Fireman, Astronaut, Race-Car Driver — Oh My!

Kids are always dreaming of what they want to be when they grow up. Sometimes it's something generic, like a superhero, or heroic, like a firefighter or police officer, or something completely out of the blue and made up, like a unicorn tamer. My sons (aged five and seven) want to be a scientist and a soldier, respectively, and become extremely excited when either of those occupations are mentioned.

Whatever a child thinks of it is always said with tremendous enthusiasm, followed by a terrific smile. The enthusiasm and the smile show the child's happiness in stating what he or she wants to be when the child grows up.

That is exactly how you should be when explaining to your friends and family what you want to do with your future. Simply, enthusiastic about the possibilities your future career may hold for you, while doing what you love.

While determining what you want to do with your future may seem silly at first, perhaps even intimidating, finding your passion and motivation is truly the most significant thing you can do. Remember, being happy or unhappy at a job might affect how you behave at home or in your personal life, so choosing the right career path is very important. You have to identify what will motivate you in order to fulfill the utmost potential within yourself, and that may not necessarily be more money, a fancier title, or a bigger office with a nicer view. (I once took a job solely for the money and paid the price; I was miserable. I learned that happiness is being in control of my own future, whether as an auditor, author, or a unicorn tamer.) Everyone has different motivations and varying needs, which leads to people traveling opposite paths because of those differing needs.

These different needs may lead to different types of motivation; therefore, we must first look at the beginning of the thought process. When we look back at this starting point, we see it may set us up for failure. Teenagers, who for all intents and purposes really still are children, are forced to decide what they want to do with their lives with the ever-present choice of going to university looming. If you take a hard look at it, education is set up in the most unintelligent of fashions for some since it is quite hard to figure out exactly what you want to do for the rest of your life at the age of 17 or 18. For example, you enter business school since that's what you think you want to do at 17; after three years you realize that business school isn't really for you, rather you would have preferred to be a teacher.

Even though education may be a setup for possible failure, some kids get trapped into the mind-set that they need to go to university because everyone else is doing the same thing and because it is considered the right thing to do at the time. However, these kids then get stuck wasting the first few years of their postsecondary education solely because they don't have a clue as to what they actually want to study and may end up settling for a degree they didn't want in the first place (e.g., the business degree versus education degree).

Universities will try to sell you on the idea that you are attending school in order to "find yourself," but what they fail to tell you is that the people paying the bills want you in and out of university with a job at 22 (assuming your parents are footing some or all the bills!). My parents were definitely not going to let me discover myself by taking a variety of classes over five or six years (e.g., business, education, science), and most won't. In my career, I've only met one person who took several years of university classes while he was trying to find himself, and he came out with a computer science degree that he could have gotten in a much shorter amount of time, and that was only because he was the son of a university professor, so he attended classes for free. His parents didn't mind him living at home, which was close to the school, so he had little-to-no costs while attending school.

After receiving a degree that they may not want, they end up with a job, and eventually a career, that they really may not desire. Instead of continuing down the least desired path, they possibly should have taken a few years off school, figured out their own lives and passions and then gone back to school to do what they really wanted. Yes, there is difficulty in willing yourself back into study mode after years of being away from it, but if you're motivated enough, that won't matter, even at the age of 34. Even after being away from school for a while and having a degree, I still found motivation at age 27 to go back to school to get even more education for the advancement of my career.

One of the most helpful things in finding out your true passion in life is to connect the dots in your own personal career journey. Use this to find out what made you happy in previous experiences and then to plan out your future dots so that you connect them more easily. The good dots in your life can be copied, such as the good habits or tendencies that certain managers or coworkers had, or even just something you respected or admired, or jobs/tasks that provided you with a great deal of personal enjoyment and satisfaction.

Some of these dots can be things such as wanting to be successful, learning and growing, continuous improvement and building an environment that you want to work in all the time. You have to figure out what you really enjoyed and didn't enjoy doing. When Steve Jobs, a huge public icon who founded a revolutionary company, was fired from his job at Apple, a company that he founded, he took the money and the things he knew he liked and began other companies, like Pixar, based on those ambitions. When he was fired, it actually started a bigger fire in his belly and motivated him to be even better. Jobs is the perfect example of how being let go and figuring out your true passion in life can make someone great. These hard lessons in his life allowed him to take a step back and turn his despair into motivation.

After taking a sober second thought, recognizing these dots in your life will help you realize that you can learn lessons from them in order to better yourself. If someone did something you absolutely couldn't stand, or that others couldn't stand, never do it, or do the opposite. You can learn things such as the value of respect, open communication, and how to treat people fairly by observing poor or weak leaders. Never think that just because something bad has happened there is no learning point that can be taken away from that...