Advice I’m glad I took

Pearls of wisdom that changed the direction of my life- and might just help you too

Advice is pretty cheap nowadays. You can tune into any podcast on any day of the week and you’ll find someone, anyone (I mean literally anyone) dispensing wisdom about how to live your life.

I tend not to listen to these people.

Instead the best advice I have taken over the years has come from watching people whose characters and way of life I admire. I would say, on average, this has served me well.

I will, for example, never forget the maths teacher who saved me from public humiliation by telling me I had flunked my exams in the privacy of a back room - she had led me there on the pretence of needing some books to be carried, rather than doling out the news in front of my classmates. Shame, she clearly realised, being the ultimate slayer of childhood confidence.

Neither will I forget the female CEO whose advice to me when I became a boss myself was simple and powerful: do what you have to and I will take the heat if it comes our way.

I’d wager neither of these individuals has any idea how their behaviour touched my life, but touch it and change it they did.

So anyway, this week I thought I’d take a step back and share some of the good stuff I’ve picked up along the way. Who knows, it might change your life too.

Great networkers give more than they ever take

Firstly let’s all agree that the phrase ‘networking’ is up there with ‘circling back’ ‘reaching out’ and ’cross functional’ as one of those words/phrases that has no place in the English language.

The problem is, growing up the only advice I was actually ever given by those well ahead of me in the game was to network, network, network. This was both terrifying and, I have since discovered, very bad advice. Because networking relies on you having something others want: status, power, the ability to be useful. When you’re 21 few of us have any of that stuff.

But here is what I have found and seen after thirty years in the workplace: great networkers are simply people who give far more than they ever ask. In fact really really good networkers never ask at all. They shore up such a bank of good will that people actively want to help them. So give. Don’t ask. And always give without expectation too. Somehow the good you put out into the world finds its way back to you.

By limiting your choice early, you expand it later on

When you’re young it’s easy to believe you can do everything. But at some point you have to make a call about the thing you want to do most of all. And that’s hard, because making a choice feels like giving up on all the other options around you. I learned this from an academic many years ago. He, like me, had wanted to to do everything when he was younger- write, paint, speak publicly, play music, but at some point he was forced to make a choice. And he chose academia. For years he concentrated on nothing else until the very point when he was so good at the thing he had chosen, all the other opportunities he believed he’d left behind, swam back into view. But, he told me many years later, they only came back because he’d become so good at the one thing he’d chosen, suddenly the world was interested in what else he could do. I suppose what I’m trying to say is this: in trying to do everything we fail to do anything with impact. And impact counts far more than you think, especially when it comes to opportunities. So choose one thing, do it well, and then, maybe many years down the line you can take a breath, look up and see all the things you thought you’d left behind find their way back to you.