I spent 20 years making other people’s arguments. What happens if I choose my own?

For most of my working life, I’ve written things other people needed me to write - usually yesterday or sooner, and usually for minimal fiscal upside. In the last two decades, I’ve become a complex device that turns low-quality caffeinated beverages into high-quality documentation, which my clients - I assume - have then keenly read. Twas not always thus, however.

Despite leaving university with lofty ambitions of getting my knees grazed and my shins barked in Fleet Street’s notoriously dank paragraph mines, I actually realised that there was one important problem with pursuing a career in the crepuscular world of what we now must legally term ‘the legacy media.’

It was bollocks, for a variety of reasons.

It was ferociously underpaid, it was cliquey, it was rapidly becoming irrelevant. More distressingly, I was working, and writing, in the way I always had. Just doing the stuff you get told to do on a Journalism degree at university: find an angle to keep yourself interested, gather three facts, a piccy and a quote, and tappity-tippity-tap, hit the wordcount, and you’re done. Governed and overseen by exhausted hacks who couldn’t contain their racist misogyny past lunchtime, lashed to outdated technology and themselves desperate to do something - anything - else with what remained of their time, many were leaving, some were drunks, and some were looking forward to retirement. I was 27, and clearly, these were not my people.

As I staggered out of the smouldering remains of print journalism in 2008, looking for something else to keep me in socks, cigarettes and Lucozade, I realised I had to do something radical. Something cool. Failing that, something… else. I didn’t know what that was, but thankfully, the phone rang, and a nice lady offered me a job writing proposals. And so it was that I entered a new, and differently shadowy nether world: proposal writing.

Suddenly, my day was all about stuff that made no fucking sense at all. I had somehow landed a writing gig, at a Tier-1 provider of facilities management services, whatever they were. Contract terms were discussed in earnestly hushed terms around hugely advanced coffee machines. I was placed, trembling like a shitting dog, on a morning conference call, during which crackly men called Ray phoned in and actually told their boss what they were doing.

This sort of thing would not be tolerated in publishing, where vital early morning phone calls would typically centre around whether anyone could find Nerys’ shoes, as she’d been out on the lash. Oh no - actual adult life had infiltrated my consciousness, like warm oil under a door. I’d wanted more money, not endless calls with a woman called Ramona in Berkshire whose NHS Trust was failing to commandeer its fiscal returns objection certification F:2234 accreditation certificate, or something.

Jesus H Christ on a Harley, what had I done? Public-sector work. Outsourcing. Transformation. Amortisation. Gain-share. De-risking. Hard and soft services. Red reviews. White reviews. Commercial close. Stop the bus, I need to get off.

I was lost. Trapped, forever looping around on the Pepsi Max Big One of acronyms, vastly important meetings that could have been skippable emails, and dull, terrifying men who didn’t blink often enough.

To survive this Proper Job, I had to pretend to know about a lot of things, now, or sooner than that. Thankfully, I can type while I’m listening to something. This has become a vital skill.

I also realised that lots of this head-spinning esoterica, on which many a senior corporate bod would rely to justify his salary, was as much of a mystery to me as it was to him. So since I can write engaging copy to any length as long as I know enough about it to keep typing (as you’re no doubt realising here), I could, with minimal fuss, pretend I knew what I was doing. I could in fact fudge the Geoff out of it until doing so was fine. I could lie, pretend things were interesting or exciting or vital when they patently weren’t, and be paid for doing so. This is, of course, a falsehood-driven word-production technique that would later be perfected by everyone on LinkedIn.

So, regardless of my level of interest in any of it, there were complex services that had to be explained clearly enough, credibly enough and persuasively enough for someone on the other side of a table to choose them. That bit I understand. I’ve done negotiation - I had a younger sister, and parents. How much harder can it be? Combining this with the realisation that seniority does not always reflect intelligence, and some people are just ‘in post’ because, like me, a job needed doing and they were within earshot when it was being handed out, I felt my confidence growing.

It turns out that if you hold your nose and don’t expect to be thrilled to your very core every second of every day you can get quite good at this. It’s proposal writing - you’ve not just been asked to play lead clarinet for the Berlin Symphonietta. Do the work that isn’t very taxing, in a nice chair within range of the coffee machine, and get paid.

Then one day, you sit down with somebody actually nice, who knows an extraordinary amount about a subject you knew almost nothing about that morning. You ask stupid questions. Then slightly less stupid questions. Eventually you find the bit that matters.

I’ve always thought of myself as a bid writer because that’s the job title. Increasingly, I’m not sure it describes the actual job. The real work is finding arguments - connected chains of ideas that lead someone to a solution.

Here is the problem. Here is what we understand about it. Here is what we can do. Here is the evidence. Here is why that matters to you.

That skill, reluctantly honed over the years, travels with me, and is getting far more useful with each passing year in proposal writing. Now I’m older, hairier and give fewer fucks, I’ve realised that the reader is more important than my interest in the subject. The reader has a difficult, sometimes life-changing decision to make. Given that it’s my job to serve the reader and make their life easier, I’d be best off doing just that: helping.

So: a charity needs to persuade someone that its intervention is worth funding. A climate organisation needs to explain why apparently expensive action today is cheaper than catastrophe tomorrow. A public body has to explain why something complicated matters to people who have 127 other things demanding their attention.

Same job. Different nouns. And that has left me with a slightly uncomfortable thought.

What if the most important career decision isn’t what job do I want?

What if it’s whose argument do I want to spend my time making?

I’m 47. I’ve spent a long time getting reasonably good at something. Starting again as a marine biologist is probably out. But perhaps starting again isn’t necessary.

Perhaps the more interesting move is to point the existing machinery at something more useful. Education. Social mobility. Climate resilience. Public services. Health. Conservation. Something Better, with a capital B. Organisations attempting things that would make the world marginally less stupid - just because, now more than ever, outcomes matter.

There is a tendency to talk about ‘meaningful’ work as though everybody needs to discover one sacred calling hidden somewhere inside themselves, but I’m beginning to suspect that’s also a load of old crock. Maybe ‘meaning’ is simply what happens when a useful skill meets a problem you think is worth solving.

I know how to interview people. I know how to understand unfamiliar things quickly. I know how to write. I know how to persuade.

The unanswered question is no longer whether those abilities are useful. It’s what I want them to be useful for.

That’s why And Another Thing exists. Where it goes, nobody knows, but this is where it starts.