00:00:00: Introduction
00:00:56: The quote
00:01:05: The inspiration behind the quote
00:02:32: Changes resulting from the quote
00:03:44: How it helps others
00:04:57: Ideas for action…
00:05:40: … 1: a coach-yourself question and mind map
00:06:58: … 2: the ‘what’ – fresh-start effect
00:08:56: … 3: the ‘who’ – weak ties
00:11:14: … 4: the ‘where’ – new places and spaces
00:12:44: Final thoughts
Sarah Ellis: Hi, I’m Sarah.
Helen Tupper: And I’m Helen.
Sarah Ellis: And this is the Squiggly Careers podcast. Every week, we talk about a different topic to do with work, and share ideas and actions to help all of us navigate these Squiggly Careers with that bit more confidence and control.
Helen Tupper: And we’re recording a series for the summer. And so, we wanted to do something slightly different, because we recognise that work might feel a bit different in the summer and you might be juggling some different things, holidays, childcare, lots of different work priorities. So, these episodes are part of our summer series, where we are taking quotes that have inspired our career and turning them into actionable advice for everybody who is listening. And in each episode, we will take one of those quotes and the other person will interview. So, it’s going to be Sarah’s quote today, which she will reveal in a second, and I get the opportunity to interview Sarah. Have I ever interviewed you before?
Sarah Ellis: I don’t know if you have.
Helen Tupper: We’ll see how this goes. A live experiment, completely unprepared! Okay, well, let’s start with question number one. What is the quote that has inspired your career?
Sarah Ellis: So, the quote is, “Never live the same year twice”.
Helen Tupper: What does that mean to you?
Sarah Ellis: Well, I first heard the quote from a very impressive lady, called Nicola Mendelsohn. And I think for me, “Never live the same year twice”, was me connecting the dots between letting go of ladderlike thinking for my career, and embracing this idea of a Squiggly Career. Because in lots of ways, I’m really attracted to the ladder. It’s ambitious, it’s achievement-oriented, I want to progress. For a while I wondered whether progress or progression was actually one of my values. I decided achievement was a better word. But I think I was trying to sort of reconcile in my mind, “Well, I don’t want to let go of my ambitions, and work is a big part of who I am and I enjoy the work that I do. But I do recognise this ladder is starting to feel limiting. But how do I bring those two worlds together?”
I think hearing, “Never live the same year twice”, I was like, “Oh, okay, this is much more about me”. You know we talk about, “Create, don’t wait”, in terms of your career and your job? It just stuck with me as like, be more intentional about your career. And that doesn’t need to look like a change in job title, doesn’t need to look like a change of company, doesn’t even have to look like a change of job. Every year, you can make the commitment to never live the same year twice and you can deliver on it.
Helen Tupper: What have you done differently in your career or life as a result of that quote?
Sarah Ellis: I think much more about doing things I’ve not done before, partly because I think I know a bit about how good it is to be a beginner, but also because I do find those moments of doing something for the first time — there’s that really good question that Cath Bishop asked in her book, The Long Win, “When was the last time you did something new, or when was the last time you did something for the first time?” And I do recognise that it is so easy to get stuck in habits, patterns, doing things you’ve done before. And there’s that great phrase which I always think feels really harsh. It’s sort of the stick version of the quote that I’ve chosen. So, if the carrot version is, “Never live the same year twice”, I feel like the stick version is, “Familiarity breeds complacency”. And I’m like, that’s the stick.
Helen Tupper: Yeah, that’s quite harsh.
Sarah Ellis: Yeah, it is harsh, but I also find it quite interesting. The thing that I do differently is I do look ahead to a year and I’m like, “Right, what do I want to try out? What do I want to do differently? What do I want to do for the first time?” and then it informs a lot of the actions that then I take.
Helen Tupper: So, clearly it’s a quote that has made a big difference to you and your development. Why do you think it is something that could help other people?
Sarah Ellis: Well, I was reflecting on this, and I think we often ask people at the start of workshops or programmes that we’re doing, “What’s one word to describe your career so far, or to describe how you’re feeling about work at the moment?” And you do hear people say, “Stalling and stuck”, a lot. I think that is kind of natural. We all have those moments where perhaps you feel like you’re plateauing a bit. But if you have this idea of never living the same year twice, I think it helps you to get unstuck. And it helps you to make progress, because we can all do this in some way. Even if our jobs are quite habit-based and we do a lot of the same things and there’s lots of routines, there’s always some newness that I think you can find and that I think is really good for us. And if I think about what does it look like to be resilient in our Squiggly Careers, you don’t want to do the same again, you don’t want to get stuck in the status quo. I think that increases your career risk and decreases your resilience.
Helen Tupper: I think that is a lovely, compelling question. So, let’s move from the question, “Never live the same year twice”, the statement of that, into specific actions that people can take. If they find that inspiring, how do they activate it in their work and career?
Sarah Ellis: As regular listeners will know, I’m very anti manifesting or manifestation. So, I think if you just go, “Oh, never live the same year twice”, and then just hope that will happen, in my experience, that’s not true. And so, I do think you’ve got to be more intentional about that. But some of what I’m going to describe, I think does actually get quite close to manifesting. So, I think there’s a good critical challenge that you and some of our listeners could maybe have of me here, but I do think they’re different. So, I think a really good, propelling coach-yourself question here is, “What do I want to be true in 12 months’ time that isn’t true today?” And for that to work really well, I really recommend a mind map. Get these thoughts out of your head, get them onto a bit of paper.
The thing that I find from doing this is naturally, perhaps it’s the way my brain works, by doing that fast-forwarding, you’re fast-forwarding through your year, you then naturally come back to the present day and go, “Well, what do I need to do now to invest in Future Sarah?” Because again, most of the time you do need to look ahead and think about, I don’t know, are there people you need to talk to; do you need to spend some time on ideas; do you need to book into a course that you really want to do; whatever it might be. And usually, you can’t turn those things on straight away. So, I do think you need this moment, or perhaps I need this moment, of thinking and reflection, where I fast-forward, I get the mind map down, and then I think I do the, “What? So, what now?” two questions. Or, “What does that mean for me?” And it’s not like I map it all out perfectly. I think I have more themes and territories. And then I kind of do the ‘so what now’ and that gets me to some actions.
Then I’ve got three more kind of practical actions. The first one is based on — this is new for me this year, so though I’ve known this quote for a while, this is a new insight. And it’s based on a conversation I had earlier in the year with Katy Milkman, a psychologist who’s really interested in change and behaviour change. And she talked about this idea of the fresh-start effect, which is essentially any moment can be a fresh-start effect, but it helps you to maybe do something different or to try something out. So, a fresh-start effect could be September. So, if you are listening to this in August, September is quite a natural back-to-school, back-to-work moment. Even if, I mean before I had kids, I always went on holiday in September, but I still think I came back from holiday in September feeling quite like, “Oh –”
Helen Tupper: It’s so ‘new pencil case’, I love it!
Sarah Ellis: Yeah, so it could be a September, it could be a Monday, it could just be one that’s based on your life as in, “I’m on holiday next week, so my fresh-start effect is going to be next Monday”.
Helen Tupper: My birthday, right? It’s my birthday this month. It’s going to be a fresh start.
Sarah Ellis: Exactly, anything like that. And I think you can use that thinking as a prompt for finding small firsts. So, even though, “Never live the same year twice”, I think feels quite zoomed out, never living the same year twice, a lot of that is about finding small firsts, doing things in your week that you’ve not done before. And that could be a new way of working, experimenting with someone, doing a meeting in a different way, a new piece of tech. If I think about this year so far, never living the same year twice, I’ve experimented with more technology this year than I probably have in the last three years. And that’s not all AI. I know the default is, “That’s all AI”. It’s not all AI. It’s using video in two or three different ways, it’s us thinking about the podcast and how technology can help with the podcast.
So, if that’s about the ‘what’, like, “What are you doing?” in terms of never living the same year twice, my second action is about the ‘who’, so, who can help you to never live the same year twice? So, who are you spending time with and make sure that you’ve got enough newness and novelty. Sometimes they’re described as weak ties. So, the people you don’t know as well, who know things that you don’t know and know people that you don’t know. And the first one that we described, the first action, that’s just me, like I’m naturally more like that. This second one would not happen, if I didn’t think about it. I don’t want to meet anyone new really. I’m introverted, I’ve got some very good friends, and I’m very happy with those people. And so, what that then does is limit your ability to never live the same year twice, because you’re limiting your learning, you’re limiting your possibilities. So, I think very consciously about, how do I do this; how do I find new people in new places?
Actually, when I really thought about this, for me, I take quite a structured approach. I’m not a spontaneous person; again, I don’t hope it’s going to happen; I think about the communities I want to be part of, the networks I want to join; I very intentionally do some things outside of Amazing If really with this in mind. So, if I think about this year and never living the same year twice, I’ve really thought about, I’ve joined two boards of two companies outside of Amazing If. And part of my motivation for that is to learn and to spend time with some different people. I know this year I’m not going to live the same year twice because I’m spending some of my time with an employee-owned trust, an organisation that has transitioned to being an employee-owned trust, and being on the board of a company in a way that I’ve not done before.
It’s often actually not about my day job. Actually, that was my other observation. Everything I looked at around not living the same year twice, around the who, was always stuff that went beyond my day-to-day and was more about my development.
Helen Tupper: I guess being on the other side of it, as someone that does work with you in the day job, I see that come back. Like, by spending time with those people, it then results in doing things different in the day job. So, I definitely see how that loops around. What’s the final action?
Sarah Ellis: Well, the final action is one that I don’t think I do very well. So, I thought I would share it as a kind of gap that I’ve got. So, I thought I’ve got the ‘what’ and the ‘who’, and then I think never living the same year twice is also a bit about the ‘where’. So, variety is one of my values and I get a lot of energy from spending time in different places and spaces. And so, sometimes I think never living the same year twice is about visiting new places, or just spending time in new places and being really inspired by that. And I had a moment in my career where I did that a lot, and I am starting to creep, I am creeping back or rediscovering, which sounds less weird, I am rediscovering that, I think, for myself. And I think to again be kind to yourself, it is harder to do. It was harder to do at the start of our company and when you’ve got really young kids. Now my kid is a bit older and I’ve got a bit more support, I can think about this again, I think. And I do, I find this very inspiring for myself and for my career, but also just for my life.
So, one reflection I wrote down was that I’ve never been to the British Library, ever. And I was thinking, “I feel like that’s my spiritual home”. I applied for a job at the British Library once, didn’t even get an interview. But you know when you’re like, there’s no reason why I’ve not done that? It’s in London, I live near London, I’ve walked past it, I know where it is, and I’m pretty sure you can just go in, I think. Even if you can’t, I’ll just go and join. I’d love a membership card for the British Library.
Helen Tupper: Any final words on never living the same year twice for our listeners?
Sarah Ellis: I think don’t feel pressured to necessarily go through this process by yourself. I am quite individual and quite independent in my approach, so I do a lot of thinking by myself. But I do have a Helen in my life to kind of run things by. But again, I don’t run a lot of these things by Helen, to be honest. You’re just like, “No”! But I think that is kind of unique to me, and other people might work in that way as well, but I think this is a brilliant thing that you could do with someone you really trust. This is a great thing to chat through with a mentor, great thing to talk about with someone just you trust at work and you get on really well with. If you both connected with this quote, have some conversations around it. Don’t feel like you kind of have to do this solo. I’m always quite aware that I’m quite a solo person.
Helen Tupper: But you are a lovely person and I learn a lot from your solo reflection. And so, that is the end of today’s episode. It’s the second one in our series. So, in the first one, I talked about, “Run your own race”; we’ve obviously just done, “Never live the same year twice”; and in our third episode in the series, I’m going back to my quote, which is, “Challenge your limits, don’t limit your challenges”, and Sarah will be asking me some questions to understand that quote a bit more.
Sarah Ellis: Looking forward to it. I’m enjoying these conversations. Quite a nice change of format for the summer. Thank you so much for listening everyone, back with you again soon and bye for now.
Helen Tupper: Bye everybody.