Career counselors will tell you to choose a course based on aptitude, passion, and long-term goals.
I chose mine because a woman in a sharp corporate suit looked like she knew exactly what she was doing.
I was sixteen.
This seemed perfectly reasonable.
She was the guest speaker during Career Week. She worked in Human Resources for a multinational company.
She was articulate, confident, and carried herself with the kind of authority that makes young people think: I want to be like that someday.
So I enrolled in Psychology.
Looking back, I would love to say I had a deep fascination with the human mind. That I spent my teenage years reading Freud and pondering its mysteries.
I did not.
I was simply impressed by a woman in a sharp suit.
Here’s the twist.
I never became a psychologist, an HR practitioner, or a counselor.
Instead, I became a banker.
Somewhere in the middle, I spent six years in telecommunications before returning to banking again. Today, I am in my 34th year in the corporate world.
Over the years, people have occasionally asked if I graduated with a degree in Economics or Business.
I didn’t.
I’ve always loved numbers. I enjoy economics, forecasting trends, and making sense of what is happening in the world through data. But I never formally studied any of it. Most of what I know came from books, seminars, experience, and conversations with people far smarter than I am.
For a long time, I assumed my degree and my career had very little to do with each other.
One belonged to my youth.
The other paid the bills.
Then I realized something.
Maybe the degree was never wasted.
Because all along, I was still studying people.
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The branch manager and the borrower.
The executive and the politician.
The friend and the colleague.
The mean girl who grew older but never matured.
The person who becomes generous when successful and the one who becomes cruel.
The one who cries and the one who performs crying.
The one who seeks applause and the one who quietly does the work.
For more than three decades, I have encountered them in boardrooms, branches, offices, coffee shops, family gatherings, and now, increasingly, on social media.
And I remain endlessly fascinated.
People can be predictable.
People can be surprising.
Sometimes they are both in the same afternoon.
Perhaps I never left Psychology.
I simply changed laboratories.
The bank became a laboratory.
The telco became a laboratory.
Coffee shops became laboratories.
Social media became a laboratory.
And somewhere along the way, this column became my field notebook.
Looking back, I sometimes wonder what happened to that woman in the sharp corporate suit.
She probably never knew that a student sitting quietly in the audience would choose a college degree because of her.
She certainly never knew that decades later, that same student would still be studying people.
Not in a clinic.
Not in an HR department.
But everywhere.
I still love numbers.
I still enjoy economics, forecasting, trends, and the stories hidden in numbers.
But after all these years, I’ve learned that numbers explain many things.
People explain the rest.
And perhaps that’s why I never really left Psychology.
