Midlife MavericksTeresa messaged me on LinkedIn asking if we could talk. I don’t know Teresa from Adam, so the temptation was to say no, but she caught me in a weak moment and the message was very good. I ended up meeting her at the end of August.
She had just been appointed to the top job at the company she works for and had never been in a position like it. She turned up ridiculously well prepared, every question written out on a bit of paper.
She started by asking how I usually structure these conversations. I told her I don’t structure anything. You ask, I answer.
Halfway down the list came the million dollar question: “Looking back, what mistakes can you point to?”
I froze.
I told her it was the theme of the Executiva conference and that I wasn’t going to give anything away over the phone.
We did talk about it a bit. When I hung up the question stayed stuck in my throat for the rest of the day, because the real answer is that almost none of my mistakes took the shape of a decision.
We tell careers backwards. Three or four big moments, each with a date. The move to another firm. The jump out to your own business. We find a reason for each one, we make the list, and out comes a line that looks intentional.
Twenty seven years out of Portugal and what I see when I look back is nothing like that. Thousands of tiny decisions, made on the hoof, between one email and the next, that at the time never even reached the status of a decision.
You didn’t apply because they asked for ten years and you had eight.
You stayed quiet in the meeting because it was already running at forty minutes and it would have looked bad to hold it up.
You took the number they gave you, no counter, nothing, because it was already more than you were earning before and you were embarrassed to be haggling on day one.
You put off the conversation with your boss until after the summer. Then until after Christmas.
You said yes again to the project nobody wanted, because somebody had to do it.
None of this goes in the calendar. There’s no meeting, no minutes to sign. Each one of these decisions takes between four seconds and an afternoon, and then they add up for twenty years.
For me, one of those mini decisions was never going to work abroad.
I’ve lived in England since I was twenty three, and everyone assumes that settles it. It settles it the first time. Only the first time. It’s not the same thing, I promise you.
There was a period when I could have gone somewhere else. I didn’t. My husband, before he was my husband, was already here and worked regularly in another part of the world. England ended up being the neutral territory between the two lives.
There was never a conversation where somebody asked “what if we went?”. We just stayed on. A contract that made sense to renew, a project half done that it would have been stupid to drop.
So London became my Switzerland. Neutral territory. That’s how I’ve always described it when people ask why I’m here. The question usually comes out like this: “But you’re from Portugal, you’re living in London, why???”
What comes into my head when I think about it is always the same useless question. What if? I’ll never know what I’d have gained there. But I know what I’m missing.
Teresa wanted to know what, exactly. Exposure. A life where nobody around me thinks the way I do, where the most ordinary thing is done some other way and you’re forced to learn how to work again from zero. You don’t pick that up travelling. I’ve travelled a huge amount. It’s not the same thing.
I told Teresa what I always tell people. If it really matters to you, fight to be offered it. You can always turn it down. You go abroad for two years and you win either way, even when you lose.
I didn’t tell her that I’m speaking from the experience of not having had it.
I hate the word mistake. I say they’re experiments, and I mean it: you did a thing, it didn’t give the expected result, you take the lesson and you iterate next time.
Except an experiment has to have actually happened. What you never did produces no lesson at all. It sits there with no data, taking up room in your head for decades, waiting for an answer that can no longer come.
Then there’s the maths. At twenty six, moving country is a suitcase and a contract. At forty it’s a school year halfway through and parents who are starting to need you. The decision is the same. The price is never the same again, and it goes up every year you don’t move.
What irritates me about this is the mythology around the big decisions. People always ask me about the moments when I decided. I almost never decided anything. What I did was react, at speed, with small children and too many flights, and the conclusions I reached, I reached because I got burned. I got it wrong and learned from the consequences. I never sat down and calmly reassessed anything, because there was no calm. And no time either, not least because every time I get some time back, I immediately find something to fill it with.
And then you tell all of this in an interview, in a meeting, as if it were a eureka moment. Behold, a system. No. It was thousands of tiny decisions, one after another.
The conditions these things get decided in don’t help either. I spent years in an open plan room, no walls anywhere, where every two minutes somebody asks if you saw that and another message pings on top. I could never work like that and it’s got worse with age. I need long stretches of concentration.
Nobody decides a career well between two phone pings. You decide whatever is right in front of you and you get it off your desk.
We’re all like this.
We answer a message at eleven at night with a yes that takes up the next six months, and we call it answering a message. We stay in the city we were already in and we call it life.
On the day you make them, none of those things looks like a decision. And that is exactly the route the whole career takes.
I’m still terrible at this. I still decide on the run and I still need to extract myself from everything, take a whole day out of work and out of the house, without looking at anybody, just so my brain can think in a structured way. The only thing that’s changed is that now I notice some of them. The ones that repeat.
A decision that repeats has stopped being chance. It’s become a method, and you’d better know what yours is.
Teresa hung up happy with the conversation. It was some other answer she liked.
This is the one that stayed with me. The decision that weighed most on my career was never made by anybody. It was just the place where two lives met halfway, and where I stayed.
As for the real mistakes, the ones that actually matter, I’m not writing them here.
Those I say out loud in Lisbon, in the conversation I’m having with Madalena Cordeiro Dias at Executiva’s Grande Conferência de Liderança Feminina. Anyone who wants the unfiltered version has to turn up. That’s what I told Teresa on the phone.
Come and find me. Get the metro, get a train, drive, walk if you have to. Bring your mother, your friend, the colleague at the next desk, your grandmother. The dog stays home, because Isabel Canha and Maria Serina won’t let it in.
Tickets are cheaper until the end of September. The conversation is mid October.
Comment below. Which of the decisions you never treated as a decision is still running your life? I read every response.
This article was first published in Portuguese in my weekly column Oh pá, não me lixem! for Executiva.
