Having a Career

When I came across Kin Lane’s post Having a Career I felt inspired. His post prompted me to think about whether it’s worth having a career, and what that means, and if it matters. These words in particular chimed with me:

However, now I see having a career is about me. It is about owning my own professional narrative as much as I possibly can. I consider a career adjacent to entrepreneurship or running your own business, but it is something that will span multiple businesses, and give you much more control over the work you do and the money you make. A career is about me. It isn’t some category on a college aptitude test. My career isn’t chosen for me. 

Thanks to this inspiration, I’ve been trying to create a story about my career, and tried to make a drawing, too. That proved trickier than I had anticipated, because I started to plot my journey along a rough timeline that started in the mid 90s with summer jobs and somehow portrayed the next three decades as a linear progression. Which it wasn’t.

Similar to Kin’s younger self, 17 year old me wanted no career. 17 year old me wanted to live a life which was authentically mine. I felt the world deeply as a young person, and it poured out of me in writing poetry, plays, novels, art, music and a lot of difficult behaviour. That I was academically able and got good grades made early adolescence easier, but eventually I outgrew my ability to fit into a regular school system. It must have been very difficult for my family and friends to make sense of my behaviour. It was very difficult to for me. I had no idea how to navigate life. Thanks for leaving school at an unconventional time, without sitting the traditional exams at 16 or at 18, I never ended up having career’s advice and made up my own instead.

From that point on, my list of jobs started in earnest: I had every bar, cafe and restaurant job London’s service industry would offer a young immigrant with broken English. I graduated to working in bookshops, cinemas, shops, and eventually in bilingual marketing and market research. I had a job once that only paid me in tips (which took me months to realise. Once I did, I left with the whole tip jar after one very good Saturday night never to return).

From 17 to 32 I mostly worked at whatever job I could to fund my education. Having left secondary school I discovered that there was a whole world of learning out there, and London, and later Athens, and even later Oxford, offered me every opportunity. Looking back it now seems implausible that I worked 40 hours and studied full-time as an undergraduate and later as a Masters stundet, but I loved it! Studying first design, then art and then anthropology allowed me to explore my curiousity and challenge my mind, spending days in the libraries and museums. I was lucky that I always managed to get scholarships to fund my fees (this being an era of education in which that was still possible).

In 2004 life changed for 3 glorious years, thanks to a full AHRC PhD scholarship that enabled me to give up work. I recall the moment I found out exactly. I was on my way to work in a cafe in West London and picked up my post in the student hall where I had rented a room in for the summer. Gower Street was hot, noisy and there was no lift between my single room on the top floor (shared bathrooms) and the laundry room in the basement. I opened the letter on my way to the bus stop and right there and then, life changed. I resigned my job that day and that September I started to be a proper full-time student for the first time, with spare time to go to seminars and lectures in the evenings, and student bars, too, of course.

It was during those years that I started working with more intention, finding jobs as a archive admin, then as a teaching assistant and as a Moodle admin at my university. As my funded years came to an end, job hunting to fund the final year of my PhD began again, and I found an admin role in a nearby university in Oxford. The deciding factor that convinced me to take the job was that I could walk to the office. Writing up my PhD in the Radcliffe Camera library sounds romantic, and it was certainly a lovely environment to work in, but it also came with a problem: I didn’t want to be an academic. My interest in my research topic had been genuine, but had been satisfied. It offered no clues as to what might be next, and so my admin summer job gradually turned into a manager role, which turned into a more senior manager role. As a side hustle I started to work as a researcher and consultant on projects. I was hungry to learn and quick to figure things out, which made me a good contractor. A few years later I decided to apply to become the CEO of the organisation I was working for, and for the next 12 years that (mostly part-time) role and my continued work as a consultant turned into a very fulfilling career.

In my early years being a CEO I often struggled to explain to people how I had ended up in the role with a PhD in cemeteries, a degree in art, a penchant for making stuff and evidently little leadership experience. A young immigrant and a women to boot. No one had ever heard of me and my story didn’t really make sense. Working hard and being good at what I did eventually helped establish my place.

Being a CEO of a small not-for-profit that employed fewer than 10 staff and often just 5, and turned over around half a million pounds a year (and sometimes much less) offered me the opportunity to learn a bit of everything, from finance and HR to governance and operations. It also offered me lots of opportunities to get involved in activities and communities, and to work for something that aligned with my values and that made a difference. I developed a much greater appreciation for the ethical dimension of work, of having a career. It let me experience what it’s like to have a (small) platform, and helped me develop my voice.

As my interest in leadership and mentoring developed and I started to train as a coach and write my first book, a new chapter in my career story started. I began to re-invigorate my freelance work, which during the pandemic had dried up, and started a period of transition, letting go of one role and building a new one. I started to plan out more books I want to write, and began to sketch out a new vision for better work life balance and more independence once again.

To many people the move didn’t make sense. It wasn’t a step up, a move to running a bigger organisation, building on what I had achieved in a smaller organisation. My pension provision agreed with them. Depending on my own little venture at this stage was (and is) risky. But it felt and still feels right to me.

Making sense of the story so far sounds something like this in my own head:

I started out looking for things that interested me and would challenge me. I gained some knowledge and skills, and found a lot of interesting things. So I put those capabilities to use and see what else I could do. Then I found that I could make a positive difference to others, and poured my energy into making that happen. Eventually, when I felt I needed more balance, and to spread my energy across more areas of my life, new interests led to new goals and a wish to fulfil some bigger dreams; like writing books and getting a dog and living near the sea.

And so, I started to put together the building blocks for a small, independent business venture that would help me fulfil these and other dreams, whilst doing work that makes a positive difference in the world and aligns with my values. It makes perfect sense to me, even if on a day to day basis it remains equal parts imagination and profitable job.

This summer it’ll be 28 years since a young Maren climbed the steps from the tube station up into the streets of London, carrying a duffel bag, a pillow and a role of The Cure posters (and an open ticket to fly home anytime, because my parents thankfully had more sense than I did).

At the time I felt the urgency of life deeply. I thought time to be my true self would run out when I reached the (what I then thought) calm and boring reaches of adulthood, of middle age. I think my younger self would be relieved (if disbelieving) to learn that existential dread and big questions still float around my head every day, even though I have become a lot better at managing daily life. I like to imagine that 17 year old me would LOVE my dog Posey, and would appreciate that I have managed to publish my first book, and being on my way to the second.

I am not sure what I thought “success” would look like when I was 17. Money or status has never driven me, even though I have always safeguarded my financial independence. Ethics and values are important to me, as is making a difference. The best I way I have to explain it is a metaphor:

For years and years I’ve kept sketchbooks filled with writing, drawing, sketches, pictures and small mementos. The process of keeping the sketchbook is much more important than individual pages, and often I might find a little gem flicking through the pages years later. I still have a lot of my sketchbooks, and I treasure them. They are the best metaphor for how I imagine my career, and what makes it successful in my mind. Having a career, for me, is like a sketchbook. I fill pages and pages, and over the years these amount to a substantive amount of work, of me. Looking back, there are gems and there are duds, and it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that I follow my curiousity in order to create and contribute.