I remember when I was young. “What do you want to be when you grow up?” is the staple question in school. Every pupil is automatically asked this question.
And each time, I would answer, “To be a teacher!”
That answer was based on my limited knowledge of the occupations people can have. My world basically consisted of home and school. Teachers were the ones I had met firsthand. And to my eyes, they were my heroes.
That staple answer lasted until I was in Grade Four. By then, I got to know my aunt’s job, a CPA. She gets to count money and keep accounts and sit at an office with a computer. That seemed pretty cool to me. And so that year, when I was asked about my ambition, I answered, “To be a CPA.”
However, when I was in Grade Six, I didn’t find numbers interesting. I was bored by Math, and I wasn’t good at organising things. I figured CPA won’t fit in my skills and my interest. By this time, I had watched lawyers on TV who look sharp in their suits, and who hold their heads up high each time they win a case; I‘ve seen judges pound that hammer thing (now I found out it’s called a gavel) — that also looked awesome to me. And so this year, when asked about my ambition, my answer became “To be a lawyer.”
Those were three different ambitions for the first thirteen years of my life. And for the next four years, my ambition would indecisively bounce to various vocations: writer, newscaster, TV reporter, psychologist (I had this notion that psychologists can read minds), dentist, advertiser, and many more.
I really did not know what I wanted to do in life.
But I did know what I was good at — communicating. I had an inkling that my future vocation will be in this field. I delved myself in creative writing, trained to act in theater, and sang in the choir. Not that I have all that talent, I just wanted to try new things. That time I did these things for the fun of it, and not really to pursue a career out of it. I honestly didn’t think too hard about what to do in the long run.
When I filed my college application, I didn’t put much effort into the decision making either. Knowing that communication is my strong suit, I just looked for courses with “Communication” in the title; in my university there are only two. I chose the less famous one.
Like most students, I only got to know my course when I started taking it. My course is more of an advocacy discipline. You use communication for the betterment of the society, mostly to eradicate poverty. This is such a noble purpose, but also a huge feat. It’s an attractive but quite challenging ambition.
By the time I graduated college, people would expect that I already know the answer to the question that kept bugging me all my life. They expect that I had figured it out.
I had not figured it out.
Even today, I am left with the question “What do I want to be?” without a ready answer in mind. I know it should be something that would help my family and the society, and consequently myself, but heck, what is it? Is everyone even required to have a ready-made answer for this?
However, I can safely say that right now, I am content with where I am. Life, in its own little way, lead me where I ought to be. I am twenty-four, and in a private publishing company. I don’t know if others may consider this job “developmental” (the staple question in my course), but to me, it is. Heck, a book with too many errors won’t help a country to progress now, would it?
To be honest, I have no idea if I would stay in this job forever, or if I have another calling to shift vocation. All I know is that my plans (well, my many plans) were different from what actually took place in my life; but in retrospect, I would not have it any other way. I am content with being an editor for now, for this is the job where I feel God can use me to a specific purpose. This job may not make me rich (yet), but with this I can offer something to my family and keep a little to myself, and that’s about enough for now. There even have been numerous, compelling setbacks that make me want to quit this job, but for mystical reasons, I still choose to stay.
I’m not saying that you should imitate me and leave your plans to the universe. Goals are what keeps us going; they are our compass. But I guess I stopped seeing myself boxed in a future that I think is best for me, only to find out later that I shall go another way. With a scatterbrain like me, possibilities are vast.
But I believe the future can only get better.
Thus, it exhausts me to come up with a rigid answer to the question of ambition. If society requires me to have a concrete answer, then consider me a deviant. To me, what matters now is that I love what I do and people benefit from it. My plans for the next few years shall be for its enrichment. Like Lily said in How I Met Your Mother: “You can’t design your life like a building. It doesn’t work that way. You just have to live it, and it’ll design itself.”
Who knows what the future holds?
I will update you when the answer changes, but as of this writing, my answer to “What is your ambition?” is “See, I have lived my life trying to answer that, and I am tired figuring it out. We never know what the future lies ahead, but I can say it looks great. Now may I please get back to my paperwork?”
