I'm lost, you're lost.

The 20’s… “best” decade of our lives… right? 

Last week one of my close friends sent me a podcast by Mel Robbins that in all honesty changed my current life. 

Being super transparent here, the past year has been anything but easy when it comes to work and developing my career…

• Graduating from a program that has (technical skills wise) nothing to do with where I want to start my career

• Having about 10 different ideas of what I want to do, and having them change every day

• Applying to endless jobs and hearing no- if anything at all

• Endless ambition and curiosity feeling challenged by what seems to be reality 

All of these are challenges that I can overcome, and I know that. What makes these little hills become mountains is the environment to which they are taking place in. As Mel Robbins described it, the 20’s are an era of “the great scattering”. Throughout elementary, high school, and university, everyone around my age and I were walking on the same path, taking the same steps from when we moved to another grade/year of school, right down to when we had vacations. 

Life was synchronous. All of a sudden, graduation happens- woo hoo for a few seconds and next thing you know, that sidewalk you were all strolling down together veers off in several different directions. 

You have to continue walking, but how do you know what path to continue on? Each one leads somewhere different, and some you’d have to go down alone. Yet the constant on all of the paths is that NO ONE KNOWS WHICH ONE IS RIGHT BECAUSE THERE IS NO RIGHT ONE. 

Let me repeat that- no one knows which one is right, because there is no right one. 

As Mel explained, there is NO reference point for success. If all of us post-grads are looking to each other to help us define what success should be or what we should be doing, it becomes useless as there is no exact benchmark or reference point for a general definition of what success is. 

Google defines success as, 

1. The accomplishment of an aim or purpose. 

As purpose is different to each of us, so is success. What is your purpose?  What is your definition of success? 

If you are feeling lost in “the great scattering”, feeling like your definition of success is based external to you, or just feeling young and frankly confused… SAME HERE. And guess what… it’s so normal and so okay! REMEMBER: YOU ARE EXACTLY WHERE YOU NEED TO BE.