One of my earliest professional dreams did not work out.

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One of my earliest professional dreams did not work out.

And that led me to the purposeful work I do today.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot as I watch my grown children (in their 20’s and 30’s) experiment with and test their capacities and their interests on the road to figuring out what they want to do for work in this wild world.

I notice my own impulses at times to offer support and guidance when it is neither asked for nor needed. I am learning to instead stand on the balcony and watch, cheering their efforts and their learning.

I think back of what my parents must have thought when I was embarking. They did a good job holding back their opinions as I tried one job then another, moving from outdoor education to counseling to corporate training, with stints in between as a guide, a bookseller, a waitress, a hospital housekeeper.

It was in college that I started writing for the campus newspaper and my passion for being a scoop burgeoned. A lifetime reader of anything I could get my hands on, I was intrigued by the thought of writing for a big paper or a magazine. I was decent at it and every success fueled my conviction that I was going to make it as a journalist.

But over time, the doors that opened were not about writing.

Little bit by slow, I was offered opportunities that stacked, one on the other, like accidental Russian Nesting Dolls, in ways that over many years, added up to the work I do today and founding my own business.

I could not have seen the way counseling kids with substance abuse disorder in the wilderness would make me patient of group process. I never would have imagined that the boss I had as a housekeeper would see in me a work ethic that was crucial for entrepreneurship. In my wildest dreams, I could not have predicted that the precision of investigative journalism would chew me up and spit me out.

But each nuanced job, each boss, each sector, and each discovery of my own gifts and liabilities would, over the course of a lifetime, stitch together to work that I love in service to a mission I believe it.

Our work is not who we are.

But who we are shapes our work through the things we suck at and the moments we shine.

What would be possible in the realm of employee engagement if employers saw themselves as existing, in part, to help people find the work that activates their good stuff?

It’s time we took the pressure off finding the perfect job easily or swiftly. Right work takes a lifetime to build.

More on that in Friday’s news.

I want to know: how did something that did not work out for you shape what you’ve done for work?