This month it’s a very special episode of Serendipity Soup because, although I haven’t completely decided yet, I think this is probably going to be the last one. It’s possible I will take a break and come back with a second series, but right now that’s not the plan, so how to round off the Serendipity Soup story neatly?

Well, when I floated the idea of ending the podcast in the previous episode, several listeners suggested the idea of me giving my story as the final episode so I asked my editor Anna if she would interview me and she agreed.

You may disagree once you listen but I’d say there’s two themes to this one. The first is the idea of having respect for the stories that people tell me and how difficult it is to make sure that I do justice to something so personal. It’s shown me what a skill really good quality journalism is.

Second, I think the podcast itself rather neatly sums up the very idea I’ve been wrestling with: what is success? I recently read that Dick Fuld the disgraced head of Lehman Brothers – the bank whose collapse nearly took down the entire global financial system in 2008 – once publicly shredded the tie of the second best trader in the bank, saying essentially that “second place is first loser”. 

This is the key message of the celebrity success industry, so in podcast audience terms I should probably have my entire suit, socks, pants and probably my house shredded. After all, if a podcast can only be deemed a success when it has the highest listener numbers then everyone other than Joe Rogan might as well just pack up and go home. Obviously they don’t, which shows there’s more to it than that and so I talk a fair bit with Anna about how successful or otherwise I think Serendipity Soup has been.

Huge thanks to all of you who’ve listened to the podcast and got in touch to say how much you enjoyed it. I really appreciate your support. Here are the links for this episode:

• Joe Rogan - https://www.joerogan.com/
• Adam Buxton - https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-adam-buxton-podcast/id1040481893
• Wolf and Owl - https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/wolf-and-owl/id1540826523
• Bill George ‘True North’ - https://www.billgeorge.org/book/true-north

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Welcome to Serendipity Soup! The antidote to celebrity success podcasts.

This month's guest is Andrew Finlay, the owner of Wildview Retreat (https://wildviewretreat.com/), an amazing wellness centre set in the middle of the hills of southern Portugal. He’s a nutritional therapist and has, at various times also been a dive master, environmental consultant and head of environmental protection for the Marshall Islands.

Andrew readily admits that he has a strong need to feel that he’s doing something worthwhile with his life but that following this desire, often without thinking about the consequences, has given him both extreme highs and worrying lows. He’s a very forward-looking person. Someone who feels that life’s too short to put up with situations that don’t make you happy and that if you want to feel good about yourself you should always be ready to move onto the next chapter in your life. As you’d expect I challenge him – hopefully fairly gently! – on that. At one level it makes sense, but when is enough enough? When does making a fresh start tip into giving up because things have got a bit tricky?

I think it’s fair to say that Andrew isn’t into giving up when things get tricky. You don’t buy an abandoned hilltop village in Portugal and turn it into a fully functioning retreat complete with running water and electricity if you quit at the first sign of trouble. But Andrew’s reflections on the cost of being this driven are fascinating.

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Welcome to Serendipity Soup! The antidote to celebrity success podcasts.

A lot of my guests define success in work as finding something that makes you happy. But this month’s guest, Camilla Waterman, added a really useful twist. Success is finding something that makes you happy at the time you’re doing it.

The thing I envy about Camilla is her positive attitude to change. Just because a job makes her happy when she starts, doesn’t mean it will always make her happy. She seems so comfortable recognising when that point has been reached and then simply acting to improve the situation by moving on. In that respect she’s a lot like my guest in episode 2, Nicole Shamier, who was very comfortable recognising that at some point she wouldn’t be the right person for the dream job she was in at the time.

Only two links this month. The first is to the brilliant BBC documentary ‘The Edge’, which is available on BBC Iplayer here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000lhvt/the-edge. The second is a last minute addition as I re-listened to Camilla's episode, which is the Wikipedia entry for the classical Greek legend of Cassandra: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassandra.

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