Career Update: Emergent Ventures grant,unshackling myself from the 9-5 and why Tyler Cowen thinks I should move to the US
If you weren't afraid of failure, what would you do?
I was at the New Statesman Christmas reception last night along with the other B-list Westminster players who weren’t invited to the Spectator Parliamentary Awards. My name card had my former employer on it, and I realised I needed to announce to the world the changes in my professional direction.
I can’t stomach LinkedIn anymore and, until now, was only posting because I love my boss and she values it. If anyone is attracted to the fake and meaningless AI slop there and wants to hire me to produce fake and meaningless work based on my posts there, they are unlikely to offer me any opportunities I am interested in. So, I will be spilling the beans here instead.
In the last month, I have set about a million things in motion.
People have been shocked that I have just left my 9-5. I built a profile in my policy area and always spoke of my charity glowingly. It is a sterling organisation, and my colleagues and bosses are some of the best people I have ever met. I would trust them to carry my cat out of a burning building, and I will miss them dearly. I will continue to consult my former employer on a freelance basis.
I recently had two organisations approach me to help them with their policy and media work, and my own media gigs have been taking up more of my working days.
Then I started dreaming up a book proposal, and a writer from across the pond connected me to an editor at Penguin Randomhouse in the US who has shown keen interest and is helping me shape it.
Most excitingly, I received a generous Emergent Ventures grant from Tyler Cowen at Mercatus Center. You can find out more about them here.
I have been following Tyler’s work for years. He is a libertarian economist, and his blog, Marginal Revolutions, is popular among American and British politicos. Rishi Sunak is a fan of his, and Liz Truss appointed him to her short-lasting Growth Commission.
The first time I read Tyler’s book on talent, my heart stopped when I reached the paragraph about people high on neuroticism and openmindedness being bad, unsalvageable hires because they are never satisfied - as evidenced in this post, I have always leapfrogged in my career; he was describing me - but after the last sentence, I breathed a sigh of relief: these obnoxious wet blankets are good for one job and one job only: social justice campaigning.
Since I started writing under my own name and waging my own media battles, I have realised I am a lot more effective when running without a pack than when I try to nudge big bureaucracies and bored email pushers into action.
You may be asking yourself, why is a left-wing person taking advice and seeking the mentorship of a libertarian? It is very simple: Despite my belief that systemic oppression is real, I only have one life to live. And in living my own life, I am not interested in wallowing in self-pity. I don’t want people to point out my inherent limitations to me —I already know them. I am only interested in people telling me how to overcome them.
In that, I have two people to thank. One is
, whose podcast with is how I was first alerted to the fact that Tyler does not just fund start-ups and scientists but also writers. He did an interview with Tyler himself, which I would recommend to anyone thinking of applying. There is no chance in hell I would have thought to apply if I had not heard about it there, despite my already being aware of the grant.The second one is
and anyone else involved in creating Substack.Until Substack, I never allowed myself to even dream of calling myself a writer. I had read all the reports about how it is impossible to make money off of it, and as a child of the Greek financial crisis, I am compulsively cautious with my financial well-being. I read all the long pieces about how the world is awash with writing nobody wants to read, books that never pay off their advance, magazines and newspapers that close down, and a zillion bloggers trying to make pennies on the pound off affiliate links. I got the message loud and clear: don’t even try.
But then, Substack came to town. Labour had just lost the elections for the third time, and I left Parliament searching for career progression. I started working for a legendary but stiflingly politically correct campaigning org, and that’s when I started reading the writing in my heart of hearts I was certain I could do, too. Long, unfiltered, intoxicatingly engaging personal essays. The kind the Paper of Record would never publish, but you’d leave your warm bed on a freezing morning to look for your credit card to pay to read.
I know I write like I desperately need an editor but I never suffer from writer’s block. I never feel like I can’t write thousands of words that many will want to inhale. In fact, while I often show self-consciousness about other aspects of my career and abilities, I am frighteningly arrogant about my writing. I am convinced more people should read it. I have the emotional openness of a Haribo melting in a tea cap, and the world is always in need of sweetened caffeine. I can reach down to my inner core and regurgitate whatever smoosh I find back up for consumption while my confidence and self-conception remain intact.
I am the mother eagle, hunting for human truths, and you, my readers, are my baby eaglets. Scared and vulnerable, chained to your laptops. Open your mouths and eat my worms.
I know that now because since I started writing here, people sent me long, personal emails about how my writing touched them. A few people wrote handwritten letters and sent them to my workplace, much to the disgust of my British colleagues, who find expressions of admiration by strangers to always be suspect (but not me, my sweet sweet anons). People I followed for years invited me to their podcasts, and some of my favourite writers of global fame subscribed and became regular readers.
It was because of the evidence Substack gave me that I built up the courage to take this chance on myself.
Or the sense to see what has been obvious to most people who know me.
Of course I am a writer.
Of course I can make it as a freelancer.
Of course, obviously, self-evidently, I am going to be doing important, meaningful and inspiring things with the time I have been blessed to live and breathe on this planet.
Not because I am especially talented or smart but because I am motivated and disciplined enough to lead an army of starving peasants into a war of certain slaughter, let alone my own attention and energy into passion projects.
Tyler has been encouraging me to move to the US and has offered to write a recommendation letter for a ‘special talent’ visa (lol) if I put my ducks in a row and decide to make the move. Despite his well-documented faith in Britain, he believes people like me do better in the US, where ambition is rewarded, and off-kilter personalities are not penalised. I sadly agree. I will defend the British till my dying breath, but I’d be lying to myself if I didn’t admit that there is often a sense of enforced misery. You need to at least pretend you are trying to fit in.
told me the same, Americans are generous people who value enterprenurship. You’d be surprised how many of them will be invested in your journey and pine for you from across the pond.My recent trip to the US also didn’t help to make me want to continue slogging along in a British charity sector 9-5. I met the coolest people, especially women. Basically, I met a branch of kickass millennial women running tech start-ups, and I was like, waaaaa, you girls are so cool. Why have I been getting inspo from struggling fallen aristoBrits when the mothership of feminism has been here for me all long? If only I’d remove the love-goggles to see HER.
Since I have abandoned the constraints of the imagined career ladder, I feel the wind beneath my wings.
I have been obsessively working on a personal campaign that, if successful, could save the lives of thousands of people every year.
I am also turning my attention to the talented people in my life and want to invest more energy into helping them self-actualise.
I have a writer friend who is trying to break into a new field. I want to create a marketing strategy that will catapult her into the long-term financial security she deserves.
I want to start a podcast with another friend who is one of the most brilliant young men in Westminster but is wasting his time away because he doesn’t know how to play the game. He is a hormonal black man who loves nothing more than getting drunk and chatting shit, with one of the worst cases of unmedicated ADHD I have ever seen. He has been unlucky in many ways but extremely lucky in one. He has met me, and my sharp elbows. I will make it my mission to see him dominate the barren streets of SW1 even if I sink (get cancelled) down with him.
I will continue doing political and media consulting for organisations and individual politicians I trust and want to see flourish who are serious about putting themselves out there to make an impact.
If you have a passion project that you’d think I’d be interested in, let me know! If you are reading this newsletter you already have about 1000 times the information about me than what you could get out of my LinkedIn profile. No harm in having a chat.
I am fully planning on going back to the US soon as well, so do reach out if you are a Yank.
Oh, there is one thing I would love to do again: speechwriting. Are you or someone you respect in need of a speechwriter that will make them sound like Obama, but with a smidge of whatever made Trump win? Get in touch!
I am writing a lot more, and this substack will be the main training ground for my book.
I want your help with that.
Please sign up for a paid subscription if you want to encourage me to write and help me set aside more time for this. I will post more regularly and put more posts behind a paywall.
If you can afford it, consider taking out a founding membership. If at least two (2!) people take one out, I will start posting founding members-only posts about things that I’ll never make public.
Thank you to everyone who has already taken out a paid subscription, especially those who did so when there weren’t any paid posts to entice them.
If enough of you start to pay me, I promise to get an editor, with strict instructions to make my writing readable but with enough struggle remaining to keep my masochist readers coming back for more.
I'm deeply touched by the personal call-out—thank you—but, of course, you over-credit me. I am but a tiny piece of Substack, which is a collective effort from a team of people who care deeply about helping writers and media makers of all sorts.
That aside, this is an incredibly gratifying piece to read, and I personally am very excited to hear that you're betting on yourself as a writer. You will succeed tremendously. Also, I'd be happy to add a letter of recommendation into the mix for your visa application, if that would be helpful.
Best of luck.
What makes you think you need an editor for your substack posts? The stuff you write is more delightfully readable than almost anyone else I read regularly. It is so naturally charming and all the more remarkable given that English is not your first language. I love your writing style and would worry that an editor would take away more than they would add to it.