I call my shots

Somewhere in a box of school papers I have a sheet from second grade where I wrote that I wanted to be an “animal photorafer” when I grew up.

By fifth grade I’d gotten more specific. My yearbook entry that year reads: “I’d like to be an engineer because I would like to design a new generation of electronic sports equipment.” I still don’t have a clean one-word title for that job, but I know what it looks like now.

For a long stretch I didn’t do either. Middle school through college and into work, the obvious path was software, so software was the path. I learned to code, then learned more, then went to RPI for it, then started doing it for a living. Lifting came in through football and stayed. Those two early ambitions just kind of sat there. I forgot I’d ever had them, mostly.

What changed isn’t dramatic. I bought a camera, started shooting birds in the park near my apartment, and the old thing came right back. Not as a career, but as a hobby that felt obvious in a way new hobbies usually don’t. Around the same time I started thinking seriously about what I’d actually want to make if I made something of my own. The answer was the obvious one, just what I kept wishing for in the gym: equipment for athletes. So I started building it. Little did I know I’d wanted the same thing ten years earlier. My mom found these worksheets in a box and sent them to me long after I was already deep into the project.

So here’s the lesson, plain. Chase what you wanted before you had the words for it. The feeling you had as a kid, that you could do anything you set your mind to, is worth holding onto. The work you’d choose anyway has a way of finding you.