David James Olney
15 October, 2026
Can you remember a time when the decisions in front of you seemed enormous compared with your experience and understanding? You did your best with what you knew, perhaps feeling optimistic, frightened and remarkably sure of yourself all at once.
I ask because October brings that mixture back to me. In Australia, final-year high school students are trying to clear the last hurdles of secondary school while beginning to decide what comes next. Some have a plan; others are frightened because they have no idea. Sometimes the distance between those two states is a good night’s sleep, a careless comment from an adult, or a second carton of strong iced coffee.
Over the past twenty-five years, I have provided a great deal of professional, academic and personal mentoring. When I was teaching young undergraduates, I would sometimes try to remember my last months at school and my first months as an adult. The memory of feeling excited, nervous and vulnerable helped me listen with an open mind. A decision that looks small from the other side of fifty can feel like the whole world at seventeen.
In October 1989, I was determined to earn marks high enough to study law and terrified that I would never work out what I wanted to do. As a blind seventeen-year-old, I could not see an obvious path or many role models who had travelled one I might follow. Preparing for law gave my anxiety something practical to do. It did not give me a passion for law.
After my final exams, I spent weeks in anxious melancholy, hoping I had done enough while becoming less sure that I wanted what I had worked so hard to make possible. My results arrived in January 1990. They were good enough. I was relieved that the door to law had opened and fairly sure that I did not want to walk through it.
So I deferred university for a year. I trained as a massage therapist and began studying guitar. Massage gave me meaningful work, a sense of worth, independence and some financial security. Guitar gave me somewhere to put very big emotions and a way to lose myself in something singular and ephemeral.
By the time I began university in 1991, I still did not have a grand plan. I did know that I could work, learn and move forward without knowing the final destination. Looking back, I wish I had understood three things before I finished school. I also wish the adults around every school leaver would keep them in mind.
The first is that connection needs care when the timetable disappears. School puts the same people in the same place five days a week. That does not guarantee friendship; school can be a lonely place. But it does create repeated chances to talk, notice somebody and try again tomorrow. Once school ends, the timetable no longer does that work for you.
Research on the transition from high school to early adulthood documents changes in relationships and social networks. In a small qualitative study of university students, young people described discovering that friendships did not form as automatically as they expected from school. That finding cannot describe every young person’s experience, but the practical implication rings true: connection often requires deliberate invitations, shared activities and a willingness to be the person who makes contact again.
Keep in touch with people you value, even if your paths diverge. Join something that meets regularly, whether that is music, sport, volunteering, work or a course. If you are an adult supporting someone through this change, do not only ask what they plan to study or earn. Ask where they will find people they enjoy being with, and make it easier for them to get there. Solid relationships will not make every decision easy, but they make it less lonely to live with uncertainty.
Connection also makes it safer to be less than perfect. The second thing I wish I had known is the difference between doing your best and demanding flawlessness. I put enormous pressure on myself during my final school year. Unfortunately, I learned to take that pressure with me. For years it robbed me of the pleasure of playing guitar. Several people told me how much they enjoyed listening, while I remembered little beyond the errors I had made.
The distinction matters. High standards can help us practise and improve. Treating every mistake as evidence that we are inadequate can make both learning and enjoyment harder. A meta-analysis of studies involving young people found much stronger associations between distress and perfectionistic concerns—worry about mistakes and others’ judgement—than between distress and striving for high standards. That research reports associations, not a simple cause-and-effect rule for every person. It does give us reason to notice which kind of pressure we are carrying.
In four experiments, people encouraged to respond to a setback with self-compassion showed more willingness to improve on several measures; in one, they spent longer studying after a disappointing test. Being kind to yourself does not mean abandoning a demanding goal. It can make it easier to learn from a mistake without making the mistake your identity.
There are moments when precision really matters. Your exam mark might determine which course is available next year. But it does not determine the only worthwhile life available to you. Adults can help by praising preparation, curiosity and recovery from mistakes, rather than treating a young person’s result as a verdict on who they are. Most of the time, there are more good places to go than perfection can imagine.
Once I stopped looking for a single flawless route, I could see the value of the route I was actually taking. The third thing is that how you do things travels with you, even when what you do changes. By the end of my deferred year, three excellent music teachers were investing more time in me than I could ever have afforded. I was working with remarkably capable chiropractors as a massage therapist, and I had begun teaching my first guitar student.
Today I work in strategic communication and business development, and I finally know how to play guitar for fun. The job titles in that sentence are very different from the ones I imagined in 1989. What has carried forward is a willingness to do my best, learn from anyone willing to share their expertise, and say yes to opportunities I can take seriously. Teaching, listening, building trust and finding a useful next step began to matter long before I could name them as professional skills.
Career researcher John Krumboltz argued that people learn about possible futures by taking part in interesting activities, noticing their responses and staying alert to unexpected opportunities. His happenstance learning theory does not say that planning is pointless. It says a career is built through exploration as well as decisions. A ten-year study of more than 3,000 young adults likewise found that interests could change substantially around the transition into further study, training or work. You are allowed to learn things about yourself after you leave school.
Of course, character alone does not open every door. Money, disability, family responsibilities, discrimination and access to good teachers all shape what is possible. I had people who invested in me, and I remain grateful. That is a reason for adults and institutions to make opportunities more accessible, and for young people to seek support without imagining that needing it is a failure of independence. Be curious about the next opportunity; you do not have to say yes to every one of them.
The question what next? does not disappear after high school. It returns whenever we grow into a situation larger than our current experience. The answer need not be a perfect map of the next forty years. Maintain the relationships that help you think and feel your way forward. Work hard without turning every error into a judgement of your worth. Pay attention to how you learn, treat people and respond when an unexpected door opens.
If you are finishing school, you do not have to know everything that comes next. If you are guiding someone who is, please remember how much they are being asked to decide with how little they can yet know. Help them find people, room to experiment and enough confidence to take a thoughtful next step. That is a better beginning than demanding certainty from either of you.