Some people may have ice water running through their veins, but I’m pretty sure ink runs through mine.

Journalism is essentially the family business. My Poppy, dad, and uncle spent more than 60 years combined at The Wall Street Journal, and I’ve known since I was five that this was the career path I wanted to take. Poppy used to tell me I had the perfect name for a journalist because Shannon has seven letters and Carroll has seven letters, and seven-and-seven looked best in print. (Of course, his byline was Charles Carroll, so make of that what you will.)

I grew up captivated by the stories my dad brought home from “work.” He sailed across the Atlantic, battling 40-foot waves in a small sailboat. He became a professional wrestler: The Wall Street Warrior. A Mexican cabinet member once slipped over to our house under cover of darkness to spill secrets — reporting that eventually helped make my dad a Pulitzer finalist. It’s no surprise that journalism seemed like a pretty good way to spend a life. 

And over time, I’ve gotten a few good stories of my own.

I started out in sports, first at UC Berkeley’s student newspaper, The Daily Californian, because I loved writing features. I interned at Sports Illustrated, which I’d been reading for years. After writing a story about domestic violence in the NFL, I went on ESPN’s Outside the Lines to talk about it with Bob Ley, one of my journalism idols. I conducted interviews in Spanish in major-league clubhouses. I got to do the work I had imagined doing when I was a kid.

In typical Carroll fashion, my dad and I turned our careers into a competition. I’d remind him about the Olympians, World Cup champions, Super Bowl winners, World Series winners, and top draft picks whom I’d interviewed. He’d remind me that he interviewed Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.

For a long time, I was very happy to leave the billionaires to him. Business journalism wasn’t exactly calling my name. I’m most certainly not a numbers or economics person, despite all my teachers’ best efforts; I still sometimes need my dad’s help figuring out a stock’s percentage change. But at Quartz, editing business news gradually turned into writing more of it myself, and I started to realize a good story’s a good story, regardless of the beat. And so: I spent the next stretch of my career writing as many of them as I could. At Quartz, I covered everything from AI and semiconductors to markets and media, reported from Spain and San Francisco, and helped write the Daily Brief for an audience of about a million people. I liked the pace, but I especially liked taking something messy or complicated and finding the exact way to tell it to make the most sense — and be the best story.

Business journalism also improved my side of the family scoreboard. I interviewed Jensen Huang while Nvidia was becoming one of the most important companies in the world, which is something I’ll happily lord over my dad. Twenty years after my dad interviewed Bill Gates, I interviewed his daughter. At first, I’d send Dad my business stories and ask him for his opinions (and occasionally, edits). Eventually, I found myself explaining chip restrictions and AI to him at dinner. But yes, I still ask him about the stock math.

Now, I’m less interested in finding the perfect label for what I want to cover than in finding the next thing I want to know more about. Sports? Duh. Business? Of course. Travel, culture, and food? Yes, yes, and yes. My beat, more or less, is whatever has me curious.

That curiosity recently took me somewhere special.

After my time at Quartz ended, I decided to log off and walk 500 miles across Spain on the Camino de Santiago. And after weeks on the road, I came home with plenty of thoughts — which I then turned into a piece for The Wall Street Journal. I’d spent my career taking a route that looked nothing like my dad’s and somehow ended up in the same newspaper anyway — by following my own stories until one of them led me there. And there, at the top of the piece, was the name Poppy had spent all those years insisting belonged in print: Shannon Carroll.

Seven letters and seven letters.