“Why did you choose to become a data scientist?”
My girlfriend was helping me prep for job interviews, and that was the first question she decided to throw at me. It was an easy, warm-up question.
Sadly, I didn’t have an answer.
The thing is, I never actually made a choice to become a data scientist. It just kind of happened.
I didn’t set aside time in college to figure out what career I wanted for myself. Instead, I did the career equivalent of rolling dice at the craps table, accepting whatever role I got.
I don’t think I’m alone here. In general, there’s just not much deliberation in our lives. The vast majority of the time, we just go through the motions, and that’s the case, even with the really important decisions in our life. For example, many of us live in our current cities, not because we did a rigorous cost-benefit analysis of the cities in America, but because we graduated nearby and just went with the flow.
Arguably the most important decision in our life is figuring out who we want to spend the rest of our lives with. Yet, just think about all the couples who are in unhappy relationships. Are these mismatched couples truly choosing to be with each other? More likely than not, they’re just going through the motions.
In an ideal world, all the important things in life are the result of deliberate choices that we’ve made for ourselves. And on the surface, this seems quite easy to do. Just do what’s best for you and be intentional about it!
Unfortunately, there are quite a few things that get in the way of that.
In my first job out of college, I was miserable. I worked long hours, didn’t like what I was doing, and wasn’t all that close to my co-workers. I wanted to quit, but given that this was my first job out of college, I was worried about the optics of being at a job for less than a year.
Basically, I was too busy running towards that 1-year finish line, that I didn’t give myself the time to stop and smell the steaming pile of shit that was my life at the time.
Figuring out whether or not I should quit my first job after college was the first real decision that I made in my life. I deliberated for weeks. I talked to friends, co-workers, and mentors.
I meditated.
I prayed.
And I quit my job.
I could tell you how awesome my life has been since then. Or I could talk about how that was the worst possible decision I could have made. But that’s not the point.
In life, we’re responsible for the effort that we put into our choices, not the outcomes of them. For me, that’s enough.