Gareth Cliff and Ruda Landman both have something in common – they had a choice to hang on to that job, or to leave their comfort zones and do something new.
Ruda met up with Gareth at his new studio to find out what led to his decision to quit a stable, comfortable job at 5FM and enter uncharted territory with Cliff Central. In turn, Ruda also shares some of her experiences from the time when she too took the plunge, quitting her job at Carte Blanche to become a freelancer.
Transcript:
G: Alright, its just after nine, and I know I should be getting out of here, and you may be bored with me, but I’ll tell you what: you’re not bored with Ruda Landman. Ruda is here to interview me this morning about all kinds of things to do with careers and the different paths that we’ve walked, and perhaps at the same time we can shed some light on things that may be interesting to you in your own career, or perhaps, if you’re deciding on a career, what you might like to do.
R: There’s a new website called the Change Exchange.
G: Okay. What is it?
R: It’s all about the changes in our lives. You know? When you grow up, you leave whatever education you’re going to do, and then you have to find a job. It’s a huge thing. Then you might get hitched, you might get children… Your life shifts and changes. And finding your feet in a career, a job, more than one, one after the other, or at the same time, all of those are huge life changes and that’s what this is all about.
G: Right.
R: So what you’ve just done, what you’ve created in your life is…
G: Destruction.
R: Such a moment… (Both laugh)… well, I hope its creative destruction. I’m sure its creative destruction.
G: No, no it is. Sure.
R: Let’s start before it happened.
G: Okay
R: When did you start thinking, and not so much when, but what were the circumstances that made you think the time may be coming? Because you were comfortable in what you were doing, riding up high.
G: Well, isn’t that part of the problem? When you get comfortable? You know all about that. What happens is that you find yourself in a comfort zone where you know exactly what’s happening around you. You start cutting back on all the extraneous stuff, and you just know how absolutely little you have to do to achieve the desired result. It’s the ‘laziness coefficient’ I call it.
Because at school I would know if I did two hours of studying before an exam I would get sixty to seventy percent, and that would be sufficient. I was never one of those people who wanted to work to those upper eighties and nineties. I thought “Well, it’s a waste of time, I could rather spend that time laughing, spending time with friends, watching TV, masturbating furiously… whatever it was, but I didn’t have to spend the majority of that time outside of what was necessary doing anything extra”.
It’s a bit of a problem if you find you have the capacity to do something that maybe other people did find a bit difficult, because I know there were people at school with me who were probably cleverer than I was. But they struggled with exams, and they found it very nervous and tense, and it put them in an anxious mood and they probably couldn’t deliver the results they did. I’d just walk in and do the thing, and if I didn’t know anything I’d write something…
R: Vaguely sensible…
G: Some wise crack or, ja, or something about I’d turn an essay on history for example, because I remembered the important facts, and I’m a fan of history, its something I’ve loved all along, so its something like I’d have this backlog of general knowledge, and I’d just spew it out onto the page, and it would look more or less sensible enough, and the lazy marker would go: “Eeehhh, uuuhhh, yeah, this guy’s sort of… He’s coherent. He seems to know at least a minority of the facts that were applicable, give him a sixty.”
R: Ja. But it’s quite difficult too… In the first place you have to be aware that that is happening in your job situation. Because its like the frog in the hot water, except that the water is not getting boiling hot, its getting easier and easier. So…
G: Yes. It is. Because you know more about what you do through experience.
R: Do you remember a moment when you thought: “Mmmm…. I should be….”
G: Yes. I was driving in to work and my show started 15 minutes before I’d got there, and I thought: “I’m lazy”.
R: This is not good!
G: And I don’t care. I don’t care about this, I’m not working hard anymore. This is too easy for me and I don’t care about what management say to me, and the audience will forgive me… And it was just arrogance, it was very, very bad. And I just suddenly realized that this is not good enough.
R: So? What did you do?
G: Well, you have two options. You either try carrying on to improve the product you’re already engaged in, or you force yourself to go up a level and do something a lot harder. Which is going to give you no option. Because I don’t have the option for failure. If I’d had failed at the SABC they would’ve moved me to afternoons or evenings, then they would’ve put me on weekends, then I would’ve been picked up by some horrible adult contemporary station and I would’ve been one of those DJ’s just sitting there going: (in a rip-off accent) “Well there’s the Doobie Brothers with Michael McDonald. My name is Gareth Cliff, what song would you like to hear? Email me at Gareth…” whatever the station’s name is.
R: And you would still get the salary.
G: I would’ve got paid. So if I were just after the money and security, perhaps that would’ve been a better option. But also I think you have to, there’s a point in everybody’s life where you decide to take control of your own destiny. And in most respects my life was my own design anyway. I live the way I want to live, I’m with the people I want to be with, I enjoy reading, I enjoy drawing floor plans of buildings, I enjoy doing chemical experiments, it’s a mess… This was the thing that was missing.
R: But you’re in the middle of your career, and you do have responsibilities like any grown up person, and here you were letting go of all of that, of that whole safety net .
G: But you said it.
R: Didn’t that make you… Well… It must’ve made you nervous.
G: You said it earlier. You said you didn’t have any regrets afterwards. Before the decision you’re racked with all the… You look at it from 360 degrees. You walk right around the problem, and you check it out from every angle and you say: “Okay, well if this happens, what will happen there, if that happens, what will happen there?”
Then you start figuring in: “Okay, I’ve got this bond to pay, I’ve got these bills at the end of every month”. You really analyse your life, you get down to the bare bones of it and you go: “Is that what I want, and can I carry on doing what I’m doing, and sustain this current lifestyle? Is that all I need to do, or do I need to do more?
R: So it isn’t an irresponsible… You don’t just jump?
G: Oh no no no no no…… I’m not like that.
R: You do it very carefully.
G: I may give the impression that I’m a loose canon and do ridiculous, stupid things, but a lot of the time I…
R: You try hard to give that impression. You don’t really.
G: Mmmmm… Do you think I try hard? Do you? That’s interesting.
R: Are you not trying hard? It just happens?
G: No… I give the impression that I’m careless. Because a lot of the time I am careless, but when it comes to things like my career, radio, my audience, I’m not careless, I’m very careful about that. Those are not things you take for granted. People will just as quickly as they listen and they enjoy it, tomorrow they’ll forget about me.
R: Gareth, but in this case you stepped out into completely unchartered territory. What’s that like?
G: Well, there were a lot of things around it that had convinced me it was an interesting thing to do, and it would be worth trying. The current climate, the economy at the moment, the fact that the media business is changing as it is. These all gave me reason to be positive.
Um… And the fact that I’ve got this creative bug where I need to be able to do “my thing”. It’s almost childish, and a little bit of a brat attitude. But I need to do it my way, and I couldn’t do that working for any other radio station or being on television.
You know how hard that work is, its lighting and cameras and rehearsals and scripts. I don’t want to do that. I want to do everything live like we’re doing this interview live now. Because it’s real. South African audiences deserved something new, radio has become very stale, it’s become over-commercialized. I got bored as a listener. And I thought: “If I’m a listener and I’m bored, I can only imagine how people who sit in traffic for two, three hours a day have to put up with so much more boredom, let me fix that for them. There’s a value in that.
R: But how could you be sure that you could actually pay your bond?
G: I can’t! I can’t tell you… Maybe a month from now they kick me out of my house. Who knows? I mean, I’m not earning anything here now. We’re hopefully going to be in a short while, but you don’t know.
R: How does one live with that? How do you live with that insecurity?
G: It’s funny, I thought about it this morning. I walked into the kitchen, and I thought: “What can I grab out of this fridge for breakfast?” I’ve got a little cooler box there with some yoghurt, with some muesli or something horrible in it. Then I though: “What do I do when the yoghurt and muesli runs out? And when I don’t have money in the wallet to buy more?” You just… You live! You carry on putting energy into what you’re building rather than worrying about what you already have. You have to do that.
R: And planning for the fu……
G: … That’s what you did!
R: (laughs)
G: You left a job, and you didn’t know what you would… You could’ve done a thousand different things, but you don’t know for sure.
R: You don’t know.
G: Because you haven’t already lined up the next job. And when you create your next job, what both of us have done, its even more difficult, because there’s no guarantee anywhere.
R: There’s no guarantee anywhere, and I went into a completely freelance environment, and for the next two, three years, every January, I’d have a week-long panic attack about “Where’s the money going to come from?” You see, I’m in a different situation because I am married to someone who earns well so I’m not…
G: Dependent.
R: I do have a safety net.
G: But you weren’t dependent on your money.
R: Ja. But I am a partner in the partnership. I can’t just say: “Oh darling, you will look after me, can I have another diamond ring please?”
G: You have to bring your value.
R: So there were moments where… Whhoooo… I remember them, when it was really “What did I do? Was I out of my cotton-picking little mind”.
G: Right. But I thought that not after funnily enough, I’ve never got any regrets about not hanging on to that job.
R: No, neither have I. There’s always something you can do, we talked about it earlier as well, you can’t be too precious.
G: You know what I really wanted to do? Here’s what I thought: I’d make a huge success of this, which I’m still hoping we’ll get right. Or I’ll go and… lecture history. That’s what I’ll do. That’s my back-up plan: I’ll go lecture in history. Bore some students to death. But that wouldn’t be so bad. And I thought: “If that’s the worst that could happen, then that’s not a bad outcome.” That would be cool. I could fulfill two things: I could try my hand at this own business, new-broadcast medium type environment, which really is the most exciting thing I’ve ever done, or I could go into teaching something that I really love, and filling other people’s minds with the love that I have for history.
R: But I think a part of a decision like that is to say: “Okay, what is the worst that can happen”, and face that fear. And say: “Okay, that’s gone wrong….and now?”
G: Be homeless and sell myself for sex.
R: (laughs)
G: And no one would buy. And that’s the most scary part.
R: Ja, the problem is always: is there a market?
G: There’s no market for me. Tell you what.
R: Well, I can only say good luck.
G: Thank you.
R: And may it go better and better.
G: Thank you so much. And I that everybody who’s wondering, if there’s anyone listening to us now thinking “I deserve better than this”, and you have a plan, and you take a long time to think it through because these are not the kind of decisions you make on the flip of a coin. If you’ve thought it through and you want to do something badly and you believe it can have, most importantly that it can have value for other people, because if you’re doing something for you all the time, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to make a cent. You only make money if people are prepared to exchange that money for some value they’re getting out of you. And if it’s people that want to advertise here because we’ve got listeners who like what we’re doing, that’s fantastic. Then I don’t even mind if it’s a small amount of money. But it will all be mine, and I’d have earned it. And that’s better than taking it from a parastatal.
R: Good for you.
G: Thank you.
R: All the best.
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