koratkar

As a high school student, I worry a great deal over my future profession. According to Cal Newport, career satisfaction for any choice of occupation often won't materialize until you've become "so good they can't ignore you" at what you do. Based on this, Newport recommends directing your nervous energy towards building skill in whatever you choose, rather than choosing the "right job". While I found his advice useful for framing the issue, it opened a new box of concerns: What if you chose something you have little innate ability in – or what if the point at which your improvement slows down is not exceptional? How do you even know whether you have talent in something before you've invested effort into shadowing or interning? Sometimes talent doesn't appear initially – what if the thing you have the greatest potential in is something you'll have to struggle at for a long time? And there are so many jobs! We have to narrow the search space! There's another panoply of concerns related to your worth to the world: if you care about the world and your impact in it, don't you owe it to those who worked hard to give you the opportunities you have to find the thing you'll be the best at? But what if the thing you'll end up being the best at is something that doesn't always scale well – like medicine? (Of course, you could go into research, but what if you're only mid-tier at that?) You'll end up positively affecting the lives of many fewer people than you could have! And how do you avoid choosing work dry of meaning? People tell me I over-think these things – the answer to most (if not all) of my what-if's is "nothing interesting will happen in this case or the counter-factual one - you are ultimately insignificant in the greater procession of the world, and you live a cushy live in the developed world, meaning that no matter how badly you screw things up, as long as you don't get addicted to heroine, you will still have access to food, water, and shelter." While I thin