What will you do with your one wild and precious life? (Mary Oliver)

From Robert Fritz:

True, for the first ten or twelve years, children are asked, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" But the children's answers are usually discounted unless they happen to follow in the footsteps of one of their parents. Similarly, people often ask adolescents, "What do you want to do when you get out of school?"

Usually, even though that question is asked, the young people have had no educational experience of the creative process. From their vantage point, the game of life appears to involve choosing from among uninteresting alternative proposed by adults.

In the educational system, aptitude is often substituted for vision. For many people, their doing well on certain aptitude tests in secondary school was a great tragedy, because traditional guidance counseling helps students find out what they might be good at and helps them design careers around their aptitude.

Many people have mindlessly followed advice coming out of that mentality and become physicians, lawyers, engineers, accountants, nurses, and chemists, only to discover to their dismay, twenty or thirty years later, that they never really cared about what may now be the only field or profession they know. A major part of their life was spent developing what they happened to have an aptitude for at age fifteen.