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Asking a 5-year old “What do you want to be when you grow up?
“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
This is one of the first questions parents and teachers often ask us when we’re young.
They want to help us figure out what we want to do in life. While their intentions are good, I don’t think this is the best way to guide anyone, especially kids.
I remember when I was little, I wanted to be lots of different things:
a teacher,
a firefighter,
a doctor,
even a taxi driver.
These ideas kept changing!
Looking back, I realize I was just copying what I saw around me. If I went to the doctor and they helped me, I wanted to be a doctor. If I took a taxi with my parents, I thought being a taxi driver sounded interesting. In the end, I became an engineer, but even now I sometimes wonder if that’s really what I wanted.
This got me thinking about a great way to figure things out: try new things.
The idea is, if you’re not sure what you want, try different things and you might just discover your true passion. For me, I found out I wanted to be a writer when I was 34 years old. This realization came after I studied engineering and management and started my…
