What do I do if no cool career seems interesting?
Actually, finding no cool career interesting is very common. Only about five percent of people have one career that they're absolutely orgasmic about. Somebody who wants to be a pianist or a computer game designer or a comedy guy at the Improv. For most people, they're kind of interested in a lot of things but no one thing stands out. That's okay. If I filled this room with a hundred people who were ecstatic about their career, most of them would not know up front that they were ecstatic, that they'd be ecstatic about their career. They have to get into it for a while. And what makes them ecstatic about the career is that they decided to become a master at it. They got a boss that treated them well. They got paid reasonably. The commute was reasonable. They had reasonable time off. I'll tell you a story. There was this guy, graduated from Michigan State and, like so many millions of people, had no idea what the heck he wanted to do with his life. Well, so he was living on his parents sofa and not knowing what the hell to do, and one day his friend said, "Hey man, I got this job at Navistar. They make these harvesters and things like that. And, see, I think there's a job on the floor". So the guy says, "Well, I need to make some money, you know, I want to take my girlfriend out, I have no money, alright I'll go in." So he goes down and he gets a job on the factory floor of Navistar making tractors. Making one little part of tractors; the dashboard, the foam dashboards. What could be more boring. Nobody in the world has ever thought of this as a cool career. And yet because he was a Michigan State graduate, he was a smart guy, more so than the typical person who was on the factory floor, so he learned very quickly. And he was a curious enough guy, he started to ask questions of the real experts who knew about the foam extrusions and which adhesives work on the plastic that goes over the foam and all this other stuff, and little by little, he became the go-to guy about dashboards in tractors. And he got promoted. And he got to help design, help improve the process by which they were going to do dashboards, and you know what? Before very long he became passionate about dashboards.
