The High Flyers Podcast with Vidit Agarwal
00:13:37 · Vidit Agarwal, Alan Joyce
[00:13:37] S0: And are you a believer in nature or nurture? [00:13:40] S1: I think it's a combination of both. I think a lot of my upbringing is thanks to my mother and father. I think it's also thanks to those teachers and mentors that were there. So I think that nurture did help. I think I'm very different in some ways. You know, if you met my brother, you say I'm similar to him, but we're very different in other ways as well. So it can't be all nature and it can't be all nurture, because we had the same upbringings and we're slightly different in different ways. Everybody's very driven in our family. You know, they all went on to great careers. One of my brothers became a director for Disney and MTV and has produced major pieces of work. The other brother is an actuary which takes a lot of dedication, another graphic designer but very different than personalities in some ways. [00:14:30] S0: I'd love to ask about your dad because that came up, you mentioned your brother, I spoke to him for research and he was very candid with some of the stories he shared I think one of the ones if I heard him correctly was about your dad, about how he almost apparently trained you to be competitive. And can you touch on that because that to me is so interesting, right? You see that in athletes where they often talk about their parents, and they go one of two ways. They either become very competitive or they hate the competition.
00:14:59 · Alan Joyce
[00:14:59] S1: Yes. It was interesting because it was little things like I think he found at one stage that we weren't doing well in mathematics, as an example. And then he would do little cards with the times table on them, and then do it between us. We were all very similar age. And then do it between us to see who would get the answers right and encourage us to be competitive on that. He was he was also... We would throw problems to us or questions to us and get us to debate or discuss stuff, and we enjoyed it. You know, we went off and did our own things. We lived in a very working class suburb, so we didn't have we couldn't afford cricket bats, but we made our own cricket bats and played cricket and got very competitive around the backyard. We played tennis over the wall between us and our neighbor. I got very competitive very late into the Irish evenings at that. And I'd say in the book that I felt like, you know, I have had three brothers. I felt like competition was the fourth brother. It was always there. It was always part of our upbringing. And my father encouraged that, and he thought it it would make us better at what we did, and I think it did.
00:16:11 · Vidit Agarwal
[00:16:11] S0: And I mean, the the other one is your... The environment you grew up in. Like, people say the island when you were growing up was a tough place to grow up. How much of that is true? Like how much of that... And then how much of it is still instilled in you? Like I very much agree with your point. Like I have that view where if someone doubts me, it just lights a fire in my belly where I will go, great, I'm gonna prove you wrong. But I have realized that leg can also be my massive Achilles heel. Like my wife always says, she's like, dude, you need to calm down. If you do this, you will just blow up. But just reflect on the island you grew up in, like how much of that shaped your approach to life?
00:16:52 · Alan Joyce
[00:16:52] S1: Ireland was very different back then growing up in the mainly the eighties, seventies and eighties, but mainly the eighties. It was, we were very working class suburb. Ireland had a lot of economic problems. There was high unemployment. We were lucky, my father always had a job, and my mother had worked as a cleaner in a sports facility. So we were lucky. We always had an income coming in, there was high levels of unemployment, and it wasn't guaranteed that you were going to get a job. It was also very conservative. It was dominated by the Catholic church. You know, homosexuality was illegal until 1994, and you really couldn't come out. I had one of my neighbors who came out to his parents, and he was kicked out at 16 from his home. And I always thought that one of the things I talk about in the book is coming out to my parents and the relief when my father hugged me when I was in my late teens on that, because, you know, you were scared the same thing would happen, and you wouldn't see your brothers again. That would have been a sliding door moment for me because it would have changed my life completely. So you were living in this very poor, economically challenged country and very conservative at the same time. And then when you went to university, what was great about Ireland, which changed my life, is that the university fees for per families with low income were paid for by the government. So even though they were in economic trouble, that allowed me to get through university. I think if we had to pay the fees, we couldn't afford it, I couldn't have afford to do it. So I got through university. And then at the very end of university, I was one of the few people out of my degree that ended up getting a job in Ireland. Everybody else left. So there was part of, you know, if you needed to go, you went, and you... There was none of this located. One of the things is sometimes you get frustrated off in Australia is people love their cities, whether it's Sydney or Melbourne, and don't live. In Ireland, was part of the culture. You know, for career opportunities, you went, and you went to the other side of the world if you had to.
00:19:03 · Alan Joyce, Vidit Agarwal
So I think, you know, that that tough environment, that conservative environment changed my life in some ways, because it encouraged me to leave the country, to come to Australia because I was gay, and I didn't feel that Ireland was accepting at the time. Then in the next twenty years, God, did things change. Ireland became one of the most accepting countries in the world. [00:19:26] S0: I was going to ask, if you hadn't left Ireland, do you think your life would have been different today?
00:19:26 · Vidit Agarwal, Alan Joyce
[00:19:26] S0: I was going to ask, if you hadn't left Ireland, do you think your life would have been different today? [00:19:32] S1: I think it would have been. I think you look back in the book, I talk about the sliding door moments where the opportunities are there, and then sometimes you grab them. And sometimes the opportunities are not career, because the job, the job in Australia, working for Ansett, was probably a step backwards from where I was in Ireland. But it was for the the personal development, the opportunity to be who I am, to come down to Australia and have an open life. And that's when I met my partner and now my husband, Shane. So that was for that reason. And then I look at the career and say, any time there was an opportunity, I always grabbed it because I felt you take those risks and went with it. And maybe it would have been very different because the choice I had back in Ireland at the time was not to come to Australia, but to work for Ryanair, for Michael O'Leary, because I was offered a job working for him. Who knows where that would have went to. Ryanair turns out to be one of the most successful airlines in the world, has had huge growth opportunities, but it would have been very different from the career I got in Australia.