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Where the Road Bends
On a recent thread here, I mentioned my belief that it’s generally a mistake when young, ambitious people try to plan their lives out with too much precision. I get the psychological impulse behind it — the illusion of mastery is no less comforting for the fact that it’s an illusion. But the reality is that most lives are defined more by unexpected twists and turns than by regimented adherence to a to-do list. That’s why I was delighted to read (God help me for saying this) Frank Bruni’s weekend column in the New York Times, entitled “From Hamlet to Hillary,” charting the career of Joel Benenson — now one of Hillary Clinton’s top strategists, but previously everything from an actor to the co-owner of a beer distributorship to a journalist. Strip out the Democratic politics and the rest is worth a read. This is the passage that jumped out at me:
Benenson shared his story and thoughts in part because he’s concerned, as I am, that too many anxious parents and their addled children believe in, and insist on, an exacting, unforgiving script for success and (supposedly) happiness. Go to this venerable college. Pursue that sensible course of study. Tailor your exertions to the looming job market. They put too much faith in plotting, too little in serendipity. And it can leach joy and imagination from their pursuits.
Another passage later:
There’s only so much in life that you can foretell and plan, though you wouldn’t know that from my inbox. Last week was typical: one email about a study of which college majors led to the best-paying positions; another about a proposal to make every college student do an internship, take a class in business and get career counseling starting freshman year. Both emails reflected a widespread desire to find some surefire formula for a guaranteed livelihood.
But the biographies of many accomplished, contented people aren’t formulaic. They’re accidents of a sort, except for this: By taking approaches that weren’t too regimented, these people were able to color outside the lines and surprise themselves. And their learning transcended their formal studies.
Now, let’s stipulate that it’s very easy to abuse this insight. One doesn’t have to stretch much to imagine a listless twentysomething justifying a lifestyle based around Halo tournaments on the grounds that he’s waiting for the universe to send him a signal. And a certain measure of planning is undoubtedly a good thing. But there’s a golden mean in there that yields immense dividends.
Question for the Ricochetti: what twists and turns that you never planned for changed the course of your career or your personal life?
Published in General
I’ve got several things, of varying degrees of importance.
I’m a professor at a low-ranked state university. While I’d originally wanted to get a position at my alma mater (Rhodes), I’ve found that my current job has given me an impressive amount of job stability in a very uneasy academic environment; at 43 I’m the most senior physics professor.
Furthermore, I turned down a better-paying job offer at another college, closer to my family. But by taking the job I have, I turned out to be in driving distance to date my now-wife. We had already met, probably we wouldn’t have gotten to date if I’d taken the better-seeming offer.
One day at the doctor’s office, I’d brought along a book on Greek philosophy. The doctor got to asking me about it, and he invited me to join his “Philosophy club,” which is a group of doctors and professors meeting weekly to study philosophy. I don’t know what this might lead to, but it’s an impressive group to be a part of, and I learn a lot.
I have always had a plan as to what I intended to do with my life, but I was always willing to change it. I considered being a symphony flutist, a chemist, an archaeologist, a physicist, a historian, and a linguist. I wound up in astronomy, where I’ve really found my niche.
I never planned to get into information technology, a twenty five year career from systems analyst to Director IT just sort of happened because of a casual interest in high school with this teletype thing hooked up to an RCA mainframe.
I never planned to get married at 19, but I met the love of my life and decided to make the move. Still married with 4 grandchildren over four decades later.
I never planned to get into management, companies just kept throwing more bodies at me to take care of.
I never planned to start my own company, buyouts and mergers and unemployment were a fantastic impetus.
Looking back at my plan from a long time ago, getting a degree in Physics and doing ground breaking research, chance events have exceeded planning for me. Halfway through struggling with sophomore electromagnetic fields and waves, I took a cab in NYC and the driver had a masters in Physics. I changed my major to the business school that Monday.
Planned economies never seem to go as planned, either.
In the summer of 1990, I was studying theology in Cambridge, Massachusetts at the Weston School of Theology, preparing to be a Jesuit priest.
In the summer of 1994, I was married, and welcoming my second of four children into the world.
Tell me about changing plans …
“But the biographies of many accomplished, contented people aren’t formulaic. They’re accidents of a sort, except for this: By taking approaches that weren’t too regimented, these people were able to color outside the lines and surprise themselves. And their learning transcended their formal studies.”
But biographies are partially works of fiction, or at least incomplete works of non-fiction. And autobiographies even more so. When an author writes a biography, he already knows the outcome of his subject’s efforts, and the climactic denouement. It is impossible to write about the earlier periods of that person’s life without letting this knowledge bias the story. A trivial detail that may happen to an average Joe takes on an epic dimension in the narrative. Example: the lemonade stand at 5 years of age becomes evidence that this person would found the largest juice company in the world.
As to autobiographies, I think that most successful people don’t really understand the reasons of their success. It is something intangible in addition to what they tell you about. So there are three ingredients to success: the thing they want you know, the thing they don’t want you to know, and the thing they don’t even understand or are aware of.
I was a grunt COBOL programmer in a small state government agency in the late 1980s. We had a major system meltdown and our system guy was working 2 or 3 days (and nights) straight trying to get the database back up. The second night I hung around to keep him company, plus I thought it was fun to load the 9-track tapes on the tape drives.
While we were waiting for tapes to spin, he showed me how to calculate blocking factors for B-tree indexes in our DMS-II database.
Then a couple months later he quit, and I was the only one in the shop that knew how to do it.
Fast forward a few years, although technically still a programmer, I’m acting as the DBA for the RDB databases on some VMS equipment we’d installed. Meanwhile our DEC salesrep had taken a job as director of IT at a manufacturing company that was implementing Oracle eBusiness suite. He had a falling out with their existing DBA and called me.
I got hired as the Oracle DBA despite the fact that I’d never in my life seen an Oracle database. And 20-plus years (and 3 or 4 jobs) later I’m still an Oracle DBA.
For those of us in the early days of IT , that was called a career path. Enjoyed the story!
Yeah, that’s the New York Times. And it’s so convenient that you can fit it on a postcard!
Joking aside, I agree with the fundamental insight. Planning one’s life too assiduously only leaves you disappointed.
And all because I liked pushing buttons on the tape drives.
Successful people generally have quite a lot of drive and self-discipline, but it can hurt you to be too linear in your thinking. Some people are so fixated on a very specific career that they can’t ever step back and say, “OK, this isn’t working. Are there other things for which my talents/interests/education might suit me?” (And there are also people who are scatter-shots, and blow the chances they do get because they can’t focus on any particular thing. Hard balance to find.)
I absolutely believe that luck is a significant component in success in life. Sometimes you get the breaks, sometimes you don’t. However, your chances of getting good breaks are obviously improved if you can find ways to try for more than one sort of opportunity.
Life is funny… now that I’m not really doing academic philosophy anymore, and have found other interesting pursuits, people occasionally make remarks along the lines of, “Just think if you hadn’t spent all that time languishing in graduate school!” And indeed, getting a PhD in philosophy might seem like the epitome of a one-track, limited-application sort of pursuit. One I would be very reluctant to recommend to an undergraduate student. For all that… I think for me that it was pretty worthwhile in the end. For general self-promotion purposes it’s not a bad credential to have (because, while it’s admittedly kind of random, people still know it’s not a cereal-box sort of degree). And I think I got quite a lot from the program itself, intellectually and personally. I enjoyed it. Once you add in the very significant plus that my graduate degree was self-financing (no debt!), it actually seems like a fairly solid life choice. I know plenty of people who have done “the safe thing” by slogging through law or business school (when they really didn’t want to be there), and ended up regretting it far more.
Interestingly, I have a sister who also collected a fairly eclectic assortment of credentials (which, however, were all reasonably impressive and showcased things she’s genuinely good at) and after some years of bumping around, ended up with a job she really loves at the State Department. She got very good at marshaling her various accomplishments into colorful resumes. For both of us though, there were quite a few things that didn’t work out before something did.
It’s always very hard to predict what sorts of opportunities will open, and when. I think the best advice you can really give a person (in this age of rarified employment) is to develop the talents you actually have, be flexible, and try not to double down on already-failed endeavors. Of course, for many of today’s anxious and obsessive 20-year-olds, that counsel seems ridiculously impracticable. You might as well advise them to grow wings.
Deeble beat me to it, but I was going to say I find it ironic for a democrat politician to say that things cannot be planned. I wish Hillary would follow his advice…
Rhodes was one of my bends in the road! I was a doctoral student at University of Memphis, and one of my practicum sites fell through. The directors of the counseling center and the career center at Rhodes put together a summer practicum for me on short notice where I worked on program development and strategic planning for them. It was the first time I had worked in any kind of big picture health care and a was key experience in the kind of work I do now.
The advice that you should (paraphrasing) just sort of wing it, take what interests you in college, etc, is not necessarily bad, but it does leave a lot of confused and under-employed people with political science degrees wondering where they made a less than ideal choice.
I would argue that selecting a practical major or studying a specific trade or joining the military will at least give you the luxury of having a marketable skillset you can fall back on if the wheels come off at some point down the road. There’s quite a lot to be said about chasing a dream, or starting (or helping to start) a business you actually care about, but let’s be wildly clear:
Most people are never going to do that.
It’s not that they can’t, or shouldn’t; it’s that they choose not to. Being in a place where you might have a little cash saved up from a real job, an asset in a home or other investment, will give you the flexibility later on in life to take a flier, or try something new if it comes along. It’s sort of like doing the prep work in anticipation of the opportunity – you can’t take the opportunity if you’re not ready.
Which is also an argument for men to keep their ear hair trimmed. Really, we’re talking about the same thing here.
I did everything the article said not to do – I wanted to fly airplanes since I was 4 – I even remember the day I looked up in response to the question “what do you want to be when you grow up” and saw the airplane flying over my questioner’s shoulder. Everything I did past that point was in pursuit of that imperative. My high school JROTC instructor gave me the best advice – which was to build my resume in order to get into a service academy. I actively flew in the USAF for 15 years.
It was only after leaving my flying career that I had no clue what to do next. Serendipity led me to my career now.
When I was a young adult, I quite deliberately adopted a policy of not planning ahead, but rather doing whatever seemed to make sense at the time. This directionless approach did not serve me well, and I ended up with a useless college degree that qualified me for nothing.
And so I decided to take control of my life, decide what I wanted to do, and work to get there. I set my sights on a career in broadcast journalism; I went back to school, earned another degree, and soon landed a job … as a technical writer. Because I’d discovered in the meantime that I actually despised being a reporter, and I much preferred a job that paid decently.
I’ve always found it interestingly that my life was enormously improved by my decision to plan my future and work for certain goals, even though I ended up deflected from the chosen path. I guess the moral (for me, at least) is that you have to keep moving forward with a sense of purpose; you just have to be willing to let that purpose change.
I believe there is a difference in having and marching to a plan and accepting that plans go awry and aimlessly drifting. People need to have a direction to succeed, and when life happens and all plans are upset, you need a new direction. There is a difference between rapidly adapting to changed circumstances and aimless wandering.
“Most people ” did not anticipate having their house financing under water, or getting laid off at 50.