Along the same lines, there&#x27;s the ridiculous cultural meme that is recited to kids: &quot;Follow your dreams&quot; implying that it&#x27;s a perfectly reasonable and even admirable idea to fixate on some particular career early on in life and pursue it despite any setbacks.<p>This is awful, because a young kid may only have heard of a handful of well-known &quot;classic&quot; careers like journalist, lawyer, athlete, nurse, and then they end up fixating on achieving one of those simply because they committed too early -- before they had a chance to hear about careers less likely to be in a Richard Scary book like forestry, mechanical work, system administration, helicopter piloting, whatever, even though one of those might be just as exciting or more.<p>As a result the &quot;popular&quot; careers that everyone&#x27;s heard of by the age of ten are all oversubscribed, and all other careers are undersubscribed. Because &quot;follow your dreams&quot;