The transition from college to adulthood might be the hardest one we make in our whole lives. After we spend twenty years learning how to get good grades, we go into a workforce where those skills are largely irrelevant.
In fact, the skill that is most important in adulthood is self-knowledge—knowing what you like, what you need, and how you make decisions based on that information. Self-knowledge is hard, though. Even for someone who’s been in the work world for decades.
To make matters worse, Dan Ariely, behavioral economist at MIT and the author of the book Predictably Irrational, finds that we are pretty bad at making decisions based on what we want, and we are easily influenced by extraneous issues. So here are some mental potholes to look out for when you’re steering your own path.
1. Taking action is more important than taking correct action.
I’ve written before about how the soul search is not a good thing for a job hunt. This is because when we are job hunting and we perceive that everything is available, it’s nearly impossible to make a decision. So we don’t. We tell ourselves we’re figuring things out, but really, when presented with tons of choices, our preference is to do nothing:
Ariely describes a study someone did about buying jam in a chic-chic grocery store. Researchers gave free samples of twenty-four jams one day, but only six samples the next day. More people took samples with twenty-four jams to choose from than when given samples of only six. But when researchers gave people a coupons for buying jam in the store, 3% of the people bought jam on a day there were twenty-four jam samples, but 30% of people bought jams on a day there were six samples. “It’s just sugar and fruit,” says Ariely, “but twenty-four jams is just too much to choose from.”
In a job search, if you tell yourself you have a gazillion choices, you do yourself a disservice. Instead, force yourself to just take a job, any job. Because after a week or so on the job, you learn to naturally limit what you would consider next—you see things you don’t like about your current job and you say I’ll never do this again. So the best way to zero-in on what you want to do is to force yourself to do something—to do anything.
And if you are reticent to take this advice, pretend you’re at the jam counter, and you should arbitrarily knock 18 jars on the floor.
2. The worst time to go to graduate school is when you don’t know what you want to do.
One of the biggest problems with grad school is that people graduate into the work world, which is an open, undefined road. It’s scary to see that you will probably go through your twenties having no idea what you’re doing and trying a lot of stuff.
The worst time to go to graduate school is when you are facing this problem of feeling lost, because the confused feeling of going through emerging adulthood makes you very likely to instead take what used to be a default course for life after college: Law school, business school, getting a PhD.
Ariely found that if you are confused but you have a default choice, you’ll take it. He makes this point by showing the rate of organ donation among people in various countries. At first blush, the chart makes no sense. Less than 10% in Germany and nearly 100% in Austria, for example. Or about 20% in Denmark and nearly 100% in Sweden. These are culturally similar countries with drastically different donation rates.
It turns out that it depends on the form that people got about organ donation. In countries where you have to opt out of donation, there is nearly 100% donation rate. In countries where you have to opt in, there is typically less than 10% donation rate.
The tendency to choose the default option is not because people don’t care about organ donation. In fact, they care so much—because it deals with their own death and also with ethics—that they don’t want to think about it. Ariely says that if there is a difficult decision and a default option, people go with the default.
So back to grad school. When your parents were graduating, grad school might have been a safe choice, but today, it’s actually a really risky path. This makes it even more dangerous that people have a proclivity to choose grad school because we naturally look for a default in the face of confusion. To make a good decision about graduate school, do it when you are feeling safe, focused, and certain about what is right for you in life.
3. Take pride in making bad career moves.
The truth is that even when we think we have a good understanding of our preferences, we totally overestimate our ability to control our lives in relation to our preferences.
So now it makes sense that most of us have made terrible career decisions. It also makes sense that people who have not made some terrible decisions are not living, not trying to find what’s best. The only way to have a perfect, straight and narrow path is to not open yourself up to your own irrational decision-making process. And if you are not making decisions for yourself, then what are you doing in this life?
So today, let’s celebrate all the times we went down the wrong path. That’s our nature. That’s how we know we’re really guiding our own careers.
译文:
大学毕业做决定的秘密
从大学到成人的转变也许是我们一生中所做的最困难的转变之一。我们读了二十年的书，学会怎样去取得好成绩的能力，而这些能力在我们转变为劳动力后却用处不大。
事实上，成人期最重要的能力是有自之明，知道自己喜欢什么，需要什么，从自知的基础上怎样去做决定。然而，要有自知之明是困难的。即便对于那些在职场上打拼数十年的人来说也如此。
更糟糕的是，丹 爱瑞斯，麻省理工学院经济行为学者和Predictably Irrational一书的作者丹·爱瑞斯发现，我们不擅长根据我们的需要来做决定，并且会很容易就会被外部因素所影响。当你掌舵你人生道路时，你应该留意以下的精神沼泽。
1.行动比做采取正确行动更加重要。
我以前写过有关于为什么以自己的喜好来找工作为说不是件好事。这是因为当我们在找工作的时候，我们会认为我们什么都可以做，因此，很难做决定。所以我们不会这样，我们会跟自己说我们在努力寻找答案，但是，当我们面临无数选择时，我们的个人爱好就对我们的选择毫无帮助：
爱瑞斯描述一个别人对于在杂货店里顾客买果酱选择的研究报告。研究员第一天提供24种免费果酱样品，但第二天只提供6种。与只提供6种样品比，更多人在提供24种样品那天尝试果酱。但是当研究员在商店里给顾客优惠券时，只有3%的人在提供24种样品的那天购买果酱，而却有30%的人在提供6种样品那天购买果酱。“这只是糖各水果，”爱瑞斯说，“但是24种果酱对于顾客来说是太多的选择。”
找工作时，当你告诉自己会有很多选择时，这对你来说一点帮助都没有。这还不如强迫你自己去做任何一份工作，什么都可以。因为在你工作一周左右的时候，你就会自然地有限制你的选择――你会看到你工作当中你不喜欢的东西，而且你会决定以后不再干这一行。所以，想让自己知道自己想做什么的最好办法就是强迫自己去做点事，什么事都可以。
如果你不愿意接受这个建议，你可以想象自己在果酱柜台前，任意地把其它18种果酱推翻到地上。
2.最糟糕的是，当你不知道你要什么的时，选择了上大学。
上大学最大一个问题是，人们从此开始他们的工作生涯，这是一条未知的道路。
最可怕的是，当你快要走完你的二十岁时，你对你正在做的事一无所知，而且继续做一大堆其它的事。当你迷茫的时候，这是你上大学的最坏的时间，因为在你成人期里所出现的迷茫情绪很可能地会让你在大学毕业后不去上默认课程：法学院，商业学院，获得博士学位。
爱瑞斯发现，如果你迷茫便你已经做了一个未履行的选择时，你就会接受它。他通过在不同国家的人们的器官捐赠率来说明这点。一开始大家都不羞愧，这个活动就没有意义。比果说，在德国有10%的人，在奥地利则是100%。在丹麦有20%，在瑞士出乎100%。这些都是文化背景相似的国家，却有迥然不同的捐赠率。
结果表明捐赠率取决于人们传播器官捐赠形式。在一些你必须要脱离捐赠系统的国家里，有几乎100%的捐赠率。而在一些你必须加入捐赠系统的国家里，一般只有小于10%的捐赠率。
这个默认选择的趋势不是因为人们不关心器官捐赠。事实上，他们是相当关心的――因为这涉及到他们的死亡和道德规范――这是他们不想去想的。爱瑞斯说如果有一个很困难的决定和一个默认的选项，人们一般都会选择默认的。
回到大学的话题。当你的父母毕业时，大学可能会是个安全的选择，但今天，这却是一个相当冒险的道路。更危险的是人们有会趋于选择大学业，这是因为我们的惰性驱使我们在困惑面前会选择一种默认的行为。做一个是否要上大学的决定时，最好是在一个你认为安全，专注的时间里，并且清楚在你人生中什么对你有帮助。
3.为做糟糕的职业行为自豪。
事实是，尽管当我们认为自己很了解自己的喜好，我们完全会高估自己的掌控人生的能力。
所以，我们现在明白大部分人都会做糟糕的职业抉择。我们也明白，那些没有做糟糕决定的人没有活着，没有试图去找最好的。通向那完美，平坦的职场的唯一方法是不要去做一些不理性的决定。如果你不为自己做决定，那你一生中要做些什么？
所以，今天，让我们为走错的路庆祝。这是我们的本性。也是指引我们职业的原因。