Dear 18-Year-Old Me: Your Interests Are Not Distractions

Creative career advice for students: Letter #2

At eighteen, adults have a way of asking one question as though there should be a perfectly organised answer waiting inside you.

“So, what exactly do you want to do?”

The word exactly is where the trouble begins.

Perhaps you enjoy photography, but you also love writing. You can spend an afternoon editing a video and then lose another two hours reading about psychology. You notice the typography on a restaurant menu, save advertisements because you like the storytelling, experiment with music, doodle in the margins of your notebook and occasionally wonder whether filmmaking might be your thing.

Meanwhile, someone else seems to have chosen a lane already. They know what degree they want, the role they are aiming for and possibly even the company they want to work for.

You, on the other hand, seem to be collecting interests. If that makes you feel scattered, this letter is for you.

Dear eighteen-year-old me,

I wish you would stop being embarrassed every time somebody asks what your “main thing” is.

You don’t know yet, and that is fine.

For the next few years, you are going to worry that your curiosity is actually indecision. You will look at people who seem completely focused on one craft and wonder whether you are wasting time because you cannot seem to stay interested in only one thing. You write, you photograph things, you enjoy designing, you care about music, you notice how stories are told, and you will spend an unreasonable amount of time adjusting the spacing on a presentation slide that nobody else in the room seems to notice.

Somebody will eventually tell you that you need to stop getting distracted and choose something serious.

Don’t dismiss their advice completely. There is value in learning a craft deeply. At some point you will have to practise long enough to become genuinely good at something. But please don’t confuse focus with shutting down every other part of your curiosity.

The things that look unrelated may not be unrelated at all

Years from now, you will begin to understand that many of the things that looked disconnected were actually teaching you different parts of the same language.

Photography will teach you composition long before you use the word composition professionally. Writing will teach you that clarity is often harder than cleverness. Music will make you sensitive to rhythm, pacing and silence. Psychology will make you curious about why people respond to one message and ignore another. Your obsession with small visual details will teach you to recognise when something feels wrong even before you can explain why.

Eventually, all of those interests will start meeting each other in your work. The thing you called distraction may turn out to have been preparation.

AI will make creation easier. That won’t make creativity automatic.

Here is something I definitely couldn’t have explained to you at eighteen: by the time you are building a career, the creative world will have changed dramatically.

There will be tools powered by Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) that can generate images from a sentence, write several versions of a headline in seconds, edit video, suggest layouts, create music and produce ideas faster than you could have imagined. Tasks that once took an afternoon may sometimes take seconds without any human intervention.

At first, this will feel extraordinary. Then everybody will have access to the same tools.

That is when you will discover something important. The ability to produce something quickly is not the same as knowing what is worth producing.

AI can give you twenty images, but you will still have to know which one communicates the idea. It can give you fifty headlines, but you will still have to recognise which one sounds like a human being rather than a campaign. It can imitate styles, combine references and make things look polished, but it cannot automatically give you a point of view.

Your point of view will come from all the things you currently think are distractions.

It will come from the neighbourhood you grew up in, the films that stayed with you, the conversations you overheard, the books you loved, the photographs you took badly before you learned to take them well, the music that shaped your sense of rhythm and even that strange detail you noticed through the window of a bus while everybody else was staring at their phones.

Those things become your references and you should not underestimate them.

Not every interest needs to become income

I also want to save you from another pressure that will become increasingly loud: the idea that every interest needs to become income immediately.

The internet will make this sound very sensible. Like photography? Start freelancing. Draw well? Sell commissions. Write? Build a personal brand. Know how to edit? Start taking clients.

There is nothing wrong with any of that. Some of your interests may eventually become your livelihood, and there is something wonderful about being paid to do work you care about. But don’t turn every curiosity into a business plan before you have had the chance to enjoy it.

Some interests need years before you understand why they matter.

A book you read simply because you were curious may influence an advertising idea five years later. Playing music may quietly improve the way you edit video. Volunteering to organise an event may reveal that what you actually love is not designing posters at all, but creating experiences and bringing people together.

You cannot calculate the return on every experience while you are still living it.

Look for patterns before you look for job titles

If I could give you one piece of creative career advice for students, it would be this: instead of desperately trying to find the correct job title, start looking for patterns in yourself. Ask what keeps returning.

Perhaps you are drawn to storytelling regardless of whether the medium is a photograph, a paragraph or a video. Perhaps you enjoy making complicated things easier to understand. Perhaps you care more about creating experiences than making objects. Perhaps you notice how people feel when they interact with something.

Those patterns may tell you far more about your future than the career labels available to you at eighteen.

The creative careers you eventually encounter will not fit neatly into the boxes you know today anyway. Design will meet technology. Psychology will meet marketing. Writing will meet product development. Data will meet storytelling. Education will meet digital media. Entire roles will emerge that you couldn’t have selected from a career-counselling brochure because they didn’t exist yet.

So don’t panic because you cannot name your destination.

Explore widely, but learn deeply

Keep exploring, but don’t use exploration as an excuse to remain mediocre forever. When something matters to you, practise it seriously. Learn the fundamentals. Take feedback. Make bad work. Make better work. Finish things instead of endlessly collecting inspiration.

Use AI too. Learn what it can do and let it make parts of your process faster. Just don’t let it make your curiosity unnecessary.

Ten years from now, when almost anyone can generate something that looks impressive, the people who stand out may be the ones who still know how to notice, question, choose, edit and care. And perhaps that is what all your scattered interests were doing for you all along. They weren’t pulling you away from your path.

They were helping you develop the eyes with which you would eventually recognise it.

Your creative life does not need to fit into one box

So keep drawing and Keep writing and Keep taking photographs. Keep reading things that have nothing to do with your course. Keep noticing what catches your attention. You don’t have to turn every interest into a career.

But don’t be surprised if, one day, several of them find their way into the work that finally feels unmistakably yours.

With considerably less panic about the future,
You, ten years later.