Now What?

Forget Brand You...

Some years ago, I closed my third tech start-up. I’d been brought in to run it when the original CEO was fired for failure to progress. We built and completed the software and proved the concept and that there was a market for it. And yet, at a time when U.S. broadband penetration was still far below 50%, there was no business model that didn’t show ever-rising costs and and endlessly receding profits. I advised my investors to shut the company down. This was the biggest fight I ever had with them. But a market tremor changed the mood and we were able to walk away with reputations high and finances sound.

But now what? I was pretty burned out and devoted many months to getting fit and healthy again, reintroducing myself to my children and husband and learning to sing. It was a good recovery. But now what? My husband later told me he kept looking at me quizzically, wondering wonder what the next company would be.

During this period I was invited to a get-together organized on Nantucket by Fast Company magazine. A fascinating cross-section of entrepreneurs, business thinkers, designers and writers convened to explore the future: of the world, of business and tech, of ourselves. I recall little of our discussions bar one comment I have never forgotten (though sadly I cannot remember who made it. Please get in touch if it was you!)

Just because you’re good at something doesn’t mean you have to do it.

Someone had handed me the key to the prison door and I was free.

On one level, this made my Now What question harder: the choices were (almost) limitless. But I wasn’t strangled by my CV. Or by the limited (and limiting) expectations had of me.

I think of this period in my life frequently, because sooner or later almost everyone I know wrestles with the Now What quandry. Recent graduates discover that what they thought they wanted is nothing like the reality they encounter. Most people seem to spend their twenties jettisoning the plan they had (or that their parents had for them) and thinking afresh. Once they get a real experience of work, who they are and what they want can change radically. They are frequently confused and frightened; the most stalwart are experimenting, trying on jobs to see how they fit. That’s the only way to find out.

A whole other bunch are facing into what used to be retirement, asking: now what do I want—and what do I need? Many have never really asked that question since their first job which put them on an escalator whose end now approaches. I’ve watched and helped many senior executives through this moment. It is exceptionally emotional, confusing and, again, frightening, requiring patience and nerve.

And then there’s a huge intermediate bunch who, after a decade or two, just want something more: more meaningful, more fun, more money, more freedom, you name it.

Every one of these groups feels stuck. Many have been persuaded that they need to stick to Brand You, as though they are just so many cereal boxes jostling for space on the supermarket shelf. Or they are, in the memorably ghastly words of a coach I once heard, considering whether they are a Dyson or a Hoover, a Trabant or a Jaguar. It says something about the concept of Brand You that all the proffered metaphors are inorganic objects. I’ve never once met anyone inspired by the idea, but I know hundreds trapped by the demeaning commodified self that it implies.

The other trap is consistency: the belief that the good life must have some neat, narrative consistency in which each step leads the way to a coherent end. Why? Human beings are not consistent! (This may be one reason why social scientists have so much difficulty with the replicability of their experiments; they assume consistency where it may—or may not—exist.) As individuals, we’re highly sensitive to context, to the company we keep, to political moods and economic shifts. And we change, all the time: with new information or experience, we should.

The philosopher Galen Strawson argues that there is no one way that we experience ourselves through time. That would be a form of essentialism, a simplification of self that actively hinders self-understanding. Of himself he wrote, “I have absolutely no sense of my life as a narrative with form or as a narrative without form. The me thinking about the past is not the me that was in the past.” Instead he chooses to celebrate “the beauty of being”—which is a long way from Corn Flakes.

When I consider some of the longest, most remarkable careers, they are full of change. Bob Dylan’s now a painter. e e cummings believed himself to be a painter first, a poet second. A world class opera designer is now a ceramicist. My neighbour, an agricultural journalist, became a medical doctor. Katy Prewett left the world of opera to run a farm. Jed Mercurio left medicine to become a TV writer. Many architects, despite their long, expensive training, seem to turn into chefs at a remarkable rate. Pretty much all of these people will trace a connection afterwards; that doesn’t mean it was obvious at the time. But all of them appreciated that just because they were good at something didn’t mean they were stuck with it.

These transitions aren’t easy; the financial and existential peril that attaches to them is real. But there is risk in consistency too. Anyone sticking too long to a once-loved company, business investment or partner will tell you: I wish I’d got out sooner. As Dan Pink points out in his book The Power of Regret, we are more likely to regret those things we didn’t do than those we did. But as far as I’ve ever known, the moment of change is always tricky. There are no guarantees. Brand You is a prison and consistency a myth.

I never did start another business after closing the Internet software company. Instead, I’ve written 7 books, 5 plays, numerous radio programmes, taught at universities around the world, sung in at least one excellent choir, become a parish councillor and a professor and returned to cycling.

So: now what? I’m trying to figure out some changes I feel I need to make to my own work. After writing about experiments for years, I’m starting to do some of my own. It’s exhausting. Scary. Frustrating. Exhilirating. Maddening. Am I on the right path? I’ll only know when I turn around to look, but right now the path ahead is more compelling, at least to me. I don’t think I’m a particularly brave person. But I do know that boredom is my friend, an alarm telling me to move on. We make our paths by walking.*

One last thought. The director Peter Brook once said that just a few weeks into rehearsal, a director isn’t the same person they were at the beginning of the production. The work we do changes us, revealing and developing who we are and who we might be. That’s the adventure.

If You Want to Go Deeper

Galen Strawson’s book Things that Bother Me: Death, Freedom, The Self, Etc. (2018) is narratively as untidy as life itself. And it manages to be simultaneously challenging and comforting.

For the Love of It

As I was cycling recently, I passed a row of trees that someone had decorated with handicrafts. No idea why, but it felt funny, daft and wonderfully human. Not everything that matters is efficient.

*This last sentence is a quote from a Spanish poem; I wanted it to be the title of my book that became Uncharted. But it was thought too obscure. I’m still unsure. It is said of Green Park in London that when it was first opened, the Charles II asked its designers where the paths were going to be. He was told that in a year, it would become obvious: the footpaths would be where people had chosen to walk.

Emergent phenomena are not a modern discovery.