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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]As a child I remember being told many times by my parents to pursue my passion, with all the implications that if I did so then everything would fall into place and I'd have a successful life. This was a common mantra among the boomer generation, and for someone like my father it was very easy to say, as he had a clear passion for a certain field and and he worked extremely hard at it. His hard work was second nature to him and one that must have been effortless as he genuinely loved his field. He did achieve quite a bit of success, which allowed him to provide very well for his family and we had the comfortable upper middle class life of the 1980s-1990s with private schools, a nice house, European vacations, Volvo station wagons and elite colleges for the kids. It allowed my mother, when she decided she wanted to go back to work, to be a history teacher at a nice girls' private school where her income was secondary to the point of having something to do that she enjoyed, and admittedly was very good at. And my parents now have an extremely comfortable retirement.

But there are two problems. The first is that not everyone has a clear passion or the drive to succeed in it, and not every passion pays well. I received a superb education but I never really had any strong calling to a particular occupation or profession. I more or less drifted through college without a purpose, majored in a soft liberal arts subject, and then found myself wondering what to do, and because I just didn't know, I randomly fell into a graduate program in a field that was mildly interesting but without a real clue as what I'd do afterwards. For my parents, it almost didn't matter as long as I was getting a good education at good schools, and they continued to assume everything would fall into place.

In my second year of the grad program, I started to panic as the reality of the future hit me. I was going to have to get a job. And live. And the salaries of the industry the program was training me for was not... great. I started looking much more closely at the long term outcome of the program's graduates, even in mid career 20 years later they were not living the lifestyle I'd grown up. Meanwhile, around me I was watching friends coming out of professional schools or MBA programs walking into six figure salaries, and wondering why I hadn't done the same. I was just as intelligent, yet somehow I'd missed figuring out what they'd clearly long realized.

I ultimately lucked out because I took the old fashioned way to success. I married well. But I still occasionally wonder what life would be like if I hadn't. And I still do wish my parents had been much more proactive in sitting down with me over the years and being frank about career choices and the tradeoffs you make rather than blithely assuming everything will work out as long as you do what you love. I will not make that mistake with my kids. 
[/quote]

How did you meet your husband? What do you do now?[/quote]

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