My daughter graduates from high school next Wednesday. She’ll be taking a gap year spending August through next January as a teaching assistant at a private school for international students in Denmark. I hope it will be a positive experience and open the door to future opportunities. Things like that usually do whether one realizes it or not at the time.
When I graduated from high school in the mid 1970s I didn’t realize a lot of things. I had little sense of direction although I initially thought whatever career I pursued would have something to do with film. The closest I ever got to that goal was writing movie reviews for a cable television magazine in the mid 1980s.
What I couldn’t have imagined upon high school graduation is that I’d end up spending nearly 30 years writing about office technology. Was this the industry you thought you’d be working in when you were pondering career choices after high school or what classes to take in college?
You’ll often find me writing about how great this industry has been to me even though “great” might be an exaggeration, but for an 18 year old kid with hair down to his shoulders and little sense of direction, it’s comforting to know I’ve somehow made enough of the right moves over the years and now fill a niche that I never ever knew needed filling back in 1973.
Sometimes things work out, but not always how one’s planned it.
Some of us start with a set destination in mind, but get detoured or rerouted along the way. That’s the way it works. And along that way, there are a lot of lessons learned. I imagine you’ve figured out a thing or two on the way to your current position in the industry, and yes, sometimes that journey is filled with compromises. But the journey to one’s destination is just important as the destination itself.
If you’ve got kids who are graduating from high school this month, I hope their journeys are as full of surprises, useful detours and rerouting as mine and maybe yours have been and that it works out for them in the end. I suspect it’s going to be much more difficult for them than it was for us.
I wish it wasn’t, but it looks like it will. After all, it’s 2015, not 1975.
Thanks for reading.
