Make sure the career you’re chasing is your dream and not a hand-me-down from someone else.

Ambitions get handed down quietly. A relative says you would make a great doctor when you are eleven, people repeat it, and by seventeen it feels like a decision you made. Inherited goals are not automatically wrong, and plenty of them fit. The problem is only when you never checked, because then you are working hard for a choice nobody remembers making.

Ask where the idea first came from and whether any part of it still pulls at you. Talk to one person who actually does the job and listen for the boring parts. You can keep the plan after that, but keep it as yours.