Sometimes people ask me how a life like this is possible, so I thought I’d put an explanation here.

At school I was pretty much top of my year academically throughout. I went on to Cambridge, got a 2.1, and it should have been straightforward after that, yes? Well, no. I had tremendous trouble securing employment out of Cambridge, and whilst I did eventually get work, problems continued once I did.

I think one problem is that, firstly, there is a substantial disjunct between education and employment. You go to school because you are too young to work, and we can agree that it would be wrong just to spend your childhood sitting at home playing computer games. Of course you need to learn how to read and write, but that doesn’t take very long. So you get taught a lot of extra stuff which makes you a more interesting person. And then you are still too young to work professionally when you leave school at 18, or 17 in my case, so you go to university. It will make you a yet more interesting person. But, unless you have studied a vocational subject such as medicine or accounting, that doesn’t really give you a path afterwards. So you have to take a bit of a leap of faith when you enter the world of employment. I, I think not unusually, grew up seeing a career in the context of joining a profession after university. In my last year at Cambridge several people independently suggested law. It wasn’t something that I had particularly considered before, as my studies had been based more towards maths and science, but the more I thought about it, the more I felt that it did appeal, partly out of a desire to do something more wordy, and it looked more interesting than becoming an accountant or an actuary. And the financial crisis of 1988 put me, as well as a lot of my contemporaries, off working in finance. So I became a solicitor, and eventually manged to join a City of London firm.

But that doesn’t explain why a Cambridge graduate should have difficulties finding work. I think that, truth be told, employers have a lot of reasons for not employing the brightest people:

  1. Such people may be a threat. Typically, applicants are interviewed by people they will work with. Those people won’t like you if it looks as if the applicant will show them up, either by being brighter than them, or by working more efficiently.
  2. A lot of business is done in ethically grey areas (to put it politely). Just think of all the examples of commercial impropriety that you see in the press, and then reflect on the fact that most such cases probably never come to light. If that is the case, then the ideal employee is one who is intelligent enough to process the work, but not intelligent enough to understand the reasons for it being done. The latter person is obviously going to question them. I recall one employer once telling me of graduates “the brighter they are, the more difficult they are”.
  3. It’s probably a lot easier to manage a team of people who are all the same. A bright person may come up with some novel ideas, but are most jobs creative enough that anyone really cares? Easier to just have people who will get on with the job as it is, and come up with a predictable product.

Of course, no employer is going to say any of this. Most of the time an employer doesn’t have to give any reason for a rejection. But, otherwise, it’s easy to fob applicants off. I was told by various City employers that I “wasn’t quite right in terms of fit”, “the trouble is, your thinking is too far advanced”, asked if whether, given the level of “grunt work” in a job, I felt that it was appropriate for someone like me, told quite often after an interview that the employer had decided it wanted someone more senior after all, and once was rejected from a job on the simple ground that I was “too pleasant”. But mostly I never got any reasons. It was intensely frustrating.

I had a technology idea that interested me. It was to do with drawing up financial diagrams with boxes and arrows to represent parties to transactions and the relationships between them. I took some time out to write a business proposal, and sought funding for it. But, while I had a few meetings, there wasn’t really any uptake. It’s an interesting idea, but probably too complicated and too niche to be financially attractive for investment. So I applied for jobs. And I couldn’t get one. Potential employers (in one case, clearly after much consideration!) encouraged me to keep going.

So I found some sources of casual income, and took up travelling, together with the task of developing the idea myself, never with a complete belief in it. And of course I applied for full-time jobs from time to time, but never with any success. The money never ran out, so that’s how I came to travel almost everywhere, and how this website came into being.

Finally, just a thought for any children getting top grades at school. A lot of the people I meet who have done really well in life didn’t go to Oxford or Cambridge, but to second-tier universities such as Bristol, Durham or St. Andrews. Reflect for a moment on how well academic excellence is really likely to serve you. I know it’s offensive. But it might just be serving your teachers better than you.