Don't Follow Your Dream: The Career Mistake to Avoid

I've spent many years working with young people, whether it's my own siblings who are all younger than me—some of them much younger than me—my students, people I mentor, neighbors, or my own kids. Over time, what I learned to do, and this was a very long time ago, was to stop telling people to follow their dreams.

Dreams are fine and all, but I ask them, "What does a job need to do for you? What do you need from your job?" And of course, you need an income, right? But there are other things we need from our jobs too. Nobody talked to me about that. It never occurred to me that I would need anything from my job other than, like, following my dream.

I mean, dreaming is great, but we can also follow a dream that fits with our lives and our other dreams instead of making everything else collapse or constantly being a source of friction. Certainly there's no perfect career, but finding a job, career, or direction that fits well with what we need from a job makes a huge difference.

Every person has different needs. For one person, it might be, "I need to be around other people or I'm going to go crazy." For another person, it might be, "I need to not be around other people or I will go crazy." There's nothing wrong with either one, but it means the same job won't work for both of them. Even if they have the same passions, interests, intelligence—everything—they need different jobs.

That goes for so many other aspects of careers. When I sat down with my 17-year-old and we were looking at options, his primary thing is ballet. He is a pre-professional ballet dancer. That's going to be the main thing, hopefully until he's about 40. That's about when they retire. There aren't any guarantees, but it seems to be okay right now.

So he needed to find something he could do that would pay well enough, not hurt his body, and have really flexible hours around dance. Looking at those requirements eliminated a lot of other things. Even something simple like being a waiter—lots of people do that—but that's hard on your body. Or something that's not so hard on your body might need a regular schedule.

After going through a lot of different options, we found phlebotomy might be perfect for him. This might not be his final choice, but it's flexible. The training is a two-week intensive that he can do between sessions of ballet. The hours are really flexible. You can be a phlebotomist literally any time, day or night, because they need them at different times.

That also means he can get PRN jobs, which means as needed, where he fills in when they're short-handed or during busy times. Think about it: you have this huge rush in the evenings at the ER, or you need people on Sundays at the blood donation place, but you don't need that many people the rest of the time. So you need to be able to hire extra people for that. That's perfect for him because he can be that extra person.

The main problem is getting your first job because they want someone experienced. A blood bank is a great place to get experience. There are other places, but now we have this path of, like, this fits with what he wants. If we find at some point that it doesn't, then we eliminate that and try something else.

In his case, he doesn't need to find a primary career. He's finding a secondary thing that's going to pay bills, or that he can do if he gets injured, to pay the bills while he gets better, or deal with the various things that come up for dancers.

We're also looking at the future. When he's in his 40s, if he retires from ballet, he could go on and become a radiology technologist—take X-rays, do CTs, MRIs, whatever during the day—and still teach at night. He's not really a medical kind of guy. He's not actually that interested in biology. He loves science, but more like other parts of science.

The reason phlebotomy works for him is not because he has a dream of doing medical stuff. It's because he has a dream of doing ballet, and he needs this other thing.

Now look at somebody else. For example, a neighbor kid I was advising is looking for her primary career. She wants to have kids, so one of the things we talked about is: okay, how is that going to flex around pregnancy or maternity leave, child-care issues, or kids getting sick? What if you want to leave early? What if you want to take a couple of years off? Can you go back?

A lot of times, that gets treated like, "You shouldn't let that limit your choices." But it's actually making the choices possible. Going into a career that won't work with the rest of your life limits your choices in the rest of your life. We tend to prioritize the career dream over the rest of our lives and then make the rest of it impossible.

I know someone who really wanted to live in a rural area, and they became so specialized in their career that they couldn't get jobs in a rural area. They had to live in the city. It's great that they got the job they loved, but now they hate their job because they're stuck in the city. They would have been much happier if they had done a job that worked in rural areas. They never thought about that. Nobody told them that. It wasn't part of the discussion.

This happens all the time. I always ask people: Where do you want to live? What do you want your daily life to look like? Describe for me your dream day when you're 37 years old. Which is really funny, by the way, to ask young people, because trying to think of 37 is really hard when you're 14 or 16 or whatever. Even in your 20s, it seems like a million years away.

But describe your dream day. Who are you with? What does that look like? Now describe your workday. What do you want your workday to look like? Tell me what you're doing. Are you talking with people? Are you sitting at a desk? Are you walking around? Are you traveling?

It gets them out of that mindset of having to pick a career because they're [unclear]. And none of them [unclear] something that involves being miserable, not being able to go home at night, not being able to have a hobby, or being overtired—all these things we kind of take as normal for certain careers.

Of course, I don't want to scare people away from anything. But I want them to think about their own preferences and needs. Let's say they want to have a career where they're going to travel. Being a traveling nurse is a really cool career, in my opinion, if you want to travel. I've seen so many traveling nurses come through—especially when I was in residency—and they had a blast.

For me, I don't want to travel. There's nothing wrong with people who do want to travel, but I get horribly carsick, airsick, and boatsick. I prefer to stay on solid ground. Each person has their own things they want to do, and being able to look at those differences and choose a career based on what they actually want to do is so important.

It doesn't limit their choices. It does limit some career choices, but it opens up the rest of their life choices. If our career is at the service of the rest of our life instead of the rest of our life being at the service of our career, we're going to be happier because we're getting the life that we want.

Sometimes that means following a slightly different dream, an adjusted dream, or a different version of the dream. I know so many kids want to be doctors because they want to help people and they love science, and that's great. But that's why in my MedPath program we actually explore all different careers, because you can love helping people, love science, and not be a doctor.

That's not to discourage people from being doctors, because some people need to be doctors. But some of them might love something else. Being able to look at all these different things makes such a difference in a person's life, and it gives them a path so they know what they're going toward.

If something about their life changes, they can make a pivot to match their life. A lot of people have to do that, and it's really hard. But if you've already come across the idea that your career is at the service of the rest of your life, it's a lot easier—speaking from personal experience.