From what I understand, it's not that you'd be guiding him toward defining a career choice at an early age, but you'd be supporting his interest while he learns how to be passionate and self-guided -- encouraging him to dig deep. In the end, if he changes his focus, it's totally okay, because he's learned a lot about how to be enthusiastic about a subject, without someone telling him what he was supposed to learn. Maybe it lasts half a year and he switches to something else, or maybe he finds a fork in the road and all that knowledge he's gained becomes the foundation for another interest. My DS has two or three strong interests right now that are creative and engineering related, and practically speaking, he probably won't end up going into those specific interests (one is highly competitive, another is very specific), but he sure loves spending time learning a whole lot about them. I told him if he's interested in them, think of all the skills he'd need to go into that career (drawing, CAD, programming, etc), and if you change your mind, you still have all those other skills to take you somewhere else. He's 11 and I'm just planting seeds right now. I'm all about adaptability and mutability, evolving your skillset to new subject matter in a quickly changing society. ;-)
