, her whole life plan has been centered around getting to this place: Graduating from university with a degree.  Now that’s she will soon accomplish that, she has no clue what to do with herself next.  The breadth of the options open to her are actually more scary.  To this point she had a pretty clear path.  Now the path branches infinitely and that is, in my experience, an absolutely daunting notion.

I had a bit of a crutch with respect to that.  I knew from the time I was 15 what I was going to do: I was going to find a way to get paid to writing programs on a computer.  That passion, that clarity of purpose drove my every decision from that time through to when I started my career.  There was no wavering, no doubts.  Certainly the lawyer notion fell to the wayside once I had this epiphany.  I was incredibly lucky that my passion lined up well with a career that would pay me well to do what I love.  That’s a rare and very, very fortunate thing.

Of course, I wish nothing more for my kids than that same kind of passion about whatever they want to do, but I’m learning that that’s actually a pretty rare thing in life, let alone from the time you’re fifteen.

My daughter is weighing between just “getting a job” and doing what she loves.  And I have counseled her firmly that if you do what you love, you don’t care as much about how much money you are making because you love to get up in the morning, you love to go do that thing because it’s what you loved all along.  Alternatively, if you just go get a job to get paid, it’s easy to hate the job, hate the choice and resent it for holding you back from doing what you love.   My advice to her is to first figure out what she loves and what she would love to do and find a way to get paid doing that.

She’s just about to turn 21.  She has plenty of time to later make compromises, as many of us do, between money and passion.  But I hope she doesn’t start there.