What Do You Want To Be When You Grow Up?

What did you want to be when you grew up when you were ten or eleven years old? For me, that was long after the days dreaming of being a ballerina princess. I’m not sure how I would have answered, but is having an answer really the point at that age? I think it’s more about dreaming of all the possibilities, and adults think whatever you say is a wonderful ambition.

By age ten, I was already a Girl Scout drop out. Truthfully, I never even made it officially to Girl Scouts. I dropped out when I was a Brownie in second grade so I could join our school’s writing club with my big sister. Meetings were at the same time after school, and that was that.

Maybe I would have told you that I wanted to be an Olympic gymnast. We had a wax museum in school that year and I was Dominique Moceanu. [Out of all the amazing women on the 1996 Olympic gymnastics team, she was my favorite.] But, age ten was also the year my coach gave me a choice, and I confidently chose soccer instead. Another career path thrown straight out the window.

I don’t remember people asking that question when I was in middle school. For a few years, adults just let you be a kid without asking you to imagine the future. But I think it’s those years in middle school when some preferences start to solidify. Actually, many of the things I liked to do in middle school are still the things I like to do today.

By the time people start asking you about what you want to be when you grow up again, they expect you to have a conventional career answer. You no longer get to say a musician or an athlete without the expectation that you have a backup plan. You’ve barely gotten a driver’s license, and adults want to know what five and ten year future plans are.

The question becomes, where are you going to go to college? What are you going to study? People’s faces when you respond let you know there are only a few right answers, and your answer wasn’t one of them. They ask what you want to be when you grow up, and they expect you to know what you want to do with the rest of your life. You aren’t even old enough to vote. How can you possibly have an answer to that question?

It isn’t until later, when you are an adult too, that the other adults let you in on the secret. The secret is that very few people know what they want to do with their whole life. Even after they’ve graduated college and were supposed to have everything figured out. It isn’t until after you’ve spent a ton of money you probably didn’t have on tuition and graduated with a degree in something you might not even like. That’s when a few adults finally admit to you that they don’t know either.

But by then, no one asks you what you want to be when you grow up anymore. No one asks you to dream of all the possibilities. Instead, they chitchat about the weather and ask what do you do? It’s a small talk question and we all know the rules. Whatever you do for your job is what you say. People’s faces let you know that there are still only a few right answers. And unless your answer was a respectable stable career, you’ll know you gave the wrong answer. Again.

No one tells you that every answer is the wrong one in the eyes of someone else. No one tells you to get used to it, and that it’s okay. Because you will never get everyone’s approval on your choices. When you answer those questions, everyone projects their own life experience and opinions onto your life. Their judgmental looks actually have nothing to do with you. Their looks have everything to do with their past choices. The choices they’ve made and the choices they wish they had made.

What if we stopped asking other adults about what they do for work? What if we didn’t ask high school seniors and college age students to be certain about what they want to do for the rest of their lives? Gosh, that would be refreshing, wouldn’t it? Or if we keep asking those questions, it would be amazing if we were genuinely interested in the answers. Because the world needs all kinds of people. Not just a whole bunch of people living in our own tiny box of what we believe success looks like.

What if we just starting asking people what they like to do instead? I bet we’d have better conversations and plenty more things to talk about.