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How did we end up here?
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What is this beautiful house?
And you may ask yourself
Where does that highway go?
And you may ask yourself
Am I right?...am I wrong?
And you may tell yourself
My god!...what have I done?
Talking Heads/David Byrne/Once in a Lifetime
I
We move through life in irregular motions to arrive at places that seem they were planned destinations. Our choices create a pattern—giving shape to what we become. Some of our decisions—both large and small are deliberate, or so they feel at the time. Life takes place in 24-hour increments and we clock our movement accordingly.
Events occur that seem to stop the clockwork pattern. It might be the death of a parent, close friend or child—the diagnosis of an illness, or even something as seemingly innocuous as receiving an invitation to a high school reunion. “How could it be my 40th high school reunion?”
We can recall the events that have taken place between then and now, but it is often more difficult to remember the details.
What does this have to do with our career choices? Plenty. We do not make our career decisions in a more structured manner than many of our other life decisions. However, most career advice grounded in a linear process. There are some who have stepped outside of the grid to consider that making career decisions may not best be done by thinking and planning. People, such as John Krumboltz, Professor of Education and Psychology at Stanford University who offers such radical advice such as “You never need to decide what you are going to be in the future.” Why? Well, if career “decisions” are more a matter of luck and “happenstance” than the results of left-brain thinking and ‘rational’ decision-making, then it probably makes a great deal of sense to keep our options open.
Neither Krumboltz nor I are suggesting that you take a passive approach to life and career planning, but rather that you do not just think about your career, but that you explore and experiment—and in the process you might be surprised by what you discover.
Krumboltz, John D. & Levin, Al S. (2004). Luck is No Accident-Making the Most of Happenstance in Your Life and Career. Atascadero, California: Impact Publishers.
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