There is a well-known problem facing parents and children that at first seems quite unlike this one, but upon closer examination is really just a different version of it. It is the problem of what to do with your life.
Your child asks you, “What do you want me to be when I grow up?”
You have two choices. One is to tell them the truth, which is that you have no idea, because you haven’t done enough work yet to know who you are. The other is to give them a confident answer, which is either a lie or a premature decision.
We tend not to think of it as a dilemma, because we know instinctively why we want our children to avoid the obvious mistake of following an uninformed early decision too blindly. But here we face the same problem in miniature, for ourselves. If I don’t know what I’m doing with my life, how can I know whether working on something will be moving forward or moving backward?
The answer is that I probably can’t know that in advance. That doesn’t mean that decisions are worthless; on the contrary, it means they are indispensable! If I hadn’t decided to do physics at all rather than something else, I would never have become a physicist.
I knew what I wanted to do when I grew up. I wanted to be an accountant.
I don’t think any of my friends had considered the same career. But it seemed obvious to me.
The idea was presented to me by my eighth grade math teacher. What are the three most important characteristics for a person? she asked us one day. I raised my hand, answered without hesitation, and sat down to listen as she agreed with me.
She said most people at least think about this question at some point in their lives, if not frequently. If you have thought about these characteristics, what is your opinion on the subject? How would you rank them?
My opinion is that integrity is most important, honesty is second, and compassion follows after that, I said. She agreed with me again.
After class she came up to me and told me that she had something important to ask me, said that she would later tell me what it was but that first I should write down the three characteristics of a good person, which is what she was asking me to do now.
There’s no way I could have known what was coming next. It turned out that her son was applying for jobs and one of the companies he wanted to work at required
When I was a child, people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I always gave the same answer: “happy.” But I didn’t really know what grown-up happiness looked like.
If you were to ask me today, in my early twenties, I would give a different answer: “I want to be an accountant when I grow up.” This is not because accounting has replaced happiness in my values system, but rather the opposite. My values have changed over time, but accounting has stayed constant.
The question that a young person should ask isn’t “What do you want to be?” but rather “What kind of person do you want to be?” And one of the most important parts of this question is what counts as success for you? What is your vision of your future self?
What does an accountant look like? A decade ago, it looked like a man sitting behind a desk with a calculator and a green eyeshade. Today, it looks more like someone typing numbers into a computer. But whatever it looks like, that’s what an accountant looks like. If your vision of your future self is that of an accountant, then learning how to do accounting will help you achieve that vision.
We are apt to think of the young as the future, but the young are also the present. We are all young once. Some of us grow up to be old people, but not all of us. Some of us never outgrow childhood. Some of us never stop being children.
Older people have more experience, they have seen more things fail, and they have seen more examples of successful strategies. But older people think more about what they do not yet have than what they have already done. The young think about what they will do next. Older people are cautious; younger people are bold.
The most interesting person I know is a little boy named Isaac Newton Vasco da Gama Alvarez-Yáñez Beavertonia von Humboldt III. He is my nephew, and he lives in Brazil, so I don’t get to see him very often, but when I first meet someone new I often find myself thinking: “You should meet Isaac Newton.” This is not because he can solve differential equations or speak Portuguese (although he can); it is because he knows what he wants and does whatever it takes to get it.
It was a question I had to answer in fifth grade, and I have been answering it ever since. What I wanted to be when I grew up turned out not to be what I wanted to do for a living. My first job was washing dishes in a restaurant, and that did not work out because my boss was a tyrant. After that, I could think of nothing that seemed better than being an accountant.
In the particular firm where I took the job, there was no training program or curriculum. The only person who knew anything about accounting was the office manager, and she couldn’t teach me because she didn’t know any more than I did. So she taught me how to file instead. There were no clients yet; the firm wasn’t even officially open for business. But we already had a lot of filing to do, so it wasn’t a bad place to start.
I worked for this new firm for about six months without getting paid anything at all. In fact, they ran out of money just as I arrived, so they couldn’t pay any of their bills either.* It took them another couple of months to get established enough that they could start paying a few of us a nickel a week plus mileage.
When I was in high school I wanted to be an accountant. The only other choices were doctor and lawyer, which didn’t fit my personality.
I liked math, but I liked numbers even more. As I explained to my father, the exciting thing about math is that once you know the rules it’s all about what numbers you choose; there’s no mystery in 2+2=4. But with money you get to decide the rules. That’s where all the fun is!
Accounting seemed like a profession where you could apply your math skills but still have lots of room to make decisions about how to apply them. Instead of doing whatever some teacher or textbook told me I would get to make up my own rules for how to account for things. And when I made a mistake, even if it was a stupid mistake, it would be my own mistake and not some teacher’s.
I was sitting at a table with a group of Princeton undergraduates who were considering careers in business. One of the students, a varsity squash player, asked me what I thought he should do. I said that if he wanted to make lots of money, the most direct way would be to become an accountant.
“But I hate math,” he said.
“True,” I replied. “But you don’t have to use calculus. There are plenty of jobs that just require you to know how to add and subtract.”
“What’s the pay like?”
“It’s great if you’re good at it. The highest-paid people in America are all accountants.”
“Really?”
“Absolutely. Trust me.”
That was probably my first time using this phrase, though certainly not my last. “Trust me” is what you say when you are about to tell someone something they don’t know but are predisposed not to believe. It is the most useful phrase in teaching and sales, both of which are most effective when they are invisible. If you can get someone to believe something simply because you said it was true, then they will continue believing it on their own for years if not forever after.