Sep 58 min read

Starting from scratch (again) in midlife – a letter to my younger self

Time machines haven’t been invented yet but if they were, what lessons would I try to pass back to my younger, less-wise self as he nervously sits his A-level exams back in 1991?

With the relative wisdom acquired between 17 year old me and 50 year old me there are a few things I wish I could prepare/warn myself for and since I have a teen daughter currently sitting her GCSEs and teen son not far behind her this all seems timely.

Dear James,

I know you’re feeling the pressure and weight of expectation of what your A-level grades may mean for your future and I know you’re doing your best to hide it in case anyone sees past the confident veneer you’ve learned to protect yourself with.

Some good news and bad news…

As you discovered, it’s much harder to wing it at A-level and your strategy of hoping your brain will dredge up the right stuff on the day despite doing almost no meaningful revision is about to come wildly unstuck.

You won’t understand it for another 30 years, but you have been nurturing a fear of failure and of disappointing people which has prevented you from really trying. This feeling will manifest itself leaving you needing to prove yourself over and over again and will actually serve you pretty well.

It will also stop you from trying things that you might have found really rewarding too so look out for the things that scare you and consider if the win might be in the attempt rather than the result. As is printed on the wall at your future children’s classroom, F.A.I.L – First Attempt In Learning….

You chose your A-levels based on what you thought would be easy or useful (and that your mates were doing) rather than what you were actually interested in and good at. Yes you were told Physics would be hard but the notionally easier Economics won’t be any easier – you can’t get on with and still don’t, subjects that you can’t see a tangible application for. You’re a visual learner not a theoretical one.

By the way, you’re a little bit on the spectrum and have a processing quirk that makes the fast recall of facts & detail hard for you and means you’ll often feel stupid in pub quizzes. It’s the framework you struggle with, not your intelligence. Some of your mates will be better at quickly recalling obscure facts but then again, you’re better at picking up new physical skills than they are.

Your A-level results are going to be hard to take and harder to make peace with. You’re going to feel like a failure, will retake two of them and despite doing slightly better, will still feel like a failure. You’ll begin to double down on defining yourself by your physical characteristics instead.

It’ll feel like everyone else did better, found it easier and that they’ve all got a clear plan on their careers. That’ll mostly be completely untrue. Was then and still is now. Of all the people you will be really good friends with, only one of them always fancied being a lawyer and goes on to be one. Absolutely everyone else figured it out as they went and most of them still are.

You’ve already got a decent work ethic, (just not necessarily in an academic sense) and will apply it straight away by working in hospitality which will turn out to be the first of your three careers.

You won’t realise it, but your time at Latymer taught you much more than could be recorded during some exams and you emerged some valuable qualities that’ll set you apart from many others.

I know you mostly joined the Jantaculum to meet Godolphin girls, but you also developed confidence in uncomfortable and exposing situations that most will never find the courage for.

Your time on stage at school will pave the way for you step in front of TV cameras on a primetime 1990s gameshow called Man-O-Man in front of millions.

Once you’ve done that, all the pitches and presentations done for professional audiences will feel pretty easy in comparison.

You still use many of those skills and confidence today and are way more comfortable in front of audiences than practically everyone you’ve met. They covet your onstage charisma and can’t imagine themselves ever being as brave as you.

You’re going to set high expectations for yourself which in your late 40’s are going to lead to a career altering and life changing burnout.

Just before it becomes painfully clear how ill you have become, you will be at your most commercially successful. You will have been running the most successful, fastest growing and most profitable team in Europe for your employer who will set a series of sales records.

Everyone around you (including you and your oldest friends that know you the best) will be amazed and say that you were the last person they’d have guessed would burn out. You’ll all claim there were no signs or signals.

Your Mum and Dad are going to wish they’d could have seen it coming and could have protected you.

You will be very ill for about 9 months in 2019 and be almost totally unable to function as a person let alone and employee.

You’ll get better.

During that period of (overt) illness and recovery, you’ll learn some things that you are now extremely grateful for and wish you’d earned much earlier.

By the way you’ll be made redundant in 2020 and will have an identity crisis as you will have defined so much of yourself by the job that you do and the results you deliver that for a while, you genuinely won’t know who you are without that fancy title and the sales figures.

This is going to be turning point and you’re going to be grateful for the impetus to have to move into your third career.

You’re going to decide to speak more openly more often to more people about how you are really feeling rather what you think they want & expect the answers to be.

You’re going to be amazed by how many times, people that you’ve known for years will open up to you in return and the quality of your valuable relationships will dramatically increase.

Almost everyone wears masks almost all of the time and once you remove yours, some of them will remove theirs and you’ll both better for it.

The characterises of strength and toughness that you hold so dear will prevent you from asking for help or even admitting to yourself that you might need it. That will change. It will become clear that if asking for help were a sign of weakness, why is it so hard to do it?

You’ll learn that to show vulnerability is an act of courage. You expect others to be honest with you and let you in, but for years, you won’t offer the same honesty in return and you’ll hide more and more of your true self, even in crowded rooms.

You’ll realise that just as you learned by example from your family, peers and role models, your children will very likely do the same. It will become clear that the older generation did it their way. Topics that held stigma were considered ‘dirty laundry’ and such would not be aired at all let alone in public.

It’s different in the 2020’s and your Mum and Dad will still be hesitant to ‘make a fuss’ or ‘worry or bother you’, but they’re coming around and sharing things more openly. They and you are learning a new vocabulary.

It’s the vocabulary used to discuss the important difficult things that we all struggle with and your at times dazzled by how much better your kids are it his already.

Resilience will feel like an innate quality that you’re born with so you’ll spend no energy on nurturing it. It will become clearer that Resilience is an adjective and a consequence of your choices and habits.

Some of your most successful habits will turn out not to be sustainable or healthy and you’ll have to find new ones.

Luckily, you won’t really be interested in recreational drugs but you will end up self-medicating with alcohol for a while. That’ll be one of your successful but unhealthy habits and you’ll kick it.

Tying so much of your self-worth to your physical ability will serve you really well in your younger years and you’ll feel pretty much invincible, believing that physical health is far more important than mental health (a term that was barely invented in the 90s anyway).

Unfortunately, yours and everyone else’s body keeps score and your treatment of it will eventually catch up to you. Especially since you will relentlessly ignore signs you don’t like the look of or that seem inconvenient.

Such as that time that you rupture your ACL playing rugby and can’t be bothered to go to A&E and stay on for loads of beers instead. You should have sought professional help and had it fixed at the time, not 2 years later having done loads more damage to it that will be irreversible.

It’ll be a pattern – see signs, choose to ignore them, don’t ask for help, pay the price later.

A problem shared is a problem halved as they apparently say, but the trouble is, you don’t like sharing or even admitting to having problems. You think it’s more virtuous to solve things all by yourself and deliver a tah-dah moment when you’ve solved it.

As a result, plenty of things are harder than they ever needed to be.

The real quote is actually from Charles Kettering who ran the innovation department of General Motors in the 1940’s. He said:

‘A problem well stated is half solved’

No sense of burden there – and that alongside the more open, more often habit will serve you really well later.

So back to those three careers I mentioned earlier:

Hospitality
Sales in Market Research Technology

And the third – well that’s where you are now. You’ve decided to take a really crappy chapter of your life and make sure that the priceless lessons learned are available to others. You’re a professional coach and public speaker now.

You earn less money than many of your mates and certainly less than before your illness but you’ve finally realised that comparison is the thief of joy and so is perpetually casting your happiness into the future.

You now live far more in the present now than at any time in the last 20 years and sure, sometimes you wish you had a few more quid in the bank and weren’t worried about interest rates. You’ve finally realised that by constantly striving for things you didn’t have and thought you needed that you were too often forgetting to enjoy the riches you already had – health, family & friends. (Especially your wife who is the really strong one).

You try not to, but you still sometimes take it for granted.

So a final few words that I hope past James might just listen to:

Better out than in – try to speak up when things are hard

Your confident armour will become a cage if you let it – try to take it off regularly

You will never, ever be alone – someone nearby will understand if you let them in

All success comes at a cost. Try to make sure it’s sustainable and worth it

Your success or failure at GCSE, A-level, Job title, salary, bonuses, car, size of house and all the other trappings are only one small part of your scorecard. Absolutely nobody will remember you for what you score on those – they’ll remember you for how you made them feel.

P.S. thank whatever deity you may or not believe in that social media and smartphones with high resolution cameras weren’t around in the 80’s & 90’s. At least your mistakes didn’t wind up going viral. Kids these days are RIDICULOUSLY exposed and conscious of how they look to others.

Take care,

James

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