I have a good friend named Chris Cooper. (No, not the actor.) I worked for Chris for many years when he was Director of Developer Services at Novell; now, Chris is a partner with UV Partners, a venture capital firm in Salt Lake City.

Working for Coop (he goes by Coop, not Chris; calling him Chris seems weird) was a very important educational experience for me, primarily because Coop is a businessman, not a technologist, by background. Because of this, Chris taught me things about the software business that no other manager or director that I’ve worked for has been able to teach me. In particular, Coop helped me understand many of the reasons why Novell made some of the decisions they made, and why they didn’t make others I thought they should. Knowing this doesn’t mean that they are right, but it certainly helped me to gain a different perspective.

Some time ago I had the opportunity to meet Coop for lunch in Salt Lake City. I asked him how he was liking his work and he gushed about how much he loved his job. Then he admitted, “You know, I never would have even considered this as a career opportunity for me, let alone would I have thought I would like it so much.” He briefly covered his background — education in business, joined Novell as a sales representative, established key relationships with others, always tried to execute in his assigned role — and then this opportunity played out for him. We discussed how odd it is that as young people we fret so much about which major to choose and which college to go to and which classes to take and which job opportunity to pursue, almost as though we think that the sum of of these decisions is going to head us down a career freeway, at high speed towards a specific destination, with no exits or detours or scenic byways, when in fact many, many people end up somewhere completely different from what they had planned.

I mentioned this later to a long-time friend who had spent many years in his chosen profession as a physical therapist before making a career change to sell educational technology to schools (yeah, I know!). Of course he could really identify with this. He said that often we think of our career not only as a path, but as a freeway like I just mentioned. But in fact, he said, our career is more like a waterway. It might be a little stream, or a large river; it might be straight or twisty; it might be fast-moving and exiting, full of whitewater rapids, or it might be slow and steady, if somewhat boring.

He continued the analogy by saying that as you float along the waterway you’ve chosen, you might eventually realize, “Uh, I don’t think this is going where I want to go anymore.” Maybe it started out going the direction you wanted, but quickly or gradually turned a different way. Maybe you thought it was heading one direction, only to find that it actually wasn’t heading where you thought it was. Or maybe it is still going where you once thought it was, but you’ve changed your mind about what you want. Clearly, if you want to end up where you intended to go, you’ll have to pull your raft out of the waterway and choose another one.

That’s why I say, your career path probably isn’t. It probably is a waterway.

This is why this post over the weekend by Seth Godin really stood out to me. I’ve got a big extended family with lots of younger people (siblings, siblings-in-law, cousins, etc.) for me to give advice to that they can quickly ignore. I’ve seen many of them struggle with this. They choose a major because it is easy instead of choosing a major because it is interesting, or they don’t finish their degree at all, or they don’t even make choices in college or a career because they are afraid to commit their whole life to it. I believe in the value of education, but sometimes I’ve wondered why it matters at all if your career is so much left to chance?

Seth’s post identifies the link for me. Education should be preparing you to take the choices as they become available to you. You might have a career endpoint in mind, but you can’t be so in love with that endpoint that you won’t consider opportunities and alternatives that become available to you along the way. How do you even know you will like that endpoint anyway? Fretting about choosing the right endpoint is pointless. Your career isn’t a path, it is a waterway. You don’t know whether the waterway leads where you want or not; you choose one based on the best available knowledge and judgment you have at the time. You can always get out and choose another one. So just get in and get started!