“Follow your dreams” is one of the first pieces of life advice most of us ever receive. We hear this mantra at every stage of adulthood: as young kids in elementary classrooms, as undergrads walking across campus, as new graduates preparing to enter the workforce, and even as full-time working professionals. We are taught that work exists to chase our passions, not just collect a paycheck. If you do what you love, we’re told, money and success will naturally follow. If you love what you do, you’ll never feel like you’re working a single day in your life.
What is the unspoken fine print attached to all this idealistic rhetoric? If you don’t land work centered around whatever you find most personally fulfilling, you are somehow a failure.
The truth is, you do not have to chase your early dreams to end up with a career you love. In fact, I would argue the opposite holds true. When it comes to building a career, “follow your dreams” is often terrible, even damaging advice. That is because most of us step into the working world with no real clue what our actual dreams even are. Instead, I believe a far wiser approach is to follow your opportunities.
A culture built around dream obsession
Most of us are convinced we already know what our dreams are, and many feel totally certain of their path. That is no surprise: Americans are raised on a steady, dream-heavy diet of cultural messaging from toddlerhood onward. Dreams are the cornerstone of our cultural identity, the core theme of fairy tales, superhero stories, and countless Disney and DreamWorks blockbusters.
This obsession does not stay confined to fiction and fantasy. Phrases like “I’m living the dream,” “It’s a dream come true,” “the person of my dreams,” and “beyond my wildest dreams” are woven into our everyday language. Athletes say these words in post-game interviews after a big championship win. Actors repeat them in acceptance speeches while clutching a shiny industry award. Even dating show contestants utter them after receiving a last-minute rose to stay another week.
From the time we are small children, we are asked the same standard question: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Of course, when we are young, we have no real-life experience being anything other than a kid. So why wouldn’t we aspire to be a professional athlete or a pop star?
Early career choices are still a shot in the dark
As we age and prepare to join the workforce, some of us cling to the dreams we had in childhood or our teens, while others develop new passions to chase. It is true that 22-year-olds are far more mature and thoughtful than 5 or 15-year-olds. The influences shaping our choices are usually more practical: our favorite college course, a recruiter we connected with at a campus career fair, or a summer internship that excited us intellectually and socially.
But just like when we were young, we are still picking from a limited pool of options that are largely curated by other people or shaped by our narrow life experiences so far. Even if we have a better grasp of what full-time work actually entails, our understanding of who we are and what we truly value is still very limited.
As a result, most of us never have a clear idea of what we actually want to do with our careers, especially when we are just starting out. And that is something to celebrate! The whole point of life is to learn and grow as you go, so that should also be the point of work: to test new things, meet different people, and get to know yourself better — what you enjoy and what you cannot stand, what energizes you and what bores you, what makes you excited for Monday morning and what fills you with Sunday-night dread.
We spend one full third of our lives at work. It only makes sense that whatever you daydreamed about while zoning out in Intro to Economics will almost certainly not be what you want to do 30 years later. But instead of recognizing how lucky we are to have this room to grow, how much freedom we have to change direction, most of us just feel lost. We have been taught that dreams are supposed to act as our North Star, guiding every career choice we make. We often even envy people who seem to have a fixed, clear dream to guide their path.
A culture built around dream obsession
