Picture from: http://www.nutrigrain.com.au/iron-man-series.aspx

While growing up, I changed my childhood dreams a fair bit.

Primary School Dreams

The earliest dream I can recall is wanting to be an iron man tri-athelete. I loved the beach and I was getting far with my swimming lessons at the time.

I then found a passion in books. It seemed logical that I would want to become a writer, like my favourite authors Roal Dahl and Paul Jennings. After being told that I wouldn’t make much money from being a writer, I soon lost enthusiasm for that dream.

It would be a few years before I would create another destiny for myself. I was in year 6, I was elected the school captain for my primary school. It was the year Pauline Hanson made headlines over her controversial views and statements. I had given a speech in class condemning her views and the racism she was promoting. I had finally decided that I wanted to be the prime minister of Australia. It was the same year that I discovered that John Christopher Watson – Australia’s and the world’s first Labour Prime Minister (1904) – was born in Valparaiso, Chile just like me.

High School Distractions

The following year I started high school and different things started occupying my mind. Sports, social life and school work soon distracted me from dreaming any further. I stopped thinking about what I would be when I grew up and I was clueless until the end of high school.

When I was around 15, I realised that I was rather good at using the house computer and I picked up things pretty quickly. Not really impressive, I guess being young and curious helped my knowledge but it made me think that if I found computers easy to use, I may as well aspire to work in IT.

Not as ambitious as my previous dreams but it seemed sensible. There was a large world-wide IT shortage so it was logical. It would be a profession that paid well and I had the capacity to pursue it.

So I enrolled in IT when I started college (college in Australia means year 11 and 12) to try it out. I don’t know why, but I didn’t understand a thing in that class. We did databases, programming – both html and c++, system architecture and other stuff I can’t remember. Those two years were so tedious to get through that I almost lost hope altogether. Convinced that if I studied IT at uni, that I would start from scratch, that it would be different – I stuck to my idea of pursuing an IT career.

After Secondary Education

After switching undergraduate degrees, taking time off from studies, changing from different jobs, it seems that somehow I’m still heading towards the dream of working in an IT-related role.

After all this time, I still don’t enjoy the technical side of IT but the managerial and analytical aspects are of interest to me. I’m 25 years old, I’ve done a fair bit of travel and of living and still have not fully entered into my professional career. There is still time for me to investigate other avenues but I think I’m on track to pursue my latest dream.

Writing, My Real Passion?

Since beginning this blog, I feel that I’ve opened up a connection to my childhood dream of writing. Although I don’t think I’ll become an author anytime soon, It’s quite rewarding to translate my thoughts into words, share them and express my originality.

Somehow, being able to channel my childhood interest of writing through this blog, enables me to find the motivation to work towards my current dream. Now all I need is to get into shape and participate in those iron man competitions that fascinated me all those years ago.

Conclusion

It’s important to encourage children to dream while they’re young but at the same time, you don’t want to accelerate their growth by making them think like adults. It’s equally vital that you let kids dream whatever they want to dream, there should be no right or wrong aspirations. It’s the originality, humility and spontaneity that make children and their aspirations so remarkable. I always enjoy looking back at myself, I just hope the future me does enough to impress the child me of about two decades ago.