What did you think you were going to do for a living when you were young? And what happened to make you do something different?

Here's my answer to that...

I didn’t know of too many jobs for women.

In my head, the list was as short as:

·         Teacher

·         Nurse

·         Doctor

·         Air-hostess

·         Secretary

I thought it would be the easiest to become a secretary.

So I learned typing.

But a few different things happened, because of which I became a copywriter in an ad agency, rather than a secretary. 

Here's the story...

When I was in 2nd grade, I won a state-wide SPCA essay writing contest for an essay I wrote called "My Pet".

This was the first sign of my writing talents.

The next sign was after I finished high school and started having boyfriends.

As soon as we got serious, "the boyfriend" would start receiving handmade greeting cards from me.

I would express my feelings in all sorts of creative ways on these handmade greeting cards.

They were low on image quality, since I couldn’t draw to save my life, but they were reasonably good on word quality, it seems.

Because when Boyfriend 2 came along, after receiving the 4th or 5th card from me, he said, “Minoo, you would make a good copywriter”

“What’s that?” I asked. I had never heard of copywriters.

At the time, our city was dotted with some very clever billboards for a floor laminate.

My boyfriend said, “Minoo, you know those billboards with those clever Woody Woodpecker lines - those were written by a copywriter.”

“Ooooh, I would love to do that,” I said, “How can I get to do that?”

“You have to join an advertising agency,” he said to me.

At the time, I was still in college (well, somewhat still in college, if you know my story), so I just filed it away.

But that was sign 2 - the recognition from the boyfriend for my writing talent.

Sign 3 emerged shortly after.

When I should have been in my 2nd year of college, I switched to “external college studies”, which was really an excuse to give myself time to think about what I wanted to do with my life.

As a result, I had a lot of spare time on my hands.

I used this spare time to scribble again.

Since there was no boyfriend, he had departed for another city with my greeting cards, my scribbles took on new form.

I wrote my own guitar songs - lyrics and music, which I found to be more rewarding than writing greeting cards for boyfriends, because I had a larger audience, consisting of family and friends.

And I also started writing middles for the local newspaper.

Writing for the newspaper, was of course, even more rewarding in terms of audience; the audience was as large as the circulation of the newspaper.

And I was to find out how rewarding it was to reach newspaper audiences, when my sister got a call one day from a friend, who said, “We have a job for that sister of yours who writes for the newspaper.”

The friend was calling from an advertising agency.

Shortly after that call, I started my first advertising copy job.

My boyfriend’s suggestion had turned out to be prophetic.

So this is how I ended up being a copywriter instead of a secretary.

In my next post, I will tell you about how I ended up in my next career, which was a completely different career that I got into after moving to America.

Meanwhile, it's your turn. What did you think you were going to be when you were young, and what happened to make you do something different?