Say you wake up at 8 am. You shower, eat breakfast, brush your teeth… and get to work at 9. You spend your day working, leave the office at 5, and get home at about 5:30. You unwind a for a few minutes, and then start making dinner. By the time you’re done cooking, eating and cleaning, it’s 7 o’clock. You want to make sure that you get in your daily exercise, but you need to digest first, so after watching TV for a half hour, you start your workout. An hour later, it’s 8:30. And after showering, it’s 8:45. You now have about 3 hours before you go to sleep and start your day over again.
There are two points I want to make.
Your career is very important. Aside from routine daily activities, the majority of your day will be work. That big 8 hour chunk. 9-to-5. And since this will be true for, say, 50 years, I don’t think that it’d be too much of a stretch to say that the majority of your life will be work. For this reason, I think that it’d be wise to give this decision the time and thought that it deserves.
When you ask people, “What do you want to do with your life?”, I don’t think that they give you an honest answer. I don’t think they’re trying to deceive you, but I think that they’re answering a different question. The question that they hear is, “Given that I’ll be busy from 9-5 every weekday for 50 years, what else would I like to fit in to my life?”.