The not-so-straight path

J'ai trouvé cet extrait sur un blog, et ça m'a fait me sentir mieux sur mes détours dans ma vie scolaire et professionnelle: I'm paraphrasing but a close friend of mine once described his career as follows: Get a scholarship to study agriculture in college. Attend college and get your agriculture degree but then, rather than getting a standard agriculture-related job, decide to go to law school. Discover that you hate law school but persevere nonetheless and get your J.D. Now be sure not to practice law but instead go to work for a large agri-business firm in Arizona. Get laid off, then get a job with a land bank in California. Work there for several years, then leave for a financial job in Florida. Have health problems and take a job as a county air pollution inspector in Arizona while you're recovering. Once you've back on your feet, leave that job to take a position in Texas and Louisiana researching land rights for oil companies. Learn that you are not only very good at that work, but that you love it. Get your realtor's license along the way. A straight shot, right? There are people who have careers that seem to move along a super-highway. God bless them. But a sizable number of talented people will take long detours and a few muddy country roads. This is not always bad. An alert individual can pick up a lot of insight while hauling a career out of a ditch or two and those fortunates who have never known such set-backs can risk becoming a tad complacent. The reality that many a career encounters "Bridge out" is seldom communicated to young people. Those innocents are asked, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" by elders who know that some of those hope-filled answers will be sucker-punched by life. As brutal as that seems, there may be no way around the process. Many of us don't know what we want to be until life shows us what we don't want to be. http://www.execupundit.com/archives/2007_10_01_onthejobwithmichaelwade_archive.html