“What do you want to be when you grow up?”

When I was a kid, I felt anxious about the question, because I never had a good answer. Adults always seemed terribly disappointed that I wasn’t dreaming of becoming something grand or heroic, like a filmmaker or an astronaut.

In college, I finally realized that I didn’t want to be one thing. I wanted to do many things. So I found a workaround: I became an organizational psychologist. My job is to fix other people’s jobs. I get to experience them indirectly—I’ve gotten to explore how filmmakers blaze new trails(开创先河)and how astronauts build trust.       1    

My first complaint with the question is that it forces kids to define themselves in terms work. When you’re asked what you want to be when you grow up, it’s not socially acceptable say, “A father,” or, “A mother,” let alone, “A person of integrity(诚实正直)”. This might be of the reasons many parents say their most important value for their children is to car about others, yet their kids believe that top value is success.     2    

The second problem is the implication that there is one calling(使命感) out the everyone. Although having a calling can be a source of joy, research shows that search one leaves students felling lost and confused. And even if you’re lucky enough to stum a calling, it might not be a viable(切实可行的) career. My colleagues and I have form callings often go unanswered:     3    

If you manage to overcome those obstacles, there is a third hurdle: Careers rarely your childhood dreams. In one study, looking for the ideal job left college seniors feeling more anxious, stressed, overwhelmed and depressed throughout the process satisfied with the outcome.       4     Sure, you might be a little less excited to take it, but on average you end up more productive and less likely to quit.

I’m all for encouraging youngsters to aim high and dream big. But take it who studies work for a living: those aspirations should be bigger than work . As they want to be leads them to claim a career identity they might never want invite them to think about what kind of person they want to be -- and about things they might want to do.

3 . Just when you thought you figured out Millennials (those who reached young adulthood around the year 2000), Generation Z is now entering the workforce. A massive 72.8 million individuals are included in this group born between the mid - 1990s and the early 2000s.

Are you ready?

While we have learned how to create a culture where Millennials can do well, what Generation Z needs can be quite different:

4 . All across America, students are anxiously finishing their “What I Want To Be …” college application essays, advised to focus on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) by experts and parents who insist that’s the only way to become workforce ready. But two recent studies of workplace success contradict the traditional wisdom about “hard skills”.

Google originally set its hiring systems to sort for computer science students with top grades from top science universities. In 2013, Google decided to test its hiring theory by quickly dealing with large amounts hiring, firing, and promotion data collected since the company’s establishment.

Project Oxygen shocked everyone by concluding that, among the eight most important qualities of Google’s top employees, STEM capability comes in dead last. The seven top characteristics of success at Google are all soft skills: being a good coach; communicating and listening well; possessing comprehension into others; being supportive of one’s colleagues; being a good critical thinker and problem solver; and being able to make connections across complex ideas.

Those characteristics sound more like what one gains as an English or theater major than as a programmer. Could it be that top Google employees were succeeding despite their technical training, not because of it? After bringing in more experts to dive even deeper into the data, the company enlarged its previous hiring practices to include humanities majors, artists, and even the MBAs (Master of Business Adminstration).

Project Aristotle, a study released by Google this past spring, further supports the importance of soft skills even in high-tech environments. Project Aristotle analyzes data on inventive and productive teams. Google takes pride in its A-teams, assembled with top scientists, each with the most specialized knowledge and able to throw down one creative idea after another. Its data analysis revealed, however, that the company’s most important and productive new ideas come from B-teams comprised of employees who don’t always have to be the smartest people in the room.

Project Aristotle shows that the best teams at Google exhibit a range of soft skills: equality, generosity, curiosity toward the ideas of your teammates, understanding, and emotional intelligence. And topping the list: emotional safety. To succeed, each and every team member must feel confident speaking up and making mistakes. They must know they are being heard.

STEM skills are vital to the world we live in today, but technology alone, as Steve Jobs famously insisted, is not enough. We desperately need those who are educated to the human, cultural, and social as well as the computational.

5 . Choosing the right job is probably one of the most important decisions we have to make in life, and it is frequently one of the hardest decisions we have to make. One important question that you might ask yourself is: “How do I get a good job?”    1    .

There are people who can answer an insignificant advertisement in the local paper and land the best job in the world; others write to all sorts of places all over the country, and never seem to get a reply at all. Still others believe that the in person, door-to-door approach is by far the best way to get a job; and then there are those who, through no active decision of their own, just seem to be in the right place at the right time.     2    . He used to spend a lot of his free time down by the sea watching the tall ships, but never thinking that he might one day sail one of them. His father was a farmer, and being a sailor could never be anything for the boy but an idle dream. One day, on his usual wandering, he heard the captain of the ship complaining that he could not sail because one member of his crew was sick. Without stopping to think, the lad(少年) offered to take his place.     3    .

    4    . If the lad had gone home to ponder(考虑)his decision for a week, he may have missed his chance. It is one thing to be offered an opportunity; it is another thing to take it and use it well.

Sometimes we hear stories about people who break all the rules and still seem to land plum jobs(美差). When you go for a job interview or fill out an application, you are expected to say nice things about the company to which you are applying. But there was one person who landed an excellent job by telling the interviewer all the company’s faults. And within a year this person had become general manger of the company.