Gemma Spake

I'm going to give you an example and it's a really weird one, but I was in Amsterdam the other day and I went to this strange museum called the Mouse Mansion.

And whilst we were there, I'm going to be real, it's a children's museum.

But my friend Rosie was like, you have to go.

It's really endearing.

We go.

We do a tour.

We like paint these little doors for the mice.

And this woman, shout out to Eleanor, the host, was telling us the story of this museum is like now one of the most famous museums ever.

in Amsterdam and I was like who made this museum like who where did this come from and she was like it was this woman in her like 40s or 50s who had had her kids had a career and she just like was having this vision of these mice stories and she wanted she wanted to make

children's books about mice and she wanted to make this mice mouse mansion and she did it and she found this like level of success and like fame and she's created all this joy for other people like at an age that like

I don't think society wants you to find particularly extraordinary.

Like, finding success in our 40s and 50s like this woman did, like the mouse mansion creator did, is not highlighted as much.

But I genuinely think that, like,

It is impressive at any age.

And it's probably sweeter at that age because you've had all this time for self-exploration.

You've had all this time to explore and to make relationships and make memories that maybe you wouldn't have gotten if you were visibly successful.

And that all comes back to you in dividends later on.

So I think that that's kind of what I want to end the episode on.

The pressure to be extraordinary is immense.

All of us have felt it in some form or another, whether that is when you were at university, whether you were at high school and it was to perform academically or to find internships, whether it is now to be somebody who is considering viral fame, somebody who posts, somebody who starts a business, somebody who starts an AI tech company.