Advice to My 22 Year Old Self

GoThinkBig is a pretty cool website helping young people get their ‘feet on the ladder’ in great companies. They post up opportunities that offer the chance to explore industries, build skills and most importantly get ahead. This post was inspired by their “Advice to My 22 Year Old Self” series.

I am yet to turn 22 (3 months and counting) so this is kind of flipping the concept of this series on its head…

This journey from school, to some form of further/higher education and then work is not as straightforward as you originally thought. Unlike the plan you wrote out at 7 you’re still yet to become an archaeologist-business woman-rapper and that’s okay.

Please stop feeling like the whole puzzle will fall into place after you read that next ‘productivity hack’ or tech entrepreneur’s biography because, spoiler alert: life doesn’t work like that.

You’ve been sold some (not so great) advice that “achievement is talent plus preparation”. This justifies feeling wronged that you didn’t get an A* in English Lit, because you revised for 6 whole months. However, when you finally read the book that quote is from (Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell) you’ll see that what distinguishes people who achieve great things

“is not their extraordinary talent but their extraordinary opportunities.”

Opportunities are magical things.

Don’t worry about whether something fits into a grand 10-year plan. Don’t worry about whether it’s making your CV look “all over the place”. These thoughts are draining and make you chase things you might not want to do because you think you “should” or it’ll better prepare you in some way. Yes, I’m talking about the degree that you’ve tried three times to complete.

On your most recent break from university you:

• Helped open a pop up portrait studio, capturing a community in print and in a documentary.
• Made another short film with the Prince’s Trust that was shown in the Prince Charles Cinema
• Started a company, raised investment and even ended up pitching in St James’s Palace

You enjoyed doing those things and learnt a lot. You’re still learning, mostly that some things won’t work out even when you put your all into them and that doesn’t make you a failure. When you get an idea of something you’d like to create/become you know there’s bound to be an opportunity to take that dream for a test drive.

So take chances, experiment and reinvent yourself as many times as you want but most importantly keep going.

Sincerely,

Yourself