The Unexpected Career Podcast

John Turley-Ewart: Historian to Columnist and Banker

• Megan Dunford • Season 3 • Episode 7

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S3E7: John Turley-Ewart has a PhD in History and a MBA. He has built a career a columnist and a banker.


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Welcome to the Unexpected Career Podcast, where we share stories of real people and the twists and turns they have taken along their career journey. I am Megan Dunford, and as someone who found myself in the payments industry, largely by accident, I'm fascinated by how people's careers unfold and how they've gotten to where they are today. It's also why I'm passionate about reducing the pressure on young people, about going to university, what to take in school, and on getting that right first job My guest today is John Turley-Ewart, a historian, journalist, and regulatory change management consultant in banking.

John:

Hey, how are you? Hey

Megan:

John. I'm good. How are you?

John:

Not too bad, thanks. Sorry for keeping you waiting there.

Megan:

No worries. How's your weekend going?

John:

Oh great. It's beautiful here in Toronto. Ah,

Megan:

nice. Shall we jump in?

John:

Yeah, let's do that. Let's

Megan:

do that. Awesome. Mm-hmm. I always like to start from when you were small. did you have a dream of what you wanted to be when you grew up,

John:

so I, I would say to you that the memories that I recall most is. My love for storytelling and not me telling the story, but other people telling the story. You know, that library time, when you were a kid, in grade one or two, there'd be that time when you'd go to the library and then the librarian would pick out a book and, read parts of the book too. Mm-hmm. And it was a way of exploring the library, obviously, and opening up that whole world to you. And so for me, I really was struck by how amazing a library was and how one could learn from the stories that those libraries contain. So really I would say in my early days. How I learned was around storytelling. I fell in love with that. Obviously as you get older, I went through, the Catholic school system, so they had, parables, mm-hmm. That we would do, which is also stories there with obviously a moral, end to it, a culture story to it. and so, that kind of fed into. My love of, of stories and I think like every little boy you go through, I wanna be a fireman, I want to be a policeman. You go through all yeah. Kind of stuff, which means like, you want to be a hero. Like every little boy wants to be a hero.'cause. You read comic books, a Batman and all that kind of stuff, and you think that would be cool. But you, realize that, Batman's not real and spiderman's not real after a while. Mm-hmm. And, I think what really started me thinking about. What I wanted to do in life, came down to also my love of music and records. So I needed money to buy records. Yeah. You know, allowance only goes so far and when I was 14, I picked up my first job. It was, a summer job working in an art supply warehouse, and I had the mundane task of counting pencils and paint brushes but this is good work because you have to learn to get up in the morning, go to work, and you. not every job we were given we love so's. Mm-hmm. It's part of the process is I'm here to make money'cause I wanna buy records. And so from there, I remember I started working in, Woolco, which was like a department store, like Walmart. Which was, kind of fun. And I worked in the deli section. And, I always remember, there was a senior's home near us and the elderly ladies would come in and I'd give him like an extra scoop of ice cream., and I'd get in trouble all the time'cause the manager would be watching me, right? And it'd be, did she pay for one scoop or two? Uh, she paid for one, but how can you not, give her an extra scoop. Come on. So, but I relay that story because it also conveyed to me about management. Mm-hmm. of a business, right? So you're not there to give away things to people. People have to make money in order to pay you who, working for the firm. And so, as much as you. Want to give stuff to people. there, of course are associated costs with that. So, this is one of the younger lessons that, that you learn. And again, I frame all of this in the stories because every day I would go to Woolco, there'd be kind of a different story. And at, at this department store, I actually made my first commission and it was the person in the jewelry section. Had not shown up for work. So I got thrown into the jewelry section that day and I managed to sell someone a ring believe it or not, and I think I made,$14 commission, which was pretty exciting. Not only did I get an hourly wage, but I also. Got this commission, I thought, wow that's pretty cool. But, sales wasn't going to be my thing. I was, back in the deli, at least selling rings. Anyways, I was better at selling ice cream cones and, sandwiches. And through all of this like I should say that. I grew up, with, I had a single mom and my grandparents and my grandfather, he went to school till he was 14. But he read a book a day and, he taught me how to read and how to write before I went to school and to do math. My mathematics and we used to go to different libraries. He loved reading Western books. And he would read all of the Western books in the western section in one of the public libraries, so then we would have to go to another one so that he could find them there. But. I think you can see the theme here is that, libraries, learning, reading. Mm-hmm. And so education is the big equalizer. And so in terms of a career, I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do until I was really 19 and I picked up a job at a place called Canada Trust, which is part of TD Bank now as a teller. And then I fell in love with that because. There's so many stories around money. It is personal. Mm-hmm. And I remember so I work Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Canada Trust was famous for being open till eight o'clock at night, so it was the convenient bank. And so I'd start at four o'clock and we'd work to 8 30, 9 o'clock type of thing. Mm-hmm. The interesting thing is, working as a teller, and back then they didn't really have ATMs like they have today, so there'd be a lot of people in line. And there was this old fellow who would often come into the branch and if we didn't have enough tellers, he would let us know. He would say, open up another teller. And'cause people don't wanna hang out in the branch. Yeah. They wanna get their transactions done. The door and so for me, this was interesting. First of all, cashing people's checks doing their basic, banking, learning. You know, sometimes I had to put checks on hold. Someone would come in and and then you had to learn how to go through that process of explaining, yes, I know it's a check, but we don't know if the money's there. And then they're like, don't you trust me? And it's not about not trusting you. I just don't know if there's money. So this is all a learning process because what you're doing is explaining to clients. Why do we have these policies? Mm-hmm. And you can do that well, or you can do that poorly. So for sure. And in the process, I really learned about empathy with people. And the best customer service I saw were people who were empathetic to others. Mm-hmm. You need this check'cause it's your paycheck and you need to pay your rent. Is there anything I can do to help with that? And then in some circumstances, you would then call the bank. The check was drawn on to make sure the money was there. Mm-hmm. You try to do that, try to build a relationship with the person, look at their history. And so, I really fell in love with that because because money's so personal. How do you do banking? Well, how do you serve customers well? And what makes a great bank, a great banking experience and. From my perspective, the numbers were not the core of it. Mm-hmm. The core of it was for the personal interaction. And when I went through my undergraduate at University of Toronto, I studied history, amazing. Outside of history, Canadian history European history, US history and I had the great fortune of having. some really awesome professors, like really, truly outstanding professors. And, one of them was kind enough to tell me that my writing was crap. And because I thought I was an awesome writer. I say this in the context of if you're, in your career, getting honest feedback Yeah. Is really helpful. Yeah. And sometimes, people. As you know, in Canada, they may not want to offend you and they don't wanna get to the point that you're doing something not as well as you think you're doing. Yeah. And so this was a really critical piece of information that I received from a professor. And so I went to extra classes to learn how to write. and that was something I thought, okay, I'm gonna figure this out because I was getting B pluses, but how do I get an A on an essay? And the writing was key there. And so. I really dived into writing, learned how to, write better, and then continued doing history. I went to grad school. I did an MA in British history and I had a, another tremendous professor who helped me. His name was, his name is Trevor Lloyd, and so he came from Britain. He wrote The Oxford History of Modern British History. It was just like an incredible prof. And so I did my ma on British economic history. I studied women in the workforce between the first and Second World War, which had nothing to do with banking, which is interested in how the first World War. Change the culture of work in Britain, and particularly the impact it had on women, women in the workforce, and ideas around, what was women's work, what was men's work, all that type of thing. And then, how people saw themselves in society based on the work that they did. And some of the interesting findings you come up with is, in some industrial towns, the men were unemployed and the women were all working, they were all working in light industry. Mm-hmm. The war had created this reversal for many folks. And, when I look back at the thesis I wrote, it wasn't great at all. But'cause it's hard to learn to synthesize so much information.

Megan:

Yeah. Yeah, for sure.

John:

But what I did learn was a great headline and it was the return of white and useless hands. This was something that I came across because women who had been working during the war, especially middle class women, were expected to go back to. Yeah. And that's where the white and useless hands come from.'cause before their hands were all dirty with covered in, grime and oil and all the work they were, had been doing. Mm-hmm. In fact, and everywhere else. And so it, it was ironic because you never got back to white and useless hands that time had disappeared. And so the moral of that story was I had a great mentor had a topic that had nothing to do with banking. So I, it was a stretch kind of goal thing. I did well and then I had a decision to make. and the decision is what do you wanna do? Do you wanna, walk back into the banking world? I was working in banking through this entire time, by the way.

Megan:

Mm-hmm.

John:

Okay,

Megan:

so you kept your like teller jobs throughout school? Yeah,

John:

exactly. So I did not stop working, so I was I teller customer service personal banking officer. Then I was a senior, operations officer and a branch. So I did credit, mortgages, loans, everything. During all this, so everything, wow. I was learning the whole banking business, while I was doing that. And I continued doing that up until the second year of my PhD, program. So I decided to do a PhD. I wanted to be a historian. Mm-hmm. because I love the tales that history had to tell. And I enjoy conveying those aha moments, to people. When you read something, you go. Wow, I didn't know that. That's amazing. I now have context to understand what's happening today. Yeah. So, I went into the PhD program at U of T. It was, a hard time to get in because, there had been funding cuts to the university. Typically they had led in about 50 people, into the program a year they cut it down to 17. So it, it was extremely competitive. And I wasn't sure I was gonna get in, but I somehow managed to squeak through. and this is where the real intense book learning and studying and writing occurs, but it is a preparation, largely for being a historian. Yeah it is not a team project either. It's all about you. And you have a thesis supervisor, PhD supervisor who's there to guide you, but you know, your meetings are not, daily or anything along those lines. No. You're really

Megan:

on your own in your PhD.

John:

You're totally on your own. So the first year was coursework. Now coursework is important. it's where you have to shine because if you want to get a good supervisor, you have to do great in that coursework. the pressure's on. I loved the coursework. I did well in the coursework. And I ended up landing, with a really great historian professor Michael Bussey. He passed away in 2017, but he was one of the top business history professors in Canada. And top historians in Canada. He had the Order of Canada, and it was interesting. I remember I went into his office and I said, I would like to be your student. And the administrator had sent me down the hall to him and, thought, this would be something we could talk about. To which he said I've got enough students. I really busy. And I thought, oh man, that's not good. And he said, so let's see how you do and then I'll decide if I wanna work with you. And that's the that's your kind of thing you have to realize in life is that you, sometimes you have to prove yourself before people are willing to work with you. For sure. And so I had to go through that process. And I managed to wint him over. And second year was all reading. When I started reading, you had to read 200 books. Wow. You were examined on. A hundred in Canadian, 50 in us, and 50 in British. And I did modern history. Then you have to go through written exams and oral exams for each of the different subject matter. For you to be allowed to continue on and actually write your PhD thesis. So, but it was fantastic because it's a tremendous privilege to be able to just be asked every day. Okay. You have books to read. Yeah. And so what I learned to do. I read books in a very different way than many people. I start back at the footnotes and the bibliography, and I want to know like, where's all the sources? Where does this person get all their information from? Let's look at the footnotes they use. Then I start going through the book to see how they've actually figured out how to synthesize all of this. And for me, a book is, you're not just reading it you're literally deconstructing the whole, writer's mind as they put this book together. it becomes, I quite an amazing process because you're really learn how stories are assembled. Mm-hmm. Again, going back to that storytelling and learning piece. And so that went really well. But Michael Bliss said to me you gotta understand there's no jobs in history, right? So if you're gonna do this you have to understand that there's almost no chance of you're getting a job in history. So you need to know that. And he gave this speech to all of the students that were coming to him at about that time who were trying to do a history. And I know one of them she was like. 10 times smarter than me, and she decided I'm gonna be a doctor, a medical doctor. And she had no science and she went back, did all her undergraduate work, in science, then got into med school and she became a doctor. And I know there's another one who became a lawyer. And so some people really reflected back and said. Yeah, you're right. There's no jobs here. I'm gonna go do something else. So I had to decide what I was gonna do, and this is where there was a leap of faith, right? And so the leap of faith was I had been working in banking this whole time. Yeah. And rather than go the typical route where you do an accounting degree, or you become a CFA certified financial analyst. I wanted to learn banking from a very different angle. I wanted to understand, particularly the Canadian banking system from the history of it. Because it really had not been studied effectively. Most of the histories had been corporate histories. Yeah. And corporate histories are coffee table books for the most part. There's some exceptions, but they're coffee table books, that people leaf through while they're waiting to have an interview or meet somebody. So I had to take a leap of faith. I said, okay, I'm gonna do this. And I ended up, trying to figure out what topic I wanted to write about.'cause I wanted to write about Canadian banking. And this is where your supervisor's so important. I was able to have access to the Canadian Banker Association archives and Michael Bliss knew the president of the Canadian Bankers Association. It had. They had lunch or dinner and he said, there's been no history of your organization. I have a student who'd be interested in doing this. And so she gave me full access to the archives which was fantastic. And I thought at first this was gonna be, history about clearing houses and stuff like that, but it wasn't, this was like a history of Canada that I came across and their archives were. Phenomenal. And I also obviously went to the Canadian archives. I went through the papers of prime ministers and finance ministers and all that kind of stuff. I was out in the East Coast in Nova Scotia, a guy called, fielding. He was a finance minister for years. And I went to many odd places. As a student, you go to these archives in these cities, but you don't have much money. So I would stay in these funny little motels, which gave you an interesting introduction to different parts of Canada. So at the same time that I'm doing this research, I'm also doing this like little tour across Canada, which was, fun and I got to meet people. Out west in Alberta, and then obviously people in the East coast and then in, Montreal and in Ottawa. And so it was really quite a journey. I give you all this background because I write a PhD thesis goes extremely well. and then you know what happens when you finish a PhD thesis? You know, the school basically says, thanks. Bye.

Megan:

Good

John:

luck. Yes. Audios. so when I finished the PhD, it was like, what do I want to do? Yeah. And this is again where your supervisor comes into play. I had conversation. He said, you wanna go work in a bank? But the bank seemed. Boring. Because after having gone through like the personal papers of, hundreds and thousands of letters and wrote a 400 page book with a thousand footnotes in it, and having felt like I knew Canadian banking history better than anybody. I wanted to tell stories. Yeah. So. Where that landed me was Michael talked to someone at The Globe and Mail. They were looking for an editorial writer. And so I ended up going to the Globe and Mail and I started writing editorials for the Globe.

Megan:

That's amazing.

John:

Yeah, it was. It was and I was so lucky to get that'cause I was quite worried and the reason I was worried is when I went to talk to a bank and he said, you have a PhD in what? And I said, I have a PhD in Canadian history focusing on banking history. You're like shouldn't you be teaching at a university? Probably, but there's no jobs.

Megan:

Yeah. There's no jobs for that. And after you've written this book, which is really almost a macro view because it's the history of banking in Canada, dealing with the day-to-day strategy would be quite boring.

John:

Yeah. It seemed that way. And I'll tell you though, this is a problem with PhD. So if you're gonna do a PhD, you come out feeling like you, you're ready to take on the world. You have this, I would call it almost this kind of arrogance, right? Right. It's like I have so much to share with you guys. for the last five and a half years, you have no idea what I learned, so I want to tell you all about it. And people don't care. That's the worst part. Like they're like. Ah, yeah, that's great. Maybe we'll have a few drinks at the bar. You can share a few stories with me, but, I don't see how you fit into this workplace here. Yeah. So you come to realize pretty quickly that people don't know what a PhD is. They don't know what skills you have. What they do know is what they are familiar with. And they try to put you into different categories and boxes and figure out where you would fit within an organization. So I went into journalism, I fell in love with that. And, you know, editorials is that little column in the opinion section where it's the newspaper's opinion every day. Mm-hmm. And so you would sit around with the editorial writers, you would talk about, what should we say on this, that, or the other thing. And then you have three hours to write 400 words. Wow. And so. The, the challenge with that is coming out of a university setting where you're used to writing thousands of words. Mm-hmm. Now you have to write in, 400, 500 words and something that's compelling. one of the biggest lessons that you can learn when you transition from university writing to writing for the public is understand that when your professor said you were a great writer, they were being paid. To read your writing.

Megan:

Good point.

John:

Yeah. Being paid. And when you're transitioning to, to write for a newspaper for the public, they are paying to read you. Which means that's a very different level. Is anyone willing to pay for your writing? And so this was my great lesson in journalism was really learning that writing for a wide audience, not an academic audience, but a wide audience, really means you got to. Think about who your audience is. You gotta think about what interests them, and really try and capture that in as concise of a number of words as possible. And you have to be clear. And so editorial writing was a great way to do that. I saw, I was at the Globe for a little while, and this was a golden age of journalism. This was around 2000, 2001, and I flipped over to the national Post. Which was great. And it was great because at the Post, which was a very entrepreneurial place, you could do everything. So layout pages editing, and I worked in the Common Pages. I was an editorial writer there. Then they made me the letters editor, which was really critical because one of the hardest things you can do as an editor is take the writing of people who are not professional writers. Yeah. And make it sound and book good. Yeah. And so that's what I did. I worked on that, and I learned how to tell these stories. I learned how to edit. I edited some of the country's greatest writers. I learned an amazing amount from them. And then I also learned that the newspaper business was headed toward this brick wall. There's this thing called the internet. So, this created this opportunity to reinvent oneself again. And this is where you and I met up. Mm-hmm. And at Ivey I thought, okay, I'm gonna do an MBA because I need to have some technical training. I want to go back into, the banking world. And this is after I'd written about banking in the newspaper for years and it was fun, but I needed to have some technical training to hang my hat on. the thing I loved about Ivey, it was a case study approach mm-hmm. Storytelling again, as a way to learn about business and what works, what doesn't work, and strategy and tactics and all of that. And again, I just, I love that because in my view in a business, the numbers are important, but it's the culture, it's the people, it's the ideas, it's the emotions, it's all of that stuff that, is a difference between success. Failure. And this is the piece that I really found fascinating at Ivey. I loved my time at Ivey. It was like one of the best experiences ever. And I see. It was. And then I came out of that experience and I did a little bit more time at the newspaper, but then I went into banking in a serious way. And so I picked up a job at, Royal Bank, RBC, with the Chief Compliance Officer there, I became her senior advisor. She reported into the CEO and I reported to her. In a huge organization I got to see the top of the food chain, so to speak, and the big picture. And that's always what I was really interested in, is understanding the big picture of how the bank works, how compliance works. And one of the reasons that I like compliance is. When I studied the Canadian banking system, I studied bank failures. We had tons of bank failures, things that people don't think happened, and I read the letters of these people these managers of banks and, when their bank was failing and they didn't know what to do. And sometimes they would hire people the board would, when they knew the bank was insolvent and Afterwards when the bank had gone down the reason we hired you is we thought you knew something about business. And he'd say, I didn't know anything about business. I didn't know you were hiring me for that. I just ran a little branch. I didn't know how to run this big business. So it is funny. And then there was the corrupt one. you always find this a and it's true today. You have people who are just they're not smart enough to deal with a problem.

Megan:

Yeah. They're out of their depth a bit. They're

John:

out of their depth. They don't know how to deal with it. And then there's other people who just turn a blind eye and hope, things will go away. And of course, Don don't. I ended up working, for the chief compliance officer and I got sent down to New York. This, as you recall, we had a financial crisis in 2007, 2008. There was a bunch of regulatory reforms that came out of that whole process. I thing called Do Frank. And so I began to specialize in Dodd-Frank. And so what this meant was reading massive amounts of new regulatory requirements and then translating that into plain language. In other words, telling your compliance story, to the people who had to operate the compliance systems in the bank, and also to the people who would inspect the bank. So outside regulators, when they come in. They don't know your bank inside and out. You have to be able to tell them a plain story. Like how do you comply with this stuff? Yeah. And I loved working with Americans in New York because they were so unlike Canadians and that they would tell you right away if something was great, if something was not great. and it was about, let's get this done. And it was wonderful to learn that, we always talked about cross enterprise learning and Ivey. Yeah. It was interesting to learn about this in the context of cross-cultural enterprise working because you had to, coordinate and get folks in Canada and the US and different parts of the world in Europe and the UK sometimes get them all going in the same direction.

Megan:

It's its own translation skill really, understanding those cultural pieces and getting everyone aligned and understanding each other.

John:

And how do you get there? You can show'em people a whole bunch of numbers, but if you can't talk to them.

Megan:

Yeah.

John:

It's not gonna happen. And so I had the benefit of working with fantastic people there. And then came back to Canada and I didn't have enough of New York. I wanted to go back. And I also wanted to do something different. I wanted to open up my own business, which I did mm-hmm. I had specialized in Dodd-Frank and I knew elements of it very well. I opened up my own, little consulting shop here, and then started, doing, consulting work mm-hmm. and I did some work for TD Bank and then I did some work for Bank of Montreal and Bank of Montreal sent me down to New York to help them with a US programming. And so, I was back there and I did another year and a half or so helping between there and Canada and. Had a great time. I really, really enjoyed it. What I enjoyed about the consulting piece is I had the liberty to tell people the truth.

Megan:

Yes. Yeah. You're not part of the political machine within the bank in the same way.

John:

Right, exactly. So what typically happened is I would work with a senior leader. And I positioned myself as, look, I'm gonna tell you what I believe to be true, about, the program that we're working on. You know, lots of money is being spent. Mm-hmm. I know you're hiring out external consultants that are helping as well. And so what I tried to do is be the person that you would go to and say, tell me what's really going on here. And I like that role. I thought that was a great role.'cause it's really hard to do it when you're working full-time inside an organization. Yeah. Again, because of the politics. But as a consultant, you can speak up. And I thought, oh, it should be like this if you work inside a bank, but that's just not the way it typically is. Mm-hmm. so that's how I ended up in, in consulting. And so I did that up all the way through. COVID, when COVID hit, we all started going, work from home. And then I did some communications work during COVID because people shifted to this thing called Teams, which you've probably heard of. And working with, one of my big clients, I built a communications program. For the chief risk officer, I interviewed a whole bunch of, senior leaders. We put videos on. What we were again, trying to do was retain the sense of community even though people were not present together. Exactly. And how do you do that? Telling stories, right. We would have senior leaders talk about their challenges with being disconnected from people. And I know now we've kind of forgotten that time, but it was an important time because. All of a sudden you're not in the office anymore. You don't get to see people anymore. You're isolated socially. And, and also like people are dying. So what's that? Just crazy period of time.

Megan:

Yeah. Stressful time.

John:

Stressful time. And, again, it gave me the opportunity to see, these large organizations in a different context. Right. Cross-cultural. Implementing large regulatory programs coming out of financial crisis pandemic how you deal with that. And then, I started doing other work in something called Basel three, which, is pretty technical and dry. But I learned a lot in that process. I actually started doing work on committees of the Canadian Bankers Association, which was tons of fun because I had studied its history, which meant that when I worked on those committees, I'd had all these in my mind case studies of how to make those committees work and not work. Yeah. In order for us to move and create progress. So that was a great experiment of connecting what I've done. With the present. Then I took a couple years off, so in about summer 2023 and when I say I took them off, I mean, I had a contract and, I didn't have something set up. Then I started thinking about what I wanted to do again, and this is where I started just writing a lot. Yeah. For the newspapers. Financial posts, globe and Mail. And then eventually I ended up at the Globe and Mail, where I write a weekly column now and it was this period where I didn't have any clients, but I wanted to continue writing and I wanted to do self-development. And I went and became a certified anti-money laundering specialist.'cause it just seemed that was such an interesting area. Mm-hmm. And every bank seems to be talking about it. It's a huge deal, obviously. Yeah. It's pretty, important. Absolutely important. So I tried to, as you say, uplift my skills, but at the same time focus on writing this column. Because again, I had all this knowledge that I had built up and I never got a chance to be a history prof, but what I could do was maybe share some of what I'd learned in these columns. And, you've got 725 words to do this. Mm-hmm. So I sometimes I integrate history, sometimes I don't. But what I try to do is something different. Meaning when someone reads my column, whether they disagree with it, agree with it, or not really sure. I just want them to be thinking in a different way about something. Yeah. So writing the column for the globe is for me, it's a big deal because it gives me a chance to, convey some of the stuff that I learned as a student reading all those books. Mm-hmm. And working with great professors and try to contextualize some of the things that are happening today in terms of the history we've lived or our parents or grandparents or great-grandparents have lived. And, I enjoy doing that. And so I'm back serving clients, in the consulting world that I do. But the column piece is really important to me. I enjoy very much and, I think, you know what I've learned through. This entire career trajectory is about having faith in yourself and also doing that leap of faith if you really believe that you're going to get the skills that are gonna help you have a career that you will,, enjoy. Yeah. This is something that you can pursue. And I would say one thing though is that. No one sat there and planned out the career for me, right? Mm-hmm. That's just not how it happened. You've got to take control of that yourself. And so that, that means that, if someone says you can't have a career in X, like for me it was, you're not gonna be a historian. I know you wanna be, but it's not gonna happen. Then you have to realize, okay, so what can I do with what I've learned? And still add value still, have a good life. And what I mean by a good life is you don't come home at the end of the day and want to like, drink three bottles of wine and forget about your day, right? Yeah. You know? Every, once in a while you're gonna want to come home and have a few glasses of wine. I get that. But you don't wanna have that kind of unhappiness. And so, there's that element to it. And then the other piece obviously is networking, networking, networking. And people go, oh yeah, I know that's easy to say, but. Networking is really just being nice to people and being Yeah. Open to meeting new people. And I know,'cause I listen to your podcast regularly and some of the folks you've had on, you've met at social events and you mm-hmm. You said, oh, you have an interesting story to tell, which like, and so really that's what it is. It's just, yeah. I find that I spend a lot of time listening to people tell me their stories'cause they're so interesting. And for me now at this stage, and I don't know if you, this sounds weird, but you figure out how much longer you have to live, right? what do you

Megan:

really wanna do with that time?

John:

What do you wanna do? So I was thinking, of a book. Again, I'm really great at titles. I don't know, if I'm good at books, but I was thinking that, 10,000 days the life before my Eyes, right? I think that would be you are very

Megan:

good at titles. I already wanna read it.

John:

And so I think about that in a way because. When we get to a stage in our life it's not so much talking about what was, it's what can be like Yeah. For yourself and for other people. And you really wanna try and think that your life might have some value for folks. It might be the people around you. It doesn't have to be a book or anything like that. Yeah. But it can just be about, sharing some of your stories that help people. Their own story and their own writing of their own life story. And I think that's that's the stage of the life where I am now is I just love being able to help people if I can and tell them stories and help them better understand the world that we're living in right now.

Megan:

Yeah. What I love so much about, your journey is, there weren't necessarily a lot of jobs for historians. Academics in general. There's very few jobs at the end. But you found a way to make history and storytelling part of it, and you found ways, and even the column you're writing right now it's an opportunity to bring in history so that we can understand today. And that's something that's quite often missing, especially when you think of more economic business writing. So I think that's really amazing. And then you also talked about, you know, you need to take a leap of faith and I can see that so often in your journey there isn't a path to follow so you have to take a chance. And thinking about threads in your journey storytelling and learning is such strong threads in your whole journey. Are there any kind of other threads when you look back that you think have pulled through that full journey and story of your career?

John:

Well, I would say for sure, my grandfather's love of learning. Massive impact to have someone in your household who reads a book a day, we would have the TV on in the house, but my grandfather had his chair, like, every grandpa has their chair. They would sit in their chair and, he had his book, and he would be reading his book. That's what he did. Mm-hmm. What it does is it tells you as a child that there is something really interesting behind those covers, right? There's a great story, there's lots of stuff to learn there, and the important piece was it's using your mind and this is what, when I first started reading books is I love tv, don't get me wrong, but the images you create in your mind when you're reading a book are also I dunno. there's just something about being so connected into that story. And, I don't read just history. You remember there was a movie, the Silence of the Lambs, but there was a book that came out. I read that in like one night. sometimes you find a book and it's like, I'm not stopping until I'm done. Yeah, yeah. I have

Megan:

definitely closed a book at like 5:00 AM

John:

because

Megan:

I can't sleep until it's done.

John:

That's amazing. To me, words, that can grab your attention and get your imagination going and thinking and, that to me is the life of the mind. Mm-hmm. And there's something incredibly just amazing. That's a human experience, if I can put it that way.

Megan:

Yeah. Amazing. Yeah, I totally agree. As someone who also loves to read, what do you think, 15-year-old, 16-year-old John would think about what you're doing today?

John:

Oh, I think he would think it's pretty cool. I think 16-year-old John wanted to be a dj, but like anything else, there's kinda limits to that. It was fun in high school, but it wasn't something. I, at that time anyways, I could imagine building a career doing and

Megan:

mm-hmm.

John:

Didn't picture

Megan:

yourself in Ibiza.

John:

Well, I mean, that would be fun. It looks amazing, but the reality is I remember the last thing I, DJ'ed was a wedding where people got drunk and there was a fight, which that's kind of the reality of DJing, right?

Megan:

Yeah.

John:

It's like people drinking too much screaming at each other, and then there's a fight. It's like, okay, this is not going to be a career for me. There's no life of the mind here. Right? This is something quite different. But the interesting connection is, music tells stories as well. So I think, 16-year-old John would think, this is very cool, what I'm doing, so I can't complain. I really can't, I can't complain. When roadblocks were put up, you know, at the time they're devastating. Yeah. It feels like. How am I ever gonna get through this stuff? But then, you just wake up and you think about what do you need to do? And sometimes there's that leap of faith and you just get it done. And I say to younger people today, when I talk to'em, they tell me what they wanna do. I always ask'em, how are you gonna get there? You need to think about how you're going to get there, because that's critical. And one of the practical things you learn writing a PhD, and doing the thesis is you've gotta think about how am I gonna get to the end of this? Mm-hmm. And if you think about writing this, scholarly book that's brand new, like no one else has written about this before you, if you think about it holistically, it becomes daunting. Yeah. If you think about it in little pieces. Then you can manage it. It's those little steps, but you're all headed in the same direction. Right?

Megan:

Yeah. And plus, you're on your own for a PhD, so it'd be very easy to get overwhelmed by the big idea of it and the amount to do, and there isn't someone else telling you what to do and how to do it, and that you should work on it instead of doing something else. I can see that would be extremely important if you're gonna get there in the end.

John:

Yeah I remember when I finished the thesis and Michael Buss was happy with it. He told me the first chapter that I handed in he thought was terrible. I rewrote it like 10 times, right? Yeah. But rather than telling me that it was terrible he just said, keep going, right? Keep going, right. Keep working. And the lesson there sometimes is. You just gotta work at things sometimes to master it, right? the first time you try it. It might suck, right? It's just the way it's, but the more you work at it, the more time you invest in learning how to do something well the better you get it or you learn, it's not what you wanna do. There was a number of people in the PhD program who left, and there was nothing wrong with that because, there wasn't a job at the end or it wasn't for them. And again, that's where you have to think about what do I want? How do I get there? Is this part of me getting there, or is this going to prevent me from getting there?

Megan:

Yeah. Those lessons of oh, actually this isn't for me are just as important. There's no shame in saying, this isn't the right thing for me. Mm-hmm. M gonna try something else now.

John:

also other people telling you it's not the same thing for you. I remember I got fired from a hardware shop. So despite reading lots of books, and I was a kid. It was a summertime. I was working two jobs. And I tried to put together a barbecue and it was a disaster. And the guy who owned the hardware shop came and looked. He goes, how long have you been working on this? I said, like, three hours. He goes. This is terrible. You're done. You're out. Right. Because I'd put things on backwards. And you know what, that was a good lesson for me. Right? I'm obviously not very good at putting together barbecues, so there's no career for me doing that. So, sometimes people do you a favor too by, saying this area of life is not for you. Yeah. But good point. So generally speaking, I'm grateful to those who fired me. I'm grateful to those who hired me. And, the roadblocks meant really thinking through how do you get to the end of that road where you wanna go? And now it's really about, those days ahead and, what do you want to do with them and how can you, maybe add value and help people in their journey as well.

Megan:

Yeah. And you maybe have touched on this'cause you have already shared some really amazing advice. Is there one piece of advice that you would love to go back in time and give yourself?

John:

Hmm. So I learned how important determination is, right? And I don't mean being obstinate, I just mean determination. like many people, I'm sure I wasted a lot of nervous energy freaking out about things like, oh my God, the world is ending. This is never gonna blah, blah, blah, blah, without having really faith in my ability to follow the path that I wanted to follow and to be determined about it. And trust in that determination. Mm-hmm. Right. And those nights where you just can't sleep and then you're grumpy and you're not a nice person to people.'cause you think the whole world is against you. When you look back at that, you think, man, that was a real waste of energy. Mm-hmm. And also it wasn't good for you. It wasn't good for the people around you. And, I would say that's one thing I would say is if there's something that you're determined to do, have faith in that determination. And I mean, obviously, learn from it and find a way to make it work. And don't freak out all the time when, things come up that are like, I was bad. I freak out all the time. oh my God, like, this happened and I'm never gonna get a job and this terrible, and then you realize like everyone goes through this, right? And some people do it better than others. And I think the people who do it better than others are the ones who are like, okay, just breathe. I'll get through this. And I'll stay focused'cause I know I'll get where I want to go eventually, so

Megan:

for sure. That's great advice. But it is a, it's a hard lesson to learn and it sometimes, takes a few tries to get there.

John:

I still struggle with it today. there's days where and especially in the world today, you think, what else could go wrong? Right. But, you gotta keep your head down and think, okay, I know where I want to go and I'm going to keep working that way.

Megan:

Yeah. Yeah. Very good perspective. So when you look forward, are there things that you are hoping for? What's your vision for the future, whether that's in the short term or the longer term?

John:

You know, I think writing is huge, right? It's a big part of what I want do. Mm-hmm. And I love the East Coast, by the way. I love quiet, I love reading books. And it's kinda reverting to, that period of time, earlier in my life where I just, I want quiet and I want to read, but I'm not quite there yet. So I wanna spend a lot of time. Working with my clients, helping them the best I can, adding the value I can offer sharing with them, what I've learned and hopefully help them succeed in the work they have to do. And also their career building. But eventually, I want to write more, and I wanna write a book. And it's, you know, where is that going to come from? Is it gonna be just a book, like I said, 10,000 days of life before My Eyes? Or is it gonna be something a little different? I've got tons of research. And so when I did my PhD thesis I came across some amazing, amazing people, I mean characters. A man called Frank Pike, who was a bank manager from Newfoundland. He worked for, the Merchants Bank of Canada, which was taken over in the early 1920s by Bank of Montreal. And he was a western banker. He was a fantastic banker. the town that he lived in out in Alberta, when he retired, they had to parade for him. That's how much they loved him. You know, people hate bankers today. Mm-hmm. But this guy deserves a book because he knew everybody in town. He understood how here's a great thing about a banker. He understood how to say no. And make you feel good about it in terms of a loan. Yeah. Because he was looking out for you and Right. And so when you read these, so like

Megan:

a true community banker,

John:

a true community banker and so when you read these stories and you read all these personal letters of these people like they really come to life and so I have all their stories in my head. I would just like to tell them. But, it might just be me. Other people might find these people boring. I think they have something to tell us in the present. And that's the one thing I like to think, the history that I do and when I do bring history into the columns, is that you give some voice to those who have been left behind in the past Yeah. Who have something to say today. And so when I look forward I look to do something useful today, and it may involve. Giving voice to those people who are long gone, but their letters still remain and their life is still in those letters.

Megan:

That's amazing. And I look forward to reading your book when it's written, whatever you choose to write about. I know it'll be amazing. I

John:

hope so. This has been great. I really enjoyed it, Megan. It's great chatting with you.

Megan:

Me too. I could listen to your stories all evening, and also as I like writing, but I'm terrible at titles, so I will, maybe be coming back to you for advice and come up with good titles.

John:

Happy, happy to help with that. Always happy to help with that. That was great. Thank you so much.

Megan:

Amazing. Thank you.

It was such a pleasure to speak with John and hear his incredible story so far. A few takeaways from his diverse journey are one, storytelling. John is clearly passionate about storytelling and brings his perspective into everything he does, whether it's bringing in history to give context in his column to how he navigates in the corporate world. Storytelling is a truly human endeavor, and it's an important skill for connecting with people, influencing others, and for creating your own path. Which leads me to number two. Create your own path. John decided to pursue his PhD even though there wouldn't be a specific job at the end. And while his thesis supervisor probably helped him get his foot in the door for his first job in journalism, he had an extremely hardworking foundation and wasn't afraid to take a leap and invest in himself to support those leaps, including getting an MBA when he wanted to go back into banking. And more recently with an A ML specialist certification. Three, giving back. One of the things I really heard from John was the value of giving back. Whether it's sharing what you've learned by sharing your own story or highlighting other people's stories, or just thinking of how you can be of service and add value at work. And of course his advice to his younger self of don't waste energy freaking out. Trusting your determination and stay focused because you'll get where you want to go eventually is a great reminder. And lastly, I look forward to reading whichever book John chooses to write, and we'll leave you with a beautiful quote from our discussion that struck a chord with the writer and reader in me."Giving voice to those people who are long gone, but their letters still remain and their life is still in those letters". Thank you for listening to the unexpected career podcast, please follow, share and rate on your favorite podcast provider. The unexpected career podcast is produced, edited and hosted by me, Megan Dunford. See you next week.

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Megan Dunford

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