Undecided: navigating life and learning after high school

What Makes You Love to Do?

Now we are going to move from theories about the individual (you) to theories about the group (that is, everyone else you come in contact with). If the information in the previous chapter revealed a little more about your personal identity, the material in this chapter should reveal more about your social identity. Experts in group dynamics call this social orientation, and in its most simplistic form, social orientation reveals what an individual values most in a group setting. It comes down to three things:

A big pay-off for oneself (individualistic)

A bigger pay-off for oneself over someone else or another group (competitive)

A smaller pay-off for oneself or more equal outcome among the joint groups (pro-social)

In plain English, this translates into how much of your own individual ground are you willing to sacrifice for the betterment of others in your group. Nicholas Lore, a very successful career coach and founder of an organization called the Rockport Institute, breaks it down into two very general descriptions, sort of like PC’s and MAC’s.

Tribal People People who get the biggest buzz out of being a part of an organization, group, or “tribe.” They have a natural sense of human nature, which they use to absorb many of their values, goals, and perspectives from the group they’re in. Most of us are tribal (three out of four), probably because the survival of our species relied on a majority of our prehistoric ancestors sticking together. (It would have been a lot easier for a saber-tooth tiger to pick off a lone wanderer than to attack the group.) A tribal person is much more likely to have a competitive or pro-social orientation.

Maestros These are the exceptions and make up the other 25 percent of the population: the bold outliers. These people march to their own beat and don’t require fitting into the group in order to feel happy or whole. They often have very specialized interests, expertise, or knowledge, and by high school, their unique talents are pretty clear to everyone around them. While they don’t need to be popular, they do like to be acknowledged for the special contributions they make. A maestro is more likely to have an individualistic orientation.

It’s pretty easy to know whether you are more of a tribal person or a maestro by your own social tendencies. Observe how you feel more often. Nobody is just one thing, so a tribal person can have maestro leanings and vice versa. The thing to look for is what you prefer more or most of the time. If you suffer from FOMO (fear of missing out); if it feels more comfortable for you to go with the flow of your group; if you can say you have a group, it’s likely you are more tribal. If you are more of a lone wolf and like to do your own thing, regardless of where the crowd wants to go, you are more likely a maestro.

IT’S YOUR PARTY

In his book, Now What? The Young Person’s Guide to Finding a Career, Lore came up with the following four basic personality types that combine an essential aspect of your personality (introversion or extroversion) and an essential preference in groups (tribal or maestro). This is very basic information about yourself that will give you a hint as to your preferred social scene and how you recharge—but it is top level. To refine it, you will have to do more specific research about yourself on your own.

Circle the definition you think is the most like you right now:

Introverted Tribal	Introverted Maestro
Extroverted Tribal	Extroverted Maestro

This information about yourself is certainly NOT the end of the story. As I’ve pointed out, there are a lot of other traits to take into account. For our purposes right now, however, it’s enough information to begin the decision-making process. I stress the word begin. The next several years are about exploration and experimentation; the last thing I want to do is have you label yourself in some kind of lasting way. It is useful at this point to think about how you process information, about the underlying forces that influence what you do and why, and what kinds of experiences are in your comfort zone. Once we have that understanding, you are going to use the rest of the book to imagine scenarios that will challenge that comfort zone. It’s a balancing act, and part of becoming an adult is learning when to take risks and when to retreat into safety. I’m trying to save you a lot of time and grief in this chapter by helping you understand what makes you feel safe and why; that way, you can have the confidence to break out and try new things.

Paul Orfalea, Founder of Kinko’s

If you told a teenage Paul Orfalea that soon he would found the most successful copy-store chain in the country, he would have probably laughed. By the end of high school, things did not look great on the academic front. Orfalea was labeled severely learning disabled: a D-minus student who suffered from undiagnosed and untreated ADHD and dyslexia. In the classroom, he was a mess by school standards: He couldn’t read or sit still. His mind and his tongue raced. He was restless and hyper and flunked two grades before getting expelled from several schools. He’s been quoted saying, “I’m not good at being at work—I’m good at getting out of work.” His best class in school was Wood Shop.

It was this restlessness that helped Orfalea build a fledgling copy store—a store he started in 1970 with a $5,000 bank loan cosigned by both his parents—into a business that sold to FedEx for 2.4 billion dollars in 2004. That road began when, after barely graduating high school, he realized he had only two choices: go into the military or go to college. He chose college and started taking classes at a local community college; then, after consulting an admissions officer at University of Southern California, he was allowed to transfer there on the condition that he would only attend USC Extension, or night school. Orfalea couldn’t believe the long lines of students waiting for the Xerox machine in the USC library—or that they were willing to pay 10 cents per photocopy. He got the loan and set up his first store, selling stationary and offering copying machine services at less than three cents per page. Within ten years, his company had expanded to 80 stores. He couldn’t bear staying inside the office, so he made it his business to go store to store and see what was happening. He turned his weaknesses into strengths and didn’t let poor grades get in the way. As he says, “there’s more to life than what goes down on a report card.”

YOUR INTERESTS

Now let’s find out more about what you like to do with your time off—not what adults think you should do, but actually the kinds of things you prefer to do when you have some empty hours and are left alone to decide how to fill them. Now, I know that if you only had a few days, you might like to sleep until noon, watch Netflix, and eat cereal, but I’m not talking about that. That’s vacation. I’m talking about what you would do after you got sick and tired of chilling out.

And just for the record: You’re not trying to find your lifelong passion here, because it’s okay not to have one. All you want to do is hone in on the activities you enjoy and see what that says about your personal preferences. Later on, you will use the information to help make the plan best suited to where you’re at right now. Remember, you’re just building the launching pad. Where you land in the adult universe is something you don’t need to worry about until later.

Listed on the following pages are activities that teens do when they have time to themselves. Check at least five that you are most likely to do.

Now take a look at what you’ve checked. Is there any common ground? Generally speaking, teens fall into several categories when it comes to interests. These categories overlap a lot and are mutually interdependent, so don’t go pigeonholing yourself. You may lean toward being a little of everything (a generalist) or you may focus on one interest (a specialist)—your answers will clue you in. I have come up with different names for these categories, based on my research, that I think are especially applicable to young adult life.

The Creative You know who you are because you can’t help making things, either from scratch or by assembling something new from something that already exists. Even when you aren’t actively making, you are absorbing new ideas, new songs, new videos, new images— anything to add to your repertoire. You tend to collect things and can handle projects that are open-ended, as long as they are imaginative.

The Helper You are the go-to person when an event, a parent, or a friend needs attention or an extra hand. You have a lot of energy to get things done, combined with a sense of social justice and empathy and your role in the larger world. Giving feels better than receiving, and it doesn’t take a lot out of you to put your energy toward someone else. You like to do things that other people find valuable.

The Thinker Your mind is your playground, so you are rarely bored. You get excited about working out a problem from beginning to end and enjoy the process of learning as much as or reaching the goal. Ideas and theories excite your imagination, and a conversation about a cool topic will make your day. You often come up with alternative solutions to things and turn your friends on to new concepts and trends.

The Planner Nothing pleases you more than getting stuff done, and done well, especially if you can cross it off your ever-expanding to-do lists. You excel at managing your time and, as a result, often have a lot more free time and accomplish a great deal. You like a schedule because it helps you relax to know when you need to be somewhere and helps you have more fun after your work is done. People often turn to you to lead because you are so efficient.

The Doer You need to move your body, and you get pretty dull if you have to sit in class all day. You can accomplish whatever you set your mind to, but it is a whole lot more fun if you can use your hands and your feet, too. Watching and listening just aren’t your bag (and this may have given you a reputation for being easily distracted, but that’s a misunderstanding). You are fully engaged when you are doing, and you need a good balance in your day between brain and muscle power.

The Communicator You are the classic people person, the hub of the social wheel. You have tons of friends and even more acquaintances, and you love to make connections between them. You are the person everyone texts to find out what is going on or the latest gossip. You have a global approach and can see larger patterns and common ground between people. You tend to use words well and rely on them often.

Write a description of yourself that best suits you right now. If you are more of a generalist, write down the top category or two that feel right more of the time than the others:

I’m more of a and a _____________________ and a _____________________.

PUTTING IT TOGETHER

When you look back at your answers here and in Chapter 1, you will get a very broad sense of four important motivating factors for you:

Where you get your energy (Introvert or Extrovert)
What mode your brain tends to operate in (Mover, Perceiver, Stimulator, Adaptor)
How you sustain your energy in a group (Tribal or Maestro)
Where you want to spend that energy (Your interests)

Take a look at the chart below and put your finger on the row description that best suits your temperament and social preference, then check the box (or boxes) along that row that best describes your interests right now. Once you’ve checked the box (or boxes), scroll your finger down each column to see where it lands on the spectrum of your most immediate post-graduation plans. After that, feel free to apply what you now know about your preferred operating mode as an additional filter.

If your X marks a spot you didn’t suspect (or one that might give your parents the shudders), it’s okay. At least you know now that college may not be the choice for you right after high school. Give yourself permission to widen your perspective to include the possibility of doing something different than what everyone automatically expects you’ll be doing after graduation. I also should say here that there are all kinds of schools out there, for all kinds of people. If you land on the less traditional, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go to school— only that your comfort level will also be high in an alternative plan (or nontraditional college), should you go that way.

Most teens assume they will go to college, and there’s no reason to change that assumption. But what might change is your thinking around when you go, where you go, why you want to go, and even how you go (for instance, you might take courses online or go abroad). As I write this, there is a boom in online educational offerings. By the time you read this, or very soon thereafter, there will probably be even more possibilities. Most major universities are trampling each other in their efforts to sync traditional curriculum with online courses and recruit bright young people like you, looking for alternatives. This trend can only be good for the undecided. Taking an online course is not always free, but it is less of an investment than full-boat tuition and, therefore, gives you some wiggle-room to explore.

What might this exploration look like? Well, if your check mark on the chart shows you tend to be an extroverted maestro with a preference for being a creative, you might be more fulfilled apprenticing at an architect’s studio or volunteering for a film production company for a year before going to college. That kind of activity could help you define and refine what you want out of school and give you the life experience that separates you from the herd of other applicants. On the other hand, if you are an introverted tribal with a preference for planning, you might be the perfect volunteer for an arts organization in your community, which you could do in addition to taking French online. Once you have this basic idea, you can tinker with the specifics as you do your own research to find a particular program, organization, or mentor that best suits your personal preferences and operating mode. Again, I’m not trying to tell you what you should do, but am getting you to think about what might be a good fit for you. Though you are making an X inside a box, inside another box (this book), my real goal is to get you thinking outside the box, and more inside of you.

THE DREAM PLAN

By now you should have a better idea of your core personality and the activities that inspire you the most. I don’t want you to limit yourself with these very basic descriptions. However, they are helpful as an extremely broad way to begin editing out things you really don’t want. Imagine putting an extroverted-doer-stimulator in a program where students expect to study alone in a library carrel most of the time with only books for company. Or, on the flip side, imagine an introverted-thinker-perceiver in a big party school with a heavy reliance on fraternities and sororities, where attendance at team rallies is required in order to fit in. Those people would spend a lot of time pounding their square peg into the program’s round hole and wondering the entire time why they feel so miserable. That is the opposite of what you are trying to do here. Right? You want to design a plan that is the right fit for you.

J.J. Abrams, film director

Hit movie and TV producer, director, and writer J.J. Abrams was born in New York City and raised in LA He went to Palisades Charter High School, or Pali High, a public school that has graduated a number of famous folks. Abrams’s parents were both in the “business,” and he was a huge movie fan. As a teen, he got his summer dream job: He worked for Steven Spielberg, restoring some of the director’s teenage films. Abrams and Spielberg never met then, but the experience hooked him. He got his first job writing music for a film when he was sixteen. Abrams went to Sarah Lawrence College in New York and graduated after four years with a liberal arts degree. He moved back to LA and wrote his first screenplay with a friend, Jill Mazursky. It was purchased by Touchstone Pictures and eventually became the film Taking Care of Business. Within a couple of years, he was writing on his own and became Hollywood’s ace script fixer.

Abrams’s real breakthrough came when he moved to TV and wrote the hit series Felicity. He moved on to Alias and Lost, and now the sky is the limit for him. Abrams is in charge of writing and producing the next Star Wars trilogy. I’m guessing he’s an extroverted maestro with a tendency toward being a creative, but only he can say for sure.

Keeping your own set of qualities in mind, take a few minutes to fantasize about your dream life after graduation. What would you do right after high school if absolutely nothing was in your way and all that mattered was your own happiness? If living on a fantasy island with five of your best friends and Lady Gaga is your dream, write it down, because that is going to tell you something (for instance, you will need a lot of money and some serious bartending and construction skills). If your dream is spending four years in an elite college, strolling across ivy-clad quadrangles, that tells you something else (you will need stellar grades, good teacher recommendations, and practice time with the SAT or ACT). Don’t hold back. Who would you do it with? Where in the world would you do it? What are the qualities that would make it right for you? And how long would you want to do it for?

Turn the corner of this page down or put a bookmark here, because you are going to come back to this later. You want to set your directional sights so that you land as close to the dream as possible. Next, look at all the different ways you can get there.