The Dots Only Connect Looking Backwards
My first proper job was customer service for the worst hotel chain in the UK. A call centre.
For me, it was the epitome of where hopes and dreams went to die.
Nothing quite a shocking for an 18-year-old then doing a 10 hour shift and speaking to over 200+ frustrated people. The constant cutting tone and indignation about the poor quality of, I kid you not, rooms which once sold at £11 per night.
There were points in the day across the malaise of the incoming calls, complaints and of course occasions bookings the Team Leaders would bark:
“30 calls waiting guys…. Can we speed it up?”
“That toilet break was over 4 minutes, would you mind watching your time next time?”
“For god sake guys!!?? Did someone cut off a furious lady trying to book in for Blackpool?!”
The job itself was never taken as my first step into a career in hospitality. It was taken as it was commutable, paid I believe £6.50 per hour at the time which cleared minimum wage by a whole £1 per hour for the time. (Don’t worry dear reader, it was £7.50 for evening shifts.)
And frankly, at 18 years old and having only worked serving tables prior. What I offered to a prospective employer was somewhere in-between a human paperweight and doing my best not to get in the way.
It was never intended to be the origin story for the next mogul hotelier. Painting a picture of an extremely baby-faced version of myself scheming in the corner while booking in £35 dinner, bed and breakfasts and manically saying to myself “soon….. all this will be mine.”
No, I was doing it just to make ends meet to pursue my other passion.
Around the age of 15/16 I’d started to get really into music. Beatles, Bob Dylan, The Stones and all of that. This was somewhat of a surprise, even to myself, as academically I’d always been very business and economics focused. Music though had never been anything I’d been interested in at school. Part of this may have been because at 13 we’d be introduced to music lessons as -
“Sit down kids and why don’t we have a listen to some Bach?” 👴🎼
Over a period of a few weeks around my 16th birthday I had started creating something which sat somewhere between atonal, and a bag of cats. There was however enough there to keep me interested to learn more. At the time, I was all the cliché versions of teenage dreams. It makes me cringe thinking about how seriously I took it.
The truth is though, I loved creating. Something about the strange focus when hours dissolve over a keyboard, a guitar or at the time, an 8 track recorder. Combined with the typical idealised version of what it must be like to make music for a living, I was hooked and desperate to ‘have a go’ at pursuing it. Whatever that meant.
This did however create some very pressing problems for me:
Where I lived was not so much ‘the centre of musical activity’ but more Narnia’s commuter hub.
I wasn’t very good at music at the time.
I knew absolutely no-one in the music industry and had no real clue how to go about getting into it.
This led to a carefully and strategically thought out of plan which started and ended with “go Manchester… there be music.”
This began a near decade long-journey. From working days at a job that I despised, to evenings to rehearse at nights for various incarnations of bands. Managing personalities, creative projects and yes, as I found out, the very true-to-life stereotype of inconsistent drummers.
All this played against the backdrop of Manchester’s Northern Quarter and Ancoats. While now it is viewed as ‘one of the coolest neighbourhoods’ in Europe. It was at the time, much more Joy Division and for Ancoats, a whole lot more stabby.
One of bands I was in eventually settled in a rehearsal room in the basement of ‘Sunshine Studios.' Now part of Boohoo’s Billionaire owners property portfolio. It was down the steps to dark and very dingy rehearsal room in the centre of Manchester’s Northern Quarter which produced bands and artists who saw reasonable success. Bands like The Ting Tings, HURTS, Wu Lyf (bet you never heard of them) and Bipolar Sunshine who all rehearsed either next door or down the hall.
Looking back at spending 5 of the what for most the ‘most fun of your life' working in a call centre, to then spend evenings in a dark rehearsal room on music which 99% of the time went nowhere probably wouldn't appeal to many. It was pretty brutal looking back, getting back at 10pm-11am at night after work and rehearsals wasn’t unusual. Then to do it all again the following day. But at the time, I was passionate, naive, young and dedicated to seeing how far it could go.
One of Steve Job’s most famous speeches he recounted how he dropped out of college and only as a consequence of this he stumbled across a class in calligraphy to learn beautiful and subtle typography.
All of this was entirely pointless, until through a mixture of opportunity and timing, it wasn’t. Jobs puts it perfectly in saying:
“You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. Because believing the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path and that will make all the difference in your life.”
Life for us all is like that. Things that are formative, but in ways that we can’t recognise at the time. While we are still breathing, any outcome is only the current chapter. Like the ancient Chinese proverb, ‘maybe so, maybe not, we’ll see.’
Success is fleeting for most, but the uniqueness of our experiences and even failures is how we create real life alchemy. It is this appreciation for the frankly bizarre combination of events, which can open doors in ways you could never envisage at the time. Jack Butler sums this up in this video called ‘stop being average - world class market creation’.
He combines his core skills of Graphic Designer, frames that through the lens of philosophy and packages it through motion design.
For me it’s one of the best videos I could give to anyone in their 20’s wanting to succeed. The skill is being able to layer the circles of different outlooks and disciplines in a way that creates a specific brand/identity/etc. It’s exactly the same broad concept that Naval draws upon here when he talks about ’specific knowledge.’
I can only reflect now that taking and sticking to that job for 5 long years was probably one of the best decisions I made. Certainly not for the experience, that was dreadful. It did however give me some pretty brutal lessons of the sharp end of the world of work and my young, often egotistic and certainly stupid teenage version of myself needed this.
Many years later when I would reflect on the whole experience, I look back and conclude:
Had I left that terrible job early and hopped around. I don’t think I would have been able to part fund the project which eventually led to going full time as a musician. The ultimate lesson in the importance of persistence and delayed gratification.
Had I not against all logic, talent at the time and reason. Decided to ‘give it a go.’ Would I have found myself here or been able to turn my hand to content creation, this channel that I’m grateful you follow. Something that had big implications for my future career.
Would I love my job as much if I hadn’t had the earlier experience to contrast it to?
Had I gone immediately into the more business-focused route as I’d initially planned. Would I have had the same perspective?
These are things that we can only speculate on. Life is a series of paths, constantly unfolding.
Looking forward into 2023 and embarking on new projects at work which combine content creation, client education, marketing and systemising our processes. It’s clear looking backwards that without the earlier experiences, there is no way I would have had the skill set to do this.
Life is an endless array of possibility. It is unpredictable and that should be embraced. Be it the market dips, the change at work, the life event on a rainy Tuesday which throws everything in up in the air.
Perhaps it’s just a mindset, but I do believe there is always scope to take comfort whatever your position, as long as you adapt and iterate. There is always the chance the dots will connect looking backwards.
As Jobs says - “Because believing the dots will connect down the road will give the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path and that will make all the difference in your life.”
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Next time I’ll be building on this sadly, true-to-life story with - “You don’t know what you want.”
