Snippet 1 - Advice Every 20-Something Year Old Needs To Hear
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So there's this common myth that goes around the internet that when you are in your twenties, you should be spending that time trying to get ahead. And as someone in their twenties, where most of my friends are in our twenties, I often like hear a bunch of, and feel a bunch of existential career risk angst around, oh, what if like, I haven't really figured out what to do with my life. I haven't figured out what my career path is gonna be for the next 50 years.

"Ah, maybe I'm kind of doing things wrong because I'm exploring this YouTube thing rather than doing medicine." Anyway, what you're about to hear is a little snippet from a conversation that I had on the Deep Dive podcast with Hannah Witton, where we talk about this idea of getting ahead in your twenties. And I think Hannah gives some amazing advice that every 20 year old needs to hear. Were you concerned at all about the YouTube thing not being a quote, "real job"? And what is your career going to look like 10 years down the line? You're still going to be making videos, like all of those fears that people have as they switch from a quote,

proper job to a quote like not proper job i don't know because i never i don't really ever feel like i had a proper job yeah because um even what i was doing for that charity like i was a freelancer and i was making youtube videos but just for somebody else which if anything was proof very early days for me that like this is a skill that other people also want like and will pay you for yeah

But I think I have more of those fears about like the longevity of it now than I did then. Like at the beginning, I was just like, I'm riding this wave. Like this is going well. Let's not like freak out. Let's just keep going, like build on this momentum. But also it was just me then. Whereas now it's like,

I rent a studio space, I have a team. There's definitely a lot more of like the business element to it now as well and maybe you can relate to this as well. At the beginning I was like in my early 20s, had no dependents, had savings so I was just kind of like your early 20s is when you move to London and you take risks that's what you're supposed to do right? So it didn't

I didn't feel any fear there because I was just like, if this all goes tits up, like that's normal, I'm 23. Like, you know what I mean? Like who cares? Whereas now it's like, oh, I'm about to turn 30. I'm about to have a baby. I have a mortgage. I have a team. I have a business that has a lot of overhead costs. A lot more fears about the longevity now than then for sure. - Yeah, so on the point about your twenties being for experimentation,

that itself is kind of a novel thing i guess for medicine in particular your 20s are for setting yourself up for success in banking and consulting and law your 20s are like hey let's hustle hustle hustle so that when i'm 30 i'll have made partner at mckinsey or whatever people do and a friend of mine um who's also was also medic in my year who recently quit medicine to pursue a job in tech put out a tweet that went viral the other day which was basically like you know what

when I left medicine at 26, I was really scared because for the last 10 years, I had a very clear path. And now it feels like all this uncertainty. But then I realized actually my 20s are for experimentation. That tweet went viral and people like, I think the idea that you can actually just like screw around doing stuff in your 20s and it's actually okay. Yeah, yeah. It's actually fairly novel to a lot of people. Well, we put a lot of pressure on

on people to make a decision about the next 10 years of their life really early like and you'll know this like from doing medicine at uni so like at some point you decide you want to become a doctor okay you have to do medicine at university okay in order to get into uni to do medicine i need these a levels in order to get into college to do those a levels i need these gcses

at what age are you making decision about what GCSEs you're doing? You're 14. - Yeah. - You're 14 and you made like all of those decisions for the next 10 years of your life. Like we specialize real early in the UK in terms of like,

those decisions that we're making about our studies and our work and career and stuff. I didn't have that because I went the humanities route. But yeah, I do think that there is a lot of pressure to like know what you want to do. And then also like as a classmate,

culture we idealize and like look up to people who are really successful very young we're like oh my god look at what they've achieved and they're only 21 like isn't that incredible but then you find yourself actually comparing yourself to a lot of these people who had great success and whatever it is they're doing super young yeah there's a bunch of um examples in tech in particular that get they get thrown around that yes there are some you know

19 year olds find founding Stripe or Facebook or whatever. But actually the guy who founded LinkedIn was in his forties. Jeff Bezos was in his thirties when he started Amazon. Like there are people in their fifties starting these companies as well. And like, it's not a race. This is one thing that I find a lot of people do in our YouTuber Academy where, especially if it's older people,

comparing themselves to the younger kids. And it's like, if you're in your 40s and you've got a family and a mortgage and a job, there's just no way you can give the amount of time to YouTube as like a 19 year old at uni studying psychology who has one lecture a week. He's just like banging out the content. But if you're over 60 and you're retired, maybe you've got loads of time to dedicate to YouTube. Like amazing. Chelsea Fagan, who's the CEO and co-founder of The Financial Diet. She like often talks about how

I think on her Instagram or like on social media in general, she basically only follows influencers who are over 50. - Oh, interesting. - Because she's just like, we're a youth obsessed culture and for her, like she's in her early thirties and she just wants to see older women

thriving because we also as a culture kind of like, you know, you're a woman and gets to a certain age and suddenly you become completely invisible to the world. And so for her, she like is actively seeking out these like positive examples of older women just like thriving and like doing their thing. And I'm like, I love that. That was brilliant.