If you haven’t seen the movie Citizen Kane, there’s MAJOR SPOILERS ahead 🙂
It is one of the most iconic opening scenes in film history.
A camera glides past a large iron gate. A sign hangs there: NO TRESPASSING. It passes over dilapidated grounds and moves towards an obscenely large Gothic mansion. Inside a dark room, a man lies alone, holding a snow globe. The globe slips from his hand, crashes to the floor, and he utters his final word.
Rosebud.
Then he dies.
A nurse enters and covers his body with a sheet. And the film becomes, in many ways, a journalist’s quest: to find out what “Rosebud” meant, and why it mattered so much to Charles Foster Kane, the billionaire newspaperman. Kane is loosely inspired by William Randolph Hearst. The story traces Kane’s life from a happy child playing in the snow to his ascent as one of the richest and most powerful men in the country, and the people he leaves in his wake to accomplish that ascent. He burns relationship after relationship in pursuit of money, prestige, and control.
He dies alone.
In the final scenes, after his death, Kane’s possessions are being sorted. The items that will not be auctioned off are thrown into a giant furnace. The camera lingers on one object in particular. A childhood sled. As it’s tossed into the fire, the camera zooms in on the name painted across it.
Rosebud.
The world finally learns the answer. But it’s too late for Kane.
That final scene is not just a twist. It’s a reckoning. Because the tragedy is not that Kane didn’t succeed. He did by every possible measure. The tragedy is what his success cost him. The sled burning is symbolic because something essential in him burned long before that furnace was lit.
When the great naturalist E.O. Wilson was seven years old, his parents announced they were getting divorced. That summer, he was sent to stay with a family he didn’t know in northern Florida. Every morning, he would have breakfast with them, then wander alone along the beach until lunch. After lunch, he would head back again, wandering until dinner.
He went searching for treasures.
What he found cast a spell on him. Crabs and needlefish. Toadfish and porpoises. One day he saw his first jellyfish. In his memoir Naturalist, he writes that it was astonishing, something that “existed outside my previous imagination.” Another time he saw a gigantic ray, and he writes, “I was thunderstruck,” seized with the need to see it again, to capture it if he could, to examine it up close.
Later, Wilson reflects that it wasn’t systematic knowledge that made him. It was hands-on experience at the critical time. Better, he says, to spend long stretches simply searching and dreaming.
David Brooks calls moments like this an annunciation moment. A childhood experience that lights you up so powerfully it prefigures much of what comes after. The delights and the challenges. It’s an early signal of the person you are becoming.
Sometimes it’s something found. Sometimes it’s something lost, and then found again in another form. Wilson lost the stability of his family home, and found in nature a home where he would always be welcome.
Sometimes, though, there is no trauma at all. A child is simply walking through ordinary life and suddenly beauty strikes. Some sight or experience renders them dumb with wonder. A kind of radical openness arrives: curiosity, reverence, a desire to go closer. To simply bask. To understand.
Albert Einstein remembered such a moment from when he was four or five. His father bought him a compass. The needle swung under the influence of a hidden force, and he later wrote that it made him tremble. “Something deeply hidden had to be behind things.” It isn’t hard to draw a line from that trembling needle to a life obsessed with invisible laws: magnetism, gravity, inertia, acceleration. Walter Isaacson writes that, in Einstein, music, nature and God became intermingled into a moral unity whose trace never vanished.
Nietzsche once suggested a method for discovering what you are here to do: go back into your past, list the moments you felt most alive, and see if you can draw a line through them.
Robert Greene makes a similar claim in Mastery. He studied masters across history and noticed a common pattern: an early fascination, a chance encounter that shows how to apply it, then an apprenticeship that brings unusual energy and focus. At the core is not simply “talent” in the way we casually use the word. It’s a deep inclination. A pull. A preference.
And these preferences don’t need to be heroic. They just need to be human.
If you loved puzzles, Lego, fixing devices, you may have been rehearsing a mind that thinks in systems and enjoys patient construction. If you stood up for the kid being excluded, you were revealing loyalty, justice, protectiveness. If you disappeared into imaginary worlds, perhaps you were practising an inner life, creativity, or imaginative problem-solving. It’s not the activity itself that matters most. It’s the pattern of self it expresses.
When I was young, I was mesmerised by Elvis Presley.
Not the fame, exactly. The expression.
Yes, I loved the music. But what captivated me was the sense of a human being fully inhabiting his own presence. He seemed to give himself permission. To move, to feel, to be uncontained. I devoured his songs, copied his moves, read and re-read his story. I don’t remember a time when he wasn’t there in my inner world.
I grew up in Mumbai, India, and I’m genuinely grateful for my childhood; for my parents, and for the opportunities I was given. But the shape of life felt regimented: school, church, expectations, timetables. There was a “right way” to be a kid, a “right way” to behave, a “right way” to live. And something in me resisted that. Not out of rebellion, exactly…more a feeling of being quietly cramped, like I was being trained to become respectable before I even knew who I was.
So I escaped.
Movies were one door. Reading was another. And Elvis. Elvis was a kind of permission slip. Not permission to be loud, necessarily. Permission to be real. To feel something and express it without apology. I was drawn to anything that made the inner world visible.
At the same time, I was obsessed with films (as regular readers probably know from my essays) Not just the usual kids’ movies. I watched black-and-white films, biblical epics, Westerns, courtroom dramas. I didn’t care about genre or age. If it told a human story, I was spellbound. I would watch the same films again and again, not merely for entertainment, but because I sensed there was something underneath them that I was trying to learn. Emotion. Truth. Courage. Human nature.
And here’s the tension: I was a shy kid. I hated being the centre of attention. Looking back, I can see the thread that never left me. A longing to express, to make the invisible visible, and a fear of what it might cost to do so.
That tension still lives in me. Even now, when I’m writing, podcasting, teaching, building things that require me to be seen.
Underneath it all is the same quiet question: how do we bring what is most true inside of us into the world, honestly and courageously, and let it matter to someone else?
Maybe that is my Rosebud.
Not a sled. Not a lost object. But a longing that began early, and never stopped whispering.
There is a line I keep returning to adapted from David Whyte: it is corrosive to the personality of the person who repeatedly says no to something that keeps whispering yes.
At some point, the pattern becomes difficult to deny. You reach a threshold where your freedom to choose seems to narrow, not because you’re trapped, but because you’re finally seeing what you are. You begin to understand that you were made for the world in a particular way, and that this way of being is, at the bottom, non-negotiable.
We like to imagine vocation as something we decide, like selecting from a menu. But the older I get, the more it feels like a mutual recognition. We seek it, yes. But we are also sought out by it.
To glimpse your vocation, you don’t only ask: What do I want?
You also ask: What keeps finding me? What keeps returning? What refuses to leave?
It’s why a purely strategic relationship with work so often leaves us flat. You can choose a job on a financial basis. You can chase success through compulsion and unrestrained ambition. You can gain money, status, prestige. But without some acknowledgement of who you are, the success can become oddly hollow, even if it looks impressive from the outside.
Citizen Kane ends as a tragedy because it shows a man who gained the world and lost the thing that mattered most.
The sled burns, and we understand that the loss happened long before the fire. The furnace is only the visible end of an invisible story.
So the question is not simply: what was Kane’s Rosebud?
The question is: what is yours?
What captivated you before the world told you what to value. Before “respectability” and “a good living” and “career success” became the dominant vocabulary. What did you love when you were young, not because it was useful, but because it felt alive?
If you can find that, and trace the line through it, you may not get a perfect answer.
But you might get something better: a direction.
And if you can name yours, even roughly, you don’t have to turn it into a career overnight. You don’t have to post about it. You don’t have to monetise it.
Just don’t throw it in the furnace.
