Exam Study Expert: ace your exams with the science of learning
Don’t work harder, work smarter: how to study effectively and get the grades of your dreams with winning review strategies, killer memory techniques and exam preparation tips you won’t hear anywhere else. Join Cambridge educated psychologist, study techniques researcher, coach and tutor William Wadsworth as we dive into the secrets of academic success.Looking for the grades of your dreams? Want to know the real secrets to preparing for and taking exams? Through a powerful combination of rich personal experience and the very latest learning and memory science, William and his expert guests are here to help. Here's to results day smiles!
Exam Study Expert: ace your exams with the science of learning
197. Beyond The Exam: Finding Meaning in Work - and where is Charlie now
Charlie Colenutt shares his journey from disillusioned lawyer to author, exploring what makes work fulfilling based on interviews with 100 people across diverse professions.
You'll learn:
•How the most satisfied workers can see clear, immediate results from their efforts
• That career satisfaction shows little correlation with income beyond meeting basic needs
• Many fulfilled workers had experienced career crises before finding satisfaction
• Career paths are rarely planned and usually involve significant randomness or luck
• Young workers often face disappointment when workplace rhetoric about meaning doesn't match reality
• Being honest with yourself about your motivations is crucial when making career decisions
If you enjoyed this episode, please take a moment to leave us a review – it means the world to us as creators!
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Hosted by William Wadsworth, memory psychologist, independent researcher and study skills coach. I help ambitious students to study smarter, not harder, so they can ace their exams with less work and less stress.
BOOK 1:1 COACHING to supercharge your exam success: https://examstudyexpert.com/workwithme/
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Hello and welcome back to the Exam Study Experts podcast and to our summer schedule which, as in previous years, is a nice excuse for us to bring back and resurface some gems from the archives that you may have overlooked or may be well worth a re-listen, as well as bringing you some fresh conversations which I think you, dear listener, will find very stimulating and inspiring but can otherwise be maybe just a little tricky to weave into our regular broadcast schedule. This week's episode is a fresh conversation for you, a little bit tangential to the core topic of studying smarter and passing your exams, zooming out as we sometimes do in the summer to look at your journey a little bit more broadly. Just to explain, I think this is a great episode. I think you're really going to enjoy this. We are rejoined today, I'm excited to say, by a former student story star. You may remember Charlie from episode 75, if you've been with us for a while. We met Charlie some years ago when he was sharing details of getting through his law school exams. That was his student story episode in 75. So if you're studying for law exams or other exams that have a lot of difficult information to learn, there's a really nice case study of how he applied some of the key ideas from this podcast. He'd been a podcast listener for a little while. Since then, charlie has gone through something of a rebirth, after struggling to enjoy the career in law that he'd striven for for so long, and he ultimately ended up doing a huge piece of research, drawing on some of his skills as a historian, perhaps, to try and understand people's career journeys and what can lead to enjoyment and satisfaction, and this all culminated in a major book called Is this Working? I know Charlie in real life, he's a friend in the real world and he landed a really significant publishing deal for the book and he did really well for this. So really really proud of him and kind of excited to showcase some of his findings today and, I think, just to give a little bit of my own perspective on, I think, why this conversation is why I'm so excited to bring this conversation to you.
Speaker 1:Like, I know that the folk tuning into this show do so in order to achieve academic goals, but I also know that those goals generally are means to an end rather than the end in itself. You're sure you might be kind of towards the end of your career and maybe you're taking a course just as almost like literally a hobby. You know you're at the opposite end of your career, you've done with the world of work and sort of in retirement you're taking a course literally for your love of learning and because you enjoy it and because you want the learnings. But I think for the majority of people listening, you know we are studying with a goal in mind. So we're studying for exams at school to get into our preferred university or college. We're studying for exams at university to access our preferred career path, like Charlie was with his law exams. Or maybe in order to earn a place on a program of further study or research and stay in the world of academia. Or, for many listeners, you might be studying for professional certifications in order to advance your career and get promotion, move to the next step in your career path. But wherever you are on your journey, there's this sense of kind of the exams forming part of your path, part of your journey, and I think it's really important and something we perhaps don't talk about enough, either on the show specifically or society as a whole, sort of we don't talk enough about sort of stepping back and taking the time to think about where we are on the journey, what our next steps are and whether we're kind of making the next right step for us.
Speaker 1:Charlie hit a little bit of a rock bottom moment when he realised like, after years and years of working towards a career in law, he really didn't enjoy the work and that's kind of what triggered him to go and do this huge piece of work, interviewing kind of about 100 people about their careers, what led them to them, what they enjoy about their work and so forth, and about their careers, what led them to them, what they enjoy about their work and so forth. And he was aiming, in those hundreds or so people, to get a representative cross-section of all different kinds of jobs in society, from the manual to the creative, to the technical, to the executive everything represented. And there are some really fascinating lessons in this and the stories he tells and the things he found out from talking to all these people. I think there's some really fascinating lessons in this for all of us as we aspire to build rewarding and fulfilling careers and lives for ourselves.
Speaker 1:And I've taken a little bit of time because there's quite a lot in this episode, so I've taken a little bit of time and I've summarised my top takeaways at the end of this interview. We're well worth tuning in for that, because I've sort of taken a bit of time to go through and pick out some of the highlights and the key messages. But I think it's worth listening to the interview first so you kind of understand the context and the stories behind the ideas so that they land. So without further ado, let me welcome Charlie Colnup back to the Exam Study Expert podcast. I kicked off our conversation by asking him to give us just a little of the backstory of his journey to date by way of context to bring us up to speed.
Speaker 2:Thank you very much, will. So, yeah, the story of my working life it's. I suppose we'll start at university, where I did a history degree. As with lots of people that do degrees that they're kind of passionate about and follow their interests, I didn't really know where it would lead professionally. That kind of state of uncertainty and insecurity is when you're often kind of vulnerable to the ideas of others, and not so much things that are kind of internal to you. So I ended up becoming a lawyer not wholly, because I knew lots of other people that were becoming lawyers and that seemed to be a very sensible and pragmatic thing to do with a history degree. If you wanted to live in the Southeast and buy a house and have a family, then you ought to do a sensible thing and become a lawyer. And so, yeah, I was probably led by external motivations and not so much by what would actually probably make me happy deep down. I had considered going to the US to do a PhD in history, but for various personal reasons I decided to stay in the UK and that left a kind of well, what else am I going to do? Type vacuum.
Speaker 2:And then the thing with professional services, jobs like law and accountancy is that it's very much an extension of university in that when you go to university there's a structure laid out for you. You know what you're going to be doing in year one, year two, year three. That structure is marked by assessments, as you well know, and there's a kind of comfort blanket nature to that. With law it's exactly the same. I did a law conversion course and then a bar course and then the next stage, year three, would be a pupillage, a training year at a set of chambers, and then after that you would be out there practicing as a lawyer and then after that you would be out there practicing as a lawyer, still with clear markers of success. You know how much are you earning, how many years qualified are you, what type of work are you taking on. So you're on a kind of lazy river, being swept along by this very structured career, and I think I probably would have carried on on that lazy river. It wasn't that lazy, I suppose, because it was quite hard work. The exams are very tough and the work itself is, you know, quite long hours and intellectually demanding For me. I was doing a commercial pupillage, which is the training year that barristers do, and that involved reading huge amounts of material sort of construction contracts with appendices that would go on to 700, 800 pages, and then writing very long documents about those very long documents that you've just read. But yeah, I started in September 2020, which is obviously during COVID.
Speaker 2:I think COVID acted as a bit of a kind of electric shock to the system, where I was sort of traveling down a particular path. That winter lockdown I don't know if you remember it, but in January 2021, I was basically in a flat by myself staring at a screen for very long hours and then just going to bed and it was dark outside the entire time and it really stripped away all of the kind of aspects of being a barrister that I probably would have found some comfort in. So there's the kind of camaraderie, there's the status, being able to wear a suit and parade around. It left you with the core, core elements of the job which, for me, I just did not find very fulfilling at all. I became quite unhappy and quickly realised, through talking to people that you know there was one clear source of the unhappiness and that was the fact that I didn't enjoy the work at all really, and this was the work at its most basic and most stripped back. So if I couldn't enjoy this then surely I probably wasn't going to enjoy the next 40 years. And so I decided to leave. I said, well, I'll finish my pupillage so I've got some kind of qualification, and then maybe I'll go back to law. But I don't think I will.
Speaker 2:At about that time, or maybe just before I'd started pupillage, I'd read this book by an American oral historian and radio broadcaster called Studs. Terkel is a great name and it's called Working and he basically traveled around Chicago putting down a tape recorder in front of ordinary working people. Well, not some ordinary, some extraordinary. So there's baseball stars, waitresses, coal miners, people that work in car factory plants, and this is in the early 1970s. And he got them to talk about their jobs, sort of describe in detail what they do all day, tell them how they feel about what they do all day. And it's this wonderful kind of choral work of people doing wildly different things with their days, whether it's strip mining coal or being an accountant or being an accountant and yet saying similar things about what they experience at work and the kind of humiliations and satisfactions of it all. So I'd read this book and I'd loved it and I thought, wow, it'd be really cool to do this.
Speaker 2:You know, 50 years on in the UK and leaving my job as a lawyer was kind of the trigger for thinking, well, you know, I don't know what else I could, what else is out there. Doing this book would be kind of interesting by itself, but also it might tell me what I wanted to do with my life. If I spoke to enough people then maybe I'd have a clear answer about, you know, the perfect job for me, and I don't think it gave me that. But uh, it was certainly a yeah. So I started traveling around the UK, um, just talking to people about their jobs, whether that's carers, mechanics, doctors, lawyers, investment bankers, the whole kind of sweep of society. The idea was it was a kind of cross-section. If you imagine the UK working population as a village, then this was me walking around the village and just talking to people.
Speaker 1:That's probably, yeah, a not very abridged account of my working life so far. That's a good point to pick up the story. So you were in this situation where you'd achieved your goal of getting into law and passing your exams and you were on the path and kind of just finding the fundamentals of the job. This is dissatisfying and you mentioned you're quite unhappy in it. I'm sure it's an experience many people have when they finally get into their in inverted commas dream career and find actually, you know, maybe this isn't quite what I was, what I was hoping for.
Speaker 1:And I think possibly there's an exacerbating factor when it's something you've worked so hard for so long and had your sights on for so long, and then it's a bit disappointing, like I think it doubles the disappointment compared to, you know, if you've just sort of fallen into it, you've almost, you know, built it up so much and put so much into it. The disappointment, the sting is kind of even worse when you're not enjoying it. So one of your motivations for doing the book and doing the exercise was a personal one, you know. I think you wanted to kind of find out a bit about sort of perspectives, wisdom on the world of work and maybe use that to kind of inform your next steps and where you want to go in your life. So what did you learn? What become some of your big personal takeaways that are sort of shaping your next steps and where you're going with your working life next?
Speaker 2:Well, it was interesting to see the lack of plan and the sheer randomness that defined so many people's careers.
Speaker 2:So there was, you know, software developers that only got into working with computers because, well, there was one site reliability engineer who his boss broke his leg and he was then allowed to start managing the network and then that led him from a career in you know.
Speaker 2:I think he was working in IT in a school and that led him to London and a kind of really promising career in tech. There was somebody else that was working as a receptionist and was playing the computer game Doom in her spare time and loved it and was only introduced to that by an ex-boyfriend. And then she realized that she also loved working with computers as a result of playing so much of that and was begging the IT department at her company to let her have a go at resolving some support tickets. And it was only when one of them fell ill and she was allowed to take over for a few weeks that her career in software started. And throughout it there's just all these sort of extraordinarily random career stories where no one at any point in all the 100 interviews I did sat down and thought you know what are my skills? What job best accords with these skills? What career goals should I?
Speaker 1:have. So I mean, that kind of randomness is really interesting. I mean, you know, so many people sit down and have that plan and they kind of come up with that. You describe it. You know any careers advisor worth their salt will say, oh, what are your skills, what are your strengths? Okay. You know any careers advisor worth their salt will say, oh, what are your skills, what are your strengths? And you know, okay, well, what sort of careers are going to be most suited to you. I mean, I guess I'm kind of interested in the kind of who.
Speaker 1:If careers and working life is a game, you know, I think the most important measure, certainly, as I see it, is kind of your fulfillment, your satisfaction and how much you enjoy it.
Speaker 1:Like a certain level of money for sure is important, like it's vital to have a certain level of needs met, highly desirable to have some finance left over beyond your basic needs to cover some wants. But I think you know, there's increasingly an awareness I think perhaps from what I see, particularly from the generation just entering the workforce now that money is not the end goal, or certainly not the only end goal. It's necessary but not sufficient. So from all these different stories, I was just curious who struck you as the most happy, the most fulfilled in their work. Is it the high-paid bankers and lawyers? Is it the careers stereotypically associated with job satisfaction, like people kind of some form of education or caring for people, healthcare like? Is it those pursuing a kind of a creative calling um? Or is it just like totally random, like were there any patterns in terms of who had cracked, being able to find some satisfaction, some enjoyment in their work?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so, as you say, there was no real pattern as to income and salary and happiness and satisfaction. People that were working in sort of truly precarious jobs, um like, interviewed a gig delivery rider and he also worked part-time as a carer. Just the fact that the money was so inconsistent and low caused them a huge amount of stress in life. But beyond, as you say, a certain level, there was no correspondence really in in the interviews that I did between salary and satisfaction at work. I think in fact the people that seemed most satisfied were those that had gone through some kind of experience where they hit some kind of rock bottom with their career. So I interviewed a joiner like a carpenter, who had been working in a factory, was in a huge amount of debt I think something like nearly £10,000 of debt and had just had a child and was completely despondent about the direction that his life was going in. He then took a risk and decided to borrow some of his friend's tools and sort of strike out as a joiner and self-employed Was doing, you know, living hand to mouth where for each job he would use that to buy the tools that he needed for the next job. And if he didn't have the tools, then he would put off the job until he could do enough work to buy the tools that he needed for the next job. And if he didn't have the tools, then he would put off the job until he could do enough work to to buy those tools. And then within a couple of years he had cleared the debt and was working for himself.
Speaker 2:And, um, there were lots of frustrations in his work in the um. You know all the the frustrations that you have working the construction industry. Uh, in that it's hard work, long hours sometimes and people aren't paying you, all of that kind of stuff. But having been through that experience of kind of looking around at his life and thinking I need to make some kind of drastic change here there was a kind of level of gratitude and appreciation for where he was and he didn't have any ambitions to go much further beyond where he was. And he was saying I don't want a fleet of 10 vans and a million pounds a year, I'm happy where I am because everything is balanced.
Speaker 2:And likewise there were you know I interviewed someone that had come to the UK without any right to work from South America and, you know, had been working in one of those, one of those kind of dodgy operators who drives a minibus full of cleaners and pays them four pounds an hour, drops them off at various fancy houses and then takes the whatever the difference is from what they're actually being paid probably sort of 15 pounds an hour for himself. And then she had then since set out and started to find her own work, um, and was then managing her own cleaning company. And again, there's a that kind of great, deep sense of gratitude, and so I suppose it's that old thing of like, well, if you're, if you wouldn't be happy in a mud hut, then you're not going to be happy anywhere because, um, actually it's not so much about your the environment you're in, but it's about your perspective on it. And yeah, by the same token, there are people working very, very fancy jobs earning significant amounts of money.
Speaker 2:I think of the trader in an investment bank who was saying that she just felt like a number had been, uh, was sort of was talking about children and watching a toddler push a car across a room and seeing the smile that the child gets from, seeing cause and effect so obviously, and she felt that she didn't get any of that in the job that she was doing. So, yeah, the patterns are maybe not the kind of in the conventional sense of yeah, the job you're the actual task you're doing and the um, uh, the money you're earning, but in a more kind of uh, emotional sense, I suppose I think the point about the difference between your, your kind of rock bottom and and then where you are now, that kind kind of contrast is sort of a really interesting, a really interesting point.
Speaker 1:And and and I obviously I don't mean to make light at all of how terrifying it can be when you feel like you're, you're kind of in in, in crisis and and and can't provide for yourself, for your family, and you know I, I the first bit, you know it kind bit, you know kind of there's an element to which that sort of rings true. For me, the early years of exam, study, expert life, you know, before I was sort of established, were financially quite stretching as I was getting established. And the contrast between that and now I I don't have a fleet of 10 vans and you know millions of pounds are in common, yeah, but but I don't feel I need that. You know I need enough to kind of take care of myself and my family and and and and the, the sense of sort of satisfaction and the kind of appreciation you get for that I think is a lot higher, um, as a result of having gone through that experience. So so I really do kind of relate to that.
Speaker 1:I think that's a really interesting insight. You know I'm sort of curious do you notice any changes in how different generations approach the idea of work? And you were chatting just before we spoke and you mentioned some careers advisors have been reaching out to you and perhaps the slight frustration from careers advisors in some quarters that everyone's wanting to go for the big salaries in the UK, trying to aim for London life and things. I'm just curious are there any trends you notice between generations and how they approach the idea of work and developing a career?
Speaker 2:and how they approach the idea of work and developing a career. Well, I interviewed quite a few people in their 20s and early 30s, so I suppose that's late millennials and early Gen Zs For them. It's been quite a kind of interesting experience at the workplace In the time that they've been around, uh, in the workforce. You've had kind of silicon valley at peak pump um and all of the ideas about what work should be and what a work an office should look like. Um seem to sort of come out of california and traveled around the world. So the whole kind of discussions about bringing your whole self to work, the idea that your job should be a kind of core part of your identity. And if you're not, you know very few people in that generation are. You know going to church and engaging in civic life because they're, you know renting and moving house every year, and so work was kind of held out as this place where you would.
Speaker 2:I suppose the word is self-actualize. I don't really know what that means, but that's what everyone the word everyone seems to use. It leads to a kind of raising of hopes about what work will do for you when you go to the office. You expect to, if people are saying you know, bring your whole self to work, this is, we're all a family, etc. Then you expect to find that when you enter the workforce and for many of the late 20-somethings and early 30-somethings that I interviewed, they kind of had believed that. And then they get into the workforce and into their career and you realize that that's just one part of the company talking.
Speaker 2:Often, you know HR departments uh, trying to advertise the company out to potential applicants and to clients, but in fact the internal dynamics of the company run very differently.
Speaker 2:So, for instance, there was a management consultant who had they were doing some training on sexual harassment and the firm's policy had been very much. You know, we are zero tolerance to any kind of sexual harassment and that kind of thing. And she'd had an experience with a client where the client had been saying things along the lines of you know, women don't, shouldn't be engineers, they belong in the kitchen, all that kind of stuff. And she raised this at the workplace training and one of the partners that was managing the training said yes, I know we say zero tolerance, but it's very difficult when it's a client, isn't it? Because you don't want to jeopardize the contract, and so I think you did the right thing there not saying anything or reporting it, because we've got to protect our relationships with our clients and that's probably how these companies have run for decades. But it's a kind of interesting example of the hopes and expectations that have been raised about what work should be and then the realities that people find once they begin their careers.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's another one that you raise in the conclusion section of the book which is about not too much admin, one that you raise in the conclusion section of the book which is about not too much admin. So so many jobs now kind of have a whole lot of paperwork and kind of effectively associated with them, that's not the core task of the job, it's it's kind of work to do with the work and I guess the lesson there is well, we'll need some of that. If that takes over too much of the job, then that can get quite frustrating for the people doing the job. Um, I wonder if you could maybe talk to us a little bit about that idea.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I suppose it comes back to this idea of crisis. Several of the interviews, or several of the interviewees were considering maybe in the last year or two, were considering leaving their jobs because they found it too overwhelming, too stressful, they're burnt out. And those were particularly people that were working in vocational professions, so teachers and people that were working in the NHS. And there's a kind of parallel with what we're talking about earlier with Gen uh, gen z and millennials where, uh, there too, you have great expectations of what your job will be because you feel called to it, you feel like you're doing good and, um, then when the reality and you've set so much of your identity by that job and when the reality doesn't then live up to that or is too difficult, then it's a kind of extremely painful experience because of that gap between the expectations and the reality. And so the way that several of my interviewees managed to stay on in those careers was by a kind of conscious stepping back and kind of looking at things in the whole and saying I'm extremely stressed and burnt out. There's a huge amount of my job that I find deeply frustrating and that part of my job is often irrelevant to the kind of true purpose of my job.
Speaker 2:So, for instance, a teacher was spending a huge amount of time responding to parent emails and management emails and doing marking and data drops and all of this other stuff that is, when it comes down to it, is separate from the job of teaching and being in front of a classroom and getting kids to learn stuff. And so she decided that she was going to take her work email off her phone, stop being a kind of goody two-shoes when it comes to senior leadership, asking people to do things, stop, I think, responding to parent emails with the same frequency and just just kind of focus on being the best teacher in the classroom that she could be and doing marking as she went around in the classroom and that stepping back. Then she said, you know, I feel completely different now in terms of my relationship with work. So she was, I suppose, in some senses caring less, but in other senses, was kind of redirecting her care towards the kind of true essence of the job. Kind of redirecting her care towards the kind of true essence of the job, which is which is teaching.
Speaker 2:Um, and so I suppose that's a kind of broader theme that we've been talking about a bit today, which is that there is this kind of heart of one's job and so much of work gets in the way of that heart. Uh, so we talked about admin and worrying about money and worrying about what other people might think of you, or worrying about status. All of that is external to the heart of your job, and so all of these are different ways of kind of focusing on what really matters when it comes to work you say that when it comes to that, you know if we can manage to find ourselves a job where you know we are not swamped by all the admin.
Speaker 1:You talk about how a good task is one with a clear and immediate result. Could you give us some examples of what that looks like?
Speaker 2:Yeah, this was a kind of comparison with I definitely felt this when I was doing law that you're writing these extremely long advice documents and you send them out to the client or to whoever and there's no real sense of like was that a good thing that I did? Was it successful in its aim? And doing these interviews and listening to people. So there was a cleaner who was talking about the sense of satisfaction she got from cleaning a room and she would say that she'd clean it and then she'd look back and think, oh lovely, like that kind of oh lovely thing is such an important thing when it comes to the tasks that you're doing day to day thing. When it comes to the tasks that you're doing day to day and yes, they're kind of associated with kind of manual work, in that there you're kind of making and shaping something in the real world. So perhaps it's easier to see that the outcome does this, have I done the task well? Does this thing that I've created do the job that I intended it to do? But also, you see it, with software developers.
Speaker 2:I interviewed a software developer who was saying that I intended it to do. But also, you see it, with software developers. I interviewed a software developer saying that he likes it because it feels like it's the kind of closest thing you can do on a computer to working with your hands. You can test the code. You can see if it works. You've got this clear idea in your mind of what you're trying to call forth. Yeah, it either works or it doesn't. It's a very difficult thing because so many of the jobs that we seem to be creating in our modern economy revolve around email and things like, I suppose, content marketing, hr. When you're spending a lot of your time just responding to emails and communicating, it's hard to see what in the real world you have accomplished that day. And certainly the ones the interviewees that could see that were in some senses more satisfied.
Speaker 1:I think I know exactly what you mean when you're kind of removed from the end product and what you're producing as reports and PowerPoints and emails and stuff. You know it can be a little bit harder. You know from my own time in that kind of of world pre-exam study expert for me. You know I, I, I was deeply unhappy in jobs where for long stretches I might not get any or barely any kind of feedback on the quality of my work. You know I I need, you know internally from from the people I was, from my kind of line manager supervisors effectively, you know I desperately need, I had a desperate need for that kind of validation.
Speaker 1:You know, if I'd spent maybe weeks putting a report together or some analysis, you know I really needed that. Like I had a real sort of psychological need to know it was good and know they thought it was good and if that was the case, then that was okay, was okay, like I didn't need it, didn't need much, it just needed that. You know that's a good job and if it wasn't good, that's okay. Like you know, help me learn from that and I'll get better next time. And and you know I had there's quite a big variation.
Speaker 1:Some people I worked with did a great job of that, some not not very good at all, and and it made such a difference to my kind of happiness at work and my satisfaction when that was in place, um, compared to when it wasn't, and and so I suppose a lesson for anyone listening to this who does have some management responsibility or management responsibility or aspires to in future, particularly in a situation where the end product is a little bit more intangible, you know giving that feedback to your, to your reports can be, can be huge for for their overall happiness and enjoyment of work and life generally yeah, that cleaner that I mentioned, she used to get texts from her clients um, afterwards, after she'd been, and they'd say, oh, the house looks amazing, thank you so much.
Speaker 2:it's kind of perfect start to the weekend, basically, and she was saying how much she loved getting those texts and how buzzing she was every time she got them. So all these things cost so little, don't they? But it means so much to everyone. We all crave that sense that what we're doing has some level of value and purpose.
Speaker 1:On which note, dear listener, if you enjoy the Exams to the Expert podcast, do take a moment to leave us a short review if we've been able to help you. Hopefully, that's very clear why we love that so much. So please do that. And the same token, you know if there are any other kind of creative products. You know YouTube channels, podcasts. You know books you've read. You know taking that moment to leave that review just means so, so much to the author, the creator behind that, who, in many cases, has poured so much of themselves into producing that. Just taking that moment to share what you thought and how much you enjoyed it, how much it's helped, just means the world to us, to us creators. Um, so, charlie, this has been so, so interesting. Is there anything, uh, you think we haven't touched on that you think would be interesting to to, to, to bring up before we, before we start to bring this to a close?
Speaker 2:um, I suppose it's the kind of practical uh side of things that if you are in your early 20s or going through a career change, or if you're 17, 18, thinking about what to do at university, how you can make those decisions in a sensible way. I don't know if I've got much to say based on my interviews, but it's certainly a kind of crazy thing that when we make our career decisions, we really know very little about the world and about ourselves. And yet, as I was just talking about, you know, most people don't really go in, go through life with a career plan, and so often the decisions you make when you're that age with a career plan, and so often the decisions you make when you're that age end up that being the kind of path you walk down for the next 30, 40 years, I think.
Speaker 1:Given the amount of time we spend in our working lives, it's scary how little thought we give to making that choice, making that decision. You know, if you add up the number of hours of time that the average person spends in the soul, searching, doing the researching, trying things out, you know it's it's very, very little time compared to the what is it? 60, 70, 000 hours of your adult life is spent at work. It's, it's crazy. I don't know, charlie, is there anything that would have helped? Because I mean, in hindsight the path looks clear, like doing the law conversion course, kind of knowing how it would end up for you. But you know, with hindsight doesn't seem like the right choice. But like, is there any way that you, the version of you pre-doing that law conversion course, could have learned that like?
Speaker 2:yeah, it's, um, that's a good question. I so I I've done a huge amount of work experience and preparation for it and um. But the kind of human mind is a very powerful thing. You can basically rationalize your way to any decision once you've kind of uh, you've decided upon it. Perhaps what we're talking about more generally is just this kind of being extremely honest with yourself about where these ideas are coming from. Is it because you're pursuing some kind of high status? Is it because you want money?
Speaker 2:All of those are kind of fair and valid goals and aspirations, but often we clothe them in other things. We say you know, I want to do this career because it's a good job, it's going to give me good skills that I can then use to do the thing that I really want to do down the line. Well, the other lesson of this book is that people very rarely make that leap. You know, doing three or four years in a job that you know, perhaps a corporate job, and then doing something apart from you will, I should add. But, yeah, be sort of truly honest with you. Know, know, don't talk to yourself like it's a job interview where you need to dress everything up in the language that you think others would find acceptable. If you want to pursue a high status job because you status is something that really matters to you, then fine. But uh, be honest with yourself in terms of things that I should have done.
Speaker 2:There's a book called Designing your Life by, I think, bill Burnett and Dave Evans. I've just looked that up and there's a good piece of advice in there which comes back to this idea of what constitutes a good task, and they recommend doing a good time diary. So whenever you're doing you're in your job or you're doing work experience, kind of write down a list, uh kind of table, of how you're spending your time and then how it makes you feel. I did that, but only when I was sort of six months into pupillage and I could see the. Basically, you know I was spending, you know, six hours a day reading, reading um particular documents, five hours a day writing, and the scores that I was giving myself for those were quite low. Just as you should make a large list, you should also just go out there and try as much as possible.
Speaker 2:People like to talk about themselves and their own careers. So if you message people on LinkedIn and say I'm really interested to hear how you got your current job. That's a great way of exposing yourself to lots of different jobs, getting work experience and things like that, and don't just stick to jobs that someone in your position would be expected to do so. Last year, I worked as a construction labourer whilst I was finishing off the book, for two or three days a week, and I found that extremely, extremely rewarding. Like I love the work, I thought it was. I learnt so much doing it and I wouldn't have done that when I was 20, 21, because you've got your tunnel vision on. So it's just about casting an extremely wide net, all the while being extremely honest with yourself. Buckle up and enjoy the ride buckle up and enjoy the ride.
Speaker 1:And well that, charlie. Thank you so much for joining us once again on the show. It's been a really interesting conversation today and I hope it sparked some useful food for thought for those listening. So, charlie, if anybody's interested in learning more about your work on working, where would be the best place for them to go?
Speaker 2:So the book's called Is this Working the Jobs we Do? Told by the people who do them? Is this working the jobs we do? Told by the people who do them? Um, and it's in all good bookshops, uh, and also on all major e-commerce uh websites, uh, but maybe go into a bookshop and support them if you can, uh, and I've got a sub stack, uh called the administration of things, which I occasionally um blog from, but no other social media, and perhaps that's another piece of advice. I've felt a lot happier since, uh, stripping away all of that stuff well.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much once again, charlie, and an extra little bonus bit of advice for us there at the end, which I think is um, I'd fully endorse uh, stripping away some of the social media and I think exposure to the news media cycle in the way that many of us are just dialing all that noise back a little bit in our lives, can do wonders for our day-to-day wellbeing and our mental health. So I wanted to share just a few of my top takeaways from this conversation, because I think there are some points in here that are really worth highlighting and reiterating. So the first one is just to say that Charlie says that the state of uncertainty is when you're most vulnerable to the ideas of others. These influences can be positive, though not necessarily. So be especially wary and stand guard at the door of your mind when you're making choices. In times of uncertainty, when you yourself feel a little bit uncertain, unsettled, and be sure that if you are being influenced by external voices and even you know very well-meaning advice, that you know just trying to have your best interest at heart you know really take extra care that the choices you're making in those circumstances are in line with your values and where you want to take your life.
Speaker 1:Secondly, when you strip out the superficial elements of your job, or perhaps the job you're aspiring to what's left. So if you don't get to parade around in a suit or an academic gown or lab coat or scrubs or whatever, uh, and you're going to get that glow of status in the eyes of your community and society at large. You know, if you don't have those after work socials, if, uh, you don't have the little treats and perks that some jobs may offer, you know you don't have the little treats and perks that some jobs may offer. You know you don't have the big vacations that you may be able to afford with your paycheck. You know, if you strip all that back, do you actually like the fundamental tasks that you do? Do they bring you some satisfaction on some level, maybe from the raw intellectual challenge and the thrill of problem solving or from helping someone in some way? Or is all the fluff around it sort of just a salve and it kind of just numbs and distracts you from a fundamental set of tasks you don't particularly enjoy? Things that can lead to more enjoyment of those tasks include having that clear and immediate result so you can look around at the end of cleaning a house or writing some code and see the change. Or maybe you've helped someone or maybe you get some positive feedback from somebody. You know you've done a good piece of work and you know you're in a work culture where your clients or your supervisors or your line manager, you know, will turn around and kind of pat you on the back and say you know, great job well done and we want to try and avoid too much admin load in our work. That can you know. Great job well done and we want to try and avoid too much admin load in our work. That can you know.
Speaker 1:Charlie's research shows that for many people, even when they enjoy the core task, there's all this kind of bureaucracy you know, paperwork and meetings about meetings and all this sort of stuff that gets in the way of being able to just get on and do the task that is your job and that can be quite frustrating for people when when that admin load gets gets too high. And planning is helpful, but be open to your plan evolving. It's really interesting when charlie said that in at no point in all the people he interviewed did anyone say that. Well, actually the thing that led me to get into my current line of work was I was sitting down with a skills matrix that determined what I was good at and that determined the path the rest of my life. So it's kind of difficult advice here, but sort of being open to opportunities the world puts in front of you, being open to your interests evolving and emerging, and look out for doors that seem interesting to push open, even if those aren't the doors that you intended to push on. You know, 5, 10, 20 years ago, as your grandma or spiritual leader might have told you many times, beware chasing money or stasis. There's nothing wrong with chasing either, and we certainly need a layer of income to be stable in life, but beware putting these idols above our own well-being.
Speaker 1:And finally, there's a really interesting one for me about crisis breeding satisfaction. You know so, if you are currently going through difficult times, either in your, your uh study, either in your in the kind of world of studying and academia, or in a kind of professional context, if you, if you have a, a job or you're in a career at the moment, and you know, I think it's really interesting what charlie was saying about how, for many people, having been through that really really difficult patch, that kind of hit rock bottom and then recovered from it and pulled themselves back and you kind of develop a level of life satisfaction that's. That can be quite hard to get to otherwise if everything had been plain sailing the whole time. So a silver lining perhaps of finding things difficult, finding times hard, is that when we can get ourselves out of that there is life at the end of the tunnel. Hopefully, you know, once we can kind of recover from that and get out of that, you have a sense of life satisfaction and kind of appreciation and gratitude for what you have. That's quite hard to gain otherwise.
Speaker 1:So thank you so much for tuning in today. It's been a real pleasure to have your company and, as I say, I hope there's been some useful food for thought off the back of this episode, whether things you're thinking about in terms of your own journey or your own life, or perhaps for those around you. You know, perhaps, especially if you're a parent, a teacher, a mentor of some some kind, some things that you might be able to support, use to support others who you care about. I look forward to joining, seeing you again next Sunday for another episode. Next time is going to be a replay episode. We're going to be revisiting one of my absolute favorite episodes from last year and replaying that for you, so really looking forward to that. For now, I just wanted to wish you every success, as always, in your studies. Thank you so much for joining us today and I look forward to seeing you again soon. Thank you.