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Why some of us don't have one true calling | Emilie Wapnick

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sZdcB6bjI8

Raise your hand if you&#39;ve ever
been asked the question

&quot;What do you want to be when you grow up?&quot;

how old would you say you were
when you were first asked this question?

I&#39;m someone who&#39;s never
been able to answer the question

See, the problem wasn&#39;t
that I didn&#39;t have any interests --

In high school, I liked English
and math and art and I built websites

and I played guitar in a punk band
called Frustrated Telephone Operator.

and at a certain point, I began
to notice this pattern in myself

where I would become interested in an area

and I would dive in, become all-consumed,

and I&#39;d get to be pretty good
at whatever it was,

and then I would hit this point
where I&#39;d start to get bored.

And usually I would try
and persist anyway,

because I had already devoted
so much time and energy

this feeling of, like, yeah, I got this,
this isn&#39;t challenging anymore --

But then I would become interested
in something else,

something totally unrelated,
and I would dive into that,

and become all-consumed,
and I&#39;d be like, &quot;Yes! I found my thing,&quot;

and then I would hit this point again
where I&#39;d start to get bored.

But then I would discover
something new and totally different,

how I was going to turn
any of this into a career.

I thought that I would eventually
have to pick one thing,

The other reason it caused me
so much anxiety

I worried that there
was something wrong with this,

and something wrong with me
for being unable to stick with anything.

I worried that I was afraid of commitment,

or that I was scattered,
or that I was self-sabotaging,

If you can relate to my story
and to these feelings,

I&#39;d like you to ask yourself a question

that I wish I had asked myself back then.

Ask yourself where you learned to assign
the meaning of wrong or abnormal

We are first asked the question
&quot;What do you want to be when you grow up?&quot;

And the truth is that no one really cares
what you say when you&#39;re that age.

It&#39;s considered an innocuous question,

posed to little kids
to elicit cute replies,

like, &quot;I want to be an astronaut,&quot;
or &quot;I want to be a ballerina,&quot;

But this question gets asked of us
again and again as we get older

in various forms -- for instance,
high school students might get asked

what major they&#39;re going
to pick in college.

goes from being
the cute exercise it once was

See, while this question inspires kids
to dream about what they could be,

it does not inspire them to dream
about all that they could be.

because when someone asks you
what you want to be,

you can&#39;t reply with 20 different things,

though well-meaning adults
will likely chuckle and be like,

&quot;Oh, how cute, but you can&#39;t be
a violin maker and a psychologist.

and he&#39;s a luthier and psychotherapist.

And this is Amy Ng, a magazine editor
turned illustrator, entrepreneur,

But most kids don&#39;t hear
about people like this.

is that they&#39;re going to have to choose.

It&#39;s this idea of destiny
or the one true calling,

the idea that we each have one great thing

we are meant to do
during our time on this earth,

Why some of us don't have one true calling | Emilie Wapnick

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