99% of Gen Z thinks about careers the wrong way (do this instead)

Most college advisors and keynote speakers at graduation ceremonies rely on some version of the message, “follow your dreams.”

For 99% of early-career individuals, this misses the mark. At best, the quip is an incomplete cliché; at worst it’s disingenuous. The advice sounds encouraging at first, but its value runs quickly out for two reasons.

First, a lot of people have the same dreams, but few people have the same level of interest or abilities. If you told 1,000 graduate programmers to follow their dreams of working at Apple, only a small fraction of them could do it. The adage fails to account for variations in talent, ambition, and luck. 

Second, assuming young people do indeed have a specific dream, the corollary is to reverse-engineer how to get there. This leaves far too much room for speculation. 

Conventional wisdom suggests working backwards from your ideal role in the future to where you are today. Ask people who have already done that job. Read, journal, and manifest the path into reality. 

That is not how people land dream jobs. 

I’m currently a senior reporter at Business Insider, for example, though I would not have arrived where I am if I’d tried to map it out from the start. Starting a blog, self-publishing books, and traveling the world are what got me here. That’s not a path any industry veteran would recommend to an aspiring journalist.

My last five years only look linear in retrospect, but much of it was spontaneous and opportunistic. Mostly, I tried to play the best hand I could at any given juncture, then I crossed my fingers.

I thought differently in college and high school, but I now believe career advice shouldn’t be based on working backward from a distant dream. The opposite makes more sense to me now: Capitalize on the best possible opportunity right in front of you, and do that over and over again. 

Open as many doors as possible, for as long as possible

Besides my friends who went to medical or law school, no one I grew up with is still on track to do what they said they wanted to do as a teenager. Everyone understands how common this is, yet convention implies otherwise. Mapping out what happens tomorrow, next week, and next month seems far more productive than locking in some blueprint for your career decades from now. 

A helpful framework I’ve used time and time again is evaluating opportunities based on what further doors they could open. 

While I don’t advocate stringing along opportunities, I do think it’s wise to keep as many irons in the fire at a time, for as long as possible. This allows space to pivot and experiment, and you can leverage the opportunities against one another if needed.

When I was in graduate school, I was hesitant to commit to full-time roles in part because I didn’t have much free time, but also because I knew that would narrow the range of opportunities I could take in the near future. 

I wasn’t ready to commit, and even though I was interested in all of them I wasn’t sure which I’d like best. I ended up pursuing four part-time gigs simultaneously, freelancing for various publications, because I felt that kept the door open to all four positions later on. Doing so also helped me determine what I was best at.

Curiosity is your compass

A great career, to me, must center on what you are interested in. Rather than focusing on some vision in an indefinite future, I see far more value in defining the things you already like and don’t like to do. 

Yet, when you take the time to sit down and think, figuring out what you actually like to do is hard. Maybe it’s investing or writing or singing. Perhaps it’s cinematography or coding. Then, if you do pin it down, it’s still unclear what doing the thing looks like in practice. 

Whatever opportunities you have on the table, whittle them down based on what your curiosity draws you toward. It’s more likely you become excellent at something if you’re interested in the work at hand. 

I find curiosity to be a better indicator for good work than almost anything. The most successful people I’ve met are those who care very little about outcomes, but who are obsessed with the work itself. A high salary or prestige is often a side effect.

Ultimately, combining these two strategies — leaning into curiosity and capitalizing on the opportunities right in front of you — offer the best insurance against a fast-evolving world. There are jobs today that won’t exist in a decade, just as there are jobs that did not exist a decade ago. 

The people who fare best in a shape-shifting job market tend to be those who do what they do because they can’t help it. Think of the writer who wrote millions of words before making a dollar. The engineer who spent years building projects outside her day job. The producer who made 100 YouTube videos without any viewers. 

If I were a betting man, I’d put my money on people like that. And for what it’s worth, I try my best to emulate people like that. Curiosity can lead to passion, and obsession is a close cousin. 

All this is not to say stop dreaming. But for young people especially, you should focus first on where your feet are. Only then can you figure out what you like to do, and how you can do it for long enough to get good at it.

Thank you to Jacklyn Dallas for reading a draft of this essay.

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