on optionality - by connie - web surfing

Growing up in suburban PA without a car but with a bike but still many unbikeable roads meant that I spent a lot of time on the internet. Somehow one day I stumbled upon this article some Harvard Business professor wrote about optionality. It was about how people go into business and do the safe well-trodden professional path in the pursuit of increasing their optionality, or the amount of available options they have at any stage in life. But he argued that by doing so, they lose sight of their dreams, and it takes them longer to get to where they want.1 When I read this article I scoffed, I was going to be different and follow my dreams of finding the intersection of art and technology, which I had then believed to be UX Design. To be fair, no one in my immediate circles at the time knew what that was so I had thought it was a magical intersection of art, which I enjoyed, with some practicality of a stable job and real-world applicability (tech? maybe this also meant I could positivel

Growing up in suburban PA without a car but with a bike but still many unbikeable roads meant that I spent a lot of time on the internet. Somehow one day I stumbled upon this article some Harvard Business professor wrote about optionality. It was about how people go into business and do the safe well-trodden professional path in the pursuit of increasing their optionality, or the amount of available options they have at any stage in life. But he argued that by doing so, they lose sight of their dreams, and it takes them longer to get to where they want.1 When I read this article I scoffed, I w