Do we need to Change the Question?

Who do you want to be when you grow up?
That’s the question every kid is asked - and every grown up once tried to answer.

But honestly, what we are really asking is -
Where do you want to work?
What job do you want to have?

Can’t we change this question?
Couldn’t we improve it?
Yes. Yes we can.

As a former youngster, I assumed what I did for a living made me who I was.
But that thing we do to support ourselves and our families? That’s not us.
It doesn’t have to define us.
It doesn’t have to be the only thing that makes us US.

This is 4th grade me rocking my Veterinarian era.

I wanted to be a veterinarian when I was little. That’s the first dream I remember.
Once I got to high school - and didn’t even consider college - I had no idea what I was going to do. Then someone suggested I go to beauty school. I had good hair. I’d mastered the art of all hair grooming equipment: the hair dryer, curling iron and hot rollers.

The two things that clinched my next path:
1. People are always going to need their hair cut.
2. Tammy Wynette was a beautician who kept her license active even when she was the queen of country music.
It seemed like a good bet.

Tammy Wynette’s 1976 album - Til I Can Make it on My Own.

So let’s come back to the real question — and maybe ask a better one.
What kind of person do you want to be when you grow up?
Just for fun.

I’d like to be the kind of person who:

- takes care of people

- teaches reading

- takes care of animals

- laughs easily and often

- makes others laugh

- others want to talk to

- saves baby bunnies

- reads big books

- makes things pretty

- draws pretty pictures

- builds cities

- gets dirty and grows flowers and tomatoes

- gets dirty

- who sings songs to help people feel good

- isn’t afraid of the dark

- lives beside my best friend

- keeps their pet goat in the closet

- bakes pies and cookies for the lady down the street

I joined the Navy because I wanted an adventure and I had to find something to do. I didn’t have a grand goal or dream of “serving my country” - as lovely and honorable as that sounds.
That is not where I was at 19.
I was thinking: travel, paycheck, a place to live, something different.

Maybe I was already becoming an adventurer back then.
I surely wasn’t thinking of the kind of person I wanted to be.
That didn’t occur to me until much later. Much, much later.

The bottom line for me is this - very few kids know what they want to do for a living when they are 5, 10, 15, 20….
But we all know what we love doing at the age of 5, 6, 7, and 8.
Playing baseball, hopscotch, pogo sticking (or is it pogo-ing?) kickball, jumping rope, going fast, the smell of horses, helping Mom do anything.

Somewhere along the way - maybe around the 3rd or 4th grade - we start to lose touch with what we love.
Maybe that’s when other people’s opinions start to matter more than our own.

So let me ask you again:
Who do you want to be when YOU grow up?
What’s changed? What have you learned?
This is Day 1. Go get ‘em.

Sending you rusted buckets full of love - and hydrangeas -
the limelights are stunning right now.