The question

What did you want to be when you were growing up?

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.

Others on this question

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Chris Hoy British track cyclist, 1994–2013
Scotland’s rugby captain. My hero Gavin Hastings was captain when he came to our school for a training session when I was 10 or 11. I met him and was blown away.
Recorded The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 10 February 2018 source ↗
Jack Whitehall English comedian, actor, presenter and writer
I was hellbent on being a Thunderbird. I was devastated when my parents finally told me it was a fictional organisation. Ruined my 18th.
Recorded The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 29 April 2023 source ↗
Agnès Varda Film director, photographer and installation artist
Did I have a dream job? I’m not sure. I remember making a little, two-page magazine like kids do, but I never intended to do that as a job, I just thought it was a way having a parallel life to school, doing something different. But I never had that in mind.
Recorded Nick Dawson, Filmmaker Magazine, 29 March 2019 source ↗

More from Jacqueline Novogratz

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Question What is the book you have given most as a gift, and why? Taste & recommendation
But the book I give right now in this time of so much despair is Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, where he really looks at people in the Holocaust and asks himself, why did some just sort of crumple up and die and others stayed resilient and strong? And that at the end of the day, no one can take our dignity away from us.
Recorded Tim Ferriss, The Tim Ferriss Show, 6 May 2021 source ↗
Question What is something everyone in your world agrees about that you think is wrong? Values & belief
On the one hand, we have people that say the aid system is so broken we need to throw it out. And on the other we have people who say the problem is that we need more aid. ... Both sides are right. And the problem is that neither side is listening to the other. Even more problematic, they're not listening to poor people themselves.
Recorded TED, 3 June 2009 source ↗
Question What have you come to understand about what it means to be human? Values & belief
One of the biggest lessons of my life, Krista, has been that we can’t separate the world into monsters and angels and that there’s nothing like loving people and knowing friends who played different roles in the genocide, including being perpetrators, that makes you have to confront that most raw element of what it means to be human. And the only conclusion I could make was that there are monsters and angels in each of us and that those monsters really are our broken parts — they’re our insecurities; they’re our fears; they’re our shames — and that in times of insecurity, it becomes really easy for demagogues to prey on those broken parts and sometimes make us do terrible things to each other.
Recorded Krista Tippett, On Being with Krista Tippett, The On Being Project, 2020 source ↗

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