How to Choose a Profession Without Regretting It 20 Years Later

AVAlexander Volchek

And this is imposed on them, including by society. It's imposed on them by other people, by YouTube videos. Just look at YouTube videos. Look, for goodness' sake—there are so many videos, and they talk about it everywhere. The problem is that when I was supposedly choosing my life's work, going to university to become a programmer, nobody told me my life was long and had a huge number of stages ahead. There are things you can't predict. You simply can't.

AVAnna Volchek

There's a very popular piece of advice: follow your dream. For example, a young person is deciding where to apply or what direction to choose. Should they perform in the theater, become an actor, or go to a university to study computer science? They're agonizing over a choice between what seem like two diametrically opposed paths. They're struggling, and someone tells them, “Just follow your dream. Follow what your heart tells you—”

AVAlexander Volchek

What do I think about that?

AVAnna Volchek

“What is your dream?” What lies behind this “follow your dream”? Is there really something to it when you make a decision based on a dream, knowing that you're putting rational reasons and judgments in the background? Because becoming, for example, a successful—

AVAlexander Volchek

I'll answer.

AVAnna Volchek

—programmer with a good grasp of the work seems easier.

AVAlexander Volchek

If someone says, “Follow your dream,” that's an abstraction. I would under no circumstances support advice in precisely that form: “Follow your dream.” But if you want to really work out which professional decision to choose and make, start examining it. One of the fundamental ways to move forward, find opportunities for something truly worthwhile to do, understand what to pursue and explore, and bring yourself closer to it is this: consider your professional activity not only in terms of tomorrow, not in terms of a week, not as a spontaneous decision, not as a dream, but with the following understanding. Your professional activity and professional development will continue throughout your life. I'm forty-two. Well, when this video comes out, I may already be forty-two, or perhaps still forty-one, right near the end—forty-one, with a couple of weeks to go, and so on. I'm forty-two; I turned forty-two on March fifteenth, or I will. Most likely, I already have. I graduated from university twenty years ago. I started working a little earlier: I began working as a programmer while I was at university.

I'm very clear that I've changed a great many things since then. I've already had many different lives; many lives have come and gone. I'm very clear, very clear, that I have at least one more enormous stretch of professional life ahead of me: at least twenty years. And seriously, if we're being serious, most likely I have more. Perhaps thirty or forty years, until I die. Until I die. I'm hardly considering anything after eighty, but even if we take eighty as the limit, that's another two stretches of twenty years. In these twenty years, I've already lived an enormous number of different lives. The problem is that when I was supposedly choosing my life's work, going to university to become a programmer, nobody told me my life was long and had a huge number of stages ahead. I wasn't building a professional life strategy based on anything—anything at all. I wasn't building a professional strategy at all. I had no point of support. Now I do have a point of support for my professional activity.

It adapts and changes, but I have a point of support for my life strategy. I don't consider some little venture in isolation from my overall strategy, from the foundation for my whole, larger life. So when someone is told, “Follow your dream,” that's an abstraction and an illusion. You also need to understand the realities. Sometimes a person follows their dream and destroys their family in the process. Tell me now—let's invent some dream. Tell me, “Follow your dream.” I'll say, “No problem.” All six of us get together and move to live in some other country where—

—my dream is. But it isn't my children's dream or my wife's dream. They have something completely different in mind. That's why I also proceed from practical considerations. If someone has finished school and is deciding where to apply, or has finished university, they need, on the one hand, to look at things rationally: what opportunities there are, what the strategy is, what will happen if they take one action or another. Understand that there are many things you can't predict. Twenty years ago, living in Belarus, there was no way I could have predicted I'd be living in California, in the United States, under these circumstances, with this professional life. It isn't even just about where I'd live, but what I'd do professionally, what I'd live through, what I'd achieve. I have many different achievements. What was my dream? Twenty years ago, when I saw someone in a video wearing a Rolls-Royce watch, I thought some Americans in Hollywood wore Rolls-Royce watches.

AVAnna Volchek

Rolex.

AVAlexander Volchek

Oh, Rolex watches. Why did I say Rolls-Royce? I just remembered my Rolls-Royce. Look, I bought myself a Rolls-Royce. I personally bought myself a Rolls-Royce twelve years ago. That's more than half of the twenty years that have passed since I graduated from university. I don't have a Rolls-Royce now. But I don't know—maybe in ten years I'll have fifteen Rolls-Royces, or maybe I won't have any. There are things you can't predict. You simply can't. There are dreams, for example. Someone says, “All my life, I've felt I need to do this.” Fit it into your range of different intentions. Most importantly, look at whether you could do this and do that at the same time, and do something else alongside it too.

AVAnna Volchek

Should someone trust that feeling, if they have it?

AVAlexander Volchek

You don't need to deny it, and you don't need to—you don't need to ruin yourself over it. For example, I recently started learning to play the piano. All my life, I'd thought piano was for certain people, as if I weren't capable of it and couldn't do it. But I'd always wanted to, just as you said recently: “I'd love to play like that.” Right? You said a couple of days ago that you'd love to learn.

AVAnna Volchek

I envy you when I see you learning.

AVAlexander Volchek

Exactly! I couldn't even allow myself to start playing because I thought it was an enormous amount of work, something you had to devote yourself to completely. Time passed, and I started playing a little. Obviously, I started learning things and doing things. But even what I'm doing now, Anya, used to be completely out of reach for me. I couldn't imagine it. It turned out not to be such an extraordinarily difficult thing—not a difficult thing. All I needed was three months of certain lessons. Of course, I practice every day and so on. But, Anya, it's not as though I had to move to Tibet or spend eighteen years studying at a conservatory. For some things, even just to recognize and feel this—I don't know, perhaps I'll play for the next forty years. Maybe I'll become a great composer, maybe I'll perform, maybe I'll give concerts, maybe I'll teach people, maybe I'll open my own piano and music schools.

AVAnna Volchek

By the way, this piano topic is interesting. I thought it would be good to discuss whether there are foundations for professional activity that absolutely have to be laid in childhood.

AVAlexander Volchek

What you're talking about also relates to finding your own line of work. Someone says, “If I have analytical abilities, maybe I should become an analyst? If I like drawing, maybe I should go into design? If I like cutting meat at home, maybe I should become a doctor?” Some kind of—some kind of—

AVAnna Volchek

I was actually thinking of a chef, and you thought of a doctor. Here—

AVAlexander Volchek

Yes, a chef, for example. You remember that I liked cooking as a child. My parents and friends would come over and say, “Sasha, maybe you should apply…” It was a joke in Belarus: where would you study cooking in Belarus? To cook in a cafeteria or what? Back then, there weren't even cool, fashionable restaurants like there are now. Minsk has everything now, by the way: trendy restaurants, anything you like. But none of that existed then. What did it mean to go and study cooking? Now there are all kinds of courses teaching cool, fashionable things, even online. Skillbox has lots of trendy online courses. Go and study. The quality is quite good—really good. There are many different programs, and specialized universities too. I remember, Anya, you won't believe it, people saying there were schools in France. I was fourteen or fifteen. Remember when I made medovik, that honey cake? I cooked a lot. And I used to look at you all the time and think, “How can someone never cook anything?” You didn't cook at all. How could you do nothing?

Then you got married, and wow, you started cooking everything. People tell me, “She's become a homebody. She's started cooking.” But in what sense did you become a homebody? You've been working even more since then, expanding your range even further. You simply developed an interest in doing it. Does that mean I need to go into food professionally? I've been involved with food all my life since then. I cook for my family and friends. You know that if twenty people come to visit, I'm happy to put on a meal for twenty. For me, for me, putting on a meal for twenty people is like the two of us having coffee. A very, very difficult task. Oh, a very easy task. You know what I was thinking about? Hiking. Going on a hike, walking ten kilometers—of course I can easily walk those ten kilo—

Kilometers. Of course I can easily walk ten kilometers. We've just walked more than that here. But cooking for two people—could I cook for twenty instead? It's easy! It's an easy thing to do. Does that mean I need to go to culinary school? It doesn't mean anything of the sort. I haven't excluded this activity, this creativity, from my life. Could I open a restaurant? I could. A friend of mine, Anya's husband, Lyosha, and I once talked about how, if we're living in California in the United States, we could retire, open a restaurant, and call it Alex. We had a good laugh about it. His name is Lyosha, and mine is Alexander, right? Here, either of us can be called Alex. We said, “We'll open Alex. He'll cook his cuisine, and I'll cook mine, and we'll have a great time working as chefs in the restaurant. We'll have our own restaurant, our own cafe, set up our own business.” Well, maybe. I don't want to do that now. Of course I don't; it doesn't interest me. I like big projects, large-scale things, and so on. But I can honestly tell you that if life put me in a position tomorrow where I had to set up my own restaurant, I would try to take absolute pleasure in it.

I don't see any problem with that, by the way. But there are things you can't imagine. We've imagined cooking—by the way, how does cooking fit with programming? Or with managing various projects? If we can imagine cooking, how do we imagine things like piano, visual art, music, culture? How do we imagine that at all? It's as if it doesn't… How do I relate to that? Or if boys like playing war as children, does that mean they all have to get into a tank or go to military school? That's a crazy way of linking unrelated things. There are all kinds of side effects from what you do, and the question is whether you're aware of what you're doing, what it will—look at what's happening.

UPUnidentified participant

Absolutely fantastic.

AVAlexander Volchek

What consequences will it have, and what chain of different events will unfold from it?