public perception is going to have to change as well. I like listening to Lewis Black, but on one of his releases he made a crack about how “if your job requires you to wear a name tag… you… you’ve made some seriously bad choices in life.”
I’ve known people like that too. especially galling when someone with that attitude has to have a guy wearing a name tag explain that “yes, you do need to change your oil before 50,000 miles, and that is why your car needs a new engine.”
It occurs to me that there’s also a difference between dreams that involve things that are the result of one’s own efforts and dreams that require other people to do what you want them to do.
For instance, if your dream is to write a novel then the odds are pretty good that if you stick with it you can do it. If your dream is to write a bestselling novel, or even to sell a novel to a major publishing house, that’s going to be a lot harder. There are many people who have worked very hard and failed to accomplish this.
My writer friend - the one who is published and has made compromises to do so - started out as a actor.
Actors require audiences for their craft - in a way that dancers or musicians even do not - and that writers and artist don’t. Not just to make money - but acting to an empty room isn’t fulfilling, where - for a musician, the music can be it - not external appreciation for it. Dancers can take joy from the movement itself.
He said writing was something that didn’t need an audience. He could do it and find the words on paper fulfilling even if no one else read it. Because he craves the audience, he’s made concessions to the art in order to get the audience - but needing the audience is a him thing, not necessarily a writer thing.
But you can’t monetize art without someone willing to pay for it. And there is a supply demand problem when it comes to monetizing art. So a musician who gains fulfillment playing for himself will need a day job (or a trust fund or to marry very well).
I’m not even talking about aiming when you are applying. I’m talking about kids with full rides to Harvard and Williams and MIT being counseled by their friends and family and teachers that maybe they shouldn’t go there, maybe they should think about the local state school because it’s far from home or it’ll be too strange or a million things that are really versions of “it’s too ambitious for a kid like you. There’s no way you’re really good enough to make it at a place like that”. This happens EVERY YEAR.
Absolutely kids deserve an honest assessment and honest information–but too many get a paranoid narrative from anxious adults who have little faith in their kids and who believe playing it safe comes before every other consideration. I have kids who love computer science but major in biomedical engineering because they think it’s the safer choice–that any marginal improvement in starting salary or makes it a moral imperative that they take the “safer” choice.
Kids are constantly bombarded with messages that they shouldn’t try, that they aren’t good enough, that if a field is at all competitive, they are better off to stay out of it. They are bombarded with messages that if they fail even a little, it’s all over, they will live a life of poverty and want.
People shouldn’t be told to blindly follow their first, impulsive answer to the question “what do you want to be when you grow up?”, but I really don’t think that very many are. As a teacher, the bigger problem that I see are kids who think they have no choices and are afraid to follow any dream at all.
I’ve seen that happen with our daughter - who wants to go out East. “Its so far away” she’s told by counselors, teachers, etc. “Its so expensive” (we have it paid for, that isn’t a worry for her). “You won’t know anyone” - that’s part of the point. So I’m not sure if what you are seeing is necessarily completely class based - I think its that so many people are so tied to their little familiar world and are afraid of risks that they have a knee jerk reaction to anyone else taking them. Around here, that is “smart kids go to the University of Minnesota - or maybe Madison - and a few go to local private colleges. Other kids end up in the State College system” - when someone breaks those expectations, they get uncomfortable - they start questioning their own choices and the advice they’ve given others. Although, I agree that when the someone else taking the risk is also someone whose socio-economic or racial class adds to the incongruity of taking the risk, it adds to the discomfort.
I don’t think it’s all class based, though I do think it’s more extreme for kids that don’t seem like “the college type”. But that just makes my point–even kids with the incredibly modest ambition of going to school out of state get a steady stream of people telling them that it’s not practical/too risky. So I’m pretty sure that people who aim to run off to California and be in movies, or quit school to write the great American novel, or major in Modern Dance all get plenty of people telling them that it’s a bad idea. I don’t think that when someone has to close down the restaurant they poured their life savings and youth into, they often turn to their spouse and say “why did no one TELL ME that the stats for new restaurants are terrible?”.
Agreed. A ton of people take risks that don’t work out, and some of those people weren’t just unlucky but made really bad choices.
But I think it’s even more common for people not to take even reasonable, healthy risks because there can be a lot of pressure not to.
Often the advice of the type you mention is well-meaning, though. Statistically, people who head off to Hollywood with stars in their eyes or rent a lakeside cabin in New England to write The Great American Novel or whatever won’t succeed (at least to the extent they think they will). Statistically, I’d imagine someone going to university will finish their degree,
And depending on what sort of restaurant the person was running, people might be saying exactly that. A trendy eatery selling deconstructed lattes, vegetarian burgers and salad smoothies might not be a huge success in a rural, conservative area, for example.
Of course it’s well-meaning. It may even be correct. My point is just that people worry that our culture encourages people to “follow their dreams” too much are worrying about the wrong thing: there’s some superficial language about that, but the forces of “Play it safe. Don’t think you’re special. Keep your head down” are firmly in control of most people’s worldview.
Perhaps because it’s true for the most part?
Well, it’s true except when it’s not. There’s tons of people out there that don’t follow moderate, reasonable dreams–like going to college out of state, trying out for a community play, training for a marathon, applying for a promotion they aren’t quite qualified for, speaking up at a meeting when they disagree with the person in charge. That’s the collateral damage we accept because we fear that if we didn’t have a culture with a pretty low risk tolerance, we’d have too many people running off to join the circus. I don’t know if it’s worth the cost, honestly, and I do think we’d be better off if we could find a way to encourage more measured risk taking. There’s a lot of lost potential from people too scared to risk.