My first job was an unusual one, but I learned so many lessons from it that I carried with me throughout my career.
I was in my last year at Cambridge and was planning to leave the next year for the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard when a British publisher approached me. He had seen me at a televised Cambridge Union debate speaking on the changing role of women and he wrote to me asking me if I would write a book on the subject. I replied, “Thank you, but I can’t write.” He replied: “Can you have lunch?” So I took the train to London and ended up getting both lunch and a book contract with a modest advance.
That was my first lesson: take risks. People starting out, especially women, often think they’re not ready. But we’re usually more ready than we think. You don’t have to know everything before taking a leap — you can learn on the job. So when an unexpected opportunity arises, trust yourself.
It was a lesson that has served me well not only as a writer, but also in launching a company (The Huffington Post), which I’d never done before, and then in leaving a successful media company to launch another company (Thrive Global) in a completely new field, healthcare.
My first book turned out to be an international bestseller, published around the world, then everybody wanted me to write another book on a similar topic. And that was my second lesson. I wanted to explore new territory. I didn’t want to be stuck writing about the same topic again and again. So I wrote a book about political leadership and learned the lesson of pivoting. Careers are rarely linear and that’s a good thing. We can often plod along in the comfort and security of what we know. That can even be a very successful strategy, if we’re defining success in the narrow terms of a career. But leaving our comfort zone and pivoting to something new forces us to learn new things, challenge ourselves, question our old assumptions and ways of working. In other words, it forces us to grow and evolve, which is a broader metric of success.
My third lesson came from the fact that my second book was rejected by 36 publishers. By then, I’d run out of money. And at that point, I might have said, “You know what, 36 publishers think this is not worth publishing. Maybe I’ve picked the wrong career.” As I was walking down St. James’s Street in London, where I was living at the time, depressed and wondering what I should do, I saw a Barclays bank. Armed with little more than Greek chutzpah, I asked to see the bank manager and asked for a loan. And for some reason, he gave it to me, even though I had zero assets! That made it possible for me to continue submitting my manuscript until finally I got a yes!
So that lesson was one of perseverance and resilience. My mother always said that failure is not the opposite of success, it’s a stepping stone to success. Sometimes, as in my case, there are lots of stepping stones. And perseverance and resilience are what carries us across them. And some Greek chutzpah doesn’t hurt either.
My First Job is a recurring series in which prominent business leaders share what their first job was and what they learned from it.