Post by Carolyn McMurray

School taught me a lot of things. I’d bin 90% of what I was taught. You see…I’m a big advocate of UNSCHOOLING. Especially for creative young people. Young people into writing and the arts. We are so LET down. Don’t believe me? Let me take on a little journey of all the things I was taught at school that actually made my life worse… GET A STABLE JOB!!! THE CREATIVE INDUSTRY IS NOT STABLE. YES. I get it. A lot of careers in the creative industry - like copywriting - aren’t always super stable. They can be a lil difficult to break into at the start. Especially with the rise of AI. BUT…have we got no imagination left? It’s as if the education system can’t be bothered to inspire people to want more. To be the outlier. To look at a kid who is gifted and great at writing and tell them…’hey…FUCK what society says. You CAN do this. You WILL find a way.’ But no - they have to stamp and squash our dreams before we’ve even had a chance to try them. Before we can even get excited about it, they make us temper our expectations. They make us think that we need to be realistic. Fuck that! UNIVERSITY IS A SOLID OPTION THAT MOST SUCCESSFUL PEOPLE DO. If you’re the kind of person who enjoys the experience of university, who enjoys that kind of learning and knows for certain that they want to study XYZ…then go for it! But there’s also a very big group of people out there who: Can’t afford the debt and tbh, can’t be asked to deal with it Don’t cope well with the VERY STRUCTURED UNI WAY OF LEARNING Don’t know what they wanna do with their life yet BE PROFESSIONAL IN A WORKPLACE SETTING. IT’S THE ONLY WAY YOU’LL GET AHEAD Again, not true. I got less work and was less happy being a little professional bitch than the real me. The real me swears and says p**** on LinkedIn. The real me wears my hair pink with a bright neon green dress at a meeting. The real me is weird as fuck. And it’s actually led me to creating my own creative business - Word Tonic. A community + newsletter of 3,0000 gen-z writers worldwide. A business that pays my life. That IS my life. And it’s totally me. And a note on the people who say ‘no money in the creative industry,’ I make more than enough. This is not me bragging. But my life is now a dream that 12 year old me would never have thought possible. Young people need to know that. And they need to hear more from other young people LIKE THEM who are making large, gorgeous careers. Who are doing what they love and YES, making money. Who didn’t come from money or knew what they were doing. Take me. I quit uni twice. I had to look after my alcoholic parents. I became an escort and did pros**** to get by. And I still made it. More than made it. You can too. PS. I LOOOOOVE talking about stuff like this so if you have a talk in front of some young people, I'm totally down to chow their ear off. This is something I'm passionate about. #Copywriting #Freelancing #Female #Entrepreneur #Education