“What I needed was a part-time night job. Part time so it would not steal most of my week outside of work which I would use for building my creative endeavours. Also, it needed to be a night job so I could continue researching my creative endeavours via listening to podcasts as I performed the job.”
This was my thinking when I had decided to relocate to from Bath to Bristol after I had graduated with my First Class BA (Hons) in Creative Writing with Film and Screen Studies.
It wasn’t an instant or immediate option after graduating.
I had spent about three months applying for jobs much more closely related to the focus of my BA (Hons) with absolutely no success.
I had managed to secure an internship with a small creative agency in Bath that was actually a one-man business masquerading as a full-fledged company.
The chap running it was hugely resentful, spiteful and passively aggressive.
On multiple occasions while I was there, he told me about all the previous employees who had not stuck around for long… and he was too arrogantly ignorant to the fact that he was the reason they had all left.
I walked out on the third day.
My feeling was that, without radical further career development beyond a purely creative skillset, I would not get far banking everything on my BA (Hons).
It was a very annoying realization to come to, considering just how much work I had put into my first degree.
But I was also excited at the prospect of developing myself in other areas.
Simultaneous to my thinking about how I would build a creative career, I became aware of a growing confusing regarding my career focus in that I wasn’t even sure if I did want to pursue a creative career.
Another potential career option which had been ignited by my BA (Hons) was an academic career with the prospect of developing into a full-fledge researcher.
Finally, the four years in which I undertook my degree had been very much aligned on the focus of my degree; I had not allowed myself to develop beyond it and I wanted to address that.
Basically, I had a lot of figuring out to do and I knew that if I jumped into a full-time job straight away (even a creative focused full-time job) that process of figuring out would not occur.
Instead, I would end up being eaten by the job and the job would end up becoming me.
I was not stupid, I had seen this happen to so many other people and I absolutely refused to let it happen to me!
I had to find a way to earn a living and still allow myself enough time on the side to conduct a wide array of research.
But I didn’t have to look far for the solution, because I had already worked the solution immediately before going to university.
For about five months prior to starting my BA (Hons), I had worked a full-time night job replenishing the stock in a large Marks and Spencer store close to where I used to live.
It was a very miserable job but eventually I discovered the way to make it bearable – I listened to audio dramas through my headphones while I did the job.
I started with the Orson Welles The Mercury Theatre on the Air (1938) and The Campbell Playhouse (1938-1940) 1 hour audio drama adaptions and it was transformative!
My body was there stacking shelves, but my mind was experiencing invaders from mars, the horror of Dracula, the revenge of the Count of Monte Cristo and so many other adventures besides.
Suddenly, I started to relish working those night shifts because it meant I could be transported to other audio dimensions of excitement, intrigue and eye-opening insights.
Jumping back to after my graduation, it did not take long for the goal to form in my mind…
“What I needed was a part-time night job. Part time so it would not steal most of my week outside of work which I would use for building my creative endeavours and it needed to be a night job so I could continue researching my creative endeavours via listening to podcasts as I performed the job.”
That was my immediate destiny and within a week of conceiving it I found the job!
It was a part-time night job working a ten-hour shift on Saturdays and Sundays recovering the Primark store in Bristol City Centre.
I went in for the interview. Told them who I was. And got the job.
One week later I started my first night shift there.
A week after that I moved over to Bristol and, amazingly, I earned enough money from the Primark job to cover my rent (which was rent and bills all included) and I still had some left over besides.
Perfect!
By the time September, 2013 rolled around I had a blank canvas on which to paint my life.
And I didn’t waste any time.
On my first night shift, I had my ear phones in and I was listening away to my podcasts.
The podcasts I started with were: KickCast – The Podcast for Crowdfunding Projects and The Remarkable Crowdfunding Toddcast, Crowdfunding Podcast, Think Entrepreneurship: Interviews with Entrepreneurs, PreneurCast: Entrepreneurship, Business, Internet Marketing and Productivity
I was very much focused on figuring out crowdfunding, marketing and entrepreneurship because these were some of the things which had come up in the final year of my BA (Hons).
In particular, crowdfunding, marketing and entrepreneurship had come up in my practical dissertation, EYES.
Being a creative enterprise project, my practical dissertation had leaned into many aspects of entrepreneurship.
However, the competing demands of all my final year focuses meant that I didn’t really have the time to fully figure out effective marketing or raising money via crowdfunding.
Throughout the process of graduating, I realised that fully understanding how to set yourself up as a business, market yourself as a business and fund yourself as a business would be essential skills for having thriving career in the 21st century.
So I started with figuring out business, marketing and financing big businesses and yourself as a small business while I folded t-shirts two nights a week.
Folding T-shirts was essentially what the night clearance job at Primark was all about.
Let me explain, Primark is a clothing retailer and the night shift from Monday to Friday would bring in all the deliveries and put out all the stock.
Everything would be neatly set out hung and folded throughout the shop floor.
Shoppers would come in on the day, especially on the weekend, and would completely trash the shop floor.
The weekend night shift would come in and then would spend ten hours a night putting the store back together again.
The Bristol City Centre Primark is an excessively big store (the building used to be a department store) and it really did take ten hours a night to reset it.
One of the main tasks we would perform was the refolding of all the t-shirts on all the display tables.
You would come in at the beginning of the shift and there would be mountains of unfolded t-ships just dumped all over the tables and all over the floor.
We had to fold them, sort them all back into the right colours and sizes and then reset them all nicely back on top of each of the tables.
This is why I always referred to this job as my t-shirt folding job because that is what I spent the majority of my time doing.
However, there is something is both very therapeutic and contusive towards ingesting audio content while folding t-shirts all night long.
I’m serious, by the way.
The process of folding t-shirt after t-shirt after t-shirt is very relaxing and is also not too mentally demanding that it distracts you from what you are listening to in both your headphones.
If I’m just sat or stood there doing nothing, I don’t take in what I’m listening to.
I absolutely have to be doing something with my hands or the whole of my body in order to be able to properly focus on the audio content I am ingesting.
The more I folded, the more I listened to.
You can get through a lot of content across a ten-hour shift, even more so when you’re working twenty hours a week.
Pretty much for the first year that I worked that job, I basically didn’t speak to any of my co-workers.
I just kept my head down, folded the t-shirts and let the podcast educate me about entrepreneurship, marketing, crowdfunding, passive income, copywriting, freelancing, independent publishing, independent filmmaking, health, nutrition, psychology, exercise, cinema.
I also listened to a lot of old time radio shows in a nod back to my night shift days of listening to the Orson Welles audio dramas and because I had to give my brain a break every so often with a bit of pure entertainment.
I was learning a lot, but it was still a shit job and this did place a burden on my self-esteem.
Also, working nights and being cut off from daylight and a social life does get to you every so often.
There were a few night shifts where I heavily entertained the idea of walking out on the job!
But I stuck with it because, at the end of the week, it as two extra days/nights that I could devote to my burgeoning postgraduate education.
For the first year I was there I just focused on working my two nights a week.
Then I started to add on a bit of weeknight replenishment overtime here and there and went through periods where I would be working full-time weeks balanced out with part-time weeks.
For the first couple of years, the focus of the job was just recovery (folding t-shirts) then, with a change of store management, it shifted towards replenishment (lots of heavy lifting and graft).
I wasn’t so keen on the replenishment side of the job because it made it harder to focus on what I was listening to.
Then, eventually, I ended up joining the management team and became one of the weekend managers.
For nine gruelling years I stuck with that job!
Most people usually ask with a shocked look on their face why I stuck with it for so long?
Simple, that job enabled me to get my self-declared master’s degree off the ground.
I started working that job in September, 2013 and that is also the same month I started studying the first online course of what eventually became known as my Master of Transdisciplinary Application, a.k.a. my MTA Portfolio.
When I wasn’t working that night job, I was studying and building away at my MTA Portfolio.
All the podcasts, and later audiobooks too, I listened to while working that night job contributed to the creation of my MTA Portfolio.
By creating my own master’s degree, not only have I vastly expanded my intellect, but I have exercised my intellect along a number of different strands.
As a result of my self-declared master’s degree…
- I became an educator through the process of building my own degree.
- I became a life coach and created my own life coaching business.
- I became a web designer who has built multiple professional websites.
- I have become a highly proficient writer who routinely writes online articles and copious amounts of other writing.
- I have become very knowledgeable about personal fitness and have utilised that knowledge to biohack my own health and fitness.
- I have become a manager and utilised much of the leadership and management skills I gained from my studies to become a better manager.
- I have become a sustainability change agent advocating for individuals, businesses and governments to become more green.
- I have become an investor through the process of figuring out how to fix my own finances
- I am becoming a marketing manager through the process of marketing my self-constructed master’s degree as it now exists on ibuiltmyown.education.
- I have become an independent filmmaker who produces his own content.
Building my multi-focused MTA Portfolio is how I grew beyond the confines of my BA (Hons), it’s how I explored all the different career focuses I was interested in, it is how I got my creative career started and it’s how I figured myself out as a person.
If there’s one consistent lesson, I have learned from this entire process it’s that the greatest developments in person development always require you to break from the crowd and take the hard path.
Working that shitty weekend night job was a painful path to walk, but, boy, did I become a professional at folding t-shirts while I did it!