The former seems much more about extrinsic motivations: status, salary, prestige, title, etc.
I am getting more and more convinced that to have a sustainable and fulfilling career you need to be honest with yourself and find out what you like to do not what you'd like to be.
Trade-offs apply...
I think the vast majority of people in the world do not have this luxury. They should be working backwards by figuring out what their goals are, prioritizing them, figuring out how much they cost, and then figuring out what they can sell (including type of labor) to make that requisite income happen with the highest probability.
For example, do you want to write about science more than you want to have children and be able to purchase a home in a high end neighborhood? Do you want to be not working in the evenings and weekends and find and marry a spouse who also is not?
So it's a dead end to start with this because you just end up with "earn a lot of money" without any more information about how to reach the goal.
It also assumes that people are very good at career planning. If not, then it might be better to just follow the main stream.
If they’re coming out of high school and their goal is “high social status”, something went wrong in the parenting. I would hope that does not apply to the majority, but I guess it’s not out of the realm of possibilities.
There's nothing wrong with that, as long as you build a satisfying life for yourself.
But make sure that you live your own dream not your parents'.
And to avoid that risk, you need to think long and hard how you want to fill your time. This means focusing on what you like to do instead of being miserable being someone you're not.
That sounds like a different issue. By parental guidance, I mean offering your experience and resources as a parent to the child to help them model their world. For example, if my kid came to me and said their goal is to make and sell clay art full time, then I would not dissuade them. I would, however, ask them if they have other goals like buying a nice house or living in a certain area or attracting a certain type of spouse, and let them know of the various probabilities of that. A parent is a cabinet member, the kid is still the president.
> This means focusing on what you like to do instead of being miserable being someone you're not.
The purpose of my original comment was to point out that most people do not have the luxury of not being miserable just because they do not want to be. A plumber does not spend time in crawl space because they like to. But the plumber has multiple goals, and compromises have to be made to accomplish various portions of various goals. Such as not being able to do what you like to do for x hours a week, but in exchange, you get a high probability of being able to feed and house your family to your acceptable standards. And then having a couple days a week where you do get to “be someone you want to be”.
I'd feel better as a parent if they liked a lot of stuff (manual, intellectual, artistic, helping, electronics, clothes, cooking, selling, building, repairing, teaching), had an open mind and excellent work ethic, so that when they find themselves doing any job, they'll try to excel, find something in it, and 'be who they want to be' in their job too. Office politics, the way you treat others, helping colleagues, improving your skills, taking responsibilities, being a responsible and helpful member of a team or a society, keeping ethics standards high... You name it. They can also be achieved through work, while not really being fond of what you're doing. CPA, blue collar jobs (or plumber for you) don't seem to be dream careers, but there's many opportunities to be a productive, impactful, helpful and happy member of society while working those.
I think there’s a lot of bias and assumption about what people want behind your comment.
And, to be clear, most of my family and ancestry have been manual workers, laborers, in construction, fields, and they all wished dearly for us never to have to work such jobs. Maybe it's their bias, and even though they probably liked their jobs, may have some better insight (than me or you) as to why they wouldn't want their children to go the same way. My family always smirks at the modern romantic vision of manual work. 'if you have a chance to stay behind a desk doing intellectual work why would you ever want for shit working conditions, outside in the cold or heat, or doing something that breaks your body'. Their bias, doing the work is 'do something else if you can'... Who am I to say I know their life better than them?
And yes, CPA is a great career too for them. Just not anything back-breaking if they can convince you otherwise. And if you like the manual stuff, they're ready to have you take up the family business! They'll open all the doors for you. But they'll worry for you.
It may be strange, as the manual-job part of the family is far wealthier than us engineers or diploma-ridden grand-children, but they still think we're better like this...
That may be a 'stupid' view from a build-multi-generational-wealth perspective, but we're mostly 2 generations removed from starving farmers, so knowledge work seems better from their life. I only wish they'd have been as serious about teaching us practical skills and construction, home maintenance and all their manual skills, as teaching their work-ethics (Portuguese descent here, may be different in other cultures I don't know).
The outcome for most who do not go into finance is a rude awakening that most high paid individuals in a business have a technical skill which allows them to produce. There is a very limited market for entry level people managers who lack the skills of employees.
One acquaintance of mine discovered his business degree qualified for a job managing the schedules, incoming deals, and pricing of HVAC technicians at roughly half the income of the HVAC technicians with a comparatively limited career advancement route. Considering that this management position also cost twice the education time the business degree had a highly questionable ROI.
That’s why there is such an emphasis on STEM education for those looking to maximize income. The higher the hurdle, the more valuable the hurdle is as a signal to others. Hence the competitiveness of entry at some schools.
The only way out of this is to have skills which are extremely rare owing to lack of training paths, rapidly changing execution skills, or demand which rapidly outstrips training capacity.
e.g. Software Engineer with experience in the latest X, NeuroSurgeon, Software Engineer with experience on hyperscale services etc.
If the former, then I would say that is changing and see plummeting fertility rates in developed countries as proof.
If latter, then yes, teenagers can be extra prone to making non data driven decisions due to various reasons, but the hope is maybe it can instruct them in the future if not today?
Most people aren’t data-driven.
Parents, teachers, guidance counselors etc are also part of the problem.
My suspicion is that this is only an auxiliary goal to get something else - which might be some degree of material security. Especially in societies where social security is weak or non-existent. A high social status can sometimes be helpful because it increases negotiating power. And this might be one reason why people might buy expensive cars and such. But I think it is rarely the end goal, because it is so unspecific and has little to do what an individual /is/.
An individual is a highly social primate that saw reproductive gains from status (for both sexes) during its evolutionary history.
With status being 'cash in the bank' for so many desired things including security and mating success, why wouldn't accumulating enough of it be an end goal, at least in the mind of an individual?
Doesn't your theory predict that as people get richer/more secure they'd care less about social status? I tend to see the opposite, and people care very much about relative vs absolute wealth a lot.
-- L. Tomlin
It doesn’t mean “I want to win Wimbledon so I should follow my tennis”
It means “I love playing tennis. I should pursue that and make it my vocation.”
The attacks on “follow your passion” really annoy me, because they’re based on a straw man that says - you need to blindly follow what you enjoy and ignore all other concerns. Which is stupid, and no one would ever advocate for that. We’re just saying - life is short, do what you love, and aim to make it your main vocation. All within reason, which shouldn’t need to be said.
And now all these people are saying “don’t follow your passion follow the money” and it’s just the worst advice, because at least if you follow your passion you’ll enjoy what you do some of the time, even if that time is around a day job.
If what you really care about doing quickly eventually liberates you from laboring at it, you'll not stop - you'll have a lot more liberty to expand outward from that core and build on it. No matter how little most people appreciate it (set theory, for example) ... who cares? there will always be a least a few others.
The problem with a dream like marine-biology-professor in particular is it can take so many years to find out you have failed due to the tantalizingly low rung of grad school admissions and postdoc jobs.
This was a huge shift in mentality for me. I wanted to do exploit dev, I wanted to (and for a while, did) teach computer security online, and the list goes on. There was always this huge dissonance when I didn't do those things.
Then I sat down and looked at what I did do. I program obsessively. I defined that as what I enjoyed doing, rather than conflating what I wanted to do or be with what I enjoyed doing. I don't reverse engineer or create content for 10 hours a day. I do sit down and work on problems I'm excited about though.
A high school grad may be vaguely aware of this, but the reality is that many people choose to be a nurse and find out later the realities of the job.
There's no research, there is little growth. You don't get to change your job. Your title is exactly what you do.
Same story for the various lab techs.