This is a personal piece, taken straight from the diary of my memory and put into words. Although, I have not been active on my blogs lately, writing a blog article was always on the back of my mind. Today, I have finally set aside some time.
In the past few months I have joined a film school in Mumbai, where I was occupied in a number of projects. Leaving management education and venturing into the media industry was quite a task for me to process. I always wanted to get into the creative industry. Carrying the thought of studying something which is creatively fulfilling was always on my mind. I didn't like management from the very first lecture that I attended at college. It was easy for me to carry the feeling of disliking the course and wanting to move away from it, until it came to actually making a decision of moving away.
Even though I knew my cognitive abilities were in the areas of social and creativity, I still consulted a career counsellor. I was advised to take Humanities or Media, but I still went on to challenge that and took Management due to various reasons. The trainwreck of a decision, the lack of creativity in couse, the boring finance and accounting lectures really were frustrating and put me down hard. For a brief period of time, I wanted to study Marketing abroad in pursuit of finding some creativity, but eventually gave up the idea for good. During my final semester of graduation, I was certainly making plans to quit management and get into something creative. I took the psychometric test again, which gave me the suggestion to pick the area of my interests - Media.
Coming back to me taking a decision, I knew I was not going to build my career in management. While I thought I was thinking logically, I was pushing my mind towards my comfort zone. I was overthinking about the industry shift that would happen. It was not about the risk that comes with the shift, but it was my mind going back and forth between the options that I had. You see, I had two options, getting into Advertising or Getting into Film. I narrowed down these as I thought they would give me creativity along with a sense of media and management that i was looking for. I also wanted to move to a new city, challenge myself into the culture, and startup something new which I like and reset my career path. I felt Mumbai would be perfect for both the options. I didn’t want to strech my time doing masters for two years, hence I chose to do a one year Diploma and finish my undergrad.
Film was something I wanted to do out of pure interest, but advertising was close to the business school that I attended. As I was in two minds, I didn't want to repeat the mistake of picking the wrong major. Now the challenge was to pick the right career trajectory for me. I saw two different career paths in both Film and Advertising. One that is purely out of interest that sparked in me and also due to my circumstances growing up, the other was born out of the education that I hated to study. Summing it up this clearly was not that easy while I was living through the conflict. Taking the right decision, after the debacle was the need of the moment. This is just the view through a peephole into my head
I had to make a decision. I made a simple distinction amidst everything that was happening. I closed my eyes and asked myself a laughable question, “What excites me the most?.” Is It remembering the Taglines of the Brands or Quoting the Dialogues from the Movies. Of course my answer was straightforward, and so is my area of interest. Even though I was clear in my head, heart and gut, where they all said the same thing, i couldn't make a firm decision. I want to explore Filmmaking, but I was falling back towards the safety cushion that was advertising. It wasn't the fear of the unknown for me, it was the act of playing safe in picking my career.
I was indecisive. I was running back and forth, I was asking career advice from everyone around, but for the lack of a better word, I was clearly living in contradiction. I am passionate about Films but wasn't daring enough to take it as a career path. I was making it hard for myself to step into something that is comfortable for me. Films were comfortable for me. My comfort zone was to study film, but at that moment of time, my mind suggested that advertising would be comfortable. Perhaps it was the management education that was kicking in the form of the survival instincts. In management they say play safe while investing, and the only aim for any transaction is to earn profits. Maybe that's why even after making up my mind that Films were comfortable for me, I was unsure that filmmaking was the right path. I felt that Advertising was comfortable, just because I was studying Management, I was looking for a safer career option with the perks of job safety. It was not like I wasn't sure about what to choose. I took the decision of picking film over advertising while i was still applying to the courses. Advertising was my backup option. But yet, when I got shortlisted for both, I asked my parents to give me a week's time to get my head straight around one. I failed.
Even when the deadline to pay the fees approached, I couldn't give a committed decision. Right when the fee payment deadline approached I gave up thinking. There was nothing that was left for me that I didn't think of or ask for to get my head around. My father was not pleased and was disappointed with the state of mind that I was in. He assumed I was sorted in my head. I was in a different city, in the midst of my final semester exams, in need of making a decision for the future and was a disappointment. My parents being in the Media Industry supported me to find my voice in it, but was now disappointed. There were heated conversations and we gave up on paying the fees that day. Two hours later my dad called and we settled things between us. He signed off by reminding me something that I missed by overthinking. He said that if I study Film I could use the skills to make ads too, and the management and marketing education that I already had, would set me up for writing ads. This actually blew my mind. That was a small logic that I missed because I was overthinking. While weighing pros and cons, we jotted down this on a notepad, but I pushed it aside and made space for overthinking. The next day we paid the tuition fees and I picked Film. I don't regret my decision.
My experience with making the right decision was not a story that happened in a week's time. But, it was something that kept building in me for three years, which turned it into an insecurity and made me question if I was an Indecisive person. Ultimately, this was because I was believing that it was a bad decision for three years straight in my undergrad. While it was not a bad decision, as business, management and marketing applies everywhere, studying a non creative program for three years made my mind believe it. Just when you think everything is sorted, and you know what to do in Life, you sense a fear of something going wrong. In search of taking the right decision, we tend to overthink. Eventough though logically you try to navigate the feeling of taking the right decisions, you endup overthinking. There is no mantra to stop overthinking. But as I did, from my experience, just close your eyes, address your problem and ultimately if they align, go whith what seems right in your heart, head and gut.
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