There must be more than this?

Why the job you do is never the point

When I was growing up, a family friend had a band, and I’d be taken along to listen. I was too young to understand most of the lyrics, and a lot of it came back to me years later with little moments of realisation. The one line that stuck, still an unexpected earworm now, was “there must be more to this life than a 9-5 job and a beautiful wife”. Sitting in a community centre in Slough, aged eleven, I remember being intrigued. It felt like a forewarning, although I wasn’t sure what of? Beauty? Marriage? Inflexible working hours? More likely: you’ll probably need a job, and if you’re lucky you’ll find someone beautiful, but if you think that’s going to fulfil you, deep down, you’ll be disappointed.

The mid-life crisis is well documented - characterised in the ‘90s by the sports car and the affair, in the 2000s by the fancy bike or the silent yoga retreat in the Himalayas. It can trigger big changes: ended relationships, new careers, relocations, or smaller, more bizarre ones (hi, Mum, and your rollerblades). Whatever form it takes, it’s the same ache showing up a few decades too late: I did the things I was supposed to do, so why isn’t this enough?

That ache doesn’t start in midlife. It starts the moment we’re asked “what do you want to be when you grow up?”, a question I almost religiously avoid asking any child. How many times have you heard a child answer it with a list of jobs? Policeman, teacher, footballer, and then an adult answer the same question with a list of regrets? I wanted to be a lawyer, but I didn’t get the grades, so now I’m in… We teach ourselves early that the job is the answer. Then we spend the next thirty years finding out it isn’t.

When I was a child, I wanted to be The Prime Minister. Yes, I was the awkward child who decided at a young age that I needed to change the world, and in order to do that I needed the most powerful job in the land. It wasn’t that I wanted to be Prime Minister that was actually driving me, though back then it did look pretty cool, it was something deeper. I wanted to help people. I wanted to make a difference in other people’s lives. So, Prime Minister it was. Highly unlikely, as it turns out, as the fairly average, state school educated, daughter of a police officer from an unremarkable (aside from the castle) suburban hinterland.

In reality, the first and only time I ever campaigned in a general election was in 1997, at my middle school in Windsor, running a mock election alongside the real one that would hand New Labour their historic landslide. My school’s version mirrored it almost exactly, with one exception: the Underground Passage Party, the mastermind of my elder brother and friend, campaigned on policies like filling a small passageway in Windsor with rhinos left over from Windsor Safari Park (what happened to those leftover rhinos?), and appointing a dedicated Minister for Chutney who would embark on a 200-day tour of the country immediately post-election. There was, I believe, something about tunnelling underground too. We ran a disruptive poster campaign and secured a place on the ballot paper without actually asking for one. One vote, a victory for democracy.

I always thought I’d revisit politics at some point. In my twenties I felt too young; in my thirties I was a single parent with very little money and two small children, which didn’t seem conducive to parliamentary life. Now? I’d rather do almost anything else. The job never happened. But here’s the thing: it didn’t matter. Because the job was never actually the point. There was something deeper at work.

I have set about trying to make a difference, to Do Good, throughout my life. It’s the thread I’ve woven through everything I do, the check and balance in my decision-making. How I do good has changed and will keep changing as I learn and grow, but the deeper magic that drives me, the Doing Good itself, remains. That’s the “more” the song was warning me about. Not a bigger job or a better title, it is something underneath all of it that a job title can never actually satisfy. The question worth asking isn’t “what do I want to be?”, it’s “what is my Deeper Magic?”

Finding the Deeper Magic

Walk into the home of any entrepreneur, founder, or general non-fiction reader, and you’ll find Find Your Why by Simon Sinek on their shelf, or you’ll have sat through his TED talk at a team meeting, I know I’ve played it. We’re generally agreed that finding purpose in our work and life matters if we want to feel fulfilled. Not a new concept. But it’s even more important when it comes to filling a void temporarily and erasing that void altogether.

Finding what’s actually motivating you means looking below the activity itself. You might look at the charity I founded and say I’m driven by helping children in poverty. But a few years earlier, you’d have said I was driven by helping people experiencing homelessness, and before that, people with addictions. All of those things are true, I did and do care deeply about them. But none of it is what actually drives me. It goes deeper than that.

In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the White Witch believes she’s defeated Aslan because she understands the Deep Magic, the law of the land, and has correctly invoked it to kill him. What she doesn’t know is that there’s a Deeper Magic, which Aslan uses to overcome her and save Narnia from eternal winter and tyranny. (I think I’ve just worked out why I hate winter so much: these were the books and films we watched constantly as kids, obviously gave me a deep hatred of both Winter and Turkish Delight.)

That notion fascinated me. The Witch followed what she thought was the law, a set of activities, rather than the values and deeper truth beneath the activity. She knew what needed to happen (Aslan, sacrificed on the stone table) but had completely missed why it wouldn’t actually work: the deeper magic - an old principle rooted in values and purpose.

That deeper magic is what we all need to find in ourselves if we want to fill that void and do truly meaningful good in the world. Going past the activities, past the surface-level achievements, to work out what actually matters in our hearts. Everyone has something, and it doesn’t have to be complicated. For me, it’s helping people who’ve been dealt a shit hand in life, how I do that will keep changing, but the desire is the root of everything I do. For you it might be supporting people who are unwell, or caring about abandoned animals, or making other people feel good about themselves. The beauty of it is that doing good isn’t reserved for charity workers or nurses. You can find the thing you’re passionate about and make it part of your life, every day.

What that looked like for me

I’m the founder of a small charity. I started it in 2012, when my daughter was twenty months old and my son was ten weeks. It had been brewing for years, but the timing was, in retrospect, inadvisable. I’d been working in Sure Start centres in Ealing, the most transformative, brilliant places for parents with under-fives to access support, training, education and community, and I kept hearing about families who couldn’t get to the centres because their pushchair had broken, or they didn’t have a coat. There was no one who could help with that. Local authorities didn’t have the budget, and online marketplaces were still mostly the reserve of the middle class buying and selling expensive items. It seemed obvious that what was needed was a broker between people who didn’t have anything and people who did.

This crystallised for me once I had children of my own. I was sitting in my small living room, a toddler running around, a baby in the chair beside me, surrounded by baby clothes, when we started getting knocks at the door from well-meaning neighbours holding bulging bin bags of clothes, toys, equipment. One arrived with a six-foot garden slide. My husband called it ‘Middle Class Fly-Tipping’, which, frankly, it was. There were 47 white baby vests, aged three to six months, in that particular haul. I clearly didn’t need them all. But I knew people who did.

I did some research and found a study of single parents in the area: they didn’t have the “stuff” they needed to look after their children properly, and they were struggling to afford it. My mission became clear: get clothes, furniture and equipment from people who no longer need them to people who do. So First Days Children’s Charity was born. I applied for a grant, and somehow a funder decided a woman with an idea was worth investing in. I googled “how to make a website” and “how to start a charity,” and off I went.

Thirteen years later, we’ve helped thousands of families in hundreds of different ways.

What’s actually underneath that story is not “I wanted to run a charity,” but the same drive that once wanted to be Prime Minister, lol, now pointed at nappies and pushchairs instead of policy. The job changed entirely. The deeper magic didn’t move an inch.

Clearly, I did not grow up to be The Prime Minister. But I’d never say “I used to want to be Prime Minister, but now I’m just a charity CEO,” because what I actually wanted to do was do good in the world, which is what I’m doing.

How I do it will keep evolving. I had a friend who had “you are not your job”, apparently a line from Fight Club, tattooed across his chest. I think of it often, not least because he worked in HR and this meant he felt he couldn’t shower in the work gym due to fear of giving the wrong impression, but actually because I am certainly not my job. I’m someone who strives to change the world, and how I do that will change over time.

People are shocked when I mention, casually, that I won’t always be running the charity I founded. “But it’s your baby!” they say, to my horror. No. It is not. My drive is to do good. This charity is one of the current ways I’m doing that. It will change and evolve.

When we let children, or ourselves as adults, be defined by the job we want, the goal we’re chasing, the milestone we’re aiming for, we are setting ourselves up for failure, the exact trap the song was warning me about back in that Slough community centre.

My little brother turned thirty last year and felt he hadn’t done all the “right things” by that age, so he asked a friend how they were coping with the same milestone. The friend said, “great, mate, I’ve got a wife, a house and a baby, I’m on track.” What happens to that man at forty? Fifty? Will he still have it all sewn up? Maybe. I don’t think it’s likely. When people come to me with their hopes for doing good, their motivation is so often rooted in a longing for something they can’t quite name, for a sense of purpose they haven’t found elsewhere.

I believe that void, the one that sends people towards sports cars, silent retreats, or a friend’s rollerblades, can be erased, not just filled, when you become a Real Do-Gooder. Not filled, because a job, a partner, or a milestone can only ever paper over it for a while. It will be erased, because once you’re living from your deeper magic instead of chasing a 9-5 or beautiful wife, the question “is there more than this?” stops being one you need to ask.

To be clear: you do not have to do what I did and start a whole charity. When people come to me with their desire to do good in the world, a new charity is rarely the answer.

My challenge, and my promise, is this: when you find your deeper magic: the things that make you feel good, and turn them into acts of doing good, you will see your life transformed.