👋🏽

my brother is 26 years old, makes $200k a year, and just bought a house with his fiance. he’s the success story you hear about but never actually meet in person, but it all happened by accident. he wanted to go to college for clarinet performance, but he got rejected from all the top schools. so he decided to major in physics instead, and then went on to get a doctorate to put off being an adult for a few more years. but then he ended up dropping out halfway through the program and accepting a job with google as a software engineer. so to reiterate: my brother majored in something he was not interested in, and then he got a job that had nothing to do with his degree. 

he isn’t successful because he had some master plan he followed, he just stumbled around blindly until something worked out. and that’s what we’re all doing–i majored in political science and now i do customer service for a company that makes industrial-sized gas detection monitors. the marketing director at my company has a degree in biology, and my mom has an MBA and works at a middle school.  no one knows what they’re doing, we’re all just trying different things until something works out.

When I was seventeen, I was 100% sure that I was going to get a job as a bureaucrat and save the world. When I was a 21-year-old recent college grad, I found out that it’s impossible to get a government job unless you know someone. So I gave up and found something else. I know my teenage self would be disappointed if she could see where I’m at, but you know what? I don’t care. Because teenage me was an idiot. She didn’t know anything about the world or how it worked, and she couldn’t have possibly predicted the curveballs that life would throw at her. And because I don’t know a single person who’s doing the thing they wanted to do when they were teenagers.

my dad got a bachelors in chemistry, then applied to a master’s program specifically to work with one professor. after he accepted, he found out that the professor wasnt teaching that program anymore. he finished his degree, said fuck this, i dont want to work in a laboratory, and went to law school instead to practice patent law and adores every aspect of his career. probably never would have happened if that one professor had stayed to teach.

my aunt didn’t have the chance at college when she was younger because her relationship with education (and being poor) just wasn’t conducive to higher ed. now she’s 35, married with 3 kids, and halfway through an associates degree to be a medical tech (and one of the top students in the class), because she realized adult-her was more compatible with college than teenage-her

my uncle was (weirdly enough) so highly experienced that he kept getting laid off from/leaving major companies because they couldnt/wouldnt pay the proper salary for a man of his skill level. eventually, he said fuck that and went back to school to get his doctorate, then a few years later got a job as a professor of business admin/marketing and he’s really really good at it 

and even the people you think have linear paths, good news: they dont. my mom grew up in the german education system, and knew from hs she wanted to be a lawyer. went all the way through the law course in uni, then immigrated to the us to go to an american law school. she got a job at a private firm doing translations from german to english (i think??) and when her contract there ended, moved to doing government work in a completely different field. i have no idea what she studied specifically at university, if at all. so even tho on the outside she looks perfectly linear, she really wasnt