Is Your School Lying To You? Get The Career You Want. Get The Life You Deserve.

INTRODUCTION

‘To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.’

Robert Louis Stevenson

The guy who wrote the above quote is dead. He went on to say, ‘and the true success is to labour’. That is to say, hard work is its own reward. Only that’s not really true, is it? Ask anyone working back-to-back shifts in a warehouse for minimum wage how fulfilled they feel and you’ll likely get a stony stare in response. It’s honest work for sure but dollars to doughnuts the people doing it are probably wishing they could do something else. Hope is good, but hope doesn’t open doors, or get you the life you want; it’s like my Grandpa always said, ‘Hope in one hand, poop in the other - see which gets full first.’

I was lucky enough to get a scholarship to go to a private school. It was fairly liberal and progressive and was generally regarded as pretty good; but they cheated me. I don’t tell you this to look in any way special, quite the opposite - it’s to highlight the fact that this is a universal problem. Every school, every student no matter what their background, is likely going to be let down through a combination of bad advice and stupid advice. Unfortunately for you, your school is fixing to do the same to you. They won’t mean to of course but if they haven’t already, they are about to start. Mine didn’t do it through malice, just ignorance - the guy responsible for careers and university admissions had been cloistered in a grace and favour house on the school grounds for nearly three decades. That is to say, his most recent experience of any of the stuff he was charged with teaching was his own exposure to it after finishing his degree. To clarify, a man who last interviewed for a job twenty-five years ago was telling us how the job market works. He would use phrases like, ‘in the real world’ as if that had some meaning for him. You wouldn’t opt for surgery from a keen amateur who had watched Casualty twenty years ago, but this was pretty much the same thing - we were putting our lives in the hands of a man who was thoroughly unqualified to do the job.

Does this sound familiar to you? Somewhere in your building is a very nice, well meaning person who has lots of books about the types of jobs there are, lots of leaflets, some box-ticking psychometric forms with leading questions like, ‘are you interested in pursuing a career in the law?’ They probably used to work for Connexions, a careers service paid for by the government that has since been disbanded. The vast majority of these people are lovely and sincere people who have spent years building a network of local businesses that are well disposed enough to them to allow a gaggle of students to do some work experience or to come in and do a speech on careers day about an exciting life in the plastics industry. The trouble is if they’ve spent their working life doing that they don’t really have any concept of what an employer is actually looking for, or how to interview. Or how to get the best internships, how to network, how to write a CV or a personal statement. In fact, of all the practical skills you’ll need to acquire there’s not much they can offer beyond the broad strokes. You may leap to defend them of course and dismiss me as being a ‘big ol’ meany’ but these are, I’m afraid, the facts. Ofsted says so, the Department of Education says so, the Sutton Trust says so, the Local Education Authorities say so, employers are saying so. In fact the only people who aren’t saying so are the schools. Makes you think - who has most to lose?

So, set against the rather depressing backdrop of these facts, what can you do? In this book I’m going to set out in plain terms what you can do, when you should be doing it and how to do that thing you should be doing. For those of you lucky enough to know what it is you want to do with or get from your life then, assuming you’re willing to do some of the hard yards, this should be plain sailing. For those of you who are still uncertain, it’s less clear, but avoiding making a decision is in many ways making a decision anyway, so I’m going to set out some best practice activities and techniques that are universally applicable whilst you start to identify possible pathways, and again it should all be cream cheese.

There are a mix of practical exercises, hints, tips and how-tos that cover all the aspects I believe are necessary to best position yourself for your life and career post-school, whether that takes you into an apprenticeship, higher education or a year out doing something new and challenging. There are also a number of interviews with interesting people who have led interesting lives doing interesting things with their careers. I have purposely not drawn any conclusions on what they have to say; I want you to take from their experiences that which is relevant to you. Some of it may even directly contradict some of what I’m telling you to do in the book, but whilst best practice and rule breaking make for odd bedfellows it goes back to what will become a familiar motto, there’s no one right way but there are a lot of wrong ways. Sometimes following the steps I’ve suggested will create opportunities that will illuminate a more direct path to your goal, rendering other parts of the programme unnecessary, but this is not a happy accident; by following these guidelines you will proactively create opportunities for yourself and you will always be further ahead of the curve than you will be by doing the bare minimum suggested by your school.

At this point one would traditionally summon up a big finish designed to make you fist-pump the air and shout something. I don’t have that, but more of a meek promise: I’ve been doing this for a while and if you do what I suggest then everything is going to be just fine. You hear that? Everything’s going to work out. Phew, that’s a load off, right?

1

THE HOWS AND WHYS OF DECISION-MAKING

‘Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.’

John Lennon

Self-evidently everything in life is a choice. Even the things that don’t appear to be choices have choices attached to them, and how you react to them and the paths you choose have ripple effects with sometimes fleeting, but often lasting, consequences. For instance, from the moment your alarm goes off in the morning, you make a choice, do I hit snooze? Do I get up? If I hit snooze, will I have time to shower/eat breakfast, make it to school or college on time? If I choose to skip breakfast maybe I’ll be hungry and because I’m focused on that I don’t pay attention to something important in class. Maybe that’s the thing that the entire exam is on and I miss out going to my first choice university because I dropped a grade. Then I end up getting a job I don’t want to do and do it for forty years...

Obviously that’s a slightly extreme example but it does illustrate the point pretty well: every choice you make has a consequence, sometimes tiny, sometimes big, but even lots of tiny, seemingly inconsequential consequences can, over time, create a real and genuine shift. This chapter is focused on highlighting the importance of the choices you make and underlining why and how you should make them.

Ask any adult if they feel any different now to when they were eighteen and the likely answer is that they aren’t quite sure who the old person staring back at them in the mirror is. As a teenager there are lots of scientific reasons why you process time differently to adults, and conceptual thinking is something acquired through experience rather than being innate, so seeing the present as an irritating preamble before your real life begins is very easy and entirely understandable; it is not, however, useful to you.

What you do now, the decisions you make right now, regardless of how old you are or where your ambitions may take you, have an impact. By ignoring the present and not making choices you are in fact making a choice. Letting life wash over you without ever making a conscious decision is making the choice to settle for whatever turns up - which isn’t necessarily ideal.

Unfortunately for you, little brain worms are constantly munching at the decision-making portion of your mind, making any choices a lot harder than a simple yes or no, and lots of internal and external biases are subtly influencing your decisions. That is to say, if you believe your decisions are logical, you’re probably not paying proper attention. Hidden tendencies or preferences distort the decision-making process without us even knowing.

Example: Who shot JFK?

Since Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 a veritable cottage industry has grown up dedicated to solving the mystery of his death. Films, TV dramas, documentaries and in the last fifty years or so more than 2,000 books are all desperately trying to persuade us that theirs is the correct account. Each establishes an argument and then presents the evidence to support its case. Or, rather, they all begin with a theory and conclusion and then root out the evidence to support that conclusion.

This is what is known as confirmation bias and it shows a jaw-dropping fissure in how we approach complex questions. Many of our decisions are based not on the material facts, but on the application of our hidden leanings and reasoning that we justify in support of that leaning. That is to say, we approach most decisions with a view and then fill in the blanks to support our decision.

Why is this relevant to you? If your decision to go to university is based on the supposition that that is just what you’re supposed to do because of your parents or societal pressure, you will find the arguments to support that decision regardless of whether it makes sense for the career you want to pursue. If you want to work in the leisure industry or in tourism and hospitality, doing a degree in the subject is, in all probability, much less useful than working in the summer as a tour rep, interning and getting experience. Equally, if you come from a background where you make the assumption that university is for ‘other people’ because your parents and people in your circle haven’t gone, you are unfairly limiting your potential based on how you perceive yourself, a perception that is informed by other people’s opinions. Not facts. Opinions. But opinion can very quickly become fact if you don’t examine it closely.

In his book, Thinking Fast And Slow, the Nobel Prizewinning behavioural psychologist Professor Daniel Kahneman illustrates our two types of thinking - the first is rational, logical, analytical and unhurried; we know it’s happening as it happens, such as in an exam when you’re ‘actively’ trying to solve a problem or answer a question. The other is fast, instinctive, intuitive and happens instantaneously without premeditation or forethought; it’s you on autopilot. Often the poor choices we make and the biases that drive them are a result of our ‘trusting our gut’ rather than making an informed, logical choice.

Here’s a famous example, which is likely apocryphal, but as an idea it works. Doctors in a study were asked to choose between two types of medicine for 600 people suffering from a fatal disease. Treatment A, which was positively framed as ‘saving 200 lives’, was dramatically favoured over treatment B, which was negatively framed as ‘leaving 400 to die’. If you were paying attention it’s obvious that both treatments generated exactly the same result. It’s simply that A leads with the good news.

‘Heuristics’ is the name for the shortcuts we take when we need to make a decision quickly: relying on an innate sense, often based on experience, that certain things just work in certain situations. In essence an often imperfect but usually sufficient solution to a problem. Behind many of our everyday decisions is a subconscious mental arithmetic weighing whether you get the doughnut now or ten doughnuts in an hour’s time. Short term gain almost always outweighs longer term gain. It’s one of the reasons you leave your homework/ coursework/revision until the last minute in favour of playing Call of Duty or hanging out with your mates.

Even when we understand in our rational brain what delaying doing stuff means, we still readily write off the future; procrastination - ‘understanding’ the options and then choosing not to do what you ought to do - puts the burden on to tomorrow. Basically it would be like me saying, ‘Don’t sweat it, Future Edd will take care of that,’ by which point, the chances are, whatever you are putting off will seem even bigger and more overwhelming.

Because we are all human and by nature irrational, we can never really be free of our biases but we can learn how to identify them as such. Rather than simply accepting the first thought or instinct you have to commit to a course of action or resolve an issue, you’d be better off taking a deep breath, being really honest with yourself and actively seeking out evidence against those assumptions and whether that ‘gut’ feel is loaded with bias.

Average everyday folk do not make wholly rational decisions. When problems are framed in terms of emotional gains and losses, our image of probability becomes distorted through the lens of loss aversion - that is, simply put, not wanting to lose out. The distortion is, however, predictable. Prospect theory understands the distortion and can allow us to predict when the sub-optimal decision-making will occur, something which I see all the time in my day job.

FOMO - Fear of Missing Out - this is a thing I hear the young folk talk about, right? It’s actually a very real and persuasive influencer. Many of the choices we make accept as fact that an unlikely proposition may be true, even as we acknowledge the likelihood that the real outcome is unlikely to be as dramatic as the potential outcome, we worry that missing out would be worse than that disappointment. In essence we prioritise the potential loss over the likelier gain. We don’t like to lose out. To put it in simpler terms, if I told you that there was a party at a friend’s house, a pretty low key affair, a few mates, a BBQ and a sleepover - not a wild night but probably good fun and entirely bankable - but the other option was going to stand outside Tesco in Northwich, Cheshire in the rain because Harry Styles and Taylor Swift had been spotted there once, it would seem like an obvious choice to go to the party at a friend’s house - to me at least as I have no interest in seeing either of them. However, to many people, as unlikely a prospect as it might seem, the fear of missing out would weight the decision towards standing outside the supermarket.

All of us are prone to these decision-making heuristics because humans are naturally loss averse. We fear loss more than we desire gains. Something tangibly bad or at least just okay seems better than an abstract good - knowing all that should make decision-making a little easier. That is to say, once you get that your brain can’t necessarily be trusted, you’re going to question it more.

Now, I know a lot of that information may seem a little bit scientific and mind-bendy but it’s a very important thing to understand. If you can figure out how and why you make decisions, not only should they be easier to make, it should be easier to make the right decisions. I can’t tell you what you should do with your life but I can urge you to really examine the motivations behind the choices you make regarding your academic and career plans.

A lot of students mentally write off huge swathes of options without a second thought - so here’s a quick example for you: studying overseas. The vast and overwhelming majority of students in this country don’t even consider it; it’s not even a choice that comes into their head. Why not? Perception of cost perhaps, homesickness, they will miss their friends, family. All of these are valid but when you examine them closer you can see where the false assumptions come into play.

PERCEPTION OF COST - We all know for sure that US universities are far too expensive to even consider, right? Wrong. Yes, they are expensive but frankly many are on a par with UK universities now, plus there are a wealth of scholarships and bursaries available, and many operate on a ‘needs blind basis’ - that is to say, if they like you they’ll pay for what you can’t.

HOMESICKNESS - News flash: as you grow up you will have to move out. There’s no way of knowing how you will feel about that until you do it. Putting an obstacle in the way or making a decision based on the perception of how you might feel just doesn’t make sense. Fear of the unknown is natural but if approached sensibly it’s a calculated risk.

YOU’LL MISS YOUR FRIENDS - Your friends will be off doing their own thing as well. You can’t live your life for others and you can’t go home again, as Thomas Wolfe so famously said; that is to say, things change. All the things that make your