When I taught middle school, the parents of one of my students asked all her teachers for advice. Their daughter was a good student across the board, but she was wondering what made her unique. It bothered her that there wasn’t one subject she really excelled in, and sometimes she felt like she didn’t have anything distinctive to offer. Moreover, she didn’t know where to put her energies for a career or a passion. Her little sister loved acting—what was her special talent?
This thought process—what I’ve come to call the “American Girl fallacy”—is all too easy to fall into. The American Girl storybooks all center around confident girls from different time periods. Whether they’re journalists, horse lovers, bakers, or surfers, most of the American Girls have activities that parallel their personality traits, activities that they are passionate about and also excel at, and that they use to “make a difference.”
The world in general, not just American Girl, offers encouragement to “pursue your passions” and “follow your dreams.” This makes some people who haven’t been leading successful charity corporations or pottery businesses since a young age wonder: Why don’t I have a talent, like everyone else seems to? What is my future? In a culture that favors career achievement, these two questions always seem to be linked.
Perhaps I’m not the best person to be talking about this, because as a girl I latched on to writing as my “thing.” However, when I was applying to college, I had no illusions of pursuing full-time authoring as a career. I didn’t have a dream career, actually. I never did. I faced the normal amount of outside skepticism that any English major might face, even though I was technically “pursuing my passion.”
Somehow it became clear to me that I would be fine—and that having a “one thing” wasn’t the most important thing to have.
In an episode of the On Being podcast, guest speakers Dr. Abraham Verghese (physician and writer) and Denise Pope (education researcher) likewise propose that education should focus more on how we want children to grow up to be—kind, confident, happy people—and less on what or who—doctor, artist, businessman. And unfortunately, they say our system of rewarding achievement in schools and careers isn’t set up for that.
They have personal experience with what they’re talking about. Dr. Verghese is a successful physician . . . and a successful novelist. He took a break from his medical career to cash in his 401K and sign up for the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, something most people thought he was crazy for doing at the time.
On the idea of a linear career, Pope outright calls it “outdated.” She also directly addresses children who struggle with knowing their passions, her encouragement being, “It will come.” Pope adds:
“You have no idea where your life is going to lead, and so, you have to be open to the possibilities. Find lots of different mentors. Take lots of different classes and things that are exciting. Pursue things that bring you joy because you’re just never going to know. I was supposed to be a journalist, and it just didn’t happen, for a whole bunch of reasons, and I fell into education and loved it. And then I didn’t take a normal path for a professor.”
Maybe this isn’t the advice we want to hear. It’s not predictable, not quantifiable, not step-by-step guaranteed. And it’s a little scary. It involves taking risks, not doing things the “normalized” or “safe” way. It’s hard for some of us to accept permission to do what we actually love, not what we think we should do.
But there’s rarely a “should do.” Life doesn’t usually run on a linear, predictable track. We ought not to expect our careers to either. Even the steps recommended for success—college, internships, lucrative major, job—won’t necessarily lead to lasting money or happiness. Anything could happen, from pandemics to changing job markets. For example, during the Covid pandemic, most of my math major friends had more difficulty finding jobs than the English majors. Today, one of my friends is pursuing post-secondary education in two of her loves: pre-vet and ancient languages. Another went from an English major to a physics teacher. The list goes on.
It’s not helpful to rack our brains trying to find the one thing we’re “meant” to do. There’s never just one path, rarely just one right answer. I would suggest we should put the larger part of our focus instead on being the kind of person who pursues things, tries things, loves things—and loves people.
This all might sound very impractical. (Even though, paradoxically, it makes you a more appealing job hire.) But each of us, as a person, is more important than our career or our one talent if we have one.
As a young person, I wrote myself off as being “not domestic,” because it wasn’t something that seemed to connect to my primary talent. If I had continued to believe that all my life, I never would have discovered cooking, one of my favorite pursuits.
Wherever you are in your career journey, don’t relegate yourself and your talents to your career. You may be shutting yourself off and selling yourself short. Pursue interests outside your job. Take a watercolor class if you’ve always wanted to learn to paint, even if you think you’re “not artsy.” If a food documentary like Netflix’s You Are What You Eat piques your interest, start teaching yourself about nutrition. Who knows? Like Pope, you might fall into a new love that takes you and your life by surprise.
Any talent is ultimately secondary to being a loving, empathetic friend and family member, classmate, or coworker. We can all make a difference, just by being the kind of person we want to be. When the student I first mentioned was absent, class felt different, lacking, emptier. It can be hard to feel, as this student did, that you can’t quantify your achievements or put words to your contributions. But everyone else can feel it.
Who you are is more important than what you do—even when what you do is amazing.