title: "How I Explain My Career to My Children (And What Their Questions Reveal)" date: 2025-10-08 author: David Sanker
She was halfway through a bowl of cereal when she looked up and asked it — the question I've answered a hundred times in boardrooms and courtrooms and pitch decks, but never quite like this.
"Dad, what exactly do you do?"
I set down my coffee. There's something about a child's directness that strips away every rehearsed answer you thought you had.
I'm a lawyer. I'm also a software engineer. I've started companies, watched some of them fail, and built others into something worth keeping. I coach people now — sitting with them in the space between where they are and where they sense they could be. To a seven-year-old eating Cheerios, none of those words mean much. But the question underneath her question — who are you, and why? — that one deserved a real answer.
So I tried to give her one. And what happened next surprised me.
Key Facts
- A child's simple question about career sparked genuine reflection on how we narrate our own lives.
- Transitioning from law to technology came from merging two passions, not abandoning one for the other.
- The Lego tower analogy helps children (and adults) understand non-linear career paths.
- Startups taught resilience in a way that law and engineering alone never could.
- Happiness isn't a destination on the career map — it's something you keep measuring as you go.
The Lawyer Who Codes
I started with honesty, which felt risky.
I told her that for a long time, I spent my days as a lawyer — reading arguments, writing briefs, sitting in rooms where words carried weight and precision mattered more than almost anything else. I told her that at night, and on weekends, and sometimes during lunch if I'm honest, I was teaching myself to write code. Not because I had to. Because something in me needed to build things, not just argue about them.
She nodded slowly. "Like how I draw and do math?"
Yes, I said. Exactly like that.
Children have this gift for finding the analogy that fits. I'd been explaining that career pivot to adults for years — the way law and engineering aren't opposites but complements, the way legal logic and computational logic live closer together than most people think — and she cracked it in ten seconds over breakfast.
What I didn't say, because she didn't need to hear it yet, was how disorienting that crossroads felt from the inside. When you've invested years in becoming one thing, and you feel yourself drawn toward something else, there's real friction there. Not regret — I want to be careful about that word — but a kind of vertigo. You wonder if you're being foolish. You wonder what you're leaving behind.
What I've come to understand, slowly, is that I wasn't leaving anything behind. I was adding a floor to the building.
The Lego Tower Explanation
When she asked why I changed, I went looking for the right language.
I told her to think about her Lego sets. When she builds a tower, each brick matters — not just the ones at the top, but the ones in the middle, and especially the base that nobody notices after it's done. My career is like that tower, I said. The years practicing law are bricks. The coding is bricks. The startups — the ones that worked and the ones that didn't — all of it is in there somewhere, holding up whatever comes next.
She thought about this. "But what if the tower falls?"
I told her the tower falls sometimes. That's actually the most important part of the story.
Startups have a way of teaching you things that comfortable success never will. I've had ventures that looked promising on paper and collapsed anyway. I've made decisions that seemed sound and turned out to be wrong. And each time, there's a moment — usually quiet, sometimes painful — where you decide what to do with what's left. Do you step back? Do you rebuild? Do you take that particular pile of bricks and use them to start something different?
What entrepreneurship gave me, more than any specific skill, was tolerance for that moment. I stopped being afraid of the fall because I'd survived enough of them to know: the fall is not the end of the story. It's just a chapter break.
My kids understand this intuitively. They rebuild the tower. They don't write a eulogy for it.
The Question I Wasn't Ready For
Toward the end of our conversation — she had finished her cereal, I was on my second cup — she asked the one that stopped me.
"Are you happy?"
Adults rarely ask each other this directly. We ask about workload and projects and whether something is going well. We've learned to approach happiness sideways, as if looking at it straight might jinx something. But she asked it plainly, and it deserved a plain answer.
I told her yes. And I meant it in a specific way that I've only recently learned to articulate.
I'm not happy because everything worked out perfectly. I'm happy because the path has been mine — genuinely chosen, honestly pursued, built from the actual materials of who I am rather than who someone else thought I should become. The law shaped how I think. The engineering shaped how I build. The startups shaped how I handle uncertainty. The coaching — sitting with people at their own crossroads — that's where all of it converges into something that feels, for now, like home.
I don't think happiness is a fixed address. I think it's more like a direction you keep choosing.
What Their Questions Actually Reveal
After she ran off to find her brother, I sat with the conversation for a while.
Children ask questions that adults have learned to stop asking. What do you do? Why did you change? Are you happy? These aren't small questions. They're the only questions, really. And there's something clarifying about being asked them by someone who has no stake in your answer being polished or strategic.
My kids don't care about credentials. They care about coherence — whether the story makes sense, whether the person telling it believes it. In trying to explain my career to them, I've had to earn that coherence honestly.
A few things I keep coming back to:
- Curiosity is a compass. The questions children ask point directly at what matters. The questions we stop asking ourselves are usually the ones worth revisiting.
- Nothing is wasted. The legal training lives in how I structure arguments. The code lives in how I think about systems. Each phase informed the next in ways I couldn't have planned.
- Failure is part of the architecture. Not a detour — part of the actual structure.
- Fulfillment is worth measuring. Not just success by external markers, but whether the work actually fits who you are.
A Question to Leave You With
I don't think I have a roadmap to offer. What I have is the experience of building something without one — making choices, living with them, adjusting, trying again.
If a child asked you today what you do for work — and then followed up with why, and then asked if you're happy — what would you say?
Not the resume version. The real one.
That's the conversation I keep finding my way back to. I'd be curious where it leads you.
FAQ
Q: How can I explain my career journey to children in a relatable way? A: Start with analogies they already live inside. Lego towers, drawings, games — anything where they already understand that building takes multiple steps and sometimes falls down. Focus less on job titles and more on why you made the choices you made. Kids track motivation more than credentials.
Q: Why does career flexibility matter for personal growth? A: Because the person you are at twenty-five has different capacities than the person you are at forty. Flexibility isn't about being indecisive — it's about staying honest with yourself as you change. The ability to carry skills from one domain into another is one of the most underrated forms of professional development.
Q: What can entrepreneurship teach about handling failure? A: That failure is iterative, not terminal. Every startup I've been part of — the ones that didn't survive especially — taught me something I carried into the next thing. The lesson isn't that failure is fine. It's that failure is survivable, and what you do afterward is the real measure.
AI Summary
Key facts: - Transition from lawyer to engineer to entrepreneur illustrates how career flexibility enables compounding growth. - Using the Lego analogy helps make non-linear career paths legible to children and adults alike. - Happiness is better understood as a direction than a destination — something continuously chosen, not achieved once.
Related topics: career transitions, entrepreneurship, work-life balance, personal growth, resilience, curiosity in learning, explaining careers to children, non-linear success