“What would you like to be when you grow up?”

Grown-ups love to ask little children this question and I remember answering it many times as a kid. My answer would often depend on the book I was reading at the time and I’ve gone from wanting to be a teacher, an astronaut, a historian, a librarian, and a writer. The last one stayed.

An interesting conversation with a friend reminded me of this old question but this time it was in reverse. She said that her German tutor posed the question at the beginning of class, clearly ice breaker questions haven’t evolved much over time, but the interesting bit was that this time the room was full of adults and the question was, “What did you want to be when you were a child?”

A lot of interesting answers came up. There were aspiring firefighters, acrobats, ballet dancers, and singers in that room filled with real-life engineers and managers. Not one of them was doing anything close to what they once wanted to do.

And it made me think of how strange the definition of success is in the world. I mean, logically speaking wouldn’t success be defined as how close you came to eventually living up to yourself and what you’d imagined you could be when you were a dreamy-eyed kid?

Instead, that’s not how it is, is it? Your success is defined by how close you are to society’s metric of success and success has a very strict definition in our world. You are celebrated for how close you are to this accepted definition and over time you succumb to the pressure of proving that you’re just as good at life as everyone else.

Somewhere along the way, it becomes less about you and more about other’s perception of you. And you try harder and harder to mold that perception to fit society’s definition till the person on the other side of the mirror becomes less you and more them. Every time you barter a little bit more because you believe that will make you feel better, more accepted, and more popular. Except, soon new standards are in place and you’ve missed the ladder yet again. There’s someone else who understood the game a bit better and now you have a new target to reach.

That’s where kids have it different. When someone asks them who they want to be, they just answer based on what appeals to them the most - the sillier the better. Because who are we kidding when we think we know all the answers as grown-ups? Maybe our definitions of success should be more about what brings us joy than what brings acceptance. Because let’s face it - acceptance is overrated. Maybe that way we’d at least know what makes us happy, we’d be good at what we do, and we’d be happy to do it.

So tell me, who do you want to be when you grow up?