So hard to find my career

 

• Between the ages of twelve and twenty-two, I was serious about five different career ideas.

• First I was going to be a beef-cattle farmer (perhaps inspired by my uncle, who was a dairy farmer). I even studied about it as a member of the FFA (Future Farmers of America) in junior high school.

• Next I was going to be a medical technologist. A medical technologist at Grady Hospital in Atlanta befriended me. I maintained a "laboratory" in the basement of our house in Shelby, North Carolina. I went around to many of the neighbors, collected a drop of their blood and telling them their blood type.

• As I approached college, I thought I wanted to be a mathematician. I was good in both math and algebra.

• Later, after reading Ayn Rand, I planned to be a philosopher/writer. Finally, I thought, I have found something that could make a big enough difference.

• Then I was going to be an underwater welder. Not as a career, but as a way to earn enough money in two years, since it was a very high-paying by-the-hour job, so I could quit and live off the savings and “work” as a philosopher with no concern about making money right away. I even took scuba diving lessons and signed up for an underwater welding school in Fort Lauderdale, Florida (which I changed my mind about and never attended).

 

Although I “failed” to achieve any of these ideas, developing in a very “crooked way,” I could say that I am a successful philosopher today since, as a life coach, I teach practical philosophy.

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After I give up, I succeed

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I finally “stumbled” onto my first career by giving up on the idea of finding a career. After quitting college after three years, I decided I wanted to live in New York City. I told myself, “Just get a job you think you might like. If after three months, you’re not liking it, quit and get another job…”

 

Perhaps I lucked out. Within three weeks of arriving in New York City, IBM hired me and then trained me as a computer programmer (in a numerical control language called APT). Within two months I knew I’d found my career. Within six months I was the best programmer in my department. Software engineering continued to be my career for over twenty years until I changed to life coaching in 1987.