Why I Quit Marketing to Scrub Potatoes

or "How I Learned to Stop Worrying about Success"

In 2015, I quit my safe, easy, hideously over-paid office job so I could scrub potatoes in a restaurant basement for 16 hours a day.

One reason I needed to do this was because I’d really had enough of people saying shit like this to me in the morning… 👇

Bleurgh

The other reason was because a Finnish dancer called Silja helped me reevaluate what success could really mean in my life.

---

Before meeting my wife Silja, I’d spent my adult life playing it safe. I did that because I’d seen the sadness and insecurity that “failure” can bring.

My Dad started with nothing. He left school at 15 and had no Bank of Mum and Dad to back him up. But by the late eighties he had it all. Money, powerful friends. What I spend now on rent each month was just the price of a good night out to him back then.

Or so his stories suggest.

But then, sometime when I was very young, he lost it all. And he spent the rest of his working life trying to get it back, often with some disastrous results.

And having been affected by all this, I was determined to do the opposite.

A degree, stable job, a paycheck I could count on. This is what success meant to me. This was the safe way of doing things.

But just a few months after Silja and I met, as I stood outside a Heathrow Airport departures gate after saying goodbye to her at the end of one of her visits, I realised success wasn’t any of this.

Success was simply being with her.

So I left.

London, the career path, all of it.

A friend of mine said I was brave to “throw away” everything I’d worked for to move to Sweden and follow my passion of becoming a cook. But, thanks to Silja, it was the easiest thing I’d ever done.

Changing paths no longer felt like failure or being irresponsible or giving up on what I’d worked for.

It felt like life itself had begun.

---

“Success” can change as you do

Over the following years I cooked in Stockholm’s best Michelin-starred restaurants. Casual steak houses. A post-modern cocktail bar that folded after 6 months. Even at the wedding of the heir to the Heinz empire, with John Kerry and Jodie Foster on the guest list.

It was brutal. It was exhausting. And I loved it.

And, eventually, it needed to change as well.

It took all of 5 minutes with our newborn son in 2019 to know that the late nights and weekends at work wouldn’t let me be the kind of father I wanted to be. So, when we moved to Finland, I stopped cooking full-time. And though I missed the adventure of fine-dining chef life, I really loved being able to put him, and eventually his little sister, to bed every night.

And having been too busy cooking for years, I even found myself with time to start writing again.

Which led to the newsletter you’re reading now.

---

You Owe Nothing to Your Past Self

If success means following through with the degree I took, the job I had age 24, or achieving the riches my dad once had, then I’ve failed completely.

But I don’t see it that way anymore.

Success isn’t a contract you sign with your younger self. You don’t owe it to them to stay on a path that no longer makes sense to you. They weren’t writing the start of a story you’re responsible for wrapping up neatly, they were just making the best choice they knew how to make at the time.

As you can too once again.

Life isn’t a straight line. It stops and starts, loops back, makes no sense at all. Until, by chance, it suddenly does. Like when you meet a Finnish girl in a dingy London nightclub one Good Friday in 2013.

That night changed everything for me. But you don’t need love, or another person, or anything else at all to make this happen. You just need to let go of the idea that life is a fragile thing that must be played safe.

Not that I mean we should all be reckless. My rule is that any “risk” I take can’t jeopardise my family’s happiness. That’s why I now cook part-time. I pick up marketing work where I can. And for the first time, thanks to many of you, I put real time, not just evenings and weekends, into the best job I’ve ever had: writing this newsletter.

I don’t have the job title I once thought I needed. The apartment we live in is modest and overrun with Lego and plastic dragons. I don’t have a Michelin star.

But we are happy. And we are safe.

I noticed recently I'm nearing the age my father is in the earliest memories I have of him. I don’t regret that he never got “successful” again. I regret he never realised he didn’t need to be. We had each other, after all. It seems to me he missed out on a marvellous experience by not realising that, which is why I’m telling you about it.

---

I’d be silly not to ask, right?

If you’re one of the people who reads my newsletter every week, I’d love for you to consider becoming a paid subscriber today. By doing so, you help turn the hours I spend writing into work that financially supports me.

It’s simple. Just click below to upgrade. An annual subscription costs just $30/29€/£24, and your support truly makes all the difference.

Thank you for your help.