In the graduation season, advice to follow your passion and pursue your dreams abounds.  But what about those of us who don’t have one passion or a clear dream?

I’ve always had many interests.  Early in high school, I started responding to the frequent inquiries about my future plans by saying I wanted to study art.  It was something I enjoyed, and I was decent at it.  I wasn’t too worried about the starving artist trope — I figured I could always become an art teacher (doesn’t every kid at some point want to be a teacher?).  In my first year of college, I took a variety of courses and loved pretty much all of them.  I didn’t know what I wanted to do.  Should I add a double-major in psychology or sociology?  Or a minor in math or Spanish?  Should I get a teaching certificate?

I ultimately stuck with the art major and completed certificate programs in leadership studies and arts management.  Twelve years ago, I graduated from college first in my class and Phi Beta Kappa, without a full-time job and with a notion that I’d someday go to graduate school, get an MFA in painting, and become an art professor.  My joblessness wasn’t due to a bad market or sub-par interview skills, but rather a lack of direction.  It’s hard to job-hunt when you’re open to just about anything.  Where do you even look?

A month and a half after graduating, I began working as a college admission counselor.  I considered graduate programs in counseling and higher education administration.  By that December, I was taking the LSAT and researching law schools.

To this day, I don’t really know why I chose to pursue a law degree.  I knew very little about what lawyers actually do.  I think I had something to prove.  I wanted to show myself and the world that I was smart and capable of doing something difficult and impressive.  (To any teens or twenty-somethings who may be reading this, please note that this is a terrible reason to go to law school.)  But fortunately for me, my rash decision worked out well.  I excelled in the classroom, thanks to a penchant for reading, analyzing, and writing; an ability to memorize a lot of information; and the self-discipline to study every day.

In the eight years since graduating from law school and taking my first bar exam, I’ve remained something of a generalist within the legal profession.  My work has mostly been in the realm of litigation, but it hasn’t been limited to one subject area.  I’ve dabbled in education law, trusts and estates, commercial contract disputes, employment law, and personal injury.  As a law clerk in a federal trial court, I’ve worked on criminal cases, patent cases, environmental cases, civil rights cases, death penalty cases, and more.  I love the variety — I never get bored and I’m always learning.  Still, I know that at some point in my career, it would probably be beneficial to develop a niche.

For the first few years after law school, I continued to have a roving eye when it came to my career.  I considered leaving the law altogether or pursuing a so-called alternative legal career, one that doesn’t involve actually practicing law.  Ironically, perhaps, I at one point thought about becoming a career coach.  While there are benefits to being a multipotentialite, the paradox of choice can interrupt forward momentum.  I know that I could have progressed further in my career by now if I’d had a clear focus at the beginning of where I wanted to go.  In general, the people who have the greatest impact tend to be those who focus their attention and energy on one thing.

I’ve come to love my field and to realize that it’s a good fit for my skills and personality.  A lot of that has to do with developing confidence and expertise in what I do.  If you stick with one thing long enough, you can learn to do it well, and that in itself brings a sense of satisfaction.  But there are a lot of things one can do with a law degree, and while I truly enjoy my current job, it’s unfortunately not a job I can keep forever.  So where will I go next?  I’ve been doing some soul-searching lately to try to answer that question.

I’m not looking to make any big moves right now, or at any time in the foreseeable future.  I’m not job-searching.  But rather than wait to think about this until the day that I need to find a job – when I may be more likely to settle for whatever is readily available – it seems wise to me to do a little planning and contemplation now.  My mid-30s feels like a good time to reflect on what I’ve done and learned so far and to be more deliberate in mapping out my path going forward.

These are the questions I’ve been asking myself:

1. What day-to-day tasks do I enjoy doing?
2. Which ones do I dread or avoid doing?
3. When do I find myself in a state of flow?
4. What kind of lifestyle do I want to have?  How does this impact my salary requirements, availability for business travel, ideal work schedule, etc.?
5. What jobs do I know I don’t want, and why?
6. If I could write my own late-career biography or retirement speech, summarizing my accomplishments and the impact I’ve had through my work, what would it say?
7. What problems need to be solved?  Which of these are important to me?  How might I contribute to their solutions?
8. Who do I admire?  What have they done in their careers?

Pondering these questions is proving to be a valuable exercise.  I have yet to develop a vision of a specific destination, but I’m gaining some clarity.

Readers, have you struggled with the same kind of indecision in your career?  How did you break through it, and are you happy with where you are now?  Have you worked with a career coach or life coach?  

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