How Did I Get to Where I Am?

Or, my best friend interviewed me and now I'm seeing my life differently

Last year my best friend started a podcast about the ways our personal lives impact our working lives. Her own experience told her that we don’t just move jobs or change careers because it’s a good “business” decision but also because it feeds into who we are as people, what we need for our families or our health or our self-esteem. She’s interviewed a range of brilliant people and this week is was my turn. You can listen here.

I love being interviewed on podcasts partly because my ego thoroughly enjoys being given time to talk about itself but also because when I listen back I learn something about myself that I’d missed until that point. It’s a glimpse into a side of myself that perhaps I’d misunderstood or forgotten about, a little nudge to reassess the view I have of myself today.

When I listened back to this episode I was struck by one thing in particular. At one point my friend asks me what I was most proud of in my time at the Guardian. I tell her a funny story about becoming the first journalist at the Guardian to gain 1 million page views on a piece in a day by accidentally suggesting that I had nude photos of Emma Watson. Sorry Emma, that really wasn’t how that piece was meant to go.

If you listen to the podcast you’ll hear the full story and then at the end you’ll hear me say quietly that the thing I’m most proud of, “is having the courage to leave.”

One of the many biases wired into the human brain is “sunk cost fallacy.” We believe when we’ve put time or money or effort into something it is therefore worthy of us continuing to put time or money or effort into it. We look at how much we’ve already given to this job, relationship, friendship and think, “well I can’t waste all of that, I need to keep going.” We should quit while we’re behind, rather than keeping going and losing even more. Instead we become gamblers with our own lives, forever putting another penny in the slot hoping that this time it will pay-out.

I am as guilty of this as anyone. I am a typical Capricorn, deeply loyal and very stubborn, so if I’ve decided I’m in then I really hate admitting I’ve got it wrong and walking away. The problem is that sometimes you’re not walking away from something because you’ve made a bad call but simply because your time is up and you need to move on.

We really praise people for staying. In his long-term podcast, sex and relationships writer, Dan Savage, regularly asks why we measure relationship success by longevity. Surely a relationship that lasts a only a few years but ends with both parties feeling enriched by it is more successful than one which goes on and on and on for decades, with everyone miserable and resenting each other? And yet, put side by side with no details, we’d assume the relationship which lasted the longest was the most successful. We give too much power to time, investing it with a sense of importance that it doesn’t have and which it doesn’t pay us back for. Nobody ever gained time by staying somewhere they weren’t happy.

When I was working at the Guardian everyone wanted to talk to me at dinner parties. I’d tell people what my job was and they’d instantly have questions. The pay was typical journalist rates, ie peanuts, but I knew that every month that money would land in my bank account. I got good benefits, worked with kind people and was associated with a brand that everyone knew. I wasn’t leaving to go to another job, I was leaving to give working for myself a try and hope that I could make some money from it. On the surface, staying was the smart decision. But I’ve never been that smart.

It’s been nearly ten years since I made the decision to leave and until I heard myself on that podcast I’d forgotten the courage it took to make that decision. I’d forgotten that amount of work that I’d had to do on myself, the beliefs I’d had to let go of and the faith I had to cultivate. Hearing it back didn’t just remind me that I’d managed to do that once, it reminded me that I was capable of doing it again and again. That courage lives in me, I don’t have to try and gain it because it’s already there. If I can leap off that bridge I can do anything. And I never need to fear walking away again.

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