At five years old, I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to be when I grew up — and I mean none. Zero. No tiny spark of destiny. No childhood declaration that I would one day become a firefighter, astronaut, doctor, or president. If anyone had asked me then what my future held, I probably would have stared at them, shrugged, and gone back to whatever occupied the important business of being five that day, which likely involved toy cars, cartoons, dirt, or asking why grown-ups insisted on interrupting perfectly good afternoons with questions about adulthood 😄
The truth is, I don’t think I had even the slightest clue until I was at least ten or twelve, and even then, “clarity” may be too generous a word. At five, adulthood looked like some distant strange continent populated entirely by people who had car keys, drank coffee, and somehow knew how thermostats worked. There was no reason to rush toward that.
Some kids at that age had polished answers ready. They wanted to be astronauts 🚀 because rockets were loud. Cowboys because horses looked heroic. Baseball players because somebody hit a home run on television and suddenly that seemed like a life plan ⚾ I had none of that. If I admired anything, it was probably whichever grown-up currently had access to something I wanted — a steering wheel, a microphone, a whistle, or permission to stay up later than I did.
And honestly, if I had announced a career path at five, it probably would have been something wildly impractical and based entirely on surface-level logic. Maybe “the man who drives the ice cream truck,” because that appeared to combine transportation and unlimited desserts 🍦 Or perhaps “the person who gets to test toys,” which still sounds like a profession worth exploring.
What I definitely did not have was some hidden early vision of journalism, teaching, writing, or anything remotely connected to where life eventually went. None of that showed up until much later.
The first time I can clearly remember wanting to become something specific came in ninth grade, and by then I had moved straight past vague childhood dreams into full ambition: I wanted to be Bob Costas.
Not just work in sports. Not casually talk about games. I wanted to be Bob Costas — the voice, the intelligence, the presence, the guy who seemed to know everything about every sport and could sit at a desk and make the whole country listen. He made journalism look sharp, informed, and somehow elegant at the same time 🎙️
Then that evolved into an even loftier target: winning a Pulitzer Prize. Because once you start aiming, apparently you don’t start small. Why merely write when you can imagine writing something so powerful the world has to hand you a medal?
Of course, life has a way of taking your carefully imagined ladder and leaning it against an entirely different building. I didn’t become Bob Costas. No Pulitzer committee has interrupted dinner to call me. But pieces of those ambitions still survived: the love of writing, asking questions, telling stories, paying attention to what matters, and wanting words to land with meaning.
Which is why looking back, five-year-old me having no clue may have been perfectly reasonable. At five, your biggest strategic decision is whether the blanket becomes a cape, a fort, or a tent. Career development can wait.
And frankly, considering how many adults still don’t know exactly what they want to be, five-year-old me was probably just being refreshingly honest 😄✍️
