The first thing I ever wanted to be was a medical doctor. After a while, I wanted to be a professor. Then an architect. Then a computer scientist, or a software engineer. Today I am studying Quantity Surveying, and somewhere in the background there is still a part of me that wants to be a track athlete, because I have always loved running.There is something liberating about sprinting down a track where the only goal is the finish line in front of you. It is the exact opposite of a career path, where the finish line keeps shifting every single time you learn something new about yourself.   If you line all of that up, it looks like a mess. And for a long time, that is how I saw it.   I look around and see people who always knew. They wanted to be a lawyer at ten, and now they are in law school with a clear path ahead of them. Some people have a dream, hold on to it, and actually get there. I respect that. But I started to feel like something was wrong with me, because my answer to “what do you want to do with your life?” keeps changing.  

Here is what I did not notice until I wrote everything down. People rarely talk about how your choice of profession changes as you grow older. We talk about choosing a career like it is one decision made once. In reality, it is a conversation you keep having with yourself, and the answers change as you learn more about the world and about who you are. When I wanted to be a doctor, I knew very little about what other jobs even existed. The more I learned, the more options appeared, and the more I wanted to try them all. That does not look like confusion to me anymore. It looks like curiosity doing its job.   I also noticed a pattern. Medicine, architecture, software, construction. They look different, but most of them are about understanding how something works and then building or improving it. Maybe my interests are more consistent than they feel. Maybe I am not lost. Maybe I am just still collecting information.   I think the people who “always knew” are simply the ones we see. The people who did not know at my age are quieter about it. Many of them found their direction later, and often not by picking one thing, but by combining several of their interests into something that only they could do.  

So I am trying to stop treating “I don’t know yet” as a flaw. Not knowing is not the same as being behind. It can mean you are still exploring, and exploring is useful if you pay attention to what you learn along the way.   I still do not know what I will become. But I am starting to believe that is not a problem I need to solve today. What I can do is keep learning, keep running, keep asking questions, and keep paying attention to what pulls me.   If you are reading this and you also have a long list of things you once wanted to be, I want to ask you something. Looking at that list, what do all of those dreams have in common? That answer might tell you more about your future than any single job title.