I grew up in a time when people were expected to have career plans. As I recall, mine had a goals that was something like: “Be the President of a major multi-national corporation by age 40.”

Heck, I was young. I not only didn’t recognize limits, I didn’t recognize that there were limits.

On the first day of high school at the venerated Bronx High School of Science, many of us shared our plans with each other. I only know of one person who actually lived out the plan he had then. The rest of us wound up doing it differently.

One fellow tried two or three careers, doing graduate work for each one. Then he stumbled onto real estate law because he had an apartment house to manage. People who planned to be scientists discovered that they loved teaching and made a career of that.

It wasn’t that we aimed for things that were unreasonable or unachievable, even though that was true in some cases, like my own. A little time in a corporation convinced me that while I was smart, talented, and a hard worker, I simply didn’t have the temperament for corporate life.

For most of the other people I knew, it wasn’t that they changed career goals because they couldn’t achieve the ones that they set. Most of them changed because they found something they were good at and liked better.

Some successful people didn’t write out a detailed plan. They had what I call a “non-plan.” They knew generally what they wanted to do, set about doing it, and then followed the path where it led them. One woman I dated said she wanted to be a writer, and so she is today for one of America’s most respected publications.

In the beginning, the problem is often that we simply don’t know enough about ourselves and the world to make wise choices. We don’t know what some of the choices are.

And we don’t understand that some career patterns don’t lend themselves to careful mapping. Check out the material on this site about four different Career Paths to see what some of the options are.

Plan as much as you need to, but keep yourself open to the opportunities that will come knocking. Sometimes they’ll come knocking with the sense that you’re bored or unhappy where you are. That will probably happen several times in your career.

Determine what Career Path is right for you. Identify your strengths. Then a mix of a little planning and some scanning for opportunity is the way to go.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 26th, 2008 at 6:33 am and is filed under Career Paths, Tools and Strategies for Success. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.