From an early age, we are influenced by our parents, friends, relatives and society in general to get us on the treadmill of achieving success. By the time we are in college, career choice and what we want to do with our life have been heavily influenced by everyone around us. After several decades of pursuing someone else’s dream, it is hard to switch and focus on what we really want to do. It is too late and most just carry on.
I am no exception. I followed what was expected of me, worked hard and achieved some success in my career. No regrets. If I had chosen a different path, would it have been better? Not sure, and I will never know. Retirement gives me freedom to ask fresh questions now and choose what I want to do.
Did you just fulfill the expectations that others had for you, or did you go against the grain and chart your own course? This could include choosing a career, partner, buying a home, having children or making investment choices. How did it turn out?
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I did what was expected of me because when I announced I was not going to college my mother went apoplectic and said we didn’t come to this strange country for you not to educate and make something of yourself. I didn’t have the guts to tell her I wanted to be a DJ.
all these years later I’m glad she pushed me to go to college.
You earned it now. You can become a DJ.
Not me, but my father. After he got out of the army in 1946, he was making $300 a week as a machinist. But he wanted to go to college. His father thought it was a stupid idea when he could make so much money in a trade. But his mother encouraged him, and he went to Columbia on the GI Bill. He got an MBA, too, and was very successful in his career.
Parents and family may not have the experience and knowledge to help when you are looking for guidance. Some role models, teachers and mentors may provide best advice.
I think that perhaps the worst advice ever given is “follow your dreams”. It’s almost always given by someone who has beaten the odds and often due to skills 99% of people can never attain, grabbed the rainbow and made it work.
Sadly that would be going against the grain these days
In so far as my parents communicated expectations, it was that I would get a job when I left school. Since I did well in school, instead I became one of the first in my extended family to go to university. My original plan – and it was my own plan – was to teach history. A lot of English school children don’t know how lucky they are that I was diverted and wound up a techie.
There is one “road not taken” that I think about occasionally: I was offered a job designing databases for the BBC, but instead I stayed with my existing employer and accepted an assignment to the US.
My experience was similar in a way. After graduation, I attended a job interview. Of the 8 classmates who interviewed, all got job offers, except me. This was devastating. I moved on with other options and eventually moved to US. In retrospect, this rejection was the best thing that happened to me. Who would have known at that time?
I’ve always known that the consumerist pursuit of more/newer stuff was a fallacy/no route to happiness. But going against the grain there doesn’t necessarily pay off. Those that have maxed out mortgages for homes and lived materialistically will have generally seen themselves rewarded with high home equity growth.
So I guess the point is provided we don’t have seriously wasteful vices there are many routes to a reasonable outcome so being secure in the herd or bold as a lone wolf doesn’t overly matter.
It may be that, “Those that have maxed out mortgages for homes and lived materialistically will have generally seen themselves rewarded with high home equity growth.”
But that equity is not liquid.
In addition to the illiquidity, the big home means more mortgage interest, higher property taxes and home insurance premiums, and greater sums on maintenance. That greater home equity comes at a high price.
Also a need for more furniture and decor, and higher utility bills. More to clean, too. I never saw the point. I imagine that once you are used to a bigger house the next one has to be big too, thus eating the equity.
Great question. If I’m being honest, I probably did meet expectations. I think I’d be fooling myself if I said my parents didn’t expect me to succeed.
Everyone probably hoped I’d be a lawyer, because it’s one of the few professions where you are paid to argue. I’d probably do it for free, but being paid is better.
But fortunately no one in my family put anything on me overtly. I was free to chart my own path and I never felt any pressure of any kind. I’m trying to remember that as I parent my little ones.
It depends. In some ways, I’ve done things differently than my parents that turned out well, but I think they would have done the same if they’d had the same information. But in other areas of my life, I found that advice I at first resisted was the best course. It’s an interesting question, Sundar.
I was “lucky” nobody had expectations for me.
College was never mentioned in my home, the only vague direction I received was get a job and stay there. Given I worked nearly 50 years at the company where I got my first and only job after high school, I guess I listened.
My only regret is my parents never saw the success I achieved and what they did see, they didn’t understand.
My parents encouraged me to chart my own course, but within a culturally-defined world view. My father’s father, a hard man from the depression era, raised his family in to the middle class with hard work. My father came in to adulthood with the expectation of working hard, starting his own business, all in service of supporting – and protecting -his family. My parents valued education but were not highly educated. They had a limited vision of the range of things one could do to support themselves in this world. I did well in school, generally liked math, and some science. Started our big state U as a civil engineering major, wound up in chemistry, then made my way to medical school. It seemed and interesting and alluring profession, though I did not have in depth knowledge of what being a doc was really like. And I did it. It has been a great career, and I have carved out a path of my own, particularly in this last stage of my career. That all said, it was not a “passion”. I loved the learning curve of med school and residency. And I loved getting to meet so many wonderful and interesting people, often at important times in their lives. But didn’t love doing the medical work after the first 5 years or so, after which it became rote.
I am fascinated with the notion of our unlived lives – the way that walking through a door closes other doors.
“My parents valued education but were not highly educated.” Same here. There were high expectations, though. They certainly wanted their children to do better than themselves.
After taking my first international trip in my early fifties I said to my wife I regretted not taking a year off after high school or college to travel Europe. At that age you can see a lot more for a lot less money because you wouldn’t mind just back packing, eating street food, and staying in youth hostels. Of course I don’t know where I would have gotten the funds 😊. Once you are older most of us want more of the creature comforts when traveling, especially internationally.
As a young girl I loved talking to older people, trying to understand what they felt were the most valuable lessons they learned in life.
A kindly old retired doctor, our neighbor,said “always make your parents proud of you.”
I can’t really say it was the most profound statement I ever heard but it somehow resonated with me and encouraged my altruistic instincts.
Marjorie, do you talk to younger people today to give them that same sense of valuable lessons from your experiences? I love talking to younger people…my adult kids’ friends, classmates at the State University I take classes at, guys at my religion’s Men’s Club, etc. They may not all be interested in my advice/ insights but many seem genuinely interested (as you did when you were younger) to get the perspective from someone who’s been in their shoes and did OK to come out on the other side. Pay it forward.
I do enjoy young people and I am inspired by their experiences and all they seem to want to accomplish. We speak of all the opportunities available to them today and their passion to explore the possibilities open to them.
They embrace life with energy and a positive attitude.
To me, talking to younger people gives a different perspective. Their energy is infectious.
I guess I’m a bit of both. My parents had expectations for me, but I wasn’t what they expected. I’ll focus on career. As a small child I began taking everything apart. Frustrated, they got me a Gilbert Erector Set to channel my energies. While in grade school I absorbed all things science; when it was time for science class my teachers had me give the lectures. Later, I attended what we would today call a STEM high school with a college preparatory technical curriculum. I loved the science, engineering and shop classed. I tolerated English and the foreign language studies. I hated the history classes, etc. I was also a dreamer and I read, read, and read more. I altered my schedule so I could take four years of technical drawing. That required taking a couple of semesters of dreaded history during summer school; I got that drudge out of the way quickly! As a freshman I even took a typing class in 1960. That made sitting in front of a computer much easier when they arrived.
While in high school I spent a year working nights and weekends, too. This to help the family financially. It was a good intro to the working world. That company had a small warehouse with one full time employee. When summer arrived I worked full time. The manager, who did shipping, receiving and inspections quit suddenly. The company promoted me to manager while looking for a formal replacement, so I ran the place for a couple of months.
Before I graduated one of my teachers pulled me aside and asked me my plans. I did not want to go to college. I wanted to get a technical job and considered college at night. He arranged an interview with an engineering firm that designed power generating plants, both nuclear and fossil fueled. I interviewed for a job as a drafting clerk and was offered a position. I accepted but only if I could do work as a draftsman. So, at 17 I graduated from high school and three days later was taking a bus to work each day into downtown Chicago. That firm decided I was too valuable to do anything clerical so in a matter of months I was on the drafting board full time. At age 21 they flew me first class to New York city for an “Applied Protective Relaying” class.
We were required to wear a suit to work and I complied. But pastel dress shirts were being advertised and I thought starched white was too boring. I read the policy manual and there was no stipulation that the shirts be white. So I purchased a couple of tan and pastel yellow shirts and wore them to the office. That caused quite a stir and I was hauled into the department supervisor’s office. The “personnel manager” became involved. This was a time before it was called the HR Department. I was firmly told to ditch the shirt. I quoted policy and argued there was no stipulation against what I was wearing. We read the manual sections together and they reluctantly agreed I was correct. It was a large, formal engineering firm and changing the manual was an arduous process requiring multiple reviews and approvals. It was agreed I was legal. Now, the drafting room with several hundred employees in starched white shirts was aware of this infraction and had been wondering how it would turn out. The word spread quickly and in a matter of weeks all kinds of colorful dress shirts replaced the white. It was my first revolution of sorts.
Several years later at age 22 I concluded for technical reasons that this firm was not a good fit for me. I left and found a job with a firm that designed and built large industrial facilities. That’s when my career, and subsequent revolutions really began. In that company in the 1970s I was gradually promoted to Systems Engineer and ran the process controls engineering. I became known as “stormin Norman” and the president called me “the phantom” after a client described me as such. At age 32 I left that firm and began my own.
At every turn, you were doing things on your own terms. This made for an exciting life. Not many can do this.
“The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind” , Bob Dylan.
My career choices and what I ended up with turned out to be decided by the time and the society I lived in. My choice was just a downpayment or a bet. The return was realized or not by forces in the world beyond my prediction, far beyond my control. From a penniless refugee in a foreign land, I discovered the America with many paths to personal actualization, allowing me to attend college to get several engineering degrees. I was trained to be a nuclear engineer after the 1973 energy crisis, then the 1979 Three-Mile Island accident stopped the nuclear industry. I got a chemical engineering Ph.D., and the oil industry went into near collapse in the 1980s. I eventually became a top-secret military rocket scientist for 10 years, building a new generation of rockets to install the first constellation of GPS satellites. Then, the government decided to buy cheap old Soviet rockets instead of supporting homegrown rocketry R&D after the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. I found a new career path by going back to school for another 9 years to get a medical degree. The primary care medical career was rewarding but the Covid-19 pandemics forced me into early retirement against my wish – my body was literally exhausted.
I often smile with the thought: “only in America!”
Remarkable story. You have switched gears so many times, and every time made your life more exciting. I also came here as immigrant, but did not have too many pivots in my career. Let us see what happens in future.
Thank you for your kind words. My career history is but one example of “made in America” in the past tense. It is not about how smart I was for getting all these degrees, or how naively clueless I was for making the wrong career choices. Most of us are the products of our society and our time, with due respect and exception for the few pioneers who led us into a new age (e.g. space age, computer age, bioengineering age, financial wizardry/shenanigans age, AI age, etc.). Each of us, no matter what story we believe, contributes to the evolving story of our time. I recommend the book Nexus by Yuval Harari.
You sound like just the hard working immigrant/refugee that this country should be welcoming with open arms, to give opportunity to as well as decrease both the labor shortage and increase income for the government budget and Social Security.
Addendum: I’m not just talking about those who earn high degrees, but the millions of people that have come to this country and worked multiple low paying jobs to make a better life for themselves and their progeny.
Against the grain I suppose. I was a lousy student. My dad would have liked me to become a pharmacist, but the grades and the drive just didn’t exist. Instead I sold and delivered beer for the first 30 years of my adult life. Eventually I built a sweet little tax prep business; my dad would have approved.
Had I not dropped out of college, and gone into accounting instead of beer joints, I could have made a lot more money. Still I have no regrets, Chris and I have a very good life. Had I done anything different earlier in my life I wouldn’t be where I am now. Like Frank Sinatra, I did it my way.
Way to go, Dan. Inspiring story.
You’re the real deal, Dan. To paraphrase a Billy Joel song: “We like you just the way you are.”