All I wanted was a daddy. Now I get to be a stripper!

I wanted to be in the Army when I was a kid. Our elementary school library had a bunch of these books:



Yep, I knew the acronyms BAR and SAW before LOL or BRB. God bless blue-collar Connecticut.

Now I'm studying international politics, and hoping to serve my country in other ways. So it's not so bad.

 

I feel like most kids go through a stage where they want to be a vet.

Focus: I had a lot of ideas about careers through the years. I wanted to be an actress, a chef, a vet, a singer, and then in high school I was torn between wanting to be a lawyer or a writer. (The aptitude test that most kids have to take in high school to tell us what we should be said I should be a lawyer.) I ended up going to school to be a writer, but I soon realized there is no job openings for Johnny Depp's character in Secret Window, so now I'm going to school to be a teacher.

 

FOCUS: I wanted to be a professional cricketer or race driver, until I realised, at 14, that I was too fat, lazy and unskilled to be either (and too tall for driving single-seaters - I'm 6 ft.).

Life's been pretty disappointing for me overall.

 

I had a long list of prestigous careers picked out, mainly to impress the girl or the parents, doctor, attorney, cop.

After changing majors a few times, I realized I didn't want to work at all.



Now I own a logistics company. I credit a professor in college who said being your own boss is the best way to improve one's quality of life.

 

When I was a kid all I wanted to be was an architect. I loved floor plans and that's all I knew at the time. I also loved drawing and art from a very young age.

And what do you know, I made it. I'm an architect. Part of me loves what I do as I've had the opportunity to stand on the top of a few buildings I worked on and it's a pretty cool feeling. The other part wants to go back and slap the shit out of young idealistic and dreaming me, dreaming of being the next Frank Lloyd Wright. Well, fuck him too. All accounts were he was an asshole and a horrible horrible human being, albeit a genius designer. It's a tough profession and it's only getting tougher. Bad economies make it horrible. Good economies make it barely tolerable. If I was born with a trust fund it would be much easier as I've found out the hard way. Most people I see doing very well came from money and didn't have to muck in the dirt working their way up.

I also wish I had counselor's or family or anybody who could have guided me a little back when I needed it most. By the time I realized I was in for a hell of a ride, it was too late. Too many years in. Problem is that half of me that actually still loves what I do. Horrible horrible conflict. I see glimpses of wonderful potential for me, but it's going to continue to be a difficult ride.

My wife and I are going to do our damnedest to steer our daughter towards pharmacy or whatever we can find that we know is stable and will be around paying money for a long time. People are living longer and taking all sorts of pills. Every drug store and grocery store out there has a pharmacist making a shit ton more than me, starting.

 

I wanted to be a lawyer. Now, I'm a shill. Thank heavens things worked out.

 

I wanted to be a major league baseball player. I'm fine with playing on the softball team at work and going to the occasional Nats game.

Has anyone here watched Randy Pausch's Last Lecture? In a nutshell: this Carnegie-Mellon professor was dying of cancer and gave a lecture entitled "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams." Maybe it's because I'm a cynic, but the lecture didn't really resonate with me. I'm not particularly interested in my childhood dreams. That's why they're my "childhood" dreams. At age 7, I would've given anything to meet with Jim Carey. Now, I think he's an unfunny actor who spouts dangerous pseudoscience. Plus, I didn't much like Pausch's approach. Christopher Hitchens said it was "so sugary that you may need an insulin shot to withstand it."

 

I remember my dad taking me and my brother to the office on Saturdays when we were little and playing MS paint on his secretary's computer while he worked and being given extra quarters for the vending machine if we behaved well. He has worked for the same company for quite awhile and we've always heard talk about the company and his job at the dinner table.

Lo and behold both me and my brother went to the same business school and he graduated a couple years ago and is now a consultant and I am working at a startup (doing the same sales/marketing that my dad did) and am developing one of my own. I got my work ethic from him too. I don't think working your ass off is as glamorous as it looks when you're growing up, but I like it.

A lot more fun though was one of the last days I had working for the street department in my hometown after my freshman year at the U. I was in awe of this ridiculously big front end loader the city workers used to tear stuff up in parks when I was growing up and lived across a big park so I used to see it occasionally in the summer. I thought it was the most bad ass thing ever. Fast forward a few years and I saw the city still owned it when I worked there, but after joking about operating it once the foreman of the crew would yell at me for practically looking at it, much less getting near it. In my last week there, he was gone for a day and one of the guys said he needed me back at the shop when I was out chipping brush. He had the thing pulled out of the garage and quick showed me where all the knobs were and let me drive it around for a bit and move some dirt. It was fucking awesome. Check one childhood dream off.

Spoiler

The damn bucket is almost as tall as me.


I should have been wearing my old style Oakley knockoff safety glasses in the photo (so cool)... but you would be wearing a bandanna too if you were chipping brush in 90 degree weather.

 

I wanted to be a jockey and was heartbroken to find I was already too tall at fourteen years old. So I decided to be a horse trainer and I was for a few years. I was pretty successful and I loved it.

Who knew that riding a man would fuck all that up?

I am slowly working towards a psych degree, I want to specialize in sex therapy. I am also enrolling in beauty school for the short term to satisfy my artistic/possibly psychotic urge to change people's appearance. I have been taking writing classes and hope to be published one day.


I need some Ritalin just thinking about getting all of this shit done.

edited because I apparently can't spell.

 

This thread is very coincidental.
Growing up, I wanted to be a cop. Specifically, after seeing Die Hard, I wanted to be a cop. I was 9, shut up. In college I majored in Criminology and changed my focus to being a lawyer. I interned at a firm and realized I didn't want any part of that shit. Through different opportunities, I've had jobs that have nothing to do with my major. For the past two years I've had a sweet job that paid really well with the possibility of taking over the company. Said company brings in $200K a year and I was the sole employee.

Well, in January I finally had enough of my boss' bullshit and quit on the spot.

On Tuesday, I'm going to be trying out for the fire department. I've been training and taking classes for the past 4 months. The selection process is a bitch, and if I get in, I get to spend 20 weeks at the academy.

I'm 32 and I just decided that I want to be a Fire Fighter.

 

When I was young, I wanted to be a rock star and a fishing guide.

I can't sing, and the drunker I get the better I fish. So never mind on both of those.

But I make enough to keep my wife from bitching.

Win?

 

I wanted to be a football player... yeah.

 

As a kid I always wanted to be an active duty Army infantry officer, to such an extent that I joined the National Guard at 17 and a junior in high school.

At 28 and a couple of trips to the sandbox later, I want to be an expat aid worker as soon as my Master's is complete. Deep down I hear my 17 year-old self damning me as an "peace loving ultraliberal-hippy-duechebag."

 

They probably won't let him play because he's Hispanic, damn racists!

 

When I was a kid, all I ever wanted to be was a carpenter. Building things with wood. I am now a commercial framer. I've built houses, schools, churches, shopping centers, offices and restaurants. But, I am not satisfied. I want more and in the next year or two, am probably going to start my own company. That should either satisfy me, or confirm that I have bitten off more than I can chew.

 

To some degree, I'm going through this same thing. I've wanted to be a doctor since I was about 5 (I'm 20 now, almost 21) and I started at the fire department last year in May or June as a volunteer. When I joined, I never thought I would take firefighter class, but here I am now, signed up for 5 days a week for a month of summer fire class. I've really started to like the fire department, and I have considered that I might want to become a firefighter and paramedic.
But my mom told me the same thing that I've been thinking: that I would love being a firefighter, but it would never be enough for me. That I'm always going to want to be at the next highest level, so while I might really enjoy a job as a paramedic, I would always really want to be a doctor.

So I still want to go to med school, but I will say this to anyone unsure about their career: if you have ever considered joining the fire department as a volunteer, take a look into it. You may just end up wanting to do it as a career. I have NEVER seen job satisfaction so high as I see every day in the fire service. A lot of these people don't get paid well at all but still wouldn't trade their jobs for anything.

 

Growing up, I really wanted to be a marine biologist. Not in the sense that I wanted to play with dolphins or swim with Shamu, the phase that all kids went through at some point. I loved saltwater fish of all sorts, read piles of books, and could go to an aquarium or pet store and rattle off nearly every fish in the tank without looking at a label. From age 5-16, I was hell bent on being a marine biologist. But then I realized I would have to go to school on the coast, and marine biology would be a graduate school thing, not so much an undergrad major. Growing up in the Midwest, the logistics of it all kind of freaked me out. I still entered undergrad as a biology major figuring it was still an option and if not, I could always go pre-med. Turns out, as much as I liked marine biology, normal biology bored the fuck out of me, and I didn't have a particular knack for it.

I got really into financial markets when I was in college and had switched into a psych/finance double major. I really really wanted to be a trader. Unfortunately I graduated in 2008, in the middle of the financial mess, and those jobs weren't exactly plentiful. And most potential employers couldn't wrap their head around how a psych major applied or would be beneficial, a point which still astounds me. I ended up getting my chance and traded stocks for a bit over 6 months. I absolutely loved it and was actually pretty good at it. Unfortunately, the firm I worked for was semi-crooked, ran by idiots, and they layed off pretty much everyone, before folding 2 months after I was let go. I had trouble getting in the door anywhere else.

Now I work in the media department of a major ad agency, in context and strategic planning. Never in the ~25 years before I got this job did I think I would end up doing what I'm doing, but its a pleasant surprise. It allows me a nice balance of analytical and creative work, and its the first time in my professional career, except the aforementioned trading position, where I wasn't constantly looking for a way out. I'm in school part-time getting my MBA (something I started to keep myself inspired and working towards a goal before I started at my current firm) and I'm seriously conflicted as to whether, upon graduation, to keep going in advertising or try to dive back into the world of high finance.

I'm the prime example of why what you "want to be" is often unimportant, especially in HS/college, cause you need time to learn your skillset and where you are gonna best be able to kick ass. I work with people who have been with my company since they graduated 3-5 years ago, knowing they wanted to be in media and they constantly whine and moan about how their job sucks. They don't realize they have it and sometimes you need a horrid job to realize what you really have inside and where you are gonna excel.

 

I wanted to be a sports caster when I was a kid, majored in broadcast journalism to achieve that goal, and now I'm unemployed.