The Hidden Risks of Staying in the Wrong Job | Rory Sutherland

What are the hidden psychological or emotional risks of not changing careers and staying stuck? It's opportunity cost. We never think of that. We never think of there's a big risk to doing the same thing. A very small percentage of the things that happen to you or the decisions you make determine most of the success. And this is why I always say that 20% of your life should be deliberately... Rory Sutherland is an expert in marketing and human behavior. He's an author, columnist and vice chairman of the Ogilvy Advertising Company. So he knows a lot about the psychology of winning clients, taking risks and optimizing for attention. Don't ever assume that the fact that nobody's doing it is simply because they've tried and it hasn't worked. No, they probably haven't even tried. A lot of larger businesses demand proof before you do anything, but there's never any proof of anything innovative because it doesn't exist yet. If you could give someone on the edge of a career switch one behavioral economics hack, what would that be? To make it easier for them to switch? Yeah. I'll tell this story because it's quite amusing. Hello and welcome to The Switch from St. James's Place Financial Advisor Academy. I'm Ju Fitzitz. If you're ready for a better, more fulfilling career, this is your go-to resource to start that journey. And today I'm delighted to be joined by Rory Sutherland. Rory, a very warm welcome to the show. It's a pleasure to be here. Well, I'm very excited to have you in the studio with us today. Now, Rory, you have described much of your career as being shaped by luck, timing and curiosity. Looking back, what risks felt pivotal to getting where you are now? Very interesting question, which is that we tend to think that success is only valid if we planned it in advance. In other words, we only deem successful those things we achieved which we intended to achieve. And I think that's too deterministic an approach to life that you ought to always in life place a side bet, which is, I'm not entirely sure where this is going, but I'm currently interested. And it's a way of maximizing your chances of getting lucky. If you think about it, when you go to a party, you don't go to a party necessarily with a specific intention. You go there to see what happens. And one of the things that worries me about current large businesses is they're so keen in narrowly defining and prescribing what everybody does all the time to make the organization look efficient that they pay a hidden cost, which is you never have any lucky accidents. And you can take this back to the field of science, by the way, which is penicillin being one obvious case, Viagra being another one. In fact, most breakthrough scientific discoveries involve a degree of luck. It wasn't what someone was planning to do all along. And so in my own case, I suppose, I was incredibly lucky in one respect in that my brother, who's an academic, I was working in marketing in the early 90s. I'd been there for about six or seven years in the mid 1990s. My brother, who is an academic, flat shared with someone in Berkeley, California, who'd previously been the flatmate of Tim Berners-Lee. So I got to hear about the World Wide Web incredibly early. And by the way, this is always forgotten. There was a period of about a year where being an Internet enthusiast made you something a little like a train spotter. You were treated as a weirdo. And by the way, the importance of it for the first year or so was widely dismissed or people described it as CB radio for the 1990s and so on. But that gave me, in a way, actually, to be honest, it was a disadvantage and an advantage. In terms of my being able to understand it and talk about it fluently, it was a great advantage. I was in early. The only thing is, had I started a business at that stage, it probably would have been too early. It's worth noting, I think, that, for example, timing is extraordinarily important in the creation of any business. Someone made the point, I think, very astutely that if Bill Gates, for example, or Jobs or any of those people, Andy Grove, if they'd been born three years earlier or three years later, they couldn't have done what they did. Very interesting. I think Walmart, let me get this right, Walmart, Kmart and Target were all founded in the same year, I think 1962. And we mustn't forget this, by the way, when we're both praising people who are successful in business or sometimes disparaging people who fail, some part of it is beyond your control because it's simply getting the moment right. I think there are two words we should rehabilitate, which is opportunistic and anecdotal, because really interesting information generally emerges first in anecdotal form. It's not as a consequence of detailed data analysis or something. It's that someone notices something strange and decides to see what it means. And to a very large extent, I think it's intuitive as well. I think small businesses work intuitively. It's in larger businesses you need to pretend to be rational all the time because you spend half your life justifying yourself to somebody else. And I'm guessing among your viewers here, one of the reasons why they decided to go it alone is because they got sick of working in a corporate environment where only about 20 to 30% of what you do is actually valuable or revenue generating, and the other 70% is some kind of ass covering. And actually, also the nature of corporate bureaucracies, I totally sympathize with anybody. It's got worse, I think significantly worse in the last 15 to 20 years where there has to be a process or a procedure for everything that you do. And so the exercise of subjective judgment, which has always been and should remain a large part of business decision making, when you don't have all the data you need to make a decision, to some extent it's got to involve a degree of intuition. And yet business is so frightened of that they construct these kind of artificial rational processes, which are really all about blame avoidance. They're nothing to do with value creation at all. So anybody who wants to get out of that kind of world where actually the private sector increasingly looks like the public sector, you've got my support. I completely understand your motivation. Fantastic. Now you woke up one day and said, I woke up a celebrity one day. So is there a path that led you to there that others might be able to follow? Or can you optimize those lucky accidents that you mentioned? Well, that was lucky in the sense that it wasn't me who thought I'd go on TikTok. It was never my intention to be on TikTok. And actually, it was partly a byproduct of the pandemic, because during the pandemic, I just appeared on a lot of podcasts, because why not? I mean, there wasn't much else I could be doing. And also because the podcasts were online, it was pretty convenient thing to do. And then a couple of people, one person in particular, just started following me fairly assiduously. And then they started taking clips from my podcasts and effectively TikTok-izing them. And so they'd take an interesting 30 seconds or 45 seconds. They'd add captions, and they just started posting those. And the first I knew about it really was, I think one was my children going, Dad, what the hell are you doing on TikTok? And the second thing was I'd occasionally get mobbed by school kids on the street. And so that was one of those cases where simple fame and exposure has a value all in itself. And I think in the advertising industry, we've slightly lost sight of this, because it sounds very banal. If you go to an advertising agency, we're expected to say something really sophisticated now, like we need to optimize your micro-targeting of smaller-level demographics. That's kind of what makes you look intelligent and adult. And the simple promise, we can make you famous, looks a bit childish and banal. But actually fame is very, very valuable in lots and lots of complementary ways, not least opportunities come to you, rather than you needing to find them all for yourself. And how much of risk-taking is about reframing, so changing the way you see risk rather than the risk itself? First of all, I think there's a difference between risk and uncertainty. And often, even when the position may be fairly positive overall, we're disquieted by the idea of uncertainty. That's one of the reasons why people find it very difficult to leave a full-time paid job, because the money isn't great, the prospects are rubbish. I mean, broadly speaking, employers have been treating employees worse and worse over the 30 years of my working life. There was always an implicit understanding in the first 20 years of my working life that if the business did well, the employees did well. It was never formally recorded, but that was the understanding. And I think that contract's been broken. I think if the company does well, the shareholders do well, and the employees get to keep their jobs. I think it's a fundamentally different kind of engagement. And what I notice is, of course, my younger staff don't realize that it was ever any different. But nonetheless, it offers the appeal of a paycheck at the end of the month. And so even when, in every statistical question, it makes sense to go it alone, our natural instinct for variance reduction or risk aversion makes it scary. There are some elements of legislation which I think need to be looked at, because ultimately, I think the future of the economy really no longer depends on large businesses to the extent that it once did. I think the future of a wealthy economy depends really on two things, which is high-quality jobs for frontline service staff and independent entrepreneurs and smaller businesses. And in something you said earlier, do you feel that humans often overestimate certain risks, like career change or failure, and underestimate other risks, like staying stuck in the wrong job? Yes. There's a very simple way to explain this, which is a cost, i.e. the loss of a salary, is quantifiable and concrete. An opportunity cost is nebulous. And this is why I always say that 20% of your life should be deliberately a bit randomized. And I occasionally, you know, with my own employer, I would run into problems with this, which is they go, why are you going to this conference? And I'd say, I don't know yet, because I haven't been. And my argument is that, to some extent, a proportion of your resources should be devoted to exploratory activities. And the reason is, it's very, very easy to focus purely on the day job, what we need to do now, because it makes you feel very efficient. And as I said, a loss is completely tangible and quantifiable. And I would argue that the power of finance functions in modern business is problematic because they're uncertainty averse. In other words, a finance person would rather make a definite 3% than take a slightly riskier decision where the expected outcome might be 8%, but there was a chance of a 1% downside. And so, the way to understand this probably best is a book. It sounds very odd that I'm recommending to serious financial advisors a book written by a poker player. But Annie Duke, who was for some years a professional poker player, has written a book called Thinking in Bets. And it's a very, very useful mindset to adopt. It's also, by the way, a very important mindset to adopt as an investor as well. So, this applies both to your own personal life, but also to how you approach investment, that it is very important to avoid bankruptcy. So, let's not be totally foolish here. You know, if you have some sort of cushion on which you know you can depend, it makes sense to much riskier elsewhere. Because, you know, in other words, your downside is not elimination, bankruptcy. But at the same time, we probably have a... And you can understand why our brains evolved this way, because two or three bad decisions could lead to starvation. Sticking or experimenting with a new food could lead to poisoning. So, we've evolved, in a sense, to be both habit-driven and risk-averse. And also, we've evolved, by the way, to be a herd species as well. We copy other people to a disproportionate extent. And, you know, going out on your own when all your friends are in a full-time job feels disproportionately scary. But I always make the point that, you know, to an extent, you do tend to find entrepreneurs in poker clubs or casinos rather than in chess clubs. Because they accept the fact that actually, to some extent, life is fat-tailed, if I'm being honest about it, which is to say that five, you know, a very small percentage of the things that happen to you, all the decisions you make, determine most of the success or, you know, most of the outcome. And, you know, fluke events like me being on TikTok. It was never really planned. It was never really intended. But the way to look at it is, you know, when you look back on your life, two or three or four or five things you did and five things that happened to you were almost more important than everything else put together. All the decisions about what shoes to wear, where to go on holiday, often end up being relatively trivial compared to a few fluke events. And actually, if you play poker, actually, or if you play blackjack, they all notice the same thing, that actually you go home and five or six hands really determine the outcome for the whole evening. Amazing. And I think real life is like that. And we spend a lot of time pretending it isn't. Yeah. And you mentioned exploratory activities. Our audience are people considering a career change for one reason or another, not necessarily have made the decision to join St James's Place, although we hope some of them will make that decision. But what kind of activities might somebody who's already thinking if they want something different and something new, what kind of exploratory activities could they start to do? Talk to other people in the field because they will also describe to you the emotions they experienced when they first took the plunge. What you also notice is that except under duress, let's also look at observation. Let's just look at behavioral observation to cheer yourself up and to give yourself confidence. You know, I always argue, look, we can have huge arguments about electric cars, whether they're better, whether they're worse, whether there should be a subsidy. The real question to ask is how many people who buy an electric car go back to a petrol car? And it's only about seven or eight percent. Same was true of automatic transmission. And one thing, you know, people went, oh, no, no, I don't want an automatic. I'd miss the sense of control. Once people had an automatic car, they never got a manual car ever again. And there are a lot of decisions that are like this, which are difficult to take. But once you've taken them, you'd never go back. And I think simple observation teaches you that people who've gone freelance, people who've gone independent, people who've discovered autonomy, generally you don't find them going, I really missed the nine to five to you. Absolutely. Let's be honest about this. You know, I mean, there might be one or two. They might miss the paycheck. They might miss the regularity of the paycheck. There may be a whole load of bureaucratic and administrative things that were once taken care of that now they have to do themselves. And by the way, that burden is getting worse to a point that really worries me. You know, there are several things that worry me about self-employment. One is high housing costs. What we've got to remember is Silicon Valley was founded in California partly because at the time property was really cheap there. You know, that's one thing that an entrepreneur needs to minimize the number of external commitments you have. And the growth in bureaucracy also worries me. Nonetheless, when you account for everything else, there aren't many people who go, I'd go back if I could. They always say, I wish I did it soon. And I think that's a piece of behavioral evidence. Now, OK, there's probably a degree of self-justification in that people minimize regret and, you know, people tend not to not to talk about their regrets. But nonetheless, the preponderance of that, why didn't I do that five years earlier? There's also an additional economic factor to consider here. And in the world of financial advice, I've often said that Zoom and YouTube may be the most important technologies for financial advisors in the last 50 years. And the reason is that several things. One, a lot of your clientele want to have a conversation with you. They need a human being. I needed a human being to talk to me to pay off my mortgage. It was too big a decision for me to take without coaching. And to some extent, you're a financial therapist, not a financial advisor in that job. In the same way that hairdressers are therapists who also cut your hair. There's a very large emotional support role in that job. I need a human being, but I don't necessarily want them to come to my house. I've got to get home early. I've got to tidy the house. I've got to buy biscuits, make coffee, make small talk, explain that we know where the entrance is. And the Zoom call, particularly with maybe both parties present, is an absolute 10x breakthrough in this business. So that's one way in which it's really, really important. Also, YouTube, you're now your own television producer if you want to be. So the YouTube channel could be exclusive just to your clientele, but you can now spend an hour talking to 100 people rather than an hour talking to one. So those two technologies, in a field which still requires the presence of a human being, it can't be automated, and yet which fundamentally makes the whole thing vastly more efficient. That's important. But there's a third thing, which is what if you could live somewhere else? Because I argue increasingly that, and we always talk about the rich moving to low tax jurisdictions, probably the best financial move you might be able to make in life is to move to a low rent jurisdiction or a low property price jurisdiction, because then you can put less of your own money into the property market, which is a hopelessly illiquid and I would argue increasingly dangerous place to rely on capital accumulation. Buy to let without capital accumulation. I think it's a mugs game, by the way, in terms of the return you get. And so if this technology gives you the freedom to live somewhere less expensive to live, that's much more tax efficient than getting a pay rise, and it's quite often more valuable. One bit of advice, you always get the people who overcompensate and move to the outer Hebrides. Actually, you don't need to do that. There's comparatively inexpensive and very desirable property within 60 or 70 miles of London, sometimes less. But the extent to which the problem that far too much of Britain's disposable income is going into... If you ever want to feel a missionary as a financial advisor, just see your mission as this. My job is to get more and more of people's available capital going into the productive economy rather than going into the property market. Your other mission is to get young people to understand the compounding effect, because I didn't. When I was younger, I had this pension. I'm slightly resentful. I thought I could have gone on holiday with that money. It's not doing anything. Suddenly, I'm 58. I suddenly have where did all this money come from? We don't instinctively understand the compounding effect. We think that things grow linearly. You have the interesting psychological challenge, and this is why behavioral science, I think, is so important in your business, of selling something that's unappealing at first, where the real rewards only become apparent much later. You will have a lot of people in 15 years' time or 20 years' time who absolutely love you if you're doing your job right. A colleague of mine met someone in a pub who'd worked for him 20 years earlier. The colleague said to a very deeply unemotional guy, he said, don't forget it was me who persuaded you to take out a pension. He wasn't a financial advisor. He was just a colleague. When the company instituted a kind of employee contribution scheme, my friend persuaded his colleague to go into it. When he reminded him of this fact at the pub, the guy hugged him. As I said, he was not a demonstrative or emotional man by any means, but it's transformed his life now. He would be guessing he's probably 61 now, and it's given him options that he never knew he'd have. Far, far better than living in an expensive house because you actually have money in a liquid form that you can access part of it without having to move house. Yeah, absolutely. Now, let's go back to our career changes. You've spoken a lot about thinking about the risks from a financial perspective, but what are the hidden psychological or emotional risks of not changing careers and staying stuck, not taking the leap? It's opportunity cost. That's a very, very good reframing, by the way, which is we never think of that. We never think of there's a big risk to doing the same thing. There's a big risk to continuing doing what I'm doing. Or saving in the bank account. Because we've evolved to think of habitual behaviors as safe. Job security isn't what it was. That's one point. Optionality, by the way, has a value all of its own. The fact that you can deploy your time in a way of your own choosing has a double payback. It helps you make more money, but it also makes you happier in and of itself. So that's a double win, for example. Neither of those things is really available to you if you're in paid full-time employment. So interesting. Now, by the way, what I don't want to be doing here is saying to someone who's 23 and has only had one year's experience in the workforce, off you go, go and do your own thing. I think that gaining three, four, five years experience minimum in that kind of conventional work setting has all kinds of value to it. You learn a lot at someone else's expense, to a large extent. To some extent, you're insured against mistakes. And also, I think you learn things like self-discipline, punctuality. I always said, if I'd just gone self-employed after being a student, I probably wouldn't have started work until Wednesday every week, if I'm being honest about it. So Jimmy Carr always refers to this, that he worked for Shell. He worked in an ad agency, and then worked for Shell. And his work ethic is extraordinary. And he says, well, everybody says my work ethic is extraordinary. Maybe it is for a comedian, but it was just what I learned to do when I was in office. You put in eight or nine hours a day for five days a week minimum. Absolutely. So yes, I mean, one, you're tied to a particular place. You're tied to a particular time. Let's say your children have left home. One of the joyous things about that is you can suddenly take holidays at less crowded, less expensive times of the year. The sheer flexibility of it is really valuable. Now, I'm going to advise, obviously, you should take out insurance against certain things, because there are things that your employer sort of invisibly took care of that you may want to be quite alert to once you go self-employed. You will also find, by the way, the other bit of tip would be probably go and open a load of bank accounts and take out any mortgages you want or do anything bureaucratic before you leave work, because it is much easier to do those things when you're in full-time employment. Absolutely. We've got a full financial due diligence onboarding process with people, and we make sure that we have these very meaningful conversations with not just the person considering joining us, but considering the whole household, what their future plans are, what does the household income look like, and taking that risk and making sure it is an acceptable financial risk for them. But the risk of not doing it is missing out on personal growth or the autonomy and all the things that we've spoken about. By the way, I imagine what you're saying is that you're in a business which 10 years ago was overwhelmingly male, wasn't it? I don't know why, by the way. I mean, there's no particular reason. No, there's no reason why. I mean, unless it's total prejudice, you know, that, no, no, no, it's numbers, so it has to be a chap. I think there's a hangover to that. Funnily enough, I was reading a book this morning where they said that a large part of the distrust of intuition, which is an incredibly valuable mental skill, which if you become an entrepreneur, you will increasingly use, comes from an old sexist idea in psychology in the 19th century that men were rational and women were intuitive. And so intuition was considered the less reliable. And so in some ways, the undervaluing of intuition arose from a form of 19th century sexism, really. But I mean, interesting question there in terms of, you know, this would have been a field that was overwhelmingly male. And actually, I think the field needs to feminize, inverted commas, both metaphorically and literally for a very interesting reason, which is that when I said earlier that this is, you're a financial therapist, I think conversations about money purely as money are boring, whereas conversations about what you want out of life are fundamentally interesting. And by the way, it's weird how little time people actually spend asking, what do I really want to do? The day-to-day firefighting, the urgent, always triumphs over the really important. There's a story always told in, it's often used in sermons in, I think, you know, in a religious setting, which is you can get far more things in a jar if you put the big stones in first and then put the sand in second. If you put the sand in first, you can't get the stones in. And the analogy, the metaphor they're using there is that deal with the big stuff first and then the little stuff will take care of itself. But most of the time, the little stuff, by the way, in a digital world, this is even worse, okay, with beeping phones. In other words, we're always on our facility for concentration and our facility for switching off has been badly dented. But the little stuff distract, the little shiny things distract us from what's really important. And, you know, one question to ask, which, you know, if you're thinking of going independent, is do you have some massive hobby or enthusiasm or passion that you would like to combine with a job? Because you've previously seen your life as being work, leisure. You are now entering a world where the two are not mutually exclusive. I spent, what, 10 days, I suppose, about eight days in Tenerife about two weeks ago. For about three days of it, I was working. Daniel Kahneman, you may be familiar, thinking fast and slow, Daniel Kahneman even argues that when you go on holiday, you should work for a couple of days in the middle, because he said you get acclimatized to constant leisure, so it loses its novelty value. So if you lull around by the pool for two days and then do a day's work, going back to the pool now feels more enjoyable. So he argues you can actually maximize enjoyment by breaking it up slightly. So there are things you can suddenly do, which you never thought of doing because you thought of them as mutually exclusive, but in fact, they're combinatorial. I'm pretty happy. You get up in the morning, you do a morning's work, you've got the afternoon to yourself on holiday. That's actually a fantastic combination. Now, the conventional world of work never allowed for that degree of ambiguity. No, absolutely. Now, I've got one final question on risk. What is the biggest risk that you have taken that didn't work out and what did it teach you? First of all, there's a risk I didn't take, which I wish I had, which was a very, very large pitch where the person effectively asking us to pitch as an agency was mad, but the amount of money was available was very large. And I wish to this day we'd just walked away. But it was kind of like one of those biased decisions where everybody, if you'd walked away, everybody would have, you know, FOMO, it's a FOMO problem, really. And I wish for ages after that, I wished I'd just done the brave thing and walked away. In terms of risks I've taken, well, first of all, tough question, because you can reframe certain failures as a learning experience and certain things where your original intention fails prove valuable in some other way. What do I mean? I'll tell you a lovely mistake I made, which is that somebody came to me about 10 years ago with this idea to popularize a fermented tea drink, which sounded to me the most ridiculous idea I'd ever heard in my life. And it turned out it was called kombucha. So, you know, it's always worth remembering with the best will in the world, you know, the best you can hope for is to be right about more things than you're wrong about. You know, don't let you beat yourself up over mistakes you make, because it's the old phrase, if you never miss a plane, if you've never ever missed a flight, you've spent too much of your life at airports. And, you know, likewise, if you've never made a mistake, you've almost certainly been far too cautious in terms of what you do. Now, we're going to move on to winning clients and behavioral science. Now, when it comes to gaining trust, when you're new to something like our new advisors coming into our academy program, what psychological tactics can help One thing, read Robert Cialdini in his book on influence. I don't know to what part, you know, their training is to do with this. One part is underselling people, is saying what you don't need. You know, at your stage of life, I wouldn't bother with this, I wouldn't bother with this, I wouldn't bother with this. But if there's one thing I would do, it's this. Secondly, be long term greedy, not short term greedy. Because fundamentally, there are two forms of capitalism, there's transactional capitalism, and there's relational capitalism. And you're in the relational capitalism business, which is your job is to maximize the value of a relationship to mutual benefit over time, not get the biggest hit you can from a short term transaction. Other things that contribute to trust, the acts of discretionary kindness or generosity, generally do that. There are, you know, simple courtesy, empathy, lots of those things contribute to trust. It's also worth asking the opposite question, what are the behaviors which make you profoundly untrustworthy, because the first job is to eradicate any of those. Now, maybe you are deeply untrustworthy, in which case you won't last very long in this business, I suspect, because it's quite difficult to hide. Human instinct is pretty good. The other thing is to change the conversation from one about wealth maximization, to one about lifestyle, and give advice on subjects where you have no dog in the fight. I mean, one very interesting thing about going self employed, by the way, which no one ever tells you in advance, is that the tax position completely changes your approach to spending. Because, of course, you're taxed when you take money out of the business, but you're not taxed when you reinvest in the business. There are a few people who desperately want to bring back the enterprise allowance scheme, because what they realized on the enterprise allowance scheme is that when people create a business, they fundamentally think the very existence of a business in their name makes them think differently. The other thing is that, you know, it is actually much more tax efficient in many ways. Go and get an electric car, because you'll get, you know, absolutely minuscule benefit in kind tax from, you know, you can do it with salary sacrifice in some jobs. But there are significant tax advantages, because certain things which you always had to pay for out of taxed income are now available to you out of untaxed income. But talking, when I say about talk to people about wider financial advice, don't go straight to the cell, because an awful lot of the value you add to these people, by the way, I think this is true, that even if the financial advisors I dealt with over the last 35 years, even if the return had been dismal, I would still be grateful to them, because, to be absolutely honest, without them, I would have spent the money rather than saving it. And so, at the very least, what you do do is you help people think, you know, think further ahead than the traditional, you know, week or day or whatever it may be. And one of the great questions is, one way to be trustworthy is people, I don't want to get wildly philosophical and into Simon Sinek territory here, but people can kind of tell why you're doing it. And if you can build a sense of mission and purpose into what you're doing, rather than narrow financial, short-term financial self-interest, it shows. So, I would say that just as, you know, in evolutionary terms, okay, the objective of romance is probably sexual, right? What evolutionary psychologists would call that is one objective is the ultimate objective, the other one is the proximate objective. And understand that distinction between the proximate and the ultimate objective, which is that in many ways, in your business, profitability is best pursued obliquely. If you help people do something, and then profit and commission and all the other rewards are a byproduct of that thing, ironically, you end up making more money than if you pursue money directly. And John Kay has written a book about this called Obliquity. He's a London Business School professor and journalist, and the book's called Obliquity. And there are certain things, by which I mean is that you will probably be more likely to have children in an evolutionary sense if you pursue being romantic than if you pursue procreation directly. Oh, another very important thing in trust is tell people bad news, I would argue. A degree of candor, a degree of, you know, and they said it's something very, very few CEOs do because they think my job is to look perfect. But they actually said a rather beautiful phrase. They said an admission of weakness is sometimes the ultimate power move, because the fact that you can afford to do it speaks volumes. Those people who are always pretending that everything's perfect, you know, fundamentally, we're suspicious of them because we suspect that they're, ultimately, we're not getting the real them. They're issuing bulletins about themselves or, you know, or press releases about themselves rather than genuinely allowing us to look inside them a little bit. Absolutely. And what about tactics beyond our field, other new business owners wooing potential clients outside of the financial advice sector? Don't afraid to be a bit eccentric. I've literally asked the question, and I don't know the answer to this question, but it deserves some research. When bankers go on television, they think their audience is other bankers, and they always wear a suit and tie. I've always argued, if ever you're a banker being interviewed on television, okay, or anybody in the field of finance being interviewed on television, you will be an I'm not suggesting you go in jeans and a hoodie, okay, but I suspect you will be inordinately more trustworthy if you don't adopt that old uniform, because I think the suit and tie is a kind of proxy measure for probity and reliability and respectability. To be honest, I don't think it's there anymore. So, you know, there are really important questions about how you present yourself, how you think of your personal brand. So a reasonable degree of eccentricity comes across as authenticity, that you are your own person. You're not some sort of droid, and you will ultimately find your own, you know, being true to yourself, your own personality. Absolutely. Okay, is a pretty good way of being trustworthy, because we're pretty good. We've had, you know, half a million years of evolutionary experience in detecting people who are faking it. Really interesting. Now, let's go back to careers, not just financial advice. We're talking all sectors now. What lessons can we take from the world of marketing to market ourselves and our careers? Should everyone adopt an online persona and think about building their own personal brand? Yes, to an extent. And what I mean by that is, be different in some way. I mean, I partly chose my financial advisor, I know this sounds ridiculous, because they had a really good Zoom setup, and they'd really nerded out buying an SLR camera and using it as a webcam. I thought, that's how I want to interact with my advisor. Therefore, I want someone who's invested in this and committed to doing it well. And it was just a general mark of professionalism, I thought, that they were prepared to, you know, speculate, to accumulate, as it were. One of the most valuable attributes of, you know, of a brand is simply distinctiveness. That, you know, you think of that, I mean, we were pitching to an online bank, I think we're pitching tomorrow or something. And they've got a very good interest rate and everything else. And I said, you're going to hate me telling you this, but you need to make the card coral, or you need to do something slightly weird, that's talkable, that's memorable, that's out of the ordinary. Let me tell the story. There's a guy called Will Godara, and I recommend everybody who's listening to this podcast buys his book, which seems strange, because Will Godara is not a financial advisor, he's a restaurateur. And he took over the restaurant 11 Madison Park in Manhattan and turned it from the number 50 restaurant, the San Pellegrino Awards, to the number one restaurant. And one of the ways he did it is he took his staff, when they were number 50 in 2011, when they were number 50, he took his staff and his team to the number one restaurant. And they all started copying what everybody else did well. We ought to do that with the napkins, we could do that in the bathrooms, we could do this. At the end of the meal, he said, I'm not interested in anything you've said so far, because you've been talking about what they're doing well, and you've been suggesting copying it. Now, if we do that, nobody will notice all that much, because, you know, someone else is doing it somewhere else. What I want to know is what was bad about the experience, or what was just slightly disappointing. And then we're going to take those two disappointing things, and we're going to double down. And the two things that were disappointing about what was the best restaurant in the world, were the coffee, and the people in the party who wanted to drink beer, got treated relatively shabbily compared to the wine drinkers. Michelin, three-star restaurant, you can get the whole thing. And so he went back and he appointed one of his staff, the coffee sommelier, and another of his staff, the beer sommelier. And in future, the coffee was single origin roasts. And, you know, there was probably a little bit of carb that told you about the coffee you were drinking. And when you asked for beer, someone came along with a whole craft ale menu, with, you know, tasting notes and pairing suggestions. Now, if you're a beer drinker at that restaurant, that would blow you out of the park. Find something that nobody else does, and do it really well. And I literally mean that. I mean, literally find some shtick. Now, we were discussing it, and I was having a conversation with a hotelier the other day. Now, this requires some imagination, because copying what people are already doing is very easy to do. You go, we'll do that, okay? And it's already established, and, you know, there's probably a business case for it already. Doing something entirely original requires imagination, or it requires what-if questions. And talking to a hotelier, I said, you know the weird thing? I spend more time in hotels working than I do watching TV while I'm awake. No hotel has ever offered, even for money, to supply with a monitor. Now, the funny thing about that is, it's actually a source of revenue to the hotel. You know, it would only take so many nights higher. And that would make them, that would be a deal-breaker in terms of, do I stay at the X or the Y hotel? If the X hotel offers monitors and the Y hotel doesn't, for me, that's a deal-breaker. Okay, you know, it's, you know, it'd be a bit like, you know, it's like Wi-Fi was, you know, you know, about 10 years ago, I guess. No, a bit longer than that. 20 years ago in the hotel industry, Wi-Fi just became a deal-breaker. If you didn't have Wi-Fi, no one would stay there. But looking for something which nobody's doing, don't ever assume that the fact that nobody's doing it is simply because they've tried and it hasn't worked. No, they probably haven't even tried. Because a lot of business is very self-referential. Also, a lot of larger businesses demand proof before you can do anything. But there's never any proof of anything innovative, because it doesn't exist yet. And so, that finance kind of burden of proof of, can you show me the business case? Can you tell me who else has done this? Which is sort of management consultancy stock and trade. We've done this over here. Now, we'll do it for you. Okay. Fundamentally leads you to unimaginative places, which are full of incremental improvement. Now, we often crave data and evidence before making big life decisions, which we're increasingly getting from AI, chatbots. Is this doing us a disservice, taking away some of our spontaneity that we use in decision making? Yes. And Jeff Bezos has, to some extent, uncovered the reason why, which is because we're more blame-averse than we are loss-averse. We're desperate to prove that every decision we made was completely robust, because in the event that it doesn't turn out well, we will be a repository of blame if our argumentation isn't completely sound. But Jeff Bezos, whose approach to decision sciences is very distinct and very interesting and very intelligent, argues that there are two kinds of decision. There are two-way doors, and there are one-way doors. Now, a one-way door is something irreversible. By the way, your decision to leave paid employment and work for yourself may not be as irreversible as you think it is, because in many cases, your employer would probably have you back, possibly on more generous terms than you're on at present. So first of all, it's important to be clear. If you're Amazon and you're building a 10 million square foot warehouse north of Memphis, that's a pretty irreversible decision. I suppose you can sell it to somebody else. But you need to be absolutely sure your ducks are in a row, that it's the right place, that it works, that there are no major obstacles. That's a case for major due diligence and extreme rigor. Jeff argues that we make the mistake of applying the same rigor to two-way door decisions, where we should be happy with a much lower burden of proof, which is a two-way decision is one where if you walk through the door and you don't like what you see, you can dial it back. It's reversible. So marriage mostly is a one-way door. Going out to dinner with someone is a two-way door. In other words, it's the difference between an option and a commitment. And we don't really distinguish in a business setting between the rigor we apply to both. But Jeff would argue that, look, there's an opportunity cost to not trying things. If it's almost less expensive to try the thing in reality than it is to argue about it in theory, why don't we just try it? If we don't like what we see, it hasn't cost us very much because we can kill it off quickly. Now, interestingly, both Amazon Prime and Amazon Web Services, two of Amazon's biggest ideas, were initially rejected by almost everybody. In fact, board members threatened to resign over Amazon Prime. The person who put the presentation together proposing that Amazon become a cloud provider apparently didn't do a very rigorous job. And loads of people were saying, no, no, you haven't convinced me. And Jeff stepped in and said, this is a two-way door. We're Amazon. We'll have to spend a load of money on data centers and bandwidth and processing capacity. If we can sell that to someone else, whoop-dee-doo, let's do it. And if it turns out we can't, well, we haven't lost much anyway because we were investing most of this money anyway. And Jeff, by spotting it was a two-way door, said, I agree that the case is not completely compelling and it would turn us into a business that had to sell to very large corporations, which is where our expertise doesn't necessarily currently lie, dah-dee-dah-dee-dah. But nonetheless, he said, it's a two-way door. We'll try it. Now, it's now actually the most lucrative, most profitable part of Amazon. And so understanding that, I think, that what tends to happen in a business setting is we often show off by how rigorous we are. What it really is, is ass-covering disguised as commitment or rigor. And, you know, Gerhard Gigeren is one of the world's best psychologists, makes this point that the natural tendency in many settings is not to make a good decision, it's make the decision that's easiest to defend. Calls it defensive decision-making. And he argues that in everything from medicine to business, in many cases, people are making decisions not for the purposes of value creation, but for the purposes of blame-risk minimization. Or in some cases, blame-risk dispersion, because if you make a decision as a committee, there's no one person who can take the blame. So that's why so many meetings are called in business. Because effectively, if we all decide collectively, you know, effectively, we've dissipated any potential blame. Now, thinking of our career switches out there, if you could give someone on the edge of a career switch one behavioral economics hack, something they could implement today, what would that be? To make it easier for them to switch? Yeah. Well, first of all, I'm going to be responsible here. Make sure it's the right thing to do. Make sure you have a certain amount of money in hand that, you know, it's not going to lead to catastrophe. Discuss it with your significant others, patently. Worth noting that the dual income household, if you are in a relationship, makes this arguably the perfect household is where one person has a paid job and the other one has variable income. That is what Nassim would call a barbell strategy, which is the one income keeps the wolf from the door. It means you're going to be okay and pay the mortgage. The second person can then afford to be more speculative. And then, you know, you have the benefit of their potential limitless upside. Because one of the problems about working for a single employer is there's a limit to how much money you can make effectively, because everything you get is from them. The great thing about working for multiple people is no one cares how much money you're making from anybody else. So, you know, there are huge upsides to being plural, if you like. In other words, from not allowing your employer to have a monopoly relationship over you. So, you know, look at it very broadly. Look at it in terms of what you want to do. Look at it in terms of saying, which might be, by the way, something I very, very largely try and get the government to encourage. Maybe the deal here is I have a better time in my 40s, 50s, 60s, but I retire a bit later. Look at the benefits of, you know, flexibility, which is, I would genuinely argue from a philosophical point of view, this is why I'm going plural at the age of 59. People have this absolute social norm, which is you bust a gut, okay? And then you retire and you're working towards retirement. Now, the second you're working towards retirement, in other words, your day-to-day job is not providing you with enough intrinsic pleasure that you have to think about your retirement in order to actually keep going. There's something wrong because, you know, if you leave that too late, for example, you know, you end up replacing business meetings with medical appointments without an intervening enjoyable period in between. You know, be careful about that. And by the way, other things, I know you're financial advisors, but I make this point. Other things other than money have a value. It's just not quantifiable. So, what's the value of autonomy? What's the value of being able to go shopping on Wednesday rather than going shopping on Saturday? What's the value of being able to live where you want to live rather than living where your employer wants you to live? Now, when you add all those things together, yep, there isn't a cash value attached to any of those things. Just because you can't put it in a spreadsheet doesn't mean it's not important. I really love that, Rory. Thank you. By the way, you can also save a lot of money if you've got a bit more discretionary time. Maybe instead of employing someone to put up shelves, you do it yourself. There are an awful lot of things now where I would argue that your best financial strategy, to some extent, is avoiding living in a high rent area or even better selling your house. I'm not sure the property market isn't going to be either very depressing for a long time or suffer some sort of dramatic correction. And this may be a great time to actually sell up and clear out. The other one is always invert. One final bit of advice. I'll tell this story because it's quite amusing. A couple who are friends of a friend of mine, they're both teachers. They didn't have huge salaries. But when they'd met in the early 80s, both of them had bought a flat. They sold their flats, pooled the money, bought a house in somewhere like Acton. Their discussion was they were now about 58. He was from Norfolk. She was from London. What he wanted to do is sell the house in Acton for a seven-figure sum, move back to Norfolk and buy a really, really nice house for 450,000. They could still teach part-time a bit if they wanted to. They could travel the world. They could do all manner of wonderful things. She was from London and couldn't face the idea of moving out of London. Now, I can't advise them on this. But what I can do is borrow from Warren Buffett and say, always invert. Consider the opposite. And my only question can you imagine someone living in Norfolk in a half-a-million-pound house and they win a million pounds on lottery and they go, that's brilliant. We can move to a smaller house in Acton and work for the next five years. No, nobody's going to do that, right? So if the inverse of what you're doing is ridiculous, that might help you make the decision. Now, there is risk. There's risk entailed. But the other point I'd make is that the boring route to riches, which is nose to the grindstone, keep going, do what you're supposed to do, stick with your employer, stay loyal, they'll look after you, that boring route to riches aided by property price appreciation, I don't think it exists anymore. Now, Scott Galloway, who I recommend you follow, along with some of the other interesting people on YouTube, I mentioned obviously earlier, I mentioned Kurt Gigerenz, I mentioned John Kay's book Obliquity. Scott Galloway says, no, no, no, if you can get one of those great corporate jobs in a way, do it because it's guaranteed upper middle class reasonable prosperity. I think that is absolutely brilliant advice if you're speaking to someone in 1987. Get a job in Goldman Sachs, go and work for a large multinational corporation. I think multinational corporations no longer deliver on that promise, really. The world's a different place. They're fundamentally different place. Yeah. So finally, what's the best piece of advice that you've been given either in work or in life that has stuck with you? Probably, and funnily enough, it was first given to me by someone who was a friend of mine when I was at university, who was a mature student who'd organised the Isle of Wight festivals. And he was a big believer in whenever... Now, it later became the slogan of the BBH advertising agency, and everybody thought they invented it, actually. It's been around for a few years. When everybody else zigs zag, that look to an extent where automatically a herd species, the really big gains will never come effectively pursuing the same metrics of success as everybody else. And sit down as an individual and define for yourself what success looks like, because if you're not careful, you'll end up effectively judging success by direct comparison with other people. And I think if you want this to go back further than when everybody else zigs zags, I think this comes from the philosopher Montaigne, which is your own happiness is too important to be outsourced to someone else's values sort of thing. And so I think it is really, really important you make the time to actually say, this is what success looks like to a lot of people. Left to my own devices, I will simply copy that. And I will judge myself by direct and easy comparison with the people I was at school with, the people I was at university with, whatever it may be. What you're doing then is you're outsourcing your own sources of happiness to someone else. I think making the space to say what really matters, which I haven't done, and nearly enough until very, very recently. Yeah, but what parts of your job do you like, and would you do for free? And what parts of your job do you find fundamentally painful? You know, and you know, it's very, very easy to allow the urgent to derail the important. Great advice. Thank you. And that mirrors what a lot of people have come on the show and said, is take the time out, understand who you are, what your values are. Yes, yes, yes, absolutely. And so that's great advice. Thank you, Rory. It's been an absolute pleasure having you on the show. Thank you for coming. Absolute pleasure. Thank you. Anytime. A big thanks to Rory for joining us on the podcast. If you enjoyed this episode of The Switch, make sure to follow, rate, and share it with somebody who's ready for a career change. And if you're on your own journey, hit subscribe. We've got plenty more inspiration and insights coming your way. I'm G Fitted, and you've been listening to The Switch from St James' Place Financial Advisor Academy.