Emeli Sandé
British singer
I always wanted to be a singer, but I also wanted to be a doctor. I almost got there: I did four years and got my neuroscience BSc.
What did you want to be when you were growing up?
Question
What do you consider your greatest achievement?
Craft & work
Question
What advice would you give your twenty-year-old self, and what should they ignore?
Time & hindsight
Question
What purchase of $100 or less has most positively impacted your life in the last six months?
Money & investment
Question
What do you value most in your friends?
Relationships
Question
What is something you were told by a parent, teacher, or mentor that you still repeat to yourself?
Time & hindsight
Question
Who helps you get things done?
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.
14. I always played music until then, just like piano lessons. Viola, violin and clarinet as a kid. But at 14 I started playing guitar and I was like, “this is it. This is what I want”. I am so thankful that I had this single mission from the age of 14 till 29. For 15 years of my life I wanted nothing but to be a great musician.
Joe Ciccarone, podcast transcript, Built Not Born, 13 July 2022 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 223 →
Paul O'Grady
British comedian, actor and television presenter
To work in a dry cleaner’s.
Cheryl Strayed
Author of Wild and Tiny Beautiful Things
By the time I was 19, I was saying, “I’m going to be a writer. This is my path.”
Gloria Steinem
Writer and feminist organiser
First a horse rancher, then a dancer.
More from Derek Sivers
View profile →"How to Live" feels like such a masterpiece for me that if I did nothing else with my whole life, but write that one book, it still feels like it would have been a life well lived.
Yeah, anybody asks me about it, my advice was always, do not do it. In fact, it still is. Somebody just asked me last week, I was like, do not do it.
I disagree with the question.…I think too many people think that way. They think that getting something is going to improve their life. I challenge anybody who thinks that way, which almost everybody does, to try to flip it on yourself and look around you and think, “What things could I get rid of around me here that would positively influence my life?”
Vulnerability. Mutual admiration. Wide open communication. Yeah. Those are my big three.
Whatever scares you, go do it.
I have no team business-wise. I should mention that I have no assistant or team at all.
Recorded
Kelly Irving, community interview transcript, Expert Author Community, 29 August 2025
source ↗
More on identity & self
Also answered this
Tom Kerridge, Mellody Hobson, Angela Hartnett, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, Gino D'Acampo, Bozoma Saint John
Search the directory for somebody in particular.
Explore further
- All identity & self questions
- The The Q&A questionnaire — 25 questions from the same format
- Explore the archive — by field, age, era, and subject