29 Jul 2018

At some point in your life, it’s likely that you’ll find yourself stumbling into a job or degree due to outside pressure and circumstance. Maybe they offer you more money than anyone else is willing to, maybe they are the only place to give you a spot, or maybe you just feel the need to do something that ticks all the boxes and makes your parents happy. Whatever the reason, you end up pursuing a career with zero resemblance to what you drew on those primary school worksheets that asked what you wanted to be when you grew up.

There are periods in life when this is okay–stability is pretty sweet, and so is earning a salary. But throughout these times and beyond, you might feel this niggling in the back of your mind. You’ll hear a calling to something else that tells you maybe you’re not where you’re supposed to be. It’ll be something as simple as catching up with a childhood friend or finding an old poster assignment you did in primary school. You’ll remember what it was like being the younger-you again–the curiosity, the cleverness, the creativity. You’ll remember the things you naturally invested your time and effort into, before your interests were tempered by questions of employability and profitability. You’ll remember what you did just because it was fun, and because you bloody well enjoyed it.

When I was younger I used to spend my days trying to write a novel. While my friends were out playing in the park, I was sat by a clunky ass computer spinning tales about dragons and ninjas. 11-year-old me didn’t even show these to anyone, I just did it cause I wanted to. As I grew up, this pastime slowly faded and in high school I was drawn to the subjects I seemed to do well at even if I wasn’t particularly interested in them. I nearly went for a science degree before I had my moment with younger me–a chance encounter with a dusty printed out copy of my first ‘novel’. I changed my application and ended up studying a Writing & Cultural Studies degree. Now I tell stories in a whole range of contexts and while I don’t get to write about dragons and ninjas often (bar right now), I still feel like that same giddy kid again every time I get to sit by a computer and write.

The lessons you can get from younger-you may not always be clear-cut. Maybe your childhood aspirations just aren’t that feasible at this point, like being an astronaut, or are kinda dumb because kids can be kinda dumb, like wanting to be a superhero. But look beyond that. Maybe you wanted to be a superhero because you wanted to help people that can’t help themselves, like the social workers and nurses and police officers of our world. Maybe the thing that drew you to be an astronaut was the thrill of exploration, of discovering new things and places – like a scientist or tech innovator.

Some of your childhood dreams might even be better ideas than they seem. Okay, so maybe being an international pop star isn’t exactly what you’re chasing anymore, but a sound producer, or musician, or an entertainment manager? There’s plenty of avenues to get yourself started in careers like that and they could be particularly lucrative roles considering they belong to a $30 billion industry. If you can satisfy the creative little kid inside you as well as the big kid that really just wants the sweet, sweet cash, well, that’s the definition of a win-win right there.

An important thing to watch out for when entering adulthood is the loss of creativity. You will probably have expressed yourself in heaps of different artistic ways when you were a kid, and this is something to listen to when you have a younger-you moment.  It’s important to nurture this creativity and to remember that there are loads of job and study options that let you do this. That game you used to play as a kid where you would just build shit and create worlds to lord over sounds a lot like game development, your old habit of doodling in books has an outlet in animation, and your love of singing for your family can be developed into producing and recording music. In the words of one of our great modern thinkers Shia LaBeouf, “don’t let your dreams just be dreams! JUST DOOO ITTTTTT!”

Ahem. If working creatively is what younger-you is telling you to do, then take a gander at JMC Academy’s course list. There’s a bunch of different types of courses you can get into to specialise in some of the most creative industries out, like music, film and television, game design and digital design. Now go, sit down, have your own younger-you moment and see what you two can come up with.