The Defiance of Opportunity
I don’t know what I want to do when I grow up. I seriously wish I could put a child-like frowny face behind that statement. In my quest to determine what I want to do next, I sought out the guidance of a mentor. This mentor encapsulated the crux of my internal angst in one tidy statement…
You want the opportunity to explore opportunity.
Yes! YES! Why couldn’t I articulate that? I mean, that’s a perfectly reasonable goal. Clearly, it meets all of the criteria of a SMART goal — measurable, attainable, timely. Oh…wait.
Herein lies the rub. My goal, the one that resonates almost audibly within me, is actually none of those things.
I blame the “Dirty Jobs” guy. You remember him. Every episode he slopped through pig shit or stuck his hand up some horse’s hoohoo. And while neither hold any appeal for me, I am downright jealous that he gets to do a new job every day. Way to create a completely unattainable, non-specific, wholly irrelevant career goal for thousands of poor, unsuspecting overachievers with job ADD.
There was a time when one’s options for employment boiled down to doctor, lawyer, business, factory. Or, if you were a woman, and a progressive one at that — nurse, teacher, seamstress. Now, college-bound freshmen pick from a dizzying 1,500 academic programs of study. Majors like “casino management”, “fashion studies”, and “turf grass management” offer students highly-specialized training for jobs that, frankly, like 100 people in the world actually do.
I’m not hating on opportunity. I’d be seriously screwed if one of my three options was still seamstress. I’m just suggesting that the pure plethora of options may be overwhelming to those of us who want to do, well, everything. There’s a paralysis of decision created by too many opportunities. Particularly when one’s passion is the opportunity itself.
My career path looks like one of those 1990’s spin T-shirts. The ones you speckled with paint and watched some opportunistic entrepreneur tack to a piece of cardboard and spin around for 30 seconds utilizing the thousands year old concept of centrifugal force to make neon art all for $25.99. I want to spread my transferable skills out in the world like that spin shirt. Emanating from a core ethic of hard work, solid experience, and well-honed instinct. I don’t want to be the entrepreneur; I want to be the spinner.
I want to do all the things. I want to explore the opportunity of opportunity. Now somebody please make that a SMART goal!
