Tags
career, direction, jerry seinfield, poetry, robert frost, the road less travelled, the road not taken
When I was at high school we had to study the poem by Robert Frost titled “The road not taken” (also known as “The road less travelled”). The basic premise of the poem is that a man comes to a fork in the road, and he can either choose to go down a path that is well travelled, or one that is not. The last part of the poem goes:
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.
For some reason this poem was always in the back of mind when I was at university, and making decisions about what I should do in my career. It was choosing the path less travelled, the one that other people didn’t want to take that made me decide my chosen career path. However, after a few years doing what other people didn’t want to do I was thoroughly miserable. I had this poem stuck up on my computer to remind myself why I had chosen to do what I was doing, and I thought that maybe if I stuck it out it would ‘make all the difference’.
However, one day I was shopping at Typo ( I love my stationary) and I saw a card that said ‘Sometimes the road less travelled is less travelled for a reason’ – Jerry Springer. When I saw this I laughed out loud and of course I bought it. I went back to work and ripped up the poem and stuck the card in its place. It made me realise that I didn’t have to continue in a job that I hated because I thought that’s what I should be doing. So I left that job and my career. I still have that card stuck on my wall at home.