April 2025: Aspirations

In this post:

Another look at improving self-awareness with a focus on personal aspirations.

—

This series of posts started with a post on Values, followed by a post on Passions.

This post is about Aspirations.

The next three posts will be about Fit, Patterns, and Reactions.

Following the format of its elder siblings, this post asks these questions about Aspirations: 

1 When I was younger, what did I want to be when I grew up?

2 What drew me to that profession?

3 What legacy do I want to leave behind in my work and personal life?

Searching “Aspirations” on Google provides two results.

The first is “A hope or ambition of achieving something.”

The second is “The action or process of drawing breath.”

When I think about Aspirations, I think about actively wanting something. When I think about Hope, I think about a passive desire for something. Contrast that with Ambition, which makes me think more about active desire for something.

That said, I can see Hope being an ongoing fixation when injury, rest, or some other obstacle precludes active pursuit of some objective.

With breathing, you can breathe without thinking much about it, but you can also breathe – aspire – with more intent and energy. Like breathing, you can aspire to a goal with or without taking action.

Let’s consider some questions, shall we?

When I was younger, what did I want to be when I grew up?

I knew that I wanted to be in the Air Force when I was as little as four years old.

Granted, at that age, my primary fixation was video games. When asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, my earlier answers included wanting to work at McDonald’s and playing video games, or being someone who made games for a living.

My parents – mostly my father, I suppose – encouraged my interest in games almost as much as they encouraged my general interest in joining the Air Force.

The idea of making video games slowly generalized into wanting to be an engineer of some sort. My rationale was that engineers either blow things up or put them together. Being an engineer in the Air Force felt like a reasonable opportunity to put together things that would blow other things up. (Note: Most Air Force engineers are not putting things together, nor are we blowing many things up, but many of us are close to both of those things.)

Peeking back at my Passions post, it’d say this generalization of engineers also fits my interest in writing. Writers “put stories together,” after all.

What drew me to that profession?

Looks like I got a little ahead of myself above, huh?

While my parents always pushed me to perform well in school and encouraged my childhood aspirations, I think what “got me” was that I fell for the “trap” they set and latched onto academic success as the means to a distant end of becoming an engineer in the Air Force.

The idea in my mind, cultivated over the years by family, friends, and faculty was that I was a smart kid, and engineers are smart people. It was simple mental math that if I was to become an engineer – which, of course I wanted that – then I needed to prove that I was smart, therefore I needed to continue to do well in school.

Any parents out there might want to take some notes on this…

Simply put, I think the destination was set early and I jumped on the journey. Rather than being drawn to the profession itself, I put myself on a collision course with my current profession by pursuing many of the elements I felt comprised someone in that profession.

What legacy do I want to leave behind in my work and personal life?

As a military member, this is an interesting question to chew upon.

I am a little past half way through my career. Assignments only last so many years, so I constantly leave behind a little something for only a little while before the next few assignment turnovers at prior organizations slowly dissolve my past presence and impacts.

Even now, I’m considering how the work I do today will influence the next decade or so, though my name or personality will indubitably be forgotten by most in the office before 2035 rolls around.

But, I’ll also probably retire around 2035, and I can imagine that people will happily attend my retirement (please, if there is a god, let me retire…) and remember that I was around the dank and musty dungeons of my current workplace.

When I try to think about how I’ve felt at various going away lunches, I’m not entirely sure I’ve ever felt like I wanted to leave a significant impact. More often, I just hoped I did a decent job and that I learned something I could use in the future.

…and if other people happen to benefit from my work or by interacting with me throughout my life, I think that’s honestly enough for me as far as what I care to leave behind.

All that said, I think it would be cool if I published books that turned out to be popular…

Closing Thoughts

As I close on this post, I am reminded that the idea behind these questions is to revisit them on occasion to try to realign with yourself. I think my own answers to these questions right now demonstrate a bit of misalignment that I should think a little more about.

Alternatively (additionally?), I might reword some of the questions as I review them again, soon.

Instead of “When I was younger, what did I want to be when I grew up?” I can ask myself “What do I want to be when I grow up?” My perspective has changed significantly since I was four, after all.

While I care about the impact I have on the future, “legacy” does not necessarily matter to me, so I think adjusting that question to “What do I want to accomplish at work and/or in my personal life?” will lead to more productive self-discussion.

What do you think?