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Who designed the blueprint and built the model? History, tradition, social customs, media, world events, our families, teachers, neighbors, friends, the time and place we find ourselves in. All of those things handed the blueprint down generation after generation to us. At its core is the principle that a person is defined by their career. Doctor, lawyer, banker, accountant, nurse, teacher, assistant. The blueprint tells us that succeeding in that career will bring us fulfillment and happiness, and it therefore stands to reason that the higher we succeed in that career, the more fulfillment and happiness we will accrue. The blueprint also pretty much tells us what steps we should take to prepare ourselves so we can fulfill the model and gain our success. Job offer in hand, we are on our way. One of the things we may be on our way to is the need to pay down the student debt we incurred. For these debtors, a pattern of paying something but not enough to cover the full obligation means that their virtual debt load will always be a burden, locking many of them into positions they may hate just because of the importance of that biweekly deposit from their employer to cover that massive debt obligation. It means that their average debt load is increasing virtually all the time. That is certainly what has happened with my generation of millennials. Not only that, but in general, millennials have less wealth than their parents did at the same age. 
Little Things That Count
They feel too financially strapped to embark on such milestones as starting a family or buying a house. Even without the burden of debt, the blueprint can sometimes feel like a trap. The truth is that the blueprint we were all born into has a couple of significant flaws. If you want to see what one of them looks like, take a look at some of the most successful people of our time. Etsy now has a market cap, as of this writing, of nearly 35 billion. And then there’s Lady Gaga, who dropped out of the prestigious Tisch School of the Arts at New York University so she could keep singing at open mic nights and pursue the career she believed she was meant to have. Blueprint breakers, all of them. Stubbornly and persistently, they listened to what they alone could hear, strayed from the blueprint to follow their own individual paths, and gained a level of success most of us can only dream about. They and the others are individuals driven by a kind of genius, a drive that they simply refuse to set aside. Most of us can’t aspire to their genius, and we probably can’t achieve what they’ve achieved. Remember the college admissions scandal that erupted in 2019 and that caught a bunch of wealthy parents, including Hollywood celebs, in a conspiracy to get their kids into prestigious colleges? The scandal was the subject of a fine documentary, Operation Varsity Blues. Sure, we all know that some very rich people will donate serious bucks to elite schools to get their kids acceptance through a kind of side door. Things Aren't Always Easy
It stings for those who would never get that shortcut, and it sucks for those whose spot they are taking. If parents think they are doing their kids a favor by beating the drum for this kind of prestige, they are dead wrong. Doesn’t this at the least tell us that many changes are necessary? Yes, divorce is down. In fact, the decrease is attributed as much to couples’ financial inability to pay for divorce as to the strength of conjugal ties. Also, the rate of total marriages is down, meaning that people are marrying later in life. This suggests that those people at least may be pulling away from the traditional blueprint, deciding to gain a bit more maturity and perhaps more economic stability before committing to marriage. For those at work, meanwhile, the statistics remain bleak. Maybe it is worth asking if such statistics are another side product of following the blueprint. Tell me about it. When I began my banking career, my definition of success was totally based in the traditional blueprint instilled in me from day one of my life. Success to me was about chasing money, responsibility, power, and titles. So, for me, achievement meant success all day long, but that was driven by ego. Picture This
When nobody was looking, I knew how unhappy I was and how empty my life felt. It all began to remind me of a story told to me by my mother’s father, my grandpa Lenny. But he also told me that he always regretted not having taken a shot at his dream. My grandfather lived in a different time, to be sure. Yes, I was moving up fast. Jason has a unique perspective on client service. Jason successfully hit and quickly exceeded the goals set. This opportunity arose because we had Jason as a resource. Not to mention one promotion after another. It was a game played out with deadly seriousness at the Starbucks right next to the elevator leading up to the executive suite. It meant you were in with the power crowd, on your way to being knighted by the king. The problem was that this was my dream. Rising up the ladder in corporate America was exactly what I had been striving for. That’s precisely what I’m asking you to do, however, and I’m suggesting that you do it right now. I arrived in the bank’s Seattle office ready to take on the job I had been aiming for since my first day at work, it was not my first visit. It wasn’t right, I was told, for my title or for the way we do things in Seattle. Cut it, they told me, much shorter, and ease up on all the gel. I actually felt terrible for my boss because I could see in his eyes that it actually pained him to make this request.