I wanted to do a lot of things. I guess it is possible to be interested in too many different things.
When I was in the 5th grade I wanted to be a writer. I kept coming back to that one over the years but never made much progress towards it. I have written a fair amount over the years as a hobby but I seem to be quite lacking in talent.
I always enjoyed taking things apart to understand how they worked. And I enjoyed fixing things. When I was a teenager I wanted to eventually open up my own bicycle shop and repair bicycles. I started tinkering with cars when I was a teenager (my friend’s father had an old car that he constantly tinkered with - I learned a lot about car mechanics from him). I never had the urge to become a car mechanic though.
I started tinkering with electronics when I was in grade school. My friend had one of those electronics kits where you could wire things together just by putting wires in springs.
I have also always enjoyed music. I play the piano/keyboards (I had about a decade of piano lessons), guitar, bass, trombone, as well as a few other instruments. I can play the drums a bit but I don’t consider myself to be a drummer. By the time I got to high school I had combined electronics and music as a hobby, and I was building my own guitar effects boxes and amplifiers and such.
I almost went into music, but then I decided that the low pay of that career wasn’t for me. It was a pretty late decision. I was still considering music up until the point where I had to actually make a final decision and stick with it.
I ended up with computer programming. By the time I was a senior in high school I knew more than all of the teachers and they basically just let me study whatever I wanted and kept buying things for me to learn (a COBOL package, for example). I also tinkered around a lot with machine language programming since it was pretty much required to do anything complex like writing games with the tiny 8 bit computers of that era. I wish I still had some of the games I wrote back then. They were kinda fun.
I also created and wired in some circuits to my Commodore 64 so that I could use it as a drum machine and synthesizer of sorts, and connected it to an audio mixing board that I had made. I made a lot of things just because I couldn’t afford to buy professional music gear.
I signed up for Computer Programming, but before I took any classes my uncle took me to the University and had me meet with the head of the Engineering department. By the end of the day they had convinced me to switch to Electrical Engineering, and that’s what I finally went into. I’ve taken enough programming classes over the years that I could have probably had a second degree in Computer Science if I had taken a few other electives and maybe a phys ed class or two. I have found that being both a hardware and a software engineer has given me some definite advantages in my career.
I still sometimes wonder what my life would have been like if I had stuck to music.