“What do you want to be when you grow up”

A question with no answer

You have heard this question all your life. At six, people asked it with a smile. At sixteen, with pressure. At twenty-six, it sounds like this: “So… what are you going to do with your life?” And now there is worry in their voice.

Listen to the words. Not “Who are you?” but “What do you want to be — when you grow up?” As if right now you are nobody. And one day a job will make you somebody.

So you start looking. You change your major. You take career tests. You read stories about people who “found themselves”. You try design, then data analysis, then something else. Each time you think: this is it. Six months later, the same emptiness is back. Only your CV is longer — if you stayed long enough to add a line.

People usually tell you: you just haven't found your thing yet. Keep looking.

I think the answer is different. You won't find yourself in a job, because you are not there. A job grows out of who you have become as a person — and out of the people around you.

It's a bit like a house: you can't start building from the third floor.

1. Who was supposed to teach this?

You have heard “What do you want to be?” many times. Now try to remember: who ever sat down with you and talked seriously about these things?

For me, almost nobody. When I ask other people, I hear the same.

So here is my question: whose job was this?

Everyone thinks it's someone else's job

The school expects the parents to do it. Its job is subjects and grades; family life is something you “learn at home”. Some parents expect the school to do it, or think the child will work it out. Other parents would like to talk, but have nothing to pass on: nobody taught them either. I don't think anyone means harm. Everyone simply thinks it's someone else's job.

Just when it matters, parents stop being heard

Around thirteen, children start to pull away from the family. They look for who they are outside the home. That's normal. The problem is timing: this is exactly when parents' words count the least. A teenager needs a third person — someone older, from outside the family. Someone they trust and want to be a bit like.

Where the time goes

Look at how young people spend their time outside the family: school, university, a few clubs, games, friends, then work. Nothing wrong with that. But look at what they learn along the way: subjects, skills, a profession. The rest is rest and fun. We need that too. But it doesn't replace a real conversation about yourself and other people.

The result

So here is the picture. For knowledge and work, we have a whole system: school, university, courses, internships, diplomas. For understanding another person and keeping your own boundaries, we have nothing. It's left to the family — which nobody helps — and to luck. Then we're surprised when a 25-year-old with two degrees can't live with the person they love, and doesn't know who they are.

Is this just my impression? Three numbers

I checked. One number for each of the three: the family, the talk at home, and the third person.

The family, the one everyone expects to do the job, is getting weaker. People in the EU marry half as often as in 1964. Divorce is twice as common.

The talk at home gets harder just when it matters. At 11, most children find it easy to talk to their dad. By 15, one in three don't.

The third person. In the US, one young person in three grows up without a single mentor. For Europe I found no data at all. Nobody counts it.

I don't think the problem is bad families or bad schools. The problem is how we split the job. To talk about it clearly, we need words for what nobody teaches — and an order. That's the next part: the three floors of the house, and why you can't start from the top.

2. The three floors — and why the order matters

I lived in Korea and Japan and worked with Koreans and Japanese for about ten years. Out of that came my own view of how a person grows: on three floors, one on top of another.

The first floor: the heart

The heart here is the inner pull to find joy in giving love. It is also the core of a person's character.

So raising the heart means raising a person who loves people and the whole world around them. A person whose mind, feelings and will are in balance — and rest on the heart.

The heart grows first in the family, our first school. As children, we learn to receive our parents' love. With brothers and sisters, we learn to share and to settle fights. In marriage, we learn to share everything as equals. As parents, we learn to give for years without asking anything back. When a person has been through all four, the heart is full.

The second floor: norms

Love alone doesn't tell you how to act with your father, your younger sister, your wife, your child. Usually we don't invent these ways ourselves. We inherit them from an order older than we are.

So for me, norms are more than manners. Norms are how to act in each of those four roles: what it means to be a son or daughter, a brother or sister, a husband or wife, a father or mother. This includes something people rarely talk about today: self-restraint, and taking sex seriously.

So a family that raises norms well also raises a good citizen of its country and of the world.

Norms and the heart must grow together. Rules without love become empty form: a person keeps them only while someone is watching. Love without rules is no better. It becomes blind love; children stop respecting it and grow up spoiled. And with many rules and little love, a person rebels against whoever gave the rules.

The third floor: skills

Only after that comes working with the world around us. Here we gain knowledge, technical skills, mastery. This is everything we now treat as the main thing, and where almost all our years of education go: school, university, profession, career, portfolio.

Skill is power over things. Picture a conqueror and a good farmer. Both have the same power over the same field. One drains it and moves on. The other looks after it and leaves it better than he found it. Without a heart, skill easily turns into the first kind.

Everyone is born with the seed of a genius: the ability to create. Who you are decides what kind of genius you become — in music, maths, politics or cooking.

But skills must stand on the first two floors. If the heart and norms are weak, creativity doesn't disappear, but it never fully opens. The person has no one to create for and no limits to create within. In the end, they do what they're paid to do, exactly as well as they're paid. And how can a child grow creative when the parents fight at home, the child lacks love and slowly loses the will to live?

What each floor gives

The order matters: each floor holds up the next.

I'm not asking you to believe this order. Later I test it against data and real life.

That's why I think “What do you want to be when you grow up?” is a bad question. It looks for who you are on the third floor. But who you are seems to start on the first. The next parts show why I think so.

3. The diagnosis: we build only the third floor

Here is the main claim of this lecture:

This isn't a complaint about certain parents or schools, and it isn't longing for a better past. It's about where our effort goes today: almost everything we call education works for the third floor.

I test this with research, mostly from Europe. I show the numbers as they were published, including the ones that don't help me. First, how young people are raised today. Then, people whose third floor is built as high as it goes.

4. Proof one: strong skills, nothing to lean on

Young people can't choose a career — and it's getting worse

Some older people say young people just don't want to work. The researchers see something else: young people can't decide. And this at a time when there is more career information than ever.

The first floor, in the family

Whether a teenager finds it easy to talk to their dad shows whether there are living relationships at home, where love is actually passed on. Almost 3 in 10 teenagers in Europe don't have that with their dad. And the heart grows only in relationships. Love from a distance isn't enough. Paying the bills is good, but it doesn't bring you closer — and neither does a good kindergarten.

The second floor, at school

Social and emotional skills fall exactly when they should grow

Between 10 and 15, social and emotional skills go down. On the house: responsibility belongs to norms, trust and tolerance grow from the heart, curiosity and creativity feed skills. All of it falls at once. The data doesn't prove that it falls because of the first two floors — only that it all falls together.

What we can already see

Loneliness and depression have many causes, not only a weak first floor. But in none of these studies do people say they lack knowledge, skills, or access to school or technology. They lack connection — the feeling that someone needs you for who you are, not for what you do.

Schools want to, but don't know how

5. Proof two: skills without the first two floors

If the order of the floors really matters, we can test it the other way round. Find people whose third floor is built as high as it goes, and see what happens to the first two.

Such a group exists: scientists. They were selected for years for knowledge and intellect. And science has unusually clear rules: don't invent data, don't bend results, credit other people's ideas. So if the third floor can stand without the heart and norms, this is where we'd see it.

Scientists admit to faking data — and say more about their colleagues

People are careful about themselves even in anonymous surveys. So the first number is a floor, not the real share.

The better you measure, the worse it looks

The authors say misconduct is higher than in earlier surveys. Where people are better protected, they admit more, not less.

Scientists know it's wrong, and do it anyway

This is what Part 2 predicted: without the heart, norms turn into hypocrisy. A person knows the rule, agrees with it, and breaks it when no one checks — because nothing inside makes the rule worth keeping.

A record number of retracted papers

It isn't about knowledge

I'm not saying science is rotten. It's still the best way we have to test claims about the world. Admission rates depend on wording and method, some “questionable practices” are carelessness rather than bad intent, and countries and fields are hard to compare. But even read carefully, the result holds: these people don't lack knowledge — knowledge is what put them at the top. They lack what should come before it.

Researchers who study this name the main cause: pressure to publish. In the language of the house, the system rewards the third floor (papers, citations, grants) and barely rewards the second: accuracy, admitting failure, retracting your own mistake. People respond to rewards quite rationally.

But a person who only follows rewards has nothing above them. If the heart is alive — if you love the specific people behind your work: the reader of your paper, the doctor who will prescribe a treatment based on it, the patient who will take it — faking data stops being just risky. It becomes almost unthinkable, the way most parents couldn't hit their child for a bonus.

That's the second half of the proof: skills alone save no one without the heart and norms beneath them.

6. How did we get here? A hidden flaw in the idea of equality

Why do societies that are richer, better educated and safer than ever fail the first two floors so consistently? My working answer: the meaning of equality has changed.

Everyone leads and receives at once

A head of department leads a team and answers to a boss. A father raises his child and is still a son to his parents. A teacher leads a class and keeps learning. This isn't a hierarchy where someone humiliates someone else. It's just a structure. There is no place where you only give and never receive.

I call this a connected body. In it, knowing that you receive comes first. First you receive — language, love, a body, knowledge — and only then do you give. A person who forgets that they first receive from something higher, and only then lead others, becomes a dictator, whatever the size of their position.

How equality before God became equality before the law

When society became secular, the formula stayed, but its base didn't. “Equal before God” became “equal before the law”. An equality of people who receive turned into an equality of people who only lead and claim.

When everyone only leads, relationships easily turn into a fight: if nobody receives from anybody, there's no reason to give way. While people still remembered a shared “higher”, this barely showed. When that memory faded, it all came to the surface.

Why “what do you want to be?” sounds the way it does

That's why the question sounds the way it does today. It assumes you give yourself your identity — or find it in yourself and defend it, competing with everyone else who did the same.

A line from one of my favourite films, Dune, says it better:

Identity rests on relationships. You are someone's son or daughter, friend, partner, support. You don't pick these roles from a catalogue. You accept them, and then you carry them. A person with no accepted role, only self-chosen ones, is looking for themselves where people rarely find themselves.

7. The turn

How it works today

And norms, decency and meaning wait for “someday”, if there's time left.

Now change the order

First, through our roles in the family and in society, the heart grows: the pull to find joy in love. At the same time we learn to respect order in the family and in society and build norms — inside love, not instead of it. Then the profession comes naturally: how can I serve people in a way no one else can, because only I have this gift in this form?

Now a profession answers “Who needs me, and what can I do for them?” — not “Who am I?”. Who you are comes from the first floor, and the profession becomes its tool. The question “What do you want to be when you grow up?” is no longer needed.

Gen Z already wants to serve — and it can be measured

And in Europe?

Most work in Europe is useful, and meaning matters to young people more and more. Yet they are less happy at work than older people. So the problem is less in the work than in what a person brings to it. If the heart is weak, there's no inner pull to give. Then people choose a profession to become somebody, not to be needed by somebody — and even useful work gives no meaning.

8. What to do

Step-by-step guides come in the next lectures. Here are three things you can start today.

1. Change the question you ask yourself

• The first question is about people, not causes. Not “which problem makes me angry” — that's an opinion — but specific people whose joy and pain really reach you.
• The second is about your roles: son or daughter, brother or sister, friend, partner. If in some role you don't know what's expected of you, or you keep to it only in public, that's where your second floor sags.
• Only the third is about a profession or other skills.

2. Check that you have at least one role you accepted, not chose

Son, daughter, brother, sister, partner, father, mother, the friend people call at three in the morning. If all your identities are self-chosen — creator, entrepreneur, a personality type from a test — there's nothing to lean on. These roles aren't bad. They just all grow on the third floor.

3. Ask one question before every career decision

Before you say yes to a job, a project or a client, ask:

If you can't, it's your third floor working without the first two. And in Part 2 we saw that without a heart, skill easily turns into exploitation.

Questions for reflection

1. Remember the last time you felt real joy because a specific person was better off thanks to you. How long ago was it? It's a measure of your heart, not a reproach.
2. Name one of your roles (son or daughter, brother or sister, friend, partner) and how you act in it when no one is watching. Where did that come from: did you reason it out, or learn it from a specific person?
3. If your profession disappeared tomorrow, who would you be? Answer without naming a single skill. Then see whether your answer is about relationships.
4. Remember the scientists: 1 in 2 often bend the rules. What would stop you in their place, under the same pressure? Fear of being caught, a rule you know, or specific people you'd let down? Only the last one works when nobody is checking.
5. Who would notice if you stopped doing your job well? If the only name is your manager, you're probably working for a grade, not for people. This is less about your job and more about whom you see behind it.

What's next: the course

This lecture was a map. The next lectures turn it into tools. Read them in order: each one uses words from the one before.

The foundation: three lectures, one arc. How life is meant to work. Why we break what we love. How what's broken is restored — and by what rules.

Then, deeper lectures. Raising the heart in a real family. Norms that don't kill love. Work as service in a real career, not on a poster. And tools for thinking: seeing systems, telling causes from coincidences, noticing your own biases, arguing well, building trust in a group.

Each lecture is a 25–40 minute read, with sources and “Don't take my word for it” boxes. No paywall, no required email.

Subscribe to the next lectures — one email per lecture, nothing else.

What's next: live meetings

The heart doesn't grow from reading — awkward for a course made of texts. It grows only in relationships with specific people, in real time. A lecture gives you words for it, not one gram of the thing itself.

So alongside the course I run live meetings: small groups where we test these ideas on our own lives — mine too. No stage and no guru. A conversation, not a talk.

If something in this lecture touched you, that's where to continue.

Sign up for the next meeting — online and offline, small groups, free.

What this work is, and what it isn't

Sources