Couldn’t agree more. There is a certain amount of stress and frustration in spending the day at a job dependent on one’s weaker aptitudes, even if one is “good enough” at it.
The more a kid can find out about what studying a certain major entails, which is not necessarily directly corollated with liking/doing well in particular subjects in high school, and the more realistic knowledge of what actually working in a field involves, the better off they’ll be.
How does someone decide when:
Agree it becomes more difficult when there is no clear answer. Then personal priorities and risk vs security types of issues are front and center.
If I had a kid in category 1, I would say things like “will you be willing to live as a starving artist?”; “you need to have a Plan B if you don’t get into med school”, and the like. I would encourage them to explore ancillary careers that might be close enough to what they love best. For example, a colleague’s son would have loved to be a professional sports player. Wasn’t going to happen. He currently works as a high school sports teacher and coach. His day is still all about athletics, and he is able to support himself, albeit more modestly than his well off parents. He’s happy.
If category 2 seems more apt–maybe financial and/or job security concerns matter more to this kid–I would encourage them to find out as much about the day to day reality of the careers they’re considering, and make choices accordingly. It can lead to disappointment to pick a career primarily because it’s the hot one right now.
The reality is most of us make some sort of trade offs when it comes to choosing jobs and careers. IME it’s not the norm for folks to absolutely love what they do and get everything else they want out of it. The trick is to discern one’s own priorities, make the best decisions based on them, and have some notion of what switching gears down the road may entail, if that seems likely to be necessary.
And with even the best laid plans, as I like to say, “life happens”.
I wouldn’t. That is between my child and their spouse. It’s not the parent’s business.
As my kids college professor said so long ago—“Location, money, the job–pick two.”
I did my best to keep my mouth shut about kid’s career choices because the landscape changes pretty fast sometimes. In my teen years I wanted to go into advertising but at the time the only place to do it was to move to New York. No internet at the time. But if I had pursued it I would have been on the very ground floor of graphic design (as computers came about) and now working at home or owning my own company. Nobody has a crystal ball.
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The only thing that we “insisted” on was that our kids graduate without debt. (I get this is a privilege). We also “insisted” that they do whatever they could in college to maximize their chances of getting a job when they graduated. We also expected them to get good grades and take full advantage of all the resources available.
Talent is relative. They should look for area(s) where they have some competitive advantage, or at least comparative advantage, due to their strong interest and talent. If they don’t have any advantage in an area crowded with others with greater talent, then it may not be a suitable area for them. If they’re uncompetitive everywhere and have no comparative advantage anywhere, they probably should focus on area(s) where they can make the biggest contributions, which will likely be the most valued among their options (and therefore they can be best compensated in).
So are you saying if it’s elite don’t bother to try it? And what skill/talent is so narrow that it can’t be applied to many jobs?
IMHO, good enough neither satisfies the person nor the pocketbook. Have a nephew who is well known for his good enough. He’s falling behind the rest who went for it. Not all have high paying jobs, but many are very satisfied. I’d never push my kids into good enough fields. You need passion and purpose to be good at your job and to get promoted.
Maybe you meant something els from your post? Like set your sights on something where you can get your foot in the door. On CC, people often talk about IB and other elite fields. Yet many people don’t talk about the social skills associated with these elite fields. And there is a huge aspect to connections in elite fields. Sad, but true.
Suppose your greatest talent and interest is in playing basketball, and you are better than 99% of people who play basketball, but you are not as good as those playing in the professional leagues. Should you attempt to make a career out of playing basketball?
My dad used to say, “There are a lot of people who love what they do, but don’t make much money. There are a lot of people who make a lot of money, but hate what they do. There are a precious few who love what they do and make a lot of money.”
And some people are only interested in the money. This is true. When I ask them what they are passionate about, they can’t come up with anything. They have never spent any serious time in childhood developing an interest in anything. It takes effort to develop an interest. Interest let’s you put in more effort, which makes you better, which makes you more interested and so on. If effort is lacking in the first place, it is hard to drum up interest.
And interests are not singular – it is not as if there is just one soul mate (of an area of interest) for you for all of life. Often whatever you work on and become somewhat good at will seem interesting to you, because you will see depths in that field that are not apparent to the untrained eye.
There is room here to cultivate an interest in children in some fields, early enough in their childhood, that in your judgment they seem slightly interested in, and you know can provide a reasonable livelihood.
I have also seen people who are genuinely interested in many things. On occasion that could also be a problem. They are unable to decide on a path.
Sports might be a bad example. Only the top 1% fit into the highest paying (or even paying category). But I can’t think of a non-sports example.
Let’s say a kid is good in math, leadership and collaboration. So many fields to explore. Or a kid who loves history, research and teaching. Again lots of avenues. I honestly can’t think of a single career where one would be excluded unless they fell into the 99% category. I’ve worked in several elite fields and we had many who came via indirect routes or bounced into the role and excelled.
Should you make a career playing basketball? Maybe, maybe not. You could make a really great business owning a club team for high school kids. Our kid played club lacrosse. I calculated once. He was making 1 million plus a year. He had played in college. D3. Doubt he was in the 99%.
So I guess I’d still say go for it rather than be “good enough” But I’m a huge risk taker ( and don’t regret it). Have had big successes and big failures but when it’s all over, I can say I went for everything I wanted to do. Not everyone can. You learn a lot from failing too.
Do you believe this? Most of the people I know who do really well created their own path. And most make far more than the norm. I think this was true up to the 1990’s when technology set us free from working in a singular place. Many people have led interesting lives based on their ability to work from home over the last 3 decades. I’ve worked from home since 1995. BTW, I love my work, I’d work for free.
I’m kind of struggling to picture (other than sports) what #1 would be. For instance, there are only a few Academy/Tonay award winners, but I know of a number of fulfilled actors who are self-supporting and happy.
Maybe I’m missing something but I just can’t picture all that many fields that are completely shut out to ‘non-elites’ (assuming 99%?) - and which a young person would pursue headlong, with only a parent’s caution stopping them. E.g., I’d imagine most kids (by the time they hit high school) are aware enough (if interested in sports) to know that they probably cannot make a lucrative career of professional basketball (but even then, they might be able to be a coach or teacher at a lower level?).
My observation with performing arts is the opposite, in that most whom I know do it not as a career, but as an outside-of-work activity (community theater, etc.).
Medicine would be another example. Probably many who would be fine physicians never get the chance to enter the career because they never get into any medical school.
Of course, it can matter, based what one’s situation is, whether the consequences of failure are that one just gets to try again in something else, or if one choice diminishes the ability to try other choices later. For example, if the choices all involve substantial different education from each other, the consequences of failure may differ for someone from a family willing to fund more education if the first choice does not work out, versus someone who may barely be able to afford one of the choices and no other after that if the first choice does not work out.
Telling an 18 yo what he should major in is a fool’s errand – they listen to you with only one ear. The seed is planted much earlier, sometimes in elementary school.
Kids like to do what they are good at, or what they think they are good at. We as parents tried to determine where they have aptitude and facilitate them getting better in this area. In third grade my son won a math Kangaroo competition in his school. This was my clue that he likes problem solving and I did my best to enable this interest. I signed him for Russian math and various math circles and bought the AoPS books. By the time my son was in HS, he was convinced that he should pursue a math-related major, and something that does not require memorization (this ruled out biology). Had I signed him up for robotics clubs, he may have veered more towards mechanical or electrical engineering. I could have signed him for musical theater, and maybe he would have put his energy into this. I did not think he is gifted in musical theater even though he sings in the shower.
As somebody mentioned upthread, this goes beyond college majors. We like hiking and travelling, and dragged our kids on many trips involving both. They learned not to whine and stopped asking ‘are we there yet?’. We signed them for monthly summer camps in Spain (moderately expensive) which was wonderful for their social skills.
As a result of all this traveling, including a trip to the UK in the summer before junior year when we visited some colleges there, my daughter decided to study abroad. Nobody told her to do so, but if we hadn’t exposed her to so much European culture, it probably would have never crossed her mind.
Early exposure makes a huge difference
A good example (as @ucbalumnus points out) is performing arts. D has just graduated with a BFA in ballet. In freshman year they started with over 30 kids. By graduation there were about 24. Only about 40% are continuing to dance and the main factor determining whether to continue is not talent, but whether your family can continue to support you, as no one is getting paid and most have to pay for a traineeship. You feel fortunate if you only have to fund your own room and board.
We didn’t really have to do much directly. From early on, I saw my responsibility as trying to help the kids have the tools to find satisfying, productive adult lives. I didn’t pursue push them toward prestige despite the prestige-obsessed environment in our wealthy exurb. But, both kids were very bright (my son more like brilliant) and had significant learning disabilities (especially my son).
So, I talked with them about playing to their strengths to find career possibilities that would also give them a sense of meaning. [I get asked to give talks about career choices/trajectories so that they have heard things from me more than once]. I did talk about how money matters, which beyond a certain level is more for security than lifestyle, and that the trick was to create a life in which one’s expenses are meaningfully less than one’s income, rather than seeking to focus on making the highest income.
My son saw both my career and my wife’s. She is a very gifted artist and in the top few percentiles in terms of a) showing (many gallery shows, museum shows, work in museum collections); and b) remuneration (she has been cash flow positive for 20 years, but that cash flow would not enable the life we have). He was gifted at art but as well at the kind of abstract thinking I do for a living. When we were hiking one Saturday, he told me and one of our friends that he would pursue a business or academic career rather than an artistic one and would do art on the weekends.
I did guide him towards what I thought were choices that work for him. I guided him away from an Ivy and toward an LAC where I thought he would thrive. After he started a company in his senior year, he decided to pursue a career as an entrepreneur. When he was applying to grad/business school, I guided him toward a grad program/business school that I thought was by far and away the best in the world. Fortunately he was admitted (I think the chances may have been less than 5%). But, he would have been able to generate a good income no matter which choice me made.
My daughter didn’t need our guidance. She is a much more concrete thinker and wanted to have a career quickly – she told me she did not want to go back to her HS reunion without already be engaged in her career. She told me that the only two subjects she liked in HS were biology (particularly human biology) and statistics. She decided in the first week of college that she wanted to go into nursing and transferred that semester to a program that gave her a BSN/MSN in five years (pretty intense actually). She had clinicals at Boston area teaching hospitals where several doctors approached her unsolicited and said, “You are so smart. You should go to medical school.” Amazingly, so did the head of her MSN program. But she did not want to spend years in school and wanted to have a career that was compatible with being a mother. She went into primary care and at age 28, she is the medical director of the clinic where she works.
Our kids are still half baked but I agree with this approach. 18 is too late.