Decide what you like to do best

and work out a way to make a modest living doing it

The Jasper Conran shirt dress bought in May 2022 in its fourth year in a row as part of my Chelsea Flower Show uniform.

I’m not sharing newly discovered pearls of wisdom here. What I have to say is known. But what I have learned is that sometimes it takes a voice saying something in a language you particularly understand which will allow you clarity.

I’ve been thinking hard about purpose, and finding a direction, and working out a way to make a living in a meaningful and useful way. People often tell me how lucky I am to be growing flowers for a living - and it’s true I am. Other people look wide eyed with ‘no thanks’ at the hours I work in the summer. Those people feel sorry for me and wonder if I’m a fool because surely there’s an easier way to make a living.

I look at my kids, one just finished his a levels, and one doing her GCSEs next year, and I think about what I hope they’ll take from the example their parents have made in the choice of business they run. Will they be inspired? I suspect at least one of them thinks we’re fools.

We are the children of our parents. We are brought up with examples of how to live, and strictures like, ‘Always save money for a mortgage,’ or ‘Save for your pension.’ I had a student here a week or so ago whose parents are afraid for her because she wants to set up a small business of her own which will mean she steps out of corporate financial security. Her parents are understandably risk-averse for their child, no matter how grown up she is. Of course we want our kids to be safe, financially secure, have a roof over their heads, a good pension so that one day they can stop working for somebody else and enjoy a well-earned retirement. Of course this student will run a small business brilliantly because, unlike me, she’ll approach the process with the finance and operations managing brain which has been trained by her corporate career. Her parents need have no fear for her.

Of the many privileges from which I benefit, one is that my mother brought us all up hissing this in our ears: ‘Don’t have a boss. Don’t work for anyone else. Do your own thing.’ My brother Alex Newbery, accordingly, designed websites from a garden office years before working from home in a garden office became a thing. My sister Beatrice Newbery has been a journalist, a farmer, now she’s a voice coach. I’m not sure she’s ever had a job that wasn’t freelance. I did work for other people in a PAYE sort of way - until about thirty years ago (I’m 58 years old) I stopped and tried to make a living writing novels, then developing television programmes, and finally, in my early 40s, the lightbulb moment came and I started growing flowers for sale.

Not one of us three kids stepped straight away into the thing we would do for the rest of our lives. There is a swerving about that is necessary after one leaves school: one has to learn how other people run businesses, learn what kind of a life one wants to lead (expensive, moderate, or can one be very cheap for oneself to keep?) One must learn whether one will be more of a consumer or creator. One must see how other people might have taken the thing they liked to do a lot and made a business of it, and whether they had been able to keep hold of the fun part, or had been rolled into the business machine to become a cog in it themselves.

And now we get to the nub of the question I’m asking here today.

How to be happy in life? Yes, find the community in which you choose to live, the friends, the grown up family you adopt, or marry, or live near to - the people who love you and you love in return. Yes, find those people.

But the one person you’re going to spend most of the time with is yourself. And so it’s good if that person is happy, no? So how to be happy?

The skill is, I think, to work out what it is you like doing best and then work out how to make a modest living doing it.

I like growing flowers and I like writing. I like growing flowers a lot more when I can do it as an escape from writing - and vice versa. I am enough of a flitter that it’s good to have both activities as income sources. I have spent many years working this out, and I’ve worked out a way to make a modest living doing both. My life as it is might not pay for the style in which someone more consuming might need: no fast cars or snazzy watch collection for me - though I do have a very nice Jasper Conran shirt dress which I bought in May 2022, which is working hard in its fourth year of being worn, and I think is now coming in at about £14 per wear. Right now it’s sloshing around the washing machine so it’ll be clean and ironed for my godson’s wedding in August (that dress was a worthwhile investment.)

The reason I have no desire for the fast cars or the watches I think is simple. I’m more interested in the work I do than in stuff I can buy from other people. It is the interest that keeps the focus and the job keeps drawing me on.

So this is what I’ll encourage the children to allow themselves. They need to allow themselves to acknowledge what they’re good at and they enjoy most - and that could be ironing, cooking, arguing, walking, selling, talking to people…. Then, while they get a job doing anything that they can be paid to do at the age they are nowjust so they can earn a bit of money so they can buy a car, for example, they can look at how other people run businesses, the structures from which the small jobs they do in the holidays spring. But all the time they must keep an eye on what they like to do best. And that, naturally will evolve: a kid who loves ironing, for example, might end up in the costume department of a theatre or film set, or the embroidery school at Hampton Court or fashion at the V&A where they become specialists at looking after rare and interesting textiles… I love the story of the author of the books I’m reading so fast I’ll be bereft when I’m finished.

J C Harvey has had what I’d call a portfolio career but you can see that the focus was always there as she learned her business and her craft and has ended up making a good living doing what she likes to do best.

This from her Amazon bio: J.C.HARVEY studied English at Cambridge, and History of Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art. She worked in museum publishing for twenty years, first at the National Portrait Gallery and then at the Royal Collection Trust, where she set up the Trust’s first commercial publishing programme. She has worked as a movie extra, as a life-model, and is the author of bestselling non-fiction including 'RED: A History of the Redhead' and 'Walking Pepys’s London'. She also writes for children, under the pseudonym ‘Daisy Bird’. The extraordinary history of the Thirty Years War (1618-48) and of 17th-century Europe has been an obsession of hers for as long as she can remember, and was the inspiration behind the Fiskardo's War trilogy, which begins now with 'The Silver Wolf'.

Re myself: it is true that I’m partly driven by the fact that two friends in particular damned my efforts to turn what I loved to do into a way to make a living. When I announced I planned to write my first novel one of them looked at me in amazement and said, ‘What makes you think you can do that?’ At the time I thought he was saying I couldn’t, that I wasn’t good enough, that I was stupid to think I could. In retrospect, in fact, I think he really wanted to know what my plan was. How did I plan to do it? One word at a time would have been the answer to that question if I’d taken what he said the way I now think he intended. Sadly I was so lacking in confidence that I thought he meant I was too stupid to do such a thing and I took offence and didn’t speak to him for years afterwards. Then when I started the flower farm another friend said, I thought in a patronising, patting-me-on-the-head sort of way, ‘Oh, a LIFESTYLE business!’ Of course now I’ve refined what I think a lifestyle business is, that it is the opposite of the more-for-the-sake-of-more way of running a business, where the business itself is the be all and end all, while the founder and person who runs it can be collateral damage for the sake of growing the business, I take that judgement as a great compliment.

So there, that’s my advice for my children this first of July 2025.

The skill in life is to find out what you like to do best and then work out a way to make a living doing it.

The activity will keep you interested for years. You can evolve what you do to suit your circumstances, or even create circumstances in which the business sits as comfortably as another friend at the table.

What you do as your job you do with yourself: your paid occupation is your friend, your companion, your life partner as much as a person you choose to live with.

If what you do is interesting to you, and you like doing it, it will occupy your mind so much more than eight hours a day. A job you can step into at 9am and step out of at 5pm without a backward glance is fine. But if you can work out what you love to do most and then work out a way to make a living doing it, the challenge, the interest, the learning, the satisfaction, will be worth a great deal more than a shiny car for driving to the sparkling watch shop for kicks, and if it occupies your mind for longer than the quotidien 9-5 you won’t resent it.

Will I print this out and leave it on the kitchen table for the kids? Oh yes. Will they read it? Unlikely. Do I live in hope? Bah oui! x

Caveat: you risk falling out of love with the activity if you can’t make the business work. But the alternative might be spending your whole life wishing you could make a living from the thing you love to do best. You choose.