And by should have I mean “should have” because this kind of thing can be subjective.
I’ll start. Senior year of high school I would often skip class to go to the park and smoke weed with my partner (at the time). This park had a lot of birds. The sometimes silly, sometimes strategic, sometimes social and cooperative behavior of the birds blew my 17 year old stoned mind. I remember my partner and I would theorize about what they were doing and thinking. I thought it was super cool. I still think birds are super cool.
Now, many years later, I have a PhD in a behavior adjacent field. I don’t study birds specifically or anything like that, but those experiences and curiosities pushed me in this direction.
Maybe it was all inevitable: these are deep interests that would have been pulled out of me in one way or another. The tinder was inside of me and if it wasn’t getting stoned at the park as a teenager and watching birds that sparked the flame, something else would have. Who knows.
This is a wild one, but I had a meth addiction for about 5 years in my late 20s. During this time I would tweak out on electronics, computers, soldiering, hacking threads and pretty much anything related to that. Skip forward a couple decades and I am a pretty well paid engineer that’s a senior level in his field. I honestly feel that having that time to really focused and tweak out on that stuff helped along my career. (Once I stopped doing that poison)
Probably shouldn’t mention that if you get asked about how you got started at your kid’s school career day.
Then again he’s maybe the best person to explain the hard work it took to move away from meth and focus his time, money, and energy on something fruitful.
ADHD?
Isolation and Christian fundamentalism.
I think autism falls onto this category for me. I wasn’t diagnosed until my early 20s. It did hold me back and probably made some things way harder than they should be. But likewise it also fuelled my desire to constantly learn new stuff. Especially when I was younger my interests would constantly switch around. My mind was constantly hyper-focused on the few topics that I was interested in at that moment. Anything else was deemed irrelevant.
This made me struggle with anything that didn’t interest me, but I managed to just about get by in those subjects. But more “logic driven” subjects like math, chemistry, physics, and biology would constantly feed me with new interesting information to dive into. Throughout highschool and especially throughout university (Computer Science) this effectively became a way for me to learn without much effort. Whenever something is interesting to me, the information is just absorbed and I’d spend my free time still thinking about it. Many lectures in uni just led to an overwhelming stream of new ideas and as a result to me playing around with the concepts explained to me
Autism definitely isn’t a “super weapon” like some people seem to claim, but certain parts of it can be very useful traits in the education system and beyond.
Christianity.
If by younger, you mean two years younger than now, them I have a story that is applicable in regards to my career.
Got fired from my first job in my field (IT, specifically tech support/help desk.) The firing was unexpected and done in a Tuesday afternoon with zero warning. I wasn’t given and kind of formal write-ups and had been getting great performance reviews. I was crushed. The reasoning that my boss told me was that “I wasn’t learning fast enough.” Which was absolute bullshit because I was left alone to run the department on a regular basis. I did all of my tasks and did them well and users loved me.
I suspect I was the fall guy for all the failing projects my boss was implementing. They cost far more money than he said they would. I believe I was fired so he wouldn’t get a pay cut.
I was absolutely heartbroken and considered going into another field entirely, after fighting my way through the rampant sexism in college and in job hunting. The first tech job I applied to after being fired (three days later), called me almost immediately after I applied. I did a phone interview and was then asked to do a practical interview the next day. I did well enough to get offered the job before I had finished the half hour drive home.
I make so much more money now, have great benefits, and I am respected and encouraged to grow. This job is absolutely incredible.
My grandmother says getting fired from my previous job was the best thing that happened to my career and I agree with her.
The emotional damage getting fired like I did has given me crippling anxiety that my therapist likens to that of PTSD, but without some of the PTSD symptoms. I’m getting treatment for it, and I’m at the stage where it’s getting worse before it gets better.
I had an hour long panic attack when I had to tell my boss that a doctor told me to take a week off to recover from an injury that wasn’t healing right and hindering my daily life. My boss wasn’t pleased and told me my attendance will need to be near perfect because I have already missed a lot (I have.) I’m not worried about getting fired anymore, so I haven’t panicked since, but I do get flare ups of anxiety. I get to go back and face everyone on Tuesday and hope that I won’t have to talk about it face to face because I will end up panicking then.
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