Why You Must Realize You Were Lying to Yourself About Your Chosen Career.

I have to share the difficult truth that, in almost every career you imagine, forget the roses and the glamour you thought it was when you were younger, it is the boring? and uncelebrated parts that actually make it work and in embracing it, you will begin to see the value you bring to the table.

After a very difficult calculus exam during my second year of engineering, I overheard one guy say in frustration, “Some of this is just to flush some of us out!”. I laughed to myself as my head was still spinning from the difficult problems we had encountered? in that final. I remember little else about the partial differential equations, fourier series and the multiple integrals but the degree of difficulty was beyond anything I had faced before that point. Fast forward almost 20 years, as an engineer, I have questioned my profession and I felt like an impostor. This is because problems like the ones I faced in the calculus exam don’t come on my desk, at all! In those younger days,I felt less than an engineer because I expected calculations but instead got standards, guidelines, procedures, technical specifications, requirements, deliverables, milestones and spreadsheets. Lots of spreadsheets.

It was until I understood the difference between complication and complexity that I saw that my engineering mind was still being fully utilized, but only now in a totally different way than before. Calculus problems are complicated, the parameters within them often remain fixed and once you have tackled the problem you can get to the solution or series of solutions. Real world engineering problems, and life for that matter, is complex. You have multiple variables that are constantly changing and piling and emerging behavior from the system you're dealing with. Worst of all, you have to deal with people; most are fine human beings but I have met one or two who are selfish, egotistical, hard-headed, absent minded, maniacal, dim and in charge. This means the problems we have to solve don't have a set answer and sometimes when they do, someone doesn’t like that answer and has the power to tell you to leave it be.?

In learning to solve intractable problems at school, writing a hard essay, doing a research paper that made you want to pull your hair out and dealing with difficult lecturers; the main lesson you learn is that you can deal with difficult problems. School projects give you a taste of doing something long term, within certain constraints and these just barely scratch the surface of what real life is about. It is still a good foundation as what you face decades later can be overcome if you try and think of the small victories you had in school or earlier. You then use that knowledge that you are capable of solving complicated problems; you learn to think in systems, that there are more connections than imagined and the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.? In doing that you have perspective enough to consider more of your blind spots and realize that many people are involved in almost every decision that you make and with practice or subconsciously you have to consider their viewpoint.

So, to disappoint a lot of young people getting into idealized careers like engineering, law, medicine, accounting and a lot of others, we usually don’t get to do the difficult things we learnt at school. What you dreamt your career is about is not usually what it is really like day to day, with some exceptions of course. It is the boring, complex and thorough duties that make people become professionals daily, with only a few exceptions where you have the ‘joy’ of doing real world calculations, court appearances, surgeries, initial public offerings and all the exciting things that make you keep dreaming of work.

A lot of lawyers will never see the inside of a courtroom and most engineers will not write code or build a robot. Each, rather, will do complex and rewarding work, the problem is it may not really look sexy authoring a technical specification or reviewing the terms and agreements word for word, but it does not mean you are less a professional than advertised or you are an impostor. This will make you happier and lived more productive and fulfilled.

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