Your childhood dream job vs your currrent career? Any ragerts

[JSB 677]

Growing up I wanted to do something in music. Saw far too many really talented people that just never could make a full time living at it, so I decided Accounting was probably a good place to start. Now looking back, I do really wish I would have given it a shot. There is no reason I couldn't have taken 5 years and really put forth the effort to see if there was any traction there.  I played it safe, and now I have too many responsibilities to take a chance like that. 

[closetohumping 17484]

26 minutes ago, JSB said:

Growing up I wanted to do something in music. Saw far too many really talented people that just never could make a full time living at it, so I decided Accounting was probably a good place to start. Now looking back, I do really wish I would have given it a shot. There is no reason I couldn't have taken 5 years and really put forth the effort to see if there was any traction there.  I played it safe, and now I have too many responsibilities to take a chance like that. 

Not to derail too much, but that's my attitude with NYC.  I should've taken 5 years after my graduation and just toughed it out there.  Now, got a couple of rugrats so it would never work

[Knoxtnhorn 6067]

Funny.  I kind of did the opposite of @JSB and @closetohumping.

I didn't settle down to teach until well into my 30's.  I now regret not having that extra 10 years of salary/retirement income; as opposed to 10 years of just making ends meet.  Granted, I would have lasted a *month as a teacher if I had started in my 20's.  

*It probably wouldn't have taken me long to tell a principal to go F themselves at a younger age.

Edited January 3, 2022 by Knoxtnhorn

[Bevo&Pevo 5229]

Rolling on 4 pages and no gynecologists?

[Onboard 2.0 9083]

5 minutes ago, Bevo&Pevo said:

Rolling on 4 pages and no gynecologists?

Nobody said anything about hobbies .

[Ojo Rojo 1981]

I didn't have a dream job when I was a kid. Maybe astronaut because I liked Star Wars so much and I knew NASA was a thing. Probably the first job I actually wanted was to be a doctor because my grandfather was a doctor and he was probably the biggest influence on me when I was old enough to start thinking seriously about such things.  I had an uncle who was a doctor and I knew some doctors' kids and they all seemed to have more and nicer shit than we did and they got to do more fun stuff than we did.  My grandfather once told me, about money, "Money can't buy you happiness, but it's harder to be happy if you're poor."  I took that to heart.  One of my best friends had decided early on that he was going to medical school, largely for the same reasons I wanted to go.  So that was my initial direction.  Little did I know that college was going to be a lot harder than high school and it was nearly impossible to work 30-35 hours per week to make enough money for tuition and living expenses and make straight A's, which is pretty much what it took to get into med school. My grades after my first semester at UT pretty much cast the die.  I wasn't going to medical school. After that, I had no direction whatsoever.  I was pretty devastated that, for the first time in my life, I wasn't going to get to do what I wanted to do.  That, and losing the girl who I thought was the girl of my dreams during that same first semester, was a double blow that took me out.  Maybe I'm an overly sensitive pussy, but it took me a while to recover from those things.

I picked a major at UT that I thought would at least allow me to get a degree.  Something that I was interested in and that didn't involve physics or organic chemistry. So I got a degree in anthropology.  It took me a while to finish it, for a lot of reasons.  I thought it would be a non-event.  The funny thing is that when I finally got that fucking piece of paper I felt pretty good about it. Right around that same time something happened at work that caused me to have to use the court system. My boss told me to go to small claims court to sue a customer who hadn't paid their bill. I walked it through, awkwardly, but I eventually got the constable to seize this guy's property and the very next day he showed up and paid his bill in full. That was my first taste of the law and how it worked. I was absolutely hooked. I immediately looked into whether my GPA was good enough to get into any law school.  It was, barely, if I did well enough on the LSAT. I studied my ass off and got into a decent law school.  I treated law school like my second chance. I worked really fucking hard. I wasn't top 10%, but my grades were good and I even excelled in the advocacy program (mock trial). Turns out, I was a natural. Looking back, I should have known, given my skill set and what makes me tick.

There are days when I absolutely love being a lawyer.  There are days when I absolutely hate it.  I've never seriously thought about walking away from it though.  I know for certain that this is the best use of my natural talents I could have possibly found. There might be other jobs where I would be happier, but I don't think there's anything out there that would give me the combination of things the law has given me.

So, I don't have any regrets about where I ended up career-wise, for sure.  I just wish I had found it sooner and that the journey had been less painful. 

[closetohumping 17484]

1 hour ago, Bevo&Pevo said:

Rolling on 4 pages and no gynecologists?

You ain’t gotta pay me for that or as the great poet humanitarian mike Tyson said “I don’t know what I got my honorary degree in but judging by the fine hunnies in the crowd I hope it’s in gynecology.”

[Sam Lin 3564]

2 hours ago, Bevo&Pevo said:

Rolling on 4 pages and no gynecologists?

Some of my doctor friends say the ob/gyn rotation was some of the most disgusting stuff they dealt with in med school.

[Incredulity 11684]

6 hours ago, closetohumping said:

Now, got a couple of rugrats so it would never work

Username doesn’t check out

[nnm 36700]

9 hours ago, Sam Lin said:

Some of my doctor friends say the ob/gyn rotation was some of the most disgusting stuff they dealt with in med school.

Yeah.  There’s a reason they’re at the doc. You want to look at and explore diseased cats all day, on Vic specials?  Be my guest. I’m glad someone does that job, but I would want no part of that. 

[huge 3795]

In high school I was sure I was going to be a courtroom attorney type.  Thanks jeebs I got into UT business school and that idea went out the window.

[Tom 2959]

My young elementary school age dream was to be a cartoonist and draw comics for the newspaper.  Turns out I suck at drawing.  

If I could do it all over again, I'd move to LA for at least a few years after high school and try to pursue acting or comedy.  It's something I secretly wanted to do, but I just thought it was so impractical and a pipe dream.  Told myself I'd spend a lifetime being poor chasing a dream that would likely never happen.  But it's not like I didn't waste plenty of time anyway switching from one unrelated job to the next in my early-mid 20's.  I didn't wind up in my current industry that I'll spend the rest of my career in until after I was 30, so I could have chased the dream for a few years and worse case scenario ended up in the same exact place I'm at now.

[Nole-4-Life 804]

Rock guitarist vs. IT Director. 

I just needed more talent. A lot more.

[Scheiss Meister 8414]

I did have an epiphany once that being a lawyer is all about stupidity: either someone has done something stupid and needs help getting out of it as best they can, or someone wants to do something and avoid doing it stupidly.  Either way, at least one lawyer, and usually more, profits.  And since stupidity will never be in short supply, being a lawyer should be a pretty steady job.  I just realized this too late to try it.

[Ojo Rojo 1981]

15 hours ago, Scheiss Meister said:

I did have an epiphany once that being a lawyer is all about stupidity: either someone has done something stupid and needs help getting out of it as best they can, or someone wants to do something and avoid doing it stupidly.  Either way, at least one lawyer, and usually more, profits.  And since stupidity will never be in short supply, being a lawyer should be a pretty steady job.  I just realized this too late to try it.

How right you are.  I talk to other lawyers a lot, obviously, and we always marvel at the stupid shit that people do.  People who are somewhat sophisticated and should know better too.  We always joke, "Well, if it wasn't for people doing stupid shit like this all the time, we wouldn't have jobs."

[Brisketexan 105465]

2 hours ago, Ojo Rojo said:

How right you are.  I talk to other lawyers a lot, obviously, and we always marvel at the stupid shit that people do.  People who are somewhat sophisticated and should know better too.  We always joke, "Well, if it wasn't for people doing stupid shit like this all the time, we wouldn't have jobs."

That's my cocktail party explanation: "My business model depends on just one thing: a steady supply of unreasonable people.  Business is good."