Jeopardy: The Danger of Playing It Safe on the Path to Success

And the whole premise of this book is to say, "Unless you are prepared to embrace jeopardy in your life, you will never fulfill the things that you want to fulfill." What you need to do is re-look at jeopardy to find out what your attitude is about jeopardy, and to try and overcome your fear of jeopardy, because jeopardy is the great teacher.

In the West, in our society, we spend a lot of time in search of certainty: any time there's some change or something different it brings up a most violent fear that their lives will be destroyed. And I say, "Look, the only guarantee in life (if you want a guarantee), there's only one guarantee and that's life is uncertain."

It's about your attitude to uncertainty, which will determine how and what you achieve in your life. And what I try and do in this book is to give people ideas and examples of what they need to do to overcome uncertainty.

The other interesting thing about this book is that I talk a lot about my own personal life, and my own personal story is that I am a boy from society's dustbin heap. To achieve the things I have achieved now, that only happened because I was seizing jeopardy. I didn't allow it to stop me from moving forward. Because if I had done, I wouldn't be where I am today. And every step of my achievement I have had to make sure that I didn't allow fear to hold me back.

So it's a long answer to your question, but I think that – hopefully – the title, "Jeopardy," is deliberately there to cause some alarm, but really it's to try and tell people it's something they should not be fearful of.

Rachel Salaman: And what do you say to people who might think that seeking out jeopardy sounds reckless or even selfish in some circumstances?

Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones: Well, you see, I think sometimes people associate jeopardy like bungee jumping or doing some sort of dangerous sport. That's not the sort of stuff that I'm talking about.

I'm not saying you've got to go out and risk your life. I'm saying that, for a lot of people, the idea of changing their job, leaving their marriage, just doing small steps, is so fearful that they are trapped where they're at. They will sense and feel that it is like jumping off a building. The feeling inside is that they're about to do a traumatic action, but in reality it's a small step, it's about that mind change.

So again, if you think that what I call "everyday living" is dangerous, that just isn't the case. So I don't want people to be confused between dangerous sport (or dangerous activity) and steps to improve your life.

Rachel Salaman: As you mentioned, your book is a series of tips, broadly one per chapter. One of them is titled Stop Surviving. What do you mean by that?

Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones: Well, most people's lives is that of survival. One of the things I tend to find when I talk to people is, "Oh, I would really love to do this, I would love to do that." So why aren't you doing that? "Well I've got to pay the mortgage, I've got kids, I've got responsibility."

That tends to be the justification that people put forward for why they're not chasing their dreams, and I call that "survival mentality." So there will be many people who are on the train today, commuting into work, and they hate it. There will be many people sitting doing their job and they absolutely hate it, it's destroying their very soul, but they feel they have no choice, so therefore they have become survivalists.

So it's a perspective of only seeing what's in front of you, rather than having a perspective of a horizon, a future. And to have that you need to have hope, and that's one of the things I talk about there as well.

Rachel Salaman: Yes. So in order to stop [merely] surviving, the route through to that is hope. And what else, what other ways?

Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones: Well, in order to stop surviving the first thing you have to come to terms with, it is not outside circumstances that are stopping you from doing what you want to do, it's a mindset. You know, as I said a moment ago, I am from a very, very poor background. I was born in Jamaica, I came to this country when I was three years old, I lived in one of the poorest areas in Britain, I'm from a large family, we were poor and we were hungry.

Now, a lot of the people that I was brought up with are still in that environment. And one of the reasons why they're still in that environment is because their mindset was, that is where they belong, that is where their future lies, and the idea that they could break out of that, they just would not accept that.

There is absolutely no difference between me and them. The only difference is my mindset, and the mindset is, you never accept "no," you don't accept the limitations that people place on you. All you have to do is think and believe that you can be different and do things differently and it will happen.

One of the things I talk about in this book is about to have the courage to dream. Not only the courage to dream, but to go out there and shout about it. Because everything that has happened in my life, it's happened because other people have gone out of their way to give me a break. And that would not have happened unless there's other people who knew I wanted to do something different in my life.

Rachel Salaman: And in the section on dreaming, and the importance of having a dream, in your book you mention three things that we need to shape our dreams, which are space, time and talking. That last point, is that what you were referring to when you mentioned getting your dream out there, talking about it, or is there more to the talking point than that?

Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones: It's all about… you know, the greatest problem that most people have in their lives is that they would say that their problems and their issues is to do with something outside of themselves. "Oh my partner treats me like this," or "My boss is this," or whatever, it's always nothing to do with them, it's something outside of them. That is wrong.

Everything that happens in your life, rather than saying, "That person has made me feel this way," you need to say to yourself, "Why am I feeling this way because of that person's action?" That's the first thing you've got to do. Always examine your reasons for feeling, not what they're doing. That's the first thing.

Then also understand that when you are making decisions about your life it's not about seeking approval, it's about having the courage to say, "This is what I want to do." And you'll know that you are doing the right thing because not everybody's going to agree with you.

Some people are going to be horrified at the thought that you're going to stop surviving and go out and do something different: it will terrify them. And that says more about them rather than it says anything about you.

Part of knowing, and part of proving to yourself that you are preparing yourself for that journey of doing what you want to do with life, is that you have the courage to talk about it. If you don't have the courage to talk about it you're not preparing yourself for that journey, so that's why talking is really important. Then, by talking about it, you will then be dealing with all the different responses: some people will say, "We think you're nuts!" Some people will be supportive.

And then, by talking about it, you'll be amazed because you will find guardian angels – these vital people who will help to sort of set you on course. They're not going to hold your hand and take you through, but they'll be able to say, "Oh how about speaking to so-and-so?" Or give you suggestions to start preparing you for that journey. So none of that is going to happen unless you start to talk about it.

Rachel Salaman: We've talked a little bit about the phrase you use in the book: "making a friend of fear." It's interesting that, in the book, you also acknowledge that fear exists for a reason – to protect us from harm. So how can we tell whether it's better to heed that fear and avoid harm or ignore it and push through? Because that is a difficult crossroads.

Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones: Well it isn't difficult, you see. I think the fear – the innate fear – goes back to our prehistoric being: touch fire, it's going to burn, so that registers. Even now, you don't have to be very sophisticated to know you touch fire, you're going to put yourself in danger. Certain activities are going to put you in danger.

So, it's to understand that the prehistoric gift of having fear in terms of our survival can also be causing damage in our society now because we don't need it. I like to strip it down to something pretty simple: most people do not change their job, because they are worried. Ultimately the fear is that they'll be on the streets, they won't be able to feed themselves, so therefore why leave something that you know; and it's paying the mortgage, why leave that and go into something unknown?

And I say this to people: you will know, you will fundamentally know, whether you are the sort of person, regardless of what life throws at you, whether you'll end up on the streets or not. You will know that.

Five years ago I was diagnosed with AML, I think it's acute myeloid leukemia, and most people exaggerate when they say they were on death's door, but in my case I was on death's door. I ended up in intensive care and the doctors did not think that I was going to survive, and I ended up in hospital for a whole year.

Now what is interesting, I think, about that experience is that we all know we're going to die, but it's in the back of the mind. When something like that happens it becomes front of mind. Not only does it become front of mind but it strips out the white noise of living. You'd be amazed how little really matters when it's a question of life and death, whether you live or die.

And then fear has a very interesting place then, you know, so the fear is about whether you're going to live or die. You either can be consumed by that or you make a friend of it by saying, "Actually I have no control over this, if it happens it happens." You have to decide what you have control over and what you don't have control over, and then embrace this sort of experience, because from that experience great learning comes.

You know, some of the great learnings I've had about my life is from that experience, and even though it was pretty traumatic I've learnt a lot and I have a greater ease with life. What I talk about in the book is also when I was at the point when I thought, "Look, death is better than this." And this is why I think all this stuff about mindset is really important, because I had made my mind up that death was better than this and I sort of switched off. I wouldn't eat. I just wouldn't go along with the process.

What was interesting is that I think I got bored with waiting to die. Well I needed to wee, and I had to make a decision, do I wee? You know, when you give up, you just sort of let everything happen, so do I need to just lie here and let it happen or shall I get up and go to the loo [bathroom]? So I got up and went to the loo.

Then, having done that and then got back to the bed, it then created a tiny moment of hope, and it taught me that the most powerful thing that we have as human beings is hope. Because when you have hope it lifts the spirit, and by lifting the spirit it helps you to sort of endure and to go on.

And that's why dreams are really important, because if you've got something to look to, you can see there is a possibility of something else. It is amazing how that energizes our being, and in my case it brought me back to the land of the living.

So, one of the things I say to people is: have a dream, have a hope. Don't try and work out how you will get there, because you'll get there but you won't get there by the way you think you'll get there. It will take you on all different curves, but keep looking ahead, have that sort of dream.

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Rachel Salaman: Can you tell us how you achieved your dream of working in television?

Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones: OK. So I think I said to you earlier that I was born in Jamaica. I was brought up in Small Heath in Birmingham. Eleven of us lived in a two-up, two-down terrace house, we were poor and it was cramped. I went to a pretty awful school, they didn't really educate us, they policed us. They didn't expect much to happen to these kids.

Then I wanted to leave home so I joined the army. And the first major lesson in life that I learned is that if you are any way entrepreneurial you do not join a corporate environment, a military environment, because everything about me is to challenge the convention, and places like the army, you're there to do as you're told.

So I didn't last very long there at all. I got kicked out of the army and I have a dishonorable discharge to my name. So having been kicked out of the army, in those days, if you were a failure at everything the only thing then left open to you was catering, believe it or not. So catering back then was not the glamorous profession that it is now. So I went to the local catering college in Birmingham and then I trained to be a chef, and, you know, I didn't work in anywhere exotic or grand, just sort of burger joints and things like that.

So I was doing that for a while, but what was really interesting with this – and this is why I keep talking about the power of dream – is that when I was being brought up in Birmingham, living with my parents, my father had an allotment [community garden] and it was my job as the eldest boy to look after this allotment, and I absolutely loved being in this environment. Because one of the things that I said you need is space, and it was the first time in my life I could have space to think and just to be, and not really be in survival mode, because if you're brought up in the ghettos you're constantly looking over your shoulder (because there's always danger), but in that environment you have time to breathe and think.

I can remember making myself a promise at the age of 11, that one day I would like to own my own farm, and I lodged that dream in the back of my mind. And then everything that I subsequently did in my life was always directed to trying to achieve that. It was always a great reminder.

So when I was working as a chef… you know, it's paying good money and things like that, but I kept thinking to myself, "Well if you're going to buy yourself a farm you ain't going to do that being a chef." And I knew I always had to constantly improve my lot in life.

So at the time there used to be a very famous TV series on, Making Documentaries, and I thought, "I'd like to do that." So again you see it's just the audacity to say, "Actually I'd love to do that." When I told all my family and friends they thought I was nuts, because, a) I have no qualifications to my name, b) it very much is a profession for the Oxbridge [Oxford and Cambridge] set, but I decided that's what I wanted to do.

I remember that my father taught me two things, which I believe to be true: it doesn't really matter your background, it doesn't matter your education, it doesn't matter on the color of your skin, you just need two things to achieve whatever you want in life. And anybody who achieves these – whatever they want to – have these two qualities.

The first is that you need to have ruthless focus, absolute ruthless focus, and what I mean by that is this: if you see an athlete who's disciplined to get up at 4 o'clock every morning (rain, sun, snow) to train, it's that sort of focus. And then the most important of the two qualities you need is passion, ruthless passion. And what passion does, it defies reason and logic, it helps you to get over all of the hurdles in life. So focus and passion.

So taking that advice I decided, "Right, I'll write to everybody at the BBC!" [but] nobody would write back to me, [I] tried to ring them, nobody would take my calls. But then, what I used to do – there were cleaners who would go and clean the offices, I would go and help them (didn't get paid) just so I could be in the building. And security guards, I would go and help the security guards just so I could be around them.

Then after about two and a half years it paid off. And this is how it paid off: when I talk about guardian angels, they're there and they will see something in you and they will give you a break, and in my case it was a guy called Jock Gallagher, who I met at BBC Pebble Mill [studio].

He took me up to his office and he spoke to me for about an hour, and he said, "Look, you know, you're not the sort of person we tend to employ in television because a) you don't have the education and b) you've got a bit of an attitude problem." But he said, "I'll give you a contract for three months and then see what happens."

So that man, having the courage to give me that break, then started off my career in television. I would never, ever have got it by writing a CV [résumé], being interviewed, because they would have looked at it and the computer would have said "no." And one of the great dangers I think we have in the age that we live in now is that it's all about whether the computer says "no" and we don't trust gut instinct. All of my career and everything that I've achieved, somebody has trusted their gut to say, "OK, we'll give this guy an opportunity."

So I spent 15 years at the BBC, I traveled the world making films. My big claim to fame is that I brought some of the big name celebrity chefs to television, like Gordon Ramsay, I gave him his first break.

So when I look at that and I think that's a big achievement from a guy from nothing, to be working in the BBC. But the dream I had from when I was an 11-year-old kid on my farm was always the thing that was spurring me forward. So I know that if I wanted to buy my farm, that as wonderful as it was working at the BBC, I would need to – and I was running out of time because I was getting much older then – I would need to do something dramatic in terms of, you know, earning the sort of money I would need to get my farm.

So I decided to leave the BBC and set up my own company, food and drink company, and I left the BBC with just enough money to pay the mortgage for three months, no clients, nothing. So there's nothing that focuses the mind more than, you've only got three months to pay the mortgage.

Rachel Salaman: This was your PR company?

Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones: PR company, yes.

Rachel Salaman: With your wife.

Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones: With my wife, yes. So you can imagine, the first child, three months' money to pay the mortgage and no clients, and a dream, an aspiration to do something, and again you find the people who will help you on that sort of journey.

The saddest thing that I see are people who are trapped in a moment in time, and because of the things I've achieved in my life I've seen many, many people trapped in a moment in time, and you see life passing them by and they're finding a false security in yesterday. Which is a great tragedy in a lot of people's lives.

Rachel Salaman: From the PR company to The Black Farmer, how did that journey go?

Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones: So having run that business for about 14 years, that then gave me the money to buy my farm, and I wanted to buy a farm down in the southwest [of England]. So at the time a lot of farmers were getting out of farming because it was very difficult to make money, anybody with any sense were going "up country" as they called it.

And they saw me coming down and it just didn't compute. They were thinking, "A black guy coming down to Devon, this just doesn't make sense." So some people thought I was there to grow drugs, you know – it's like a cover to grow drugs.

But what I see (and this is the thing that I have always held on [to]) is that people who bring about change are outsiders, because they think differently. And I thought, "Oh, there is this gap and there's an opportunity to bridge this gap." And I thought, "Well what I'm going to do is I'm going to create a food brand," because I'd obviously been in food most of my career, "and I'm going to do something that is quintessentially British."

Because even though I was born in Jamaica, I mean, I've been in this country since I was three years old and I regard myself to be very British. So I decided, "Right, I'm going to do something quintessentially British." So I thought, "Right, I'm going to do a sausage and I'm going to do a fantastic sausage. And rather than it being an ethnic product I want it to be an absolute mainstream product."

So I found a manufacturer that was going to produce my products, and then the next thing was to come up with the brand name. And I was scratching my head thinking about it and then one day it came to me.

All of my next-door neighbors, a lot of people around me, they used to call me "the black farmer," and I thought, "Actually that's a bloody good brand name!" Not only is it a really good brand name, but it has jeopardy, because people are not too sure… is it politically correct? Is it the right thing to say? And also it has an edge to it.

It then creates interest, curiosity, about, "Well what's going on here? The Black Farmer, is he British, is he American, is he a real person?" So even now people are amazed that The Black Farmer's a real person, because the stereotype in how we operate sometimes does not pay justice to… actually we live in this very interesting world where people are just really [more] complex than we sort of think. So it challenges perceptions, and that's a thing that always interests me: challenging perceptions.

Rachel Salaman: Yes. Now, in a life that embraces jeopardy, anybody will encounter a certain amount of failure. In your book you have some really interesting, nuanced thoughts about failure. Could you just share some of those?

Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones: If you could say that you've never failed, you haven't lived. The only way to measure your life's worth and value is how much failure you have, because failure is the great teacher.

So failure, as far as I'm concerned, should be celebrated, because it's an indication to yourself that you are living life. So if you could look back at your life and say, "Well I haven't failed in the last year or two years or five years, I don't think much of the life that I'm living at the moment really." And so it's to understand that failure is an important indicator that you are living, and it is not a negative, it is a positive.

If you're in control of every aspect of your life there is a vital part you're not allowing in, and the part you're not allowing in is the uncertainty part, which will take you to places that you will never have imagined. If you restrict your life down to every bit of certainty, well this over there might have the answers to what you need, but because you've restricted your life down to absolute certainty you're missing this golden nugget.

Rachel Salaman: So I just want to pick up on one point you made about the benefits to being an outsider. If one is not naturally an outsider, if one is a member of a team who all look very similar to oneself, is there a way of getting an outsider mentality when you're not actually an outsider?

Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones: Well you have the choice about whether you're an outsider or not. The choice is you have to decide whether you're a be-er or a belong-er.

Now, with the whole book we're talking about jeopardy, about doing what you really want to do. If you really want to do what you want to do, that's like being, and to be means that you cannot belong. There will be people who will disapprove or will challenge or don't like, so you have to decide, do I want to belong or do I go down the route that I want to go down?

Anything that you want to do in life in order to be your authentic self, you have to decide whether you want to belong or to be, and the moment you decide to be, there will be support but there will also be resistance.

And fundamentally that is a choice. It's not about, "Oh right, you just happen to be this type of person." You've made a choice, that actually it's easier to belong because it's a place to hide, [to] not be spotted. To be is to make a statement. So it's a choice.

Wilfred Emmanuel Jones was talking to me in London. The name of Wilfred's book again is "Jeopardy: The Danger of Playing It Safe on the Path to Success."

I'll be back in a few weeks with another Expert Interview. Until then, goodbye.