To Be, Or Not To Be; An Engineer?

Paul Coelho was asked how he had decided he wanted to be a writer. Here's what he said:
"When I was fifteen, I said to my mother: 'I've discovered my vocation. I want to be a writer.' 'My dear,' she replied sadly, 'your father is an engineer. He's a logical, reasonable man with a very clear vision of the world. Do you actually know what it means to be a writer?' In order to answer my mother's question, I decided to do some research. This is what I learned about what being a writer meant in the early 1960s:
A writer always wears glasses and never combs his hair. Half the time he feels angry about everything and the other half depressed. He says very 'deep' things. He always has amazing ideas for the plot of his next novel, and hates the one he has just published. A writer has a duty and an obligation never to be understood by his own generation.. A writer understands about things with alarming names, like semiotics, epistemology, neoconcretism. When trying to seduce a woman, a writer says: 'I'm a writer', and scribbles a poem on a napkin. It always works. When invited to say what he is reading at the moment, a writer always mentions a book no one has ever heard of. Armed with all this information, I went back to my mother and explained exactly what a writer was. She was somewhat surprised. 'It would be easier to be an engineer,' she said. 'Besides, you don't wear glasses.' "

It made me laugh, because its something that myself and Ismaool were talking about the other night. The differences in how life, the world, problems and so on are approached depending on how your mind is trained. He's an engineer, I'm a lawyer, our approaches to life couldn't be any more different! Paul Coelho's mother was right when she wanted him to be an engineer. You know why? Because he's always going to be SURE. An engineer sees life as a set of right or wrong answers, there's nothing in between. There's no deliberation. There are formulas, equations, methods; follow them and you're on the right path. On the way to correctness, to excellence, to TRUTH. Ask me what truth is, and I tell you that it depends on whose side you're looking at it from. Truth in what sense? I ask you whether truth as a fact really does exist. In effect, I complicate my life. I don't think its a characteristic of all lawyers. In fact, my good friend P is a lawyer, and if you listened to our conversation over dinner last night you would realise that being a lawyer is in no way a hinderance to his being sure about anything. His background as a lawyer means that he is open to looking at a problem from many different points of view but it does not encourage him to complicate his life. Maybe it's just the philosophical writer within me. I always was very good at coming up with all those different 'meanings' that writers of classics intended. We all know they intended none of it. When they said the table was round, they meant the table was round. They weren't intending it to be a metaphor for the circle of life or something similar... Or did they?
See what I mean!
To be honest though, I think an education in the arts is far more beneficial in the long run. It may mean more complications, but it means you can think outside the box. Or it should mean that. For many, thats sadly not the case. But thats for another post.