Our generation is facing a major crisis in deciding what to do with the lemons that life throws at them. We grew up being told to aim high, study hard, graduate (irrespective of the course you do, just make sure you graduate).
We were raised to believe that lawyers, doctors, engineers and many other professionals are the only people that make it big in life. Becoming a teacher, a carpenter, a mechanic or a farmer was for the underprivileged children who probably didn’t make it through school.
We were mentored to believe that education is everything. Passing exams and moving to the next level was the determinant of success. It didn’t matter what we studied or how it fed into who we really are as individuals.
However, as much as the education we were given put us in better places, it wasn’t everything. Despite our hard work at school and our hard-earned degrees, we still feel like there is more to life than good grades and fancy professions.
Present times have seen doctors give up on their jobs to go pursue farming or become runway models. Bank managers have given up their 7-figure salary to start a bakery shop. And these are just a few of the individuals who have discovered their true calling in life and taken the next step to live the life that makes them happy.
Majority of us are not happy with sitting behind that desk every day. We are not content with waking up to send emails on behalf of a multinational organisation. It does not drive us to wait for instructions from our managers on how to execute the next task. We are not comfortable with the places life has put us in, but we don’t know what to do about it.
We are still hustling with self-discovery. It is easy for us to identify what we don’t want and what is not working for us, but we continuously fail to find a way out. We don’t know who we really are or what they can do to bring the best out of what God intended us to be.
We want to be artists, chefs, fashion icons and much more but we are too afraid to step out of the circle and be different. Our decisions are based on a “what will other people say?” mindset. We cannot stand being judged and mocked by the society that bore and grew us. The same society that has given birth to success stories of individuals who stood out and did something they are passionate about, something different.
We want to be teachers but it’s a low-profile job so we shun from it. We want to be mechanics and it’s for those who didn’t finish school. We want to be deejays, but our relatives won’t be proud. The hustles of self-discovery… Knowing what we need to be happy healthy individuals but unable to pursue them because of what could go wrong or what society would say.
My opinion;
Empower your children to be who they really want to be when they grow up despite how “low profile” a job may be. Our education system still focuses on structures that do not allow our minds to explore beyond what is being offered in the classroom.
We grew up with the belief that white-collar jobs are the only means of survival in life. But not everyone is born to be an employee or spend 8 hours in an office working for a month’s pay check.
We need to teach our children that they can grow up to be instrumentalists and make more money than the CEO of X Bank. That you can bake cakes and be happier than a lawyer. That you can become a football player and have a stronger sense of fulfilment than an engineer.
We need to help them discover their God given talents and support them to build their passions and ideas. Expose them to all the options life has to offer and let them discover who they are meant to be.
We need to observe who we are, listen to life, define ourselves outside our professional assignments and ask ourselves the serious questions; who are you when you’re not buried under work papers in an office?
Arnold Schwarzenegger once said, “Ask yourself, who do you want to be? Figure out for yourself what makes you happy, no matter how crazy it may sound to other people.”
*Catch the second series of this article in our next issue*
Mildred Nanteza
Assistant Treasurer 2018/19 – Rotaract Bukoto
Industrial Psychologist
Tax Consultant - KPMG
