Nobody Cares What What You Do—so You Might as Well Do What You Want.

We're all getting in our own way, worrying about not being clever enough, good enough, prestigious enough. We stay awake at 2am fretting about our not-enoughness; we mentally self-flagellate; we make things so much harder and more tortured for ourselves than necessary.

Meanwhile - and here's a straight-up reality check to slap you in the face with - literally nobody else cares. You're the only one putting this much pressure on yourself.

Here’s a ridiculous/tragic story about a self-induced meltdown from my high school days that I think perfectly demonstrates this point:

It was the final year of high school and we were all at our fullest brain-capacity with university applications and preparing for our IB (International Baccalaureate) exams (an equivalent to A Levels).

Now somehow, I’d ended up in The Top Maths class of my year.

The fact that I now need to ask Alexa “What is 154 minus 67?” is an indication that I was obviously not cut out for a life of science and numbers - but that’s where I was then.

I was also in a highly competitive, high achieving school.

Everyone else in that maths class had applied to and were accepted by Ivy League universities and/or Oxford / Cambridge to study something Very Serious like medicine or engineering or a complex degree requiring a great deal of, well, maths.

I was the only person in that class going on to read an arts/hums degree which, compared to these smart fuckers, made me feel like the village idiot (obviously, I now know that you can’t make simple comparisons like that - but culturally and socially, in the late 90s, maths/sciences were considered far more prestigious and intellectually demanding than the arts/hums).

Anyway, even though nobody ever said a single thing to me, never gave me a funny look, never gave a single tiny indication that they thought any less of me, I got a real chip on my shoulder about this whole science vs arts thing and became horribly indignant. I began to feel absolutely convinced that everyone else thought I wasn’t as smart as them, that I was a shitty failure.

So, I gave myself a nervous breakdown.

I decided, in an act of rebellious, petulant defiance, that I would go to my mock maths exam (the one right before the finals) but I wouldn’t bloody do it.

Instead, I wrote a poem. Something pretentious and cringey about ‘not fitting in’ and the grossly unreasonable pressures of ‘forcing square pegs into round holes’. I thought it was deep and telling but really, it was just mortifying and embarrassing.

My wonderful maths teacher came to talk to me afterwards, listened to me wail about something-and-nothing, and talked me off this imaginary ledge I’d put myself on.

It all blew over. I went back to studying, did the finals and got a grade of 6 out of a possible 7. Then I went to university and never did maths ever again.

No surprises - the only person putting pressure on myself was me

I realise now that nobody in that maths class gave two shits that I was doing a Literature degree. I recognise now that they also wouldn’t have given any more of a shit if I studying something ‘hard-core’ like theoretical physics at Harvard. Everyone was too focused on their own thing to really be bothered about what one other random classmate was doing.

But fast-forward 20+ years, and many, many other work / life accomplishments, failures and experiences later, I realised one day in my thirties that I was still thinking, feeling and doing the same thing.

That is: putting a tremendous, undue amount of pressure on myself to be ‘just as good’ as - or better than - the next guy, when in fact, literally nobody cares and nobody else puts that pressure on me.

Okay, so maybe I could have put my teenage folly down to the pubescent, hormonal dramatics and heightened emotions that come with being 17.

But here’s the cruncher - how many of us still do this to ourselves well into our adult years? Into our 30s or 40s?

How many of us roll through every day convinced that we’re utter and total failures because we’re not good at the same things / don’t have the same goals / haven’t achieved the same successes as Marvellous Milly and Terrific Tim over there?

How many of us go on to berate ourselves, feel increasing anxiety and general-shittiness about our lives, and maybe even go on to have full on melt-downs?

Maybe not as flamboyant a show as sobbing in a maths exam while writing tortured poetry, but still some sort of frazzling-out?

Honestly, nobody cares what you're doing. So just do what you want.

All the clever clogs in that maths class did go on to study medicine at Imperial or maths at Cambridge and then got jobs at Wall Street or became Vice-Presidents at multinational corporate companies.

I went on to do my two Literature degrees and a PhD at a university I loved, and wrote for some of the world’s largest magazine brands, won awards for public speaking, and am now delivering training and coaching on issues matter deeply to me and which I love.

Bottom line: we’ve ended up doing the things we love, honed our skills and had a good f*cking time doing it. That is all.

After all those teenage tears and all the things I feared that ‘everyone’ may have thought of me, none of it mattered a single tiny f*ck for what I went on to do and found great amounts of success and happiness in.

So here’s the takeaway: just because you’re in a particular place, at a particular time, doing a particular thing (e.g. in high school, when you’re a student, studying in the year’s top maths class), it doesn’t mean you have to go on to follow the same trajectory

or desire and achieve the same things,

or express those skills and capacities in the same way as the other people in that same place, at that same time, doing that same thing with you.

(In fact, how utterly boring the world would be if we did all end up heading the same way).

Literally nobody gives a hoot whether your work experience / qualifications / skills / passions / preferences perfectly aligns with everybody else’s goals / aspirations / next steps. (And anyway, they’re usually too busy dealing with their own stuff to also worry about yours).

So if you’re a PhD student right now, you don’t have to go on to do the usual things that PhD students aspire towards and do (be an academic, commit to a research career, aim for a lectureship)

If you’re a highly-paid, highly sough-after consultant at a top Fortune 500 company, you don’t have to aspire to make partner or be a CEO before you’re 35.

If you’ve trained for years to become a great lawyer and then decide you’re now flipping bored of law and want to open a pie shop instead, there’s nothing that says you can’t or you shouldn’t just because you’ve got this set of law qualifications.

In the end, I realise, nobody set those punishing expectations on me. Nobody gave a flying fuck whether I went on to pursue a speciality in quantum physics or read some of the world’s best literature for 3 years. The only person who cared that much, who worried herself into a nervous breakdown, who gave way too many fucks - was me.

So this is my nudge for you: just do the thing - your thing.

And make it the best, most pleasurable, satisfying, heart-filling thing you’ve ever done. That’s the only thing worth giving a f*ck for.