on life building

This week I've been reading a lot of Elise Cripe's blog archives. This summer I read through from her 25th birthday (Feb 2010) to this year, but this week I took it back to the beginning - December of 2006, Elise's junior year at USC. I'm somewhere in the summer after her graduation now.

From the time she was a tiny kid to her senior year in college, Elise's life plan was to "work in a tall building and wear a suit." It took until senior year - and several deeply disappointing interviews & rejections - for Elise to see that maybe her passion wasn't in the tall building but in... making stuff. In her last semester of school she starts sharing her scrapbooking hobby in earnest, her passion that will turn into a small business that will carry her, through ups and downs, all the way to her current job: the creator of Get to Work Book, the author of Big Dreams Daily Joys, and maker of many other projects: make36 & Playbook Patterns the most recent. I love listening to and watching Elise make stuff, and I hope that one day I'm as cool as she is. 

My question today: what was your plan at the end of grade school or when you entered college? And how does it stack up to where you went and where you are? I'm endlessly curious to hear more stories about life building.

.......

Okay, after some thought, here is my real question: is the life-shaking shift when you enter the "Real World" inevitable? If we worked with students to identify their actual strengths and what they actually enjoy, instead of feeding them the occasional cold career survey and leaving them subject to the glitz and prestige of the idea of various careers - if we taught students the difference between hard work that feels hard but good and hard work because one isn't suited to it - if we stressed the okay-ness of branching out and taking that photography or web design or music class over having the valedictorian GPA - would it make a difference? Or does everyone just get to figure it out on their own timeline regardless?

I have a feeling that it is inevitable for my personality type: the planner for whom everything came easy up until the part where I got to choose the plan - and I assumed that the plan would keep working as well as it had, but didn't know how unprepared I was until I tried.