Prepare for Failure in Your Early 20s
“There is no direction or set path after college,” says u / InvictaVox’s editorial editor on r / AskMen on aging . When you spend most of your life in school, finishing one grade a year, you get used to steady, progressive progress. You may be able to keep this feeling in your first job. But if you’re in your early 20s, if you’re one of those lucky ones who haven’t had a major setback yet, you’re probably heading for your first.
From the age of five or even earlier, you enter a long program with a roadmap broken down into years, semesters, and modules. Sometimes this roadmap has several options; if you go to college, you have many options. But you’re still on the rails.
The education system is built in such a way as to virtually guarantee progress for the majority of those in focused, including receipt, at least in college, if not in the desired college. (In the United States, this system is often broken, giving huge setbacks to children who deserve a better chance. The first lessons that come with these setbacks are not comforting.) The complete mercy of chance and timing.
While the plan for early adulthood is admirable, it is not a solution. This could be part of the problem. The solution is to be open to surprises, shock, and disappointment, and always remember that temporary failure is not permanent failure .
Your first job search may not produce anything remotely related to your desired career. If you do get a good job, you are likely to leave it on someone else’s terms as a result of being laid off or fired, and you may end up in a second job that is not at all like moving forward from the first. Perhaps you are still in internship at 23 , your skills are undervalued or irrelevant, now that your success is measured by how much money it makes for someone else, rather than actual benefits to the world.
If you are fortunate enough to receive financial support from your family, you will feel like a failure. If you’re unlucky, you’ll have to take on mediocre or terrible jobs that eat up the time you’d like to spend on a steady climb. And you will have to find new ways to get back on the right path or find a new path.
Even if things go well, you ruin everything. For example, I didn’t have a specific plan for the years after graduation, and then I was incredibly lucky. Even before I graduated, I landed a prominent position as Founding Editor of Valleywag, the now defunct part of the Gawker Media blogging network (which recently launched Lifehacker). By the end of the year, I was fired. I immediately got interviews with several companies interested in hiring a Valleywag guy, but I thought I could reach a great opportunity. I spent the next three years unemployed and freelance, quitting work when I got bored, always broke, borrowing money from friends and paying my rent late.
I accepted my early success as the next step in a steady climb and gave up anything that felt like a sideways movement or a step down. Success in school gave me a huge ego and self-esteem that set me back for years.
I hope you can avoid this if you know it will be difficult. The first failure will shock you, but the more you expect it, the better you will do. I’m not usually a fan of Late Bomb stories – Harrison Ford was a difficult actor and worked as a carpenter until 30 and so on – because they might teach the wrong lesson. But the lesson is that successful people were often very unsuccessful in the beginning. So when you hit a wall, be prepared to eat shit and don’t think that it means failure.
You will have to find your own way to learn this lesson. But I can offer one option: a series of science fiction novels. When I was 20, I wanted to have the Wizards trilogy , Harry Potter for Adults, which uses magic as a metaphor for adulthood. Gifted young magic users graduate from a secret university and then find that their skills are completely inadequate for the “real world.” They suddenly turned from students to adults, their authorities were helpless or disappeared. They face an imminent physical threat – they cannot cope with it. They are faced with the boredom of a privileged, hassle-free life in a normal world – they also cannot cope with it. But they make sacrifices; They grow; they learn to become adults. They find a path that suits them, even if it is not the path they wanted to go.