Career Decision Making Quotes

When I left university with a history degree, I had no idea what I wanted to do, and I was terrified of accidentally ending up in the wrong career.

When I started with 'Cocktail,' I was trying to figure out if this was something I wanted to do.

I was a liberal arts junkie and I figured, well, I'll go work for somebody somewhere. All I knew was that I was going to have to come home and figure it out.

The truth is I've just never had any kind of plan at all for my career, which is probably not a very flattering thing to admit. I don't know that I'd ever planned to be in this situation. I'm still just an idiot, really really stupid. It's not like I'm now a genius because this has happened. I just got hugely lucky.

I had no clue what I wanted to do. I tried nursing, I tried science, I tried English. I just kept bouncing back and forth.

This is not a pleasant route for many young people to consider. You have to be either hopelessly passionate, or very stupid.

I don't really have a career plan.

Intern will resonate not only with doctors, but with anyone who has struggled with the grand question 'What should I do with my life?' In a voice of profound honesty and intelligence, Sandeep Jauhar gives us an insider's look at the medical profession and also a dramatic account of the psychological challenges of early adulthood.

My idea of that[idea of career] is constantly changing. I mostly just throw it out to the universe and I can't really do much after that. I've never taken the steps to be "successful": I've never had a manager or signed to a publishing house. I've talked to people about it but I've never followed through because it gives me the creeps.

I think the biggest mistake most people make when they pick their first job is they don't worry enough about whether they'll love the work, and they worry more about whether it's good experience

I think I made the wrong career choice

My career is not well thought out. Every choice has been instinctive and, quite literally, impulsive in many ways.

When you have a 13 year old child, you suddenly realize that you may need to pick a vocation.

I received a letter from a lad asking me for an easy berth. To this I replied: You cannot be an editor; do not try the law; do not think of the ministry; let alone all ships and merchandise; abhor politics; don't practice medicine; be not a farmer or a soldier or a sailor; don't study, don't think. None of these are easy. O, my son, you have come into a hard world. I know of only one easy place in it, and that is the grave!

But everything that I did starting out, every job that I had, I haven't regretted any of them. They've all been informative, interesting in one way or another. With a career, I think there's this idea that you're just trying to get somewhere. It's like, "Oh, okay, let's keep going, because if I do this, I can get this, I get this, this." It wasn't that way. I did what I wanted to do when it was in front of me, and I'm trying to continue to do that.

Lot of people know very early what they want, but I didn't know I wanted acting.

You go through stages in your career that you feel very good about yourself. Then you feel awful, like, 'Why didn't I choose something else?' But overall I'm pretty satisfied that I made the right choice when I decided to be an actor.

I never gave my career much strategic thought. Maybe I should have.

I was just sort of young and went with the flow. It wasn't like I was 6 and knew I wanted to be an actor. I was thinking more along the lines of, I'm 6. When I was 20 I realized, I've never really thought about what I want to do. So I took a bunch of time off, stopped answering my phone, stopped doing anything. I'm pretty sure this is what I want to do, but I needed to be sure. It took me about two years to come around.

When I was a kid, I thought I was going to be an architect, because when I was 12 years old I had a guidance counselor that convinced me that that was the best career choice for me.

I don't have a career plan. I've never done that. Things happen accidentally and I've been lucky.

I tried to talk to the graduates who haven't figured what they're going to do next. The kids who are heading in medical school or law school, they've got pretty much figured where they're headed in life. But there are so many kids out there, that are just going, they're still kids. They've always been promoted from grade to grade.

There's this notion that actors choose their career. After a certain level, I think that that's true. I still take way more jobs than I turn down, and the reason that I turn down a job is that I just can't find anything in it that charges me or excites me or challenges me about moving to the next phase of where I'm headed.

Not a great deal is known about the factors in childhood that doubtless underlie a person's choice of career - I'm talking now about a career to which one is passionately committed, in contradistinction to a career chosen merely as a means of earning a living.

I grew up always knowing what I wanted to do, and I'm starting to see how rare that is. All of my friends are just figuring it out. It's a process of elimination until you find what you love.