The time after University finishes can feel like getting kicked down a flight of stairs with alternating steps made from marshmallow and granite. The optimism (marshmallow) of exploring the world untethered and discovering abilities you never knew existed, versus the realisation that nobody cares, you’re not special and being financially independent is hard (granite) and it hits you in the face.

You graduate in the summer, go on a group holiday with your uni mates and begin searching for grad schemes with companies you like in cities you like.

Or perhaps you want to go home and save for a bit, take a year out, see some of the world before taking your first step on the career ladder. Find yourself, or at least a version of yourself that’s not a self-entitled dick.

If you have a passion or skill that you unearthed pre adulthood you are one of the lucky ones. You can quickly begin to narrow down your objectives, perfect your craft and envision a future where you MAKE your living rather than trudging up a career ladder.

Unfortunately I have fallen unwittingly into the category of unskilled and uninteresting. After 5 years of student life I came out with a failed Zoology degree, a one-year tenure at Greggs (yes, the fucking bakery), and a 2:1 in Geography. I joined no societies, founded no businesses and with the help of smoking and drinking managed to turn what was a once a fit and healthy body into a coughing potato.

To my parent’s surprise the potato was given a sales job and a company car. Fortunately when it comes to bullshitting interviews I’ve got what it takes. Nothing teaches you how to bullshit like the need to enhance the content of your pathetic life to attract women far out of your league.

Over the course of a year selling headphones I made the horrifying realisation that an Audi, a well paid job and flat in Fulham did not equal happiness.

Shit.

If only it was that simple. Unfortunately the unthinking journey of coasting through life had resulted in me being depressed. I wasn’t pushing myself and my potential would remain untapped. So I quit.

I began to look for role models, people who had forged their own path; David Attenborough, Hunter S Thompson, J.K.Rowling, Billy Connolly etc… Granted the list was fairly scattered but there’s still a theme, an unwavering determination and confidence in their purpose. This “drive” seems to be an important part in carving out some meaning in life.

If you’re driven, work hard and don’t give up you’re successful. This is reiterated multiple times throughout life as a young person. Everyone knows this. So why are so many people resigned to dead end jobs and discontent. There has to be something else going on here that isn’t immediately apparent. To attempt to get to grips with what ‘it’ is I decided to talk to people who have stuck their neck out in life in pursuit of mastering their talent. How did they overcome the setbacks, silence their inner critic and summon the courage to forgo the status quo… or “How did they mange that?” for short.

Slight problem.

With success comes the ability to choose who you wish to spend your time talking to. If I’d studied journalism with a track record of at least being able to write well I may have had a chance of interviewing somebody whose story could inspire others in my shoes. As it is I’m starting from scratch…

So I’ve cheated. My cousin is Simon Stephens, and he’s managed the tricky feat of becoming one of the most influential playwrights in the world.

Simon was born in Manchester (1971) and grew up in Stockport with his mother, father, sister and brother. Since “Bring Me Sunshine” at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1997 he has written 32 plays, winning multiple awards and cementing himself as one of the key figures in British theatre. He also is a huge fan of dancing round the kitchen in his dressing gown to the sounds of Daft Punk, shouting expletives during Manchester United games and his dog Gilbert.

Family life in the Stephens household is fun and hectic with three children, one with a love for maths (Oscar), one with a love for shooting things in both the real and virtual worlds (Stan) and one with a love for pasta and bagels (Scarlett). Holding the whole thing together and occasionally providing Simon with essential doses of reality is his wife Polly, a woman whose patience and love extends far beyond levels I can fathom.

The plays I’ve seen of Simons have included topics such as adultery (Harper Reagan), school massacres (Punk Rock), the London bombings (Pornography), Autism (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night) and I have always left the theatre with an altered outlook on the world.

For a man whose disarming charm and laid back nature never fail to shine through, its always a surprise to see how easily he can twist and manipulate audiences into feeling things much darker then they had anticipated their evening would contain.

My family used to visit Simon and Polly in London when he had just embarked on his professional writing career. I remember a terrace house crammed full of bikes, scripts, music and toys as Oscar had just been born. Although it was a house full of love and happy memories it’s a long way away from the life Simon has now been able to provide for his family.

If there’s anybody I know whose story could inspire others to carve their own path, it’s Simon

Josh Porter (J)

At an early age what things did you come in to contact with that influenced your creativity?

Simon Stephens (S)

What do you mean by Early Age?

J

The earliest memory you have of seeing someone and thinking, “they’re fucking cool”, or something that caused you to emerge from your Stockport roots and realise there was a world outside.

S

I could go much earlier than that, long before the notion of leaving the “Stockport roots”. Long before even realizing that I was contextualized within Stockport. There’s two parts to your question. One is the interrogation of creativity and the other is the interrogation of coolness.

Even pre cognitive memory, the notion of story telling, the notion of imagination, the possibility of escape from the Stockport your talking about happening not through physically leaving the place but from imagining different places, was really important to me.

My dad used to take me to the local newsagents and buy me spider man comics. So I taught myself to read at about the age 3 or 4, reading Stan Lee’s spider man comics. So he was a kind of figure of importance.

I could answer your question from about 5 to 18, when I did leave Stockport, and it would take about an hour and a half to list all the people who were important to me.

J

So the Marvel Comics were the initial imagination trigger?

S

Yeah exactly. The Idea of New York existing, and realizing that it was in some sense different to Stockport.

J

In some sense.

S

Haha, the idea of a man who could swing from skyscraper to skyscraper, in a weird hinterland between goody and baddy, weirdly, was interesting to me.

I wrote stories for fun and for my own pleasure from when I was about 9 or 10 years old. The encouragement of teachers was always nourishing and really important.

The teacher Mr. Norris, Frank Norris, I think he was called, was a really important primary school teacher to me. He was funny in a way I remember not quite understanding. Nick Carr was another primary school teacher who was quite strict and austere but really encouraged my stories, and also taught me how to play guitar, so that was important.

My godfather was massively important, because he was a male mentor outside my nuclear family who was legibly an adult but was only ten years older than me. He gave me records and made me mix tapes and gave me books to read.

When I started writing creatively for fun the form that I wrote in was song writing, so I started writing songs when I was 9 and I played them in school. I remember doing a gig playing songs to the reception class, and as I went through my teenage years I wanted to be a songwriter, my godfather said to my parents

“He’s really good, his literary maturity for a 13 year old is impressive. When he’s lived through something and he isn’t just imagining it, he might write something really significant.”

So that was really important to me.

Then as a teenager, I have very, very vivid memories… it’s all music. Two cultural things happened to me that were very significant.

One on my 13th birthday. Our birthdays always had the same convention, which was it would be the one day a year that my dad would cook, and he’d always cook steak and chips, pan fry the steak and cook the chips in the deep fat fryer, and that was a real birthday treat. I asked my mum and dad if I could leave the table early because top of the pops was on, you know, the chart show?

The charts in the 80’s, maybe less so in the 90’s, but in the 70s and 80s they were really fundamental to popular music in a way that I don’t know if they are now. It was really varied. There will always be awful music, ever since pop music was invented there’s been dreadful pop music, but there was always the possibility that somehow an outlier would gather enough steam and have enough support that they could somehow invade from the outside. David Bowie going on top of the pops in 1972 with “Star Man”, it felt like a culturally radical moment, the lunatics had got out of the asylum… and were in the… shopping mall… or whatever.

Bowie was dangerous; he wasn’t the Osmans or Gary Glitter… I mean I loved Gary Glitter when I was a kid, before he was famously revealed as a pedophile

J

I’m sure he would have loved you too

S

Haha, he would have done, yeah. But the Big thing! My 13th birthday! I got down from the table, went to watch top of the pops and the smiths were on. I remember they were on doing “what difference does it make” and I was aware that I was in the presence of something the like of which I’d never seen before. I’d never seen anything like it. Like Morrissey or Johnny Marr. Johnny Marr looking so fucking cool on the guitar, and Morrissey looking weird and bespectacled, and as a weird and bespectacled 13 year old, which is what I was… You know I always look at Oscar (Simons son) and think he was very lucky in terms of when he was born because culturally in this decade, the geek is an admirable trait. In the 80’s it was fucking wretched, if you had glasses… they weren’t good then, they were bad.

J

Big thick ones.

S

They weren’t even good bad, they were just bad.

J

Like, circular…

S

Bad, bad glasses. Then Morrissey just wore them with such swagger; that was life changing. I was very into Frankie goes to Hollywood; they were making big noise, disco funk music. Their first single was banned on the radio, it was called relax. It was kind of a song about gay sex and it was banned on radio 1 and went to number 1.

J

That’s sick (“sick” as in “cool!”)

S

It was the first time I’d heard of a banned record and that was quite exciting. They had an album out, “welcome to the pleasure dome”, and there was a guy on Piccadilly radio Manchester called Tony the Greek and he was the first person in the country to have “welcome to the pleasure dome” and he promised he was going to play the album on his Sunday night radio show, Autumn 1984. I really wanted to stay up and listen to it.

J

What time was it played out?

S

10 o’clock at night, I was 13 years old.

J

What was your mum saying?

S

She didn’t know. I had a little single headphone that you plugged into the radio, and it was pre-digital, so when you tuned into a station a little light came on and it filled my room. I knew if mum came in she’d see this light on, so I got a little bit of blu-tack and covered up the light. I lay awake waiting for the new Frankie goes to Hollywood album BUT, this is important, Tony the Greek said “the new Frankie goes to Hollywood album’s rubbish so I’ll play the first track, then I’m not playing anything else because it’s rubbish, but… The Smiths are in the studio and they’ve got a new album, “Hat full of hollow”, and they’re going to play every track”.

So I stayed up until 1 in the morning listening to Hat full of Hollow by the Smiths and that radio show was the start of a whole new universe being opened up and the Smiths were the start of a whole new universe being opened up.

(Simon doesn’t mess around when it comes to music. He was a bass player in a band called the “Country Teasers” in his twenties and his eclectic taste in music consistently falls flat on his disinterested children… much to his disappointment)

J

So that was at 14. Were you still concentrating more on writing songs as you went through college?

S

All the way through to sixth form I don’t even think I wrote stories; I think I just wrote songs.

J

What about your English teachers? Were they encouraging you to write songs?

S

In English you had to write stories and I liked doing that, was quite good at it and did well at English A-level. Creative writing was something I always kind of cherished, but in my own time, the writing that I did for myself was just song writing.

J

That was your passion

S

It was really my passion.

Then in sixth form I was in two school plays, a school production of Wind In The Willows and a school production of a Christmas Carole. They were both directed by a teacher called Mr. Watson, who was clearly a gay man at a time when it was difficult to be outwardly gay. It’s still difficult now for gay teachers to come out in the context of the classroom. It’s very rare for a teacher to come out as gay. Most teenagers aren’t kind of mature enough to… I’m quite optimistic they’re much more mature in terms of sexuality now then they were when I was a teenager. Certainly talking to my kids about sexuality, they don’t, I don’t think…

J

They just don’t care anymore?

S

I don’t think they give a shit, I really don’t think they care, in any way.

It was much more problematic in the 80’s.

He could be quite an aggressive man but he did direct these school plays and I was never a very good actor but I loved being in them, and I loved it because I went to an all boys comprehensive, and the nature of comprehensive schools… It was a place of brutality and violence. Not massive violence but just an undertone of general aggression.

I never really got beaten up, but you always had the sense you’ve got to watch your back, or you’d just get teased. You could never relax. Never really kind of be happy. There were complicated, manifested hierarchies. The one place these Hierarchies didn’t exist was in the school play. Didn’t matter what year you were in; 6th former, first year, teacher, caretaker or a parent, everybody was working together to do the show.

I just thought it was the most exciting environment I’d ever been in. To be in the classroom back stage putting our make up on, getting ready to go on stage… Even though I was fucking like… second ferret in wind in the willows. I was rubbish.

J

Ferret two, Simon Stephens

S

Yeah, really you know, I was never going to be an actor. I was in it with a guy called Wayne McGregor, who is now widely recognized as being one of the great international choreographers.

J

Was he Ferret One?

S

He was Mr. Toad.

J

Big role.

S

He was very, very good, I remember thinking he was really remarkable.

I fell in love with that absence of hierarchy and that gang mentality. It reminded me a little bit of being in bands but it was like being in bigger bands or something.

I knew if I’d been a good actor I wouldn’t have been ferret number two, I thought one thing I can do Is I can write, so I’ll just write a play and carry on being involved in this thing, which is theatre.

(It’s worth reviewing this. Simon found something that excited him greatly despite not being a particularly talented actor. In order to combine this new exciting medium of theatre with his own talents he found the sweet spot of “writing” that merged the two. Simon’s ability to recognise what he had to offer within theatre meant that he wasn’t immediately disheartened upon discovering he wasn’t a great actor. This is a great example of using your intuition to play to your strengths.)

J

What initially threw you into theatre? Were you nervous? Taking that first step into a world that you might not be very skilled within…? I would have been nervous.

S

I don’t know if it was nerves, It’s an interesting question actually…

I genuinely don’t believe in talent, I get very suspicious of the notion of talent; I don’t like it as an idea. I think Success comes from work actually. What’s interesting though is there are some things that people are committed to working on. Look at Oscar and his commitment to Mathematics, which is remarkable. Is he a talented mathematician? I don’t know, but there’s something about mathematics that resonates with his sense of self. It makes him happy. So he’ll work at it, so he’ll become really, really good at it.

With me I don’t know what it was about acting that didn’t resonate, but whatever it was that didn’t resonate with acting did resonate with writing, and I just thought, this is what I want to do.

The combination of theatre and writing, as soon as I did it, it felt really… (Gestures: mind-blowing, eureka moment).

A friend of mine talks about the analogy of finding your keys, you know that euphoria you get when you find them… The keys were where they always were, it’s not that the keys have moved, the keys were always there, but you discover it so completely and I think there’s something about playwriting, it was like finding my keys. This is it. They’re here! The keys are here!

I did carry on writing songs, through university. By the end of university though I’d stopped writing songs and singing them, because I kind of… I got in to different musical forms that were less lead by singer songwriters and I became aware that I wasn’t very good at it. I didn’t enjoy it so much; it didn’t excite me.

I went to York University to do a History degree and at university all the most attractive girls wanted to be actresses… Like really beautiful, posh girls…

J

I know the type.

S

From impossibly, kind of exciting places like… Surrey and Hampshire.

J

Hahaha.

S

As a boy from Stockport, it was just like “oh my god, have you seen Tabitha and… Sara from Surrey… Fuuuck. I’m definitely going to go watch them in their play and if I watch them in their play I might definitely meet them and then probably get off with them”

J

Probably?

S

That never happened. But I did go watch the play, and so did go to the theatre. The lure of these posh girls led me to the theatre.

J

Your Libido drew you to theatre.

S

My libido drew me to theatre. I think it drew a lot of great people to the theatre.

J

That’s funny.

S

It continues to be a necessary kind of magnet for a lot of people to the theatre. It was the first time I went of my own accord to see plays, and the plays were really shit. I remember watching these posh girls in shit plays thinking: “the girls are never going to talk to me, and the plays are awful, but this form is interesting, and what if you wrote something good, for a theatre like this. What if you wrote a story that was exciting, or dynamic or explosive…?”

J

How would that feel…?

S

How would it feel!

J

Did you start imagining that?

S

Yeah definitely! Definitely. The drama I grew up in, or with, was film and television. Growing up watching Martin Scorsese movies or David Lynch movies. The art form that I most engaged with was still music and still live music, and I remember going to the drama barn at York University and thinking “the potential in this tiny little studio theatre…” You could tell a story as good as taxi driver. As brutal and dark and dangerous… and the thing about theatre is it’s live! Fucking anything could happen; it’s like going to see a gig. Normally when you go the band plays the songs, and that’s fine, and that’s what they do and it’s great. But there’s always a kind of thing where “they’ve never played this particular song in this way before, and it could fuck up, it could be incredible, it could be a kind of seminal moment.”

J

This is why artists get put on a pedestal isn’t it; you can’t believe how well they can handle that pressure and deliver a “godly” performance… It can stay with you for a long time

S

It’s very interesting there’s something about the human animal that needs gods in some way. The gods might be spiritual or supernatural or gods that we kind of imagine are the gods that invented the planet or the solar system or the universe… or they might just be like people, who in some sense help you make sense of who you are in the world. For me the gods who helped me in some sense make sense of who the fuck I was in the world, were musicians and artists, live musicians in particular. That was a very, very exciting art form. And the notion of synthesizing that art form with Martin Scorsese story telling was what I was imagining. I was sitting in the theatre thinking if you told a story that was better than this, it would be like watching a live band, but also watching a movie, and that would be fucking great.

J

You’ve worked with Lincoln Barret (High Contrast) and Punk Rock obviously had massive musical influences.

S

And still is, Nuclear War has got Gazelle Twin, who is an extraordinary electronic musician, and I’m currently doing father land in Manchester with Karl Hyde from underworld.

J

Do you consciously think, when you write, about the music? How much of an input do you have? Do you talk to the director and say, “this is the sort of vibe I’m going for”

S

Much much more, in the early plays. I would really prescribe the soundtrack, like absolutely prescribe the soundtrack.

The very first play that I wrote on my own, which was a play called “good rocking tonight”, about an Elvis Presley obsessive, and we had a live Elvis Presley covers band in the play, and I played rhythm guitar in it.

J

Did you!?

S

Haha yeah! Absolutely!

J

Is that the only play that you’ve written and starred in?

S

Yeah, I’ve done readings of “Seawall” but it’s the only one I’ve written and starred in. I wrote a play before it, which I co-wrote, in which I played the lead character.

J

How did that go?

S

I really enjoyed it, but I didn’t do any more acting after it. I was 18, in my first year at university.

J

End of the acting career, on to the playwriting.

S

Yeah I was fundamentally Oscar’s age. The play was called asylum, and I remember sitting… It was set in a launderette, about a killer who’d just murdered somebody and was washing his clothes in the launderette, and he was sitting shaking and smoking throughout the rest of the play. I can remember some form of the exchange… How weird.

J

What was the exchange?

S

It was a posh girl, and a posh boy and they were having an argument and then the murderer started puncturing their poshness and mocking them, saying stuff like “you fucking posh gits you don’t know anything about life. I know about life… Because I’ve ended life”.

J

“I’ve killed a man”.

S

Haha yeah exactly! Exactly.

J

“With this thumb”.

S

Haha yeah it was pretty bad…

J

So you think “Talent” is bandied around a lot?

S

I think it’s actually bandied round a lot to discourage. I think people use it to say to somebody, you can’t do that because you’ve got no talent.

J

Whereas they may have just started out, but what you’re saying is that if someone finds something that they are truly passionate about they will work hard enough to become a master of that field.

S

Yeah, have you read Malcolm Gladwell’s books? He’s an American sociologist who wrote a really brilliant book called outliers. It’s a book of essays and each essay is an interrogation of the myth of “Talent”. One of the key ones in it is about professional sportsman, and their birthdays… People born between the end of august and the end of January, are much more likely to be professional sportsmen, because of the school year and physical development.

J

I actually put this into practice because when I played rugby from the ages of 7-13 I played in the year below, because I was 28th of august, and I loved it. Then I was forced to move up a year and I started getting absolutely battered… I just gave up.

S

There’s a really brilliant thing about why you’re more likely to be involved in a plane crash if your pilot is South Korean, because of the politeness of South Korean culture. The safest pilots to have are British or American.

J

Because they’re brash?

S

Because they’re brash.

J

Why do you want brash pilots?

S

Because if you’re running out of fuel and you need to land you just say “we’re landing”

J

Ahh right I see. Whilst the Koreans just politely fly themselves into a mountain.

S

“It would be very good if we can find a place to land in” then they crash into the fucking mountain. The British and Americans just go get out of the fucking way, we’re landing. This is our slot. We’re getting in there now.

The main thing he talked about that was relevant to my career, having not been a sportsman nor a pilot was a whole series in which he studied people of significant talent, and his argument was:

All of those people had 10,000 hours of practice, between them starting their work and their major breakthrough.

J

That was my next question; do you believe in the 10,000 hours rule?

S

Well it’s a Malcolm Gladwell idea and I think it’s true. I just think it’s true.

J

When did you hit 10,000 hours?

S

I think about the time of Bluebird. Lets say I wrote my first play in 6th form, so I was 18. I wrote Bluebird in spring of 1998, I think I was 27 years old. I think it took me about 10 years of writing plays.

J

You told me that you were doing 4 hours or writing a day?

S

Yeah I’d try and do 4 hours of writing a day. If you were doing bar work and you get home at midnight, you can’t really go to sleep, because you’ve been working.

J

I could have gone straight to sleep.

S

Haha, I’d tend to get home at midnight and then write until 2. There wasn’t anything on tele, it wasn’t like now where you can just watch whatever you want whenever you want. So you get home from work, what the fuck are you going to do? You could read a book or you could write.

So I’d get home from work, write till 2/2:30 in the morning, then get up at 10:30/11:00 and write until 3:30, so I’d be doing 4/5 hours a day.

J

Were there times when you thought this is a bit of an effort? Or was it routine after you’d done it for a couple of months/years?

S

It was twenty years ago; the easy misremembering for me would be to go yes I always loved it. It was always exciting. I never felt of it as a burden. I think I remember it being neither enjoyable nor not enjoyable. The idea of not writing was just weird. It would just be unthinkable. If you said to me now you can’t write all year, you’re not allowed to write all year I think I’d find it more confusing then anything else.

J

Would it be like “The Shining”?

S

Well I don’t know, I don’t think it would make me depressed or violent, I think it would just be confusing. I think it would be really weird. Not weird as in not eating or not drinking, it would be like saying to somebody you can’t turn right for a year, if you want to go right you’ve got to go left, left, left… It would just be like “Why? What the fuck”, it’s such a fundamental part of myself that it never felt like a burden.

I’d write on a type writer, I would share it with friends and receive their approval or criticism which was inspiring or dispiriting by turns, I sent plays off to theatres and got encouraging responses back which was really thrilling. But the idea of stopping…

Definitely what was frustrating was that I wasn’t making my living doing it. Definitely what was frustrating was I wasn’t making any money.

That people didn’t seem to give a shit. Theatres weren’t producing my plays; I wasn’t getting big reviews. I think there were times when I thought: “fuck this, nobody gives a shit.”

J

How many people did you know in York who also wanted to be playwrights?

S

There were 4 or 5 of us that wanted to be Playwrights; the only difference between the others and me was I didn’t stop. Through those years when I produced my own plays on the Edinburgh Fringe, I remember doing an interview about one of the plays and this fucking… looking back now, at the Edinburgh fringe the journalists are not the most brilliant journalists, there’s so many things to review that they just get interns. I did an Interview on the phone, and thought: “bloody hell this is what writers do”, and the journalist was just asking about the inaccuracy of the guys accent.

J

Oh god…

S

I remember thinking; “is that all you care about, the accent? If that’s all you care about then I’ve just fucking wasted the whole time of writing, directing and producing the play”. I think I thought:

“Well fuck it I’m going to quit”

Also a lot of people around me weren’t very encouraging. A lot of people in my family were really worried that I was wasting my time.

I have a very vivid memory of my mum, who I adore, telling me I “was kidding myself if I thought I was going to make it as a writer”.

I remember when she said it and thinking:

“Right, I don’t know if this is a deliberate tactic on your behalf, but if it’s not a deliberate tactic you just really fucked up, because that moment has made me totally determined to be a writer now. I’m really going to do it; I’m really going to make it.”

There was a big family, kind of, intervention. My mum and dad sat down with me and my sister came over and said, “you’re working in bars, you’re earning £800 a month, we’ve got you this degree, you’ve been brilliant all your life and you’re just wasting your time.

I said:

“I’m going to be a writer”

And my mum laughed in my face and said, “You’re kidding yourself”

The next day, talking to my dad about it later he said:

“If you’re going to be a writer you should take it seriously. You should read more plays, you should get the stage magazine and find out what’s happening in the industry and be serious about the industrial side of the job. Give yourself a deadline and say if I’ve not done it by the time I’m this age, then I’ll do something else”.

I think that was really well intentioned, but as it happens with the nature of the theatre industry, wrong advice. I started when I was 22, if I hadn’t made it when I was 32 then I’d look for something else to do.

J

You wouldn’t have stopped at 32 would you?

S

No I wouldn’t,

The notion of ‘making it’ is specious, it doesn’t make sense, it’s a ridiculous notion. After a while you realize that when you’re starting off as an artist in any form, but I think for a writer specifically, when you start off you think that what you want is you want to be a writer. Then you realize, as you start sort of being a writer that actually that’s not the point. The point isn’t being a writer, the point is writing.

What matters isn’t the noun, what matters is the verb.

So it doesn’t fucking matter how you earn your living it matters that you’re doing the verb, doing the writing.

If I got to 32 and still wasn’t making my living from doing the writing I still would have written…”

End of Part 1

“What matters isn’t the noun what matters is the verb”

For too long when we’re young we concentrate on what the end product of a job is. Simon’s point resonated with me because you see the outcome of being a doctor, lawyer, surveyor etc and think: “I’d like to do that”, or more: “I like the life that those jobs provides”, focusing on the “noun”.

Instead, focus on the things in life that you already do and try day by day to do them better, and better, and better until one day somebody asks:

“How did you manage to get so good at that?”

At that point without realising it you’ve become a person, through commitment and hard work, who can inspire others to not just follow their own dreams and desires but trust that what they enjoy doing is what they are meant to be doing.

If you have been lucky enough to chance upon a skill in life you are intent on honing then work to “master it”, not to “make it”.

If you haven’t found something you’re willing to invest 10,000 hours in don’t worry. Start worrying when you stop looking.