The Moral of the Story - Part 2

Career journeys are broad and winding. And by the time you rack up a few years on the job, you learn a thing or two.

In Season 1 of The Career Circus podcast Story Knight interviewed leading figures in law, comedy, business, finance and more.

Each guest shared the moral of the story that spans the arc of their career.

Last week we unpacked the moral of the story according to Wendell Potter (health insurance executive turned whistleblower), Evan Shapiro (media executive turned cartographer and podcaster), and Farzana Baduel (accountant turned PR executive).

This week we hear from stories spanning careers in law, comedy, business, civil service and finance thanks to Yasmin Elhady, Lady Suzanne Heywood and Abbas Hashmi.

Below are their takes in their own words. Words have been edited for length and clarity.

Yasmin Elhady - comedian, lawyer, reality TV show host

“Everything that I do, I seek connection and I seek real authentic connection with people, with stories.

In my job, I’m serving the public and I’m giving answers to people that really need them, that are waiting for a response.

And whether that be in comedy or in matchmaking, I’m trying to connect with people and let them relate to me in a way that I can better their life in some way.

Maybe it’s to relieve stress. Maybe it’s to find you a partner. Maybe it’s just to let you learn about yourself a little bit more.

But that is what we’re doing, I think, as comedians and performers. We’re trying to let you see yourself in us.

Say the things it’s hard to say. Recount the things that you yourself may have dug very deep and buried deep and uncover it to be able to deal with it, to be able to discuss it openly, bravely.

So that you can laugh at yourself and that you can laugh with me as well. And that connection, I think, is so, so crucial to feeling healed. So all of it is connection. All of it is healing.

And I think that especially in matchmaking, there’s so much healing conversation that happens.”

Lady Suzanne Heywood - executive and author

“I was very conscious when I wrote Wave Walker that there were two kind of underlying morals coming out of this tale.

One is a bit more negative and one is very positive.

So the more negative one is that there is a real need for parents when they’re going to kind of take their children out of the mainstream to balance their desires and their needs with those of their children.

Because they’re not the same. And when you’re making a decision as a parent, you’re effectively making a decision for your child because they don’t have autonomy.

We see all over Instagram pictures people taking their kids out of school and walking along a lovely sandy beach and saying what wonderful parents they are.

And I feel like saying to every single one of them, ‘lovely, but just listen to your child and bear in mind that what’s wonderful for you may not be wonderful for them and they don’t have a voice’.

But the reality is there’s going to come a time, particularly when those kids are a little bit older, where the last thing in the world they want to be doing is walking along a beach with their parents.

They’re going to want to be hanging out with their friends and making relationships outside of the family and starting to build their own lives.

And then in a much more positive way the other, the huge moral that comes out of my story is how, you to catapult you from one type of life into another.

Without education I would probably still be sitting uneducated in a boatyard doing some sort of manual job.

Or I’d be a single mother sitting somewhere unemployed. I don’t know what I would be, but I would be nowhere.

I am an eternal optimist, but one of my great hopes of kind of AI education is that we’re making it easier for people in the sorts of situations that I was in to educate themselves.

Education can catapult you from that into a completely different life trajectory. And that’s what happened to me.”

Abbas Hashmi - finance executive, wealth manager

“Money is not everything. It’s the relationship that matters.

You can talk about numbers. You can talk about IRR.

But if you don’t know the person; you’re not selling.

So my moral of the story is spend time in learning your relationships, whether those are personal or they’re professional, and build on that.

Don’t consider humans as a transaction. Don’t meet with somebody and think, hey, this is a lead in my CRM. This is a human relationship.

That’s a household. That household can open up so many different doors, not only professionally, but personally as well.

I’ve learned so much from my clients. I was usually the youngest wealth manager or private banker in my team.

And I was meeting with people with decades of experience. And they will sit with me and then I’ll ask them these questions and then just like walk away without selling anything.

People need to feel connected, seen, heard.

The biggest concern people has is not that they’re going to lose the money. The biggest problem that they have is when they need you, you won’t be there.”