If you had a time machine and could send just one message to your past self, what would it say?
“Stick to the plan.”
At seventeen I went to the BBC to find out what it took to get in. The message was daunting but perfectly clear: an Oxbridge degree, if you could manage it, and a CV to die for. I took that seriously. Two years later I applied. I got as far as a final interview.
And then, somewhere between wanting it and almost having it, I changed course.
Advertising looked like another way into the world of words, images, film and communication. Perhaps it looked more attainable, more fashionable, more immediately grown-up. Whatever the reasoning, I deviated from the plan. And I hated advertising.
That is why the message I would send back is not follow your dreams, or believe in yourself, or any of the other things adults tell young people with the benefit of hindsight.
So I wouldn’t tell my seventeen-year-old self that the plan could never change. Of course it could. But I would tell him to distinguish between changing direction because he had discovered something better and changing direction because the thing he really wanted had become frighteningly real.
The BBC had told me it was hard to get in. I had already done the hard bit: I had listened, taken their advice, built towards it, applied — and reached the final interview.
Stick to the plan. Especially when it starts to work.
18 months later I was working with a former BBC producer, and soon producing and directing. I hadn’t had two years formal training but af least I got back on track. Eventually.
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