I Miss the Family Business

"What do you want to be when you grow up?"

It's a question that you get asked consistently as a child, and more and more as you get older you're expected to have an answer. I think we could all be doing a better job of thinking about this question for more than the five seconds before we answer our relatives we haven't seen sine last Christmas. And to stop making the assumption that we know now that we are officially grown-ups.

I come from a reasonably large family so I've got the privilege of watching the process of people discovering what they want to do with their life or the approach they want to take with life at least. What I mean is I haven't really seen any of my siblings live a dream from the age of 8, investing their interest and spending their time on investigating every nuance of their future life. They did well at school, so they went to university and tried something out, sometimes it worked out, sometimes it didn't but they finished their degrees and they got jobs.

No one tells you what being in a particular job is like, or talks about why it is they travel across the world working for different companies. Or why they stay in the same job for fifty years. You're expected to glean what job you would enjoy based on your subjects at school, or something glamourised on TV. Maybe you will be able to do it, maybe the first thing you try is perfect for you and you never have to worry about your professional life and can just focus on other things. Maybe I sound a little disbelieving.

That's why I miss the family business, so that by default you have at least one thing you were involved in since day one, not as a fallback but as an introduction into the parts of life that many people don't see until they leave school, or university. I know a lot of business students who have never worked in a business, engineering students who have never been into an engineering firm and science students whose only experiments have been coursework. They haven't had to understand the point where you are convincing someone else to give you recompense for your services and your skills. If you ask people what they could do that people should pay them for I'm not sure you would get a good answer.

If this was the 18th century, my father would marry off some of his children, my older brother would inherit most of the stuff and continue in my father's work and I would go off to the church or become a man of science or something. But it isn't the 18th century, our lives have changed and we have a much broader array of options now. I don't think we have too many options, but I wonder if it's bewildering to be as free to choose as we are. Maybe doing the same thing our parents did would be good for us, because when you say "Sod this, I'm going to become the first person on the moon in fifty years" then you now have a plan.

I see a lot of people who go university because they did well at school, which they went to because at first it's government mandated and later because you go to school. They don't leave the education track for a long time, and then they find out that what they always wanted to do but never knew about, doesn't require anything they've learned. It seems strange to me to suggest that becoming educated is another rut that people can fall into but it happens.

I think this is why I wish we would bring back Take Your Kids To Work Day, because then maybe we could see how our parents, people we presume to know incredibly well, solved this problem for themselves, or how they are still working on it.

Our choices are delayed for us, parents work hard so we can try new experiences and not be pulled into the exact same lives as them. Maybe we should see what just what we are leaving behind before we walk out the door? Do we owe it to them and to ourselves to make as much use of these opportunities as possible?

Finally, I might disagree a little bit with what this guy says, I think most of you would be interested in seeing some alternatives to the education that I talked about last time. He's got goals and is self-directed which is something that is incredible to see based on our own preconceptions of how to treat 13 year olds and our assumptions of a teenagers ability to plan for their own future. So have a listen and see why I think we could all be doing a better job of thinking about what we want to be when we grow up.