Hot Take: You're not boring, you just haven't decided who you're pretending to be this week!

Older people often say that your 20s are for growth and discovery. They say you shouldn’t limit yourself. You should try everything. Say yes to everything. Travel the world. Learn new things. Learn about yourself.

Instagram says this too in a much more obnoxious and self-esteem-damaging way, filled with over-the-shoulder looks, clinking glasses and swimwear made for people who only live keto/sugar-free/vegan/carb-free/taste-free/surgery enhanced/intermittent fasting lifestyles!?

But all of these people forget that your 20s are also when the concentric circles of responsibility, having no idea what you’re doing and being broke fuse to form “adulting”. (Btw these circles become the foundations of your life as far as I can tell. So it’s only up and down from here!!)

In your non-work life, you will mentally (and physically) oscillate between the circles like this:

Responsibility?

I’ve got it all under control OR F**k it/I’m doing enough to stay alive

Knowing what you’re doing?

I love it when a plan comes together OR I hope no one notices how insecure I am?

Being broke

Excuse me, sorry, I couldn’t see you past all of my money OR Money is a social construct holding humanity back. Burn the establishment!

In your work life, it looks more like this:

Responsibility?

I will be the CEO in a month OR If I can earn enough to eat, being mediocre sounds like fun

Knowing What You’re Doing?

I am the fountain of wisdom. OKRs are my spirit animal OR If I say strategy, objectives and financial year enough can I cosplay an adult human ready for promotion?

Being broke

I have a budget and a team. Double-digit growth is my love language OR How can I deliver 10% growth with a marshmallow and spaghetti?

The rollercoaster of growth and self-discovery that is your 20s is unrelenting and arduous but in retrospect, brief. At some point you settle into being something, the more confident among you might say, feels like you.?

Being yourself is a choice

I was in my late 20s when I started to get a glimpse of who I actually am (still working on the full picture). Growing up I watched men in films and my dad go to work in a suit carrying a briefcase. That was what I wanted. That is what I thought going to work was. I was going to be a businessman and it wouldn’t feel right unless I looked the part.?Little did I know that briefcases were lunchboxes for people who can’t carry their Postman Pat ones anymore. Herschel backpacks are the new briefcase. It says my dad's generation destroyed the planet but I am a liberal conservative who is grown up but down with the kids and I can’t take my X-Men lunchbox to work anymore.?

For my first suited job, I was working in a Ford car dealership. I thought I had it all. A company car, a well-fitting suit (the best ￡70 suit money could buy! The blue trousers started to go purple in the sunlight…????) and my plastic-heeled faux leather shoes made a loud clicking noise when I walked. I was the man! Living the dream!

The dealership was also in Essex. For those of you outside of the UK, Essex is just on the edge of London but is culturally different from anywhere else in the UK. Some might say it’s another planet. It is definitely different from the rundown, mostly Black inner-city council estate I grew up in.?

In Essex people looked and dressed a certain way. Everyone had a tan, porcelain white veneers were everything, the skinniest of jeans and at the time, all the men had quiffs.?

Most of the men in the dealership also spoke a modernised version of Cockney rhyming slang (non-UK readers imagine what a millennial Oliver Twist would sound like). I had never heard these words before. To say I was a fish out of water was an understatement. But I was desperate and determined to fit in.?

Within a matter of weeks, I was cosplaying a man from Essex, badly. I had no money so the teeth and clothes weren’t an option (thank God!). I also was not about to get on a tanning bed (for the avoidance of doubt Black people do tan, just not as obviously as people with lighter skin). I was as bald as an egg so the quiff wouldn’t work either. All I had in my “please can I be your friend” arsenal was Cockney rhyming slang. So I started to learn a few words.?

I learnt that “‘ello mate” means “greetings strange man who is not my friend and will not be my sexual partner”. I also learnt that saying this to a woman was enough to start a fight. “Do I look like a man to you?” is a common retort.?

Another commonly used phrase in the dealership was “a bag-a-sand” as in “Smith just paid a bag-a-sand on the 08 Fiesta”. (If you’ve ever bought a car in a dealership you are known only by your surname internally. They call you Mr or Ms X because they’ve forgotten your first name not out of respect???) This one was tricky but I had a plan: say nothing until someone else says something. This plan failed. Everyone else’s first language was Essex and then English. I was learning Essex for the first time.?

My colleague Brian used the phrase religiously. So I decided he was the best person to ask. Brian was dumbfounded. He looked at me incredulously and said “bag-a-sand, a grand”. This was Cockney rhyming slang in its full glory.?

Bag-a-sand rhymes with grand and grand is slang for ￡1000. So Smith had paid ￡1000 towards their new car! It all made sense… finally! A slang within a slang. Cockney rhyming slang is the language equivalent of the film Inception.?

Armed with a greeting and now being competent in business-level rhyming slang it was time to connect with colleagues and customers.?

Funnily enough, I never really did. There was always a sea of something I now know to be fakery that we couldn’t navigate. They had their perceptions of someone who grew up in Tottenham surrounded by Grime royalty (Wretch 32 literally stopped me from getting robbed. Story for another day!) and couldn’t understand why I was acting like their actual mate Gary! I was so consumed with being liked and fitting into a version of myself I thought my Essex (majority White. I’ll come on to this later) colleagues would accept.?

I would love to say that this was when I learnt my lesson but it wasn’t until 6 years later at 29 that I saw the consequences and benefits of just being yourself.?

Professional vs Performative

I had just got my job at the mighty Experian . To say I was overawed was an understatement. At the time all I could think about was impressing my middle-class colleagues who I thought would never understand a Black man from a rundown council estate. Where do we get these ideas from?

So I decided I was going to be someone else. I stood as straight as I could and tried to pronounce every letter of every word when I spoke. I also let my girlfriend (now wife) dress me…

We were both convinced (with no data to support our theory) that Experian was a very corporate and stuffy financial services company. So I needed to look like a hard-nosed modern businessman. So I let her dress me like an Italian Pinterest model!! ?? This was not me. Cropped trousers, shirts with no collar and loafers that hurt like hell.?

This farce lasted until I had my probation extended. I was struggling to perform because I was too busy pretending to be a private school-educated Zara model! I was failing on all counts.?

This is one of my proudest f**k it moments to date. I needed this job for many reasons (including being ￡36k in credit card debt. More on this in the next month's article) but most of all to prove to myself what I was capable of. If I was going to succeed it would be on my terms; just showing up and being me. In a matter of days, I had ditched the checked trousers and news reader pronunciation and got to work.?

From there my career took off! I delivered projects in India, Colombia, Brazil, Peru and the US. I launched the first Black heritage ERG in the UK (with the incomparable Leanna Hay ). I launched a financial inclusion programme that reached over 5m people in the UK. I was killing it. And it all started from just deciding to be me.?

It was just easier to focus by leaning into who I am and what I bring. No one else understood marketing like me in the team because I had worked in sales. I also grew up on a council estate so financial exclusion and poverty was my lived experience. I have family in developing countries so I could relate to people in Colombia and India because my cousins don’t have running water either!

You are the sum of your experiences good and bad and that makes you incredible.?

Being yourself is a choice. It’s also MUCH easier than being someone else. The strange thing is that it takes getting used to. The idea of getting used to yourself sounds crazy but it's true. We are bombarded with so many external influences, it’s hard to know where you end and someone else’s idea of you begins. It takes time.?

However, being yourself does not negate the need to be professional. I swear like a sailor but that’s not appropriate for work. You might speak four different types of slang, again not appropriate for work. This isn’t you being fake. It’s you modulating your behaviour to the circumstances. We all do it, all the time outside of work. Chances are you swear less around parents. You might be brilliant in a street fight but you do not want to get on the wrong side of Anthony Joshua! The point is, bringing your whole self to work doesn’t mean you act like you do at brunch with your girls or at the pub watching football!

A note for the others reading this?

Now if you are from a marginalised group or come from a disadvantaged background aka poor (council estates and free school meals make special people!), being yourself is even harder because you’re constantly trying to navigate the discomfort you feel around people that make you feel like an “other”. Overthinking and measuring what you say to not trigger a microaggression. It’s exhausting.?

I grew up around mostly poor, Black, heterosexual people. The only White/Asian/gay/wealthy people I interacted with were on TV. I had weird ideas of them based on other people’s negative experiences and stereotypes.?I judged them and thought they were judging me. This leads to paranoia and fear. At least it did for me and it made me awkward and unproductive.

To make things worse, most of the things I was anxious about and afraid of never happened. Most people are nice and the ones that aren’t, natural selection should take care of???.?

You have to show up and be you. If you don’t the next generation will feel just as unsafe and insecure as you do at work. Normalise your version of different or weird because if we don't, we can't complain that the world doesn't see us. We never showed the world who we are.

So, eat food that represents your culture, speak how you speak and style your hair in a way that represents you. Show up as you and the world of work will be better because you do.?