How much can you remember about being 15,
And being asked to choose a career?
The idea is absurd:
That you pick a career from a menu of options,
Knowing little about your own interests or skills,
that supposedly you would stick with for life?
I didn’t even know what music I liked, never mind what I was going to do with my life.
We were presented with the textbook choices of career such as dentistry, law, dentistry, accounting or dentistry,
Then shown the classes we’d need to take, and the scams exams we had to take to get there.
The teachers meant well,
they wanted us to succeed,
they wanted us to have financial stability,
and most of all,
they wanted us to do dentistry.
But what if you don’t want to be a dentist?
What if you want to start freelancing, or create career in the creative industries,
or god forbid,
What if you don’t want a traditional 9-5 at all? 🤯
I don’t remember anyone even once discussing alternative routes like apprenticeships, entrepreneurship or, god forbid, freelancing.
These options weren’t even on the menu!
And the menu was confusing enough back in 2005
Imagine how difficult it must be for kids now:
- There are thousands of jobs now that didn’t exist even 5 years ago
- The pace of technology and change has rocketed
- They are bombarded with ridiculously unrealistic expectations of success via social media
- They also are given income figures which are usually wildly out of touch with reality and the cost of living crisis
So all of this was going through my
mind when I was approached by the BBC to do a series of talks in Scottish schools about a creative careers.
Their research team had come across my writing online, and wanted an alternative perspective on a design job, that didn’t include the traditional route.
It felt like a huge recognition to me to be selected,
after years of working on the shadows, slowly growing my side hustle into something respectable, only a few years into full-time freelance, with imposter syndrome lurking just over my shoulder
But somehow now I’m on my way to give a talk to over 300 school students about creative careers.
I’d spent hours trying to gather my thoughts into something simple enough for kids to grasp without the luxury of lives experience.
I also desperately didn’t want to torpedoes their careers before they’d even started by giving bad advice.
In truth, I was struggling with a major wave of imposter syndrome…
What was I supposed to tell them?
- That I bailed out and switched career paths multiple times?
- That I never really had a clear idea of what I wanted to do as a career?
- That all the time that I spent at uni felt like a waste?
- That I still don’t think I have it figured out
- That I often don’t enjoy the day today of my chosen career?
I was still trying to pull something salvageable together the morning of the presentation, and was already running late,
So I decided to take the shorter route and take the back roads to the school.
My mind was over occupied when at 7am, in minus 3 deg, I hit a patch of black ice and went skidding off the road.
In hindsight, it would have been wiser to the main road.
Hindsight is wonderful
In hindsight I wish I could go back in time and do a lot of things different, especially when it comes to careers.
But at that moment all of my thoughts around what I was going to say on stage crystallized for me
And I knew exactly what I would tell the kids about careers in the creative industry.
I checked the car, no harm done,
Reversed the car out the verge,
And got back on the road,
But now my mind, and my message, was clear…
A warning:
The route I took in my creative career isn’t for everyone. And that’s ok.
There are plenty of careers out there which are predictable and safe (for now…)
The path to becoming a solopreneur,
Building your own job, can be stressful.
It requires a LOT of work, failing all the time, constant adaption and learning.
But I believe it’s the only route to long-lasting wealth, freedom and fulfilment.
If you want a good life later, you have to do the hard stuff now.
It’s easy to make easy choices now, but it often leads to a hard life later, and your choices will get more and more limited as time goes on.
When I was in school, I was prepared for a vision of work that doesn’t exist anymore.
Your parents, though they mean well, don’t have a roadmap for work anymore.
People are still clinging to a work model that was invented over 70 years ago in the wake of WWII.
“Propaganda”, the science of manipulation of mass populations, had been retasked to see what effect could be had if propaganda was used on a civilian population.
This is now known as “public relations”.
Under a new science of mass control, they attempted to address the issue of what people would do for work, now that 50% of the population (women) were now able to work in manual labour jobs,
link to yT video
And that the production outputs from the war effort needed to be redirected.
People couldn’t go back. Women would not settle for being only housewives anymore. And rightly so.
But what to do with a workforce with no purpose?
Continue producing.
But what to produce?
People didn’t need bombs, bullets and tanks anymore.
Their basic needs were already being met.
And people didn’t buy things they didn’t need.
if something broke, they mended it.
Men went to work and all wore the same suits, the same hats, the same shoes. Fashion was not yet even an industry, it was an art.
Silverware, Jewellery, clothing and other “luxuries” were bought only by the top 1% of aristocrats.
The solution?
Invent new things for people to need!
Public Relations experts like Sigmund Freud worked hand in hand with government, to convince the public to buy things they didn’t strictly need.
He used celebrity endorsement for the first time to popularise the idea that people should buy things for pleasure.
This had never been done before.
This is now known as “consumerism” and we now live in a consumer society.
At first, this nicely solved the problem of keeping the populace occupied in meaningful, purposeful work.
But unfortunately consumerism wasn’t ready to stop there.
Capitalism as a business model requires constant and endless exponential growth so satisfy stakeholders.
“Endless increasing growth”.
Doesn’t that sound insane?
You can’t just grow indefinitely.
Yet we pretend it’s possible.
It was no longer enough for people to some nice luxuries with the money they had.
They needed people to buy ever more,
and so we increasingly see problems which are invented to make us feel “not enough”.
We buy things we don’t need with money we don’t have to impress people we don’t like.”
-Dave Ramsey
But It’s much easier to want less things than to make more money.
And when you remove money as the only measuring stick in a “successful” career,
suddenly that opens up a lot of options.
We’re still stuck in that ratrace even 70 years later,
where we all judge “success” by a paycheck which we use to buy luxury goods.
Is that really all there is to a good life?
your income?
What if instead of working for more money to buy stuff,
We found work which was rewarding to do, for the sake of doing it.
You might make less money, but you may also need less money, and have more fun to boot.
Plus, there’s another big factor that no-one considers:
Time
What’s the point in being a big shot lawyer making £100k/yr if you work 80hr weeks and have no time to enjoy life?
We live in the most exciting time in the history of work,
But most people can’t see past the cage of a 9-5.
There’s plenty of careers out there which are predictable and safe (for now…)
Building your own job can be stressful, it requires a LOT of work, failing all the time, constant adaption and learning.
But I believe it’s the only route to long-lasting wealth, freedom and fulfilment.
All the stuff that makes up a good life;
If you want a good life later, you have to do the hard stuff now.
It’s easy to make easy choices now, but it often leads to a hard life later, and your choices will get more and more limited as time goes on.
When I was in school, I was prepared for a vision of work that doesn’t exist anymore.
Your parents, though they mean well, don’t have a roadmap for work anymore.
And neither do I.
In fact my own route was pretty random:
My questionable career path
Paperboy
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Human robot at an Amazon warehouse
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Studied 4 years to become a product designer
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Couldn’t get a job. Spent 5 years becoming an architect instead
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It was boring. Became a web designer, which was my passion.
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Didn’t pay enough. Started side-hustling alongside full-time work.
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Had a series of underpaid jobs
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Got fired for sidehustling. Doh!
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Turned sidehustle into full-time freelance
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1 year later → earning more £ every month than my whole annual salary at a 9-5
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Freelance morphed into a marketing agency with a team
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I burned out bad. Money won’t make you happy, folks!
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Cut my work week to 3 days, spent my time hiking, biking, writing, gardening,
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Spent 2 years building my own japanese garden and home office.
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Started writing about lifestyle design and sharing how I built my solo business.
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Now I’m on a mission to help as many people as I can escape the grind of a dead-end job.
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became a father Dec 2025 to little Finaly
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Who knows what’s next…
A new path to design your own fulfilling job
The way I see it, I went through 3 painful phases of freelancing before I found my way.
The path I propose is long and isn’t suited to everyone. And that’s ok.
It’s impossible to know what IS suited for you upfront.
But what I offer is a methos to explore different career paths so you can figure out what’s best for you as you go:
The old career path is dead
In 15 years AI will decimate a lot of professions.
Labour jobs won’t be far behind.
What remains?
Your insight. Your unique lived experience.
👆 THIS is what you have to turn into something people will pay you for.
Which means you can literally take ANYTHING you have learned and turn it into a job.
But you have to learn it first….
Here’s what to do instead:
- Figure out what you like to do
- Figure out how to combine your interests into something that solves a problem
- Figure out how to get paid for it
The old way vs the new way
❌Pick a career and work your way up the ladder
✅Pursue your passions, and build your own ladder
❌ Work hard and you’ll be rewarded with a small pay rise and a lot more work
✅ Work hard to build your own job
❌ Choose something with prospects and advancement
✅ The jobs with most promise haven’t been invented yet
❌ Your work should fulfill all of your identity needs.
✅ Your work can fund the things you find fulfilling
So here’s my top 8 contradictory career truths that you won’t hear from your parents and teachers:
1 pursue your interests, not a career
“Medicine”, “law” or “TikTok influencer” is not who you are.
Don’t build your whole identity around a job.
Because what happens if you lose your job?
The only route for long-term fulfilment is doing something you like.
You don’t have to love it all the time.
But if you pursue a career just because of a paycheck you’ll run out of motivation FAST.
2 Work should fund your lifestyle, not the other way around
Don’t choose a job because of money
Because once you have enough money, there’s nothing left to chase.
You can always make more money, but you never get back your time.
Many people live to work, I want you to work to live.
Or at least, make work part of your life, not your whole life!
3 You can literally make money from anything online
I’m not talking about being an influencer. “Influencer” is not a job.
Whom are you influencing, And influencing to do what?
Likes and follows are meaningless.
If you want to be important, or famous,
Get really good at something, and make an impact on people.
It’s your Ideas and skills that are valuable, and the impact they have on people.
You can turn your ideas and interests into skills, and turn those skills into money.
4 you don’t have to go to uni or college
I did. But I wish I hadn’t.
Last month I burned my degree in a firepit in the garden
I’ll never work for someone else again.
You can learn anything and everything on Youtube.
But the best way to learn is real life.
Start a business or a personal project and learn by doing.
5 You don’t have to commit to choosing one thing.
Nothing is permanent
My wife was a dance teacher, then a Dr
I’ve changed career three times too.
I have many interests, many sources of income.
It’s never too late to pivot
6 don’t try to figure out a career path
it’s impossible to know what you want at your age
You won’t know what you like and don’t like till you try it
Instead of picking a career,
Try to pick a general direction that aligns with your interests and natural skills
7 Be patient
It takes longer than you think.
Social media encourages impossibly high expectations on improbably tight timeframes.
This is why everyone feels like crap about work these days.
They see where they could be instead of how far they’ve come.
Don’t live in the gap.
In the real world, nobody is a millionaire by 20,
And you don’t have to be the next Bezos.
8 bonus – how to become a millionaire before you die
Most people live far beyond their means.
Cars, watches, entertainment, and other “status symbols” mean nothing.
Open a moneybox account for free.
Invest 50% of your income every week.
Behold the magic of “compound interest”
By the time you are 50 you’ll be half way to being a millionaire.
This IS possible, IF you don’t buy all the crap you don’t need.
