"Follow your dream" is career advice I have frequently received. This is also advice I have given multiple times. I must confess that, on reflection, this is really bad advice. I don't feel too bad about having given this advice, I will pass the blame on to the omnipresent self-help management gurus, but it still remains really bad advice.
The only dream I've ever had that feels worthy of the name was to play cricket for India. My inner ten-year-old still believes that it is my destiny to open the batting in a test match at Chepauk, take strike at the Wallajah Road end, and drive the third ball of the day past extra cover for four. But, heck, that was not meant to be. Gautam Gambhir and Virender Sehwag are doing that job on my behalf; they're doing the job pretty well.
I shared this dream with tens of millions of Indian boys. The dream had some chance of coming true for about fifty of those boys. "Follow your dream" was excellent advice for that gifted fifty. What about the remaining tens of millions? Mostly, they've made peace with real life, and are getting on with their careers as Business Systems Analysts, or Sales Managers or tax lawyers.
Sure, the Business Systems Analysts and Sales Managers need direction, purpose, meaning and fulfullment in their work-lives too. But when an everyday professional is looking for direction, when she is at a career crossroads and asking herself what to do next, asking her to "follow her dream" is worse than useless. It provides no insight or intelligence that is relevant to the here and now, and makes mockery of her childhood dream to be a ballerina, or cowboy, or cricketer or whatever.
A colleague of mine came up with a much more useful formulation to provide direction to his own career, an outside-in view rather than the inside-out view of the "Follow your dream" merchants. His take was, "I try to put myself in a place where lots of good things are happening around me. If I do, chances are, good things will happen to me." It is hard to predict what those good things will be, except that it will not be an India cap. But, heck, maybe that is real life.
Well said - I have always believed that 'Follow your dream' does not take statistics into account :)
ReplyDeleteIf you take the probable outcome (in terms of fame, wealth, satisfaction etc) for two diverse things - 'play cricket (potentially for India)' vs 'be a statistician' or 'be a manager' - the net outcome is always likely to be better for the second and third options.
High probability X Lower money/fame/satisfaction > Very low probability X Infinite stardom/wealth/achievement.
Can I translate that a bit differently. To me 'follow your dream' means finding something that you really like doing and doing it with all your heart. Most people I meet don't like what they do - And that is a pity. So it doesn't need to be the unattainable dream. Those we all have (and often have to give up), but neither should we settle to easily for the mundane.
ReplyDeletePrithvi - The advice is "follow your dream", not "follow your wishful thinking"! :-)
ReplyDeleteI do think, that the more passionate one can be about what one does and/or how one does it, the more fun and happiness-generating it is. And funnily enough, the better the chances of actually being successful (but I define success as happiness, so this is a tautology).
I found that when I changed my objective at work from "being successful" as in getting ahead, to "work and interact with integrity", work life became more fun. For me, that is the closest equivalent of following my dream, to be the person at work that I really am and not some hollow pretender who is walking on egg-shells, constantly mindful of consequences. The "how" became the journey and the destination, not the "what".
Karthik, I love the algorithmic approach to maximizing happiness :)
ReplyDeleteOne insight from behavioural economics to speaks to your formulation is that most people, even trained statos, don't intuitively understand really small numbers. The mind easily understands that 10% is half as likely as 20%. But it doesn't easily understand that one in a million is a thousand times less likely than one in a thousand, but is still not zero.
So people are systematically "irrational" about very unlikely events with non-zero likelihoods, like plane crashes, or becoming superstars.
Radhi...I actually agree with your point completely.
ReplyDeletePeople like us will wind up spending almost half our waking lives at work. Getting real satisfaction and fulfillment from that half of life has to be a big part of any conception of a life well lived.
I suspect the "unattainable dream" part of my post was a bit of a red herring. Will try and clarify what I'm getting to in my next post.
Vikas...I really like the formulation of success as "work and interact with integrity". This is something controllable, and is ultimately the main source of work-satisfaction.
ReplyDeleteEchoes of the Gita there..."karmanye vaadhikaraste maa phalesu kadachana".
Prithvi,
ReplyDeleteThere's a link to Darwinian evolution here.
Cynical misanthropes would suggest we actively encourage the millions of Indian boys to become cricketers, so that fifty of those do become the best cricketers India needs. The remaining nine hundred and ninety nine thousand are collateral damage, and will find their second calling whenever reality hits them.
Unfortunately, those statistics about the expendability of human ambition sound like something Hilter came up with on a bad morning, and so the sympathetic parents / teachers / mentors (such as ourselves) tread carefully and hesitate telling our children to "follow their dream"
But if we really want the best to come out for the larger population as a whole, then probability theory favours those who encourage the succeedin generaton to follow their dreams. Otherwise all that India will get are sub-par cricketers, and scentists, and astronauts. We will probably get lots of mediocre management gurus though (oh wait, thats already true.....)
My 2 cents.