What does opportunity look like?  Do you fetch it off a shelf or simply pet it when it lands on your shoulder?  Feed it, tame it and milk it.

When asked about limitations on women getting started in business, someone wise said – it’s all in their heads – The inside out approach to being successful means that limitations are on the inside; you must feel the part before being the part? Is that fake it till you make it?

None of the data in the Royal Society’s 2010 report, “The Scientific Century: securing our future prosperity” is separated by gender.  Phew.  They have digested data about UK university learners who then become researchers and where these people end up working.  The graph on page 14 gives percentages that are relative to students starting.  I am interested in percentages relative to the number of early career researchers, or postdocs.  Of postdocs: 8% stay on as full-time university staff (1% will become professors), 36% work in non-university science, 56% go on to work outside of science.

I don’t (yet) have data for Newcastle and specifically for the Faculty of Medical Sciences.  I am on the trail of it.  But once I have it, what is the purpose of it?  Is it simply to get people to sit up and take notice?

There is that.  In the principles of my nudge universe where full disclosure is needed, where people must be allowed to make a proper choice with all the information in from of them, the above numbers are stark.

Researchers – and I include postdocs – do not simply fool themselves though.  They are people who have that scientific curiosity and the delight that comes from talking to smart friends about curious problems and maybe coming up with a view of the world that nobody else has before then.  Finding the fresh snow.

All the most fun-driven entrepreneurs are motivated by that same thing.  To change the world (and maybe make money doing so), to create something novel, to fill a need.  To listen to someone who runs a start-up one can be absolutely certain that it is not the money per se that drives them, the money is a marker and brilliant; and fun is the driver. But there is often an altruistic streak, and a search after passion, a need to set my own pace, generate my own life feeling that is similar to the drivers for researchers.