When did “What do you want to be?” become such a stressful question?
Jen, Thinking Aloud
Founder of TICE
At five, it’s a lovely question.
What do you want to be?
At that age, answers seem to arrive from somewhere untouched. They appear quickly, confidently, often with complete conviction, as if the child answering has briefly tapped into some wonderfully unfiltered version of themselves. An astronaut. A pop star. A vet. A footballer. Someone who lives in a treehouse with a dog, muddy knees, and absolutely no bedtime.
Nobody asks how they’ll get there. Nobody wonders whether the market is oversaturated, whether their skills will be transferable, or whether artificial intelligence might eventually replace them. Nobody leans in and asks whether they’ve considered a backup plan or if the salary progression is competitive. At five, the question isn’t really about work at all. It’s about instinct. About wonder. About saying something out loud before the world has had a chance to edit it.
More than anything, it feels like permission.
And then, by fourteen, something changes.
The words themselves haven’t changed. What do you want to be? It’s the same question. The same sequence of syllables. The same innocent arrangement of language. And yet somehow, somewhere between option forms, predicted grades, open evenings, careers fairs, personal statements, and well-meaning adults reminding us that we “need to start thinking seriously now,” the question begins to carry a different kind of weight.
It stops feeling like an invitation.
And starts feeling like something you’re supposed to get right.
What’s fascinating is that this tension doesn’t seem to disappear with age. If anything, it just becomes better disguised. Many adults still feel it in quieter ways, in that moment at an event when someone asks, “So… what do you do?” In the split second before answering. In the tiny mental edit of what version of your work, your title, or your life you’re about to present. In that strange, almost universal feeling that perhaps everyone else received some sort of manual on how all of this was supposed to work… and yours got lost in the post.
Which makes me wonder whether the real pressure was never in the question itself, but in the moment it stopped being about discovery and started being about definition.
Somewhere along the way, being curious became being certain.
Years ago, education thinker, author, and one of the most-watched TED speakers in history, Sir Ken Robinson challenged one of education’s quiet assumptions: the idea that its role was simply to sort, rank, and prepare.
Sort by attainment. Rank by performance. Prepare for the next stage, the next application, the next measurable milestone.
Instead, Robinson argued something far more radical, that education should help young people discover what they are naturally drawn towards before asking them to decide what they should become.
It’s one of those ideas that feels immediately obvious… and yet quietly unsettling once it sinks in.
Because if he’s right, and I suspect he is, then perhaps many of us were never short of potential at all.
Perhaps we were simply asked to name ourselves… before enough of ourselves had even had the chance to emerge.
We chose subjects before meeting the people whose jobs those subjects might one day lead to. We wrote personal statements before we’d collected many personal stories. We were encouraged to think about careers before we’d fully understood what made us feel alive, curious, useful, challenged, or quietly obsessed.
And perhaps that’s where the work of social psychologist Hazel Markus becomes so interesting. Best known for her groundbreaking research into identity, motivation, and what she called Possible Selves, Markus explored a deceptively simple idea: that our futures are shaped not simply by what we’re capable of, but by what we can actually imagine for ourselves.
In other words, human potential doesn’t unfold in isolation.
It expands through exposure. Through proximity. Through seeing somebody, somewhere, doing something that quietly stirs something in us and whispers:
Maybe… that could be me.
It’s such a simple idea, but once you sit with it, it changes almost everything.
Because how can anyone aspire towards something they’ve never encountered? How do you imagine yourself as a documentary producer, a sound designer, an entrepreneur, a trend forecaster, a creative director, or someone brave enough to change direction entirely at forty-five, if nobody has ever shown you that path exists?
And perhaps that doesn’t just apply to young people.
Perhaps it applies to all of us.
We don’t just grow into who we are. We grow into who we can imagine.
Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, best known for her work on mindset and human potential, reminds us that identity isn’t fixed; it grows through challenge, exposure, mistakes, curiosity, and time.
Which is strangely comforting.
Because it means the version of you sitting here today may not be the most interesting version of you yet.
We are not finished products at sixteen. Or twenty-one. Or thirty-eight. Or fifty-two. Most of us, if we’re honest, are still becoming. Some of us are simply better at looking as though we’ve already arrived.
Identity was never meant to be a final draft.
Psychologist and generational researcher Jean Twenge, whose work explores identity, social comparison, and what it means to grow up in an always-on world, has shown how confidence and self-perception are increasingly shaped in public, not in private.
But truthfully, you don’t need to read the research to feel it.
Five minutes on social media will usually do the job.
A promotion here. A side hustle there. A beautifully branded business launch. A podcast. A marathon medal. A carefully curated workspace. And, inevitably, that one person from school who somehow now appears to own a vineyard in Portugal.
No pressure.
So perhaps the problem was never “What do you want to be?”
Perhaps the problem was believing it needed one answer. One title. One lane. One neatly packaged version of ourselves that made sense to everybody else.
Perhaps the better question was always something softer. Something less urgent. Something that leaves room for detours, reinvention, mistakes, and the wonderfully messy business of becoming.
Perhaps the better question is this:
What do you want to discover… before deciding what to be?
References
Out of Our Minds. Robinson, K. (2011) Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative. 2nd ed. Chichester: Capstone.
Possible Selves. Markus, H. and Nurius, P. (1986) ‘Possible Selves’, American Psychologist, 41(9), pp. 954–969.
Mindset. Dweck, C.S. (2006) Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. New York: Random House.
iGen. Twenge, J.M. (2017) iGen. New York: Atria Books.
The Anxious Generation. Haidt, J. (2024) The Anxious Generation. New York: Penguin Press.