I remember really wanting to go into space. I liked the idea of flying.
What did you want to be when you were growing up?
Question
Aside from a property, what is the most expensive thing you have bought?
Money & investment
Question
How close have you come to death?
Death & what remains
Question
What inspires you to learn?
Attention & the world
Question
How would you like to die?
Death & what remains
Question
How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success? Do you have a favourite failure?
Failure & regret
Question
What are bad recommendations you hear in your profession or area of expertise?
Craft & work
Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
This is a standing question in The Guardian's decades-long The Q&A and also recurs independently in career and life interviews.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
When I was growing up I wanted to be a minister. I wanted to preach.
Academy of Achievement interview, Chicago, 10 June 2004 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 192 →
Adrian Edmondson
English actor, comedian, musician and writer
I only ever wanted to be an actor or a rock star. I was suspended from school in the sixth form and allowed back only when I promised to join the army. But I lied.
Jo Nesbø
Norwegian writer and musician
I wanted to play for Tottenham.
Joanne Froggatt
English actress
An actor – that’s all I’ve ever wanted to do. I went to stage school when I was 13.
More from John Lewis
View profile →Buying art…. But it makes me happy!
On the Freedom Rides in the year 1961, when I was beaten at the Greyhound bus station in Montgomery, I thought I was going to die. On March 7, 1965, when I was hit in the head with a night stick by a state trooper at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, I thought I was going to die.
I wanted to know. I asked a lot of questions and she would say, "Read, read."…So she inspired me a great deal.
Recorded
Julian Bond, Explorations in Black Leadership interview, Explorations in Black Leadership, University of Virginia
source ↗
I don't want to die. I don't think I'm going to die…but we all have to die. Since I do, I hope I live on in the hearts and minds of people.
I never thought that we would fail or that I would fail. I knew from time to time we may make some blunders. We may make some mistakes, but we were not going to fail.
I would come home and ask my mother, my father, my grandparents, my great-grandparents, 'Why?'. And they would say, 'That's the way it is. Don't get in the way, don't get in trouble!'
Recorded
Emory University Quadrangle, Atlanta, Speakola (speech transcript archive), 12 May 2014
source ↗
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Chris Bryant, Clive Myrie, Desmond Tutu, Edmund Hillary, Emma Barnett, Gloria Steinem
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