“Bad results aren’t the end.”
Anne can still remember opening her A-level results.
“I got the most appalling results. Really bad results,” she says. “I just thought, I just don’t understand what happened here.”
Until then, school had gone well. She had done the work for her O-levels and got strong results. Then something shifted. “For some reason, I didn’t understand the difference in what I had to do,” she says. “Everybody else around me seemed to understand how to take everything up to a different level.”
It stayed with her. “I can still remember it quite clearly all these years later. A trauma.”
For a young person reading this, that moment might feel painfully familiar. A bad set of results. A plan falling apart. The sense that everyone else got the memo and you didn’t.
That is exactly why Form the Future shares stories like Anne’s. Because careers often begin here, first with a wobble and then with the next practical step.
She had always been drawn to creative things
Anne did A-level Art and knew there was “something creative” in her, even if she didn’t quite know what shape that might take.
And her results changed the picture. With university no longer feeling like the obvious next step, she looked for another way in to work.
Her brother was at Watford College and mentioned a Higher National Diploma (HND) there that combined marketing, publishing and print.
“It was one of the few colleges where you could go and learn about printing,” she says. “You could learn how to bind a book and get your hands really dirty with inks.”
So, she went.
“We think we have to make all these strategic decisions,” she says, “but actually the randomness of, ‘OK, I couldn’t do that, I’ll do that’… It’s fine. It actually is fine. It just leads you on a different path.”
Work started with an overdraft and a job in a bookshop
After college, Anne wanted to start earning and stand on her own feet. She had an overdraft of about £250. “Which to me was like, oh my God, I’ve got to clear this.”
She moved back in with her parents for a few months, started writing speculative letters to employers in Cambridge and Norwich, and landed her first job in Cambridge at the bookshop Heffers.
“If I’d got my first job in Norwich, I would have ended up in Norwich,” she says. “Once again, complete randomness of life.”
From there came a series of jobs in marketing, publishing and production. Some suited her better than others. One role seemed sensible because it paid more, but she knew quickly it was wrong. “It seemed like a good idea, but I didn’t like it.”
Still, even the wrong turns gave her something. She learned about the industry and how workplaces worked. She learned what kind of environment brought out her best and just how much relationships mattered.
“Don’t burn bridges,” she says. “You just never know. Especially somewhere small like Cambridge where they’re going to turn up again.”
Others helped her build something new
Later, after getting married and having her daughter, Anne tried to reshape work around family life. She negotiated a freelance arrangement with the company she was leaving. It looked ideal with familiar contacts, guaranteed work, more flexibility, and more money.
Then, during her notice period, the company went under.
“So, I had nothing,” she says. “I had absolutely nothing.”
It was the kind of moment that someone could easily stop in their tracks. Instead, she picked up the phone.
“I called everybody,” she says. “Pretty much everybody I’d ever worked with over a period of time.”
That is how the freelance work started to come in. Bit by bit, through people she had worked with before, people remembered her, trusted her and picked up the phone. It’s a reminder that careers are often built through relationships and the impression you leave on the people around you.
Looking for community changed everything
Freelancing gave Anne flexibility, but it also left her alone at home and missing the ordinary sociability of work.
“It was a lot of sitting in front of a computer,” she says. “No face-to-face contact.”
So, she started walking down Mill Road, her local high street, getting to know shopkeepers, becoming curious about the lives and stories around her. Around the same time, a report labelled Cambridge a “clone town”. Anne did not recognise that description at all.
“That’s not the Cambridge I know.”
She began asking herself how she could use her publishing skills to champion the small businesses she saw around her?
“I just thought, oh, I can make a book.”
It sent her out into the city to speak to business owners she had never met before. She persuaded them to join her to help make something worthwhile. So much so they paid to be part of it which helped to fund the project.
“You have to deliver what you’re saying you’re going to deliver,” she says. “Otherwise, that’s game over.”
The project slowly became something else
The businesses involved started referring to themselves as members rather than customers.
“We were like, oh, that’s interesting,” Anne says. “They obviously feel a sense that we’ve created something. We don’t know quite how we’ve done it, but they feel that they belong to something. It’s so important to listen.”
And that changed the shape of the work. The book evolved into a membership model, then a magazine, then a network.
Anne is clear-eyed about the language often used around business. “Entrepreneurial” is not a word she reaches for easily.
“I just want to be able to run a sustainable business,” she says, “that gives me some money and does some good at the same time.”
She shaped her career around what mattered to her
For young people, there is something freeing in that idea. A career can work with you, rather than against you. It doesn’t have to follow the loudest version of success in the room. It can be practical, meaningful, and shaped around what matters to you.
When Anne talks about what matters now, she keeps returning to localism, community and the difference people can make close to home.
During Covid, with a print run ready and distribution points suddenly gone, she put out a call for help.
“Members, non-members, whatever,” she said. “Can anybody help?”
They did. A fruit company offered to put copies in boxes. Restaurants doing deliveries took magazines out to people’s homes. “The whole print run went,” she says.
“That’s where I get my inspiration from. That attitude of collaboration rather than competition.”
Young people need a place to start
Asked what she would say to young people now, Anne’s advice is practical.
If you want to work part-time, start on your doorstep. Look at the businesses around you. Think about the kind of work you want to do. Write a letter. Hand-deliver it. Try a whole street if you have to.
“It’s just not true,” she says, when asked about the idea that one choice determines everything. “There are just steps. And you can continue taking steps all the way along.”
In the end, that is the real point of her story. Everything doesn’t work out neatly, and sometimes setbacks are secretly wonderful. Life is usually less final than it feels when you are 16 or 18 and staring at a result, a rejection or a blank page.
Sometimes the future starts with a plan going wrong.
Sometimes it starts with a lift to college with your brother.
Sometimes it starts with walking down your own road and paying attention.
And sometimes, as Anne puts it, it starts with realising “your power to actually make a difference in this world starts on a tiny level on your own doorstep.”