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Don't live life as an algorithm
No master plan
One biotech CEO never laid out a step-by-step plan. As a kid, he dressed up as a cop for Halloween every year, not as a biotech CEO, and he got into biotech out of necessity.
Finding where you belong
The advice is to find the schools, organizations, and teams where you feel you belong, because of the principles, ideals, values, quality, character, and chemistry, all those almost intangibles. Countless institutions in America can educate you. The question is where you will fit, be happy, and thrive while studying things you enjoy.
In hindsight
He got a bachelor's in foreign service with a major in international economics. In hindsight he probably should have majored in history, which he liked a lot better, but part of him was thinking too far forward and trying to plot that algorithm. Opportunities and very difficult challenges show up that you have to step into, which is why the foundation matters.
Why are people bad at predicting their future?
Psychologists Daniel Gilbert and Timothy Wilson call it the impact bias: people overestimate how intensely and how long future events will affect them. In a 1998 study led by Gilbert, assistant professors who were denied tenure were not as unhappy a few years later as they had predicted. People adapt to setbacks and successes faster than they expect.
Does a more selective college pay off?
A 2002 study in the Quarterly Journal of Economics by Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger compared students admitted to selective schools who attended less selective ones with those who attended selective ones. Their later earnings were about the same. A follow-up by the same authors found larger gains from selective schools for students from disadvantaged backgrounds.
How do careers actually unfold?
Stanford counseling psychologist John Krumboltz and colleagues proposed in 1999 that chance events shape most careers and that people do best when they stay curious and act on unplanned opportunities. They called the idea planned happenstance. The paper appeared in the Journal of Counseling and Development.
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