Bullish: Cultivating A Career When You Have Too Many Choices

Jennifer Dziura writes career advice for The Grindstone on Fridays and life coaching advice for our sister site, TheGloss, on Tuesdays.

Someone once Tweeted one of my columns – this one – with the note, “@jendziura says you can have anything you want, just not at the same time.”

I was baffled. I have never said that. I think Oprah said that. Or at least repeated it. I categorically reject that.

I mean, I recognize the fundamental truth that you can’t literally do everything at once.

I recognize that, if you work hard beginning at a young age, you can probably achieve your number one big goal – but maybe that’s it. Becoming an astronaut might be incompatible with having six kids. You can’t be President and also farm alpacas, although there’s plenty of time for both in a lifetime.

But I also believe in stretching the limits of what you can do at once, and not just via workaholism, although workaholism is a valid choice for certain seasons of life (see Bullish: Maybe Work-Life Balance Means You Should Work MORE).

Yet. workaholism should be pursued cleverly, not just hard.

There are plenty of freelance gigs that it’s difficult to make a living at, but not too difficult to make half a living at. Why not do three of those – if you can use the same resources and blocks of work time to run those businesses, and especially if you can sell more than one of those products or services to the same clients, or to their friends and networks?

I believe in some high-level ADHD, and in stretching your capacity for managing multiple tracks of achievement, and for transmuting what most people experience as “stress” into a growth experience for getting what you want.

Let’s hear from a reader I’ll call Lenina Crowne, after the main female character in Brave New World and also a character played by Sandra Bullock in the 1993 film Demolition Man, which was very loosely based on Brave New World in a manner I found really cool when I was 15 but which didn’t at all distract my parents from enjoying a Sylvester Stallone film.

You’ve written many times on making ballsy life decisions, and looking at the worst-case scenario.

I have spent the last few years trying to figure out what my plan is for when I finish university (April 2013), and to be honest your columns have probably been the most convincing, helpful, and inspirational advice that I have found yet. But at the same time, you’re a smart woman and I know you don’t advocate making foolish decisions, starting an unprofitable business, or pursuing a dead end career.

I feel like I am getting closer to my decision about what I want to do, but I still can’t seem to come to a decision, because once I pick one, I feel like I am giving up my other options.

I know you have written about having your income come from multiple sources, but that doesn’t seem a viable option when you have no real work experience.

I know it’s difficult to say because you don’t know me, but I was wondering if you had an opinion on, or advice about having to decide on and commit to a job/ field.

When you were graduating, how did you decide on what you wanted to pursue? And is it possible to make a decision, but try to keep the other things you think you might want to do open as an opportunity one day?

Oh, choices, choices!

First of all: fuck, yes.

Yes, you can “make a decision, but try to keep the other things you think you might want to do open as an opportunity one day.” You can do this twenty-five times if you’re clever, and especially if those things have some tenuous sort of thread holding them together (and no more than one of them requires a Ph.D).

Let’s talk about how.

The paradox of choice.

Were you a young man in medieval times – and lucky enough not to be bound to the land – you might follow your father into the button-making guild, marry the woman your parents chose for you, and be a pretty happy guy, at least until the plague.

Now, you have more choices than probably anyone in the world. Really, I mean that – in Europe and most of the rest of the developed world, you get locked into a university track (or not) in the early teen years, once you’re admitted to university, you can’t try things out or switch your major, and once you’ve graduated, people kind of expect you to stick with whatever you studied. There’s very little of this going-back-to-get-a-second-masters-degree-at-35, for instance.

The problem with having too many choices is that there are so many roads not taken that even good outcomes are tinged with regret. (See Barry Schwartz’s TED talk, whence I stole this subtitle). I once spent three hours reading online reviews of rice cookers, and then, upon receiving my $20 rice cooker, wondering if I had made the right choice. If I had just gone to basically any store and purchased basically any rice cooker, I never would have thought twice about it. Does it make rice hot and less hard? Check!