Pursue Your Dreams; After All, They're Yours

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It is important to be practical in a career choice.  It’s even good to realize limitations and strive to set up a plan to overcome them.  You can even set up long term goals and still pursue short term objectives that lead to these goals.  But don’t get talked into a career you don’t want by a guidance counselor that’s really working for the needs of the local business community.

 

In Las Vegas, an honor student was told that she should pursue a career as a card dealer and was discouraged from any other career.  Why not?  It takes a good head for math to keep all those Jacks and Queens straight.  Except; she didn’t want this.  But the guidance counselor was persistent.  And this kind of thing is happening across the country which can be a problem because how do you get into a good college without your guidance counselor signing a recommendation, something good schools look for.

 

Now if you happen to have this problem, you can get around it.  Get more than one recommendation from teachers that you studied under.  Bring your parents into the school to talk to administrators and even seek legal help if necessary.  After all; what good is a card dealing career if you move to Kansas? 

 

In everything you do, make sure you are qualified to pursue your objective.  If you want to be a doctor, doctors need to be focused, serious and have the stamina to complete the rigors of medical school which often requires a life of zero sleep.  You also need math skills.

 

If you want to be a college professor, understand that you may well have gaps in your education.  Education from the 60’s on went away from cognitive education towards affective education.  It went away from individual education to small groups.   Skills learned this way may not be sufficient to get you where you want to go.

 

Affective education is based on feelings, your feelings.  It is easier but inferior to cognitive education. Cognitive education is where you read a subject and think through a problem or gauge an author's intents and motives with critical thinking from all learning.  That is why you should take philosophy, logic and literature in college to develop these skills  It improves and challenges your mind, making it grow.   Be careful though.  Some professors of philosophy are indoctrinators, not teachers.  Just look at the people of Occupy Wall Street.  And believe it or not, it’s not some of their conclusions I disagree with it, it’s many of the signs carried by demonstrators I would have recognized as silly in the 9th grade.

 

At any rate, if you wish to find your dreams, go for what you can do based on a true inventory of yourself.  Listen to your guidance counselor when he or she is good, yes, but measure advice against the inventory which you know about yourself.

 

Do research to see if the career you want is obtainable also.  It’s one thing to want music fame like the Beatles had, but if you can’t sing, or play an instrument, you're going to come up short.  On the same hand, if you can sing and play an instrument know that only 4 people became Beatles in the end and there were a lot of people who passed up real careers to pursue a career in a field like theirs who ended up losing out because they were not practical.

 

Pursue your dreams.  Think beyond aptitude tests and counselors.  But  acknowledge to yourself your actual potential and count the true costs of those dreams.

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