In Andrew Yang’s book, Smart people should build things, he talked about how young people right out of school are being coached and lured into the high-paying consulting, finance or other professional jobs. And there are limited times when they get to actually work towards their dreams to build things that can change the world.
The fact is that having attractive options can indeed limit us and our pursuit especially when the attractiveness is measured not in the actual qualities that we care about. For example, most young graduates would obviously be keen to learn about different industries and they are right in thinking that going into consulting helps them do that. Yet after they cycled through different industry projects, they no longer value their place in consulting that way – their metrics start shifting towards the lifestyle that the paycheck can afford, how much they can save up, the recognition they get in the eyes of peers.
This is no different from the behaviour we have when we go into the supermarket buying so many different things other than the item we first thought we wanted to buy at the supermarket. For grocery shopping, that probably doesn’t matter because your fridge has sufficient capacity; but our work life don’t have sufficient capacity for many different jobs or roles!
Our jobs play very different roles for us in our lives and we ought to be clear what are the qualities we are choosing our job roles for. If we forget that, we might end up jumping from one boiling pot into another.