From the desk of a Student Outreach counsellor
A boy sat across from me last year and said something that’s stuck with me. “Ma’am, everyone in my class has a thing. One is the topper, one is the cricket guy, one’s already coding apps. I’m just… normal. I don’t have a thing.”
He said it like a confession. As if being a regular sixteen-year-old who hadn’t yet found his great passion was a defect he needed to apologise for.
I hear a version of this constantly now, and honestly it bothers me more than most things in this work. Somewhere along the way we’ve convinced an entire generation of teenagers that by Class 10 they’re supposed to have a clear identity, a standout talent, a neat headline. And the ones who don’t — which is most of them — walk around quietly feeling like they’re already behind.
So let me say this clearly, to that boy and to anyone like him: not having a “thing” yet is not a problem. It’s just where most people genuinely are at your age. The students with the dramatic spike at fifteen are the exception, not the standard, and plenty of them burn out or change direction anyway.
Most interesting lives don't start with a spike
The story we get sold is the prodigy story. The child who knew at eight she’d be a surgeon, the boy who built robots in his bedroom. Those stories are real, but they’re rare, and they’re not the only way a good life gets built.
Far more often, what happens is slower and less cinematic. A student tries a few things without much drama. Something mildly catches. They follow it a little further, not out of burning passion but ordinary curiosity. It grows. By their twenties they’re doing work that suits them, and it looks, in hindsight, like a plan — but it never felt like one while it was happening. It felt like just trying things.
That’s not a lesser path. For most people, it’s the actual path. The neat origin story is mostly something we add later.
What I tell the "normal" student to do
If you don’t have a passion yet, your job isn’t to manufacture one. You can’t force fascination, and trying usually just makes you anxious. Your job is much gentler: to put yourself in the way of things, and pay attention to what you don’t hate.
Join the club that sounds vaguely interesting, even if you’re not sure. Say yes to helping organise something. Try the subject you’ve been curious about but assumed wasn’t “for you.” You’re not looking for fireworks. You’re looking for the small, quiet pull — the activity where you lose track of time, the topic you find yourself reading about when nobody assigned it. That pull is worth ten loud passions that fizzle.
And here’s a relief for the parents reading this: you don’t need to engineer a perfect profile out of this either. A student who genuinely explores, takes a couple of things a bit deeper than required, and can talk honestly about what they learned is far more compelling — to a college, to an interviewer, to anyone — than one whose CV was clearly assembled to impress. Depth grows from real interest. It can’t be installed.
The skill that matters more than any single talent
I’ll let you in on something the obsession with “find your passion” tends to hide. The most valuable thing a student can build isn’t one standout talent. It’s the habit of being able to learn new things, stay curious, and adapt when the ground shifts.
That matters more now than it ever did, because the working world is changing fast enough that a big chunk of the specific skills people use today will look different within a decade. The person who’ll do well isn’t the one who locked onto a single thing early. It’s the one who stayed curious and kept picking things up. If you’re a student who likes a few things, is open to more, and isn’t fully decided — you are not behind. You may actually be better positioned than the kid who’s been sure of one thing since Class 6.
So if that's you
Stop comparing your inside to everyone else’s outside. The classmate with the obvious “thing” has their own private worries, I promise you. You’re not late. You’re sixteen, or fourteen, or seventeen, and you’re allowed to still be figuring it out. That’s not a gap in your story. That is the story, at this stage of it.
Try things. Notice what pulls. Follow the small ones a little further. The “thing” tends to find people who keep showing up curious — and it’s in no rush, even if everyone around you seems to be.
If you’re a student who feels like the only one without a clear direction, or a parent worried your child hasn’t “found it” yet, come talk to us at Student Outreach. Helping ordinary, curious, undecided students discover where they fit is, quite simply, our favourite part of this work. There’s no spike required to start.
