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What did you want to be when you were growing up?
Question
What is the biggest obstacle you have faced professionally?
Craft & work
Question
Which trait do you most dislike in yourself?
Identity & self
Question
What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Identity & self
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
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 195 →
Matt Goss
English singer-songwriter
I wanted to be like Vidal Sassoon and wear the three-piece suit and be part of pop culture.
An actor. I watched a lot of TV because we lived in the countryside and the weather was so bad.
Johanna Konta
British tennis player
When I was five, I wanted to be a cleaning lady; when I was nine, I wanted to be the world’s number one tennis player.
More from John Lewis
View profile →More than anything else, I had to combat the barriers, and we tore down those barriers. I just had to set a sail against the wind, those strong winds, to end segregation and racial discrimination, but somehow, in some way, I didn’t let those barriers keep me down.
My tendency to skip meals.
When I was growing up on a farm in rural Alabama, I fell in love with raising chickens. They seem truly innocent. Whenever I'm around chickens, I feel 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.
More on identity & self
Also answered this
Desmond Tutu, Malcolm Gladwell, Gloria Steinem, Jess Phillips, Robert Peston, Zack Polanski
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