Life’s lived forward but understood backward

The Happy Entrepreneur

If you’re like Laurence and Carlos, following a squiggly life isn’t just a matter of circumstance, it’s in your nature.

Sarah Ellis, cofounder of AmazingIf, says in her TED talk with her cofounder Helen Tupper “The legacy of the ladder is all around us.” That’s the career ladder; the linear view of life where work is all about straight line progression.

Many of us were led to believe that progressing in life was as simple as ABC: school to university to graduate training scheme to skilled professional to moving up the hierarchy to getting paid more, to success.

However, Carlos and Laurence didn’t follow that path. Instinctively they knew that it didn’t suit them. It didn’t excite them.

They followed a more meandering road. Carlos been an academic, a web designer, a freelancer, an entrepreneur, an event manager, a retreat host, an online course creator, a community builder and a coach… This wasn’t a path that he’d predicted but for him it’s now all starting to make sense.

When you follow a squiggly path it’s hard to understand how all your skills, knowledge and experience thread together, and therefore how to use them in the next stage of your journey.

“A squiggly career is both full of uncertainty and full of possibility. Change is happening all the time. Some of it is in our control, and some of it's not.” says Helen in her and Sarah’s talk.

Accepting this change is the secret to your resilience and understanding the meaning of your squiggly path is key to taking advantage of your future opportunities. However, you can only understand what it all means when you spend time pausing, reflecting, and asking yourself the right questions.

On this episode, Laurence and Carlos are joined by one of the cofounders of AmazingIf and co-author of the books Squiggly Careers and You Coach You, Sarah Ellis.

They talk about Sarah’s own squiggly career, her transition to entrepreneurship and what success means to her. This conversation is designed to inspire you to make important changes in your career and also make you feel more comfortable with living a squiggly life.