Hey. Happy Friday night for you guys, Friday morning for me. Elodie and I are now in Brussels, and I’m loving it so far. I’ve just popped outside to do this live from where we are and it’s a bit chilly, so I might go put my scarf on. Totally beside the point. This morning I was wondering what I was going to do my live on. And occasionally, I talk to Elodie about it, “What should I do my live on?” She might ask me a question or something comes up in a conversation I go, “Okay, let’s go there.” And she was asking me questions like, “Who’s your favorite band? Who’s your favorite singer? What’s your favorite book? What’s your favorite movie? Who’s your favorite actor?” All those kinds of things. Just want to stand that up on my handbag. I did it. And I couldn’t really answer on a lot of them.
Favorite singer, I could. Favorite band, I couldn’t. Favorite movie, I couldn’t. Favorite superhero, couldn’t really even do that. Who would I be if I could be a superhero? And it got me thinking why. And when I was Elodie’s age, I’m 45 now, so 31 years ago, we didn’t have a lot of choice. Like if the superhero movies that were out were Superman, that kind of ilk. Was there any others?, Terminator, not really a superhero. There weren’t so many movies coming out. We didn’t have Netflix, you went to Blockbuster and you rented a DVD, a video, gosh, a video, video for a couple of nights, then you got charged a fortunate if you didn’t return it on time.
You had a few books you chose, you saved up and you went and bought a CD of one of your favorite… No, before CDs, a cassette or a record of one of your, oh my God I feel old, of one of your favorite artists, and you played it on repeat, or you sat in your bedroom with a cassette tape and the radio on, and you made your own mix tape from the three FM radio channels that played stuff you actually liked listening to. So when you were in love with a band, or an actor, or a genre, or a book or something, you immersed yourself in it so easily because it’s all that there was. And these days, life is such a fricking smorgasbord, like as auntie Mame says, “Life is a banquet and some poor suckers are starving to death.” We don’t have to choose. We don’t have to be Sade’s biggest fan. We don’t have to be Bon Jovi’s biggest fan. We don’t have to go and see every single movie that Sean Connery does, whatever.
I’m just picking names out of the blue here people. They’re not all my favorite people, although they’re good. We don’t have to choose. We get to change who we like and who we are and what we do with the wind, with our moods. And for someone like me who’s a Gemini, it makes it fantastic because I’m not very good at choosing at the best of times. But if we’re on a… if you were to say to me, who is my favorite band? What is my favorite radio station? What is my favorite album? My answer to all those questions at the moment would probably be Spotify or some streaming service, because I get to choose what it is that particular moment.
And I think it’s the same in business. It’s the same in life. It’s the same for food. It’s the same for everything. I remember years ago, probably 20 years ago maybe, I wanted to make this Nigella salad. I was up at my mom’s house and I wanted to make her a Nigella roast vegetable salad with halloumi in it. And she lived in Newcastle, in New South Wales. And I had to… couldn’t Google, so I got out the Yellow Pages and looked up a few delicatessens in Newcastle, rang them all to see who had halloumi, drove to one. Only one out of the four of them I rang had halloumi. Drove there, got the halloumi so I can make this bloody salad. Now you can get a halloumi at the petrol station. We are unlimited, we are totally, as the tattoo says, limitless. It was this bizarre conversation about superheroes this morning that got me so excited by the fact that I don’t have to choose. We don’t have to choose.
When I was at school, we got told, we got really… My generation is not so bad, but the generations before us, like you were literally told you pick a career, you stick to it, you collect your golden watch at the end and you die. You retire and your die, that’s life. That’s what you do. And we got a little more flexibility than that. But now, careers advisors are openly telling students that they’ll probably have six to 10 different careers if not more in their lifetime. And I think that’s really exciting. I think there is a downside to it that our attention span and our unwillingness to stick to things has become an issue. We flip and change a lot more because it’s easier to do so than it was 10, 20, 30, 50 sure, absolutely 50 years ago.
I also think that’s really exciting. If you pick up on an idea, you can go with it because the world is at your fingertips whether it’s food, music, art, business, life, love. People are openly talking about monogamy not being that easy for most people, whereas 20 years ago, if you had that at a dinner party conversation, “Oh my golly, golly, gosh. And these days, I sure as hell don’t believe that it’s common to find one partner and that’s it for life. I think our needs, our desires, our changes… we change, all that stuff. I think it’s very rare for two people to grow like that. So I think we need to have more conversations about that, but that’s a whole other life.
So yeah, this random conversation about who would I be? Or who’s my favorite superhero? What’s my favorite band? Has led me to being really excited that we don’t have to choose. The world is at our fingertips tips, and we can literally say our favorite book is a Kindle because it’s whatever’s next. Our favorite album is Apple Music because it’s whatever’s the latest. And I think that’s really exciting. So I hope you think that’s exciting too. We’re going to go off and explore a bit more of Brussels now and we’ll see all those glamorous… We just hear the French accent oh, so glamorous. Have a great night and I’ll see all you tomorrow. Bye.