Knowing "What You Want to Do When You Grow Up"

So I found these tapes while I was unpacking and it got me thinking.

So these are videos of me teaching classes to my fellow IBM sellers back in 2001. So a couple initial reactions were:

1) I had forgotten about teaching these back then.

2) How much technology AND IBM has changed in the 17 years since I started right out of college.

But then I started looking closer and thinking deeper about it and I remembered how much I truly enjoyed doing that early in my career. Teaching, coaching and mentoring teammates and other sellers. How much even then before "Social Media" was about to explode, I was a big believer in personal branding, personal web portals, communicating with clients through IM and other real-time tools.

Fast forward 15 years and now my job is teaching and developing new strategies for sellers and it is no wonder that I wake up every day loving what I do and the opportunity to impact others.

The lesson I walked away from this is that my desire to develop sales / marketing strategies and then teaching those to sellers has always been there inside my heart, but I ignored it for the majority of my career and instead chased money, goals others set for me and success as it was defined by others. I could have answered the question "What do I want to do when I grow up?" a lot sooner had I listened to my heart all along, set goals that were in line with that calling and actively pursued those goals.