I know it is an old Microsoft slogan, but it is indeed the most important question that everyone of us should ask ourselves.

So, where do we want to go today?

How many of us are in our career of choice? And, how many of us eventually grew to love our jobs?

Think back to the days when you were five, did you have an ambition? – How has that changed?

I wanted to be a rice farmer. I picked that up from a storybook and I thought planting rice was fun!

What about when you were 12? – Did that childhood ambition changed? How did it change?

And, when you were 18? – Did you get more realistic? Or, did your dream get bigger?

Did you give up on what you had always wanted to do? Or, did you grow out of it?

The permutation of questions are aplenty, but the point I am driving at is – “Every one of us, at one point or another had a dream on how we wanted our life to be”.

Notice that I did not use the words “Dream Job”, “Dream Career”, and whatsoever. That is because, it is not important at that point of time when we began dreaming. What we had dreamt of is the actual feeling of what we wanted to do.

It could had been the feeling of “greatness” as a scientist discovering the next breakthrough, or the feeling of “nobleness” as a doctor saving lives, or even the feeling of “bravery” as a fireman putting out fires.

What had we lost? Or, what had we gained?

Some says, we had lost our ability to dream, some says we’ve gain a perception of reality.

I had interviewed my fair share of fresh graduates and I felt sad to hear that many had not looked at their lives carefully and plan their career seriously.

Many choices were made basing on the basis of stereotyping expectations, and many were by peer pressures. Others were on the basis of short termed vision and the rest on chance.

To have invested all those years of their life studying, only to jump onto the wrong bus when the time has come to do what they’ve always dreamt of is a case of poor planning and terrible decision making.

Which brings us back to our question – “Where do you want to go today?”

Cheers,
Eric Wong