We all start as children with pretty and lofty dreams of changing the world and living the best life. We want to travel the world, own cars and mansions, and live amazing lives. Growing up, however, paints a different picture. This is where choosing a career comes in, as you will want one from which you can earn a living and sort your bills. At this point, most young people get confused and have no idea what career to pick.
Even with no idea, you can choose a career by studying yourself, understanding your strengths and weaknesses, and listing out career choices that may likely fit you. This article will explain why you need a career and reveal simple ways you can choose a career even when you have no idea.
Why Do You Need a Career?
Life is beautiful because our choices and actions don’t always have definite results. Some people’s choices turn out well, while others do not. Regardless of the place of personal choices and decisions, a career is one of the most important things every young person who is serious about life should have. You need a career for the following:
- With a career, your chances of living a successful life increase exponentially. This is because you get to earn monetary rewards and other benefits that may be attached to your career field, making it easy to acquire your desired assets and perform specific strategic actions.
- Also, having a career helps you grow into a much better version of yourself and to develop personally. For instance, when you are on a career path that rewards certifications and advanced education, you automatically want to improve yourself, thereby increasing your worth and value.
- In addition to self-growth and development, a career gives you a sense of purpose and direction. So, you no longer live with prayers or hopes that your dreams come true someday. Instead, you can contribute systematically to the progress of your life through a career.
- A career also helps you learn discipline and the relevance of set rules and regulations. It gives you the understanding that achieving success in life is about finding systems that work for you and using them appropriately.
How To Choose a Career When You Have No Idea
It’s okay to be confused when deciding on a career path to follow. Most successful people were, at some point in their lives, unsure about the path to take. However, such confusion can be dangerous when left unchecked, so getting clarity should be of utmost importance to you. Even when you have no idea how to choose a career, you can figure it out with the following steps:
4. Look Inwards
When famous philosopher Socrates said, “Man know thyself”, he was not only speaking from a philosophical standpoint, he was giving a crucial tip for choosing a career even with no idea how. Your career defines who you are and, in a significant way, shapes your life. So, to select it, you need to know yourself honestly by looking within yourself. Looking inward here is not about self-love but understanding yourself and your personality.
It also involves identifying your strengths, weaknesses, beliefs, passions, goals, desires, ambitions, skills, talents, and abilities and recognizing your core values and what you want. You may dismiss this process as unnecessary, but looking inward helps clarify your thinking, which would benefit your career choice. While looking inward, you can also conduct some self-assessment tests to know more about yourself and your personality.
2. Write Out Your Options
While growing up, my father would ask us as children every fortnight what we wanted to do in life. After blurting several words out, he’d ask us to write them out, promising that the ambitions would stick closer when written down. He wasn’t wrong. Making a list of options brings to focus all that you have in mind and allows you to judge how concrete they may be. The crux of this exercise is that you employ honesty in assessing yourself and your abilities such that the options of career choices are closely related to your personality and capability. Your personal preferences also influence your choice of careers, so you should consider your passions and interests. Figuring these things out will align your personality with careers that would likely fit. To make your options more streamlined, you can read and research appropriately on them before listing them out.
3. Gather Experience
There is this advice that always comes in handy, and that is simply doing things irrespective of how ready or prepared you are. You might never get to pick a career if you keep thinking and considering several options without actually getting involved in some of these options. Getting involved in your areas of interests and passions gives you an inkling of what to expect when you finally decide to make such an area your career. In addition, the roles you choose to have working experience with do not have to be central in terms of labels and tags. They may just be areas where you have lasting interests.
4. Try New Things
The trick here is not to get bored or burned out but rather to stimulate your interests in areas of life that you probably never paid attention to. One key value you will readily gain from trying out new things is that it pushes you into a different trajectory and out of your comfort zone, allowing you to develop more strengths and possibly discover new weaknesses. As a result, it becomes easy to understand yourself, clear your mind, and make the relevant career choices.
Why You May Not Know How To Choose a Career
As easy as choosing a career might sound, several successful people have once been confused about their career choices. Below are some reasons why this may likely occur:
- Overthinking the relevance of a promising career and your chances of success can attract an overwhelming feeling, confusing you as to what career choice to take.
- Another reason you might have problems deciding on a career is the fear of failure and not getting things right.
- For multi-talented individuals, their numerous talents can become an obstacle when choosing a career as it gives them too many options, which can be confusing.
- Self-doubt can also cause you to be oblivious about your choice of career. Such is possible because you lose faith and confidence in yourself to the point where you become your own obstacle in choosing a career.
Conclusion
Remember those childish ambitions and desires you blurted out without placing much value on them. Well, it is time to live them out, or at least one, if not all. Although success means different things to several people, and there can be multiple ways to become successful, a career gives you a relatively solid headstart in the race toward success. Amazingly, you do not need your entire life figured out before having a career, as you can get one even when you do not know how. All you need to do is look inward, identify your strengths and weaknesses, list likely options, gain experience, and try new things. The career itself will find you.
