Episodes
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This conversation is with Anneka Kapadia, who turned 30 a couple of weeks ago. She emailed me quite soon after the first podcast came out with a great story of how she traded in her comfortable life in Manchester to go travelling in South America.
Her experiences have changed her perspective not only on reaching 30, but also how she’s planning on living her life in the future.
Anneka’s just come back to the UK after almost a year away, but is planning on heading out to South America again pretty soon.
Despite the fact she’s had really different experiences to my last guest Steph, she’s actually come to quite similar conclusions - about the importance of appreciating the little things in life and enjoying the journey.
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“It’s far more important to enjoy the everyday, irrelevant of whether you’re ill or not, or how long or short you think your future’s going to be. You only have today to deal with right now and I think we’re all too keen to wish that away”.
My next guest is another one who emailed in, and I was immediately blown away by her story. Steph Wedderburn is 28, a mum to a one year-old son, and the former owner of two businesses - but there’s a lot more to it than that.
I’ll let her tell you the whole story, but one of the most striking things to me was how much she’s had to deal with in such a short space of time. Not only that, but she seems to be a really positive person too, despite everything.
This one is a little longer than the others, but hopefully you understand why - I had real [...]
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Missing episodes?
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Episode 5’s conversation is with Cortney Hamilton - someone I met through her husband, who’s an old friend of mine.
Cortney is a 27 year-old American PhD student studying at Stanford in California,who still has two years left on her doctorate in Iberian and Latin American culture and literature.
She’s definitely one of the smartest people I know, and has a really different perspective on the whole turning 30 thing as she’s spent almost all of her adult life as a student. She’s going to be finishing her qualification just before turning 30, and will be then entering a super competitive jobs market in academia.
We also spoke about the prospect of kids and planning for a family when you’re a woman who’s very focused on her career - and there’s a ridiculous Game of Thrones analogy in there as well.[...]
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In episode 4 I chat to Colin, who preferred not to give his real name - he’s a teacher from the UK, and is just coming up to 34.
He emailed me after listening to the podcast and I’m really glad he did, because our chat was really different to my first three shows.
Where those conversations were mostly about career, Colin’s was almost entirely about his personal life and how when he was younger he really thought he’d have a wife and kids by now.
This was a completely different perspective on the pressures of growing up past your 20s and one I hadn’t had the chance to properly think about.
During our chat he made quite a few powerful statements about how his relationship situation affects him, and how these feelings are also tied into other key events in his life.
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Joe Tidy is probably the person outside of my family that I’ve known the longest. Our families lived next door to each other when I was a little kid and our friendship has lasted for the best part of 25 years.
Our lives have followed similar, if crucially different, paths. Joe is, to the casual observer, a super-successful broadcast journalist working as a reporter at Sky News. The interesting thing is, though, that he sometimes doesn’t feel that way.
His incredible determination to improve and better himself is probably a significant factor in how he’s worked to where he is now, but it’s also the reason he feels like he needs to continue to further himself even now.
Career aside, he’s still doing great – Joe said he can attribute most of his success to his brilliant wife Sophie, and his young family has gained another member in 2016.
His interview was a great contrast to my first one with Dave Rogers – I’ve already seen two successful pe [...]
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In the first episode of The 30 Project, I chat to self-described “big human” Dave Rogers. I met Dave 8 years ago when we both spent a year working at our Students Union in Loughborough – he’s one of the most energetic and infectious personalities I know.
By his own admission, he’s having the best time of his life post-30, even though he doesn’t think he’s yet figured anything out. He also told me his greatest fear is that everything he’s built to this point “will just disappear”. This, combined with his relentless determination to approach every obstacle in life with a positive attitude, made this conversation a great starting point for the 30 Project.