Made by Moving: Why Direction Is Something You Walk Into, Not Something You Decide

The form is not a complicated one, a page, maybe two. Tick the subjects you want to carry into your senior years, sign at the bottom, and hand it back by Friday. Around this point in the calendar, thousands of Australian teenagers sit in front of a version of it, and a good number of them feel something they would struggle to name, not excitement, but something closer to dread.

That form never feels like it is only about subjects; tick the wrong boxes, and you might close a door on a future you cannot yet picture. So a fifteen-year-old is asked, in effect, to predict the shape of a life they have not started living, and to do it before the end of the week.

I have sat with a lot of young people around these moments: the subject form, the careers night, the relative at the barbecue who wants to know the plan. Over time I have come to think we have built an entire culture around a single question that can quietly do young people harm, not because we mean it to, but because we have never really examined it.

The question is simple: what do you want to do?

The problem is everything we have loaded underneath it.

The certainty we mistake for maturity

Somewhere we decided that a young person with a clear answer is a young person who has their act together; the kid who can say "medicine" or "electrician" or "law" with a straight face gets a nod of approval. On the other hand, the kid who says "I don't really know" gets a worried look and a follow-up question.

We have the signal backwards.

In my experience, early certainty tells us much less about self-knowledge than we tend to assume. I have seen young people work out that adults relax when you give them an answer, so they produce one. It ends the conversation, earns the approving nod and buys them out of the discomfort of being watched while they do not know.

That is not a plan; it is a performance of a plan. The cost of the performance is that they now carry a decision they never actually made, one that can harden over time into an expectation they feel they cannot walk back.

Meanwhile, the honest kid, the one who admits they have no idea, is not necessarily the one to worry about. They are sitting in the uncertainty instead of papering over it; that stretch of adolescence, the years spent trying on identities, testing options, and working out what is worth committing to, is not a malfunction. From everything I have seen, and from what developmental psychology has long suggested, exploration is not wasted time. It is part of how a durable sense of self gets built; rushing a young person out of it does not make them mature faster. It risks pushing them into a commitment before they know what they are committing to.

Why you rarely think your way to clarity

Here is the assumption sitting under the whole thing. We treat direction as a decision that comes first: reflect hard enough, and the right path will reveal itself, after which you simply follow it.

For some people, life works that way. For many others, it does not, and telling them it should sets them up to feel broken when it does not. Reflection still matters; it often becomes more useful alongside experience, each one sharpening the other, rather than relying on reflection alone.

You rarely learn what you are good at just by thinking about it; you learn it by doing things and noticing what comes back. You do not always discover what holds your attention in the abstract. Often you find it by being bored to death by one subject and quietly gripped by an unexpected one. Interest, aptitude, direction: these are not always things you arrive with fully formed. They take shape through experience, they accumulate, hey show up in the rear-view mirror once you have covered some ground, not on the map before you have moved.

This is why "follow your passion" is such thin advice for a sixteen-year-old, any young people do not have a fully formed passion sitting there waiting to be followed. They have hints, flickers of interest, half-formed curiosities, a few things they do not hate. Passion, where it exists at all, is often built rather than found. It can grow through doing something long enough to get better at it, find meaning in it, and discover that you want to keep going. Getting good at something means starting before you feel ready.

Direction is the same; it is made by moving.

The long way round

I know this one from the inside.

I left school thinking I wanted to be a panel beater; I was sure enough about it that I started a school-based apprenticeship while I was still completing years 11 and 12. It took me almost no time to work out that I hated it. That was my first real lesson in the thing I am describing here. You can be completely certain about a direction and still have it wrong, because certainty on paper is not the same as knowing what the work actually feels like.

What followed was years of what looked, from the outside, like wandering. I managed a Domino's, ran my own business, tiled roofs, and even worked as a wardy in a hospital. A fair list of jobs, none of them the answer, and at the time I could not have told you where any of it was heading.

Then something small happened: I was working in sales, as a service adviser for one of the well-known Queensland car dealership groups, when I bumped into an old colleague. He had just graduated with a degree in criminology and criminal justice. We got talking, and for the first time in a long while, something genuinely pulled at me. Not a plan, just a real flicker of interest, the kind I had spent years waiting to feel and had half given up expecting.

I followed that feeling and four years later, I graduated with the same degree. Along the way, I noticed myself gravitating toward the youth-focused subjects, and I quietly tailored more and more of my study in that direction, including an internship with Project Booyah at the PCYC in Logan, south of Brisbane. None of that was mapped out in advance; each step revealed the next one.

That is when it landed for me: I had not been lost all those years; I had been gathering the exact experience and information that would eventually make sense of itself. I had found my edge, and it took a long, unglamorous, roundabout path to get there.

That realisation is the reason NextGen Edge exists. The whole thing is built on it: a young person does not need to have it figured out. They need help finding the thing that is genuinely theirs, and finding it is better understood as a process than a single moment.

Why the pressure lands harder now

Young people have always been asked what they want to do. What has changed is the volume and the visibility.

A teenager today makes these choices while watching a constant feed of peers who appear to have it all sorted. The one who started a business at fifteen, the one with the clear athletic path, the one who has apparently known since childhood exactly who they are. Much of that is curated, and some of it is plain luck dressed up as destiny, but a sixteen-year-old does not always experience it as curation. It can land as evidence that they are behind.

Layer on the expectation to start thinking seriously about careers well before school is finished, a credential race that makes every choice feel high-stakes, and a general cultural message that you should be optimising your future by now. What you get is a generation feeling pressure to be certain before many of them have had enough experience to know what that certainty could reasonably be built on.

The uncertainty is not new. What is new, however, is how often young people are asked to hold it up against everyone else's apparent certainty.

Two common ways this goes wrong

When we push young people for an answer before they feel ready, there are two responses I come across regularly.

The freeze

Some young people look at the size of the question, cannot see the whole path, and respond by taking no step at all. If they cannot know the destination, they will not choose a direction, because choosing feels like risking the wrong answer. From the outside, this can look like laziness or apathy. Up close, I have often found something very different: a kid so worried about picking wrong that they have quietly decided not to pick at all; it's just paralysis dressed up as indifference.

These are often bright, thoughtful young people. They are not failing to care; they are stuck, in part because the decision has come to feel enormous, permanent and due now.

The premature lock-in

Others respond in the opposite direction. Faced with the discomfort of not knowing, some grab the nearest respectable answer and commit hard. The sensible degree, the safe career, the plan that sounds impressive at a family dinner. They can ride it for years, sometimes well into their twenties, before beginning to question whether it was ever really theirs. For some, the commitment ends the discomfort of not knowing, and by the time they begin to question it, they may have built a lot on top of it.

Different as they look, both responses can be reinforced by the same mistake. Both treat a fixed answer as the goal, rather than treating movement as the way you find one.

What actually helps

None of this means direction doesn't matter. It matters enormously; drift is real, and long periods with no exploration, engagement or forward movement are worth paying attention to. The argument is not that we should stop caring where they are headed; it is that we should stop demanding they see the whole route before they take a single step.

Here is what I try to do instead, and what I would encourage the adults around a young person to do as well.

Shrink the question

"What do you want to be?" is a question about a whole life. It can be too big to answer and too heavy to hold. "What will you try next?" is a question about a term, a season, a single choice. Swap one for the other, and you can often take some of the pressure out of the conversation. You are not asking them to commit to a destination; you are asking them to take a step they can actually take.

Make not knowing safe

A young person who feels judged for not having an answer may manufacture one, and a manufactured answer is worse than an honest gap. When a kid says "I don't know," one of the most useful things you can do is treat it as normal, because it is. Then get curious alongside them. What are they drawn to lately? What would they have a go at if it did not have to become their identity? Not knowing is something to work with, not something to shame.

Treat wrong turns as information

A lot of the fear around these choices comes from treating them as irreversible. Many of these choices are not permanent, even when changing direction later carries a cost. A subject that turns out to be a poor fit is not automatically a wasted year. It's just data, and it can tell a young person something real about themselves that reflection alone may never have revealed.  The kid who tries a path and steps off it is not necessarily behind the kid who never tried; they've just learned something they did not know before.

Build the trait, not the answer

The thing worth developing in a young person is not just a plan; it is the confidence that they can revise the plan when life gives them new information. A teenager who trusts their own capacity to try, adapt, change course and try again is equipped with something a five-year plan alone cannot give them. Plans change, but the capacity to keep moving through uncertainty will not stop being useful for the rest of their life.

The honest beginning

I think often about how much unnecessary weight we hang on young people who may simply not have lived enough yet to answer the questions we keep asking them with any real certainty. We mistake their uncertainty for a deficiency, when often it is simply an honest account of where they are. They do not know yet; they have barely started.

The young person who cannot name their future is not failing. They are standing at the honest beginning of working it out. Our job is not to force a premature answer out of them. It is to help them take the next real step, then the one after that, and to trust, out loud and often, that direction can emerge along the way.

Direction is not always waiting for you at the start. Sometimes it is made by moving.

Photo by Viktor Mischke on Unsplash