What Did You Want To Do When You Grew Up?

Do you remember the dreams you had when you were a kid?

Not the “ride a purple unicorn to Mars and live among the Little Red Men” dreams (not that there’s anything wrong with that). I mean the dreams about what you’d work at when you grew up…or at least, when you got older ;)

I’ve been thinking about my early ideas of what I wanted to do and my most recent ideas for a worklife, too.

If I show you mine, will you show me yours?

Here’s what I wanted to do for work as a 7 or 8 year old up to a (somewhat) wiser woman of almost 40, in order of occurrence, not preference—

I Wanted To Be:

• Wonder Woman
  Because she kicked everyone’s ass and her hair still looked good after.
• Oh Mighty Isis
  Because she kicked everyone’s ass with stuff like the weather AND her hair still looked good after.
• A Monkee
  Because they got to monkey around, and they’re too busy singing to put anybody down.
• A Librarian
  Because libraries are quiet places where people get smarter by the page.
• The Next Great Architect
  Because my father said librarians don’t make any money, and this was the only way I’d get rich using my drawing skills, because artists don’t make any money either.
• A College Student
  Because going to school to become an architect was looking to be far more fun than actually being one.
• The Good Wife
  Yeah. Right.
• Whatevah
  After I blew off the Next Great Architect gig and the Perfect Wife thing didn’t work out, I didn’t much care what I did as long as it paid okay and didn’t require me to think much. This was the start of a 10 year lesson in being careful what we wish for.
• Anything To Get Away From These Assholes I Work For And With
  Another important lesson: Never tell the Universe you’d do anything to get/have <fill in the blank>. Never. Do not voice it. Do not even think it vigorously. The Universe has an exceptional sense of humor…or at least, it seems to believe it’s funny.

And Now…

Looking back over all my Dream Jobs, as rough as some of those middle bits were, the worst were the last two when I gave up on trying for what I loved and settled for whatever I didn’t hate.

When it comes to choosing a career or a business or a pet or a partner or a car or even what to eat for take out, we need to be specific.

The “Anything but X or Y” strategy will fail us 99.9% of the time because there’s a motherlode of undesirable and unsatisfying careers, businesses, relationships, cars, and meals out there that are neither X nor Y.

Be specific about what you want.

Be specific. Even if it means having to live with the consequences of a bad call. And, of course, it absolutely does mean exactly that, but I’m hear to tell ya that there are worse things.

With that in mind, I’m going to address Bob’s Dream Meme in the next post. It’s an excellent call to action about being specific. It’s a compelling exercise because it asks for specifics. And I’ve been avoiding it because it expects specifics. And I’m dreading it because…?

So Wednesday is for specifics, but…

Today Is For Dreaming

What did you dream of being when you were a kid?

What do you dream of being now?