Jobs we dismiss are often the ones that shape us

We grow up imagining who we’ll become: a doctor, an engineer, a teacher, a writer. We picture a straight line from school to career, as if life moves neatly from one stage to the next. Spoiler: it doesn’t. Developmental psychologists have been saying for years that human growth is nonlinear, messy, and occasionally chaotic. In other words, life behaves exactly like a teenager’s bedroom.

It takes us down unexpected paths, through jobs we never planned, roles we never imagined, and experiences we didn’t think mattered. And yet those are the very things that shape us.

I remember sitting in my English class in high school. My teacher used to make us do hot seating after we finished reading Macbeth. Usually the confident students volunteered, the ones who practically lived with their hands in the air. I wasn’t weak or strong; I was somewhere in the middle, quietly hoping no one would notice me. But he did. He saw a spark I didn’t recognise in myself.