The Day I Realised “What Do You Want to Be?” Is the Wrong Question
The question feels harmless. It has followed teenagers for generations. It isn’t harmless.
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.
What do you want to be?
I had no idea. I looked around the room. Other students were writing something. I wrote something too, eventually, something that sounded plausible…I’m 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’t 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.
I’ve been thinking about that moment for a long time. And lately, after a series of conversations on More Than a Score that I didn’t expect to be quite so illuminating, I’ve been thinking about it differently.
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.
The question that closes
“What do you want to be?” 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’s a logic to it. Schools need to organise subjects. Universities need to allocate places. Systems need decisions that can be processed at scale.
But here’s what the question does on the inside of a sixteen-year-old: it asks them to know something they cannot possibly know yet.
Josh Kinder 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’t have told you at sixteen what he’d end up doing. That wasn’t a failure of planning. That’s simply how a well-lived working life tends to unfold.
Josh didn’t 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’t. What looked like instability from the outside was, from the inside, a method.
The young person who can name a destination at sixteen and follow a straight line to it is the exception, not the rule. We’ve built an entire system around the exception.
What did you want to be at sixteen? How close is that to what you actually do now?
The question that opens
Tyson Day is a careers counsellor and public speaker, which means he has spent more time than most thinking about how young people make decisions about their futures. His answer, when I asked him what skill mattered most for the world young people are entering, was immediate.
Curiosity.
Not confidence, not resilience, not the ability to perform well in interviews. Curiosity, the quality of staying interested, of asking the next question, of following an idea to see where it leads.
The question that cultivates curiosity sounds quite different from the question we’ve been asking. It sounds more like: What do you keep coming back to, even when nobody’s watching? Or: What kind of problem do you actually enjoy sitting with?
These aren’t career counselling scripts. They’re conversations. And the young person who learns to ask them of themselves is, in Tyson’s view, far better positioned for what’s ahead than the one who picked a destination at sixteen and stopped looking.
What we ask shapes what a young person believes they’re allowed to answer.
When the answer becomes who you are
TJ Weistra spent years as an elite badminton player. When he left the sport, a decision that took years to arrive at and didn’t get easier, he encountered something nobody had prepared him for. Without the sport, he wasn’t sure who he was.
The identity and the destination had merged. When one went, so did the other.
TJ’s story isn’t about regret. It’s about what happens when a young person answers “What do you want to be?” with a single, specific response. It can become load-bearing because when the career becomes the identity, a shift in the career doesn’t feel like a practical problem. It feels like a personal one.
Listening to him, something landed for me. Because this happens, at a lower intensity, to thousands of students year on year. They pick a path, commit to it, build their sense of self around it. When the path changes, and it always does in some way for the wide, wide majority, the disruption reads as failure.
It isn’t. But nobody said so at the time.
A different question
This isn’t an argument for abandoning the careers conversation. Not at all! Young people still need to make choices. Schools still need to organise curricula and some structure is necessary.
But the question we lead with matters.
It shapes what a young person thinks is possible, what kind of thinking they practise, and what they do when the destination looks different up close.
So, instead, let’s consider one small thing.
Next time the question comes up, at the dinner table, in a school night conversation, in a form that needs filling in, try pausing before it lands. Try something else instead.
What are you curious (or wondering) about right now? What did you spend time on this week that you didn’t have to? What kind of problem do you like sitting with?
The answers won’t fit neatly in a box. You may have to tweak them to suit you and your young person, but they’ll tell you something real. And they’ll give the young person something the original question rarely does: permission to not know yet, while staying genuinely interested anyway.
That, it turns out, is a much better place to start.
Dan
More Than a Score Co-Host
Dan Steele is a former educator, award-winning school leader, and co-host of More Than a Score — a podcast for parents, young people, and educators rethinking what success actually means.