# With hindsight — what would Jeremy do differently?

- **Episode:** [141](https://agents.truthliesandwork.com/episodes/141.md) (2024-10-31)
- **Type:** other
- **Tags:** hindsight, career-advice, regrets, professional-growth
- **Time:** 19:04–23:05 (start 1144s)
- **Listen:** [https://truthliesandwork.com/141?t=1144](https://truthliesandwork.com/141?t=1144)

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[19:04] Leanne Elliott: So with hindsight, what would Jeremy do differently?
[19:10] Al Elliott: I think the advantage I've got now is that my 40-year-old self has got Different interests, different knowledge. Obviously, the world has completely changed. I like to think that I would have used better the resources which are now available. There's so much content out there— podcasts, YouTube, whatever— and maybe even coaching. I mean, I don't think coaching existed for 18-year-olds at the time, whereas now I've heard of it, to get a better idea of where I might start. I mean, when you're 18, what jobs have you done? You've maybe worked the checkouts at the supermarkets or served at a restaurant or something like that. And so you've probably got some clues as to what you like and what you enjoy doing, but that gets refined over time. And so I suspect that would probably still happen. I think the shift is that it's now okay not to know what you're going to do for the rest of your life, or that's possibly better anticipated. There were loads of people at university who did degrees and they didn't have a clue what they were going to do after they graduated. It might be history or economics or art history or whatever, and then these people go and become teachers or accountants or lawyers or whatever. The advantage that people now— my goodness, that makes me sound old— all these young people, they don't know they're born. But the advantage now is that there's more information available, more opportunity in different directions. with just the age of digital and a greater acceptance that there's not necessarily the expectation of a career for life. I mean, I don't think that I'm unusual in my 40s still grappling with the idea of, you know, what am I going to do when I grow up? But I think it's now just become a bit more normalized and that people at the start of their career, that's kind of more of an acceptable attitude to have. It feels very much like an us-and-them world at the moment. There's a lot of people suggesting that different generations have different approaches to diversity and inclusion. In something like professional services, for example, I would have expected to see a bit of snobbery around which university you went to, for example. So I asked Jeremy if this was going to be right. I think less so than you might expect. Where you go to university certainly was relevant. I think that again, with the the big city firms, they're going to be interested more in Oxbridge and red bricks. But again, I mean, I haven't been involved in recruiting trainees, certainly not for a long time, if at all. A firm that I used to work for had a reputation for being very sort of blue blood. There were partners who went to Eton and Oxford and Eton and Cambridge, And that kind of thing. But it was also one of the friendliest places that I ever worked. I definitely occasionally felt like this imposter syndrome, like, crikey, what on earth am I doing here with all these people who went to private schools and that kind of thing? There's a friend of mine who is involved with trainees and they have many more safeguards in place to, like, you know, blind CVs and that sort of thing, just so you can't have any kind of unconscious biases about where people went to school, that sort of thing, you know, hide gender, ethnicity, that sort of thing