You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day.

I'm your host, Elise Hew.

What do you want to be when you grow up is a universal question.

And yet, at some point, we stop being asked.

Instead, it becomes, what do you do?

Or how much do you make? where are you going on vacation?

We've become really good at hitting metrics that were never ours to begin with.

And climbing a ladder that was designed by those were already sitting on top of it.

Consumer researcher Lance Kadegbach decided to ask a different kind of question.

Not how fast is your economy growing, but what do people actually dream of or aspire to?

In this talk, he shares what he found and makes the case for something that doesn't exist

yet.

We all still want to be something when we grow up.

If every country has the Department of Defense,

why can we have a Department of Dreams?

It's coming up right after a short break.

And now our TED Talk of the Day.

What do you want to be when you grow up?

At age four, I wanted to become a computer scientist.

At five, a vacuum cleaner salesman.

At six, a priest.

At 17, an award-winning filmmaker.

...