Years ago I worked for a studio executive in Hollywood.
At some point he told me he had known since he was five years old that he wanted to be a talent agent. By the time I met him, he had already spent years as an agent and had become head of operations at one of the largest talent agencies in Hollywood.
I remember being stunned.
Not because he wanted to be a talent agent. Because he knew.
How do you know what you want to do when you’re five years old?
That question stayed with me for years.
More recently, I’ve found myself asking similar questions while reading about musicians, artists, entrepreneurs, and other highly successful people. Many seem to have known what interested them from a young age. They followed those interests, developed them, and built lives around them.
I find that fascinating.
Because my experience felt very different.
When I was five years old, I wasn’t thinking about a future career.
I was trying to figure out why nobody had come to pick me up from kindergarten.
The school was only a few blocks from my house, but I wasn’t allowed to walk home by myself. Every day someone came to get me at lunchtime.
One day nobody came.
The other children left. The teachers left.
Eventually I was sitting alone on the curb trying to decide what to do.
I knew one of my mother’s friends lived nearby. Maybe she would be home.
She wasn’t.
I sat on her porch and waited.
I don’t remember what happened after that. Someone eventually found me. Someone eventually took me home.
But that memory stayed with me.
Not because it was dramatic. Because it felt normal.
Years later I would realize that many of the experiences that shaped me felt normal at the time.
My father drank heavily.
My mother would sometimes wake me in the middle of the night and take me to a motel without explaining what was happening.
I struggled in school. I spent a lot of time staring out windows. I failed second grade.
At the time I wasn’t thinking about safety, trauma, or adaptation.
I was simply living inside the conditions that were there.
Looking back, what strikes me is not that my childhood was difficult. Many people have difficult childhoods.
What strikes me is how different the questions were.
Some children seem free to ask:
“What do I want to do?”
“What interests me?”
“What kind of future do I want?”
Others are occupied with different questions entirely:
“Is everything okay?”
“What’s going to happen next?”
“What do I need to do?”
“How do I get through this?”
Children rarely ask these questions consciously.
But they still shape a life.
Years later I met many people in Hollywood who reminded me of that conversation with my boss. People who seemed able to identify what they wanted and move toward it.
Not perfectly. Not effortlessly. But directly.
What they wanted to do got done.
That fascinated me.
Because my own life often felt different.
I would find something I cared about. Things would begin moving forward. I would gain momentum.
Then something would happen.
I would hit a limit.
The momentum would disappear.
And I would find myself trying to regain ground I thought I had already gained.
For a long time I thought these were separate experiences.
My childhood.
My struggles.
My work.
My relationships.
My repeated difficulty sustaining momentum.
Eventually I began wondering whether they might be connected.
Whether the conditions that shape a life determine more than we realize.
Not just what we fear.
Not just how we cope.
But which questions become possible to ask in the first place.
Perhaps one of the most important differences between people is not intelligence, talent, discipline, or willpower.
Perhaps it is whether life has given them enough safety to imagine a future rather than simply navigate the present.