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Time English Language 2 Action
00:03
What do you want to be when you grow up?
00:06
At age four, I wanted to become a computer scientist.
00:10
At five, a vacuum cleaner salesman.
00:13
At six, a priest.
00:16
At 17, an award-winning filmmaker.
00:19
And at 22, when it was finally time to decide on my first job,
00:23
I became a management consultant.
00:26
(Laughter)
00:28
What do you want to be when you grow up?
00:30
I'm sure everyone here has been asked some version of that question,
00:33
but perhaps not recently.
00:35
Somehow, the questions have changed.
00:38
"What do you do for work?"
00:39
"How much money do you make?"
00:41
"Where are you going on your next vacation?"
00:44
We've become obsessed with asking these types of questions
00:47
to measure even our nation's productivity.
00:49
We track growth rates, remittances and exports
00:53
without really asking if these numbers reflect the lives
00:55
that people are trying to live.
00:57
I see the problems with this system at home in the Philippines.
01:00
Our GDP is soaring,
01:03
but we're doing it in a way that doesn't quite align
01:05
with the kind of lives that people want to live.
01:08
For one, we send millions of people abroad
01:10
to take care of other people's parents and children,
01:13
and we train millions more to stay awake while their families are asleep
01:16
so they can be up all night answering phone calls
01:19
from halfway across the world
01:20
about how much money is in their bank account.
01:22
And somehow, we're rewarded for it.
01:24
We’re told that we’re Southeast Asia’s second-fastest-growing economy,
01:27
and in a few years,
01:29
we'll be upgraded to an upper middle-income country.
01:32
As a nation,
01:34
we've become really good at hitting metrics
01:36
that were never ours to begin with
01:39
and climbing a ladder that was designed by those
01:41
who were already sitting on top of it.
01:44
But what would happen if you asked Filipinos what metrics mattered to them?
01:50
What would happen if you tried to measure dreams?
01:54
Last year, my colleagues and I at BCG ran a nationwide,
01:57
nationally representative survey to answer this very question.
02:02
Now look, no client had ever asked us about dreams,
02:05
but if you look at the websites and mission statements
02:07
of the country's largest businesses,
02:09
all of them are trying to connect their work
02:11
to national development in some way.
02:13
And so we knew that even if nobody was asking the question,
02:17
the answer was one that many people would be interested in.
02:20
We discovered three things.
02:22
First, we discovered what the Filipino dream was.
02:26
The number-one ranked dream across all socioeconomic segments
02:30
was to achieve financial security to absorb health scares.
02:34
But we learned more than that -- we also heard stories.
02:36
We heard stories like that of Tidri, [a] 26-year-old preschool teacher
02:40
who dreams of becoming a beauty queen, a host,
02:42
a politician, opening a hair salon just like her grandmother.
02:48
But right now, Tidri can't afford to do that
02:50
because she still has to help pay for her grandfather's healthcare bills
02:54
because he just had a stroke.
02:57
Second, we learned who those dreams are for.
03:01
Most Filipinos don't actually dream for themselves.
03:03
They dream for their extended family.
03:06
We met people like Joey,
03:07
[a] 56-year-old radio technician
03:09
who works from 2am to 11pm most nights.
03:13
He lives in a boarding house close to the station,
03:15
given the demands of his job,
03:17
but still wants to be a farmer,
03:19
a social worker and a high school teacher.
03:22
But he really wants to retire.
03:24
But every time he asks his company, they say, "Ah, not yet."
03:28
Right now, he doesn't really have a choice
03:30
because he still has to finish paying for his daughter's education.
03:35
And third, we learned how people perceived institutions
03:38
as helping them achieve those dreams.
03:41
We learned that most Filipinos
03:42
actually didn't feel like public and private institutions
03:45
were helping them achieve their dreams,
03:47
and so they could only rely on themselves.
03:49
We met people like Sweden,
03:51
[a] 35-year-old news reporter
03:53
who spent years moving from one field assignment to another.
03:56
But when she had her first child,
03:58
she decided to stay home
03:59
and start a children's clothing business from her garage,
04:01
believing that making and selling children's clothes online
04:04
would be a better way
04:05
of creating financial stability for her family.
04:08
Today, she dreams of opening up a flagship store in a mall
04:11
for her business,
04:12
and of buying a second home in the mountains for her family.
04:16
Tidri, Joey, Sweden
04:18
and 1,500 other Filipinos we've interviewed
04:21
all still want to be something when they grow up
04:24
and their dreams seem so achievable.
04:28
But somehow to them, they still feel out of reach.
04:32
We shared this report with clients, the business community, media,
04:35
even government officials.
04:37
And every single time they asked us the question,
04:40
why hasn't this been done before?
04:42
Why haven't we tried to measure dreams?
04:44
Look, there are many reasons,
04:46
but I think it's because those who have the power to ask the question
04:49
think they already know the answer.
04:51
In every single forum where I've asked the question,
04:54
“What do you think is the number-one Filipino dream,”
04:56
I've never seen the most senior person in the room answer it correctly.
05:00
They usually guess something safe, like to buy a house
05:02
or something generic, like to have a happy family.
05:05
Less than about five percent of people guess it
05:08
and it's usually somebody more junior,
05:10
somebody who grew up in a lower-income family
05:12
and worked their way up the ladder.
05:14
And I wonder, in how many other countries in the world
05:17
is this actually happening?
05:18
Where what we call “development”
05:19
is really just watching some numbers somewhere going up and to the right,
05:23
but people on the ground feel nowhere closer