Becoming the shape of your work - Maria Boghiu

00:00

... I don't know, where value comes from. Ascribing value to these brand names, I was living from the outside in. I was taking the world's established conclusion about what constitutes valuable and I was delegating to the world the decision of what it is that is valuable. And then he said, "How about the other way around, inside out?" And I said, "I don't know what that looks like. What do you even mean?" Try to explain to a chronic high achiever what it means to not be meeting other people's expectations. And he says, "Well, love." What you love, by loving something, you infuse it with value. He says, "I love the work I do. Therefore, it's valuable to me and not a single soul in the world can tell me otherwise. Love is a way of ascribing value to something." And it completely blew my mind. I was like, "Wait, what?"

01:10

I have changed career very deliberately. I was a software engineer for many years. And when I left Microsoft to come back to London, to move back to London, I took a year out with the intent purpose of figuring out what I wanted to do for the rest of, I don't know, my 30s, I suppose. And so during that time, I was... yeah, I kind of got quite nerdy about how to approach this question down to interviewing people about various careers. I went and talked to them and tried to figure out how they felt about their choices and going to meetups and talking to lots of people and doing lots of research as well like, what makes good choice of work? So yeah, I've actually spent quite a lot of time with this question.

02:07

How did you know where to start?

02:10

Well, I didn't, and I think that was part of the problem. Yeah, I guess there is no real starting point. I had the luxury of time, which I realize is in its all a privilege because I think when life is busy, it can be difficult to find a head space to pause, to think, to be curious about things. So I had the ability to... I had the time to just search and read, and I think I started fairly generically just with the Google search, how most things in life start, what to do about work. How do you find what it is that you want to do? And I read a few books. I think one of the earliest books I read was one from School of Life. I can't quite remember the name of it, but I would be able to.

03:06

So How to Find Fulfilling Work?

03:08

Yeah, yeah. That probably was it. I think that might have actually been it. Yeah. So trying to read about it. I came across 80,000 Hours, this charity that is trying to match people with meaningful work. So I read some of their materials. I think I went to a workshop maybe about how to find work that's meaningful. Just consuming a lot of content, I guess, from TED talks, from people who had something to say on this topic of what is meaningful. So I started very wide. I cast the net quite wide. And I think it's a self-discovery process at the same time because I think there is something in... when you look at the world as all of this infinite amount of information, so what it is that grabs your attention and happens to pull you in and you spend some time with it is probably saying something about something within yourself, a need maybe that it speaks to or something, but that's within you that I think caught your attention.

04:23

So yes, that's why I ended up reading books like How to Find Fulfilling Work because I think I was at a point where I had... in my early 20s, I had more pragmatic things to consider such as, how do I pay my debts? How do I help out financially in my family? Things like that, thinking about, how do I make living? How do I gain skills? How do I make it into this world of work? But then once I had achieved some of those things, I came to do harder questions such as, what do I want to do? Which is a pretty daunting question, I think. I think it's one of these questions that when you start pulling at it, it starts to unravel a lot of things. Yeah. And is to do with really what motivates you. And I remember around that time, I wrote this whole article for myself on what motivates me, what's intrinsic motivation versus extrinsic motivation? And why do I do things?

05:39

And this then took me into understanding things such as the difference between your experiencing self versus your reflective self, the things that you do because they feel good and they're satisfying in and of themselves and the things that you do because of the outcome. And so, yeah, I would say it was a holistic process of getting to know myself and getting to know what was available. And once I educated myself about the problem, then it became a little bit easier to formulate questions. There's this kind of a cycle, right? It sort of starts wide. You read a few things generically. By reading those things, you then are better able to formulate the next question. And then the next question becomes more specific. And then that gives you more information. And then the next question becomes more specific and you just kind of gradually refine your search until you find what you need.

06:45

Sounds like there's almost like a seesaw at the beginning of your time. You were focused on something different, but then you had this period of time where you're able to reflect and then go through that exploration. How did you know when that moment was or did it just come?

07:13

Good question. Did I know? Kind of. I mean, I think it came to a point where I felt ready to rejoin the working world. I think work is... yeah, it's an interesting thing. It's such a big part of our lives that you really do feel a little bit alienated from the world when you're not working. I remember walking down in the city of London in one of my... this days on this period when I wasn't working and just was so struck by how purposefully everybody was walking from A to B, B lining from one thing to the next thing. And everyone felt so purposeful and they really, really belonged there. And I was just there, bouncing about not quite knowing what to do with my time because I didn't have anything I had to do.

08:15

So there was that sentiment in not working of being slightly disconnected from the world. And I think partly after some time, I came to the point where I was like, "I need to come back into work because I need to reconnect with the world a little bit." So at the point at which I got that sentiment of, "Okay, I'm ready to come back now," the point at which I had got with all my thinking around what to do was where I landed. You know what I mean? It's a little bit like when you're in an exam, you're kind of trying to write an essay or something and then time's up and then you're like, "Well, I guess this is my conclusion." So I would say that was where I got to at that time, and it's a work in progress. I mean, where I landed basically was to go into product specifically and now I'm also training to be a counselor. So I think it's an ongoing journey. Who know was where I'll be in another three, four, five years time?

09:18

And by anyone's standards, the point at which you took a step out of work, you were successful. You'd graduated from Oxford. You'd been a software engineer at Microsoft. But a lot of other people would think out externally, "Oh my goodness, Maria's really made it." Did it not feel like that?

09:46

But maybe it's because it did feel like that that I started asking myself all these existential questions because the thing with pursuing goals is that you kind of go from, "Oh my God, I've achieved the goal," to, "Oh my God, I've achieved the goal. What now?" And I think I did have a moment when I was at Microsoft where I just saw the many working years in front of me just stretching out into the future like this endless valley. And, I don't know, just the nature of those, the time, just the stretch of those years, it really hit me because I think up to that point, I didn't really have a sense of time because it was this constant leveling up. It's like, "I've got to hit this goal and then this goal and then this goal, and then this goal," and it was a bit like playing a computer game, you're just kind of chasing the next thing.

10:48

But then I'd go to a point where the next thing was it was just more of the same for a very, very, very long time. And certainly, yeah, these existential questions crept up of like, "Wait, hang on a minute. What am I doing?" It's a bit like when you play a game and then you've sort of reached a bit of a plateau where you've kind of completed the campaign or something and you're like, "I've been playing this for a while." Is there anything else I'm missing? You're like, "I think I'm thirsty. I probably haven't eaten in like days." Is that kind of sentiment. You sort of wake up from these days and you start to wonder what you're doing.

11:31

So I think, yeah, there's successful and there's successful. And I think that's why one of the first questions I grappled with is like, what constitutes... where does this motivation come from? And I was in therapy at the time and one of the themes probably that I explored the most was, where does meaning come from? Where does motivation come from? I think up to that point, I'd been living my life very outside in. I was thinking in terms of the milestones and what does this look like on my CV? And it was a little bit like collecting badges or something. It was a little bit like a game. And then you then pause to think, "Okay, but what about living from the inside out? What would that look like? What motivates me? What's intrinsically meaningful?"

12:35

Now, I don't want to make it sound like it's this dichotomy because it's a bit more nuanced than that. There were a lot of things that I was doing for intrinsic motivation. For example, one of my top intrinsic motivation things is problem solving. I really like problem solving. It's really satisfying to me because I'd been doing that as part of this, some of my intrinsic motivation needs were being met, but others hadn't. And so, yeah, I think when you start to question, okay, what is it that institutes good? What is the goal? I suppose when you move from pursuing a goal to then questioning what the goal should be, and then deciding what the goal should be, that's when the journey changes a little bit, right? Because then you are less about executing and thinking like, how do I hit the goal most efficiently? To, okay, what's worth pursuing? Which is a whole another question. Actually, now that I'm speaking, accidental that I went into product from engineering because engineering is like, "Okay, this is the goal. How do I achieve it? And what's the best implementation? And so, yeah, I guess kind of a constraint resolution problem maybe whereas product is, okay, what should we build? What's worth building?

14:07

At the time, how did you know you wanted to go into product and then join Monzo?

14:16

I didn't know about knowing that I wanted to do product. I tried all sorts of things during the idea. I think in the end, the way I narrowed it down was I... Yeah. One of the things that helped me make the decision was I thought about what it was that I wanted to... how I wanted to develop. I remember either reading this or hearing this somewhere. It really, really stuck with me, but the point I was making was that we become our work. As in the work that we do shapes our worldview and it shapes us. I went to an osteopath recently and he used a very similar phrase. He was like, "We become the shape of the work that we do in a very literal sense." If you're a tennis player, you can develop one side more than the other. So you have to rebalance, train the other side.

15:14

If you're sat at a desk like we are now, you become the shape of the work that you do in a very literal sense. And I think you do it in a physical sense, also in a psychological sense. And this article was saying if you... I don't know. If you work as a, I don't know, let's say journalist, I think it was the example they gave, then by professional habit, you're used to kind of questioning people, maybe being a bit cynical about people's motivations because you're constantly trying to kind of dig stuff out and get to the truth of things. And then that shapes the way that you're used to looking at the world and encountering it. And to some extent, we shape the way the world manifests to us and by the expectations and the worldview we bring to it. Equally, if you're, I don't know, a teacher and you spend all day trying to think about how to find the best in people and how to nurture that in people, then you're going to be taking that approach to other encounters.

16:20

And I think that was the other example the article gave about teachers, which is... obviously, it's a little bit making a bit of a... what's the word? Kind of a cartoon drawing. I'm sure there's elements in journalism that aren't like this and elements in teaching that aren't like this. But roughly speaking, I noticed this actually with counseling because in training to be a counselor, I see myself thinking about the same things in my day-to-day interactions. How do you have an authentic encounter with someone? How do you set your ego aside so that you can really listen to people? Just this awareness of interpersonal dynamics. So I think it's true that you become the shape of the work that you do. And at the time, this really, really struck me. So then my question changed from, what do I want to do to what kind of person do I want to be? Who do I want to be?

17:22

And then that made it a little bit easier because then I thought, "Well, I think I know what I want. I think I want to become more people-oriented. I'm quite an introvert naturally, and tend to withdraw from the world as a kind of natural inclination. So I thought, "I want to lean into the world a bit and I want to work more with people and figure out how to do all that." And yeah. And again, I want to figure out what to do rather than how to do it. So this was another aspect of it. And I think it's because I wanted to, I guess, live more deliberately and be more resolute and make more choices then on them. And so that played into it. And there was also an element of, "Okay, what kinds of things do I want to develop? Kinds of skills, what kinds of aspects of myself do I want to develop?"

18:22

It's a little bit like, which muscles do you want to work? And then cross-reference that with what's available to me, what's possible for me because one of the things I discovered trying to change career is that your background really limits the options that you have not because you wouldn't be able to do a job just straight up skills wise, but because a lot of jobs, when you go through that screening process, people are used to seeing an archetypal type of CV. And then if you haven't got that CV, they're like, "This person doesn't quite, I don't know, match what I'm looking for." So then it becomes less likely to get through.

19:06

So I just move kind of professionally. I don't know. I've worked in the tech industry for a long time. So I have a very familiar CV to anyone recruiting in the tech industry. They'll kind of go, "Tick, tick, recognize the names. We know who they are." They know who Monzo was, for example. But if I tried to get a job in, I don't know, a civil service maybe or like a public institution, let's say, I'm trying to think of a different realm, they might be looking for different brand names, different companies, different type of work experience that they're used to seeing on the types of people that they're recreating for. And I would look less typical, and therefore, I'd be less likely to get those jobs.

19:51

So I have found that actually probably if I want to do all of this work with people, the example for me specifically was counseling. If I wanted to be a counselor, I couldn't have just gone and been a counselor having been an engineer. One of the first things that you have to talk about when you apply for therapy training is kind of prove that you have interpersonal skills and you've worked with people and things like that. They'd be like, "I'm sorry, but you've been a software engineer, the archetypal job of someone who does not work with a lot of people a lot of the time."

20:28

So if I was wanting to move more towards working with people, the immediate step available to me was to move into a more people-oriented role but within the realm of what I had been doing. So like I said, kind of taking the list of things I was interested in developing in myself, and like I said, what person do I want to be? Cross-reference with what's possible for me given what I've been doing so far, product management. So here I am.

20:59

And at that time, how do you balance your intrinsic motivations and your external motivations? And how do you know for sure which one is which?

21:12

What a great question? Where do you even begin? I mean, as I'm pausing to think, so many things flash through my mind. I mean, snippets of Heidegger talking about resoluteness, snippets of Nietzsche talking about being certain and sure about owning your choices and being very resolute in the world, snippets of, oh, I don't know, Daniel Kahneman talking about the... Actually, maybe it wasn't Daniel Kahneman, but this difference between the reflective self and the experiencing self, which is basically this difference between intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation. What a fantastic question. The answer, I guess it's a work in progress. Sometimes I think of... we say the self, and we say the I as if it's the singled congruenced entity that thinks and wants a single thing at a time, but actually a better metaphor for me in thinking about reconciling all these different needs is to think of me as we, what we want.

22:42

And then there will be... some parts of me will want... the reflective self will want the thing that looks good in retrospect. And then the experiencing self will want the thing that feels good to do at the time. And how do you reconcile different people that want different things? I mean, I think how you do it in a political project, right? How you do it in life in general. You try to establish a dialogue between your different selves and then have each part be heard and then see if there's a solution that would work for everybody. And if not, maybe you take turns and you do a little bit of this and a little bit of that. And yeah, it's work in progress because you're constantly having that conversation. Yeah. I never really finish having it.

23:39

Both things are valuable. I think it's valuable to pursue... This reflective self, I mean, it makes it sound a little bit, I don't know what, shallow maybe. Kind of like looking outside in, and does it look good in retrospect? But it's not quite that. I think maybe the reflective self is able to appreciate things that take a long time to achieve. They might not be enjoyable every step of the way, but then it's really nice to have at the end like, I don't know, learning a language, for example. It's the result that is very satisfying.

24:20

How do I do this on a day-to-day? I guess I do try to be kind of compassionate towards each of my needs and make sure I do make a little bit of space for each of them. So yeah, I'll have my projects that are like, "This is difficult to do, it's outside of my comfort zone, but I want to do it and I want to achieve it." And then there'll be things like, "I really want to play with this and give myself a little bit of time to do that."

24:55

What brought you to the end of your journey at Monzo?

25:01

I mean, one of the things that you discover or at least that I've discovered as a product person is that you become quite bound with your problem domain. I mean, I still get messages on LinkedIn being like, "Do you want to work at a FinTech startup?" And I'm like, "No, I haven't done that in three and a half years." And again, this question of, what do I want to know lots about? And in my long research, the things that came up is things like biggest problems that the world has. And the top three things that came up were something to do with climate change, that's a big problem, something to do with education, and something to do with mental health. Those were kind of the top three, or at least the top three I remember. And I thought, "Well..." Actually, my mom's a teacher. So education was definitely on the short list for me. But yeah, mental health was the one that mattered the most for me. And at that time, I was already considering starting my psychotherapy training, which is a kind of big life decision in itself, very long time in the making. So yeah, it made sense.

26:36

And what happened next? Because it's not straightforward to take your passion and your skill and mix the two together. How did you go about finding that mix?

27:00

I mean, I think partly, maybe that was the point of which I tried to set my ego to the side a little bit and everything I've described so far feels quite me-centric. It's like, "What do I want to do? What kind of person do I want to be?" Me, me, me. With a little bit of like, "What problem-?"

27:29

Or we.

27:30

Or we. Yes, correct. Or combined a little bit with, "What does the world need?" But actually, I think the philosophy that's worked best for me is to try to get out of my own head a little bit. And I call it narrow framing, is a concept I found quite useful. Narrow framing is where you kind of take a small picture of reality and you sort of think that that's the whole of reality and then you loom very large in that small picture because you are in your head a lot. But actually when you open the vista and you frame more widely, you kind of realize you're just one person in the world and everyone's just trying to get by and live their lives. And it's all basically fine. And I think when you take that approach of just everything that happens to me is not about me and it's not all about me, then that changes the frame with which you encounter or maybe it changes a little bit how you encounter the world.

28:40

And so on this question of, okay, how do you take your skills and marry it with your passions? I think I stopped doing that. I kind of started the other way around and then I thought, "Well, look, I kind of know how I want to encounter every day. I have a grounding in the kind of person that I want to be. And then I'm going to just look around and see, where is there a problem to be solved?" So then it stops being about me. I was just looking around at me and like, "Who needs help?" Quite literally, who needs help? And actually still at the time, it was very much, "I think I can help here. I think I can actually..." And it wasn't even work. It was volunteering. Just being like, "Okay, you got this problem. I think I can help with it. Let's solve the problem." I don't know. I think if you keep that in back of your mind, it's like, "I know who I am and what I want," and then you just look for problems that need solving. I don't know. I think the matching happens just of its own accord.

29:58

How do you reconcile that against the world's need for specialization? It's almost easy to say when you've got a skill but hard when you don't.

30:09

The world's need for specialization. So I'm wondering which direction you're thinking of take question. So you're saying that it's difficult to do that if you are highly specialized?

30:33

So I think it's easier to do that if you are highly specialized. So if you can look around you and offer your help, if you have a way to help, but there are... it almost comes from that place of you already have that skill, so you can give that help. Whereas what happens if you don't have that skill?

31:00

Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. It's funny you say that because I never really thought of myself as being particularly skilled at something. I don't know. I find the product skillset to be so elusive. It's like, what is it exactly that we do? It's like kind of bringing together of people. So I think in my mind, I kind of would compare myself to, I don't know, if you're a doctor and you go to Doctors without Frontiers or something or Doctors without Borders, I think it is, and you have a very specific skillset, very specific problem, we need to solve it. Whereas I was thinking... The way I experienced myself, certainly, it wasn't that, "Oh, here I'm a highly skillful person with a very specific skill bringing it to this problem." I think I experienced myself more as I am someone willing to work hard and I really care about helping you. And if those two things are true, then I don't know, we're going to find a way to... Something good's going to come out of it.

32:06

And if we become the shape of our work, how has working on a problem that you care deeply about shaped who you become now?

32:22

I don't know. I'm happier. I think...

32:26

That's a start.

32:27

Yeah, yeah. But how does it shape you? I don't know. I mean, at Spill as well, you're just... I don't know. You're just constantly... you see the best of humanity. I used to, I think, just be, I don't know, more cynical about things. And for example, one of the things that really struck me working at Spill is that working with businesses to offer mental health support, and I was thinking, "Oh, there's got to be a business interest why these people buy Spill. Surely, what's the economic incentive or something?" And after dozens and dozens and dozens of interviews, it began to dawn on me. It's like, "Actually, people just care." I think they genuinely just want to help people. And yeah. I think this line of work has certainly exposed me to a positive side of humanity.

33:33

And also just in therapy, I think if you come to therapy, you've already made some choices. You've made a choice that says something like, "Life's difficult and it's hard and I'm in pain, but I'm going to do something about it and I'm going to work at it and I'm not going to give up." And that in itself is really inspiring. And yeah, I think... I don't know. It's very, very cool. So yeah, I think I have... It certainly fulfilled my expectation. I thought working in mental health, working in therapy, working in a helping kind of field, you're going to encounter the positive side of life and I have, hence I'm happier.

34:21

How has therapy helped you find your best work?

34:26

Oh my goodness, in so many ways. I mean, there's a huge component of self knowledge, right? Just knowing yourself, knowing what you want, being able to unpack what it is that drives you. What's yours, what's your parents, what's your peers, what belongs where, what forces have come to shape you. It's a huge journey of introspection to understand what it is that motivates you. I mean, it took me six months of deliberate thoughts just to be able to formulate to myself that maybe these are the sorts of things I'd like to do. So I think it's that. One of the things that therapy does really well is it gives you this space of unconditional positive regard, which is safe. It's a safe haven. And I think you really need that when you're going out exploring and out of your comfort zone and trying new things and changing things, changing career. You need a place of safety where you can come back and regroup and refuel and regain, I don't know, energy, hope. So there's that too.

35:49

And yeah, I don't know. I mean, I think the third thing would maybe be the fact that we think by speaking a lot of the time. I certainly do a lot, I think, by speaking. And it's one of the reasons you can't do therapy on yourself. I think someone actually even asked me, it's like, "Well, you're training to be a counselor or a therapist. Do you need someone else to do therapy?" And the answer is, yes, you do. Something about someone's attention draws things out of you that would not otherwise come up. There's this really wonderful quote I won't remember exactly in a paper I read recently that says something like, "Does the parent listen because the child speaks or does the child speak because the parent listens?" And sometimes we do speak because someone listens to us. If you offer someone a moment of silence, they'll come to it and into it and speak into it. And in doing that, they will articulate things that are latent in their minds and discover things about themselves, and you really need that to be able to think clearly about these really, really complicated questions. What's worth doing in life? Who are you? What is this whole thing about?

37:37

Does your mind reflect on a particular moment or a conversation that you had?

37:48

With regards or on the topic of what?

37:52

Yeah. I wonder as you talk through your... I'm conscious to ask this question because it's to do with therapy which is private, but as you talk through it, I would love to know what moments you are reflecting on in your own experience there and if you'd share them.

38:13

Yeah. I'm happy to. I mean, I tend to speak quite open about these things. So let me see if I get the question right. You are saying in those moments of reflections, are there particular moments from my history of therapy that stand out that were particularly meaningful?

38:32

So when you've been finding your best work and you've been exploring it, when you are talking through how much of a difference that's made and the different ways it's made a difference, what moments are you reflecting on there? What was the story at that time? What situation were you in?

39:01

Let me see if I might be answering a slightly different question here, but one thing that popped into my mind as you were saying this, in this journey of figuring out what to do, I do remember this one conversation I had with my therapist a couple years ago that really... I still refer back to it now and again. The context was that I was debating this thing about... Oh, here's a good way to think of it. Joining a startup. I'd been working for big brand company up to that point. And the thing with brands is they're kind of a shorthand communicate to something about you. It's like, "Oh, you've been associated with this brand. You must have had roughly this kind of experience." I don't know, it's like an insurance policy. It's like, "Well, working at, let's say, a high tech company makes it more likely to get the job in tech or whatever."

40:05

It's safe, and it's this brand. Whereas if you say, for example, "Go work for a startup," by definition, they'll be less known, less established. They're a startup after all. And so there's a risk there. Will people know what work this company did? Will it stand out in the same way? And the conversation with my therapist was around... I was still in that mindset of badge collecting. Oxford, Microsoft, I've got to collect these names that are going to somehow communicate to the world that I'm okay. It's okay. I belong here. And then he reflected back to me what constitutes... I don't know, where value comes from. In ascribing value to these brand names, I was living from the outside in. I was taking the world's established conclusion about what constitutes valuable. And I was delegating to the world the decision of what it is that is valuable.

41:29

And then he said, "How about the other way around, inside out?" And I said, "I don't know what that looks like. What do you even mean?" Try to explain to a chronic high achiever what it means to not be meeting other people's expectations. And he says, "Well, love." What you love, by loving something, you infuse it with value. He says, "I love the work I do. Therefore, it's valuable to me. And no single soul in the world can tell me otherwise. Love is a way of ascribing value to something." And it completely blew my mind. I was like, "Wait, what?" So many things. You're saying I can be the source of what constitutes value? I can make that decision by loving? Wow.

42:33

Because what that then does is it opens up so many possibilities. You're no longer choosing from a menu that someone else has drawn up for you. This is valuable. This is valuable. This is a worthwhile career. This is a worthwhile company to work for. You get to pick. It's incredible. Yeah. It completely changed the way I thought about everything. So to give you an example of a conversation.

43:02

I feel like I need a moment to get over what you said there.

43:12

Yeah. It's a really nice idea. I refer back to it from time to time because I think it ties into... Yeah. I think we don't realize how much power we carry within ourselves by carrying this capacity for loving and for caring. I'm in love in the very kind of general sense of just caring very deeply about something. It's very, very powerful. And it's almost like a light. It's like when you have a fire and have you ever camped and there's a fire in the night on a beach somewhere? People walking past will just come to it. It just attracts people. And I think that the same thing happens in work. If you ever encounter someone who really, really, really cares about a problem, it's like a light, it just draws people in. It's like, "Whoa, I need to..." Whatever this is. And I think people don't even know what it is. It's like a heat. It's like a light of warmth. It's like this passion. We call it passion, but yeah. And then it just makes you want to get involved and be like, "Hey, I want to be here. Let's care about it together." It's really cool.

44:25

It says if we've all been spotlights, then that person is like a floodlight.

44:31

Yeah, yeah. Exactly. I think the thing to realize is that we all have the potential to be floodlights because we're all human and it's intrinsic human capacity.

44:48

It sounds really related to expanding your narrow framing.

44:57

Yeah. Yeah, I think so. I mean, whenever I try to think wide frame, I always feel much more reconnected with this kind of energy. I don't know.

45:13

It's as if the narrow framing comes from that external motivation and those badges that you picked up, but the broadening it comes from inside you somehow.

45:28

Yeah, yeah. I mean, in therapy, there is this idea of whether you think of yourself as an object or whether you think of yourself as a thou, as, I don't know, a universe upon itself, this powerful, subjective experience. And I think there is something in... yeah, there's something a bit reductive, I think, in thinking of yourself as what? A wall upon which to pin things, an object to be measured and graded. I mean, it's a bit reductive. Whereas when you expand and you kind of think in terms of, "We're all just trying to get through life in a good way," it just connects you with the fact that at the end of the day, you really cannot compare two lived experiences. It's just not logically possible. It's, I don't know, two completely vast universes. Where do you even begin to find a common denominator upon which to compare those things? It's too much. And then, yeah, I think that frees you a little bit because it allows you to think, "Well..." Yeah, it grounds you more, I suppose, in your own choices, I guess, and where you kind of value

47:04

And has this search for you made you more content?

47:14

Yeah, I think so. I mean, I don't want to sound, I don't know, like I'm some sort of like top of the hill having resolved all my existential woes. It's totally work in progress and there's some good days and bad days. But yeah, I think so. I guess I feel like I live with a little bit more conviction, just been more deliberately like Thoreau, go to the woods to live deliberately except I've come to London to live deliberately. Not quite as what? The word doesn't come to me. Lush and green as-

47:58

I think he'd approve in his own way.

48:00

Yeah. We do have a [inaudible 00:48:04]. So good enough.

48:07

Thank you so much for sharing your story.