Phoebe Waller-Bridge

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How to Fail: Everything I’ve Ever Learned From Things Going Wrong by Elizabeth Day

Airbnb, country house hotel, Desert Island Discs, disintermediation, Easter island, fail fast, fear of failure, financial independence, gender pay gap, Kintsugi, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, pre–internet, Rosa Parks, San Francisco homelessness, stem cell, Stephen Fry, TED Talk, unpaid internship

Other people were too. One of my friends started prefacing each text to me with ‘Noted failure, Elizabeth Day’. There were some commentators who argued that having a succession of famous people on the podcast to bemoan lost cricket matches (Sebastian Faulks) or embarrassing one-night stands (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) was an egregious form of humble-bragging. Their argument seemed to be that if a person ended up successful, then they couldn’t possibly have experienced real, all-consuming failure. Why didn’t I have guests on the podcast who were in the grip of current failure? Or why couldn’t I just leave everyone alone to fail in their own way, without being made to feel bad about the fact that they weren’t failing as well as they could be?

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At the time, I wondered whether it was one of those things I might grow into believing, in the same way as I grew into French cinema and liking pesto, but I never have. Schooldays were categorically not the best days of my life and, in fact, I still have nightmares about them. On the podcast, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, creator of the Bafta-winning Fleabag, spoke about the ‘duality’ she felt at school. At home she had been raised to be strong-minded and to test unnecessary boundaries and yet she was entering a place where rules had to be obeyed. ‘I remember my mum saying to me when I first went to secondary school, “Just be an angel for the first three terms, if you are an angel for the first three terms, you’ll get away with anything you want for the rest of your school career,”’ Waller-Bridge said.

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It’s not just education, which I think I sort of patched together on my own anyway. It’s that you don’t have a circle of friends that are also doing things. You’re not part of that sort of professional world at all. And the older I got, the more it became clear that I really slipped between the cracks somehow. And it is so hard to get back in.’ Phoebe Waller-Bridge struggled to get the parts she wanted at RADA and felt so broken down by her tutors that she lost confidence and spent much of her twenties failing at auditions or being typecast as the posh, hot girl until she began writing her own material. Sebastian Faulks recalled being ‘optimistic as a child.

How to Work Without Losing Your Mind by Cate Sevilla

Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, Desert Island Discs, Donald Trump, emotional labour, gender pay gap, Girl Boss, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, imposter syndrome, job satisfaction, lockdown, microaggression, period drama, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, remote working, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Skype, tech bro, TED Talk, women in the workforce, work culture

I learned the hard way that any time spent obsessing over another person’s social feeds and what they’re doing is time wasted on not creating or doing my own thing. Envy vs jealousy Interestingly, jealousy and envy are actually two different things, even though they tend to travel together.1 Envy is when we feel we lack a desired attribute enjoyed by another. (‘Phoebe Waller-Bridge is so funny and talented; I want to be a multi-Emmy and BAFTA award-winning actress and screenwriter, too!’) Jealousy is when something we already have is threatened by another person – a suspicion or feeling threatened. (‘My girlfriend keeps sexting her yoga instructor and lying about it!’)

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Working at the kitchen table without a monitor or keyboard for your laptop might not be the most conducive to creating your best work. If you’re working from home permanently or most of the time, invest in your work space and environment. If you’re trying to be productive and work from home and feel good about your life and work balance – doing it in bed in your pyjamas ain’t great. (Just because Phoebe Waller-Bridge does it doesn’t mean you should.)3 For us mere mortals, showering, brushing our teeth and putting on some proper clothing – even if it’s just unlaundered loungewear – will help you feel ‘ready’ for work (bras, makeup and shaving are, as always, optional). This helps to create a clear distinction between ‘home’ and ‘work’, even though both happen under the same roof: your bed is for sleeping and shagging – not for working on a mind-numbing presentation in Google Slides (unless, of course, this is your kink; no judgement here!)

The Breakup Monologues: The Unexpected Joy of Heartbreak by Rosie Wilby

Airbnb, Brexit referendum, Burning Man, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Attenborough, Donald Trump, fear of failure, George Santayana, Jeremy Corbyn, Kintsugi, lateral thinking, lockdown, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), social contagion, social distancing, zero-sum game

Even I don’t think she should be all those things. But I’m so exhausted and wretched from having to do all those things myself for so many years. It’s just too much. I have always longed for a creative ‘wife’, an artistic soulmate who wants to take on the comedy world together. I always feel super-jealous when I read about Phoebe Waller-Bridge and her ‘love-affair friendship’1 with Vicky Jones, who directed the first stage version of Fleabag at Edinburgh Fringe in 2013. I had a brief taste of a rewarding professional partnership when I began my first ever podcast Odd Ones Out in 2012 with my friend Rachel. It was a satirical, queer take on current affairs full of malapropisms, weirdly named episodes like ‘Pride Comes Before a Falling Platypus’2 and misnamed political figures, like North Korean leader Mel il-Kim and Labour Party brothers Ed and David Millipede, who still couldn’t get a foot in the door at Ten Downing Street despite having hundreds of legs.

Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell

barriers to entry, behavioural economics, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, classic study, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, fake news, financial independence, Girl Boss, growth hacking, hive mind, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Keith Raniere, Kickstarter, late capitalism, lockdown, loss aversion, LuLaRoe, Lyft, multilevel marketing, off-the-grid, passive income, Peoples Temple, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, QAnon, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Social Justice Warrior, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, tech bro, the scientific method, TikTok, uber lyft, women in the workforce, Y2K

As our generational lore goes, millennials’ parents told them they could grow up to be whatever they wanted, but then that cereal aisle of endless “what ifs” and “could bes” turned out to be so crushing, all they wanted was a guru to tell them which to pick. “I want someone to tell me what to wear every morning. I want someone to tell me what to eat,” Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s thirty-three-year-old character confesses to her priest (the hot one) in season 2 of her Emmy-winning series Fleabag. “What to hate, what to rage about, what to listen to, what band to like, what to buy tickets for, what to joke about, what not to joke about. I want someone to tell me what to believe in, who to vote for, who to love, and how to tell them.

The Lost Decade: 2010–2020, and What Lies Ahead for Britain by Polly Toynbee, David Walker

banking crisis, battle of ideas, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Bullingdon Club, call centre, car-free, centre right, collective bargaining, congestion charging, corporate governance, crony capitalism, Crossrail, David Attenborough, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, energy transition, Etonian, financial engineering, first-past-the-post, G4S, gender pay gap, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global village, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, Large Hadron Collider, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, moral panic, mortgage debt, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, pension reform, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, quantitative easing, Right to Buy, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, smart meter, Uber for X, ultra-processed food, urban renewal, working-age population

Looking at them, we might even dispute the idea of crisis; after all, millions of voters didn’t bother to express a view in the ballot, and firms – look at Eggleston Steel – and people have since then largely gone about their daily lives as before (MPs, non-UK citizens of the EU, exporters, importers, exchange students excepted). The multitudes who marched, took to social media or did that unusual thing of discussing political events with friends, relatives and colleagues add up to only a minority. On the evening of Johnson’s suspension of parliament we went to a West End theatre, where Phoebe Waller-Bridge, to the delight of a rapt audience, spent eighty minutes talking about her vagina in character as Fleabag. Extraordinary events convulsed the UK’s public life, but as 2016 recedes into the distance, it gets harder to recall what exactly the exam question was. Focus groups and polls showed not only that people’s views were not always linear (or consistent), but also that after deliberation or acquiring new knowledge they could change their minds.

Please Don't Sit on My Bed in Your Outside Clothes: Essays by Phoebe Robinson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-bias training, Black Lives Matter, butterfly effect, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Attenborough, defund the police, desegregation, different worldview, disinformation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, emotional labour, financial independence, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hiring and firing, imposter syndrome, independent contractor, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Joan Didion, Lyft, mass incarceration, microaggression, off-the-grid, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Rosa Parks, Sheryl Sandberg, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, too big to fail, uber lyft, unpaid internship, W. E. B. Du Bois

Our place? Literally a handful of opening notes from the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” that plays at the beginning of The Departed, which isn’t bad when you’re free to come and go, because that’s the point of living in New York City. Now this isn’t some theory I made up, such as “because of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s astronomical success in Hollywood, when I finally make it, I’m only going to be known as ‘Black Phoebe.’ ” The truth is people do move to NYC for the adventure. And that adventure typically exists outside the home. So when people say they live “in the city,” that’s because the city is where life happens—the transportation, the parties, the workplace, the gym, the theater, the bars, the museums, the parks, the backstreet shortcuts that get you where you want to go faster, the brunches, etc.

Binge Times: Inside Hollywood's Furious Billion-Dollar Battle to Take Down Netflix by Dade Hayes, Dawn Chmielewski

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Big Tech, borderless world, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, content marketing, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, data science, digital rights, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, George Floyd, global pandemic, Golden age of television, haute cuisine, hockey-stick growth, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Jony Ive, late fees, lockdown, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mitch Kapor, Netflix Prize, Osborne effect, performance metric, period drama, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, QR code, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, remote working, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, Steve Jobs, subscription business, tech bro, the long tail, the medium is the message, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, vertical integration, WeWork

Her résumé more closely fit Bezos’s mainstream aspirations for the studio: she was an early champion of the blockbuster family drama This Is Us and the critically acclaimed sitcom The Good Place, and worked with megaproducer Dick Wolf to expand his popular Chicago-based dramas, Chicago Fire, Chicago Med, and Chicago PD. Under her tenure, Amazon Prime Video would see its greatest success with a string of critically acclaimed hits, including The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, an hour-long comedy about an Upper West Side Jewish divorcée who breaks into stand-up comedy in the 1950s; Fleabag, an adaptation of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s award-winning play about a young woman coping with life in London; Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, which follows an up-and-coming CIA analyst on a dangerous assignment; and The Boys, a series inspired by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson’s graphic novel of the same name, in which a group of vigilantes sets out to take down superheroes who abuse their superpowers.