Did you know what you wanted to be when you grew up? Were you one of the kids who had his heart set on a plan from an early age? I was. Ever since I can remember, I knew that I wanted to be a pilot. My father was a pilot, my grandfather was a pilot. I wanted to be a pilot. But here I am, 24 years old, a mechanical engineer; wish his quest for a private pilot’s license put on hold. What went wrong? I’m not sure that anything did. Even when I went away to college to study engineering, I still wanted to be a pilot. The mechanical engineering degree was meant only to be a high paying backup in the event that I was not able to fly down the road for medical reasons. Flying is expensive, so I would need a high paying job to be able to finance getting a commercial pilot’s rating anyway. So I get out of school and get myself a job as a mechanical engineer. My starting salary was better than that of most entry level pilots. Why would I take a pay cut to fly? Let’s get back to that later.
So why is it that so many people wind up with jobs that they didn’t ever dream of doing when they were children? First off: we are ignorant when we are children. This is no fault of our own. We have no idea about what taking a particular job means in a practical sense. Many children want to be cowboys, astronauts, models, professional athletes, and entertainers. Very rarely do you ever hear a kid say, “I wanna be a public claims adjustor.” There isn’t much romance in a position like that. When we are kids, romance is all we care about. We want the flashy things that look grandiose to our little minds. We want to do what we see in the cartoons that we watch. Sounds pretty stupid, right? I don’t think it does.
Despite the fact that we don’t know much when we are whipper-snappers , we do know what we want. We do know what thrills us. Granted, we don’t know the full scope of what our decision making will do, but we don’t have to. That’s why we’re kids. The kid inside of us is smarter than you think. If we really want something, we can take care of the issues standing between us and our dreams. I believe that with various amounts of hard work and sacrifice and person can become a cowboy, astronaut, model, athlete or entertainer. We may have to work much harder to get there, but it can be done.
Most of us don’t hold on to our dreams long enough to let them affect our decision on university study. By then we get into the whole, “golly, what do I want to do” scenario. Personally I struggled with this decision. I’ve always wanted to be a writer so I was interested in pursuing an English degree. An English degree wouldn’t serve as well as a backup degree as mechanical engineering would (I could write a book without an English degree, but I couldn’t get a high paying job in the aerospace field with an English degree). After much deliberation I chose the engineering route. At least I narrowed it down to two majors. I know plenty of people who went to college undeclared because they still weren’t sure.
Everything I’ve said so far about getting the job you want has rested on the idea that you are willing to work harder than anything you’ve ever done to get there. If you’re not, you’re probably wasting your time. Tons of people go to school with a dream and pursue a major, but don’t really have success getting a job in that field afterwards. Part of that is a product of the economy. The jobs might just not be there. Some people don’t have the desire to get their dream job. I’m not saying that’s wrong. I wouldn’t move to Montana to get a job in my field, if there was an almost equally attractive local job (even if it didn’t really require me to use my degree). This brings me to my next point: How much do you want your dream job?
Everybody has a dream job. But a dream job is just one of our dreams. We have to prioritize all of our dreams before we fight for any one of them. Take, for instance, the man who wants to start a family. His dream job is to play in a rock and roll band. He plays in bars every Friday and Saturday night until 2 A.M. He loves the lifestyle. He watched Empire Records too many times and now he can’t see himself working anywhere else but the record store that he started working in when he was 19. He is living the dream -- but thing have changed. He met a woman and fell in love. They got married. Kid one is in a bassinet, kid number two is on the way. Suddenly, our pal finds himself in a bit of a tricky situation. He loves his dream job, but it’s hard for him to really devote the right amount of time to his pregnant wife and baby. Despite the fact that his wife has a good job as a high school math teacher, and they aren’t doing bad financially, he wants his family to be secure. He sees the best approach to security would be for him to quit the record store and actually start using the finance degree that he went to college for. He hates the rat race -- who doesn’t? But the love for his family is so strong that they are, by far, his first priority. He quits his job, and gets a secure job with better pay, and with actual benefits. Of course when he wakes up each morning, he doesn’t feel the thrill that he did when he would go to the record store, but he feels content. He has that feeling of satisfaction knowing that when he holds his child at night, he is confident that she will have a better life – the best life he could possibly give her.
So in the end, our dream job might not be our biggest dream. Then again it might just be. As for me, I always thought that my job would be my biggest dream. As it turns out I have bigger dreams. The good news is that I can achieve both my biggest dream, and my career dream. It will take some effort on my part, but I intend to live out my dream and become a pilot. It actually shouldn’t be very hard at this point. I just have to put my nose to the grindstone and get cracking. So, no I didn’t do anything wrong. I got a little sidetracked along the way, but that is to be expected. I have so much time in front of me to get what I want. And I will get what I want. And you can too. I suggest you try for it.
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