Somewhere around age eighteen, most of us were told to pick. Pick a major. Pick a career. Pick a direction. And the unspoken rule underneath all of it was that whatever you picked, that was it. That was your life. You chose wrong? Tough. You chose right but lost interest? Too bad. The conveyor belt only moves in one direction.
That’s the lie.
I bought it. Most of my generation did. I picked a plan at eighteen, and by the time I was halfway through college, I knew it was wrong. It took me until I was twenty-nine to actually do something about it. Eleven years of knowing and not acting, because somewhere in the back of my head, a voice kept saying you already chose.
Those eleven years weren’t wasted — I learned things along the way that I still carry. But they were heavy. There’s a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from building something you already know isn’t yours. You show up. You do the work. You get decent at it. And the whole time, there’s a low hum underneath everything telling you this isn’t it. You ignore it because the system told you that you already picked, and picking again means you failed the first time.
Nobody ever told me to pick one thing and drop the rest. If they had, I’d have told them to bug off. But nobody had to say it out loud. The system said it for them. The degree structure said it. The career ladder said it. The question every adult asks every eighteen-year-old — “so what are you going to do with your life?” — said it. As if the answer is supposed to be one sentence long and permanent.
Here’s what actually happened after I finally let go of the plan: I fell into data management and discovered I was good at it. I picked up a guitar and wrote songs. I started telling stories and eventually published a novel. None of it was the plan at eighteen. All of it built on what came before.
Variety isn’t the enemy of mastery. It’s the raw material for it. The more things you learn, the more connections you can make between them — and those connections are where the real value lives.
You were not meant to be one thing.
David Willis 