benzado

katespencer:

2. My parents also never pushed me to do anything else but what I was passionate about, and that’s had a huge impact on my life. Hopefully I won’t force my kid who wants to be an accountant to be a comedian.

Po Bronson interviewed over 900 people to assemble the stories in What Should I Do With My Life?, a book that makes no attempt to answer the question for you, but describes the experience of others who asked and sometimes found an answer themselves.

In part of the book he covers this idea, of the parent who pushes their kid to be something they’re not, and found that the opposite was far more often true. Many people he talked to wished their parents had offered more guidance, and parents’ insistence on doing whatever made them happy often left them feeling more lost.

As I struggle with the problem of how to spend my limited time and energy, that’s certainly been closer to my own experience.