Sometime back in an ESOMAR conference, Monica Karamchandani, Insights Leader at Mondelēz International, committed what can only be described as an act of corporate blasphemy. She stood before a sea of research professionals and not only declared but provocatively restated, “No child dreams of being a market researcher.”
The room froze. You could almost hear the collective gasp of people whose existence was being questioned out like a bad Excel macro. For a moment, you could see the self-doubt glinting in the eyes of participants- the research warriors, wondering if their life’s work was just a grown-up version of “accidentally joining the wrong Zoom call and staying there for 20 years.”
Don’t judge too quickly. Look within and see if you are one of the rare individuals who have finally become what they wanted to be as a child. The uncomfortable truth is that rarely does a child ever run around shouting, “Uncle, on a scale of 1 to 10, how satisfied are you with your toothpaste experience?” No one built a Lego office and conducted a focus group with Barbie and Ken. Market research, it turns out, is the unvoiced Plan B of silent Plan B.
However, Monica’s truth bomb pointed to a far deeper crisis. Are there individuals who actually grow up to become what they once dreamed of being? Or are the childhood dreams just shiny lies we fed ourselves before reality hits with unpaid internships, performance reviews, and “mandatory fun” team-building off-sites?
To be truthful, Childhood dreams were never meant to survive puberty.
We all started out wanting to be astronauts, cricketers, superheroes, or, in extreme cases, traffic policemen (the earliest signs of control issues). Then came school, parents, coaching classes, and Excel. The “dreams” quietly exited the WhatsApp group like a non-participant.
And if parents were particularly ambitious, they outsourced their own unfulfilled fantasies to their child. That’s how India created an entire generation of IIT dropouts who still twitch when they hear the word JEE.
Take me. I once wanted to be a soldier. Romantic, brave, uniformed, until the NDA entrance exam told me, with the subtlety of a breakup text, “It’s not you, it’s your score.”
And here I am, just another mortal who never dreamed of being an author, writer, columnist or marketing advisor. But hey, life goes on.
Maybe that’s the real secret. We don’t become what we dream of, and yet, we somehow make peace with it. Because let’s face it, no kid ever wrote in a slam book, “When I grow up, I want to handle Q2 rollouts in tier-2 towns.”
Does this make us failures? Should we light a candle for our dead dreams? Or hold a two-minute silence for that astronaut, dancer, or dog-trainer we never became?
Not quite. Childhood dreams should be treated like a work in progress. Rough directional sketches of the person we’d one day become. We grow out of them, just like school uniforms and crushes on English teachers. And yet, fragments of those dreams linger. That’s why 40-year-olds buy guitars on Amazon, why a young adult spends his first salary on a teddy bear. Why retired bankers join theatre groups, it’s nostalgia wearing bifocals.
Of course, imagine if every childhood dream did come true. The world would be 90% astronauts, 5% superheroes, and 5% cats. The traffic on Mars alone would be worse than Delhi NCR.
So we should stop feeling guilty about where we ended up. Stop romanticising the dream that didn’t survive the syllabus. And instead, give a standing ovation to those who made peace with their fluorescent-lit fates and still found pride in it.
Let’s post-rationalise: the world doesn’t only need astronauts or actors. It also needs the person who knows why your detergent ad didn’t click with Gen Z, the woman who analyses your toothpaste purchase patterns, and the team that turns the pie chart into a salivating opportunity.
So, while no child dreams of being a market researcher. But that doesn’t mean the dream can’t evolve. Perhaps some dreams, like fine whiskey and mediocre PowerPoint skills, need time to mature.
And if that sounds like weak non-strategic post-rationalisation, so be it. As the wise AG Krishnamurthy once said, “To realise the dreams, you have first to dream them”
So here’s to the abandoned dreams, the recycled passions, and the glorious mediocrity of adulthood. Respect them. They didn’t fail you. You simply upgrade and reboot the system.
Because sometimes, not becoming what you dreamed of… is exactly what dreams are for.
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