What You Loved Doing at 10 Might Be the Clue to Your Next Chapter

A library with beanbag chairs. An afternoon spent building forts out of nothing. A stack of ten books checked out because one felt like too few.

Ask any group of adults what they loved doing as a child, and something interesting happens. The answers come fast, specific, and full of energy, even from people who swear they don't know what they want anymore.

I ask this question often in the Clarity Program, and it never fails. People who've spent twenty years describing themselves through job titles suddenly light up talking about badminton, needlepoint, or hours spent in a library.

Why childhood interests actually matter

This isn't nostalgia for its own sake. Before career pressure, financial responsibility, or anyone else's expectations shaped your choices, you were drawn to certain things purely because you loved them.

Those signals didn't disappear. They got buried under decades of doing what paid the bills and what looked responsible.

The exercise, step by step

Start by giving yourself thirty seconds to think back to childhood, no editing allowed. What did you do with your free time? What made you lose track of it completely?

Write down three or four things, even if they seem unrelated to any career. Then ask which of them you still do today, and which ones quietly disappeared.

Finally, look for the thread underneath the activity itself. It's rarely the specific hobby that matters. It's what the hobby gave you, connection, creativity, competition, order, performance.

One thread, many directions

I've watched this exercise surface a love of performance that turned into a passion for coaching, and hours spent in a library as a kid that pointed straight toward a desire to teach later in life. The specific activity from childhood rarely becomes the second act exactly as it was.

But the thread underneath it almost always shows up somewhere in a meaningful next chapter.

Try it yourself

Take the thirty seconds right now. Not later, not once things calm down.

What you loved before anyone told you what you should love is still worth listening to.

This is one of the exercises we walk through together in the Clarity Program, alongside your talents, needs, and desires, to help you build a genuinely complete picture of your next chapter.

So, what's the one thing you loved doing as a kid that you haven't thought about in years?