By Frank Hyman

In high school I heard my parents' drumbeat: You'll go to college. My farm-boy father had dropped out of school after the eighth grade. My mother couldn't afford college. My parents wanted their shy, weak, bookworm son to have what they never had. I knew no one who'd been to college, but I liked school, so it sounded good.

By sophomore year I'd hit my stride: good grades, dinners with professors, dating women. But rubbing shoulders with my better-off peers revealed something no one had told me: College was a vocational school for rich kids. You merely had to choose a major, which became a degree, which gave you a career, which might make you happy. But how good are teens at choosing work that makes them happy?

What if I finished college with a degree that wasn't my calling? Would I feel like a Jane Austen character who discovers too late she's married the wrong man? I worried that a degree, like a marriage, would not only lock me into one option but also foreclose many others.

At 19, I disappointed seemingly everyone -- parents, professors, friends -- by dropping out. It didn't make sense to me to declare a major before I found my calling. So I took a gap year. It lasted 84 months.

Inspired by friends' trips on their parents' dime, I banked up money and muscle working on a sketchy construction site so I could Jack-Kerouac my way around Europe for two months. Between odd jobs, camping and couch surfing, I managed to explore the continent for six months. Would I find my calling there? Would I even recognize it if I found it?

Under a drizzly rain in Barcelona, Antonio Gaudi's mellifluous buildings captured me -- but I could not imagine designing anything so striking. Sleeping in abandoned houses in the Starry Mountains of Portugal, my eyes traced the flowing lines of stone walls by fire light. But who still builds with stone? On the Costa Brava, failing as a migrant farm worker, I fell for fruit trees and wanted to learn the names of every plant...then didn't.

Back in the U.S., I pursued any work that sparked my curiosity. I swung a hammer, served as a delegate for a state political convention and managed an organic tomato farm. I also drove working boats, taught preschoolers, rescued sea turtles and studied rhesus monkeys in the wild. Eventually, I saw that finding a calling isn't straightforward. It feels like having a crush on a person -- and this is key -- who is not your type.

By 27, my plans jelled. Somehow I would make a living from my favorite callings: plants, design, carpentry, stone masonry, politics and writing. At 30 I wrote a column for the local alternative newspaper. By 31, after finally finishing my degree -- a double major in horticulture and design -- I started a garden business that included carpentry and stonework. I earned more than minimum wage for the first time in my life. At 33, I cut off my ponytail and won a seat on the city council in Durham, N.C.

Surprisingly, I'm still making an AI-resistant middle-class living from what feel like my hobbies. Also I'm happy. Very happy.

I often introduce myself as having spent my 20s as "a very successful college dropout." People laugh, but I'm being serious. I feel grateful for my younger self, who somehow had the presence of mind to do the opposite of what so many people wanted him to do.

Frank Hyman is the author of "How to Forage for Mushrooms Without Dying." He's working on a memoir called "Shedding My Adolescence One Mistake at a Time."

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

September 12, 2025 12:30 ET (16:30 GMT)

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