Right towards the end of any college semester, an underlying feeling of anxiety starts to wave its way under the feet of graduating students. You learn never to ask one of those what they’re planning to do after graduation…of course, despite knowing you shouldn’t do it, you end up doing it anyway. The typical answers are, “Get a job”, “Go to Grad School” and “Get married”.
While there’s nothing wrong with those options, they hint at something that’s very typical of us millennials — we like structure. We leave a structured system just to jump back into another structured system. We need runway edge lights in our lives, and that’s the way we’ve been raised. So until we get that job or get accepted into that grad school or get a suitable proposal on shadi.com, we spend the nights playing PS3, we sleep in late and we fight with the family members in whose basement we live.
Get a job. Go to grad school. Get married.
There’s only a slight problem with these options. The only slight problem is it’s what most new graduates do, and if you want to know where you stand,China alone is expected to spew out 7.2 million graduates into the market. And that’s just one country. So if you’re graduating soon you’re just a droplet in a very wide ocean.
So what should you do to stand out and become awesome?
1. Wake up. A loafer’s life might be pretty appealing, but until you’re making one million dollars in your sleep, you can’t be a loafer just yet. Just because you don’t have school anymore doesn’t mean you should be glued to your bed. And since the automatic thing is to find yourself a new structure trough job or grad school, you would need to do some work like throwing your CV everywhere, and checking for companies on line in search for talent like yours. And for that, you really need to wake up – and get out of bed.
2. Find out what your unique gifts are. This transitory stage is the perfect time is to get to know yourself; your strengths, your weaknesses, your passions…basically, everything I’ve outlined before here, here and here.
3. Build your skill set and add value to the world around you (even when you’re not getting paid). It’s very hard for us to do something unless we’re getting something in return. Think of the feedback loop that exists when we go to school. We study and then the grades we get at the end of the semester closes the loop. We get into a job, then we get paid and that closes the feedback loop. But in a structure-less system, we have to close the feedback loop yourself since (surprise!) there’s no structure. So the best question to ask yourself every night is, “Am I better today than I was yesterday?” And the main areas you might want to focus on are; intellectual, spiritual, mental and social.
If you’re gaining so much weight and can feel your neurons fizzling away then you’ve got an obvious problem. Whether you watch inspirational TED talks or enroll in an online Coursera course, do not waste your transition period. And I say this because a time will come when you wish you had the energy and the time to actually pursue the things you want to pursue but because your time gets sold for money and by the time you return to your apartment your brain’s too fried to focus on anything but cat videos…make the best use of your post-commencement-ceremony-before-first-job period.
And you never know. You might end up stumbling on a million dollar idea (read the story behind AirBnb.com). Whatever you do, with the technological advances, you have more opportunities now than before to tap into a hidden market.
4. Get a menial job. So that Fortune 500 company hasn’t called you back for that interview yet? What about helping your uncle deliver milk to his customers. Many university graduates look down at menial jobs, and of course let’s not even start talking about the social implications…”He got a Master’s degree and decided to work as a farmer?” But you know what, if you really think about it farming is a basic life skill and it does build your character by teaching you patience so it can’t be that bad.
5. Read, read, and read some more. Not just comic books. Not just fiction. Read biographies and other nonfiction books. Universities are supposed to instill in us a love for life-long learning but between the eight o’clock powerpoint slide lectures and heavy textbooks, that becomes quite challenging. But pick up a book. Your brain cells will thank you for it.
6. Travel. This is not always possible because of the $$$ limitations. However, if you have a sense of adventure, you can google traveling hacks and plan for a trip without hurting your wallet too much. If you’re like me and lack that sense of adventure, then you can explore the area you already live in. Travel before you’re sucked into a job that binds you to a desk for a third of a day, inspires you to glue yourself to a couch the second third of the day, and puts you to sleep for the rest of the day.
7. Give back to society. Let’s take some time to appreciate the gift of education that has been bestowed upon us. As we speak, the war in Syria is keeping 2 million children out of school. It’s mind-boggling to multiply that by the number of troubled and poor countries where children just can’t afford to go to school. It’s quite heartbreaking to think that while the internet has made knowledge accessible…its access still doesn’t reach everybody. So give back to society, in whatever little way you can think of.
Whatever you do, make sure you’re sharing with the world your unique gifts, make sure you are adding value to the people around you, and work on paving your own path and remember the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail. Share on Twitter
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