Learning The Importance of What You’re Doing Right Now
Life is busy and you have goals, I get it. It may seem like you’re too busy preparing for what’s next, that what you are doing right now is either unenjoyable or just not what you want to be doing. I understand, getting college/job/internship applications together isn’t fun. Studying for the SAT/ACT/GRE/MCAT/whatever isn’t fun either. I’ve been there and I get it.
Throughout my college career, I have had no idea what I wanted to do or who I wanted to be. Every single semester, up until this past spring, I have changed my career plan. (Seriously, I’ve changed my career path from med school to business to nursing to teaching to law back to teaching to non-profit work and now to public health.) And everytime, up until now, I’ve never really enjoyed the plan I had made for my future career AND the work that had to be done right now. It wasn’t until I changed my major (for the third time) to Women’s Studies, and found a way to combine my passions into a career, public health, that I could actually understand the importance of what I was doing right now. Thankfully, I finally love my course and I am looking forward to continuing my education in graduate school. I am mostly loving every step of the way, too — except for the GREs. Mainly, because I know that what I’m doing right now is better than any long-term plan I can make up.
A friend of mine, who is a lot wiser than most their age, would always say something along the lines of “if it’s not preparing you for your next step, don’t do it”. This was something I never could just understand. It didn’t click for me until I realized that they, unlike I, were planning their every move to make sure that it placed them one step closer to their end goal. They, unlike I, were not just planning for the future long-term, but also making short-term, manageable goals for themselves with what they were doing in the meantime.
I write this to say, don't be silly like me and get so caught up in the long-term that you end up running in circles. Do exactly what you can right now, with your long-term goal in mind, and don’t be afraid to make an unconventional move. Find what you love to do right now so that the journey will be worthwhile. Stop doing things, working jobs, and hanging with people that aren’t helping you get to where you want to be. Take your future by the reigns, pull it tight, and steer right into the direction that you want to be in on the path that you want to be on.
