Reese Witherspoon, one of the most successful women in Hollywood ever, got people thinking last week when she gave career advice to an unidentified caller on Instagram. Witherspoon, 49, a sacred cow thanks to her multi-hyphen career as an actor and producer centering women’s stories, appears very much like someone who has never wavered from her dreams, but the clip went viral for her hard-knocks, common-sense life advice: she told the caller to put her dreams to one side and focus on her talents.
“Everybody has dreams,” said Witherspoon. “Doesn’t mean you’re going to be good at that thing. You are supposed to do what you’re talented at. It’s your job in life to figure out what your specific, unique talents are and go chase them. You don’t chase your dreams, you chase your talents.” If only someone could persuade her to stand in the audition queue at Britain’s Got Talent.
I think I’d pitch my tent in Witherspoon’s camp of home truths when it comes to advising my daughter and the younger people in my life. Dreams are wonderful things to have. And by all means, work towards them; you won’t become a prima ballerina (my pie in the sky dream) if you don’t go to classes (I gave up at ten).
What’s more, pursuing your talents doesn’t mean throwing a bucket of cold water over your dreams. The exceptional performance of all the British athletes in the Winter Olympics is a case in point. They all followed their dreams, sure, but they worked out what their talents were first. Had Charlotte Bankes and Huw Nightingale dreamed of figure skating, they would not have won Britain’s first Olympic gold on snow. I, meanwhile, am at liberty to fantasise about becoming the next snowboard cross champion without moving to Canada to spend the rest of my days training on a fool’s errand.
I suppose I fall somewhere between the dream and talent routes. I have always made a living from writing, at least, and am rarely required to go anywhere near an office. Can’t complain there. All I wish for in my mid 40s, apart from a mortgage-free home, mega pension and invitation to the cottage, is that somebody had informed me that earnings do not equate to experience.
Unfortunately, career advice, at least the useful kind, was pretty thin on the ground when I was finishing school in the late 90s. Someone turned up from the council and asked what subjects I was doing for A-Level. As I was studying English Literature and French, she advised me to pursue a career that used, um, English Literature and French.
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I had no idea that jobs, careers and half centuries of working lives have almost nothing in common with academic learning. What if she’d asked me who I was, what I liked doing, how I wanted to spend my time and where I thought my talents lay? Might I at least be in possession of a public sector pension like the rest of my family?
I don’t regret becoming a journalist. But I do wish I’d known much more about the world of work and what’s out there. My first appearance in a newspaper was an interview with the Macclesfield Express in the early 90s, thanks to some brief glory as a regional finalist in the Sainsbury’s Future Cooks competition. When the reporter asked if I fancied a career in catering, I replied that I was more likely to become a food writer. If I’d known about the myriad opportunities that working “in food” could mean, I think I would have pursued one of these rather than sitting behind a computer. The only job I really knew of in the food world was, as the reporter said, catering. As a girl growing up in Margaret Thatcher’s shadow with good grades, I was hardwired to pursue a career far from the kitchen, most likely on a corporate ladder, something I luckily just avoided.
There is widespread panic at the moment about how we can advise younger people about the workplace, given we have little idea what it will look like. Earlier this month, Microsoft’s AI boss, Mustafa Suleyman issued a startling warning, telling the Financial Times that “White-collar work, where you’re sitting down at a computer – either being a lawyer or an accountant or a project manager or a marketing person – most of those tasks will be fully automated by an AI within the next 12 to 18 months.”
Yikes! I hope he’s wrong. Either way, it’s a wake-up call. My top advice to my daughter is that she should focus on how she wants to spend her days rather than how to slog through the years. (Obviously, if she says she wishes to focus on Mario Kart, I’ll then send her to a convent). Successive generations have been kneecapped by various technological advances, and so many roles that were considered AI-proof, such as healthcare roles like physiotherapists and counsellors, are now at risk. Gunning for a single dream seems unwise, if not absurd.
My friends of similar ages seem to fall into one of the two areas that Witherspoon mentions. Those who follow their dreams mostly have unstable creative careers, though some are wildly successful. That said, those who pursued their talents also mostly have unstable creative careers. Sometimes, your talents won’t lead to the things you imagined you’d value, such as employment, a pension and a popular LinkedIn profile. They’ll take you somewhere much better, to places you didn’t know about and couldn’t ever go in your dreams.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing. Although at 45 I can hardly see with or without my glasses, I am able to look back at the years behind me and wonder what I might have done differently. Do I regret dawdling through six years at university? Not one bit. Should I have quit my job at 29 to go and live with shamans in the Peruvian Amazon? Possibly not. Will I give my daughter the same overly sensible advice that I ignored time and time again when I was in my teens and twenties? Most probably.