A Seemingly "Career" Advice I Heard 10 Years Ago Ended up Inspiring My Career Roadmap
Ten years ago, I listened to the commencement speech Neil Gaiman gave to the students of the University of the Arts Class (in 2012!).
You can watch the YouTube video here:
Or read the full transcript here.
His advice became widely popular in the following years, but one piece of advice he gave in particular struck a chord with me and has stayed with me until today.
I like to think that I followed it, sometimes more loosely and with occasional delays, but I did base my actions on it.
This is the piece of advice he gave:
Looking back, I’ve had a remarkable ride. I’m not sure I can call it a career, because a career implies that I had some kind of career plan, and I never did. The nearest thing I had was a list I made when I was about 15 of everything I wanted to do: I wanted to write an adult novel, a children’s book, a comic, a movie, record an audiobook, write an episode of Doctor Who… and so on. I didn’t have a career. I just did the next thing on the list.
Even though I definitely gave more thought to my career than Neil did to his (Virgo here! 🙋♀️), I based my career (and dare I say, life?) on things that excited me and almost always felt intuitively right:
Jumping from one country to another, leaving jobs (far) more times than my parents would have liked, ending relationships that felt 'meh,' and learning new things, from coding to Samba steps (none of which stuck with me—sigh).
In other words, year after year, when faced with the question of what to do next, I would carefully listen to my intuition and the enthusiasm I felt for the next thing or career choice. Nothing else mattered. Intuition and enthusiasm.
At times, it’s been incredibly difficult (more on this in a future newsletter…). Even so, later events and cues always ended up validating my choices. In fact, with each passing year, his advice of doing the next thing that felt right on my “list” became more and more relevant, and its implementation more and more necessary.
A Last, Relatable Piece of Advice for the Writers Out There Or Artists Alike
While re-watching the video, I also found some gems that are incredibly relatable to my Medium (and this Substack newsletter) writing:
His advice:
I got out into the world, I wrote, and I became a better writer the more I wrote, and I wrote some more, and nobody ever seemed to mind that I was making it all up as I went along, they just read what I wrote and they paid me for it, or they didn’t, and often they commissioned me to write something else for them.
Learning to write by writing. Is there anything more logical? Yet, we all spend too much time thinking about stats, headlines, timing — that is, we ruminate over the meta things when our first focus should be one thing: writing.
PS: The same goes for whatever your thing is—painting, taking pictures, filming videos, training fleas or AI algorithms.
That’s all from me this week.
I wish you an inspired Sunday y’all 🧡