They told me I was not bright enough (6/7)

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I was told I was not bright enough to finish my master's in a year. The person who told me knew exactly what she was doing. This is Sustainability Solved by Will Richardson, and this is part 6 of 7 on why I'm changing the Sustainability Solved main podcast. Last time ended in Chile. This one is the year that put me into this work for good. When I came back, I worked for Justerian Brooks, the wine merchant. Because I seemed to be interested in wine. Then I got made redundant and worked for Travelbag because I had lots of travel experience and was able to get that job fairly easily. I really did not like being a travel agent. It was really stressful. I got made redundant from there too because they closed down the Piccadilly office. I could have moved elsewhere, or they said I could take some money and leave. At that point, I was already enrolled on a master's course part-time in environmental management, so I decided to do it full-time over a year. And I was told specifically that I was not able to do it in a year, that I was not bright enough, and that I did not have the academic ability to be able to do it. They only knew my academic ability on paper. not in real life. I finished within a year with great results, and I remember Dr. Avis Hall coming up to me at the end and saying, I realize now that was the best thing I could have said to you, and that, that you weren't going to finish, because you were so determined that you were going to not only finish in a year but finish Well, in a year. I saw that tenacity and that conviction from you, and I'm really proud. It's meant a lot to me, that conversation. Now, Dr. Avis Hall got that result because she understood exactly who she was talking to. Nobody else could have said that sentence to me and had it work. Said by a stranger, It is an insult. Said by an administrator, it is a rejection. Said by her, deliberately, it was worth a year of work. That is uncomfortable if you do communications for a living, because it means the message is only half the job. The other half is the relationship the messenger already has, and you cannot manufacture that in a campaign. It is also the reason one host, however good, will only ever reach one slice of an audience. The second thing that that year taught me is about depth. A single deep conversation with somebody who genuinely knows their subject changing the direction of my working life. A quick skate across the top of a topic once a month does not do that for anybody. So we're running a miniseries instead, 3 to 4 episodes at a time with one subject matter expert, so we can really delve much deeper. Sophie Taysom, who works at the intersection of climate risk, real assets, and insurance, is hosting 3 of her own, Modeling Nature's Return on Investment, In cities, turning empty shopfronts into homes, retrofitting heritage buildings to net zero. Not one episode on climate risk, 3, because you cannot get to the useful part in 40 minutes. So what your organisation can do today is stop trying to explain your whole climate strategy to everybody at once. Pick one material issue for your sector, And go 3 times deeper on it with the people it actually affects. In food and beverage, that is usually agricultural Scope 3 emissions. In media, marketing, and advertising, it is nearly always digital delivery and production travel. One subject properly understood beats 12 subjects half heard. Next time, All of this comes together and I'll tell you exactly what is changing and why. The written version is on Substack, link in the show notes. I'm Will Richardson and this is Sustainability Solved by Will Richardson.

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