This transcript has been edited for clarity and checked against the available source transcript and recording. Filler, false starts, and obvious transcription errors have been corrected without changing the speaker’s meaning.
Elizabeth: I was jealous of people who had a passion. I didn’t have one. That’s the other thing: now there’s this pressure not just to have a career, but to be passionate about it. It’s like, “Oh my God, there’s a whole other layer added to that.” Whenever we’re championing one set of expectations or ideas of success over another, it’s bad.
Intro#
James: Hello, and welcome to Graduate Theory. Today’s guest is the founder and director of Purposeful. She has previously been a director at various startups and is now a co-founder of her no-code business, Next Revolution. Her mission is to help young people find their place in the world.
Please welcome Elizabeth Knight to the show. Elizabeth, welcome.
Elizabeth: Thank you so much for having me. I’m super excited to chat.
James: Me too. You’re certainly very inspiring, and it’s really cool to see what you’re doing in the lives of young people in Perth and right across Australia. I was listening to and researching you before the podcast, and I found that you have this particular interest in vision boards.
Vision Boards#
James: I’d love it if you could explain the history of vision boards in your life, perhaps when you started using them and what benefits you’ve had from creating them.
Elizabeth: Nowadays, you see a lot of vision boards in January on Instagram. There are these beautiful, collage-type things, and that’s the only time people talk about their goals with other people, especially on social media. But I’d been doing that for quite a while.
I quite consciously make a vision board almost every year. I usually sit down at the start of the year and spend two or three weeks resetting, connecting with myself again and thinking about the goals I have. To begin with, it’s not particularly structured.
It’s a process of trying to get creative again and tap back into the things I really enjoy. That can be anything big or small. I’ll map out full mind maps of different bucket-list items and things I want to achieve. Then I spend time refining those goals and figuring out which ones most align with my values and are most authentic or true to me.
That’s about what is true to me in that moment, because there are lots of things you might want to achieve, but they might not be the most compelling or resonant goals for you in the here and now. Then I go scrapbook-style and create a physical vision board with my top five to eight goals, anchored around the values that are most important to me.
That usually sits above my bed, so it’s the first thing I see every day when I wake up. For people who aren’t familiar with the process, the idea of a vision board is to trick your brain into thinking you’ve already achieved these things, so it feels as though you could do it again.
It’s that idea that seeing is believing: you’re training yourself to think that things which seem really lofty and ambitious are possible and within reach. It also makes them hard to forget, because most of us write down our goals at the start of the year and then maybe don’t look at them again until the next year, when we restart the process.
It’s also a really creative process for me and a grounding way of coming back to myself. I find that every six to seven months I have a mini life crisis where I’m like, “What’s my vision? What am I doing?” The process really helps me refocus.
So that’s vision boards.
James: That’s so good. I think it’s really cool. I’ve done some in the past, but I’ve just made a Word document where I find things to include. Even if it’s certain people I want to be like, I’ll put a photo of them there.
I think it would be so helpful to see it every day. It reminds you, “Oh yeah, these are the things I’m pursuing.” Often, at the start of the year, you write down, “I’m going to run three times a week for the rest of the year,” or whatever.
You might do it for a while and then go off track and forget you even decided to do it. I think that’s a big part of it too.
Elizabeth: What always amazes me is that I’ll start with a list of probably 50 to 100 goals, all of different sizes, and pick only five to eight to work on consciously right now. But when I look back each year, I’ve always achieved so many more goals than those I had in my vision and was focusing on.
That’s because so many are next steps or follow-ons from each other. We don’t talk much about consciously carving out time to set goals and dream, but dreaming is so important. You need to really let yourself ask, “What would I do if I couldn’t fail?”
What would you do if time and money were no object, or if whatever barrier you face—confidence, skills, connections, courage or something else—were no longer a barrier? You need to give yourself permission to think about things that aren’t necessarily realistic or that other people would approve of.
That’s such an important part of the process. It’s not just about having goals that seem cool or look cool to achieve; you need to do that first part as well.
James: I love that. I’m interested to hear what sort of artefacts you put on the board. Do you have a particular way of doing it?
Elizabeth: Creating the vision itself?
James: Let’s use the example of wanting to run three times a week. What would you put on the vision board? Are there any particular things you use to articulate the goal?
Elizabeth: You almost have to get really silly with it. If you cringe at what you create, that’s a good thing because it means it has struck a nerve and actually resonates with you. I always say it should feel like you’re showing someone your diary when you show them your vision, because it should be that personal to you.
For example, once upon a time one of my big goals was to meet Taylor Swift. I achieved that goal, which was huge for my nine-year-old self. For ages, I had this really cheesy Photoshopped image of me with Taylor Swift, and I wanted to move to Sydney at the time.
The Sydney Harbour Bridge was in the background. It doesn’t have to be realistic, and I think that’s what people often miss. It’s supposed to get you into the zone of what it would feel, look and be like to achieve that goal. Who would be around you? If you were going to a concert to meet Taylor Swift, how would you get there?
Do you have a dream car you’re driving? Who’s in the passenger seat next to you, coming on that journey with you? Doing all these exercises really fleshes out what that moment could be like. It seems silly, but it makes the moment all the more real to you, which is a critical part.
Lots of cheesy Photoshopped things go on my vision board, and that’s okay because it’s supposed to be fun as well.
James: That’s really cool and a nice segue: what is on your vision board for this year? Did you end up doing one?
Elizabeth: My vision board this year, I have to admit, is a little broken up, but that’s okay. I’ve unsubscribed from necessarily doing it every year; you do it when you need it. For a long time, my big vision has been to build a business that’s purposeful, sustainable and scalable.
It’s purposeful in that it creates an impact first and foremost. It’s sustainable financially, but also for me personally and for my team. It’s scalable in that I want to create something with a legacy that lives beyond my time on this planet, because we have no idea how long that is.
I’m concentrating most of my time at Purposeful, which is a startup helping young people find their place in the world and careers they’re passionate about. As part of that, my goal has been to make my first full-time hire this year and do a fundraise that enables us to build a scalable platform to support young people in finding the right pathway for their future.
That’s a huge vision item, and it’s why my vision has encroached on multiple years at the moment. Obviously, there’s a lot to try to achieve in 12 months, but that’s one of the big-ticket items this year.
Challenges Young People Face Today#
James: That’s certainly exciting, and I’d love to dive into Purposeful in more detail. You’re going into schools and helping young people understand what it takes, or what skills they need, to live a more purposeful life. What are some common challenges that young people today are really grappling with?
Elizabeth: Whatever you faced in high school, it’s that, but times ten. The challenges I faced when figuring out what I wanted to do have become more and more amplified for this next generation coming through. The number one question we get is always some variation of, “How do I make the right choice? How do I pick the right career pathway?”
I’m always interested in that wording because it assumes there’s a wrong pathway and one dream job out there, sitting and waiting for you somewhere. It assumes it’s your job to work harder, study harder and get closer to finding it, which I think is a big myth.
The idea of the future of work, and that a lot of jobs don’t exist yet, doesn’t mean there are jobs we simply don’t understand, which aren’t tangible and which we can’t conceptualise.
To me, it means being the curator of your own path and opportunities: identifying problems and potentially creating employment opportunities around solving them. That could be through a business, but it could also be within your organisation. I think that notion is what young people really struggle with.
In school, we’re taught to conform, but the way we need to think about our careers is the opposite. We need much more agency in designing our own path and must be more proactive about it. Students tend to expect you to tell them, “This is the right career for you, it’s here, and you can take these one, two, three steps to get there.” It just doesn’t look like that.
I think that’s both the biggest failing of the education system and a really hard realisation for a 15-year-old: you get to call the shots. That’s exciting but also really overwhelming, as we know.
James: I think it can be hard for someone at that age to hear, “All right, you’re in charge of your life. Take responsibility for everything.” It’s quite a big weight to carry. It’s especially hard when you’re at that stage and don’t really know what any of the options are, let alone the best option.
Elizabeth: Especially when you’re still in school, there’s a tension in the work we do because we now have the privilege of being the first interaction many young people have when thinking about their careers and future—not just their careers, but the path they want to take when they leave school. That’s really exciting.
But we’re also the first ones to introduce the idea that careers exist and that this is a choice they’ll have to make. We’re trying to set them up with the best first step we can, knowing that most young people don’t have a great first experience with careers.
It’s a lot of pressure to make that experience fun while recognising that careers are tough. It’s not easy; it’s kind of painful, and there’s going to be struggle. There’s no perfect way to do it.
A New Education System#
James: You mentioned the education system. I feel like it gets a lot of hate at the moment, but if you had to make some tweaks—or perhaps even create a whole new education system that did things completely differently from school—what would you do?
Have you thought about what schools could do better or what your ideal education system would look like?
Elizabeth: The number one change I’m passionate about is redefining what success looks like in our system. In my experience, success looks like a certain ATAR. The system prioritises one version of success over another, which is so unhealthy and has many ripple effects later in life.
We need to shift towards a wider, individualised idea of success and what fulfilment looks like to each young person. They need to be able to go through that self-discovery process and work out what it looks like for them. The second shift is related to that same notion, but it’s about expectations.
I go into schools and often talk with teachers and educators about the challenges we see young people facing and what they can do about them. There’s often a comeback along the lines of, “Don’t we have a responsibility to make sure students are doing something realistic for them—something they’re capable of?”
I agree with that to some extent, but why is it such a bad thing to fail? Why is it so bad for someone to try something and then say, “Oh, that’s actually not right for me,” rather than making all these decisions based on outside influences and factors?
When you’re 15, 16 or 17, it is about failing and making mistakes. That’s what that whole young period of your life is about, and we try to bubble-wrap kids against it. I think that’s a big problem because it means they don’t know their own limitations. It also doesn’t account for the role of passion and purpose in building skills and talents.
If you’re motivated by something, as any founder knows, you have to learn all these skills that you were most likely not good at in Year 10 or Year 11. I have a cousin who’s about 16 years old. When she was in Year 8, she received a letter from the school saying she was on a VET pathway.
She was already on that pathway in Year 8 based on her Year 8 grades. That sounds terrible, but it happens in so many schools we see. Narrowing and pigeonholing kids into these paths and definitions of what they can and can’t do is so arbitrary, and it limits people’s potential in so many ways when we think like that.
James: I agree. I remember that, when I was in school, I wasn’t someone who could say, “I’m definitely going to do this particular thing.” I almost felt jealous of people who knew what they were going to do. I thought, “I don’t know yet. That sucks.”
Elizabeth: I was the same. I was jealous of people who had a passion because I didn’t have one. That’s the other thing: now there’s this pressure not just to have a career, but to be passionate about it. It’s like, “Oh my God, there’s a whole other layer added to that.” Whenever we’re championing one set of expectations or ideas of success over another, it’s bad.
Even saying that more young people should be entrepreneurs is still bad, in my opinion, because it again prioritises one idea of success over another and doesn’t recognise that not everybody is going to be an entrepreneur. That’s never going to happen.
So I don’t think we should do that.
James: You’re right. We’re all playing a role in the team. It’s like a sports team: not everyone can be the full-forward who kicks all the goals in the footy game. Other people play different, equally important positions.
What do students undervalue?#
James: Spot on. Is there one thing you wish young people would do that would really benefit them, or something they underestimate the value of doing when they’re in high school?
Elizabeth: When I look at my journey, the biggest differentiator was something I started doing early on—not necessarily by choice—which has paid off in so many ways: spending time with myself. That might sound like an unlikely answer, but it’s about taking time to really get to know who you are and building self-awareness. It’s not about binary things like strengths and weaknesses, but simply who you are.
What drives you? What motivates you? What energises you? What drains you? What are your goals? What would you really love to do? What fires you up and frustrates you? Building that self-awareness over time is like building a muscle at the gym.
We’d love to go to the gym and have a six-pack after ten minutes—amazing—but sadly, it’s impossible. The same applies to understanding what you want, who you are and your direction. You can’t do it based on just ten minutes of thought. I think a lot of people put pressure on themselves and say, “I can’t work it out already, so now I’m going to give up. There’s no point.”
If they looked back, they’d probably spent a total of an hour consciously trying to work out who they are and what they want. It takes time, but it’s so important. When you talk to employers nowadays—and they don’t all recognise this—the biggest differentiator between candidates is the ability to be authentically yourself and to be confident in doing so.
This also differentiates the people you meet who you find interesting and compelling from those you don’t connect with. If you’re clever and take it to the next level, you can create opportunities by being your authentic self.
I did that by creating my own business. It’s an extension of who I am in many ways, and it has now become a career pathway for me. There are so many other ways to do that, too, such as starting a podcast, writing or making something creative. It doesn’t even have to be creative, but understanding your authentic self and practising it is so powerful.
It’s a form of what I call career capital: the assets you build up early in your career. We usually think about building experience and putting good things on your résumé, but there’s another element of career capital, which is your personal capital—who you are.
Can you tell a story that connects all those experiences in a meaningful way? If you can’t, they’re not worth as much as we think. So: authenticity, understanding who you are, devoting conscious time to working that out and not beating yourself up about it. You’re not going to work it out in ten minutes, as much as you’d like to.
James: I’d love to continue that thread. Recently, I’ve been reading about digital minimalism, getting off your phone and that kind of thing. I think technology is a huge barrier that prevents many people from doing this. When does a young person ever actually sit down with nothing?
You might go for a walk with a podcast in your ears, go to the shops or have music playing in the car. Unlike perhaps 20 years ago, now there’s almost no time when there’s nothing.
It prevents you from asking many of those questions: “What do you like?” “Well, I haven’t spent much time thinking about it because I’ve gone from here to here, looking at this thing and that thing.”
Elizabeth: Ironically, I first started spending a lot of time with myself when I was super burnt out after Year 12. My high school boyfriend had dumped me, and all these things were happening at once. By chance, I also did an internship over summer. It was kind of boring, and I was literally the only young person there. It was at the university.
I would sit and have lunch by myself every day. Even that act would have been really foreign to me. But over three or four months, all these things happened that made me spend more time with myself. We have a podcast and have interviewed lots of young people about the journey of finding purpose. Almost all of them found it after some event forced them to take space.
More recently, that event might have been COVID. People can say, “Oh yeah, that happened for me somewhat. I was forced to be at home and potentially alone for these extended periods.” You can recognise that and consciously create space for yourself. You’re 100 per cent right that you have to, because you can consume content in different ways all the time without ever stopping.
Now that muscle and awareness are in me, I get really anxious and often overwhelmed when I don’t do that. To me, being purposeful means acting on those feelings that say, “You need to stop right now.”
You need to tune back in to what’s going on before you rush on to the next thing. It’s really challenging because it goes against the entire way we live right now. But if you can do it, it will pay off for you so, so, so much.
James: I agree. There’s serious value in eating lunch without any technology nearby—the TV isn’t on and there are no phones anywhere—or simply going for a walk. There’s no podcast or audiobook playing. Taking simple time out like that is very helpful.
It helps you deal with everything that might be going on in your day-to-day life and gives you time to think and reflect. For me, it’s been seriously beneficial. Let’s talk about your journey as a founder, because Purposeful is your thing.
The beginnings of Purposeful#
James: Now you’re doing your second business, which is this no-code adventure. What was the story behind starting Purposeful? Was there a tipping point when you went from, “This is a cool idea,” to, “Okay, we’re actually doing this now”?
Elizabeth: I like the idea of a tipping point because lots of things lead to starting a business, but what was the thing that actually made you do it? I experienced this problem myself when I graduated with a shiny high ATAR and a scholarship to university. I had ticked off all these traditional ideas of success, and I was so unhappy.
I was so burnt out and exhausted after high school that burnout took a physical toll on me. It expresses itself differently for everybody, but, as I said earlier, it forced a period of pause and reflection. I realised that so many young people feel incredibly lost but don’t know how to talk about it.
There’s not really any support once you leave school to help you find a path that’s right for you, fulfils you and drives you. That was the problem I wanted to solve. Then an opportunity came up when someone asked me to run a workshop on something totally different in which I’d been involved; it was more about leadership.
I said, “Hey, do you mind if I try this purpose idea? I want to run a session on how to find your purpose.” It was a 90-minute workshop with about 50 Year 10 and 11 students on this camp.
It was first thing on Sunday morning, absolutely the graveyard shift. I ran this crash course. It was super raw and unpolished in so many ways, but the impact was huge. In all honesty, I’ve probably never run another workshop or session as powerful as that first one.
I still have the feedback forms we printed. Every single kid filled out a double-sided form, and they raved about the experience. That was the moment I realised, “There’s a real need for this, and I can actually solve it. I know what young people need, and I can go on that journey to help them.”
Even now, students who were in that session come up to me at uni and say, “Hey, I remember you from that workshop.” That’s amazing because it was the first real step, even though I didn’t know it at the time.
James: Having that impact is so special, and it’s great to see that you’ve had the courage to go through with it and do more of that great work with young people as well.
You started Purposeful when you were fairly young. I think you were 19, if that’s right, which is young for someone starting their own company and doing all this super-cool stuff. What has that journey been like for you as someone taking on a lot of responsibility? Has it been rewarding or challenging?
The Purposeful Journey#
James: It has probably been quite crazy. I’m interested to hear how you evaluate the journey so far.
Elizabeth: It’s a really interesting question right now because I’m forced to confront the idea that it has been four years since that first session and opportunity, which is huge. In some ways, I still see myself as the 19-year-old who was on that journey. But I have to realise all the ways I’m different, how much things have changed and everything that’s been achieved since then.
That’s a significant amount of time. It’s also a huge and formative part of your life as a young person, between 19 and 23. I’ve grown so much personally through that process. Ironically, the hardest thing I dealt with at the beginning was my self-worth, because people would look at me and ask, “How did you have the confidence to start that?”
I was confident, but when you’re founding a company, especially when you’re young, you don’t know anything. The only given is that every day you’re going to learn at least one thing, because you know nothing about the process. It can be really disempowering at times because every time you solve a problem, you move on to a bigger problem that you still know nothing about.
The resilience and grit—I love that word, grit—have been the biggest takeaways from this journey. No matter where I go next or how things eventually turn out, they will always stick with me. In addition, when I began, I was really caught up in the idea of being a young person and a young woman in this space. That absolutely influenced how I thought about things and what I believed I could and couldn’t do.
If I could change anything about that process, it would be to be bolder sooner in the journey and not wait for so much permission from people to say, “You’re ready to ask for this now,” or, “You’re ready to set this goal now.” That mindset is a little more mainstream now.
We accept it more and don’t define people as much by their age. But age absolutely played a big part in my mindset at the beginning. I wondered, “Am I allowed to do this? Can I do this? Will people think I’m silly if I do this?” You have to tackle the impostor syndrome that exists when you’re in a job and on a journey that puts you at the bottom of the food chain every day.
James: An interesting follow-up is: would you do all that again if you could restart?
Elizabeth: Honestly, yes. A key to living a purposeful life is not having regrets. If you’re being authentic, doing your best to live by your values and making decisions that align with those values, you shouldn’t really regret anything because you’ve given it your all and committed to the process.
For example, there are many things I’ve passed up to take this path, such as getting a normal job and being paid. I laugh now because I know I’m at my most stressed when I’m craving a real job—a real job.
I wish I could just go somewhere to work, get paid for eight hours and then go home. That’s funny because, obviously, it is most people’s reality. But I don’t regret my choice. You have to accept that, with every choice you make, there are thousands of things you’re saying no to in that moment as well.
That is life. I don’t regret the journey, but there are definitely times when I could have been more courageous or acted with even more conviction, especially when it came to my values. You could probably guess some of them: purpose is really important to me.
Authenticity, growth and wellbeing are also really important to me. There are times when I may have shied away from growth that would have been helpful earlier on, but it always catches up with you eventually. If you need to grow, you have to tune in to that and run with it, even if it’s scary.
Most Worthwhile Investments#
James: That’s really cool, and I appreciate your authentic answer. What has been your most valuable investment along the way? It could be something you did, a chance meeting with someone, a course you signed up for or something you paid for that had a huge impact on you.
Do any worthwhile investments come to mind?
Elizabeth: I love that question, and I’m awful at answering it. Without repeating myself too much, definitely the investment in myself. Carving out conscious time is invaluable; it’s priceless and has paid off in so many ways for my future self.
Doing and continuing that has been incredibly important. Any opportunity to shift your mindset is so powerful, and it comes in many forms. One example came during high school, and my parents paid for it, so I think it was a worthwhile investment for them. I attended a leadership conference that was like a Tony Robbins event for high school students.
It was in Los Angeles, and I’d never been to America at that point in my life, so it was very much a culture shock. We arrived and there were about 500 other young people from all over the world, raving and dancing. It was super hyped and exciting.
The founder, Dr Bill Dorfman, is a celebrity dentist. He was the dentist on The Doctors, one of those daytime TV shows. His clients weren’t all celebrities, but many were the best in the world at whatever they did in their fields.
He would bring them to the conference to speak about how they became successful and what their journeys were. As a 15-year-old, you’d think, “We’ve heard this before. Five people have said this already.” It was helpful, but you’d still ask, “Can I really do this? How does this relate to me?”
By the end of the week, it clicked that they were all saying the same things because these incredibly successful people do the same things. We should listen to them because they know how to achieve great success, whatever success looks like to them.
That experience literally paved the way for the growth mindset I didn’t realise I’d been given at that time: I could do anything. Literally anything was possible, and you were the creator of your own path. It gave me an overwhelming sense of agency that you don’t get in the classroom.
Ever since, I’ve craved any experience that gives you a new sense of purpose, makes you feel small in a really good, healthy way and reminds you that anything is possible. We all need that so much more in our lives. That would be my answer.
James: That sounds like a very cool experience. I don’t know if you can remember, but what were some of the key things those speakers said about achieving really cool things?
Elizabeth: One quote instantly comes to mind. I don’t even remember the man’s name, but he had a horrific story. He’d been in a fire, a horrible accident, and had lost multiple limbs and had all these disabilities as a result. He asked, “How far are you willing to go alone?”
For anything you want to achieve, how far are you willing to go alone? That’s always stuck with me. With any bold goal, problem you want to solve or thing you want to achieve, how far are you willing to go while being the only person who believes it can happen?
Really let that sink in, because it’s huge. As human beings, we’re biologically trained to have the support, love and care of the people around us. It doesn’t make evolutionary sense to go out on your own all the time. You have to fight that instinct to do what other people are doing, listen to them and get their approval first.
When you’re founding a company, how far are you willing to go and be the only person who believes in that thing? I think that has been my biggest takeaway and is also the source of the grit to keep going.
The other thing he said, quite humbly, was, “What more can I do?” In most instances, we can live a life as small or as large as we choose. Playing it safe and small will never fulfil you or realise the potential you could have had on the planet.
I really like that idea too: what more can I do to serve and give back in return for the opportunity to be alive and here at this time in history?
What does success look like?#
James: That’s super cool. Thanks so much for sharing that. Another thing you mentioned when talking about your trip to LA was working towards what success looks like for you. Obviously, that’s different for everyone, and it’s important not to adopt someone else’s idea of success without thinking it through yourself.
What does success look like for you?
Elizabeth: It’s an evolving answer at the moment, as it should be, because we grow and change as people too. At its core, success has always been about fulfilment and alignment with my values. Part of trying to achieve success is balancing where you are right now—fully accepting and appreciating yourself and what you have, and being grateful for the present—with the far-off vision you have for the future.
There will always be tension between those two things, especially if you’re founding a company, because you’re pitching this vision that’s far in the future. But you also have to recognise, “Hey, we’ve done well to get where we are today, but we can always be better.”
Success is always about balancing those two ideas. I have lots of dreams, goals and ambitions for the future, but I would say it takes much more work to accept what you’ve already achieved. That’s not an explicit goal or thing I’m trying to achieve; it’s something I’m trying to practise all the time in my life.
The reality—and this is really core to my thinking, if you know me well—is that none of us knows how much time we have on the planet. It’s absolutely not guaranteed for anybody. God forbid, this could be my last day. Could I sit with myself and the decisions I’ve made, in this moment, and accept them if today were my last day?
But you might also have another 10, 20, 30 or 40 years, hopefully, to work harder. I think you need both things to be truly fulfilled. Success, to me, means being inspired to keep creating and doing, while also being able to look around and say, “This is awesome.”
This is amazing. All the pain and the good—the positive and negative parts of right now—I’m really grateful for. That’s success.
James: That’s really cool. I’ll have to reflect on that. You’ve been great at sharing in the last hour or so, and I really appreciate you being so vulnerable with us. To finish the podcast today, I have one last question for you, Liz, about the advice you’d give to someone just starting out.
Advice for Graduates#
James: Let’s say they’ve finished high school and are starting their journey in the big wide world. Reflecting on your own journey, what advice would you give someone going through that right now?
Elizabeth: The first thing that comes to mind is: be emotional, which is kind of strange. When I was younger, I thought it was bad to be passionate in a way. Young people get this bad rap for being too angry and fired up—or the opposite, not caring enough.
It’s important not to worry about perfection when you’re young because it’s impossible to achieve. Just feel things, act somewhat impulsively, and appreciate the good and bad that come with being a young person. You have to go through all of that.
It’s all a really positive thing. That would be my first piece of advice. Secondly, be bold. Again, how far are you willing to go alone? Absolutely don’t let anybody else define the path in front of you if you don’t want them to. You might have a family or parents who want a particular thing for you and think it’s best for you.
You might agree with some of those things, and that’s totally fine. The key is being able to ask yourself, “Why am I doing this? What’s really driving this goal or step for me? Am I going to university because I think I have to, or because it’s actually the most purposeful step for me?”
Ask yourself why and really think about that when you’re making choices. Do your best to make those decisions in alignment with who you are, not the rest of the world around you. Honestly, at the end of the day, who cares what they think? You have to live with it; they don’t.
That would be my advice.
James: That’s fantastic. Thanks for sharing that with us and for coming on the show. It’s been really insightful to hear about your experiences and everything you’ve shared. It’s super cool, and I think you’re on an amazing journey.
Connect with Liz#
James: It will be really exciting to see where you end up in the next couple of years, so I’m super keen to stay in touch. For people who want to find out more about you and connect, where is the best place for them to go?
Elizabeth: I’m pretty easy to find on LinkedIn and our website at Purposeful. Send me a message, and make sure you let me know you heard about me here, which is always nice to know. I’m absolutely happy to chat with anybody. Thanks so much for this; it has been awesome. I really appreciate it.
James: We’ll leave links to your social media in the show notes so people can find you. Thanks so much for coming on the show today, Liz. It was great having you.
Outro#
James: Thanks for listening to this episode. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. If you want to get my takeaways—the things I learnt from this episode—please go to GraduateTheory.com/subscribe, where you can get my takeaways and all the information about each episode straight to your inbox.
Thanks so much for listening again today, and we’re looking forward to seeing you next week.