I was sixteen, sitting in a careers session at school, when the question landed for the first time in an official capacity. The counsellor had a form. There was a box. The box needed filling in.<\/p>
What do you want to be?<\/em><\/p> I had no idea. I looked around the room. Other students were writing something. I wrote something too, eventually, something that sounded plausible\u2026I\u2019m fairly certain it was something like a marine biologist, landscape architect, or psychologist to sound smart and, really, just fill in the box. I can\u2019t completely remember the exact thing I wrote down, but I do remember the feeling: that the question had a right answer, and I was already behind.<\/p> I\u2019ve been thinking about that moment for a long time. And lately, after a series of conversations on More Than a Score<\/a> that I didn\u2019t expect to be quite so illuminating, I\u2019ve been thinking about it differently.<\/p> Because the question has a structural problem, it asks for a noun. The honest answer is almost always a verb. And, probably more than one.<\/p> \u201cWhat do you want to be?\u201d presents a career as an identity, a fixed destination to aim at, arrive at, and then inhabit. It asks a young person to commit, to narrow, to choose. There\u2019s a logic to it. Schools need to organise subjects. Universities need to allocate places. Systems need decisions that can be processed at scale.<\/p> But here\u2019s what the question does on the inside of a sixteen-year-old: it asks them to know something they cannot possibly know yet.<\/p> Josh Kinder<\/a> has changed careers, countries, and schools more times than most people change jobs. When I spoke with him on the podcast, he described adaptability not as a personality trait but as the skill that has made everything else possible. He couldn\u2019t have told you at sixteen what he\u2019d end up doing. That wasn\u2019t a failure of planning. That\u2019s simply how a well-lived working life tends to unfold.<\/p> Josh didn\u2019t know what he wanted to be. He knew what he was interested in. He kept following that, changing direction when something stopped working, staying curious when it didn\u2019t. What looked like instability from the outside was, from the inside, a method.<\/p> The young person who can name a destination at sixteen and follow a straight line to it is the exception, not the rule. We\u2019ve built an entire system around the exception.<\/p>The question that closes<\/h3>