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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Peni Griffin" data-source="post: 3683081" data-attributes="member: 50322">I am unusual among people I know in that I was born knowing what I wanted to do and have spent my entire life focused on doing it; all the same, I have been forced by circumstances to waste a fair amount of time doing things that don't pertain to it.  Moreover, if I had followed the obvious educational path - the originally intended educational path - which would have optimized me for my profession, I would probably have been sidetracked hard and taken much longer to find my feet.  If you want to be a professional writer, a major in English can be a really bad choice.  (In the end I dropped out of two universities and have supported myself doing stupid office work.)  When career-minded children ask me about college I horrify the teachers by explaining that college is not necessary, but if they want to do it and can afford to go, they should go to college and take every class that sounds interesting, since being interested is the wellspring of story.  If I'd followed the original plan, I'd be less optimized than I am now; if I'd insisted on living in a loose, bohemian manner instead of getting sucked into the illusion of security offered by the day job, I might be more optimized, but the entire shape of my life would be different and who knows how that would have affected the quality of my writing?  Most people, in my experience, don't wind up where they plan to go, for reasons which vary from individual to individual, but mostly break down into Unexpected Exterior Events, Change in Preference, and Lack of Self-Knowledge.  In the current office, looking over the curriucula vitae in my word processing documents, I find people with BS degrees in biology, education, political science, industrial development, agricultural economics, and land economy.  This is a real estate appraisal firm.  The land economy degree-holder, whom one would assume had the best chance to be optimized for this job, frankly sucks at it. The industrial development degree also sounds reasonable for an appraiser, except that guy spends most of his time on massive government infrastructure projects, figuring up how much landowners need to be recompensed for having utility easements run through their land.  And so on.But this doesn't seem to be a bad thing.  No one can predict what's going to happen, and flexibility and hard work count a lot more in getting what you want out of life than doing things "right."  There's no "right way."  There's what works in context and there's what doesn't work in context.</blockquote>

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