Bad Career Advice in Sister Act 2

In the second ‘Sister Act’ movie, Delores gives some really bad career advice: she says, “If you wake up in the morning and all you can think about is writing, then you’re meant to be a writer. If you wake up in the morning and all you can think about is singing, then you’re supposed to be a singer.”

I disagree with this advice for a few reasons:

1. Teenagers and people in general like what they’re good at. It may have taken a long, slow process to get good at something, but once they’re good at it, they like it. The problem is, there are a lot of job skills out there that teenagers have never had a chance to try: e.g. operating heavy equipment, nursing, accounting, management, machining, house construction, interior decorating, to name a few. If they had a chance to try some of these and get good at them, they might wake up in the morning thinking about those things.

2. Music is something that can be done in one’s time outside of work. i.e. even if you have another job, you can still enjoy singing.

3. Adults need to earn a living. It would be responsible of us to guide teens to job skills that can earn more than minimum wage. Singing is an overcrowded field; very few singers can actually make a living; and even fewer make it big.

4. Actually, if there is something which is all you can think about day and night, that would be called an obsession, or even idolatry. I once heard a good definition of idolatry: if there’s something I think I can’t live without, it’s an idol. The center of our lives should be God and His glory.