Note: For readers especially pressed for time, key takeaways, action steps, and additional resources for this post are provided at the end.

What do you want to be when you grow up?

This is a question we were all asked at some point in our early childhoods (and for some readers, it is a question that still bubbles up to the surface of our minds, no matter how many decades into grown up we get).

Typically, it was posed by someone who wasn’t very good with kids, an aunt, uncle, or family friend. Some people are like that. Faced with conversing with a kid, they freeze up, unable to go there with the kid and be playful or imaginative. In their nervousness, they ask little kids who maybe can’t yet tie their shoes about their future career aspirations.

As those little kids, we did our best to respond. We searched our minds, tried to think of jobs we knew of and, if possible, jobs with a little action. Out came our responses: Um, fireman/woman, policeman/woman, astronaut? (The police person response has taken an understandable hit with today’s kids).

Those are the familiar responses we as kids offered adults. Meanwhile, our little kid inner voices were saying something else, an innocent version of: just how the hell am I supposed to know what I want to be when I grow up? I can’t even tie my shoes, dude!

It is funny when you think about it. Given how massive and challenging that question is, a questions some spend lifetimes trying to answer—asking little people whose reality is so fluid they believe a rabbit distributes baskets filled with candy and plastic grass once a year. Which, let’s be honest, is a bit far fetched.

It is also unfunny. For many of us, we went off to college and then out into workforce without having gotten much more of a clue when it came to possible jobs. We had a minimal understanding of the breadth of careers that were available and often no tangible sense for whether we might like the work involved in those jobs were we to pursue them.

There may have been a career day at school, or possibly some kids were taken to mom or dad’s work place once. Maybe you took career aptitude assessments and then received cryptic suggestions for your future, like the options of being an air traffic controller or a florist, with no explanation of the rationale for these divergent paths.

I guess there was an assumption that, for those who went off to college, the process of selecting a major and steeping oneself in a specific field of study would answer the career question, but the selection of major is often, in hindsight, also not the result of a well informed choice and may not end up having anything to do with one’s chosen career.

And things haven’t changed much. Young people still go off to college often having little clue about future careers and some parents are then surprised when their adult kids spend the entire rest of their twenties trying to sort out the massive question of what is the work they really want to be doing. While possibly also trying to deal with college debts.

The system doesn’t make a lot of sense. We all spend on average 90,000 hours working during our lives, and, next to finding well suited spouse, the greatest wish parents have for kids is that they manage to thread the needle in regard to work—find a fulfilling, enjoyable career in a relatively stable profession that also happens to pay well.

Given the degree to number of ours worked and the role work plays in our overall well-being and happiness, one would think that there would a better system in place. Or any system. But there typically isn’t (presumably there are some top tier private schools that have an amazing career exploration programs as part of their curriculum).

Fortunately, this is another realm where the humble unsung parents and guardians of the world can once more save the day. We can take some modest, manageable steps, some of which are possible thanks to advances in technology, and dramatically better position the kids in our lives to succeed with this central life challenge.

That is what this post about. Yet another opportunity for those of us who are parents, or who otherwise have influence over some young minds, to be amazing, realizing, as we do, that there is a strong possibility that this amazingness will not be appreciated at the time.

Three quick case studies

Before going into the steps we can take, it is helpful to consider a few case studies. The following briefly detail the radically different ways some parents have tried to help their kids with this challenge in the past and, in so doing, underscore that alternatives to the status quo have always existed.

Case 1 is courtesy of my own childhood, back in the 1970s and early 1980s, shortly after the unfortunate demise of the dinosaurs. This was the era when adults, primarily dads (bizarre as that now seems), went off to their jobs and what happened then was for most kids a total mystery. Of these case studies, this was the norm.

It was so extreme a mystery that it was a source of playground humor. Kids would ask each other what their dads did, and then in many cases, upon hearing the job, the next question was: what is that??? This was followed by the punchline as the kid responded: I have no idea!

We had no clue what our parents work entailed. My own father was something called a corporate secretary. Who on the playground knew what that was? I knew he had gone to law school and wasn’t a secretary secretary, but that was all I understood. These men could have been working with Oompa Loompas or elves. We had no clue. 

This is one of those situations where simply saying it out loud reveals how misguided it was. The one career that we could have most easily learned about, outside of being a teacher (the other career kids are acquainted with on a daily basis), and it was shrouded in mystery.

Over the years, I would pick up more clues about the work of a corporate secretary, including that it involved supporting the CEO and working with a board of directors, had something to do with annuals reports, and was clearly a source of high stress at times, but it is amazing, looking back, how little I picked up in all those years.

So, that is case one: Kids kept in near dark, and it was a dominant model back then and is still surprisingly still surprisingly prevalent.

Case 2 centers on a friend, David Mortenson. David grew up in the same period (we met and became friends in high school). But while my dad and so many others were keeping their business and life separate, David’s father, Mort Mortenson Jr., took a far different approach.

When David was a kid, his father was in the early days of trying to grow the family’s modest Minneapolis-based construction business. Were you to pass by one of the company’s building sites on a Saturday back in the 1970s, you would have seen Mort Jr. touring construction sites with superintendents, talking through inevitable issues that arise on construction sites. And then you might notice something out of place.

In addition to grizzled workers moving wheelbarrows, climbing scaffolding, manning cranes, your would notice off to the side a pack of four cute little boys—little David and his three littler brothers—playing with their toy trucks in some spare pile of sand as the building slowly went up, or possibly they were in the site trailer coloring on the back of discarded blueprints.

This was Mort Mortenson’s approach. Instead of not knowing their father’s work, they were raised in such a way that they can’t remember not knowing construction. As they got older, he would occasionally pose one of the complex building issues he was trying to resolve to the boys and then suggest they go off, think about it, draw out the solution they devised, and bring it back for review.

Mort Jr. took this immersion a step further once the boys were old enough to work. David remembers his dad presenting him with a union card, along with an address and the name of a foreman to go see. It was the beginning of the summer. David pointed out that, being only 15, he wasn’t old enough to drive to this construction job. Mort Jr. said he would be give him a ride his first day, and David could find a way to get home and figure out transportation after that.

So, began David’s first sting as absolute bottom-rung laborer, the first of many. Interestingly, the one thing his dad didn’t do was ever suggest any of the boys consider a career in the family business. Not once, despite the fact that it was growing increasingly rapidly. Mort Jr. and his wife, Alice, were unified in preaching to the boys that they find work they loved.

The one thing Mort Jr. knew, though, was that his boys knew the work, knew construction on an intuitive level. Some years later, David did join his father in the business he felt was in his blood, working his way through a modern day apprenticeship that took him on up eventually to CEO and now chairmen.

Case 3 involves someone I don’t know personally, but whose approach to helping his kids understand career options I can’t help but be intrigued by, despite how ill-advised it seems.

Jerry Murrell worked as a financial advisor in the Washington D.C. area back when I was oblivious my dad’s daily toil and David Mortenson was first pushing a wheelbarrow. Murrell also had a side hustle as a serial entrepreneur, one who specialized in failed enterprises.

Failed is the operative word. He and his wife kept starting ill-advised businesses, like the time he thought he could go down to Texas and hold his own in the world of oil exploration, not realizing how quickly he would be handing over his money to locals who saw him coming.

In the wake of a string of such mishaps, Murrell had yet another idea. It was a vision for a tiny out-of-the-way joint that would sell hamburgers and french fries. Really good burgers and fries. And that was it. The whole vision. Except that the burgers and fries would be good enough that word of the little dive would spread.

There was one hurdle to getting started on the new venture. Murrell had burned through his discretionary cash with the previous failed businesses. There was, though, one other source of potential money: the college fund he was saving for his four boys. There was enough money there to get things going. 

Murrell, to his credit, didn’t simply take the money. Instead, he pitched his idea to his young boys and let them decide. He could keep saving money for them to go to college or they could go into business with dad, put the college fund toward an out-of-the way burger joint! No mention was made of the 30 percent first-year failure rate of new restaurants.

The kids apparently shared Murrell’s indomitable never-say-die spirit. Who needs college! And thus Five Guys was born. It went on to be a phenomenally successful venture, one where Murrell, the four boys, along with a fifth brother who was born later, Murrell’s wife, and many additional family members, including grandkids, would work together for decades.

Needless to say, this approach of not just exposing our kids to career paths but suggesting we take a flyer together and go into business with them and, oh by the way, let’s use your college savings to do it, is not for everyone, but it does give one a sense for the a wide range of options (at least parents not afraid of being shamed by other parents for being reckless).

Implementing your own system of career exploration and possible apprenticeship

As you see, a variety of options exist for the role parents take in helping our kids get a jump on considering potential career paths, as they have going all the way back to time when Ben Franklin’s father his 12-year-old son over to apprentice with his older brother the printer.

Thanks to advances in technology and the availability of information digitally, we now have tools and resources that weren’t available to any of the parents described above, which together provide the makings for a world class system for preparing kids to make far more informed decisions about careers, as detailed below.

Level one - initial exposure

As is often the case, we can thank Sal Khan for stepping up and partially addressing this gap in the K-12’s traditional offering.

Khan Academy is continually expanding the curriculum that is offered on their website and this now includes a career course that is just the primer our kids should start with. It is part of their Life Skills track, which also covers growth mindsets, personal finance, and college admissions.

The career course begins with an intro by Khan, who, after making the point that the course was made possible by Bank of America (which maybe is a hint that the descriptions of the banking career track might be a especially rosy), speculates that the series will be great for those who are in college or considering mid-career changes.

But here is where—and this pains my to say, given my Khan adoration—I disagree with Sal, because, as I have already suggested, waiting until college or after is what gets young people into trouble. We want the minds of those teens and even tweens understanding possible future paths far earlier.

The Khan course covers seventy careers, including city planner, epidemic intelligence service officer, nurse, social worker, director of products, senior software engineer, marketing manager, user experience researcher, and startup co-founder/CEO.

(Have your kids skip over the first unit, after watching Khan’s intro. The first unit covers things like salary negotiations and understanding benefit packages, which are topics that can wait until much later—though the networking video may be an exception, given how friends at all phases of life become part of our networks.)

Watching these videos is a great way of gaining exposure to the specific jobs exist in the world. If you watch them with your kids, you will find yourself thinking: how is it possible that we didn’t have something like this when we were growing up? Some readers will even start researching career options for their own purposes.

There is a bigger reason than the obvious for why these early intros can be so powerful. By gaining this exposure, our kids not only gain conscious awareness of a wide range of jobs, but we are also putting their unconscious minds on the case of solving the riddle of what their future work should.

Our unconscious, as we know (because it tells us), is the real powerhouse of our thinking, not only doing 80 percent of the heavy lifting our brain does, but also heavily dictating what we notice in life, out of all the stimulus that is continually bombarding us all as we go through our days.

By exposing our kids to thinking about careers in their teens and even before, we give the unconscious a chance to works its magic, helping our kids notice relevant information in the future. We are all unique. Interesting aspects to the careers they learn about from Khan will plant specific seeds and will take root.

This taking root will subsequently influence what kids notice and are drawn to in the future. Seeming coincidences will occur because of this early exposure and their nascent interests. Opportunities will present themselves. Magic may happen. This is the beauty and power of our unconscious minds—if they get the early exposure (if not, no magic.)

Khan is really all you need for this awareness step, though your kids’ school may have career days that is also helpful or you may come across other resources, documentaries that explore interesting jobs, etc., all of which can further help expand and deepen the initial exposure.

One other step I recommend taking is a simple one. It involves making the following point to your kids when they do see anyone doing an interesting job: The person you are seeing was a boy or girl just like you; the career they have is a real possibility, if you take the right path. Once again, this is in part appealing to their unconscious.

Making the connection to possibility can make all the difference. The neurosurgeon James Doty, who is also the author of the great Into the Magic Shop, traces his career back to an elementary school career day during which he met a doctor who told Doty, then a poor kid living in a deeply dysfunctional home, that he too could be a doctor. That was it.

One of my earliest memories was learning that two of my aunts had written books. I was maybe in kindergarten. I was amazed. Writing? Just writing? They were paid to do that? I promptly raced upstairs and began writing a gripping, as yet unpublished, novel about go-kart racing, and years later would experiencing actually being paid to write.

I was emphatically making this case to my daughter the other day as our minds were being blown by architect-designer-artist-scientist-model Neri Oxman’s work while watching Abstract: The Art of Design on Netflix. Oxman heads ups the Mediated Matter group at MIT Media Labs, doing work that brings together art and design but also involves working with materials at the molecular level. Mind blowing.

I wanted my daughter’s mind to get it: this isn’t an abstract cool thing. If you followed the right path, you could end up doing work like Neri Oxman. She is a real person, not just in a documentary. She is working in a lab right now. This very moment. And some years from now she could be looking at your application for an internship on her team. I don’t have any preference for this path, but I certainly want my daughter to make the association as she watches the documentary: that work is real option.

Gaining exposure to a wide range of careers, including what they entail, along with a sense for the possibility that these paths can be our future, and doing so early enough to influence what and how we are learning as kids—this combination alone holds the power to change lives. It really does. Shouldn’t everyone have this exposure.

Level two - the work from home internship

Are you with me so far? Is this not a little exciting—this prospect of improving upon how we were shot out into the adult world? Hopefully so, and the good news is that there is more, thanks to the world-wide tragedy that had us all, seemingly overnight, working from home.

We are all familiar with convenience of working from home now (how I do not miss my former 58 mile roundtrip drive to a distant farmland-ajascent suburb), and with the intermittent craziness of the new reality (the barking dogs, the sick kids offscreen, and, yes, far too many naked spouses momentarily onscreen).

What most of us have possibly given less thought to is the degree to which work from home provides a breakthrough opportunity to give our kids a deeper dive into understanding and possibly participating in at least one or two careers—those that are regularly being carried out from their/our homes.

Teaching our kids about our own work can start with the same spiel that many of us have given real interns who cycle through our companies and maybe meet with us for an hour to learn about our roles. Or maybe this is a talk you have given a new hire—simply explaining at a high level what do you do and how it fits within the organization.

From there, we can go deeper and provide some documentation. Do you have a job description that generally describes how you work? And are there goals that define the specific aims for the year and quarters? Do projects and processes define a lot of your work? We have documents that spell out what our work is and how we do it, and these can help begin to deepen their understanding.

Some color commentary will help along the way. What do you like about your role? What could you do without? What was your path to getting where you are? What strategy do you have in mind to make future moves? And how does this all differ between you and your spouse or partner (if there is another working out of the house)?

Are our kids going to get all of this? Are they going to be engrossed in every word? To both, we can say: not necessarily. That said, it is so easy to do, it is worth a try. Our work offers internship-type exposure that is right in front of all of us and yet somehow often goes overlooked.

If you have doubts, think of the Mortenson boys trying to solve work problems for their dad, or the Murrell boys standing on milk crates to make burgers. Or consider the following glimpse from my home: my kids are reading these words, the ones you are reading, and we have talked about the writing process that produces the words—including how this technique of referencing my kids reading the words, and doing so while addressing you, the reader, is sort of a combination of breaking the fourth wall, as it is called in drama, and also going a bit meta,

My kids are into this, in a way that suggests to me that it is simultaneously more interesting and more edifying than a good portion of what they are talking about at school. While we all have plenty of drudgery in our work—and this is yet another good lesson that we can pass along sooner rather than later—there is in every career the interesting part. Maybe it is something highly strategic, or there is complex problem solving that is satisfying when you do make it to the other side. Something. Share that.

One other thing our kids will learn, at least for those parents who are knowledge workers, is the reality of how adult work overlaps quite a bit with aspects of school life. So many of us are engaged in some combination of emailing, texting/IMing/Slacking, attending meetings, and trying to squeeze in time to get our work done. Well, classes are a bit like meetings, homework like the work we struggle to find time for, and then we all have multiple ways communicating, with kids even now adept at creating slide decks.

Another way of giving your kids exposure is to have them directly participate in some administrative aspect of your work, with options including:

• Review your calendar for the week and how you are thinking about it, and then have them schedule a meeting for you or at least accept an invite.

• Work through some email, commenting on what you are thinking as you go through it, and then have them craft a simple response, followed by your feedback on how you would revise their effort.

• Help you work on a slide deck, typing some of the headings, understanding the points you are trying to get across, where you are going for information, etc.

• Sit in on meetings, out of camera, and then for those meetings where you are less involved, turn off your video, mute the microphone, and provide play-by-play for what all is transpiring.

This could be just the beginning. You might have a kid who gets into some element of the work and wants to do more. Wants to take first passes at some of your actual work. Who knows. But if they do, make it happen. Have them segue from intern to apprentice.

This effort doesn’t have to just stop in our own work-from-home households either. For kids and families who are responsive, other family members and close friends could provide a similar experience, spending some hours with the kids as they work from home, helping them experience different careers and company cultures.

In my family’s case, we have a friend who engineers medical devices and has offered to take our kids into his office on an upcoming Saturday and show them his state-of-the-art workstation, complete with 3D printer, and explain what his career is like and how he works.

He offered this without me even asking, knowing that the kids have some engineering interest, and we are definitely taking him up on it. Because my own extended family had no one in the STEM fields, I don’t even think I really understood what engineering was and all the disciplines that made it up when I was in K-12. It is embarrassing to admit and not something I want to repeat—having this whole sector of promising careers not even on one’s radar.

Still one other recommendation for this category is to look for opportunities in the summer that serve as the equivalent of internships. Traditional internships mostly happen during college years and are often a steppingstone to a first job. It is possible, though, to encourage our kids to seek out and manufacture their own internships.

One good friend has a son who is classically car-obsessed at 15-years-old and is hoping to buy a cheap car when he gets his license and fix it up. In preparation for this plan, he wrote to a neighborhood service garage that specializes in classic cars and inquired about the possibility of just such an ‘internship’, and he is now spending one day a week soaking in all in at the garage, while gradually some skills that will likely eventually lead to some actual pay.

While there is a lot to be said for those first summer jobs in high school simply teaching the value of work, however menial, while bringing in some spending money or money to put toward a portion of college, there is also an aspect to these jobs that is a squandered opportunity—if we think again about the massive value of gaining greater insight about the working world and what areas may be most promising for our kids.

The value that would be gained by working in some area that leads to revelations about future work interests during a summer, possibly a summer in which our kids find three different employers that would let them work for free, versus the money they will make at minimum wage is not even a close call, for those who can afford it. It is investment that I am guessing many of us who did struggle would make on our own behalf could we go back, give up those lawn mowing riches for a career-illuminating experience.

Level three - going the full Jerry

While I know Jerry Murrell’s approach of teaming up with his kids, who were teens and younger, using their college money as grub stake to go in on a business with a high failure rate, was technically insane, I can’t help but be drawn to it and think his approach does offer some lessons for the rest of us.

We live in an era when it has never been easier to start a business and also to do so with minimal investment—more along the lines of the money spent on a cup of coffee at Starbucks every few days than anything that will encroach on a college savings fund.

As such, the third level career learning and prep that we can provide for our kids is to consider going into business with them, but at the level of a very modest side hustle, one that has the purpose of helping the kids experience more business basics firsthand.

This can be a matter of just treating a kid’s babysitting business a little more seriously, building a simple website on Squarespace, creating nice flyers and cards on Canva, watching some YouTube videos on topics like marketing to help drive growth.

Or you can play around with some of the very familiar low barrier to entry businesses that are frequently recommended as side hustles. Create a simple tshirt and clothing business with Printful, for example. This is incredibly simple and fun. You and your kids select items, add graphics, and then spread the word.

(Note: though I could be getting affiliate marketing dollars from the referenced companies for driving users to them—affiliate marketing being another easy entry level side hustle—I haven’t take the time to set that up and am just recommending companies I use myself and think are great).

Another option we are getting into at our house is to give the kids jobs in my wife’s home-based Pilates business, currently grooming them to take over some of the billing work, as well as to help update her outdated website. There will be modest compensation and exaggerated senior-level titles as we go forward. Vice President of Worldwide Billing.

Working together, even in this very entry level way, is, I realize, not for everyone. If you don’t want to team up with the kids, there is still the option of encouraging them to try starting a business and make clear that you will stake them to the modest sum that may be needed to get started down any of these paths. For the kids who get into this, who like entrepreneurship, you can be amazed to do some searching on the different ways kids have built businesses to pay for college and the like. Amazing.

As I mentioned, I am drawn to the Jerry Murrell model, which I think is appealing for those who have a co-conspiratorial relationship with their kids. That said, I actually don’t know for certain where my working life is heading at the moment. I have had light bulb moments about the need to improve upon and expand how we educate kids and better prepare them for life, but right now I am in the mad scientist stage of playing around with possible solutions, solutions that are, to varying degrees, helping my own kids and, hopefully, can help others in future, for a price.

“So we’re guinea pigs,” my son concludes when I share these. Yes, exactly. Guinea pigs.

In making that observation, he once more made me glad I am pausing to take the time and provide both them with a look inside my current thinking and efforts around my work. They are learning from life itself, which can be such a great teacher. And as I further explore where my work is heading, I am open to the possibility the kids are going to be increasingly involved, standing on the milk crate, as it were.

The wrap-up

There is an elephant in the room. She’s a robotic elephant, and she can engage in a conversation with you, an ability that is powered by a combination of ChatGPT and Google Text to Speech. (Actually, the real version of what I am suggesting is a robot dog, created by Boston Dynamics, which you can search for online and be unnerved by, but it might as well be a talking elephant.)

The real elephant is this: None of us know what the sudden rapid emergence of AI with real life applicability is going to have to career paths as we know them. What is clear is this: disruption is coming to how many of us work and this disruption may well approach historic levels.

The old school approach to career preparation was never a good one, at all, as so many of us can attest. For the lucky, we either just knew early on what we wanted to do or eventually found our way, but for many adults there are often far more wrong turns and lost years than necessary. Given all the change that is coming, all the uncertainty, the current suboptimal system—making minimal effort to prepare young people for career success—starts veering toward negligent.

At some point in the future—speaking of technology—someone is going to make a lot of money offering parents a high-tech career exploration service that is going to address the giant gap that currently exists. Kids will take sophisticated, data-based assessments that will narrow down options, help them find the nexus of their strengths and what they will enjoy, and then will let them experience a day in the life of the leading contenders is an virtual, AI-powered environment, along with other features to help make better choices.

That service doesn’t exist yet. And our kids probably aren’t going to one of the handful of the prep schools in the world that have made career exploration an innovative and import part of the curriculum. But not to fear, because we really can make a massive difference for them, dramatically improving on how it was handled in our youth, thanks to Khan, work-from-home internships with us and others, the ease with which our kids can start side hustles (with or without our help), and more.

Just don’t forget that part of what will be so effective about this effort is the role the unconscious mind can play in helping put kids on the right path based on some of that early career exposure that resonates with their minds, once we give them that initial exposure, and also that this initiative of exploring careers offers the additional benefit that it can be as interesting and learning-rich as anything else that the kids are experiencing school today.

Postscripts on passion, purpose, and in praise of meandering paths

Life, as we adults are so well aware, involves work. The industrial revolution and technological revolution and the efficiencies they brought have in ways made it possible to somewhat obscure this fact, as well as to bestow the benefit of making it possible for some, mostly in the developed world, to be selective about the type of work we pursue. But the inescapable reality is work.

Work has been around since the first human put in some effort to gather food and find shelter and otherwise expend energy to avoid dying, and while the types of work have changed, that statistic about the average adult putting in 90,000 hours makes clear that it hasn’t gone away. We do a disservice to our kids, I think, if we don’t make clear how front and center it is. Before talking about finding your passion, following your bliss, there is just the fact work and we should become versed in its available forms.

That is what this piece has been about—our teens/tweens becoming familiar with options as they make their ways through K-12 and build their minds in a manner that, if done right, will make as many options available as possible. Working in a realm that one is a passionate about—how that happens, whether it is something that is found or built, etc.— really requires a separate level of knowledge and strategy (which is to say, a future post). But, yes, the dream of landing in work that one can describe as loving is a lovely notion.

This plea for earlier exposure and more disciplined approach to learning about careers and work should also not be confused with suggesting that our kids must always be working and that there is nothing to be gained by having periods of being lost or aimless in life. Two of the peak phases of my life—ski bumming in Colorado and backpacking in Europe and Turkey—were of the lost variety and could not be more grateful for them; I am just making case that is tragic to be lost because no one ever laid out the options.

Even well thought out early exposure to work and the many varieties it comes in will likely still be followed by a lifelong process of making adjustments, learning new skills, heading off in new directions, all in a manner that will be mystifying and only in hindsight miraculously, if all goes relatively well, makes a strange sort of sense that no amount of early-days career introduction and preparation could predict.

One piece of career advice I heard years ago may also be helpful to share early on. Some successful businessman was on TV reflecting on how he had completely reinvented every fifteen years such that he ended up with three totally different careers. That has ended up being my track, while I have a cousin who went with two, the first half as an attorney and the second half as a middle school teach in a Title 1 school. Lots of options, but the takeaway is that this career prep is in part only an effort to find a starting point.

Lastly, there is the reminder I make to myself anytime I am thinking of my kids and careers—a reminder that might be one you also welcome: our kids are wired on a foundational level to want to please us, wiring that will light up anytime something as significant as career questions are considered, but what we want them to know is that what really will please us is that they go about this quest for meaningful work resiliently and with the goal pursuing work that is for them fulfilling, brings out their gifts, and, overall, enjoyable.

That really is what we want for them and what will please us on the deepest level, though, of course, we will undoubtedly do and say things along the way that suggest otherwise.

Take-aways, caveats, details, fine print

For those interested in the condensed version of this post, here it is.

Work consumes a massive number hours of all of our precious lives. This point can not be overstated. And yet the system for teaching kids about career paths and helping them gain some early tangible sense for what might be a good fit is nearly nonexistent. This is arguably the central reason that so many young adults spend all of their twenties and even beyond trying to figure this all out. It makes no sense, even less when you factor the disruption that is coming with AI. It makes no sense and it is unnecessary. Parents, guardians, or others who are working with kids can easily implement a model that will radically improve their chances for getting on the right path. This model can include:'

• Level one - initial exposure. The biggest mistake we make is thinking that we make is doing little to start young people thinking about career paths until college or after. For a number of reasons, the time to start is in high school or even middle school. And what they need to start with is actual understanding of the jobs that exist. Khan Academy has a great course for providing this introduction, which will introduce them to nearly 70 jobs.

• Level two - the work from home internship. Once kids have the broad exposure, we should help them get a deeper dive into at least a few jobs, which they can initially get by shadowing parents who work from home, learning about the basics, as well as what parents like and don’t like, and even starting to help out with some of the admin aspects of the job or possibly even going further. This same take the kid to work-from-home day experience can be provided by other family members and close friends.

• Level three - going the full Jerry. Jerry Murrell, founder of Five Guys, started the business his wife and four young boys, using their college fund as the initial investment. While this is extreme, we can leverage the side hustle model to start businesses with our kids, or encourage them to start their own, which provides still a deeper level of early understanding into the type of work they might want to pursue as adults.

In the future, some tech firms are going to offer sophisticated version of this service, including highly accurate career aptitude interest and aptitude assessments and chances to experience different work virtually. Our kids can’t wait for this service, especially with AI coming, but we can absolutely put together our own system that will be a radical improvement on what was in place to help us sort this all out when we were young.

Realize, too, that part of what will be so effective about this effort is the role the unconscious mind can play in helping put kids on the right path based on some of that early career exposure that resonates with their minds, once we give them that initial exposure, and also that this initiative of exploring careers offers the additional benefit that it can be as interesting and learning-rich as anything else that the kids are experiencing school today.