How throwing spaghetti on the wall can help you decide what to do once school’s over

My dad so often told me that when making big life decisions, it is sometimes easier to “throw spaghetti on the wall and see what sticks”.

He didn’t mean literal spaghetti by the way.

It was his way of telling me that it’s totally ok to have a go at everything and then running with the things that worked out.

There’s often so much pressure put on the shoulders of students in their last year of high school. Besides the regular pressures of studying and going well in exams, they are expected to figure out what they want to do once school’s over. Not to mention the pressure to apply for courses and scholarships so they stand a chance at being able to do that thing they finally might have decided upon.

You might be going through this phase right now, or it might be coming up really soon. If you are currently going through it, you’ll notice very quickly that making such a decision is pretty damn hard!

What if you change your mind along the way?
What if you’re just not sure if Option A is really that much better than Option B?
What if your decisions are influenced by expectations others have of you and you’re not entirely happy with the choices these people want you to make?

Fear not! These thoughts are totally normal.

And that’s why my dad’s advice made him seem like an absolute genius when he suggested it to me.

See, you and I are part of a generation where we literally can choose all the options all at once. Previous generations did not have such a luxury. If you can’t choose between one career pathway and another, have a taste of both!

Just like this Old El Paso ad suggests.

(Fun Fact: I tutored the original Old El Paso girl maths some years ago and I was one of her favourite tutors! For the moment, she is my claim to fame. I have high hopes this will change some day :P)

Anyway, back to making important life decisions…

For me, allowing myself to choose all the options and then running with what worked gave me so much freedom!

I no longer felt trapped and afraid of making the wrong decision and dooming my future self to a catastrophic life of epic proportions. It no longer was a matter of deciding for one option or the other before I even had a taste of either.

There are so many ways you can get a taste of all of your available options before you choose one over another.

On a theoretical level, you can do some research on Google or watch Youtube videos. You can also start free courses online to see if you even like learning that kind of subject matter.

If you’re considering going to university, you can access free courseware from more than 147 institutions from all over the planet. ‘Courseware’ just refers to all the learning materials you would have access to if you were doing the course at university. Coursera is one place you can find these materials. Get a taste for what different courses are like before you choose which one to enrol into.

On a practical level, seek some work experience in companies that specialise in your interests. Seek to get some experience that aligns with all the main options you are considering. Getting some real world, on-the-job experience will give you a taste for what your life may look like if you were to choose one option over another.

You may be surprised to find out that the thing you thought you really wanted to do may no longer appeal to you once you find out what it is really like.

My favourite example is about students who want to study psychology at university. They focus so much on similar subjects in the humanities and then they get to university only to realise that there is an insane amount of statistics they need to get through before they can start learning a small amount of psychology. Oh, if only they had known this was the reality of studying psychology…

Moral of the story?

Check out all of your options before choosing which one you want to roll with.