Any advice for a regular smart 27 year old youngster, who has chronically underachieved and is motivated to turn their life around. They have a couple years of JC completed, and has no idea what path to take, or really what paths exist.
EDIT: OK, I see I gave slim pickins here. It’s not me, it’s my neighbor’s kid. I’ve known his parents since before he was born. He’s a super smart kid, but like a lot of smart kids, he got kind of jaded about…well, everything. I was visiting the other day and he asked me for advice, and my retired ass has nothing. Any relevant personal experience I may have, became dated years ago.
He’s good at just about all subjects. His longest lifelong hobby has been video games. He took a few programming classes and liked it, but the thought of doing it full time as a career would quickly become torture.
He’s kind of half-assed things and just realized he needs to get his shit straight. He was thinking something like finance, just numbers. Something solid that’s just a career direction. He is going back to school, well most likely he is, but he needs an idea of what path to take. Most of his friends are unemployed/underemployed with computer degrees.
I don’t know what JC means, junior college? One thing that helped me figure out what to do with my life was to go through a printed (if you can still get one) college course catalog and look at every single degree program my local community college (same thing?) offered. There were career paths in there I had never considered until prompted, and some I’d never imagined. I was in my 40s, btw. So while you’re better off figuring it out now, it’s never too late.
The single most-important thing you CAN do, is understand yourself as profoundly as you can.
Read John Truby’s book “The Anatomy of Genres”, which is on the 14 story-genres that we form our own meanings of.
He’s got a few details wrong
( like mistaking the Wild West village for what Village-archetype is, when real Village-archetype is the Tribal Mother Village,
and he misunderstands humor, as well, believing that the US-culture “drop” ( related to put-down ) is the core of humor, but the entire category of creative-misinterpretation is humor that isn’t dependent on “the drop”.
Hofstadter, in his “Godel Escher Bach” book, identified that the real shape of humor is the moebius strip: a strange loop.
You walk around in a “circle”, and … discover you’re now somehow upside-down??
Surprised-by-improbability, would be near-the-heart of it.
Anyways )
Truby’s book is CRAMMED with psychology insights into our forming, our growing-up, etc.
I’d require it of all high-schoolers, planetwide, for their HS diploma:
simply by making people encounter considering how they’re forming the meaning that they, themselves, are, would lever humanity up into much greater global understanding/competence, though it’d take a generation or 2 for the effects to become visible…
Lanier’s “Foreign to Familiar” & Hofstede’s “Exploring Culture” are both important, too, because if you know that some of the dimensions of culture they identify work a particular way for you ( ie doesn’t-work or you-need-this ), then suddenly, that spotlights something in your nature that has harmony in a specific subset of cultures, and shows you why that is doing this, in you…
( libraries exist: you don’t need to buy those, but the Truby books, you’ll probably fill with notes… )
_ /\ _