Why I Stopped Asking Young People "What Do You Want to Become?"

For years I asked it without a second thought, the way every adult does. You meet a bright young person, you smile, and you say: so, what do you want to become? It is meant kindly. It took me a long time to notice the small flinch it often produces, and longer still to understand why.

The question carries a hidden assumption — that a life is a single destination, chosen early, and that the worthy answer is a job title. Doctor. Engineer. Officer. We hand children a menu of a dozen respectable nouns and ask them to point. And the ones who cannot point, who do not yet know, walk away feeling that they are behind in a race no one explained the rules of.

The truth, which most honest adults know but rarely admit to the young, is that we did not become a noun. We became a winding sequence of accidents, detours, jobs we fell into, skills we picked up by chance. The neat answer we now give was assembled backwards, after the fact, to make the mess look like a plan.

So I have changed the question. I ask, instead, what they are curious about. What they lose track of time doing. What problem, in the world or in their own street, makes them angry enough to want to fix it. These questions do not demand a finished person. They invite a real one.

A child who is taught to chase a job title learns to climb. A child who is taught to follow curiosity learns to find ground no one has climbed yet. In a world changing faster than any career counsellor can keep up with, I know which I would rather raise.

We are not, in the end, trying to produce nouns. We are trying to grow human beings who can keep becoming, long after the question is no longer being asked.