Good morning, friends, and welcome to another Walk the Pod companion newsletter. This morning, I’m thinking about how long it takes to learn new skills, and the personal quality of tenacity.
Learning new things
I joined my university in July 2021, as Head of Communications and Public Engagement. I knew very little about what I was doing. But I have a smart brain which occasionally works things out overnight, while I’m asleep, and presents me with them at 4am. I learned fast. I set out to learn. I learned by osmosis, I thought, I reflected, I asked other people, I remained open to how to do things, every day.
I hired specialists who could work out how to do things like put graduation ceremonies on for 1,500 people at the Barbican. The specialists didn’t know how to do this initially, but they were events professionals with smart brains, they worked it out. I worked hard with them. I rested hard in between. Eventually, we got through our first set of trials together. 7 sets of graduation ceremonies in July 2022. They went well. I was beyond proud of the team I had worked with to get our graduates across the stage safely in front of their proud friends and families.
In March 2023, I had the privilege, opportunity, and sheer good luck to be able to apply for the role of Director of Communications and Engagement at the university. This role looks after communications and events. I was familiar and experienced in those aspects by this point, and happy to step up to greater responsibility to lead those teams through the upcoming merger. However, the role also looked after the alumni and development team, something with which I had no experience, and to be frank, no clue about, at all.
Alumni and development teams at universities develop closer relationships with the alumni community, and have income targets to raise money to pay for things like student hardship and new capital work at the university alongside the relationship building and keeping the community going once graduates leave the uni. It is fun and rewarding work. It allows alum to give back to the uni, it allows them to discover nostalgia for their old alma mater (as wikipedia often puts it), and it develops warm, fuzzy feelings in people who are working jolly hard as graduates.
Having lovely chats with alumni, absolutely fine. But fundraising? This was completely new to me.
I had applied for funding for a podcast before, and I had a Patreon with a number of wonderful patrons who support my podcasting work on Walk the Pod. But professional development of relationships with potential univeristy donors was completely new to me. I had no idea where, or how, to start.
But, as usual, I set out with enthusiasm and optimism. I would simply recruit specialists, learn as much as I possibly could from them, and eventually I would work out how to do this work myself. I assumed this would happen fairly quickly (I am absolutely relentless, in my optimism, friends!) The alumni and development folk at my university are a small and impactful team who deliver well beyond what you’d expect them to, given there are only three or four of them, most of the time.
I worked with the team, and did my best to line manage them. I learned a bit about their hopes and dreams for the vision of the ongoing work. I tried to understand. I remained open to learning more about the work. We desperately needed a leader who knew what they were doing, though! In October 2023, I hired a specialist to head up the team and determined I would work with her, support her, every day, and try to learn a little of her expertise along the way.
The job description for my own role specified that I would have my own small pool of donors. I had no idea how to develop this pool, and no idea really how to talk to the ones we already had. What did they want to talk about? What were they interested in? It may have been as simple as asking them, but I felt lost. In addition to meetings with existing donors, I started some cold outreach in January. I thought carefully about wording. I researched people as much as I could. I sent a lot of emails and got close to zero responses. Soon, with a merger looming, I was carried into more intense communications work and fundraising slipped off the radar for most of the rest of the year.
But, as we’ve learned through discussion on Walk the Pod, success is not what we immediately succeed at—which could just be beginner’s luck—but what we return to, over and over again. So I want to tell you a bit more about failure, and about not giving up.
Failure, and not giving up
I have failed in my development work ever since I started the Director’s job in March 2023. Failed at it, every day. That’s over a year of failure, friends! Tried: failed. Tried again: failed again. Failed, failed, failed, picked myself up, tried again: failed again. Left the entire thing to marinade for a few months. Fielded pointed questions from the Finance department about income targets. Failed to answer them satisfactorily.
But suddenly, this morning, I think I’ve found a piece of the jigsaw puzzle.
One piece of the jigsaw puzzle of how to build good relationships with good people has just fallen into my brain. And I’m going to give it a go.
I am surprised that 18 months from starting to try to learn a new skill, and having given it a fair amount of energy, I am so, so new to the basics of the work. I have so little in my toolkit to work with. My success still stands at zero.
The value of experience
How much experience is needed for a new skill, these days, now that we have generative Artificial Intelligence bots which can ‘do everything for us’? What I have found so far is that AI can help us, quite a bit. It can make us faster. It takes some of the slog out of writing things from scratch. It can help us to strategise, and to work out what the next steps are in a situation. It is like having a permanently delighted freelancer on the team, who never gets bored of being asked stupid questions. But Google Gemini can’t provide insight, on its own, because insight is a spark going off in your brain. Google Gemini might know the insight, in a non-sentient kind of way, and can tell you what it ‘knows’, but ultimately it’s a language model. We must know the right questions to ask, in the first place. To gain insight, your brain has to be doing the jigsaw puzzle itself, every day.
The new piece of the jigsaw puzzle will help me to build a routine around this type of work that I feel confident will now guarantee a bit more success than I had previously. Possibly not much more success! But I want it to work. Ultimately, I’m trying to raise money for health and medical students who are too strapped for cash to be able to concentrate on their studies. And I can get behind that goal. I do not want students dropping out of school because they can’t afford to learn. I donate to the cause myself. All I need to do now is find others who might want to do so too.
It is fascinating to be so bad at something, and to crawl forward, through the mud, with it. I am astonished at the extent to which it wasn’t possible just to learn this, quickly, at the beginning. I’m happy not to have given up, and determined to continue the slow learning. And I will keep at it until something happens.
Burnout
Let’s reflect, just briefly, on the concept of burnout. When we put an enormous amount of energy into something and get nothing back, we can feel absolutely exhausted by the failure of the effort to make anything happen.
When I was a stand up comedian I remember thinking, what can I make happen through this performance, if I really commit to it? If I’m really, really funny? What would that do for my comedy career? The answer was, not very much.
Success in stand up comedy does not come from being really, really funny, tonight. Success in stand up comedy comes from being really, really funny, 6 nights a week for 10 years. And that wasn’t something I had the lifestyle to commit to, in the end. I didn’t want to be away from home every evening. I missed my kids. And so I gave that up, in search of something that worked better with the school routine.
Burnout is lurking, when you’re trying to learn a new skill. If you put more effort in, in one go, than really makes any sense, you are likely to wind up disappointed. However, if you think more in terms of the medium-long term, and determine to turn up, and every damn day, then you can keep chipping away at it, every day, until something happens.
Bowling maidens
A cricketer I admire, whose name currently escapes me, said that if you bowl a couple of maidens, something will happen. A maiden is six balls in a row, with no runs being scored as a result. A batter who fails to score 12 times in a row will change something about their batting approach. They’ll make a mistake. And you’ll get them out. I remember when I was trying to find the job I eventually found in July 2021, a friend told me, ‘you only need one of these bastards to crack’. That was comforting, amongst a sea of rejection emails. (Not that you even get rejection emails, anymore.)
I think about the concept of ‘bowling maidens’ a lot. When I’m trying to learn a new skill, or when I’m trying to make something happen, I think carefully about how not to put too much effort into it on any individual day. It’s more about every day, than the individual day. And if I’m also reading books about the topic, filling the creative well with general materials whilst trying to learn something, then eventually my brain will piece what I’m trying to do with the wisdom of people who have achieved great things over thousands of years, and I’ll come up with a new way of working that just might crack it.
Podcasting was very much the same. 18 months of trying to make Walk the Pod a good pod. 18 months of flailing around. Failing. Trying again. Eventually, with your feedback, help, and support, we got there. And now I’m going to deliver it for as long as I can.
What new skill are you working on, at the moment? How is it going? Drop me a note and let me know.
Your new series of daily walking podcast episodes will start on Monday 14 October. Might it be about something related to this topic of returning to things we want to succeed at, over and over again? What would you even call that. Tenacity? I’ll put it on the list.