A Good Time to Hunker Down

(page 2 of 2)

Yes, we may run around in circles, but this is hardly the same as just standing still.

Pursuing the Perfect Career

In fact, I would argue that we are spurred by an intense obligation to live up to "our potential." Keenly aware of the tireless effort that has gone into ensuring our likely success—parents who spent 18 years carpooling us from one activity to another—we are unwilling to compromise.

Call us the serial daters of the workplace. Unlike the Gen Xers before us, criticized for approaching work with the emotional detachment of a one-night stand, we generally walk through the door wanting to find something to be passionate about and throw ourselves into, perhaps because we've been told we could make a difference.

We wade through possibilities, initially undeterred by false starts and near-misses. But playing the field can prove exhausting. All this soul-searching for one perfect opportunity can wear you down.

When I did miraculously fumble my way into the aforementioned opportunity here after a few years of interning and freelancing, I cleared the decks to devote myself to this new project. I knew it could still turn out to be a bust. But at least I had made a conscious decision to place my chips on a single, high-stakes possibility rather than blindly cast about at murky maybes. Therefore, it made sense to give this priority.

This simplified not only my work life but my existence in general. For the first time in a long time, I wasn't so busy scrambling to find the one "right" path that I was able to enjoy what I was doing. And I'm confident that I'm hardly alone among my peers in preferring the pressure of responsibility to the pressure of finding that responsibility.

Taking Steps to Settle Down

But even this is a limited version of "adulthood," as traditionally defined. I've watched as one by one, my friends and peers have begun their own version of "settling down," into jobs or graduate programs that, in many cases, provide at least some measure of short-term fulfillment while laying groundwork for potentially high-impact, rewarding careers.

Now I've begun hearing whispers about that next, perhaps even more daunting, hurdle they hope to conquer in building a grown-up life—the "committed relationship"—something that many haven't had since high school, college, possibly ever.

This may be a topic for a different column, but it does serve to illustrate further what has become the increasingly clear reality for a driven young professional. Becoming an adult has become one long hike, and it takes a lot of baby steps to get there. And when you finally feel like you're on terra firma, you want to dig your heels in.

Gerdes is a staff editor for BusinessWeek in New York and writes the Starting Out column for BusinessWeek.com.