Profession Identifying Question

The one question that has helped me most in narrowing down future professions

I don’t claim to be any expert in careers. I’m far from it- I’m only in high school and I’m still searching for what I want to do later on in life and honestly I have no idea.

My parents and even even strangers I meet push me to think about what I want to do a lot, so I started to shadow some careers that I have thought about. I’ve shadowed cardiologists, micro biological researchers, teachers, nuclear scientists, astrophysicists, managers and administrative staff, the list goes on.

I’ve found that I tend to like somethings- I like doing micro bio research but I don’t like being a doctor even though their knowledge base is very similar. So I wondered why.

The big conclusion I came up with was this:

All careers aim to solve problems no matter how big or small. The main difference, other than what the problem is, is how long the solution will take.

Doctors solve very hard problems but their solutions are short and even timed. On the other hand, researchers drag their solutions out over months or years to solve equally difficult problems.

So when you are deciding what you want to do, I urge you to ask whether you want to solve problems over the course of hours, minutes, or months.