"I always try to lead with my curiosity and if there's something I'm passionate about, to see where it takes me, to explore it without any preconceived notions, without any expectation of results, without saying it has to be this way." - musical prodigy on the pod this week (see below)
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Hey guys,

Welcome to this week's slightly disjointed newsletter. Let's dive in:
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Quote I'm thinking about, from the book I'm currently reading (The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel van der Kolk)
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​"Isolating oneself into a narrowly defined victim group promotes a view of others as irrelevant at best and dangerous at worst... Gangs, extremist political parties, and religious cults may provide solace, but they rarely foster the mental flexibility needed to be fully open to what life has to offer and as such cannot liberate their members from their traumas. Well-functioning people are able to accept individual differences and acknowledge the humanity of others."

A maybe somehow related point on acknowledging the humanity of others...
Nicole Avant on BLM in the US (via Bari Weiss' Honestly podcast):
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​"This arrogance of society—you don’t get to be the 20-year-old white girl to talk about defund the police. Who are you to say that? What are you talking about, by the way? There are so many people in neighbourhoods—in black neighbourhoods, white neighbourhoods, whatever—they want order. They want to be able to call somebody. They want help, they want assistance. So seeing lots of very young white liberal people speaking on behalf of all black people—we don’t need you to speak on our behalf at all. No one asked you to, by the way. And we can speak for ourselves, and we’ll tell you what we want.
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I was going into a store in Malibu, and people were chanting “Black Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter.” And I’m like, I get it, and I parked my car. “Black Lives Matter.” I’m black. I know. I mean, they’re literally in front of my car, “Black Lives Matter.” I’m like, “Got it, got it.” I get out of the car, I go get my food, I come out, and I hold the door open for all these protesters. They walk in. Not one person says thank you. Not one. Not one person looked at me. Not one person said thank you to me. To the last one I go, “Yes, you are correct. Black lives matter. You’re welcome.” Fucking idiots.
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They don’t even get the irony of the whole thing. And they’re screaming at everybody. I’m like, “You don’t even see the person who’s in front of you, and you want to speak for the entire race of people?” No, you don’t get to do that."

LET GO OF THE OUTCOME

And finally some wisdom from last week's podcast guest Grace Nikae that I can't stop thinking about.

Some context...

Grace Nikae began touring internationally as a concert pianist at 13 years old...

(I was going to ask her the definition of "child prodigy" and then found out she'd been on TV as a 3 y.o. solving algebraic equations and reading from a Mark Twain novel, so checks out. She started playing piano at nine months!)

Grace has done many incredible, seemingly unrelated things things e.g. after leaving her international solo career at 30, she wrote 8 best selling novels under a pseudonym (!!), taught herself to code and somehow ended up as marketing director of a 5 star hotel in Hawaii, started a TikTok on leadership and grew her audience to 80k followers. She currently works as a CMO and brand advisor in NYC.

(Our conversation though of course, is really about the human story underneath all of that. Loneliness, suffering, isolation. How as a child she just wanted to be "normal". Her abusive father and how she came to forgive her mother, what triggered the decision to leave music, the heartbreaking loss of a pet, etc.)

At the beginning of the conversation I asked her what her attitude was to succeeding in all these seemingly unrelated areas. This is what she said (and yes I need to stop saying like):
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​DB: For me, it's so helpful because it's like all these things that seem quite different. It's like you letting yourself explore and be like, I don't know what I'm going to be doing in five years or what I'm even going to be interested in.

So I can, like, throw myself into this and then it can evolve, which I think that's something that keeps so many of us stuck. Like what's my path going going to be in 10 years from now? And then you kind of don't even start.

GN: Yeah. Because we get, you know, we're a culture in a society that gets very locked into the idea of results and outcomes. And so if we're bound by that kind of thinking, then it becomes very difficult to start something new because you're already overthinking about, well, what if it doesn't work?

What if it doesn't go the way that I want?

What if I, you know, and what if, what if, what if, what if?

And and I've been very fortunate and I always preface every time I talk about the things that I've done. I always preface it by saying that I was very fortunate and very privileged to have been able to explore my curiosities in the ways that I have. I always try to lead with my curiosity and if there's something I'm passionate about, to see where it takes me to explore it without any preconceived notions, without any expectation of results, without saying it has to be this way. But to just see where it leads me. And that has really been the path with which I've walked my life.
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​This (and last) week on Growing Up with Delia Burgess​
Ep. 99 - Dave Sherwood: CEO of BibliU, quitting Oxford to start a company
​Dave Sherwood is Co-Founder and CEO of BibliU. BibliU is an education technology company, specialising in digital textbook provision for universities. Originally from Western Australia, Dave was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University but left his studies after 18 months having founded BibliU.

Ep. 100 - Grace Nikae: child prodigy, wanting to be "normal" and the freedom to change careers
​(​See above) Very special conversation xx
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