Precocious identity formation

Childhood promise—and trapped adults

I almost failed two classes in my life. Organic chemistry (because obviously).

And penmanship.

If you’re of a certain generation, you remember penmanship classes. They’re where you learned, under the severe eye of Sister Viola Pratka of the Incarnate Word and Blessed Sacrament, how to write the cursive capital Q that (for unclear reasons) looked like a 2, or the capital Z that looked like a 3.

Friends, I was not good at it. 

I got a D+ in penmanship.

And that’s when my parents knew I’d become a doctor.

I didn’t want to. I never wanted to become a doctor.

I had bigger dreams—like all little boys, I wanted to become a linguist or a philosopher or maybe a rock star. But, I’m the first-born son of an immigrant family, with comically bad handwriting to boot. 

My fate was sealed. I’m a doctor.

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Maybe you’ve felt this too — the gravitational pull of a professional identity you chose (or had chosen for you) long before you understood what it meant, long before your pre-frontal cortex was even a glimmer in your midbrain’s eye.

My friend Margaret did. She always knew she was going to be a doctor. The daughter of two physicians, she deeply admired her mother. (She also quietly despised her father, but that’s a whole other blog post…)

At age six, she confidently declared she’d be following in her parents’ footsteps. And she did. A prestigious university, a top-tier medical school in New York City, and residency and fellowship at the top hospital in the US, where she then rose through the ranks as faculty.

And she felt empty. 

Margaret struggled, though, to pin the emptiness on the true culprit. It took the pandemic, a difficult promotion fight, and the rupture of her marriage to finally admit that the choice she made at 6 no longer served her at 47.

Precocious identity formation

Who writes your career story?

This is super common, and well-documented. Our identities are formed when we’re too young to understand what we’re even doing. And then we feel obligated to carry them with us to retirement, even if we no longer want them.

A lot of interlocking factors contribute to this; I want to talk about two of them today. The first is something called occupational inheritance—which is exactly what it sounds like. 

There’s a greater-than-random chance that a child will follow in their parents’ occupational footsteps. And although this tendency is partially explained by educational and financial attainment—richer parents privilege their children—it isn’t fully.

Before our brains even know what they’re doing, our future careers are influenced by the people who raise us. And, a gender bias exists in this occupational inheritance. There is a 33–40% higher rate of occupational inheritance when children share the same gender as the parent in the profession. In other words (you’ll excuse the binary), sons are even more likely to follow their fathers’ career paths, and daughters their mothers’. ​

And sure, following a parent’s career path can provide advantages, such as mentorship and established networks. 

It can also keep us stuck. After all, how much more disappointed will a parent be in you if you abandon the career that they also chose?

When path feels like destiny

While that may go some way to explain six-year-old Margaret’s initial choice, it doesn’t explain why she’s continued to walk the path that burned her out.

For that explanation, we have to turn to another process, called path dependence. Although path dependence research has been primarily focused on how organizations change (or, more specifically, don’t), the ideas are equally applicable to human careers.

Fundamentally, path dependence posits that, once we’ve started down a path, we’re locked in. Our future depends on the steps we’ve already taken—our path depends on our path. 

In other words, our early choices (feel like they) lock us in. These choices immediately narrow an infinitely broad set of future options, closing 99% of available doors, and leaving only the “logical next steps” open. 

So, for example, once you’ve decided to go to law school, your career options precipitously narrow from a cornucopia (you could be a priest! an artist! a doctor! an HVAC technician! an astronomer! a reiki practitioner!) to a tiny basket. 

Soon enough, you’re debating between torts and constitutional law, ignoring the fact that you hate law school in the first place. 

The future depends on the choices you made in the past, and each step down the path makes you more dependent on the path itself. The same happened with Margaret. Every year in her medical path reinforced the identity—and it increased the emotional, financial, and psychological cost of stepping away.

But here’s the thing: professional identity isn’t destiny. If nothing else, you have a choice.

You’re allowed to change the career story you wrote as a kid

In the early-to-mid 2000s, Career Construction Theory (CCT) emerged as a response to traditional career theories that primarily relied on matching individual traits to specific occupational environments. 

Mark Savickas developed CCT against the backdrop of an increasingly complex and unpredictable work environment, one that resisted the simplistic skills-to-job connection, or the idea that these connections would lead to predictable career outcomes. 

Instead, CCT reoriented the career discussion from this static view of career choice into a dynamic process of personal narrative and identity formation. Savickas’s assertion is as simple as it is freeing: careers don’t have to be predetermined. They are constructed, by you, through your lived experience. 

How?

Well, as you work, grow, and age, you build stories around your experiences. These stories, in turn, serve as a framework for understanding your past choices. And they can, if you let them, shape your future directions. 

In other words, your career is a lifetime evolution, rather than a one-off decision, and the next step in your career is not about finding a perfect fit with an external job. It’s about constructing meaning and coherence from your past steps, and applying that to your future. 

Your past is not your destiny. You have a huge capacity to modify your narrative in response to shifting personal and environmental conditions.

Your precocious decisions when you were six, or eighteen, or twenty-one—decisions you made before the complex decision-making parts of your brain even fully developed—do not consign you to an indelible path. You’re allowed to modify, rewrite, and reconstruct your career identity.

The best way to start is in your mind. Start by envisioning multiple possible selves. 

As the saying goes, you contain multitudes. But… do you know who they are? Have you ever stopped to imagine them? Could you describe those multitudes?

Consider starting. Oyserman and Markus (who, in fairness, studied teenage delinquents, not people creating careers…still, their findings are cool) suggested that people who actively consider their multitudes of future selves make better and more flexible decisions. They adapt better to change. (And they’re less likely to become teenage delinquents.) 

That’s because envisioning the multitudes helps us recognize the huge range of opportunities available to us. It broadens our sense of what’s possible beyond the path we’re on.

And then, when you’re done imagining, experiment. Experiment with those provisional selves. 

Herminia Ibarra’s 1999 paper by that same name finds, as she writes, that people “adapt to new roles by experimenting with provisional selves that serve as trials for possible but not yet fully elaborated professional identities.” And that experimentation makes transition off of path dependence easier, smoother, and more permanent.

These experiments—which could be as simple as reading a book about your potential new career or as committed as getting a part-time role in it—reveal unexpected passions or talents, and, even more importantly, start to wrench loose the grip of a singular, inflexible identity.

Adult you gets to choose adult you’s path

Margaret chose her identity when she was six—the same age she learned to write, lost her first baby teeth, grew her first molars, figured out how to count to ten, and still feared monsters. 

It would be beyond ridiculous for anyone to suggest that the decision she made then had to hold for the rest of her life. 

And yet, we’re far more ready to accept that an identity we form at 18—when we choose our colleges, our majors, or our vocations, and when we’re only just developing our moral sense, when we’re incredibly susceptible to peer pressure, and when we’ve only been shaving for about three years—should determine how we retire.

Which. Is. Ludicrous.

Your past doesn’t predict your future—unless it you let it. 

Your next decision can change everything. And if you’re feeling stuck, it should change everything. Early identities are influential—and that’s it. They’re influential; they’re not permanent.

Recognize the walls six-year-old you built, and then start to dismantle them. Accept that you contain multitudes, and then start experimenting with those multitudes. It’ll move your life’s direction back under your control. 

You have the power—and the permission—to break free.

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